Messages

W00t! Thou art a star!

Thanks strazer!

Hullo! A quick question about the StartCutscene/EndCutscene commands in AGS.

Is there any way we could detect whether AGS is currently skipping a cutscene from within AGS script itself? In our plug-in we've had to cater for skipping cutscenes with the escape key, but currently we have no way of detecting if the AGS script is currently skipping or playing as normal. It would be cool to be able to start our conversation engine skipping if a conversation was triggered by AGS script while AGS was skipping a cutscene.

If not I'm sure we can work around it, was just curious if there was any way to detect this.

Much appreciated!

L&B

Hullo guys!

I've got a question about the sprite manager, mainly about replacing existing images in there to update views with new gfx.

It's pretty much a speed thing. Basically, the issue is we have a huge bunch of frames for our characters, walk cycles, poses etc, and trying to be economical, since I can well see us running well over 600 animations in the game, we are storing several animations in single views. (For example the pose loop, talking in that pose loop, transition in and out in a single view) since we're using an external plug-in to drive these. The problem comes when, for example today, we moved the doctor's belt down a pixel in all his anims, which meant replacing all his sprites in the sprite manager, and obviously in all the views. This would be a cinch if we were using single views per animation, as we could just "assign sprites to view" them across in one fell swoop.

However, since we're sharing several anims per view, this is not possible. The only alternative is to either import all the gfx again and reconstruct the views, or to "import over this sprite" each sprite individually, which on numerous long anims takes a fair amount of time.

I understand this is most probably a bit too specialised to be a realistic request for AGS, but if anyone could suggest any faster methods it would be much appreciated!

Cheers!

L&B

You mean it's the first time you did a (not so good) paintover without mentioning it and try to get away with it?

besides the legs the outlines on the image on the left and the one on the right look to be exactly the same down to the last pixel

You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

Awww, give the guy a break. He's drawing his first ever pixel art human. He uses some reference (pretty closely) and ends up with something that's recognizably ANOTHER SPRITE IN A FREE AGS GAME. Well whoopy fook! Who gives a crap really? I can only assume Mr Colossal is who originally drawn that sprite, and he doesn't seem to care.

After all, it's not like he's cost the original author any money or anything, or being applauded across the internet for his daring and original work of art, leaving the original artist bitterly missing the limelight he so clearly deserves.

It's not even like the end result even closely resembles the reference unless you're comparing outline pixels! In a community that seems completely comfortable with using trademark licences that are, to this day, important and highly profitable intellectual property of big corporations that would cease and desist in a millisecond if it suited them, should it really matter? Is this a community of people trying venomously to protect their intellectual property, or a community of like-minded amateurs and professionals who love adventure games and either play, make, or long to make adventure games?

I'd be flattered that someone used MY sprite as reference for their first ever character. Cheers for thinking my sprite was somehow the yardstick that you should measure yourself by!

Besides. He's NOT the same character. He has a hat!

Furthermore, in the Colouring Balls, is the person who draws the original outline the person who's "drawn" all the entries? Not really. Sure the guy has a lot to learn, but surely giving him pointers on how to draw guys without the need of using other sprites as reference is a more constructive critisism than quoting crap quiz shows???

Just my 2$ worth.

And for the record, I can't speak for Binky, but I'm sure he'll agree, if you want to use any of our sprites as a starting off point, then all the power to you!

Fair play to Mr. Colossal for the only genuinely useful feedback to Akatosh's post.

dismount high horse
> I do not understand the term 'high horse'.

And it isn't silly to say that if those classics were made today they would have the full voice BUT the exact same graphics???

I assumed you didn't mean just speech, but higher production values in all aspects (modern team then -> modern team now), in which case the game would be more expensive (modern pricing).

Steel Drummer:
Played it and our song is not used. You can listen to it here for comparison:
http://herculeaneffort.adventuredevelopers.com/previews/music1.mp3

Er. Okay, first off I want to say I really liked the music in SJM. Especially the resteraunt music (not to mention your Herculian Effort chime) and both me and Binky happen to be big fans of Greg's music... but I need clarifcation here. The mp3 link you posted: Is that the other tune, or is that an mp3 version of Super Jazz Man? as we're both unable to tell the difference If the former, maybe it's some jazz scale thing but those sounded identical to us. Sorry if we've got this confused

One thing to remember is doing this game is of extreme importance to us. You can rest assured that although the amount of work is quite massive... it WILL be done eventally. Though that also means we'll only release it when we're 100% happy (and we're often quite hard to please )

Also something to bear in mind is that the prologue has a lot of art assets that also appear in the other acts, so although the prologue has taken about a year thus far, we're effectively completing a fair chunk of stuff that's needed for the following acts, not least of all the plug-ins and tools we've written for it. We see Acts I - III, whilst each being longer than the prologue, taking less time than the prologue to do.

