Messages

InCreator,

I'm not sure.  Although most of my work is completely original...in this particular one, I was basically just copying a painting for fun...which allowed me to do it in about 30 min as opposed to doing it from scratch which takes much longer.  However, the painting was not in winter, so I don't know what to tell you!

Well, here I tried another attempt at VGA-ing it.  I tried running the action from the previous file...heh...didn't exactly work.  The brightness and contrast and color balance definitely needs to be done differently for each image.

This image has only 50 colors.

Not possible, you say?

BerserkerTrails,

Thank you very much...that image has allowed me to make a nearly pixel perfect replica...and I made that into a Photoshop action so I can make the conversion easily now

Original:


My edit of original:



Official edit of original:


Conversion notes:
1) Ã,  -53 Brightness
2) Ã,  -8 Contrast
3) Ã,  Convert to Indexed Color
Ã,  Ã,  Ã, -172 Colors
Ã,  Ã,  Ã, -Local Palette (this means every room uses a different pallette)
4) Ã, Posterize: 20 levels. Ã, This is the exact number of levels they used.
5) Ã, Changes to the Hue in Magenta, Cyan, Blue, Green, and Yellow (cant tell you the numbers though)

Thanks guys!

DragonRose, I LOVE seeing that pic.  The method you describe is what I was thinking of...still, I can't seem to get the VGA feel by converting it to 256 color.  Too many speckles everywhere.  Here I'll show you what it looks like when I convert it:



And here's converting one of mine:



Now, I'd really love to see what the in game picture used in QFG4 looks like so I could compare!  Can you dig that up from the same place?

In the Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf enters the House of Meduself at Edoras, he says:

"I have not travelled through fire and death to bandecrit words with a witless worm!"

The meaning of the word bandecrit is obvious from the context and I think it sounds like a word we may vaguelly recall...but in fact, it is not a word.  There is no word antyhign close to this word in the English language....however, by finding the passage that this was adapted from in Tolkien's book, the intended words can be discerned:

"I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls."

So, "bandecrit" was supposed to be, "bandy crooked"

I recorded it from the DVD so you can listen to it 

http://www.able2know.com/go/?a2kjump=http://ardan-nights.org/members/downloads/sounds/other/words.mp3

I have nothing to C&C but this is a topic for the artists.

I have always wondered how do they do the VGA or EGA graphics for the old games.

They often don't have the look of being hand-drawn.Ã,  So I wonder, how do they mask that?Ã,  People aren't perfect and I won't accept the explanatino that they are "just good"...there must be some techniques about their design process that helps them to get a professional look besides just being "good" at pixel art.

Looking at a game like QFG...I wonder, if perhaps someone has painted pictures IRL, then scanned them in and shrunk them down before converting to VGA?

A lot of times I see shading that is done with alternating pixel patterns and stuff like that also.Ã,  I don't believe someone went through the tedium of placing all those alternate pixels....because they often appear to have been done in a way that looks computer generated.

This makes me think that someone drew a cartoon, then colored it on the computer, then used some software to make an EGA rendition, which is capable of forming in-between colors by using pixel shading patterns.

Does anyone have any knowledge of these "professional" processes?

The cape on her right side has a very awkward shape also. 

But might I add, that I do really like your style.  I've always admired your work that you post here.

I think the pose looks alright!

I'm not exactly sure what you mean...but this does seem like a feature that could be used in a lot of games and be worthwhile to have built in, if that's what you're suggesting.

Yeah, it would be nice if you could program from a dynamic higher level perspective and then have it be implemented more efficiently.  Wouldn't that be nice?  Sort of like how some languages will code up a non-recursive version of your recursive functions automatically.  But I think that's just a wee bit too much to ask from our friend CJ

[be]

the lightsaber looks fine to me

however, the lightsaber should be the major lightsource

also, the upper right shoulder looks very wierd...looks flat compared to the rest of it which looks like it has depth

I got it to work.

When converting to Indexed Colors, I chose Exact.  Then chose Custom, and selected a series of colors for a new pallette.

For some reason I can't use the color pallette like swatches to pick my color...however, it will automatically pick the color closest to whatever I try to use since it's limited that way.

This works.

The very first swatch will be the transparent color.

