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Messages - stuh505

#141
General Discussion / Re: InC's TC: A tablet
Sun 17/04/2005 15:45:19
Best Buy should carry them
#142
Critics' Lounge / Re: shattered
Sun 17/04/2005 15:43:55
The only problem I see is that your main character is drawn from much more of a downward perspective than your background
#143
There were some hot chicks!  I don't know actresses though...which one was she?  The dancer or the psycho black one?  I must say I thought the girl who had the crooked cop ex boyfriend was the hottest...but maybe I only think that because she looks like my ex.
#144
Looks pretty nice

You should make the heads slightly move up and down as they walk, right now it looks like they are hanging from their heads
#145
QuoteAs people have said before, there are patches now that fix all such issues.

Heh...there are patches all right...but they don't fix all the issues!!
#146
General Discussion / Re: InC's TC: A tablet
Sun 17/04/2005 05:13:48
I have a 4x5 Wacom and it works very well.  It might be nice to have the next size up, but it's not really necessary because when I get on a roll with this I forget that it's there between me and the screen.  My cousin has the huge size and he says it's too big.  I spent $100 on mine.
#147
I went to see it opening night but couldn't get in...but I did tonight, so here's my review.

Plot: 0/10
Acting: 0/10
Cinematography: 7/10
Music: 8/10
Action: 4/10
Overall score: 2/10

It seemed as if they wrote the plot as they were filming the movie because it is just aweful and completely random.  They try to tie things together with larger themes but it's really a pitiful attempt.

There are 3 main characters which is a risky move obviously since it means that there's less time to develope each.  It's actually not a big problem though, because they are essentially all the same character anyway, just with different faces.

Instead of having unique identifiable personalities in the characters, they all just have very flat one dimensional profiles.

All of the lines seem to have been written by the same person and they are delivered hastily and without emotion.

The supervillians are really stupid; you have a child molestor who has turned into a yellow stinking pot-belled Ferangi due to drugs to re-grow his testicles, and a Harry Potter/spider man ninja who eats human flesh to get close to God, and a crooked cop.

Probably one of the worst made movies I've ever seen!
#148
I'm not sure about your health system.

Often there will be an attribute like constitution which is used in an algorithm to determine your maximum health.  Then taking damage or healing potions can slide your current health around within the range of 0-max health.

By traditional usage of the word "health" in games, it means max health-damage....so you would never need to have a slider for health AND damage, just one or the other.  This value is usually in the form of a percent because you don't really need to know the value, just the relative value.

Since you are showing BOTH, I must assume that they are actually showing different things...and that perhaps "health" refers to maximum health, and damage refers to the inverse of the regularly named current "health".

However, you have indicated that "health" is a percent...which is reverse from normal, and misleading if it's a maximum number.  Perhaps the percent means the percent of maxhealth that you have out of the maximum possible maxhealth within game limits.

If so...that seems to be a poor way of representing maximum health, and might be better understood by showing a static number.  eg, your maximum health is 150...and then they can see it increase to 200 or whatever, as their character becomes "tougher".

If you use a visual display of health, then there is no need for any of these confusing numbers.

You can simply have a health bar whose length is related to your maximum health, so as your bar gets bigger, you know that you are a tougher character.  Then the bar can fill up like a thermometer to show your current health.  You could go one step further and make it so that you have a "target" health value, which represents the health value your current health is going to go to.  This way, damaging and healing effects do not make immediate changes to your health bar, but change the target health, and then you see the bar gradually move to either level over any period of time.
#149
Yes, those were some great tips.  Thanks for the link, Erwin.
#150
I think the medpac is supposed to symbolize life actually, so the broken heart must be something else (don't ask me).
#151
If you had not deleted the original picture, I would have been able to give more specific comments.  I would be happy to point out the differences in why I liked the old one better if you put up a link to the old one, but I can't remember the the details offhand.
#152
I thought your original drawing was really nice drawing.  It didn't look like a game background, but it looked very nice.  Your new edit, on the other hand, looks aweful...the only improvement I see is that the actual trees are drawn nicer, but the composition is sooo much worse.
#153
Try having an icon for your character's face next to the health.  When you mouse over the icon, a GUI slides out showing the static attributes while you keep your mouse hovered there.  I definitely think those should not have icons, esp if they are on a dropdown...because it doesnt matter if they are bigger.

As for the non-static attribtues which I'll refer to as conditions (respect, drunkeness, etc), Darth did a good job of making those icons look like they go together via the outlines.  Your black outlines help too but it doesn't work out as well as it did on Darth's GUI.

I think you should free up more space by not saying 50/100...and just say 50% instead.  Because it still looks too cluttered. 

I changed my mind about the respect confidence I think you should go back to icons so they take up less space...but make it so that perhaps hovering over any of the icons displays the text word of that icon.
#154
Implementing the health bar would be extremely easy.  Raw draw functions aer a bad idea because you can't manipulate them and you dont want to be doing lots of raw grabs and restores...plus it wouldnt look very good.

Instead, make the GUI transparent over the health bar area...then you can display a graphic overlay there, and overlays will naturally occur with a Z order below the GUI.  So you can just move the overlay back and forth.

