Messages

It's a good drawing and the animation looks quite organic, but too fast. The legs make it look like he's going at a pretty brisk pace, not a jog or a spriting pace, but a very brisk walk. If that's the way you wanted it, then the legs are fine as they are if you ask me, BUT something needs to be done about those arms. They're going very fast. Try making them move slower as they get nearer to the top of their swing arc, or just put a delay on the frame in which the arms are at the peak of their swing.

Pretty good overall though.

Dude, you could have it so that from the front view you could see his eyes and it would all look kinda normal... but then when he starts walking left or right, because you're looking at his eyes from side on now you'd be able to see his retina and optical nerve flapping around behind the eyeballs... personally, I think that would pretty funny.

The first thing I notice about that castle is that it has no windows - medievil castles had very thin windows with no glass, which were made so that archers could fire out of the windows at oncoming attackers.

In fact, on the whole, your castle seems very unprotected all round. There's no moat, it's set on flatground, and it's very small, so the ammount of servants/guards that you could get in there would be very limited. The door to the castle is easily half the size of the front wall, indicating that the castle only has one floor, and the door is wider than the towers, suggesting that the towers are very thin, which presents problems because A) very few archers could make it up there at a time, and B) a stair case leading up into a tower would spiral up to the top, but it dosen't look as though there would be enough room for a staircase in them.

Castles in the middle ages were often made from dry wall, which means that they were just made from lots and lots of rocks jammed together, with anything but other rocks holding them in place. Your rocks seem to fit together seemlessly. What you might want to do is add a few nooks and cracks in there.

Also, how old is that castle supposed to be? You could spray-can on some dirt or moss or show some lose stones hanging around on the floor if you think that would be appropriate.


You should attempt to get a bit more shading in there too. Try spay caning different shades of green onto the grass instead of drawing lines. Also, I notice your sky is a monochrome shade of blue, but in reality, in on a perfectly blue day, the sky still gets brighter pitched nearer the horizon. A good trick for shading sky is to start off by drawing a pixel-high line that's very, very light blue, almost white in fact, then, draw a very slightly darker color two pixel-high line right above it (to shade in MS paint, from top menu click on 'colors', then click on 'edit colors', then click 'define custom colors'). Repeat this process, making your lines darker and thicker as you go up. Once you're pleased with the range of colors you have (I suggest, like 5-7 different shades of blue, but if you want really high quality graphics you'll probably want to go bigger than this), select your range of colors with the box-select tool and drag your shade range until it fills the area you want it to. This works great for simulating wood grain too (with brown shades), so you could use that same technique on your wooden door if you want.


PS: one last thing, looking at it again, some of those rocks would be huge in real life considering their size in relation to the rest of the castle. Try breaking them up into small rocks.

I was just trying to find out more info about the problem, and I figured out that it is still possible to have the GUI buttons appear by moving the mouse to the top of the screen, it's just that none of the buttons can be used. I was woundering if that might shed some more light on the situation?

PS: all the buttons, including those in the inventory box, look how they would basically anytime the clock cursor would appear.

See ? In the first one, he doesn't look natural.
But I moved his legs, and it looks much better.

It'd be even more natural if the ... err... i don't know the word in English : It would be even more natural if "the part of the body between the top of the legs and the bottom of the torso" was also moving up and down

The hips?

Hey man, here's a template I drew a while back. It'll basicaly work for a character facing the front or the back, but you'll have to do something about the hands if you're going to use it for your character's 'up' animations. (Actually, you probably won't want those particular hands anyway, but they give you an okay idea I guess).

It looks like it's bigger than your character so you'll probably have to resize it and do some propotion editing, but you'll probably want to do some customization anyway;




There are no knee joints, but unless your guy walks like a crab, I don't think you'll need them to help your front/back walking animation.

Built in. I did think there was a slight chance it might have something to do with my computer, or perhaps something that went wrong when I was downloading the program, because it seems odd that no one else would notice this problem.

Oh, I went and forgot to mention, I am using AGS 2.72, and I'm not using any modules or plugins.

