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You know what I think the rea problem is, at least for my eyes? It's that this noodle restaurant looks like it should be inside. I'm not really sure exactly why, but it just doesn't look like an outside kinna place.

I think part of it might be the foreground, actually. It looks more like clutter than buildings-across-the-street. The framing makes it feel like we're looking in a window.  And the sidewalk blocks aren't quite big enough; they look more like floortiles, and since the road isn't visible because of the foreground clutter, it's hard to know that is a road.
And then there's the background. There's a street on the left with only one building and then a big black space where another building might be. Kinna confusing.

The checkerboard isn't just distracting, it's confusing. I have no idea what that's supposed to be, and it appears to serve no function. So one might spend way more time than necessary looking at that since it also draws the eye...

I think the barstools are also a problem. Most outdoor places I know have chairs that can be brought inside out of the rain. Of course, I live in Seattle, so...

I guess I can just sum this up by saying "too confusing". I spent the first minute looking at the picture thinking, "What am I seeing?" and "What's that supposed to be?". I think you need to simplify.

Well, heck, Yahtzee's style reminds me of the old LucasArts style as it is... I'd say that's what big brother is really emulating. Just sayin'.

And there's nothing wrong with that. In a way it's actually kinna cool. You know, all retro an' junk. I say go with it.

But I also have to chime in about those shelves. Too bright, IMHO.

You know, Anvil looks like it actually has the kind of interface I've been looking for for a long while. The only difference is that I've been looking for that style of interface for a MOD/S3M tracker.

I'm probably putting a date on my age here, but back in the DOS days I used to play around with MODEdit 3.0. It was the only tracker that had an interface that graphically displayed the notes on a scale rather than displaying the notes in a text representation (note+octave, like "C#3"). Most trackers consider it more important to display time and all the various channels at once rather than display the notes in scale and time with the inactive (in the editor) channels greyed out behind the active channel.

I always found that deeply counter-intuitive. Knowing what note you're playing and when always seemed much more important to me than knowing which channels were playing what when; timing always seemed to tend to itself.

I'm gonna DL Anvil because I miss playing with music and I might just find it useful when I start making my game. But if anyone knows of a digital sampler/tracker that has a similar interface and can tell me how to get a copy, well, you can have my first born male child.

Or you could just not egg the living andhashdollarpercent out of it and stay law-abiding while she goes to jail.

Where's the fun in that? 

Honestly, I think limiting yourself is only necessary until you have a few successes under your belt, while you're still learning. After that, ambition is lovely while patience and perseverence are your most handy tools. You have to stick with it and not give up, even if it seems to be taking forever. If you're like me, where your interests and ambitions can change with the tide, this can be especialyl challenging, I know, but there's nothing to do but keep with it anyway. There's no magic wand for that; you have to have willpower.

For example, I've been working on an all-CG Star Wars fan film since 2002. I wrote the script--30 pages--and started modeling in 2003, and didn't start actually animating until late that year. I'm still working on it, have about 20 minutes of animatics and only four finalized shots...but it's looking awesome and I'm loving it...even though I'm hungry to start on my AGS project (and kind of have; I've built and animated the main character already).

But, darn it, I'm going to finish. It's so far along and looking so nifty, and I've had so much help from other people that I don't want to let down or let their work go to waste...I can't stop now!

And that's the only attitude that'll finish an ambitious project.

Mercer Island. She was gonna buy a 3 million dollar house on Mercer Island? That's a rather short bus ride away for me. Heh. Could egg the living @#$% out of it if she'd actually gotten it... 

Truthfully, I don't exactly remember how I found AGS, but I have a theory or two...

See, more than once I've gone looking for games engines, open-source or just game makers, whatever. Truth to tell, I wanted to make a Master of Orion clone because MoO3 sucked like the Mighty Hooverâ,,¢, and MoO2, while still an amazing game, wasn't quite the experience I wanted.

So I was hoping, if nothing else, to find a simple scripting language with built-in graphics support (I've programmed before, but graphics manipulation was always way above my head for some reason. I figured if I were to find a graphics engine I could probably do the rest) and I probably ran across AGS in a Google search or something. "free game engine" and variants on that theme turn up a lot of interesting items on Google.

