Messages

I've just found this gem in our local book store, called "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan. I've found his art really inspiring, especially if you're not making a wacky toon game.
The style is creative as well as a tad melancolic, somehow manga-like as far as the ideas are concerned, but a totally different artistic approach.

So if you don't know and you're stuck with your game art, consider to take a look.

Oh, the top window... well the room is not occupied at this stage, therefore it's reflecting the sky (I hope, it looks like that) - same goes for the door. So there will be a second version with lights on and the door opened.

Thanks for your replies!
@Paolo, your tip has been really good. With this new contrast, the background appears much more interesting.


So here's the next step (hopefully the last?): adding some more grass and coloring the house.



Finding a good texture for walls in lowres has nearly been impossible for me. In the first place I wanted bricks so I've started with them as a base. But filling the entire wall with bricks looked ridiculous, so I erased everything and only left two rows. Then I've tried some photoshop patterns and failed again - hmm.. so maybe a low opacity brush and some random lines? - failure again  :
So finally I've given up and used good old and boring wood planks. So if anyone knows or could teach me, how to do convincing low res structures (bricks and pantiles), don't be shy 

Apart from that - does it look finished to you? I'm afraid I'm can't appraise it anymore - I just want it to be done

@ProgZmax:
can they still be friends, even if he has not been active?

However, it's quite interesting that a RTFM discussion brings up so much emotions.

As for the knowledge base:
How about a query on all <solved> threads in the beginner and technical forum. Or maybe a nice mod adds the keyword "KB" to the title of a helpful thread and these are getting summarized.
But how do I know? I'm just the new kid...  (sorry, could not resist)

slightly offtopic: website bugs
User World map doesn't work
one the front page resources->downloads  is not shown, but it appears on other pages.
fonts download is broken (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/scifonts.zip)
Mac runtime beta is gone (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/mac/AGS271beta3b.dmg)

I don't mean this to sound 'elitist' or mean in any way, but who are you to tell us what the community does and does not need?

I'm pretty much aware of the fact, that I'm new around here
Therefore I meant a community, not this one in particular. It could also been this language barrier - if my statement, apart from that "community missunderstanding", sound snobbish, it was not meant to.
But as a direct answer: I actually work in the web business, so I might be a little sensitive to these thing. But yes, running a community in spare time is completely different from working with paying customers.

Anyway the point was, that getting started with AGS could be much easier. And instead of spending time in creating even more restriction, that time would've better been spend in something helpful. Like a new knowledge base or whatsoever.

It's getting better from day to day

I think your remaining problem is, that you treat every object, every part of the scene isolated. So you draw a room with the correct perspective. After that a cupboard in it's own persepective, the books and so on.
Try to see the whole scenery. Or could it that you like to work with the zoom tool and can't the other perspective lines?

I wouldn't say that page is particularly offensive, and most websites have some sort of rules/introduction page to their forum.
I guess the quiz is always going to be a bit devisive, but it's designed to be fairly easy and even if you get a question wrong it tells you where to look for the right answer.

I'm totally fine with the introduction page, it's just the conjunction of all three of these.

And if you seriously want to make a game and not just mess around, you need the forums.
Don't get me wrong (and I hope you're still reading), but the main website is in a desperate need of an overhaul. Broken links, more than outdated knowledge base (even from the days when I've been around), a bug tracker, that had no public tickes in 2 years. Even the main layout feels dated.

So that's it, what it might appear for a new visitor :
1) "Cool, showcase games. Let me try and see what the engine can do."
2) Downloads plays and realizes, that AGS is the right thing
3) Realize that the game, he just played also is a little old.
4) Revisits the site: "What? last layout change in 2004? Knowledge base articles from 2001?
5) Finds the news - "phew, still actively developed"

But to this point he already got the feeling that AGS's time of prosperity was in 2004. And this is absolutely not the case.

6) After messing around with AGS, he revisits the website again, looking for some resources, trouble shooting, whatsoever.
This This is my favourite btw.

At this point, feeling no.5  comes back, but because he already spent that much time with AGS (and hopefully it's online help) so he trys the forums. And then it all starts again....


Sorry for this extremely large post, but AGS is so much better and this place here too. It's like the land of Cockaigne, to get there you have to eat yourself through a giant wall of <insert whatever you can't stand>

Who sent you that PM and what did it say? There's no official welcome PM as far as I know...

