Messages

> ASK the JESTER why your REGAL FINERY is COWBOY BOOTS and a MATCHSTICK. Is the KINGDOM so POOR you can't afford a decent BALLGOWN to meet your DELEGATES with?!

Honestly, it's like we just took the throne, threw on whatever and expected noone to notice! You're a King for heaven's sake!

I really like this tool, I didn't find any outstanding bugs, but I did find it kind of hard to use. Apart from the clearer selection as stated before, would it be possible to be able to select characters by typing in the letters in a text box? I find it kind of hard to crossreference the ASCII table and figure out which box I'm clicking on when I have an empty font (which usually have 1x1 hitboxes) and select them for editing. I'd like to know which character I'm on in case two characters are alike. If this function was in there already I'm not sure I was able to find it.

Also, would it be possible to add a test render of the font to see if the font reads correctly without having to run a test game in AGS? Something with pangrams, like
The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog
Falsches Üben von Xylophonmusik quält jeden gröàŸeren Zwerg
El pingüino Wenceslao hizo kilómetros bajo exhaustiva lluvia y frío, añoraba a su querido cachorro.

Those contain most of the extended ASCII characters, I believe. Though just being able to type a word would be awesome.

This program is amazing, though, a real lifesaver for doing >128 characters!

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute()
{
	if (!gInventoryBar.Visible && mouse.y <= INVENTORY_POPUP_POSITION)
	{
		gInventoryBar.Visible = true;
                if (gInventoryBar.Y == -30) gInventoryBar.TweenPosition(0.5, 10, 0, eEaseOutTween, eNoBlockTween); //This only needs to be done once.
	}
	
	else if (gInventoryBar.Visible && mouse.y >= gInventoryBar.Height)
	{
             if (gInventoryBar.Y == 0) gInventoryBar.TweenPosition(0.5, 10, -30, eEaseInTween, eNoBlockTween); //The tween will only happen when the Inventory is fully out.
             if (gInventoryBar.Y == -30) gInventoryBar.Visible = false; //Only remove it when it's done tweening, or it'll be gone instantly.
	}
}

repeatedly_execute will runs functions once per loop, so every time those conditions are satisfied you'll get one new Tween a loop. You need to make sure you are in control of when a tween happens to avoid this.

That worked! I just put a transparent frame and told AGS not to blank the screen before playing it. Now it plays fine, and setting the duration of the first frame to 0 seconds means that it never shows up anyway. I'll make a note of it in future.

Weird behaviour, though. I wonder why it's doing that?

Edit: It flashes before it starts the animation, even when I told it not to clear the screen. Lame. :< Gonna try a few things to see if it was using the right transparent colour.

I'm trying to put an ident into my game using PlayFlic (as FLCs do these kinds of full screen animations more efficiently than AGS' inbuilt animation) but I've come across a bit of a problem - the first frame of the animation is corrupted, and I'm not sure how to solve it. The rest of the animation works fine - the frames appear to be delta encoded and soon cut through the corruption, but the first frame doesn't seem to exist. I made it with Jasc Animation Shop 3, and checked it with Autodesk Animator Studio Player.

Here's what the (corrupted) frame looks like:
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/Game/Heatwave/error/corruption.PNG[/imgzoom]

Here's the FLC file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/Game/Heatwave/error/FLIC0.flc
And here's the game's palette: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50882197/Game/Heatwave/error/palette.bmp

It's definitely not a palette issue, as then colours are all the right kind - but... it's just not working. I've used all the FLC playing options, and opening the FLC in other programs doesn't produce the same result. What's going on here?

Very well. In that case, please ignore that suggestion for 3.3.0 and consider it as an optional setting for 3.4.0 instead.

But it is a bug - I can't count how many times it's irked me playing a game and having the character explode into a million subpixels every time they scale. I don't think it looks good at all. I guess there could be an option in the config file if people really want it (hirescharacters=true?), but the regular operation of the nearest neighbour filter shouldn't do things like that.

> SWAP clothes with JESTER and become the power behind the throne. No one will be able to assassinate you if you're wearing that clownish garb!

(And it's probably heavily armoured or something. Jesters are notoriously hard to kill)

Not sure what happened there. Tread was gone and reappeared again?
AN IMAGE

Ah, Cher's only video game role, and something with a musical number by (bafflingly enough) Jim Belushi.

That's 9: The Last Resort! I played that just the other month!

How about this?
[imgzoom]http://i44.tinypic.com/2jeb6mb.png[/imgzoom]

Did you set an Idle view for the goblin? You may want to use SetIdleView to turn that off. It sounds like his walking animation was unwittingly set to that, if it's happening at 15 second intervals.

The way I did it for my fonts was to create a proxy font with the right dimensions as the one on your sprite sheet, and export it from Radiant FontEdit as a BMP. You can then open that in MSPaint and paste in the correct characters, then open it back up in FontEdit, and there you go.

Don't resize any of the sprite boxes in MSPaint, though, FontEdit is finnicky with stuff like that. And it also might be a little difficult to identify what character goes where if you make an entirely blank sprite, so always edit an existing one, or scrawl in the A slot, and the 0 slot, so you know which parts go where.

After that, you can resize the font again in FontEdit, and there you go.

Ah, I'm glad to have found a bug.

As for the other issue, it was a case of me not allocating enough music channels. I'll remember to do that in the future.

That works, I managed to time the cutscene pretty accurately. Thanks!

When I need a dynamic scene to be timed to music, I'll be sure to use MIDI instead, but timing the scene at the same time as the XM playing works for static ones.

