Messages

[nearest neighbour]

hello,

Out of curiosity: what algorithm does AGS use to scale down sprites that walk away from camera?
I suppose it's just "nearest neighbour", or something fancy in the case of activated anti-aliasing.

I've just tried an implementation of "box" (using ImageMagick), and the results are SPECTACULAR.
EDIT: "box" is not so bad (see screenshots below), but I reckon "liquid scale" would be much better for scaling down sprites in motion. /EDIT

- Unlike bilinear and such, it does not introduce blur at all.
- It does not blindly scale down, but manages error displacement in a way that it cuts out unwanted pixels in plain areas, instead of doing it in arbitrary places. That way, details remain visible for as long as possible, before the picture becomes really too small.

I would highly recommand using that algorithm, or (Calin and Khris , nudge nudge) implementing a plugin for that.

I just found that: Many walkcycles, from many games, complete with all animations.

!!!!!!!!!


http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/indy4/index.html
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/dayofthetentacle/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/monkeyisland1/


EDIT: that wite is not as complete as I thought it was in the first place. Disappointment!

[Do you know the way they say "bad advertisement is better than no advertisement at all"?]

Do you know the way they say "bad advertisement is better than no advertisement at all"? Well, Wadjet Eye benefits from that today, since its name now slowly becomes a familiar name in the video games news.
Proof is this article that talks about the bad experience they had with free keys for Blackwell -- I'd say it's excellent news, because I had never heard from them in a French paper magazine before, outside of a game's test. eventually, only the names "Wadjet Eye" and "Dave Gilbert" remain.

(note: this is translated from French, from Canard PC -- you could say it's the best (and almost only) French video games paper magazine: recently there was a big crisis in that sector, and almost all magazines collapsed simultaneously except for them. The others relied too much on ads, partnerships, and free goodies. Now, Canard PC (which was only getting 20% of its income from ads)  has pretty much the monopoly.)

======

"Wadjet Eye is a rather nice video games development and publishing company. First, they published Resonance, Primordia and Gemini Rue, that gave a lot of happiness to retro-pixels lovers -- and those people too deserve happiness. Then, since Wadjet Eye is really cool, they decided to give away to anyone one episode from the Blackwell, Deception saga, for Halloween. However in their generous exhilaration, they didn't foresee that malevolent people would seize the opportunity to get stacks of keys, in order to sell them once the discount is over. Consequence: big mess at Wadjet Eye, white hair grew on Dave Gilbert's head, who thinks it's a lot of work for not much, and people who would have legitimately benefited from the discount got really annoyed. Wadjet Eye had to cancel 30,000 suspicious keys, and in the end everybody is sad."

(also, in case Dave would read that: Don't mind the sarcastic tone -- that's what they do in that magazine, but that doesn't make you guys sound like losers at all).

There. Done.

PS: Any futher requests?

Yes, since you ask! Starting editing a WFN/SCI font from a TTF font. I suppose (it's only a guess) it shouldn't be too hard, since AGS is able to open them and to render them as bitmaps.

Monsieur OUXX: 1) Yeah, I think it could be possible.

If you implement that: could you add a little label somewhere (anywhere!) saying: "you're currently working with a genuine 128-char SCI file", or "you're currently working with an AGS-only 256-characters SCI file" ? (or something similar). Once you know thet 256-char format is custom to AGS, it seems obvious, but before that it sounds like a puzzle to solve.

- about Russian codepage: noted
- I must also edit stuff about outlines
- i must edit things about blurry low-res tff fonts

The good part about this tool is, that I delivered the sources, so every one could modify it (If I stopped the support).

That's cool.
Could I be as cheeky as to do two more enhancement requests? and those are really important, I believe, in the prduction flow of anyone manipulaitng fonts:
1) to be able to open a 128-chars font and click somewhere to extend it to a 256-characters font (with the 128 extra slots being empty at first).
2) to be able to entirely copy a selected character, to some "clipboard", and then paste it into another character.

That's because most people working with extended Latin characters have to work with commn characters (e.g. "n") and turn them into special ones (e.g. "ñ").

If you did those two things, your tool would become the ultimate tool for AGS fonts.

[game.bgspeech_stay_on_display]

Thanks Crimson. I've actually found the solution.

The difficulty (and the reaosn why your solution wouldn't work as-is -- that's also what I tried in the first place) was in the small prints of SayBackground. It's interrupted by any "Say" AND it doesn't animate the speech. that's a pain in the ass to use.

But everything is solved with  game.bgspeech_stay_on_display


  game.bgspeech_stay_on_display = 1; //to make sure that a "Say" won't discard a "SayBackground"
 
  cOutline1.ChangeRoom(c.Room); //just to make sure they're in the same room
  cOutline1.x = c.x; //we position the fake outline
  cOutline1.y = c.y-10;
  Wait(1);
 
  Overlay* o = cOutline1.SayBackground(s); 
  c.Say(s);  //by using "Say", we benefit of the animated character.

  if (o.Valid != 0)
    o.Remove(); //we remove the overlay so that the outline disappears at the same time as the actual text



Now it works perfectly.