I just made use of the almighty "Report to Admin" feature

This was mine these days.


Image snatched from here
Well it was not mine, but a friend owned it and I badly wanted it. I even offered 50 DM (25 euro)  but obviously he refused

We managed to play a lot of these early AGI games, but it was already too slow for Larry 3 - damn.
But enough of retro talk, I just wanted you to know, that I've ripped your idea of recorded floppy sounds 
(which are hard to record in proper quality btw.)

I never got this deep into C 
The languages I use to work with have function as a reserved keyword (like procedure or class), not as a substitue for int.
But I'll never stop learning

Doing it on your own, the spirit of the thread 

Wow thanks, it's that easy?!

So if I use "function", I can only return integers and if I use a data type instead of the keyword function, I'll get a differnt returning type?

Weird 

Try to get a hercules screen with CGA emulation. So you can get retro feeling with a higher resolution where it's supported.

I recently joined this forums and went all through it...

1) Before getting to the forums, I got a page describing what this forum is not for.

2) Then I had to do a quiz and wondered that would happen if I fail. A message like "too noob for us, try SCRAMM"?

3) After I finally registerd, I even got a PM that I pretty please must follow the rules.

I really felt like I was breaking into one of you houses that day  :-
If I wouldn't have known before, that this is actually a nice place, I would have left instantly.

And now even more newbie bashing and elite encapsulation? Seriously... this is not what a "community" needs.

I wanna play an ostrich like guy who recently had a near death experience which changed his life.
He's still a bit shaky, but in his pale face you can see the glance of fanatism. So  every day he's standing in the rain, convincing people to read/buy religious magazines (I'm having a certain magazin containing the word tower in mind).
Actually it only rains where he stands, because the rival god is just a tiny bit pissed about what he's doing.
Could also be possible that a thunderbold might bring him another not so near death experience.

If you like the idea, I might provide a sketch.

I recently modified hacked (as this sound more cool) SSH's QueueSpeech to run with AGS 3. It all works, so I'll be fine, but I've stumbled across these kind functions (I assume, they are functions).

Code: ags

String qAddScore(int points) {
  //StrFormat(str_delay, "add-score %d", points);
  str_delay = String.Format("add-score %d", points);
  squeue.noanim[squeue.insert % SPEECH_QUEUE_SIZE] = 1;
  return str_delay;
}

I actually don't get what's going on here. What kind of string is this? Just a very long, clever looking string? Or some kind of anonymous function?
Could anyone explain this to me?
Thanks!

@Kaputtnik
I absolutely love the Colonels Bequest (and it's stupid fingerprint copy protection). Although the sequel wasn't half as good.

@dkh
What a nice amp, I play an engl myself but just a lousy 1x12 compact amp.
Lot's of people seem to be guitar players here  btw.

Maybe I post a picture here myself, but all my cool stuff is not around the computer 

Hey, you've improved a lot! This background would totally work for me.

If you need to improve it, consider the following things.

More details on the mountains:
Make them 3 dimensional or put them more into the background
Also the outline looks wrong to me.


Color as a perspective:
Things in the background are less bright than those in the foreground. You could try layers here.
More advanced would be warm colors in the front, cold colors in the back and so on.

Black outlines:
Always use a darker shade of the area you want to outline. e.g. try a dark red outline for the roofs.

I also wouldn't smudge the trees as you didn't smudge the other grass in that distance either.

Splitting hairs, eh? 
Fortunately I just have a blue cup instead of a mug, so I'll join you later this day.


The blue cup galore

[better]

Yeah, this + annoying unavoidable mazes and I'll cry too

I do think that earlier lucasarts games made better use of the verbs available than later ones did. 

Last month I replayed ZakMcKracken again. I totally missed out that you weren't supposed to talk in the older Lucasarts games. Apart from that, the GUI worked for me. Only the deads ends were annoying as always.

Basicly all the verbs can be compressed into interact, look and walk, but the choice in verbs is the charm of games like MI and FotAQ.

Exactly. I'm just looking for something to waste space on the screen So I'll stick to verbs and try to make use of the magic rightclick a lot. That should be fine with most players.

Thanks for the input!