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So I want to continue working on my game, and whenever I look at the palette I cringe. I'd like some advice on how to sort it out. I want to make it 64 colours, 16 of them being the C64 palette and the rest pretty versatile to model all the sprites. It may be that I've been looking at it on both a Mac and a PC monitor, but the colours seem a little off. Too saturated.



Also, can any of these sprites be improved so that they can be animated better? I want to keep them as unshaded as possible so I can quickly animate them on paper first. They were made ages ago, so I'm sure they can be improved - Khato in particular. There's something about his feet. And Ollie and Desiree (bottom two) are terribly clunky looking. I loathe their art.

I would also like to see Simon the Sorcerer 3 remade properly, even if it's in 3D. So long as it doesn't look horribly low poly and loses the horrid bland wide open spaces and controls (replacing them with Simon 1's gorgeous visuals.) I wonder how many assets you'd have to do to get the thing right... maybe a recently released 3D adventure engine could help.

And Normality/Realms of the Haunting, too. Not change anything significant, even an engine remake would be awesome. Just clean them up a bit and maybe make Normality's animations actually animate properly instead of like floaty shapes.

I swear AGS already supports that format! Half the music for my game was in it.

Try it out and see.

Displacement maps, and the blur shader would be most use to me, I think - I like simulating depth of focus, and AGS is sadly lacking in these things. Machinarium did a pretty neat job of simulating it, and not having to do the blur effects manually would be a lifesaver.

So sign me up for supporting pixel shaders!

I use MSPaint for sprites all the time. It's awesome!

But for low colour digital painting and touch-up, nothing beats Cosmigo Pro-Motion.

If raycasting is definitely possible in AGS, how feasable would creating a game like Normality or Realms of the Haunting, which use low-poly models to supplement the raycasted scenes?

I mean, if you implemented the character/object interactions while rendering like that, you could have any number of awesome things going on and the world would seem a lot more real than most FPSes (where your only interaction is usually shooting something.)

(I think it would be absolutely breathtaking to see something like BUILD with the features of the Norm/ROTH True3D engine, personally. 2.5D rocks, as does Room above Room, but actual 3D modelling is way hard and this looks stylish )

I think the problem is that it's an unbalanced pose. He looks like he's going to fall over, so if you're going for the slouching teenager look, you've got to slouch him forward to counterbalance him, and give him a more aesthetically pleasing line of action (right now it's pretty straight but with rickets. Push the pose some more!). Change that lumpy shape into a nice elongated S.

As for the design, I think it's rather generic and unappealing. The eyes look kind of dead, and it's got that "slacker guy in jeans and a t-shirt" that you see in countless adventure games, and I think you need to spice it up a little - the player is going to be looking at them for the entire game and you don't want a dull main character (unless you're making everything else outrageous). Really think about what your main character is about - their personality, what they do, what they think about the world and themselves. Don't settle for one "style" or one design, you should make a lot of them and see what fits the character best. As it happens, I'm currently doing a character design project, and I've filled up an entire sketchbook with ideas and variations on the same two characters. It takes a long time, does character design. You've got to get the appeal just right, and be able to draw their structure really easily, too. S'a long process.

They're playing it safe. Remakes have a guarenteed audience. Artists will work on something with a guarenteed audience because it means their work isn't going to fail.

By remaking a game, you already have the game's structure practically there, so the art and such are the most important parts.

It's basically what the industry does. And someone might want to make a game, but not want to go through all the design process. Remakes are like that.

I used 8-bit in my game, and I used a plugin to get really grainy 2bit transparency. It's rather crude, but it works for simple transparencies. I suppose you could trick the player into thinking the GUIs are fading with it.

For the crossfading, if you REALLY need it, create the crossfade in another program (a movie editing program, or something), make sure both images have the same palette, convert it all in Smacker, export as a FLC/bmp sequence and use that.

320x200 et al generally were the resolutions used by games in the early 90s. QVGA (that is, 320x240) is a more recent invention. So you have the nostalgia hook of having rectangular pixels. Which is, I must admit, quite a cool thing - it requires a little more art skill to get everything right, considering that when you make the graphics, you're making them on square pixel ratio (this wasn't a problem in the 80s and 90s, however), but it's fiddly and unless you're really having your heart set on it, not worth it for the hassle and the 40 vertical pixel sacrifice.

However, 320x200 and 640x400 have a hidden secret that wasn't apparent at the time (the screen resolution was originally just a byproduct of memory space limitations).

It's 16:10. Roughly computer-brand Widescreen, if I remember correctly.

[only]

As far as your requests for the dialog you might want to check out the DialogOptionsRenderingInfo functions for custom dialog rendering and/or the CustomDialog module. Specifically regarding the blocking issue, there's a setting on the General Settings pane which allows you to run game loops while the dialog options are displayed, though only repeatedly_execute_always functions are run (so you can't of course call a blocking function; though it would be possible to queue and run any other functions).