As to the icons...well maybe you could just use words?  If you took out the character attributes from this gui you'd have more room
#155
Two rejects in a row -- that stinks.

Well, we've had a chance to see your first rejected one...the cowboyish one...and we've also seen the version that chapter11 DID choose.

...and I think that is really helpful for determinging WHY yours was rejected.

It seems to be merely a matter of your style.  The background they chose does not show evidence of the brushes etc used, it is much less impressionistic than your painting...which is much more painterly!

This image, like your old one, is in the same slightly impressionistic style.  If you took this painting that you had here and continued to refine it to the stage where you cannot see the indivdual brush strokes...by blurring and smuding in the right places...I think that you would have a much better shot with chapter11.
#156
The layout is pretty nice, but the colors of everything are too random; right now, it lacks unification.  The colors in all of the icons should match with the color scheme of the GUI backgrounds and text.  All of the text and numbers should follow a logical color scheme too.

Some more specific comments:

You might try replacing the health with a bar.  The bandana and thumbs up are very unintuitive...I have no idea what they are supposed to represent.  The scholarly hat, smiley, and dumbells must represent character attributes -- knowledge, social skills, and strength?  At least that's my guess.  If these are character attributes, I don't think they belong on the main heads up GUI...static data should go on a non-static GUI because you don't need to see it all the time.
#157
This background is just amazing.Ã,  It REALLY makes me want to play!!!Ã,  The geology is completely unrealistic, but hey, it looks cool.

EDIT: I checked out your website too.  Some nice stuff.  This one is definitely my favorite though.  BTW, the button to submit on your guestbook is 95% cropped off.
#158
QuoteThere's nothing unrealistic about the perspective. It's how things would look if you were viewing it with a strong telescope from an immense distance. Parallel lines appear parallel in the picture, it doesn't need a vanishing point. (Or, if you look at it another way, the vanishing point is the point at infinity.)

I highly doubt that Nethros was thinking of a high magnification telescope when he drew this image
#159
I don't think too much text is really a problem because you can always skip through it.  You don't have to read it.  So that seems to me to be a good way to balance between people who just want to go next puzzle next puzzle to the people who want to get into the character and game plot.  Personally, I think the more immersive your game is the better and dialogues are one way to achieve this.

Helm, I see your reasons for saying that walking dead etc are acceptable...but I think those reasons only hold up in a purely theoretical world.  Practically, different people have very different opinions about what is obvious...and to one person, it might be obvious that performing a certain action is idiotic...but to another person, not so. 

For example, what if there was a certain item in area A and once you travelled from area A to area B, you could not go back.  This is now a walking dead situation and the player's intelligence isn't necessarily to blame...often times it is not obvious what items are get-able, and often times items can only be gotten after specific procedures of other things have been done first. 

The main difference about an adventure game compared to other games is that an adventure game is like playing out a story.  It's really not fun to play the same adventure game twice in a row...unless you're really a super big fan of that game.  So if you suddenly realize that the only possible way to complete the game is to start over and re-do all the puzzles and dialogues etc that you spent 20 hours doing before...that's pretty ridiculous IMO. 

Now you might respond that game designers should simply be more careful...but that's such an arbitrary line, and chances are if you consider walking dead situations to be acceptable, you will get even careful players sometimes trapped in them.

Also, scripted death sequences seem to be notoriously unavoidable the first time around.  It's not because characters are stupid, it's because we have been trained that we must explore all options to get through most adventure games.  So if there's something interactable that's bad, it's not unreasonable for a player to assume that it's simply something they're supposed to do.  In a real world situation, you would never do something incredibly stupid...but in an adventure game, you are often "forced" into doing things you wouldn't otherwise do.  For example, the game may be programmed in such a way that clicking on a broken rope bridge causes the player to attempt to walk across and fall to their death.  Perhaps the character clicked on the rope bridge for a different reason, not realizing that such a scripted sequence involving attempting to actually walk across was in store!  There are also many instances which come up suddenly and may not be intended by the player so they don't save first.  Should these people be forced to re-play the whole game?  No way...

If there's a random type death encounter that's not obviously predictable, why NOT make an autosave before it?  If this situation is largely unavoidable without prior knowledge, it means many or most players will die here and need to start the game all over.  There's no reason to lose your players this way.

Now, I'm not saying that every adventure game should be solvable by everyone, or just be a matter of "putting the time in" to finish.  I simply think that there are other, better ways, to kill off the player...for instance, if your game involves fighting, then it's fine for a character to die in a fight.  It's also perfectly fine to make a puzzle that's extremely difficult...but it's not ok to make a puzzle that's difficult because it has an obtuse or random solution.

Another thing you could do is warn the player that the situation they are coming into is important and that they should be esp careful there...that might encourage some people to do a save and take the situation in a different  perspective.

#160
Critics' Lounge / Re: What do you think? bg
Thu 14/04/2005 01:00:41
If you are posting an image you drew by hand, there's no way you used a complete palette, and simply saving with an indexed palette of smaller size makes far greater difference than your choice of compressed file formats.
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