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It was gonna be in Silicon Valley, but I decided I liked how trees and rain looked, so I guess it's somewhere in northern CA. I can probably get away with being nonspecific.

Loving the look of it! You've really captured that late-eighties/early-nineties aesthetic. Among other things, it reminds me of the in-house proposal for the LucasArts logo:

Spoiler

(from https://home.comcast.net/~ervind/leclogos.html)

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Oh, perfect. I have a huge inspiration folder full of images like this. The game is partially inspired by looking at old photos of LucasArts and Sierra employees. So delightfully dorky.

Wow, I really dig the style of this game. This is really up my alley, great job on the contemporary art the walls are sporting. Cool palette cycles. Overall a very ni...WAIT did you say OPL2? Awesome!

Well, not true OPL, but emulated.

Coming in 1990...

This is a full-length game I'm working on. It takes place within the headquarters of a major computer company-- contemporaries of Microsoft, Apple, and NeXT...

The hero is Jan,
a young graphic designer who is tasked by Giacomo,
(master painter of clipart and icons)
with taking reference photos of wastebaskets.



Their team is building a revolutionary operating system.
Jan will explore the burgeoning world of tech culture;
A state-of-the-art corporation
on the verge of unleashing an incredible new paradigm.



Jan soon becomes caught up in an industrial espionage plot,
uncovering the strange, world-shattering secrets of her employers.
Exactly why is this OS so revolutionary?
Exactly how many floors does this building have?


Masochistically created in 256-color mode, so I can do effects like this.


Parallax scrolling test.

Planned features:

• 40-ish rooms
• OPL2 (Adlib/FM synthesis) music and sound effects
• Quasi-iMuse music system
• Verbs and context-menus
• Pause during cutscenes!
• Save during conversations!
• The extremely Good fashion of the time
• Beige
• Fear
• Blood
• Antediluvian relics
• Trust exercises

I'm really put off by the look of smooth, gradient shadows/lights mixed with low-color artwork. Go with either no shadows or simple solid shapes, like the shadow under the cupboard.

How do I decompile a SCUMM script, then?

Oh, I have no idea. I'm pretty sure I've seen examples of people analyzing SCUMM code before. How did you find out about this hidden ending if not by looking at the script?

I'm almost certain it's not possible. Those classic games have been worn out in every possible way -- if it were possible, someone would have posted a video in Youtube. I would suspect it's one of the many things they left in the script to avoid breaking something at release, but that is not connected to the actual game. A bit like the unused inventory items.

Stuff like unused art were always easily findable with stuff like ScummRevisited, but as far as I know, being able to look at decompiled SCUMM scripts is a relatively new thing, and they haven't been picked over nearly as much. Though you're right, it probably is unreachable code.

Guys who've been professionals for a long time and don't live in their parents houses know what to value their work at. News at 11!

Think of it this way: You're an industry veteran searching for a job. You turn down anything with less than a $60k salary. That's all it is.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimbleweed-park-a-new-classic-point-and-click-adv

Check it out, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are re-teaming to make a new game! Looks pretty awesome.

Ah, I see. I must have been confused by 3.3's error-- 3.4 hasn't given me any kinds of errors, just the weirdness with 1366x768. On the whole I'm really impressed with the added flexibility in the custom resolution versions.

Oh, I'm just confused as to what difference the size of the black border surrounding the game makes to the graphics mode it needs to initialize. I would think that a 320x200 game at 3x scale would be 960x600 and the black border would be rendered by Windows, not the game engine.

Now that I've set my resolution to 1360, I can't get that error to come up anymore, so maybe it's moot.

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Just noticed something weird: in my desktop resolution settings I have options for 1366x768 and 1360x768. I switched to 1360 and the difference is unnoticeable, but now I'm able to get my game to run at full screen width in windowed mode. Very odd, but there must be something funky about 1366 mode.

There's another problem which I noticed before though: The window HEIGHT no longer reaches the bottom of the screen. There's about a 10 pixel gap no matter what. I assume you put this in so the start bar is always visible? I preferred how the 3.3.0 version worked, because I'm planning on using an autohotkey launcher to hide the titlebar/frame and make a faux-fullscreen effect. (P.S. a native hide_titlebar option would be a nice feature.)