Thing is, I don't think you can control the dialog's presence while it's on screen - there's no opyion to turn it off. So even if you could, for instance, get REA to return an inentory item when you click, you couldn't then hide/turn off the dialog options and get on with the dialog. Nor is there any real easy way to run Dialog option scripts. It's all messy workarounds.

Just a couple of things I think would be most important:

- More customisable Dialog and Text Box behaviours - right now they automatically pause the game, but I think whether they're blocking/non blocking/pausing should be up to the designer. For example, the dialog is brought up in Simon the Sorcerer in the Tower section - you can click something, or a timer automatically turns it off after a certain time. Likewise, the Opera scene in FF6 is another example - you have to choose a certain song lyric, and after time runs out, the dialogue options end and a cutscene plays.

Perhaps adding a Dialog.Enabled tag, a Dialog.ChosenOption variable to return which dialogue option you're running, and a Dialog.RunOption (option, FollowDialogState) function just in case we want the dialog backend but not the frontend. (I know I do - I find it easier to write my dialogs inside the dialog editor than in scripts)

That way, we can have the dialog up but the freedom to let the player click anywhere on the screen, rather than waiting for them to pick a certain dialog option (this opens up the "click on anywhere but dialog" function in Scumm games that lets people automatically exit dialogs, and the ability to bring the player's inventory into it, simply by checking if the player has clicked on an option or an inventory item. I'm sure even more exotic things can be coded this way too.)

- Non blocking playing of Speech files. I'm sure this has been suggested before, but is there anything stopping this from happening?

And just something a little self-indulgant, since everyone seems to have abandoned 8bit mode:

- More intuitive GIF importing for 8bit games. I don't think you can set it to use Exact Palette yet. That would be really useful for me - I had some room specific GIFs that I needed to import, and it was a total pain doing it. It kept totally ruining it even when I had all the settings correct, too.

But these aren't the highest priority, naturally.

[New Concept Art:]

An Announcement to announce Death Wore Endless Feathers Disk 2 is in production, and here's some new concept art to tide you over while I do the new graphics for the game.

New Concept Art:
IRS Agents
William and Williamson's Cybernetic Surgery

New locations, new characters, and a much smoother interface for this episode. More concept art is forthcoming, screens will arrive after that, since I've got some more new, more complex things planned for it.

I think I'm more interested in the technology they used to key out the backgrounds, leaving the object intact. That would be a godsend for cheap character capture for film. You wouldn't have to worry about messing around with keying out the green screen - it would detect and remove it anyway.

I wonder how it deals with translucent objects.

How about dynamic AudioClips, like dynamic sprites, but with audio? I know that plugins have the capability to directly access the stream of data within sprites, so if we implement something similar for sound, we can easily pass the sounds through whatever audio system we want, and still retain the AGS audio storage system.

Of course, I'm not too clued up on sound programming, so I guess to do this the file would have to be in WAV or RAW format. I wonder if OpenAL can manipulate MP3s directly.

I can't even start the game.  It just gives me the error

error: unable to load plugin 'agstrans.dll'

Update .NET to 3.5.

Death Whore sounds like a cheap 1970s exploitation flick to me. I must use it somewhere.

Anyway, a walkthrough of this game can be found here:
http://gamesolutions.efzeven.nl/death-wore-endless-feathers-walkthrough-scavenger2009/

Some kind soul appears to have written it, and should help anyone who hasn't yet completed it yet.

Here's that custom function.

Code: ags

function Place (this Character*,int x, int y, char onwalkablearea) //I can't remember eAnywhere's enum name.
{
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
if (onwalkablearea) this.PlaceonWalkableAreas ();
}

Remember: if it can be achieved through code with any kind of speed, it's probably best as a custom function.

I would find all of the above useful, apart from the FaceDirection one, since I already coded that one B3

For the counting up for the score. Very rough, not tested, but should work.

Code: ags

//Put at top of global or module script.
int apparentscore = game.score;
int scoretickdelay = 20; //The amount of game loops you want to pass between counting up.

//Put this code in repeatedly_execute_always(), or add this function if you don't have one.
function repeatedly_execute_always () {
String labeltext = "Score: ";
if (IsTimerExpired(20) && apparentscore < game.score)
{
apparentscore++;
labeltext.Append ("%d",apparentscore);
GUIScorelabel.Text = labeltext;
SetTimer (20, scoretickdelay);
}
}

//put this in your on_event function, or the entire function if you haven't got one.
function on_event (EventType event, int data)
{
if (event == eEventGotScore) SetTimer (20,scoretickdelay);
}