Messages

It reminds me of heroic-fantasy comics like The Quest for the Time-Bird, or some rough sketches by Benoit Sokal.

I have been really getting into the style of European comic artists of old in the last few years, so perhaps that's showing through!

After some quiet months while I was busy I have put up another devlog! Hope you haven't missed me too much. 

This is my first AGS contest submission and a sneak peek at my first AGS game... I'm still getting the hang of Dee Dee Murray's art style, but I appreciate her work even more after trying to emulate it!

This is awesome.

Throughout AGS Script API we use Transparency, which is the inverse.

This gave me trouble for years when learn AGS because drawing programs use 'Opacity' for this (and usually handle it as a percentage, as AGS does, rather than the 8 bit alpha value) and I always had to convert things backwards. I'm not proposing that this be changed, just mentioning that it always stood out as a quirk in AGS's nomenclature.

I do think it would be great to be able to access the full range of the A value for a colour, though I can't say I've ever run up against it as an issue. But I imagine now that I'm getting back into making effects inside AGS that I would quite rapidly find uses for being able to read and store RGBA colour values.

What don't you understand though? Here's how reviews work:

1. People play your game.
2. They form an opinion of that experience.
3. They compare that opinion to their opinion of every other similar experience in the database.
4. They try to assign that comparison to a very limited scale.

Where are you confused about this process?

I see this in your first post:

I'm not comparing them to another developer's games which might make it subjective.

Understand this: Reviews are subjective. They are an opinion.

God forbidden, imagine what would happen if I compared my game with someone else's game.

This is the entire point of the panel ratings, except they are comparing your game with everybody else's game*, not just one other person's game. And this is how all game (and film, etc) review scores work.


*made in a similar style. They probably aren't comparing your game to games that are completely dissimilar, such as a racing or strategy game.

I think one issue here is that you are comparing one game of yours to another game of yours. The ratings panel is comparing a much wider range of games. If you believe your first game to be worthy of a 1 cup rating, have you played other games rated 1 cup, and seen what the panel is comparing it to? Have you played some 2 cup games?

Imagine you have an author that you like. You go back and read their very first book and you think "Okay, that's not as good as their fifth book, which is one of my favourites, I can see the improvement". But you will probably like it much better than some other author's best book. The panel does not exist to compare your first game to your second game. It exists to compare the full range of games people submit to the database.

Cool stuff!   I agree with folks that gradients are probably best avoided here, and had some other suggestions that are easiest to show in an edit:



-Some of the colour contrast could use a little tweaking. The brightest green of the grass is quite bright, meanwhile the contrast between her skin and the lightest pink of her top is very hard to differentiate between.

-Rather than having clear zones of earth/grass, it's nice to break up the transition zones with sketchy areas. This works a bit like dithering but feels a bit more natural and is a bit like how painters work.

-Rather than individual flowers uniformly spaced around the scenery, the Sierra artists would do grouped clusters. This feels a bit more natural, is a bit more like how painters & illustrators work, and helps both composition and give a sense of perspective to the terrain.

-Replaced the gradient sky with simple flat colour and simple 2 colour clouds. No effort spent here, I just used a big round brush with the darker cloud colour, and then repeated the process over top with the lighter cloud colour.

This works perfectly, thank you!

One thing that I especially appreciate (and I wasn't sure if it would work, but it seems to be working perfectly - my memory of using enumerated types is so foggy!) is that I can inherit the flipped property like:

Code: ags

  PlayerView = Game.GetViewFrame(player.View, player.Loop, player.Frame);
  FlipSprite = DynamicSprite.CreateFromExistingSprite(PlayerView.Graphic);
  FlipSprite.Flip(PlayerView.Flipped);
  oFlipCopy.Graphic = FlipSprite.Graphic;

Which I love! Fantastic stuff.

The topic where you were discussing masks/stencils might be this one?

This might be a better breakdown of how I envision using this kind of feature step by step, in case that would help the discussion!



