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Kinda came across your reply randomly today.

The depressing part is that I don't really think there is a solution for this.  It's just one of those things which are more noticeable in high resolution games.  I have found that it looks better once you have an "up" and "down" walkcycle.  Where it tends to be particularly noticeable is when walking diagonally (at least for me).

The short term solution I guess is making sure that you don't scale from really high to really low i.e. keep the numbers at between 40% and 60%.  I guess that's easier for me to say though because my backgrounds are rendered and it's fairly easy to change the angles...

After placing the MSVCR100.dll file in the system32 file the plugin ran fine and it eliminated the tearing in my high resolution game (which was tearing quite badly).  Nice job.

For me, it would be a major help if VSync was introduced for Direct3D to prevent tearing.

[The Story]

This is a game I've been working on for a long time, and I'm hoping that posting it here will motivate me to finally finish the thing.

The Story


This world was silent. It was a silence so penetrating that it had become a black hole for sound and threatened to envelop any noise that dared to enter it. The single voice that waded into the silence was lost and alone, searching for a response that would validate its existence. “Where am I?” it said. This was greeted with silence. The question was repeated, “Where am I?” it begged the void. For an eternity there was nothing. Then, something like a voice spoke; but it wasn’t a voice, it was the idea of a voice:

                                                                                    "Beyond"
                                                                                 **********
With no memory of who he is, Michael must navigate the world of Beyond and unravel its mysteries.  His only hope is to find the elusive Shiloh, a fellow prisoner of this world who, perhaps, knows the way back home.

Screenshots





Featuring:

*  Passable pre-rendered graphics!
*  Mystery and intrigue!
*  Puzzles!

Development Progress:

Story: 100%
Scripting: 40%
Graphics: 75%
Sound/Music: 50%

Expected completion date: Mid-September 2010

My thesis is that both sides are off topic. My thesis is that casual gaming is a paradigm led by economics, not artists. Therefore, our opinions (whatever our side) will eventually be worthless.

I just want to respond to this point with the old economic determinism card. All commercially produced cultural artefacts are shaped, and in many cases defined by economic forces. The Hollywood studio system of the 40s and 50s was certainly led by economic forces. However, artistic and social forces also influenced its output and it produced many very great films (and many bad ones of course).

A moneymaking opportunity has arisen because of the appearance of a new market for games. There's no reason some of those games shouldn't be very good.

This is a fantastic point and something I was thinking throughout my reading of this thread.  Creativity is almost always curtailed to some extent by market considerations.  Games that fail to take into account what the market wants are often horribly frustrating, and I think this is a part of what lead to the death of adventure games.  The Sierra games were absolutely merciless, killing you without rational reason or warning and I'm pretty sure that many of you have read the Old Man Murray article on Gabriel Knight III.

"Casual gamers," are not drooling idiots and it's pretty unfair to say they are because they never figured out that you needed the cat hair for a mustache.  I remember starting one of the Kings Quest games when I was younger, walking into a forest and then being devoured by some tree.  I quit the game right there because to hell with being killed by trees.

I've created a game with AGS, but that isn't relevant.  What's relevant is that you're being a child.  You've created a series of games that people have enjoyed.  It's gotten at least one good review.  What more do you want?  Why do you need constant validation?  You consistently ignore the points made about the panel by those posting here, which tells me that you're not interested in having a rational discussion about this.  So just let it go. 

You're an adult posting on an adventure game forum about how unfair a review was.  It's childish and silly.  Just let it go.

I don't think enough has been made of the fact that Harg is 33 years old.

You are, ostensibly, a grown man.  Start acting like one.

That might be too dark.  I probably need to step away from the computer for a while, because I can't judge what I'm doing objectively at the moment.  I used photon mapping, and made the chandelier and fireplace my light sources.  There's also an area lamp to lighten things slightly.

If you're going to make an underwater picture, you have to use the photoshop "ocean ripple" filter.  If you don't, your picture won't be of the ocean.  People will also laugh at you and call you fat.

I fixed this for you, and added a lens flare with a smiley face.  Smiley faces help those playing your game to relate more to your backgrounds.  I hope this helps!

Thanks for your comments.

If you haven't figured this out yet about your walk cycle, your character's arms and legs are reversed. That is, when your right leg is forward, your right arm should be back (or else you'd likely fall over).

The Muybridge animation photos are a great resource, but don't be afraid to just rotoscope your walk cycle.
Here's an example of a human walk that's been rotoscoped:

I've improved my character a lot since I posted that.  At the moment, though, he's a bit of a placeholder.  I'm using a really simple method which allows me to pose and animate him in 2-3 minutes, which makes experimenting in AGS a lot easier.

