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I was trying to make sense of that long and intricate article, but my not-so-smart comment is just this :

What's with their names? Trowe, Lowe, Crowe... Is it a requirement to work on Sierra licences or what?

I must confess I was always sketical each time I was seing your weird furry character sprites, as well as manga-ish high resolution drawings.

I never suspected that your video game art was actually closer to mythical 90's demos, with cool distortion effects and electro music.
Your game IS cyber punk. Your game IS cool and DOES look cool. Damn! I want more games like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA

That's a very useful tool, guys, even though it will most likely go unnoticed at first. Thanks Rulaman! I need to remember to mention it on the wiki page.

One final thing in my list is music skipping (without threaded audio).

Try out the "glittery cursor" module I just posted in "modules and plugins". don't recompile it, run it "as is" -- it was compiled with 3.2.1. On my Windows 7, the sound is terrible. It's not even stuttering, it sounds more like two wires are touching each other and doing cracks in the speaker. It's a game issue, though, because the game's Ogg file sounds OK when played in VLC.

But where ARE the unicorns?

up your ass.

Monkey and selmiak, since you're here: could you donwload the demo game, run it (without recompiling it) and check if the sound is terrible? It's not working properly on my PC (terrible, terrible stutter) and I don't know why. I tried both DX9 and DD5. It's not the sound file, it plays fine in VLC. I don't think it's a performance issue (the stutter is really erratic while the FPS are rather stable).

I don't see from the video what the module has to do with a looping background.

It's not looping frames (animated background), it's looping scrolling: when it reaches the far left, it starts appearing continuously on the far right. Was that your question? EDIT: oh, I see what you mean, the video is slightly too short to see a full loop.

this module looks kind of familiar.

Yes, but mine is much cuter. I hate you. I love you.

Are you able to use partially transparent particles?

Nope -- Jarakeen's module has anticipated the feature, knowing that at creation time it wouldn't work (alpha channel appears all pink). and it still doesn't work on 3.2.1, as expected (I tried). But it would be interesting to try again on 3.3.0.  At the moment I'm using regular sprites with either fully opaque pixels or pink pixels. I had issues with 3.3.0 which made me allergic to it. I'll try again when they're fixed.

[I don't know if what I'm about to say makes any sense technically,]

I don't know if what I'm about to say makes any sense technically, but my intuition tells me it's the right place to say it :
At the moment AGS has trouble allowing parallel development, because (for example) two people cannot edit a room script together, or they can't add a room to the agf file at the same time on two different machines.

Adding a feature to merge room files, or to merge the "rooms "section of the ags file, would allow to host the game on a versioning system (cvs, git, svn...) and enable parallel development.

[join existing projects]

Strangely, I mostly like to join existing projects that have stimulated my creativity, and help finishing them, rather than starting my own.
I'm so demanding with my own projects, that I almost never finish those (or even start them). They just maturate in a corner of my head for years.

[Download]

Do you like glitter? Don't lie, I know you do. And unicorns too.

I made this little module. Well, it's not a module, really. It's more of several code snippets, but clearly split into re-usable functions. It's based on Jerakeen's particles and Edmundito's tweening. ...And it's pretty.
- Use this to create a particles generator that projects particles in the opposite direction from the mouse movement.
- Use this to create a neat little credits system (see video).
- Use this to create a background that is continuously scrolling (and looping).


Video here:




Download (source and demo)

Download link broken. anybody has it?

This one stands out to me.

I was going to mention the same game ("voir la mer et mourir")

No walk cycle from The Dig.

Yeah I know They're the ones I was looking for!
I can rip them, though, if you need them.

Wasn't there a program that ripped LucasArts sprites in their entirety?

There are several tools like that, all with their weak points. As they're not as easy to find as it might sound in the first place. If you really need that, I can compile a small list.

[down]

I've found the "smart algorithm" that had struck me first time I read about it : it's called "liquid scale" : http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/#liquid-rescale

I'll run more tests on my set of sprites, to see what it's worth. But from its very definition, it should be the ultimate algorithm to scale down pixel art that gets progressively zoomed out in real time (yes, it's that specific, like any algorithm)

<3

[in motion]

Yes, I tend to get carried away. I'm a big enthusiast

Just because you guys asked so nicely  :



What can we say about that? (please read. Watching the picture is not enough)

1) The box algo looks a bit dirty in some places (dithering), and I'm puzzled why it's doing that. I'll double-check the command I used, to make sure I didn't introduce some anti-aliasing by mistake ( imagemagick tends to be a bit complex to use) EDIT: Oh, I think I know why. It might be because it's an indexed picture.
2) The nearest neighbour seems to keep the face's details much better. But it's only a coincidence here. The nose pixel or the eyes pixels could as well disappear. Box keeps an overall consistence.
3)You can see (especially on the arm) that much more detail is kept with "box". You can still see the entire outline of the arm.

That specific example is actually not very good, because it's better seem in motion : when you scale down a sprite in real time (typically, when the character walks away for the screen), then nearest neighbour makes big "jumps" in quality depending on which pixel is currently in line with the screen pixel. For example: the character 's eye might sort of "blink": appear, then disappear, then appear again... It's terrible for the face's look. With box, the scale-down transition should look much smoother.

Would everybody calm down? I only stumbled across something that was looking good, while researching 1 billion other things.
OK, I misread Snarky's "yes". And as explained I'm not depriving you guys on purpose of that screenshot, so relax please. kthxby.

You are aware that moving either one of the eyeballed two points inside the pic by just a single pixel will greatly move the far end of the lines, right?
Assuming you are serious, your entire posts prompts one huge WTF in my mind.

Hey Khris, why so stressed? Here, man, have a candy. Now, I am perfectly aware of what you're saying, but really, in this case the vanishing points are really off, which explains why the perspective of the digits, for example, looks inconsistent with the overall perspective. Talk to you soon!

EDIT: Oh, I understand! you're the one who did the first corrective paintover. Don't get me wrong: It's 10,000 times better now, especially the grey "frequencies bar". My post didn't mean to criticize the correction, my point was to say the same thing as you: "the 3-point perspective is perfectly ok, provided it's handled properly." (and in the original drawing it was not).

The final answer: the vanishing points are sometimes correct, sometimes totally random.

I've been doing a bit of research: I've actually mixed up two different things :
1. A resizing algorithm I had seen a long time ago in Imagemagick, and I found it so clever at the time that it stuck with me -- as I said it displaces some sharp areas and removes the pixels from plain areas. I can't find it any more, I'll have to dig it out again.
2. The "box" algorithm. It looks "spectacular" only if you compare it with "nearest neighbour" and "bicubic", which look awful on low-res sprites.

Strangely, when I ran "box" on some sprites, a few (really only just a few) pixels actually got anti-aliased. So I suspect it's actually some kind of weighed box. I'll produce pictures if it's really necessary (David, running tests and uploading stuff is longer than it sounds ) but Snarky said AGS is already using "box", so there's no point really.

pics

Too busy figuring out the gigantic mess that are "The Dig" 's walkcycles. No time for pics!

EDIT: do you know if it's indeed "nearest neighbour" that's used in AGS?