I should clarify - this isn't the game I'm working on, just some old assets I had laying around to demonstrate a couple of use cases! So rather than trying to solve this specific problem, I'm trying to support my proposal by showing how it could be used! Sorry if I wasn't clear about this.

Yes, that's fair, although the second part of my use case with the additive blending mode + colour adjustments is not something I can think of an easier way to do. (and this was just a simple example of how I might use it, I was actually trying to do some other things as well and found a workaround for them, but thought this feature would have made those easier + better to do).

Again, not something I'm pushing for too hard because I realize there are lots of things on the roadmap! Just something that I know would be useful to some of the ways I work with layering effects (effectively this becomes a substitute for a clipping mask, and I use clipping masks all day every day in doing graphics stuff).

Right, because I was thinking of doing things as a character animated & changed position, I figured I'd have to be calling it every game loop (or at least when a character moved or animated, hence my reluctance to rely on that function. But I'm willing to give it a try! Thanks for the information, although I don't know much about organising script apis and the like

The additions of overlays and blending modes means that AGS is starting to be capable of some lovely little visual effects that were either not possible or less easy to do previously. However currently the Tint function is a bit limited - perfectly fine for making characters and objects take on a bit of colour, but not that great for more intricate work.

My first thought would be to use DynamicSprite.CopyTransparencyMask but the manual warns that this is quite slow, and so I haven't even attempted to experiment with it. We've all seen that efficient use of AGS script is hardly my specialty.

What I'm proposing would be an effect that recolours all pixels of a sprite to an RGB value while leaving the alpha channel unchanged. Similar to Tint, but instead of an adjustment, a complete recoloring. Here's a simple use case to help showcase how this might be useful:



Here I've taken a character sprite and placed them behind a screen and in the angled light of windows. I want them to be seen through the screen, but I don't want any value variation on the silhouette there, so I make a copy of the ViewFrame with dynamic sprite, crop it down to the dimensions of the screen, put it on a room overlay and then recolour it. For the angled light effect, I take the same ViewFrame onto a dynamic sprite, recolor it, draw some black lines over the top of it using the DynamicSprite's drawing surface, then set this to a room overlay's sprite and set the blend mode to Add. Because additive blending mode doesn't do anything with black, only the orange recoloured parts show up, and we get a nice, dynamic angled lighting effect that reacts to the player's positioning.

If this is too specific or not easily possible, not a problem, but I figure it's worth asking! I do this kind of thing all the time in making pre-rendered VFX and it would be very nice to start to be able to do this at runtime more easily.

Superb, thank you so much. Being able to flip ViewFrame in the full range is also a fantastic idea.

Yes, my old blog from forever ago is still working! I know it's kind of basic but it does exactly what I need, so I still use it.

As for advanced effects, I'm a bit reluctant to think of them in those terms, especially with some of the things engines like Unity and Unreal and Godot will give you out of the box. But I am enjoying fiddling about with AGS and seeing what I can generate at runtime, especially after 10 years of everything having to be pre-rendered because I'm doing graphics for the games but rarely ever writing any modules or anything, which always limits what one can do and how interactive a thing can be.
 
This week's post is up too, in which I mostly just state the obvious a lot!

That's a good point. The negative scaling is something I'm used to in some software - I hadn't thought to try it here. I also think that having a distinct Flip property is useful because the engine supports this behaviour in a limited way with ViewFrames and more extensively with DynamicSprites, and I can imagine it would not be uncommon to want to perform operations where you're checking if a ViewFrame is flipped and then flipping the overlay if so.

Forgive me if this is already on the roadmap or already exists but I searched the forum, manual and autocomplete suggestions and couldn't find it!

It's very convenient to be able to rotate overlays without having to pass them through a dynamic sprite first, and it would be similarly useful to have an individual flip operation for overlays, similar to how the dynamic sprite flip works. Easy enough to work around by using a dynamic sprite, but having this functionality built in would be a nice little bonus.