Messages

I changed the dude's pose a little, and tried to make his sword bring the eye back up to him from the girl. Changing his sword arm also makes his sword a little clearer. Also lengthened the girl's legs a bit. Not sure if I did it right. Something still looks wrong. It's kind of frustrating, I want to move on and do other things with this picture that aren't redrawing the girl's legs. x3

I personally do not like image maps for animations, so unless there's a way to, say, convert an image sequence or animated gif to an atlas, it would be incredibly inconvenient for me. Animators generally do not work in the same way the image is stored, so that might make importing images into Adore kind of a hassle compared to AGS (which can import image sequences and GIFs). If you can find a way to solve this problem, I would be totally okay with it.

In terms of things I'd like to see in the animation thing, yeah, an lead-in and lead-out setting for animations would be good.

And something I find very useful when animating (spoilered because long):

Spoiler

Animation layers, too, would be good - instead of doing the AGS workaround of putting one character over another, you could instead layer the animation "head" over the animation "body" with frame offsets and have a single view for the player character - so the head can bob while the body walks. That makes talking whilst walking, something that AGS has struggled with for years and years, into trivially triggering the head talk animation regardless of what the body animation is doing. Layers could also be used to make customisable clothing (for QfG style RPGs, or even something as trivial as a player character changing clothes between scenes). If the character is wearing, say, a cloak, you can layer the cloak's animation over the player's sprite without having to have another entire walk animation with the cloak. This would make the game smaller, and the animator's life easier - as the animation could simply be done all in one go and exported out in pieces. Layers could also be used to layer on lighting effects, edge lights, etc as needed.

Per-frame layer offsets, as mentioned, might also be expanded to be rotated or scaled or even tweened, making programmatic animation trivial - think of Rayman 1, where every character was made of tiny sprites that moved around their own canvas rather than fully animated sprites.

+-Characters
   +-Hero
      +- Walking animation atlas
        +-Base walking animation
        +-Cloak Layer
        +-Head Layer (can be swapped with another atlas at run-time, say Head-Talk or Head-Scared or Head-Angry or Head-ChewingGum, which will keep the same x,y offsets so the head doesn't fly off the body regardless of what it's doing)

[close]

Okay! I think I've almost got it. She was doing too much with her hands, so I just moved her gun somewhere else. If her legs have become too short again, I'll lengthen them, but otherwise I don't really wanna revise her again. x3 And then, I'll start painting the thin dude.

Tried to fix her legs. I got down in the position she was in and tried to match it comfortably. Not going to repaint it until the positioning is correct. It's actually kind of frustrating to not be able to do it right, I've been trying to fix it all day :\ I could just cut my losses and have one of her legs overlap the other one, but I really want this pose to come out right.

Alright, I'll see what I can do with her legs so she's not posing like a contortionist.

And the guy at the back, he's a raccoon. He's just simplified so I can animate him easier.

How's this?

Alright, I'm going to fix the dude some more later, but in the meantime, I started painting the other two figures.



It's far from finished, I can change parts of the painting pretty easily. What do y'all think?

Spoiler

If you haven't used the wet towel on yourself, use it.

If you have, try scavenging something from the chair. You'll need another tool to work with.

[close]

Great, I tried to incorporate the suggested changes into the sketch.



- Moved the lady, lengthened her arms and legs.
- Tried to get across "leaning on his right leg" across better, minor fixes. He's supposed to be extremely thin, so I didn't add too much flesh.
- Tried to add a smirk to the dude's face. I am abysmal at facial expressions. It may be a little too malevolent for what I'm going for.

I'm currently doing some concept art for my game, and I want to paint it, but I'm not sure whether the anatomy/composition is as good as it could be before I commit to painting it. I've been at this sketch for a few hours, and I just can't see if I'm slipped up anywhere.



Any advice?

Okay, fixed ku,ke,te, and ra so they don't look nigh on identical (mostly by making one of the pairs shorter and squatter - looking up how they're hand drawn helped)



Also converted another font I regularly use to JISX0201:



You can get this one here.

And I tested out the font with the following pangram, though I had to replace ãÆ'° with イ and ãÆ'± with エ as ãÆ'° and ãÆ'± aren't in the charset:
  イãÆ'­ãÆ'ãÆ'‹ãÆ'݋Æ'˜ãÆ'ˆ ãÆ'ãÆ'ªãÆ'Å'ãÆ'«ãÆ'² ãÆ'¯ã‚«ãÆ'¨ã‚¿ãÆ'¬ã‚½ ãÆ'„ãÆ'ãÆ'ŠãÆ'©ãÆ' 
  ウãÆ'°ãÆ'Žã‚ªã‚¯ãÆ'¤ãÆ'ž ケãÆ'•ã‚³ã‚¨ãÆ'† アサキãÆ'¦ãÆ'¡ãÆ'Ÿã‚· ãÆ'±ãÆ'’ãÆ'¢ã‚»ã‚¹ãÆ'³


Is it worth adding ãÆ'°ãÆ'±? It's just two characters, and I have plenty of space, but they are obsolete.

I've recently been fascinated by different character encodings, so I decided to make a Katakana font using JIS X 0201, since that's the only AGS-compatible encoding I can find for japanese text. I don't actually speak the language, but I did try to make them look as accurate as possible.



