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Oh, I vote for @Creamy in all categories.  It's a great entry.  I love how it's a cutaway that seems "natural" somehow and has three distinct zones: room, window, background.  The emphasis is on the room obviously but the other two really play a role in selling the scene.  I'd play it!

Oh yeah I did notice that question mark block as I was driving around doing the testing lol.  I was just like "eh I'll figure that out later..."

Ha ha dang that looks great.  My Quarantine-clone is kind of a pile by comparison.

Fooling around a bit and I created an portrait generator.  I'm using it for another project but it's fun enough on its own to slap it up on itch.  If you come up with a cool one post it!  There is not good way to extract it though lol.  Anyway, there's a couple of Easter eggs.  You can make an EGA portrait of several quasi-famous people if you click around.  Press "M" to enable to cursor if you're not on mobile and if you are on mobile I'm sorry it's so insanely tiny.  I'll add the boy version to this thread when I finish it if that's allowed.  It's all the same thing after all.

EGA FaceMaker 3000


Some generated faces that more or less resemble what you can make:

I definitely worked backwards from the demo rather than forward from the module.

That's definitely part of it.  I fooled around with various figures quite a bit last night and didn't quite get it.  Steps that I took: shrunk the map to make it a little bit easier to take in.  Changed the colors from EGA yellow and black to random colors just to rule out the GetPixel 8 bit color shenanigans.  It's definitely now populating the map with the correct boundaries but doing something else that's curious.  If that code weren't working I would assume that when I increase the for loop iterations it would just completely populate the map with trees but that's not what it's doing.  It's not populating part of the map but I can't figure out what kind of rules it's using.

Code: ags

function khrisTrees(){
  
  
    DynamicSprite* highway = DynamicSprite.CreateFromExistingSprite(9);
    DrawingSurface* ds = highway.GetDrawingSurface();
    int x, z;
    
    for (int i = 0; i < 800; i++) {
      bool found = false;
      while (!found) {
        x = Random(600)-300;
        z = Random(600)-300;
        int c = ds.GetPixel(x, z);
        found = c != 6812 && c != 7127; // actual yellow and black go here
      }
    m7.AddObject(x, z, 0.4, 7);
    }
}

Thanks @Khris your willingness to always help out and write ten lines of code that solves a relatively complicated problem always floors me.  This isn't actually working lol but I think it actually is working and only appears not working because there is something up with the coordinates.  At first I thought it was because the highway was black like Color Number 0 and I remember GetPixel is a little weird about the first colors which I always use stylistically but when I changed it to a weird green it still happened. 

Eventually I had the idea to make a coordinates tracker debugger and when I drive to the edge of the map it's actually got my coordinates at like -1500 so I think there is something going on there and I just need to figure out how the coordinates relate to the map.  I think I'm gonna drive around in the woods a lot!

It occurred to me just now that I might be approaching this backwards.  It might make more sense to figure out where not to draw the trees and rocks first and then make the map match that rather than make the trees and rocks match the map since it's all relatively arbitrary. 

So, I'm using the @eri0o Mode 7 module and it's working great with one little exception which isn't really related to the module itself but a problem more broadly so I thought I would start a new thread.

The code to add an object to the "ground" sprite is as such:

Code: ags

Mode7Object* Mode7World.AddObject(int x, int z, float factor, int graphic)

I want to randomly populate the ground with trees and rocks.  So far so good, he does this himself in the demo.  The problem is that I don't want rocks and trees to be drawn into the road and I don't know a good way to do this.  The sprite I am using is roughly 3000x800 which makes it feel huge.  I assume going over the sprite with GetPixel is out since that's like 2.5 million pixels to iterate through.  And also there are two colors to disallow not just one (the black of the highway and the yellow painted lines).  I have a Python script that takes a mask of the highway portion of the ground sprite and returns a CSV with the appropriate coordinates but that's still like 600,000 coordinates and I don't think making an array of Points of 600,000 is a really good answer and I'm not even sure how that would be done anyway.  It doesn't need to be pixel perfect, however.  That is there isn't a real need to tell it not to draw a tree on 0,345 0,346, 0,347 0,348 et al. since a block of fifty pixels to allow or disallow is probably sufficient.  You could also anticipate the disallowed shape somewhat by using a pattern (like maybe a sine wave or something) although I'm going to be using a few different maps just to give variation to the highway.  I'm only kind of trying to recreate Desert Bus here!

The short version is that I somehow need to supply that function with "correct" coordinates so that it can draw the objects but not in particular places.  Anyway, thanks for reading!

I think there are some debug keys you can use to move the camera around.  I, K, O, L all do something with the camera at least in the demo.  Arrow keys, too.

Once I read the theme I pretty much had to stop what I was doing and immediately make a background.

Holy Cow Deluxe Paint lol.  How do you find the workflow?  Is there an advantage to using it?  I only know of it as kind of a relic to be honest.

As an aside, making GUIs like that just for yourself that show your variables in-game like that can be very useful for debugging purposes.  It's a really good trick to know.

Now that I've learned how it works I think it's a fantastic module and really you get a lot of character out of some relatively easy steps.  I do have a question, though.  Is it possible to have two characters talking over top of each other at once?  I was thinking you could make the speech line a single WAV file but the characters seem to block one another when called in tandem.  It's not a big deal but I was trying to script an argument lol.  Thanks for the module all the same!

Well, with @Stupot in the unenviable position of tie breaker it takes @Creamy over the top!  Great work all around!  I'll pass the baton now!

Oh great now we have a tie! 

Okay, last call for votes!  I'll close this out in the next eight hours!!

[Concept: Your background should tell us something about the place you have depicted.Playability: does it have clearly defined walkable areas, things to interact with, etc?Artistic Execution: does the image convey the wanted atmosphere? What's the feeling of the place?]

Okay, then with the entries in it looks lie it's time to vote.  Remember you're voting on the following criteria:

Concept: Your background should tell us something about the place you have depicted.
Playability: does it have clearly defined walkable areas, things to interact with, etc?
Artistic Execution: does the image convey the wanted atmosphere? What's the feeling of the place?

@RootBound entry:


@Creamy entry:

Great entries so far!  Anybody else got anything in the pipeline or shall I wrap this baby up?  I'm never very clear as to when a deadline expires since we're all in different time zones so I guess I'll just close it tomorrow unless I hear something from somebody.

Nice!  I like the high amount of intrigue there @RootBound !!  Excellent.