I'm sure I ran across AGS, said to myself, "Ooh, adventure games!", saw how small AGS was and DL'ed it. Then I got involved in my Star Wars fan film and a copy of AGS--still compressed and untouched--sat on my hard drive for about two years.

I ran across it a month or two ago, and the thought of making an adventure game just sort of ate at me until I started doing something about it, so here I am. I've been thinking about a project to do once the fan film is finished anyway and it fit nicely into a game format, so...

Okay, that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Well...maybe not the stupidest but it's certainly a logical insonsistency. Tribly insists he doesn't want to get his hands dirty digging in the yard, but when it comes to excavating graves, well, it's grit-under-the-fingernails time! *facepalm*

Ah, well...thanks.

did you use pickaxe before or after you found the spot?

Well, I don't see how you could use it before you found the spot...

There's a section I found called 'Area', and when I throw a Look command at it it tells me that's the spot indicated by the bear-stick combo. I assume that's the spot I'm supposed to dig, but the pickaxe used on that spot comes up with a "That doesn't work." message...

I'm on Day 3 and I've used the White Magic'ed taddy bear to find the correct spot in the dungeon, but I can't seem to dig it up. The walkthrough says to use the pickaxe, which was what I first tried anyway, so I'm kinna stumped...

One question out of interest, since I have already criticised the fantastic piece of art: You guys (and gals) that use 3d MAX you have a legit copy of it? Or is it too risky to tell me? Just questioning so I can see what I can do... in the future...

My copy of MAX is legal. It's MAX 3.1 because I'm too broke to upgrade, but it's legal. And gets the job done.

Yeah well, I'm talking about how convincing it looks. For a building to look like a somewhat realistic building, you only have to make a box and slap a texture on it. For a building to look like a convincingly cartoony building, you have to add bend, noise, etc. modifiers, you have to have a knack for making things look cartoony,

Not at all. See, that's true if you're going for a specific style of cartoon--say, something Sam&Max-ish--but that's only one style of cartoon!
There's anime-style, there's afterschool adventure-style (think GI Joe or The Transformers or TMNT, etc), there's the FOX Kids style (a more blocky version, like the recent Batman cartoon), there's the Powerpuff Girls style (which is like the old Hanna-Barbera style mixed with anime), and so on and so forth. You only have to warp the geometry in funky ways if you're going for that specific style. If you think that's the only way to look cartoony, well, you need to think outside the box a bit more!

you have to model more stuff, so that the plane textures don't show through it and you have to adjust lighting (which isn't really a big deal).

..."so that the plane textures don't show through it"? I'm not even sure what you mean by that.

And adjusting the lighting can be dealt with. Using a toon-shading plugin is actually somewhat problematic when it comes to lighting, but that can be dealt with by using the plug-in only for the inking and making your own shader out of Gradient Ramps (if you're using MAX, that is). In fact, by being creative with Gradient Ramps, you can do something that most toon shaders don't: alow your toons to react to light color.

If txarly were to switch to cartoony, he would most likely have a harder time making backgrounds of the same quality as his realistic work.

Re-texturing a photo-real 3D scene to become toon shaded is time-consuming, but the results can be very rewarding.

I am just learning 3ds Max and I would love to see that...

Well, when I have a spare moment, perhaps I'll post a toon-shading tutorial, then. For the interested.

My least favourite was in Indy 4': FoA, (in one of the paths) where you had to find the stone (don't wemember wich stone) from the streets of Monte Carlo. You had to remember twoFrench street names, in the corner of these streets was the stone.

See, if we're talking Fate of Atlantis, my least favorite was fumbling about in the dark trying to find/remember various hotspots trying to get a generator working to turn on the lights. The only thing that saved this from being a game-breaker was the LucasArts system that displayed the name of the hotspot your mouse was over, so at least you weren't just clicking on a black screen.

Still obnoxious, tho.

I never really paid much attention to the score in a video game unless there was some reason to, like a contest that you could only win by getting a perfect score which would then give you a code to mail in to enter or something... And I think that only happened once.

It was just never very important to me. So score or no score, I don't give a rat's tuckus.