There's a way to control background speech overlay

Cool, that will come handy to make the outline look better.
But my main issue right now is sync'ing the speech view, and the appearance and disappearance of the real text and the outline (as explained in my second post)

[new version]

The script above was faulty in many ways, so here is a new version :



  //we force the speech animation
  c.StopMoving();
  c.LockView(c.SpeechView);
  c.Animate(c.Loop, 4, eRepeat , eNoBlock); //make sure this is non-blocking
 
 
  cOutline1.ChangeRoom(c.Room); //just to make sure they're in the same room
  cOutline1.x = c.x; //we position the fake outline
  cOutline1.y = c.y-10;
  Wait(1);
  cOutline1.Say("");  //so that if wait time is skipped, the character stops talking
  c.Say("");  //so that if wait time is skipped, the character stops talking


  cOutline1.SayBackground(s); //we make both the outline and the character say the same thing
  c.SayBackground(s); //we need to use saybackground here, because "say" interrupts the previous saybackground
  WaitMouseKey((s.Length/Game.TextReadingSpeed + 1) * GetGameSpeed()); //so wait time can be skipped
 
  cOutline1.Say("");  //so that if wait time is skipped, the character stops talking
  c.Say("");  //so that if wait time is skipped, the character stops talking
 
  c.UnlockView();
  Wait(1);




However there is still an issue :
When I click to interrupt the sentence, the character says the sentence AGAIN. But this time the sentence does not appear in the same place!?! (like 10 pixels lower). And if I click somewhere before he's finished talking, now he can walk while talking. Terrible.

I'm considering ways of faking a font outline when a character speaks.
I was thinking of a solution that's not perfect but might do the trick : displaying 4 (or 8) times the text in black, with 1-pixel shift in every direction,, under the actual coloured text.

How would you do that?

I'm trying this :

1) I created a dummy character, cOutline1, with a transparent view (i.e. it can speak, but it has an invisible body)
2) Its speech color is bright green (for tests, to be sure I'll see it on my screen)
3) I tried the following script:

Code: ags

cOutline1.x = player.x; //test pixel offset
cOutline1.y = player.y-10; //test pixel offset
cOutline1.SayBackground(s);
player.Say(s);

Strangely, when I test, I don't see the .SayBackground sentence. I only see the .Say sentence.
What am I doing wrong?

Bug report: when you put the candles into the candlestick, their baseline is probably wrong because they appear in front of the character.

Spoiler

Hey! Is the teleportation animation from Flashback?

[close]

It was included into 3.4.0 alpha.

OK, I'll give it a new try. Last time, I tried 3.3.0, and it was a disaster (buggy installer, and also that annoying bug that kept telling me that the script had been modified with an external editor). Let's hope this time it will work!

that might be difference in monitor gamma level

In order to make sure it wasn't the reason, I zoomed in using Photoshop! And I used the "magic wand" tool to see if it would select something I didn't see. I believe you guys, but I'm wondering: what kind of wizardry is this?

More detailed guidelines, courtesy of Daniel Eakins :

1) Once you have downloaded Calin's plugin, you have to launch "SpriteFont.exe". This is program will create two files: "Texture.png" and "Metrics.xml". Make sure you select the ranges of characters that you want to include in your future font (in the cart icon):

2) In AGS, activate AGSSpriteFont in the Plugins icon in the right panel.
3) Import "Texture.png" as a sprite.
4) In function game_start(), type a SetVariableSpriteFont(AAA, BBB) command (where AAA is the font slot you want to use, such as 0, and BBB is the number of the sprite you have just imported).
5) Launch "AGSSpriteFontGen.exe" and open "Metrics.xml" in it to get some AGS coding. Paste that coding in function game_start() after the SetVariableSpriteFont command.

That's all, that should work. The best thing about this plugin is that you can open "Texture.png" in any image editor if you want to edit the font pixel by pixel. Also check Calin's first post in his thread to understand what the coding you get from "AGSSpriteFontGen.exe" means if you want to also edit that.

Also, for all those interested in multilingual fonts, this page could come handy : http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

Is there any plan of including the "256-characters SCI and WFN fonts" feature/hack into vanilla AGS any time soon? Just to know for how long I must resist the urge of breaking compatibility in my game

I just wrote that wiki page : http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

Please read it to check that it doesn't contain mistakes.
Then, I suggest to move this topic to "Modules and plugins". Yes, I know this is not a plugin. But this is a combination of guidelines to use the hottest fonts plugins of the moment. It can later on be linked from any other thread. Hence the suggestion.

[Character3D]

A more extensive answer :

- AGS was designed for 2D characters on 2D background
BUT
- AGS has various plugins that offer extended capabilities. There are two interesting plugins for you:
  1) Character3D . This one does exactly what you want, but is rather (very) old.
  2) Razorblade. That one does 3D all the way (it's a sort of AGS wrapper for DirectX 's 3D features). However you'll have to script yourself the ability to display a 2D background (you know, the way they do fake 2D using only 3D, nowadays)


If I'm forgetting something, someone correct me.

[Most of the confusion came from the bug I encountered]

The fonts that Rulaman linked to in his last post are actually instances of this "custom AGS format", which means that they cannot be imported in AGS

Thank god there are guys who make sense of that gigantic mess!
Thanks a lot.

@Rulaman: don't get me wrong, your tool is awesome. Most of the confusion came from the bug I encountered (that was causing all the open fonts to close, and nothing to get converted). I cannot seem to reproduce that bug either. I would suspect it happens when the app cannot write the converted font to disk, for any permission reason.

Here are the answers to the other points:







Also, for all those interested in multilingual fonts, this page could come handy : http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

Who said making video games was fun? It's long, painful and mostly boring. But seeing the game finished, and knowing you were part of that, and playing it, what a great motivation.