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If they're better, it's only because commercial adventure games have fallen to such a low standard, and are made only by small, well meaning, but mostly crap developers.

It'd be great to have a kind of gaming revolutionary feeling in the independant adventure community, but there just isn't one when most of us go for the same uninspiring, formulaic designs that the (few) adventure game developers that'll be showing stuff at E3 do.  We create adventure games just because we enjoy the process and it's not to difficult, not because we have any great vision, most of the time.  It's more of a shame because we're in a better position to make awesome new stuff than the monied developers are.

There are some exceptions to what I said, of course, no need to point out the one or two great new games in development in either scene - it doesn't make a lot of difference on the whole.

So yes, lets have a REVOLUTION, WOO! Could certainly do with one.

As far as I know, xvid is patent encumbered, like mp3 is, and xvid isn't licensed with the patent holders.Ã,  Theora is one fully open source, patent free modern codec... not many people have the codec installed for it, though, so you'd probably have to provide that.

Yeah, but it's very difficult, look at other game making engines if this is your goal.

Wow, my 1gb card (which I use for my DS) was £17.99... Sony must be making a nice profit on their memory sticks.

Yes it comes with the battery... like it says on all the product info sheets for the standard system console at stores

If you don't know how to program and produce 3d art then there are no good paid 3d engines, and there are no good free 3d engines. Please don't make thread titles in caps by the way.

Code: ags

if (character[EGO].View==2) { 
character[EGO].Say("text");
}
else { 
character[EGO].Say("text"); 
}

Also be aware that using the character[] array is outdated, you can do it more concisely with the script-o-matic name displayed in the character editor, like

Code: ags

if (cEgo.View==2) { 
cEgo.Say("text");
}
else { 
cEgo.Say("text"); 
}

I don't see anyone flaming, it's just all the things you've explained don't actually make sense the way you've explained them.Ã,  I certainly can't replicate them in Photoshop or logically, it just doesn't work.Ã,  Perhaps you could show some images from your programs showing what you're doing?Ã,  It isn't like you're talking to people who don't have any experience with graphics programming or computer art in general. I'd love to know how to use this technique, but as far as I can see it just isn't happening without some potentially complicated algorithms for guessing information in the background image, to get rid of the haloing.

If you're not sure how to explain the process technically, just take some screenshots as I suggested, perhaps we can work out what aftereffects is doing.

I think it's still "isometric", but yeah a more specific name would be useful, I don't know what it is.Ã,  Planometry is a bit confusing because planometric is already a term used for axonometric projection, which looks more like

and is kind of painful to look at.

Yeah, for example, you can have someone standing on one side of that fence there, or on the other side, but be at the same y position, in pixels, which is the thing AGS uses to define if you are behind or in front of something.  So it can be tricky to set up if you want backgrounds with a lot of walkbehinds.  Darth Mandarb drew a similar sort of thing in his game, but not in this same iso projection, instead he uses one where the angles are aligned with the screen, much simpler to set up in AGS... it was used in a lot of tile based console RPGs iirc, but it does lose some of the 3d effect I think.

It sounded stupid when I heard it, less so now, as with almost all console names (except the boring named ones like "Nintendo DS", "Sony PSP").  Even XBOX didn't make me giggle for more than a few days.  It still seems the most interesting of the coming systems... all the comments I see about it reflect one thing, the coming consoles aren't aimed at the same people at all.

Completely disagree, it's phobia of using things like timing based events that have led adventure games into "click through the story until you win" stagnation.  Unfortunately the few people that attempt to create fresh gameplay have done so poorly, most of the time.  In any case, what you're talking about is essentially an old fashioned walking dead, in this instance created because of the time based aspect of the puzzle, but there are certainly more examples of inventory or dialog based walking deads.

It's sad, all the things I can think of that I didn't like in adventure games have actually become staples of the genre... so I'm not sure what I can add to the list...  I suppose I'm glad mazes went out of fashion at least (not that a maze can't be good).