So, does this look readable? Any mangled kana?

You can get it here if you want to try it out.

The non-JISX0201 characters are:
129 - Star
130 - Heart
131 - Infinity
132 - Cross
133 - White Shogi
134 - Black Shogi
135 - Ankh
136 - Female
137 - Male
138 - Mercury
139 - Note
140 - Quarter Note
141 - Double Note
142 - Double Quarter Note
143 - Flat
144 - Sharp
145 - Lightning
146 - Thunderstorm
147 - Sun
148-157 - 1 to 9 kanji
158 - hundred
159 - thousand

Intellivision Font in Windows-1252
Hotel Mario Font in Windows-1252
Tom Thumb Font in Windows-1252

Some more 256 character fonts for use in your games.

Here's an easy one.

That's Apollo Justice, part of the Phoenix Wright series!

So do you think this solution is workable in AGS? Does it go any faster if you manually set each tri's colour as a static thing instead of calculating it? I know I'd probably be able to create prettier looking models that way - I don't really have much use for lighting, it just gets in the way of faking texture, and though lighting a model is neat, it's practicality is pretty limited for what I'd use it for - the majority of my game has a very basic flat colour/cel shaded style. Even if I could get 256 tris with just flat colours without slowdown, that would be enough for me, I can work around pretty much any limit.

(Also, would it ease up on the processing if it was rendered at half-speed? It could still be pretty smooth, but due to it's simplicity it wouldn't need to be super smooth, and you could split up the processing between two frames instead of doing it all on one)

Thankyou again for your help!

Great! It had just the functions I needed! I gutted them and made them into a general purpose function:

Code: AGS

String FormatIntoLines(this String*, int width, FontType font) {
  int words, lines;
  String word[50], line[15];
  int wc, sp;
  String message = this;
  while (message.IndexOf(" ") > -1) {
    sp = message.IndexOf(" ");
    word[wc] = message.Substring(0, sp);
    message = message.RemoveFirst(sp+1);
    if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(word[wc])) wc++;
  }
  word[wc] = message;
  words = wc+1;
  
  String cline = "";
  int cl; // current line dex
  int nw;
  while(nw < words) {
    // end line at [ or line width > width-16
    if (word[nw] == "[" || GetTextWidth(cline.Append(String.Format(" %s", word[nw])), font) + 32 > width) {
      line[cl] = cline;
      cline = "";
      cl++;
      if (word[nw] == "[") nw++;
    }
    else {
      if (cline == "") cline = word[nw];
      else cline = cline.Append(String.Format(" %s", word[nw]));
      nw++;
    }
  }
  line[cl] = cline;
  lines = cl + 1;
  String finaltext = "";
  int i;
  while (i < lines)
  {
    String temp = String.Format ("%s[",line[i]);
    finaltext = finaltext.Append (temp);
    i++;
  }
  return finaltext;
}

Inputting the width of a label lets you truncate lines down to the width, so it never oversteps the boundaries of the label. But without both sets of code, I don't think I would have been able to do it.

Thanks, everyone! I think I can mark this one as solved, barring some terrible mistakes on my part.

I looked over the code, and tried to replicate it on my own, but I'm having a bit of trouble with it. It splits up the first line perfectly, but the second line just gets written over and over, even though the Substring would never be over the width of the label area.

Code: AGS

 
function SplitString (String formattedspeech)
{
  String speechlines [20];
  int width = lblMVText.Width;
  int start = 0;
  int end = 1;
  int linenum = 0;
  int i;
  int j;
    while (j < formattedspeech.Length)
    {
      end = j;
      if (GetTextWidth (formattedspeech.Substring (start, end), eFontPDA) > width)
      {
        bool rewinding = true;
        while (rewinding)
        {
          if (formattedspeech.Chars [end] != ' ' || formattedspeech.Chars [end] != ',' || formattedspeech.Chars [end] != '.' || formattedspeech.Chars [end] != '!' || formattedspeech.Chars [end] != '?') rewinding = false;
          else end--;
        }
        speechlines [linenum] = formattedspeech.Substring (start, end);
        Display ("%d,%d,%d,%s",start, end,linenum, speechlines[linenum]);
        linenum ++;
        start = end;
        j = end;
      }
      else j++;
    }
  String testcase = "";
  i = 0;
  while (i < linenum)
  {
    testcase = testcase.Append (speechlines[i]);
    testcase = testcase.Append ("[");
    i++;
  }
  Display(testcase);
}

Any ideas?

I'm currently working with a few applications of typing out text letter by letter, similar to how old console RPGs did it, and it's working pretty well - except for one thing. When a word is too long for the label text area, it types out as much as it can on one line and then shunts the entire word to the line below, which is very jarring to look at. I'm not sure what the solution is called, so I didn't know what to search for, but does anyone know any tricks/code to make typing out a label compensate for this behaviour? In Heatwave I just did it manually with whitespace and [[, but I don't want to rely on that for the amount of text I need to create.

Any suggestions? I'm not quite sure how to make it type out all the letters in the locations they're going to end up in.

Well, this section of the game is almost done. I need to do some more programming on the interactions, but it's almost there.

I'm a bit excited!