I honestly can't play more than a half hour of Doom 3 before getting so twitchy that I jump at noises that aren't even there...

Oh, and in Wing Commander 2 when Spirit  died...well, I didn't cry, but I was down in the dumps for ages. I liked her.

Other than that, the only games that really have any visceral effect on me are those with an ambience that I really like. For example, any Star Wars game, especially KOTOR 1 & 2 and BattleFront, affect me because I tend to feel more at home in the SW universe than in real life sometimes... If I'm depressed, playing those games helps.

I guess my game stores must just suck, then. I wouldn't be surprised honestly; much as I love Seattle, there are certian basic assumptions and preconceptions that are rather insidious in this town. Assumptions about what people want, preconceptions about what will or won't sell, etc. Not just in video games, but in everything. It's really weird, for a town that's supposed to be so hip.

Ah, well. I guess I'll just have to bookmark that Adventure Gamers site and order junk on-line from now on...

well, some people asked me if the screens are for a game,soÃ,  i'll tell you.
I'm thinking to make a game, but first i'd like to know what people like more, if screens in aÃ,  toon way or more realistic ones.I mean, if you likeÃ,  monkey islandÃ,  or syberia style.

Bah! Make your game the way you want to make it. Personally, I don't care if it looks cartoony or realistic as long as it doesn't look like crap...which this scene doesn't. This scene looks pretty good. I'm actually not seeing the problems some people are about where the character can go if this were for a game; I see some very narrow places a character could walk, but they're there. Some Sierra games had less space for you to walk on, lemme tell you!

Cartoony 3d is harder than realistic 3d to get to look convincing. So stick to realistic.

Oh, I disagree. While I'm working with AGS I'm also working on a toon-shaded Star Wars fan film, and I have to say that, a few lighting issues aside that are an artifact of how large my scene is rather than any inherent defect in toon-shading, it's been pretty darn easy.
I could write up a tutorial on just how easy it is in 3DS MAX--my 3D platform of choice--but I'm not sure if this is the right place or time. But if people are interested, I'll take the time, cuz writing tutorials is kinna fun! It's all about Gradient Ramps set to Lighting and Solid, for those who know MAX. Trust me.

For example:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/rocketgrrl/TantInt02.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/rocketgrrl/Shot02B.jpg

Okay, I've got this one figured out. It might be a bit clunky, but it's also really really simple...

Code: ags

// main global script file

//Initial variables
GUI *From;
Button *ToDo;

// ********* What to do when they select OK

function DoIt(){
if (ToDo == truequit) {
QuitGame(0);}
if (ToDo == NewGame) {
RestartGame();}  
}

// *********

// ********* Suspenders and Belt Idiot-proofing

function SandB_cancel_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button){
gBelt.Visible = false;
From.Visible = true;

}  

function SandB_OK_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button){
  gBelt.Visible = false;
  DoIt();
}  

// ******** End Suspenders and Belt

// ******** Quit_Check Menu Items Here

function NewGame_Click(GUIControl *control,  MouseButton button){
  gNewquit.Visible = false;
  gBelt.Visible = true;
  From = gNewquit;
  ToDo = control.AsButton;
}

function truequit_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button) {
  gNewquit.Visible = false;
  gBelt.Visible = true; 
  From = gNewquit;
  ToDo = control.AsButton;
}

function newquit_cancel_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button) {
  gNewquit.Visible = false;
  mouse.UseDefaultGraphic();
  gMain.Visible = true;
}

// ********* Quit_Check end

I had to figure out pointers and how they worked, then I had to figure out what the *control pointer was actually doing and why reading it into another pointer or a variable wasn't working before I hit on this solution.

The *From pointer points to the GUI that the player got to gBelt from so that it could be displayed again if they pressed cancel. The  *ToDo pointer points at the GUI control they clicked on to get to gBelt so that the DoIt() function would know what action to perform after they had clicked on OK.

Maybe there's a more elegant way to do DoIt(), but I haven't found one. I'd prefer to handle that from within the button's Click function to have it all self-contained, but no matter how I racked my brains I couldn't figue that one out. There seems to be no way to make AGS wait for the player to input something on gBelt before continuing the Click functions. Maybe it's just because I was in debug mode or something, but if I made a While loop that did nothing until the player did something, the engine would crash claiming that after some ungodly number of cycles nothing new had happened so AGS assumed it had gotten hung. Annoying.

