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I'm not convinced. I've always been wary of filters myself, they seem to just butcher the spirit of the sprite in question. I thought that I wasn't going to have much luck with resizing some tiny sprites (since they have less data to work with), so I tried out some hi res sprites:

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And I was like, eh.

Then I tried it out on my own game's art:

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And it actually didn't look that bad. It gets confused often, especially with shallow curves and diagonal lines. It works best with large, non-dithered, shaded sprites (and the background really doesn't lose much, apart from gaining the zig zag dither lines). I still wouldn't play an entire game with it, since the result is kind of crude, but it could serve as a good jumping off point for redrawing sprites at a higher resolution.

Nicotine is, by itself, relatively harmless (as I understand it).  It's just "habit" forming and it's what big tobacco intentionally adds to their cigarettes to keep people buying them.  It's sickening that they get away with it but they have paid off enough politicians I guess.

Don't be silly, Mandarb, Nicotine is a poison generated by the tobacco plant in order to stop animals from eating it. In fact, Nicotine is named FOR the tobacco plant.

Wait a second though, there are plenty of "poisonous" things that other animals can't eat, but people can. For example, chocolate is poisonous to cats, and grapes are poisonous to dogs, but fine for us. There are also plenty of things besides nicotine that will kill us in high doses, but not in small amounts. Nutmeg and many other cooking spices, for example.

Nicotine may be part of the Nightshade family, but hey, so are tomatoes and potatoes.

Oh, I know it's mostly harmless to us, physically, I was addressing "Deliberately putting nicotine into cigarettes. Grr, big tobacco". When without nicotine, there wouldn't be a product to sell. Noone wants to smoke a burning plant that does nothing. x3

Though, looking more closely, the nicotine content of cigarettes has increased recently. Ooh, so that's what he meant. I've learnt something today!

Nicotine is, by itself, relatively harmless (as I understand it).  It's just "habit" forming and it's what big tobacco intentionally adds to their cigarettes to keep people buying them.  It's sickening that they get away with it but they have paid off enough politicians I guess.

Don't be silly, Mandarb, Nicotine is a poison generated by the tobacco plant in order to stop animals from eating it. In fact, Nicotine is named FOR the tobacco plant.

If tobacco companies didn't add their source of Nicotine to their cigarettes... you wouldn't have a product. I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying that if they didn't add tobacco to their cigarettes, you would have a pretty shitty cigarette.

(though it would be pretty funny to see them try to sell Nicotine-free cigarettes. All the tar! None of the high!)

No, it is impossible to access the voice clips from anything but the Say command. There are a few modules that work around this with audio clips, but alas, there is no way to non-blockingly play voice clips.

Which is something that really needs to be solved in one of the next releases, really.

I'll vote... for Kasander!

[fruit bats.]

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/c9m6B9U.png[/imgzoom]

Silent predators, swooping down to catch an unwary prey, their wings keeping them aloft, above the view of anyone who dares cross them. You cannot see them, you cannot hear them, until it is too late.

Yes, they are the deadly fruit bats.

Online: I was thinking and I want to try and throw a players chat room in the game. Players can talk to about stuff in the game and stuff, idk.

Please, please, PLEASE do not think about this until you've released the game. This is not a necessary thing you need to think about yet. You don't have enough of an audience to support people chatting from within your game. Too much work, not enough reward. It'll reduce the amount of time you can spend on the actual gameplay, as well.

The engine/editor plugin pages are blank at the moment.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/ags/plugins/engine/

I'm not really hip to what version of allegro does what, or how fast, but I've been looking at the AGS drawing functions, and this:
http://www.udel.edu/CIS/software/dist/allegro-4.2.1/docs/html/alleg020.html

It seems that allegro uses the same function for transparency/lighting for any colour depth, not just 16/32bit: draw_trans_sprite, draw_lit_sprite etc. which AGS uses verbatim (through it's own wrapper function now, it seems).

