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Btw: I gotta say I hate games with limited inventory. It always feels like an artificial way to up the game's length or difficulty. It's supposed to be realistic, but that isn't automatically a good thing. It's supposed to be a game, not real life. There are a few discussions about this already out there in the forums and this is the technical forum, so I won't go into detail any further here. Just my two cents I had to get rid of.

I feel the same way, no worries. I think that unless one has a very good reason for introducing such constraints they are usually best avoided. In the specific game idea I have in mind, it would make a bit more sense than it would in most games, I think, and wouldn't be just an arbitrary thing tacked on to make things harder.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=27384.0

Cool! I haven't had a chance to try out Besh's code yet but it's a start...

Here's a random thought I had: how would one go about creating a Deus Ex-like inventory screen in AGS? For those not familiar, the inventory in Deus Ex was a big grid, and different items took up different amounts of space. You could drag different items around to make more room for big things and had to be very careful about inventory management.

Here is a link to an image of the screen: http://www.the-spoiler.com/Sinjin/DEUSEX/inventory.jpg

Anyway, I couldn't think of an obvious way to do something like this in AGS, but thought I would ask! I had an idea for a possible game where the player would have a very limited (read: realistic) inventory system and had to make a lot of decisions about what to pick up (rather than the "fit everything you see into your pocket" model of most adventure games).

Any thoughts? Obviously the base would have to be a GUI of some sort and you'd need some sort of matrix to keep track of item locations, but what about dragging and dropping? It doesn't sound like something AGS would natively support but I am always ready to be surprised when it comes to AGS!

There is a tiny idea and a name. "The Pharao Is Not Amused". A pharao (deceased) and his favourite handmaiden (also deceased), in a tomb, and the pharao extremely vexed because his trip to the underworld is delayed (the girl forgot the tickets). Basically two rooms and one hard-pushed puzzle right now, but well, in terms of graphics it is an interesting thing.

Don't forget the H on Pharaoh! It's silent!

The biggest issue in the conversion from high-res to low-res is that the edges become very indistinct and blurry. I think if you could improve the contrast to the edges of those things which are meant to have strong edges, it would make it a long stronger looking, and fit the style a little better (and look less like you took a high-res image and down-sampled it).

The bare feet look a little weird. They're fine with shoes on so if she's not going barefoot I wouldn't worry about it. But with all of her toes the same size and on the same plane they look like animal feet, not human feet. Human feet have a slant to them (take a look down at yours).

The animation is awesome. The main question is do you have the time to animate everything else in the game at that level?

Haha, well, maybe, maybe not! The way I figure, most of the things I am animating will probably be able to be used more than once anyway (maybe not this particular animation), so as things go on in the game it'll become progressively easier to animate things.

I was just going to say way Stu said. It all looks great, both speeds work really well, but the walking around the chair looks too gamey. It's like there's an animation of him standing, then in game he walks to a point, then the second animation of him pushing in the chair.

Stu's animation is a little too drastic. When I get out of a chair, I push it back, half turn to one side, stand and push the chair in at my side.

Yeah, the more I thought about this the more these particular suggestions made sense -- it looks pretty silly to have him marching around the chair to push it in! I'll simplify this a bit; I don't think it'll be that hard, and I can keep the "pushing" animation for use elsewhere if need be.

I'd like to just throw in my two cents on this animation as well - Firstly, as Mr. Colossal said, definitely pay attention to the number of frames you're using to accomplish something. It does stand to reason that the more frames an animation has, the more fluid the motion, but even the human eye can only interpret so much movement at one time, which is why if you move your hand left-right in front of your face rapidly, it looks more like a transparent hand with a lot of fingers than a quickly moving hand.
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Another thing to bear in mind at all times is kinetics: opposing forces and natural movement. The biggest problem I see with his animation is that he somehow has the massive strength and agility to lift his perfectly vertical body off the chair without adjusting his center of balance. He just kind of floats up while unbending his knees. I'd suggest having him lean forward to keep his body over the center of his feet - all weight should be evenly distributed around the central point of balance. I threw together a really quick animation to illustrate the point I mean: Note that once he's off the chair, his body weight is always evenly distributed in front of and behind his feet.
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I've slowed down the animation a little bit when he's standing to show where I mean.