Regardless, this does get the job done. Now I just need to apply what I've learned to Save/Restore screens, because I'll be damned to Cleveland before I use the built-in ones. Not cuz they stink, cuz they don't, but because they're generic and don't fit in with the visual scheme I'm coming up with for my game.
Though I'd like to suggest in the future that ALL of these screens exist as editable GUIs so the game creators can plug in their own graphics without all this trouble. (That is why I went through all this, to create my own unique GUI scheme rather than use the default. Superficial, I know, but personalizing the GUI is what makes a game stand out as one that actual care and attention was paid to, IMHO)

Ah-hah! That's part of what I desperately needed to know!

I used to have some experience with coding in Pascal, but that was well over a decade ago. I remember that there was a way to call a function to return a result, but I'd forgotten the syntax, and I wasn't sure if it would be different in AGS anyway since AGS is trying to mimic C++ and not Pascal.

And 'return' is just what I needed for that kinna functionality.

I may still have some difficulty in changing from one GUI to another to get the yes or no results, but you've given me the first step. Thanks!

OK, you nailed the Left-Click named thing. The 'Script Name' is exactly that - the name the control is known by in the script.

Ah! That's what confused me! I was thinking that 'Script Name' meant it was the name of a script rather than the name of the control. My bad, though it is kinna ambiguous.

GUIControl, *control, MouseButton, and button are never used by any of the functions

Firstly, that's two things not four as you've split it with commas - GUI Control *control, which is a pointer to a GUI Control (like the script name), and MouseButton button.

Heh, actually, I knew that part, sorta. I mean, there are four things there, really, it's just that there's only two eventual results. All a matter of perspective. I suppose i should have said that I wasn't sure what *control became as a result of GUIControl or something... I d'know. Semantics.

Now, I'll admit I don't know what control does - perhaps someone else can explain it?

It's my guess that *control points to the button the player just clicked on, in case you need to know it, but I could be wrong.

button returns the mouse button used to click the control, meaning you could do something like:

Code: ags

function btnTest_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button) {
  if (button == eMouseLeft) Display("Left");
  else if (button == eMouseRight) Display("Right");
}

And have a different reaction depending on which button was used. The MouseButton part just means it uses the MouseButton enumerated type (other AGS Built-in Enums[/i], and where they're used) - which means it returns a phrase instead of number, to make things easier to track (in this case, eMouseLeft instead of the more ambiguous 1).

Okay, that makes sense.

So, hmm...So if I combine this with Akumayo's method, what I'd really do is turn off gNewquit, turn on gBelt, and then run the YesOrNo function described until I get a result that isn't 'null'. Then process that result as normal.

Something like:

Code: ags

function Newquit_Click(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button);
int quitornot;
gNewquit.Visible = false;
gBelt.Visisble = true;
while (quitornot == null) {
YesOrNo(quitornot);}
}

And then have YesOrNo() check GUI clicks rather than keypresses. I might need help figuring that part out, since GUI clicks are handled with separate functions rather than just simple detection...(I'm doing this without AGS in front of me, so I may have that code wrong, but the idea should be sound...)

A simple Quit GUI would jusy need 2 buttons -  one for 'Play' that turns itself off (e.g. gQuit.Visible = false;) and one for 'Quit' that runs QuitGame(0);.

Yeah, I'm just being more complex than that, trying to have GUI heirarchies or something...

But anyway, this has been a big help! Thanks!

I...

- Woke up
- Tried to deny I was awake
- Failed
- Got up
- Put on some Invader Zim
- Made breakfast (basmati rice flavored with chicken boullion cubes and turkey bacon crumbled into it, because I'm a freak)
- Made a token effort to clean my apartment because my dad is coming to visit me for my birthday
- Played around with AGS and got super-damn stuck on some scripting stuff
- Went to my local internet cafe to post this drivel and check e-mail and LJ

Pretty typical, actually, except for the part where my dad is showing up...