I'm syncing up some music to my game's intro, but to my horror, I've found that I can't make tracker music sync with the action at all. The Position property is pretty much useless (It increments once every 5 seconds, which is not what I want), and PositionMs doesn't work at all, even though the documentation said it worked with all formats but MIDI.

I'm currently timing the action with this code:

Code: AGS

  if (intromus != null && intromus.IsPlaying) lblMusicTime.Text = String.Format ("%d",intromus.PositionMs);

I tried to play a silent MIDI on another channel... but apparently you're not allowed to play both an XM and a MIDI at the same time.

Am I just using it wrong? I don't want to use MP3 music, but AGS' syncing capabilities seem to be sorely lacking when it comes to non-digital music - I could just try to find MIDI music, but I don't like the sound of them compared to tracker music.

I would very much like it if all you furry creeps would just not post stuff like this. There's like fetishes and kinky stuff and then there's interspecies creepy. I don't know where you came from or what childhood trauma you had that you think a woman looks better if she has a tail and cat ears, but don't think for one second everybody else doesn't see this and think "well I better hide my cat from this person".

Holy Toledo! This is rather an overblown reaction to what is essentially vanilla cheesecake (with chocolate sprinkles). It's some of the tamest art I've seen, and I'm not sure it quite warrants this kind of vitriol. Come on, it's not mind shattering or even alien. It's girls with flair. You see raunchier stuff than this walking down the high street.

I don't think the AGS forums is quite the right place to be sharing commissions, unless they're game related, but I don't think it deserves villification.

I'm trying to import some sprites into my game, and they do have black outlines. Unfortunately, AGS goes absolutely ape when you try and import a sprite that has 0,0,0 in any slot that isn't the transparent one. If 0,0,0 is the transparent colour, AGS will absolutely mutilate the sprite's darker colours that aren't black. I changed the transparent colour to RGB magenta to see if that would help matters, but all it did was change the black on import to white. This is using "top left" transparency, so it really shouldn't be doing this to any of the colours, and I have an actual palette slot for black. AGS just seems to have it out for really dark colours.

This is killing my ability to carry on with my game, and I'm not sure what to do. I don't have my computer at the moment, so I can't use my regular paletted paint programs to fix the problem, but I still need to work on my game.

What is AGS doing to actively mutilate every 8 bit image you give it? Can it be solved? Are there any workarounds?

Edit: Opening the sprite in MSPaint (from the sprite editor) and pasting in the correct version seems to solve the problem. Something feels wrong about that solution.

Is the character's sprite doubled in size? 75% of 400 seems to match up with the character's doubled height.

It's probably because the sprites that made up the character weren't imported at the right resolution. Check the Resolution entry in the sprite's properties tab - if it says 320x200, change that to 640x400.

I'm trying to code a dynamic colour thing in AGS, so that I can change the colours of particular palette slots to emulate some neat effects. One of these is a shifting rainbow effect - going through hues smoothly and wrapping around. I would easily be able to do this kind of thing if I did it in HSV rather than RGB, as HSV has direct control over what a colour looks like, not it's light components.

Unfortunately, I'm at a bit of a loss figuring out how to do HSV to RGB at all. I'm looking at the formula to convert between the two colour systems, and I don't understand it. I've tried to convert the formula to AGSScript, but... it has syntax I'm not familiar with. Such as "C = V x S_HSV". I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing.

Any suggestions for converting between colour formats?

I know this is utterly off topic, but I have a dream of proving that statement wrong one day.

That isn't to say there aren't ways of doing three dimensional pixel art. I love voxels. They're the best.

Okay, so here's the thing: You can't render a 3D scene to look like it was pixel art. It is way too different an art form to mimic in polygonal 3D. There are ways you can make a 3D scene look "old school" pixelised. Mostly by using flat textures with pixel art on them. But that's not what you're seeming to want here. If you want real oldschool backgrounds, that look like they're painted at low res and not 3D, you can't cheat. You can, however, use your 3D work as a baseline.

By making a base mesh (like this), you can use it to do most of the legwork of the final piece. You can then paint over it, like this.

The important thing when creating the base mesh isn't detail - you're going to render it out at 320x200 anyway, and you don't want to waste time texturing. The most important thing is /lighting/. You want a good contrast - light up the important bits, leave the unimportant in shadow. And you're doing it in 3D, so you can mess around with how it'll look. Ignore the small objects that'll be in the scenes... the ones that don't give much of an impact.

Render the scene out, and then start painting over it (I suggest a group with the blending set to Overlay). When it gets to the small details, you can paint them in, and you'll have a background that has both consistent lighting and hand painted low res qualities.

Note that Monkey Island 2 and 3 used more of an expressive, less technically accurate way of rendering their scenes, so the 3D you use may look dead if you're not careful. For outdoor scenes, I recommend doing only the main foreground pieces in 3D, and paint the background in 2D.

Texture mapping is also something you need to avoid doing too much of - unless the textures are incredibly big, like a tiled floor. That vent, when rendered out for 320x200, will become muddy and indistinct, so it's best to pixel that in over the top of the render rather than try to make the scene render perfectly the first time.

When creating backgrounds like this, and stretching what you can do with the tools you have, you can't rely on the render alone to create what you want.

So in short: Big forms in black and white, with the kind of lighting you want for the render, and when you're happy with how it looks, paint over it with progressively tinier brushes to create the small props and textures.

I am also having trouble meeting the deadline. I still need to do a bit of art for the game, and clean up the writing. If only I had a few more days. Oh well, crunch time.