A quick note on your room, darkness is your friend. Have a central light source somewhere (the chandelier, or the fireplace maybe?) and allow the rest of the room to be enveloped in varying levels of shadow. Your room has ZERO contrast because it seems to have been lit with a 2,000w light. Lighting goes a long way for covering up modeling, texturing, and materials issues.

I agree, but I'm having a few problems.  The first is time.  The picture from my OP is rendered in Yafaray, using direct lighting.  I basically just switched on ambient occlusion and set it pretty high to get an even lighting for the whole room.  Another room I'm working on uses photon mapping, with the single light source being the sun shining through the window.




Ideally I'd render all the rooms in that way, but whereas direct lighting takes about ten minutes, it can take me nearly an hour (and sometimes longer) to render pictures using photon mapping.  At the moment, I just don't have the time or patience to sit through that

The other thing I'm worried about is that my "light" character would look really bad in a darkened room and seem very unnatural.

Just had a look at the demo now.  It looks incredible!  I'll make a more concerted effort to play around with it tomorrow, but it really looks fantastic thus far.

Thanks.  Might just be a symptom of my staring at the thing for far too long.  Not sure why it would differ between PC's though? 

Sorry to post again so soon, but I wasn't sure if this was close enough to my previous issue to post there.

The issue I'm having is with continuous scaling in my game.  I've uploaded the compiled folder so you can play around with it if you want, and see what I mean:


Download

It's a high res game.  32 bit color depth and 1024 x 768.  The character looks fine when walking either straight left and right or up and down.  However, if you try to walk diagonally he seems to "jump" weirdly as he moves.  I'm not sure if this is just a bug in AGS.  Continuous scaling is on, and smoothing and all that is on as well.  When I turn continuous scaling off it's fine, but then my character looks like a giant relative to the background in certain places, which isn't ideal.

Any idea how to fix that?

Thanks so much for your help!  I've just been working a bit on the character, and changing some of the things you guys mentioned have helped a LOT.

I changed the walkcycle from 21 frames to 11, and made sure his legs actually straightened.  It looks exponentially better, and the lower number of frames also seems to have remedied the problem I was having with continuous scaling.  I've noticed now that his legs aren't quite symmetrical, so I want to fix that before posting the walk cycle again.

The emptiness of the room is more laziness than anything else.  I might just find some stock models to place in the room.  I was thinking of putting a table in the middle, but I imagine that would be a bit annoying for players.  I've struggled with the carpet.  I'll keep at it till I come up with something.

Thanks again for the help!  It's already looking much better.

I've been messing around with AGS the past week or two, trying to see what sort of quasi-3d game can be made using the new features.  The room and character were both created in Blender, and the room was rendered in Yaf(a)ray.  Anyway, here is a video of the character walking around the room:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhsHLQ3VkoU

The background is 1024 x 768, and I'm running the game at 800 x 600 with 32 bit Color depth.  One problem I do know I'm having is that the character seems to "jump" when I turn on continuous scaling (not sure how clear that is in the video).  Not sure if there is anything that can be done to fix that?  Is that due to high resolution?

Here is a screenshot of the same room, but using 1024x768 rather than 800x600 (also continuous scaling turned off, which seems to distort the character slightly), just to give you a clearer view of what everything looks like.



Any advice/help/criticism would be much appreciated,

Could it be tearing you're seeing?

I'm using the same setup as you (except 800x600), and it works fine except for tearing occasionally when the computer fails to redraw the character in its entirety in one place. In DX5 Vertical Sync will get rid of this, but that will probably be too slow for your game.

I think you're right, though I did have to spend quite a bit of time reading about VSync and tearing today.  A feel lame asking this, but how exactly do you turn on VSync in AGS (for Direct draw, obviously)?  I tried using the manual instructions with no success.

Maybe you should show us your animation - it could just be a matter of the sprite itself.

I recorded the walkcycle with Fraps against a white background.  It does the flickering thing in the game, but it isn't present in the recording.  I think this indicates that it's tearing.

I'm busy with a game at the moment using prerendered 3D images.  My walkcyle is 21 frames long, and was rendered in blender using alpha channels.  I was able to import the walkcycle into AGS and it looks fine.  The problem I'm having is that when the character walks across the screen, parts of it seem to "flicker" (for lack of a better word).  I've messed around with AdjustSpeedWithScaling, AnimationDelay, MovementLinkedToAnimation and MovementSpeed with no effect.  The game resolution is 1024 x 768 and it's 32-bit (I don't think the alpha channels work, otherwise).

I did a search, and there seemed to be one or two similar problems but with no resolution.  Can anyone offer any help?