AGS also has a lot of hacks going on in it which runs different code depending on the colour depth. Couldn't this just be simplified by using the COLOR_MAP functions where the BLENDER functions are used in lower bit depths? Is speed an issue? Memory? I guess you could make pre-baked LUTs on the compilation of the engine - with a good compression algorithm you can make them real tiny. A 100 level LUT set would be 6mb raw, but you could even cut it down to 50 or 25, considering the low fidelity of 8-bit graphics. It would improve the engine's capabilities, and cut down on the amount of ifs there are. The only concern would be palette cycling or doing a lot of palette tweaking, but even in commercial games in the 90s they didn't have those at the same time. I'm pretty sure AGS already uses it for sprite darkening on 8bit sprites, but I could be wrong.

I dunno, it just seems like it could simplify things, considering it's part of allegro already, might as well take advantage of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, though, I don't want to be barking up a wrong tree.

Depending on how many frames you have for your animation, you could just make several loops in your object view, each with successively more frames, and when you get the frame number, you animate the loop that has that frame as the last frame. Like, in Loop 0, put the entire animation, in Loop 1, put 1 frame, Loop 2, put 2, in Loop 3, put 3 frames etc. Then, when you animate it, say:

Code: ags

if (oAnimation.Frame <  Game.GetFrameCountForLoop(1, 0)) oAnimation.Animate (1, oAnimation.Frame + 1, eOnce, eNoBlock, eBackwards);
else oAnimation.Animate (1, 0 , eOnce, eNoBlock, eBackwards);

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I made these SCI fonts for my game, but since they're based on existing fonts, I wanted to release them for anyone to use.

You can get them HERE.

The ZIP file includes:

HARD CODED
font.hardcoded.0
font.hardcodedvarwidth.0
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Releases/Fonts/intellivisionvarwidth.GIF[/imgzoom]
The font used on the Intellivision console, both monospace and variable width. Contains the same garbage sprites as the Intellivision's GROM in indexes 0-20, just in case you're into that.

TUBBY
font.tubby.0
font.tubbyshadow.0
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Releases/Fonts/magicboy.GIF[/imgzoom]
The font used in Ocean's Magic Boy (and probably other Ocean games), in monospace. Includes a shadow font, again, just in case you're into that.

TOM THUMB
font.tomthumb.0
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Releases/Fonts/tomthumb.GIF[/imgzoom]
Tom Thumb, a tiny Monospace font.

SONIQUE
font.sonique.0
font.sonique.outline.0
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Releases/Fonts/sonique.PNG[/imgzoom]
The stage title font used in Sonic the Hedgehog 1. I thought it had a nice art deco look. Has it's own outline font, so use that instead of the auto-outliner. No lowercase.

OVERLOOK
font.overlook.0
font.overlook.outline.0
[imgzoom]http://khato.furrified.com/DWEF/Releases/Fonts/overlook.png[/imgzoom]
A font based off of the one used in Hotel Mario, for kicks. No lowercase.

I like doing these. I would like to expand them out to the full ascii spectrum, but Radiant would need to update Fontedit again for me to do that, and I'm not sure anyone uses SCI fonts anymore. It's all TTFs and OTFs these days, which is a shame, because nothing beats a good hand crafted bitmap font.

Been tinkering with it for a while, taking all y'all suggestions, trying to make it look more natural. This is what I've come up with.
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/temp/loopwkside2.gif[/imgzoom][imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/temp/loopwkbk.gif[/imgzoom]
I needed to add another couple of frames in there, but it shouldn't matter too much. Not sure if I'm able to do much more on it. I'll continue working in a bit, just updating to show my progress. Added his tail, too. EDIT: And backview.

And what is with your fat-emo-bear fetish?

I like drawing that body type, and I like drawing animal people. It's not as if the fat animal person is the only type of character in my game. Why'd you ask?

I'm currently trying to do some walkcycles for one of the characters in my game, but I'm having a little trouble, owing to his odd stride.
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/temp/loopwkfd.gif[/imgzoom]
Here is his front view. The main movement is in the hips, and he waddles more than strides.

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/temp/loopwkside.gif[/imgzoom]
I can't seem to replicate it in a side view, however, and it looks absolutely awful. And I'm not even sure where to begin doing it in a rear view. Does anyone have any tips regarding making animation look consistent and characterful across all the cardinal directions? What am I doing wrong here that makes the side view look so stilted and unsmooth compared to the front view?