Okay. With these settings:

Code: ags

[graphics]
windowed=1
game_frame=center
screen_def=explicit
filter=StdScale
filter_scaling=max
driver=DX5
screen_width=1366
screen_height=768
refresh=0
vsync=0

Here's the relevant part of the log:

Code: ags

Initializing resolution settings
Device display resolution: 1366 x 768
Game native resolution: 320 x 200 (8 bit)
Game settings: windowed = yes, screen def: explicit, screen size: 1366 x 768, match device ratio: yes, frame placement: center
Init gfx driver
Created graphics driver: Allegro/DX5
Supported gfx modes (8-bit): 
	320x200;320x240;400x300;512x384;640x400;640x480;800x600;1024x768;
	1280x600;1280x720;1280x768;1360x768;1366x768;
Supported gfx modes (8-bit): 
	320x200;320x240;400x300;512x384;640x400;640x480;800x600;1024x768;
	1280x600;1280x720;1280x768;1360x768;1366x768;
Requested gfx filter: StdScale, filter scaling: max uniform
Applying scaling filter: StdScale
Switching to graphics mode
Attempting to find nearest supported resolution for screen size 1366 x 768 (8-bit) windowed
Attempt to switch gfx mode to 1366 x 736 (8-bit) windowed; game frame: 960 x 600, frame placement: center
Failed. Unable to find a suitable graphics driver
Attempting to find nearest supported resolution for screen size 1366 x 768 (8-bit) fullscreen
Attempt to switch gfx mode to 1366 x 768 (8-bit) fullscreen; game frame: 960 x 600, frame placement: center
Succeeded. Using gfx mode 1366 x 768 (8-bit) fullscreen
	filter dest (203, 84, 1162, 683 : 960 x 600), render dest (203, 84, 1162, 683 : 960 x 600)
Preparing graphics mode screen
Initializing colour conversion
Check for preload image
Initialize sprites
Set up screen
Initialize game settings
Prepare to start game
Audio is processed on the main thread
Checking replay status
Engine initialization complete
Starting game
Loading room 15
***** ENGINE HAS SHUTDOWN

This is from manually editing the .cfg and running the game straight, so winsetup isn't affecting anything.
It's definitely fullscreen mode. (I have a a separate issue with palettes that only occurs in fullscreen mode. I should make a post about that too.)
I notice that with screen_def=explicit, if I set the width to 1364 (two less than my actual resolution 1366) it results in windowed mode, though with a distracting white line on the right side of the screen. Setting it to 1366 or screen_def to max results in fullscreen mode.

I'm also going back to a compile from the 3.3.0 custom resolution AGS, and it looks like a similar problem. Instead of jumping to fullscreen mode, it just gives me an error: "There was a problem initializing graphics mode 1366 x 768 (8-bit)." Changing the config to 1364 works. This is strange because I'm pretty sure I had these settings working properly with 3.3.0 on this computer before.

I don't understand why the black padding around the gamescreen is considered part of the graphics mode, anyway!

Oh sorry, I posted in the wrong thread. Yeah, 3.4.0. It's an 8-bit 320x200 game, with these graphics settings:

[graphics]
windowed=1
game_frame=center
screen_def=explicit
filter=StdScale
filter_scaling=3
driver=DX5
screen_width=1366
screen_height=768
refresh=0
vsync=0

Another problem. With "screen_def=max" or "screen_def=explicit" and the screen size set to my current resolution, it just loads the game in fullscreen mode instead of windowed, even if "windowed=1".
Actually, winsetup is saying my resolution is 960x600, which is lower than it actually is, so there must be some bug in detecting the current resolution.
The engine seems to default to fullscreen if you try to run it windowed at a greater size than (what it thinks is) your current resolution. This shouldn't be how it works, in any case-- it should just set the window size to the maximum and NOT go to fullscreen.

Works just fine now, thanks!

Problem: Mouse.SetPosition behaves incorrectly when you have "filter_scaling:max" in the configuration. It seems to place the mouse's Y position 32 pixels below what you told it to.

Since I guess this is my general low-color pixel art tips thread, here's another trick I just found. If you're one of the two people who want to use 8-bit color depth in AGS, you'll notice its color channels are actually 6-bit (RG&B go 0-63 instead of 0-255.) So even though you're importing 256-color images, their colors will be banded and inexact in AGS. While there's no way to do full 0-255 color depth in AGS, you can at least get a live preview of this limitation while working in photoshop:
Add a Posterize adjustment layer to the top of your document and keep it there. Set it to 65. That's it! Now you can tell exactly what your color choices will look like once imported, and adjust them accordingly to avoid ugly stuff.

Edit: Posterize should be 65, not 64, apparently!

Yup. It uses photoshop's Layer Mask From Transparency feature and posterizes the resultant mask. If you put posterize's levels all the way down it should do exactly what you want. (My example's at 4 levels or so.)

I love the look of this! The dither pattern in the borders is a little hard on the eyes, though.

Another trick I found!
Here's a simple photoshop Action: http://www.eviltrailmix.com/PosterizeAlpha.zip I recommend assigning it to a function key or something.

I actually prefer this to the faux-antialiasing plugin, because you don't have to flatten layers. It takes a layer like this:



And posterizes the alpha channel itself, giving you a harder, simpler edge like this:



This works well with brush strokes, text, or anything that looks a little too blurry.