Nope, it was hand-animated

Cheers!

L&B

bobs or boobs?

A bit of both.

(Cheers guys!)

Have a happy new year everybody from Lemmy & Binky!

To celebrate the arrival of 2007, the year when the Forgotten Element Prologue will finally emerge, here are a few bits and bobs from the game:

Personally, I couldn't give a fiddlers f*ck what nationality people are.

Yeah but then you're Irish, so that doesn't surprise me!!!!



PS: You're still my hero.

My daughter is hell-bent on signing up for these forums as "EmiHalfJap" but I keep telling her not too...

So which are you?

JimBrit, you have been here since July of 2005, so if people were offended by your user name, i think you would have heard about it alot sooner.

I'm a Yank, and if somebody even had the user name DumbYank, i still wouldn't be offended by it.

I find this thread very entertaining.

Jimtbrit who?

Oh yes, I know him!

And perhaps that's what we should all take away from all this!

surely bog trotting happens about half an hour after haggis munching?

Yea! we're aware how crap we are much more than you are, haha!

"I don't think I've ever referred to a person from Britain as a "Brit"  Undecided

"Bastard" usually suffices."

*sniff*

It could be worse, you could live in Britain and not have the convenient get out clause of not being British...

PS: You're still my hero.

Does anyone find the term lemmy to be any way discriminatory towards lemmings? Or perhaps guitarists?

FUCK LEMMINGS! KILL ALL LEMMINGS!

Erm. Sorry. Forget I said that.

Looking as sweet as ever buloght! Really looking forward to this one!

I think it's cool. Nice and clean I don't think the lack of a light source is a problem at all myself and would be tempted just to remove them (gravestone shadows etc), nice cartoon style I love the way you've done the grass. Looks sweet, keep it up!

Yea, well there's plenty of woe to be had working in games, but plenty of fun to be had too. I guess it depends on where you work and what project you're on. Obviously your pay has an impact on this, but I'd take some of the better times I've had in the industry over a fat pay-check any day, likewise no amount of pay would make me any happier putting up with the crapper times.

I think anyone who gets a job in the industry expects to have to do some silly hours toward the end of projects. When I was young into the industry I kind of considered it par for the course, ‘comes with the territory' and that. Ironically then it was when I was doing the most silly hours, frequent overnights and most weekends for no overtime pay (even not getting paid at all for several months) but I stuck with it because I always wanted to make games, and there I was making games.

But then I began to realize that a lot of companies take advantage of this attitude, and it factors into their project planning. This annoys me greatly, seeing this happen in big companies and small, the fact that they would factor in large amounts of unpaid overtime by pretty much scheduling it to be late to keep the pressure on, this largely annoys me because it's counter-productive, as everyone is working burnt out and what is done is rarely their 100%, not to mention me finding it a bit out of order morally.

So to sum up, it can be great if you're on the right project, and working with the right people (I've worked with a lot of cool people) in my opinion irrespective of money, as if this is all right then work is for the most part enjoyable and even if you've not quite got the cash to splash around in your spare time, or the spare time to splash it around, life feels pretty fulfilling.

That all said I've recently made an exit from working 9-5 (ha!) for a games company, opting to go freelance. Not saying I wouldn't do it again, but for the moment I'd personally rather be working on something of my own choosing (and by “my” I really mean ours, of course) I think anyone who expects to personally make any waves by joining a company are going to be disappointed, and after so long it becomes as much a “job” as anything else. This is why the amateur/indie scene is a much more exciting thing to me, the chance to express myself, and not someone else's vision of a commercial success.

Also, as Binky says, it may be a route to other things, but the crap poor testers generally go through cannot be taken lightly I'd consider the best route in to offer to work for free for a month in the role you're looking to get into, personally. It shows enthusiasm and gets you in showing your worth in what you want to do. I've personally seen many more people getting in that way than through testing.

Updated story info on first post!