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You are not for real, Babar.
I can see why you would have some difficulties reading this. It's a skeleton really.
On the other hand, both the brighter blue, the greens and the reds seem to come through pretty well, which means that you can see all essential hotspots (screens, lamps and that thing on the right, which is supposed to be a locker by the way). 
Would adding some kind of "bright colour" -mode be a good idea? Like a choice in the title screen or something.

I would vote for the one on the right.
Great bus stop animation btw.
Not sure if this is still relevant, but I was looking at the girls walkcycle and noticed that her jacket is very fabric -ish in the side view, but looks almost starched in the up/down views. I figured this might add to the arm movement issue. If there still is an issue, that is.

Thanks selmiak. It is comforting to know tha at least one person has the same settings as I do.
Maybe I should have people send me polaroids.

Btw, why 180°? (I do that sometimes as well but only to check composition, not colour.)

Ok, thanks for the feedback everyone. I don't really know where to go with this one. To me, the damn thing shines like the sun so I guess I should have my screen checked. I have been trying to turn up the light with little success. It either looks like Anians edit -flat and bright gray, or the brighter areas are vibrating all over the place.

@Snarky: Could you put [imgzoom] in the how-to thread?

As people have pointed out, when drawing a dark room you don't need to make every part so dark that people are squinting just to see anything: by keeping the parts of the image that are in shadow an undefined black (or off-black)...

I thought this was what I have been doing.

@dactylopus: The red things are supposed to be glowing buttons without any real light coming from them.

@Babar: Literal darkness was not the plan but simply pulling up light levels at this point, does not seem to work that well.

@Cat: I thought there was quite a lot of black in there. Most of the dark colour was put in to give it some subtle structure. It would be hard to do that with green and red, but I see what you mean.

At it again. Would this be a feasible middle way?
I even put off-black in there. Jay!

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42681740/snow_ship_b_anian_edit.png[/imgzoom]

Still just greens & reds, Babar?

@Stevens: I'm not sure I get that part about black affecting brightness of objects, but I am with you on background colour setting a mood. In this case however, the scene appears to need all the contrast it can get.

Not that anyone cares, because I still use a CRT, but all I'm seeing in all the pictures is a big black screen with a couple of red and green dots .

I have no idea what CRT is but seriously, are people really having that different screen setups?

@Cat: If you are being sarcastic - please read the board rules.
If not: Making the dark parts black would make everyone see what Babar was seing.
About Anians edit: It looks lovely and very easy to read in the 320x200 format. But bring it up to full screen, and every single pixel screams LOOK AT ME! and you fall backwards. It becomes horribly busy.

@Anian: I see your point but I think the result is butt ugly. It looks like there is very little contrast between colours (except between black and everything else), so everything becomes a lightsource and unimportant objects are stealing attention from essential ones. I wonder if my screen setup isn't a bit off after all. 

...I find Anian's version more pleasing to the eyes, especially in brighter surroundings.

Do you mean "surroundings" as in a lit up room or as on a bright desktop background? -The game is intended to run in at least x3 size, so readability in an original 320x200 window is not really a priority.

Edit: Two versions  to illustrate & compensate for my crappy english.
(How do you post scalable images? Can't remember how to do that.)

Dogma.
Edit: ...and consistency.

But what about pixel art? Is it really perceived by the player's eye, or does it only sabotage the contrast?

It feels a bit counterproductive, doesn't it.
(You paint? Start a thread and show some stuff!)

Your characters look like they won't fit on the background though.

Well, that background is not really done yet and the character doesn't have a shadow so he looks as if he is levitating atm.
I think he blends in better with the whole background since his colours are repeated in a big dark sky above. (not shown on the little image)
How would a checkered shadow feel btw? -A solid blob looked horrible.

Could you post a smaller version? It's a bit hard to see what is going on there right now.

@Shane: Thanks. I will have a go at it.
Why not use black btw? Is this a general rule? I am not too familiar with these things but to me, this black background gives a lot more contrast to it.

EDIT: I just swapped the background to black & changed the dark floor/ceiling colour slightly.

@Chicky:
This is our hero in the arctic outdoors evening atm. Colour count was kept down on both him and the background and is not that consistent with the ship interior anymore.
He might get a non alpha shadow to "connect" him to the ground.

I would really appreciate some help with readability of these colours on other screens. I.e. not really interested in how to improve the piece itself. (Not that it is perfect, I just can't be bothered to work on it.)
The colour scheme looks ok to me but I'm not sure if my laptop screen is playing tricks on me. I am especially worried about the darkest blue being too dark.
There are 9 colours in all, including black. Scale is originally 200x320. It is supposed to be upside down btw.

Would a launcher window with simplified setup help some of the user end driver-confusion? Something like big start buttons saying "run with direct3d" and "run with direcrdraw". Or would that only make things worse? I think Trapezoid made some little ahk script that wrote its own ags config file. Right?

Is the plugin issue a plugin-only thing or should we have second thoughts about modules as well? I tested helios123's rain/snow module in D3D just now and it seemed ok...

@Babar: The idea of having separate look, walk and interact clicks was to be able to walk around without accidentally looking at or interacting with things. An annoying thing about later, slimmed games is that I often find myself clicking away text that I already have read or sometimes even solving puzzles by accident, which makes the gaming experience feel a bit unintelligent (i.e. Click everything at least once and you're done!). 

I can't think of a situation where walking on to an object and interacting with the object should produce 2 separate necessary results...

I can.  A situation where the player did not want to interact with an object but, for example wanted to walk past it. The game I am working on has use-able snow on the ground, which means that the character would be unable to walk around the scene without a walk function. But I heartily agree with you about not having a separate walk-to-object function 1980:s sierra style: "YOU ARE TOO FAR AWAY TO PICK THAT UP." -Not desirable.


@Radiant: The MMB would do the same thing as a LMB double click. It would just provide an extra alternative.

Being brought up with scumm and similar systems, LMB as "main" or interaction button feels pretty intuitive. Beneath a steel sky always felt a little backwards to me.

Slightly off topic but not quite: I'm currently trying out a setup using single LMB = walk/select+combine inventory, doubble LMB or single MMB = interact, RMB = look/clear inv item. No verb gui or coin. Just an inventory and mousover text. Is doubble click a good way to go?

Thanks a lot Gilbert & Lewis & folks! Very interesting read.
@Andail: It appears that baselines and  things like IgnoreWalkbehind works differently in direct3d & directdraw. So a game designed and buggtracked with one driver may have issues if running with the other. At least that is my experience and is probably also what happened to that game you played.

First of all, I must say that your work looks really good. Especially the in-context example.
Secondly: I'm no artist and this may not make much sense but I noticed that the girls head is bobbing quite a lot compared to the rest of her body, her shoulders in particular. This looks to me as if her neck is getting stretched out like an old accordion.
In this walk reference clip the head-neck-shoulder relation looks much more static but I guess this varies between individuals.

Thanks lemonhead.
My own double click function works similar to your method 1, but is blocking 'SkipUntilCharacterStops' when mouse is over hotspots and objects.
I'm going to have a go at method 2 and see what to make of it.

Nice work!
Could the double click be used as a general double click? -Like trigging interactions for example, not just for quick exits. Or would that cause conflicts and hiccups?

Hat off to Chandler & Ilyich. Again. This looks almost too good to go in a free short game.
Speaking of short: How short is it going to be?