There'd have to be some interface for saying where you wanted the mask to go on the screen... I think just making your masks full screen in your paint program is easier (you should probably paint them on a layer above your background anyway...), and there aren't really any drawbacks in size, they are rle compressed, which means that blank areas compress to almost nothing.

As for the problem with walkbehinds, while I'd love intermediate transparency levels for walkbehinds if they'd work, there is a problem that you probably aren't picturing, as pointed out in the thread Strazer linked to. Ã, To get the correct pixel colour for the alpha blended area between the character and the walkbehind you need three layers, the background without the walkbehind, the character, and the alpha channeled walkbehind. Ã, The reason for this I'm not sure I can explain properly, because I'm bad at that, but perhaps I can show you with an image:

What you want is this presumably, character blended onto background, walkbehind blended onto both of them.


What you'd get with your method of having a layer saying how much to make the character transparent as it walks around is a halo where the character overlaps the attempted semi transparent area, something like


This was just a quick example I made in photoshop, it can actually look worse than that.  It certainly isn't an improvement over no alpha channel.  So unfortunately there simply isn't enough information in your setup for AGS to do the alpha blending between walkbehind and character correctly.  The only way to achieve the effect would be to force people to draw their backgrounds in alpha channeled layers.

I can't really offer much advice at this stage other than follow along with some tutorials, and get a better program.  Milkshape isn't exactly renowned as a modeller. I'd recommend 3ds Max or Maya (since there's a lot of guides to both of them), or for a pure modelling program with less confusion, Silo.

Generally you start off with 3d shapes and cut into them to create detail, rather than just making the front alone like that.  But sometimes that approach works too.

P'nawn da...

Yes there is a license, in the manual... it's extremely easy to find.Ã,  I'm not sure what you are really asking about, you want to remove all trace of AGS from the EXE? If that's the case then you should probably read this part:

Anything you distribute which has been created with AGS MUST retain the Version resources unaltered in order to display the AGS version and copyright in the Version tab of the EXE properties

You are allowed to replace the icon with a resource editor, that's all (and it's not really necessary now in later AGS versions).

Coding in C# is very dissimilar to coding in AGS script, C# is more like Java.  C coding would be somewhat useful, but only because the basic syntax is the same.  If you want to learn to script well in AGS script it's fine just to try to learn how to use AGS script well.  Follow the introductory tutorials in the manual, it's probably much more simple than you expect.

I'd generally advice against using 3d unless you have some prior knowledge of it, or have a game idea that just cannot be expressed in 2d, but anyway...

I'd say cel shading is considerably easier than not cel shading once you've worked out how to turn it on in your engine... the time to do that is tiny compared to the time to make a proper texture.  Making a 3d game is an impossible dream though, unless you are willing to spend at least a year learning how to model, texture and program, if you're starting from scratch. It's not too much harder than 2d game dev, just requires skills most people haven't got. Most people can do a basic 2d drawing.

Personally I'd recommend learning Python to code a game these days, it's the easiest good language to learn, and has access to the best 2d, 3d and sound libraries. Everything else, like Blitz or C++ sucks in comparison, for productivity and modern features. It's what I'm using for my game currently (Python for programming, OGRE for graphics, Novodex for physics).  I'd be happy to help anyone out with this setup.

Download the freely available Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/
Download SDL from http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

Now you have the best Windows C++ development environment and the most widely used 2d graphics library (which is quite easy to use).

If you know AGS script then you've got a good start, you know how to declare and use variables, and functions.  It works the same in C++.  There's a lot more to learn of course, but you should be able to follow along with basic C++ or SDL tutorials.

With that box optimisation it's actually quite fast in C, most of the time the collision will be rejected even before any pixels are visited.  And alpha against alpha channel testing with that 50% threshold is pretty fast, just check for overlapping 8th bits like (pixelA & 0x00000080) & (pixelB & 0x00000080).
I've used this in the "repeatedly execute" of a game, testing loads of sprites against each other and it works great. (I was even adding the positions of the overlapping pixels together to get a collision angle at the same time). So I'd say it's worth adding, perhaps, for minigames or something.