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I did a quick paintover:



You don't need that many colours to shade a character, you just need to know where to put the shading. For most things, 2-3 colours is enough. Always keep in mind the texture of the thing you're drawing - bring up references and always refer to them - I assumed he was wearing a leather jacket and khaki pants, so I went and shaded up some appropriate folds. Leather is very shiny in places, so I added some scant highlights. Khaki, on the other hand, is almost completely matte, so it only needs two colours. I didn't touch the boots, but you could apply the same techniques there.

If you're ever stuck on how to shade something, just look up the thing you're shading in a photograph and test it out.

That's looking great, Khris! I can't wait to be making models to put in an AGS game. It'll be the most advanced game of 1992.

Regarding texturing, there's no way you could make perspective correct textures, but flat on textures might be possible, if only technically:


By drawing the triangle on another surface, using that as a template to cut out a base texture, and blitting that on the model's drawing, you could get the kind of "endless field" effect that was used in Escape from Monkey Island, and a lot of cheaper animations. If you have sprites with the different levels of brightness, you could even retain the 3D effect whilst having the texture.

The problem here would be that you'd require 10-20 extra commands per poly, and the effect wouldn't be that great.

I cannot believe this! I am absolutely astounded! Quite honestly I thought it would be an impossible task or a pipe dream, but there you go, doing it in mere days. Thank you so much!

In terms of colouring it in 8bit, I could whip up a simple CLUT generator that mixes together two or three shades of each colour in a range (in my game it would be 0-63), so you can approximate lighter and darker colours - it's not that difficult, I already have a more sophisticated version for translucency, making blends between black, a target colour, and white should be pretty trivial. How many shades are required for a suitable 3D effect? I'll whip something up.

Though, if you want to go real basic for lo colour 3D, you'd just need some way of painting the tris manually - I think that's how it worked in Alone In The Dark? (like this). No lighting, just coloured polygons. I remember Carnby's suit in particular having shading "drawn" onto it. Not the most fancy thing around, but suitable for what I want to use it for, at least, and it'll look like it has a texture on even though it's literally just coloured triangles!

Aaah, that's really awesome, Khris! That's exactly what I was talking about! I am always consistently amazed at the talent in these forums, ahaha.

How many polys do you think could be rendered like that without slowdown? Is it feasible for AGS to handle without choking on itself? I tested out just raw DrawTriangle commands once, and on my old laptop, I managed to get up to 2000/frame without it dropping below 60fps. But I'm guessing with the extra math involved for 3D, the reality would be a lot less. I'm pretty excited - I've made 3D models as a basis for my 2D work, but I've never used them realtime in a game before!

(And I guess 8bit would be trivial to do, so long as you have a palette and the ability to set colours to each tri.)

Ah, excellent! I'll try that one out!

Edit: Hmm, I don't think the non-plugin version can load obj files, it only makes primitives. I'll still see what I can glean from it, see if I can't make it run in 8bit.

I've been working on elements for my game, and looking through demoscene stuff to get inspiration for some of the SFX I want to use to tell the story with. One of these things is flat shaded 3D models, which I have an affinity for - they look incredibly oldschool, and I do make 3D models as well as pixel art. I know flat shaded 3D prims are possible in AGS, the AGS3D module/plugin is testament to that. Unfortunately, that module/plugin only does 16/32bit, and my game is in 8-bit. Being 8-bit, it also brings up the problem that any shading can't rely on just RGB values. I've been thinking about this, and I think if I hardcode what tri is coloured what palette slot, I may be able to produce 3D images within the bounds of my game's limitations, like so:


The black outline is so that the image can be seen even when the model is turned at an angle, since in this shading model, we wouldn't have the luxury of actual shading or lighting. But because of the lack of actual shading, I can also get away with using less polys for everything. I'd guess the flow would be like this:
1) Load OBJ model
2) Have an array the size of the number of tris in the model, with assigned colours to them
3) Draw the model using the assigned colours onto a full screen drawing surface.
4) Duplicate the drawing surface, have a completely black sprite, and cut out the model's dimensions with CopyTransparencyMask.
5) Draw the sillhouette 4 times, at offsets (0,-1),(0,1),(1,0),(-1,0) onto a new drawing surface
6) Draw the final sprite onto the drawing surface at offset (0,0).

But I'm not actually too up on the programming side of this (I'm an artist :<), and I can't find any old versions of the AGS3D module (the one that uses DrawTriangle) to test it out.

So, how easy would this be to do, and more importantly, would it be fast enough to run real time? I don't need any fancy texture mapping, or lighting, or even high polys, I just need to be able to rotate, scale, and position a model in 3D space. Where would I begin to do something like this?

Thankyou, everyone, for the feedback! It's invaluable!

Okay, I really liked the Desiree you did, Khris, so I tried to transform one of her other sprites into the design you did. I really like the darker skin tone on her, it sets her apart from Ollie and complements her other colours. If it's okay, could I use that sprite?

Ghost: I tried to redraw and reshade Ollie with the same shading style as the rest of the cast. I also reduced the size of her head, bringing her more towards the rest of the humans in the cast:

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/art/Ollie_Des_Update2.PNG[/imgzoom]

I'm tweaking these sprites for my game, and I'm not happy with how they're coming out - they look very awkward and inconsistent, and I won't be comfortable animating them until I know I got their basic proportions down.

Namely, these two characters:
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/Ollie_Des_Crit.PNG[/imgzoom]

They both look a little wrong to me, but I'm not sure how. Ollie's (wearing orange/cyan) head looks fine to me, and I want to keep that, but I'm not sure about her body. It looks a little too warped to me, but I dunno how to fix it. Desiree's (wearing blue/red) sprites are just a mess, I can't even get her side head to look alright. (I added Jakob's sprite for reference, he's around the size I need everyone to be to fit on the screen)

Ollie's supposed to be boyish and a little chubby, whilst Desiree is supposed to be more conventionally attractive.