Thankyou in advance

I'm pretty sure that, with judicious use of the ViewFrame functions, and the Crop dynamic sprite function, you can hijack an animation loop and make it show whatever you want. Just make a blank loop with however many frames you have in your animation, and crop down each sprite and apply it to the view. I'm pretty sure if you do it more than once and composite the result, you'll be able to have multiple windows.

For every frame (done on_room_enter_before_fadein):
1) Make a new dynamic sprite (sprsnow) out of the existing frame.
2) Crop it to the dimensions you want using dynamicsprite.crop
3) Make a new dynamic sprite (sprbgsnow), use a drawing surface to paste the resulting sprite (sprsnow) back at the dimensions you need (making the final sprite the size of the room/your screen with lots of transparent space).
4) If there is more than one window, repeat the crop and paste the result onto the drawingsurface again.
5) Save the resulting surface, use the dynamic sprite slot (sprbgsnow) to change the view's frame.
And then
6) Apply the resulting view to an object with a baseline of 0.

You'll only have to do this ONCE, on room enter, so it shouldn't be too memory inefficient.

Limitations: You can only have rectangular windows. I'm pretty sure using some coding majicks you MIGHT (and I stress, might) be able to create a custom mask using magic pink and an alpha channel for each room (making a sprite entirely made out of magic pink, and using the alpha channel to fade it out where the snow would be), making your windows whatever shape you want, but I'm not sure how to do that, or how magic pink and alpha channels interact in-engine.

Edit: I'm not sure if AGS supports alpha channels on drawing surfaces, you may have to use AGSBlend. Again, not sure.

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I've been working on a few things for my game, and one of them is a Legend of Kyrandialike interface for one of the characters. I thought it would suit him more than any other interface. But is it intuitive? Can you use it without going mad?

You can get it HERE

It's a really rudimentary interface, left click picks something up, put it in your inventory slots, combine them together in the combination menu. nevermind that the combination doesn't currently make sense, but ID Card + Skateboard will hopefully equal Green Chip. You can also drop items by clicking on empty space.

Is it aesthetically pleasing? Would you solve a few puzzles with this interface? What would you improve?

That axe design...May I use it?

Sure, go ahead.

It's still basically your sprite, all I did was clean it up a bit. There are actually very minor edits to it, all told. So don't feel worthless!

It's all in the colours and pixel placement. Have some appealing colours based on a hue ramp with distinct difference in shades, and avoid double pixelling and keep your anatomy looking alright. Some objects don't need as many shades as others. It's all little things that make up a good sprite. You can do it!

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/temp/adam_edit.PNG[/imgzoom]

Just a few quick edits to give you some pointers.:

- Watch your colour count. It's always easier to have too few colours and work up than too many and removing them. You had a lot of extraneous colours of similar hues, so I simplified it.

- Greys are a nightmare to get looking right, always try to tint your greys with another colour, it'll make it look ten times as three dimensional.

- Small anatomical fixes - bringing his shoulders out by one pixel and his waist in by one to give him a stronger, more mesomorphic look. I may have made the legs too short now, but you can see where I was going.

- Fixed up the axe so it made structural sense - I wasn't sure how the flint was attached to the bone before.

Looking good, however, I can't wait to see more from you.

Another note: People were hunters before they were farmers - we evolved eating meat before we had the brain capacity for farming (it's a progression: eat meat -> develop tools to get meat easier -> start herding animals -> settle down -> agriculture). I would probably swap that out for something else, as agriculture before hunter gathering doesn't make much sense.

Doesn't AGS already have a way to handle character transparency? I know that's what I've been using for the past few years. Magic pink/Palette index 0/top left pixel transparent.

So then films can't be art. They're generally made with commercial intent for the enjoyment of the viewer.

So then most paintings can't be art, usually they are commissioned by someone for their enjoyment. (Seriously, most great paintings were actually commissioned by people to make a place look nice)

This line of thought leads every single non-guerilla work of art (and even including them, since you discount freeware games!) to not actually be art, by virtue of the artist having to eat to survive.

Well done. You've now proven that all art is in fact, not art.

So what?