If you really want to add some code in C++, you can still write plugins in C++ and import your functions into AGS

Can you?  I didn't think that the plugin code could call AGS functions.

It's actually good for a change to not to have to deal with pointers, memory management, etc. I started liking even C# for the same reason (in spite of its stuuupid name.    ) It would be nice to have strings similar to C#/VB6 instead of using StrCpy(), etc.

I also learned C# last summer and found it to be an extremely efficient language to program in...after about 2 weeks I was doing some pretty crazy stuff like writing dynamic code and having it compiled and loaded into the current environment...doing a lot of stuff I could never do in C++ with ease.  The only reason I was pushing C++ is because it's more universal, even if it is a bitch.

In this test I am only trying to import 1 area.  I made a 2 color image (solid black and solid white) and converted it to Indexed color in photoshop.  When trying to import it as a mask, I get an error message telling me to paint my mask using color index 0 for blank and 1+ for layers.  In Photoshop, I don't see a way to do this...I can view the color table but it does not say what the indexes are!  I would assume black is an index but it's giving me the error with this simple 2 color image.

The painterly effects are icing on the cake.

The clouds, and the grassy hill, are not well done (sorry).  It looks like a child's drawing.  I've never seen a cloud that was a white blob in the sky, nor a natural field with that color of grass.

I suggest that you look at a photograph and try to emulate what you see.  Once you get good at that, then you can make the move to abstract if you want...but you can't do abstract well if you can't do real well.

I wouldn't worry too much about trying to get the 2.5D effects in Painter to make your picture look snazzy...first you need to learn where to put paint!

No offense implied, just my crits.

That does help, thank you.  The request still stands though 

Do the script modules in 2.7 have their own namespace?

With C++ you have memory addresses and pointers all over the place, and it's simply not possible to automatically save the state of the code. Therefore, people would then have to manually code save and restore routines for their games. There are several other things like this that you wouldn't necessarily think of at first, but actually in practice mean it's not practical to support a "real" programming language in an engine like AGS.

That is a good point which I didn't think of.

However, it does not sound so impossible to me as you make it out to be

For instance, all you really need to do is keep track of the states of all the variables...which means keeping pointer records for each variable.

You must have already had to do this in AGS script for things like ints and arrays.

It seems like the only modification you would have to do to regular C++ code in order to make it truly-saveable is to record pointers to the memory locations whenever a variable is defined(or declared, I'm not sure when C++ actually allocates space) or when the new operator is used.

This could be accomplished by just doing a pre-processing pass to modify all the C++ code before it was compiled.  This would be limiting in that one could not use C++ binaries compiled outside of AGS.  You could even release a separate AGS C++ compiler that simply did this preprocessing step before compiling, allowing binaries to be compiled and linked in seamlessly.

screenshot key doesnt work for it

This is an interesting idea, though it would change the way that AGS supports animations and has the potential to confuse people -- so I guess the question is whether people think it would be a good idea or would prefer to stick with the current system.

The way I suggested it would not necessarily have to change the way that AGS supports animations.

The animation editor could be kept exactly the same, with the simple addition of a button next to each loop where a pre-made loop could be loaded.

Loading a loop would automatically put each sprite in the loop into the animation loop. 

This way, users could choose to do things the exact same way that they have been doing them all along and ignore the new Loop Editor if they wanted to.

Hmm. Ã, 

Yes, that would be good...but I don't think that would really get at the problem. Ã, It still does not treat the frames in an animation as one object that can be easily moved around; what if I wanted to copy this loop from one animation to another place. Ã, Etc.

I think the better solution would be to make a separate "Loop" editor...in which the sprites are loaded into discrete little packets called "loops". Ã, The loops could be named with aliases (or in keeping with the standard AGS methodology they could just be given numbers).

And now, it would be nice if you could then load up an entire folder/numbered-order of sprites to be treated as a loop (and the sprites would all be automatically loaded and composed into a loop which could later be assigned to any animation(s) )

In the sprite editor, you would then select one of the loops that you have made...and the loop would automatically fill up with the sprites from the loop you chose...but unloading or switching to a different loop would be a simple matter of changing the source loop, and not having to fuss with the indivudal frames anymore.