Actually, I'm not sure if freeze is the right word for it exactly, because you can still move the cursor around, you just can't do anything with it once you've looked at an item in the inventory with the display messages as speech option checked. The only way to get out of the game from there is to use the Alt X emergency escape.

Also, when the always display messages as speech is checked, when any items in the inventory get looked at, most of the speech appears behind the inventory box, making it illegeable.

PS: tried searching for this problem on the forums and the bug tracker, but I couldn't find it on the forums and all I got from the bug tracker was a 404.

Krikey, I must've missed the bit about no JPGs when I read the rules... I'm always using them.   Sorry for any inconvenience caused, people.

Scrase, your template is good, but it's uses are limited as you only have it from a face-on angle. If I had a guitar in my game it would most probably be leaning against a wall or something and be at a totally different angle.   Still, I know where to come if I need a face-on image.

Welcome to the boards.

Well, I figured it would be best to let people decide on what angle they'd want for it themselves and add dimensions as needed. I've tried to leave it open for customisation.

Did I miss a link you intended to include?

I have no use for a Strat in the game I've been making (on hold), but I play guitar so I'm sorta interested.Shame I couldn't find a link.

Yeah, I had a link up (as a jpeg), but then I noticed that this forum had it's own list of rules which said that jpegs weren't allowed, so I took it down and replaced it with a bitmap, but then it turned out I'd miss read the rules and bitmaps weren't allowed either, so I tried getting up a GIF, but at that point the website I use to host photos on (and my back up hoster) decided they didn't want to be co-operative anymore, and so I just kind of got a bit disheartened and gave up.

But apparently they have templates on the internet anyway, which is something I'm kicking myself for right about now, considering how long I spent getting my Strat's basic shape just right. I think I'll try uploading again though...

Aw really? I spent such a long time trying to get everything right!

[PS]

When I started drawing this, I was only going to draw some made up model of a guitar, just because I knew sticking to an actual model's proportions and shape would take a very long time to get looking good.
Nearly as soon as I started I felt kind of disappointed at myself, and so I decided to take what I had already and turn it into a vauge Stratocaster clone... and a vauge Stratocaster clone then became the most accurate drawing of a standard Fender model that I could manage.

Needless to say this took FOREVER. Being a guitar player myself, I was very perfectionist about the whole thing, and so even when I'd finished the basic outline I re-did it far more times than I can count.

And so, to save others from a simular situation, I've decided to upload a template of my Strat. I don't mind who uses it since I figure a Stratocaster isn't the most original guitar to draw in the world anyway.



Also, I haven't included a bridge, frets, fret markers, tuning keys, controls, a jack socket, strap buttons, strings or a nut because I figure those are the kind of thing people would want to customise for themselves. There's no wami bar because, well, people don't always keep the wami bars on their strats. (Sorry for all the guitar jargon non-players, but I don't really know how to explain what all that stuff looks like while keeping my wording concise. If you don't know what I mean, but you want to get an accurate depiction of a guitar in your game, try looking up 'Fender Stratocaster' on google, and applying what you see there to my template.

Anyway, to conclude, thankyou for your time, and I hope this helps someone. I'm having a go at a game in which the main character is in a band, so I imagine I may draw a whole host of guitars of varying models and makes. If people want me to upload these as well, ask, because I don't really know how many people will find more guitars useful and I don't want to go using up bandwidth for something no one wants.


PS: In case you're wondering how big that thing should be in your game, if it's a full scale guitar, just over half the length of a normal door, (so, the length from the top, to just below the handle), and the body would be about 40% (if I've got my math right) of the width of the aforementioned normal door.

or objects? At the moment I've only managed to find out how to create the same interaction between ALL inventory objects and a specific hotspot or object.

So for example, hypathetically speaking if my character had a loaf of bread and a key, I could have it so that when they use the key on a door, the door opens, but if I were to use the bread on the door, exactly the same thing would happen, which would make no sense.

I've looked high and low for the solution to this in the manual, old threads on these forums, and in a bunch of tutorials on the internet, because it sounds like something that would be included in at least one of the above. But I haven't been able to find it in any of them. I feel like I probably just missed it, but I've been searching for a little while now.

Anyway, if anyone can help with this, thanks muchly in advance.