That's pretty useful -- thanks for throwing it together! I'm thinking a lot more about framerates now; I was, you're right, thinking about making things very fluid, and only near the end of making it did I realize that egads, life isn't necessarily THAT fluid unless it is moving VERY slowly.

Are you using this as an excuse for practising? Because then, ok, use this thread and learn...

If you are using this thread for getting a good animation, functional and that is going to look perfect in a game, come on! Stop... You did it, you archieved it with the last edit, move on and start another paint for your game.

I do these threads for practicing, learning, etc. My feeling is that if I subject myself to a lot of strong criticism and re-working early on it will help me not make big mistakes down the line that will end up wasting even more time. I also am a strong believer that progress is, well, progressive: the more I do, the easier it will be to do it. So if I go in strong I'll come out even stronger -- and the comments here and in the other threads have definitely helped me with that. It's been my experience with other projects, anyway. In any case, I'm a horrible perfectionist with extremely lofty and obviously unattainable goals. I have very grand designs for this first game o' mine, more grand than they really ought to be, but on the off chance that I do pull them off I think the outcome will be pretty awesome.

Here's the last one again with about 25 frames dropped!

i like the animation.(Where he get;s up from chair). Looks smooth. Reminded me a little of how Trilby walks...

Not a coincidence! ;-) I used Trilby as a template for understanding walk-cycles and the like. What I love about Trilby's walk-cycles is that they convey almost perfectly the type of walking you see in early Sierra AGI games, like in Gold Rush! where the character is "large" -- that is, not his normal, small self -- such as the scenes in the hotel room and lobby and I think also the post office.

Edit:

Just as a note -- he's not supposed to be that old so I think dropping some frames is in order. :-)

But thanks for your comments. I'm enjoying trying out new things and posting them here and getting feedback on them. The feedback has helped my work a LOT. At some point I'll be a bit more confident in things and be able to charge on full-speed ahead but I want to sort of make sure I have a good idea of what I am doing before I go off and try to make 20 rooms or so!


No need to double-post - ProgZ

I think you guys are totally right about skipping frames. It didn't even occur to me to do that until I got to the walking bits, and I realized that if each walk frame only advances one pixel it looks rather comical (he looks like he's running on ice in that case). Bad news is I wasted some time on needless frames, good news is I won't do it in the future! :-)

Wow, I never realized what a pain in the ass it was to do animation (not in AGS, in general). Here are my first real attempts (other than walk-cycles, from which I happily use others as a good template) at animation. Comments, critiques, suggestions, etc., are desired.

Filling out forms, staring into space (we've all been there):





Here's the one that took me all evening to do -- putting down the pencil, getting up, scooting in the chair.





Here's that last one again in context:





Thoughts, suggestions? I did these all in Photoshop with about a zillion different layers. The last one (some fifty-five frames or so) really made me almost go quite mad, but at least some of these animations should be useful elsewhere (e.g. the "leaning" one). I got away with just using my walk-cycle animations for some of the frames but the standing up bit really was tedious. I'm rapidly scaling down my ambitions from an animation point of view.

The easiest workaround would be to just turn the periods into something else before running ParseText, e.g.

while (inputText.Contains(".")!=-1) {
    inputText.ReplaceCharAt(inputText.Contains("."),"_");
}
Parser.ParserText(inputText);

And then just make sure that instead of "filename.ext", your parser list contains names like "filename_ext" or whatever. (And if "_" doesn't work for some reason, change it to something else).

I think it looks pretty good. Her feet look pretty big, though -- most women have very small feet from what I can tell. I think if you shaved three pixels off of the foot length on the horizontal views it'd look fine. It's also a little odd that the ankle goes straight down to the ball of the foot -- usually the ball goes out a tiny bit -- but I don't know how that'd look (that is, if adding one pixel line would be too much or not). But anyway, I think it looks pretty good!

Haha, nice job JBurger! That looks awesome, and I'm flattered you'd take the time to do that to my little scene. But as GG points out it's not the right style for this game. Think less Gabriel Knight and more Police Quest 2 (but darker) -- almost no gradients, a very restricted palette (I think as is this scene is around 70 colors total), and a purposefully "flat" appearance to things. You can be in charge of the VGA re-make though. ;-)

The perspective works fine now, but you have to stick to it. The cars need to be drawn that way to. You'll find it'll look much more coherent.