Basically, I'm floundering a bit trying to get their designs down in a way that looks consistent and good, and it's really bugging me. Any pointers y'all can give me?

Thanks in advance!

I uploaded the 2010 ceremony to Youtube:

[embed=480,360]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s7B1a9BYDk[/embed]

Congratulations to all the winners! There were some really great games this year, and I'll be sure to play the ones I missed out on - they all looked fantastic. I was really impressed with the ceremony program this year, it was a marvel - and it had the capability for animation, as well.

Unfortunately, I've got to put in that I also felt alienated by the gratuitous 'lesbian peep show' too, though. Could we not include stuff like that next year?

It has term searching capabilities, they're under Index (where you can type in the function you want) and Search (which searches pages for their contents). And if you press f1 while the text cursor is over a function in the script editor, it takes you directly to that function's entry.

I'm not sure how it can be improved, except for more script examples, which would bloat out the manual a bit.

I think you want the AreThingsOverlapping function?

It's alright, noticed a few things that may make the next one a little better.

Try and add more easing to the body movements, right now they're doing a very staccato forward and backward motion through their arc, which is quite robotic and probably not what you were looking for. If you look closely, you'll notice the arms and feet move very quickly and jerk to a halt. Don't be afraid to add in some cushioning!

The head is a little hard to read at the moment - you have some bounce on the hair but it seems to be muddied somewhat by the head losing cohesion in places. Keep the head very tightly drawn - it'll make the hair seem more fluid and flowing. Trace over from previous frames if you must, just keep it cohesive.

How did you animate this? Was it in place or is the character walking across the sheet of paper? Doing the latter is how I'd recommend it, as you'll be able to see the character in motion and be able to do trailing arcs like the tail very easily. You can cut it down into a walking in place animation very easily afterward.

(Finally, as an aside, to help appraising the animation, could you make the canvas keep the same size? The flickering borders makes it hard to really read the animation. If the whitespace behind the character moves, it's very distracting.)

Some new assets for you to peruse:



And it's animated friend:
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/art/albion_map_small_pal_anim.gif[/imgzoom]

The island that the game takes place on.

We just learned that there are goblins and ettins. A world that distinguishes between those somewhat related mythical creatures is a dangerous place; Ettins are badass, and goblins are bad news.

Do they have to be bad news? Goblins are generally sapient and often intelligent. Would it be possible to have an audience with some goblins? If there's a diplomatic way we can solve their problem and ours, like hiring them as cheap militia, then the goblinoids won't attack us, and we will have more protection. I'd say map out the land around us, and if we find a goblin tribe or something, we don't destroy it instantly, but open a dialogue with them. Have them send their Goblin Chief to see us, to see what we can do for each other.

Species-based genocide isn't something I'm very keen on.

[HEATWAVE]

HEATWAVE

Download it here.

A short story set in a cyberpunk future, where an ordinary guy deals with a power cut during a heatwave. Features:

• Elaborate cutscenes in the style of a very old videogame!
• A detailed setting!
• Damn good music!
• Less than 257 colours!

Code: AGS

function Magicwords_OnActivate(GUIControl *control)
    {
        String words = Magicwords.Text;
        words = words.LowerCase ();
        if(words == "magica aqua fillerupa")
            {
                object[0].Visible = true;
                gCauldrontext.Visible = false;
            }    
    }

This should work if you don't want to worry about capitalisation. Just have the code remove all the capitalisation first. Also you forgot to close some of your brackets, namely the if block. Careful of that.

Make the blade a different mesh, then put it inside a group with itself. Set the pivot point to the base of the blade, where it comes out of the hilt. Now, when you reduce the scale of the blade mesh (on one axis), it should look like it's going in and out of the hilt. No bones required. In order to maintain the actual scale of the lightsaber, group the blade group and the hilt mesh together. When you want to move the saber around in 3D space, move the group and not the mesh (you may want to parent constrain the entire thing to a locator so you can move that about instead.)

Ok, that should be easy enough to do. Something like this maybe:

Code: AGS

#define AGS_ROOM_COUNT 30 //Or however many rooms you have in your game.
String hotspot_name[];
bool hotspotnameinit [AGS_ROOM_COUNT];
function game_start ()
{
    hotspot_name = new String [AGS_ROOM_COUNT * AGS_MAX_HOTSPOTS];
}

function on_event (EventType event, int data)
{
    if (event == eEventEnterRoomBeforeFadein)
        {
         if (!hotspotnameinit[player.Room])
            {
                int i;
                while (i < AGS_MAX_HOTSPOTS)
                    {
                        hotspot_name [(player.Room * AGS_ROOM_COUNT) + i] = hotspot[i].Name;
                        i++;
                    }
                hotspotnameinit[player.Room] = true;
            }   
        }
}

function SetName (this Hotspot*, String name)
{
    hotspot_name [(player.Room * AGS_ROOM_COUNT) + this.ID] = name;
}

function GetName (this Hotspot*)
{
    return hotspot_name [(player.Room * AGS_ROOM_COUNT) + this.ID];
}

Whenever you need the hotspot's name, use Hotspot.GetName () instead.

I did this in my last game - you basically have to hijack the text marker while the cursor is over the hotspot (or whatever you're using) and return it to @OVERHOTSPOT@ when it's not. It depends on what interface you have - it could be as simple as putting a couple of lines of code into rep_exec or as complex as creating a proxy string for each hotspot to display instead of the name.

It is unfortunately not possible to directly change the hotspot name yet, but it is possible to fool the player into thinking you have.