Hmm, I think I'm going to pass on re-drawing the cars. Aside from taking a long time, I don't think they look bad being horizontal like that (in the same way that the characters are). I'll think about it though, but it's not going to be the first thing I'm going to be eager to do.

And I'd lose the reflection, remove the outline of the window lettering and make it smaller.

Mmm.... I think the outline on the lettering helps the neon look bright. If you remove it, it looks a bit skinny and is a bit harder to see.

The problem I've struggled with is that I'd like the perspective to be similarly Cavalier perspective as the other room, but of course that poses odd problems when looking "into" places. I'm not totally sure how best to handle that at the moment.

I appreciate that you're trying to stick with cavalier projection throughout your backgrounds. I think that will add a lot to the quality of the game. Could you elaborate on the issues you're having with that?

Oh, it's just a question of making the perspective make sense, while making it also be internally consistent. Because it's an arbitrary/non-natural form of perspective it always throws me for a loop when it's for things like looking into something from some distance back.

OK, here's draft 2.





I incorporated some of the suggestions above and made a number of changes both small and large. The biggest change is obviously the inside of the laundromat, which Evil's suggestions about changing the perspective of helped me a lot. I also realized that I had to change the scale a bit, to make things a bit smaller in there, if it was going to make visual sense.

I did a little work on the cars but not too much. I changed the mortar color so that it contrasted less with the bricks. I changed the lights on the signs a bit too -- they're more focused, and there are more of them, which I think looks better.

Thoughts? I might take off the reflections on the glass; the more I look at them the more they seem to distract, and I don't know if you'd be getting that much reflection anyway (a lighted window at night is always pretty crisp in my experience).

Agreed on speed of tapping to not get brainwashed! I have tried and tried, but no go. Sadness reigns because I love this game. And really I tap VERY quickly... is me.

Have you thought about reporting it as a bug? I don't have to tap THAT fast to make it work (though I do use my right hand, and that helps a lot). It might have to do with your computer/keyboard/whatever.

First, perspective is waaaay off in that loundry. It is simply not possible to see in it like that. Think about it, look at it from "other angle".

The problem I've struggled with is that I'd like the perspective to be similarly Cavalier perspective as the other room, but of course that poses odd problems when looking "into" places. I'm not totally sure how best to handle that at the moment.

Second, you have some wheels trouble with that cars, I can not see the rear one and the front one is sunken to the road on the squad car. Also the siren is IMHO too dark.

The back wheel is mostly covered in that model of car. It is based on photo of an actual squad car model. (reference photo)

Third, maybe more contrast should be applied. It is a bit too black-and-white style, but that is maybe fine, I would just fix the places where it makes trouble (siren, wheels,etc.)

Well, it is meant to be desaturated and low-contrast; that's the look of the overall game, to give a noir-y feel.

You guys helped out a ton with my last background and so I thought I'd post my next one too to get comments, suggestions, etc. This one took much less time than the first one and I'm much happier with the first draft of it than I was the last one, so I think I'm getting more of the hang of things. The cars were the hardest bits (I'm planning to use them in many other scenes as well, so it was worth the investment); the rest was pretty straightforward.

The setting is once again 1957, Los Angeles. You're a homicide detective working the night shift. A call goes out on the radio -- possible homicide at a laundromat. You go to the scene.

It's an outdoor scene. There will eventually be a beat cop there as well (hence the squad car) but I haven't made the character yet. The protagonists' car is on the right (it's supposed to look a bit wimpy--it's a "get you from here to there" sort of car) and the protagonist is just there to give it a sense of scale (and to showcase how non-Indiana Jones-like he is -- this ain't your average adventure game!).





The other establishments are closed at the moment though you'll be able to come back the next day to talk with people there. (The one on the right, the Neutron Bar, is a set up for my all-time favorite gag: "Neutron Bar happy hour special -- second drink, no charge! Get it? Get it? Neutrons -- no charge!" There used to be a Neutron Bakery in a town I lived in for many years and I always thought that would be a great pitch). The place on the left is just a seedy pawn shop; the bar on the right is meant to be somewhat hipster 1950s. The laundromat itself is a 24-hour, unattended bleak place (based off a real place I frequented while I was in college).

Any thoughts about any aspect of it would be appreciated! Thank you.