Messages

Agree with others here, it looks awesome. The backgrounds are spot on!  :o

[Hey all!]

Hey all!

Just droppin' a line to say me and Henrik (the animator on the commercial release of the Journey Down) have just started some form of development blog over at www.slxgames.com. For you who are curious about our JD progress and/or our general bantering regarding our other projects/tomfoolery, please, drop by! If people visit the damn thing we might actually bother keeping it updated too!  

Good to see your project properly announced! There's certainly potential, from the looks of it.

I wish you the best of luck with this!

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I suspect what you mistake with videos with an alpha channel are in fact vectorial animations (rendered in real time -- since the antialising and the alpha are built-in, the effect is achieved "by design").

No. Import a png24 image with an transparency channel to flash and you will notice it (if you chose to do so) stores the picture as a lossy jpeg. I have used this in several flash projects. It works great for a series of frames, thus creating an animation with alpha. I suppose the alpha is stored in a separate jpg. OR they're using jpeg2000 which I believe -if my memory serves me right- has alpha channel support. This method however obviously won't compress as efficiently as, say, theora or any other common video codec for that matter, since it works on a frame by frame basis and does not compress based on data in previous frames.

In my experience the theora plugin completely ignores the alpha channel. This doesn't surprise me though, animated alpha channels are for some silly reason still sort of taboo, so people don't expect anyone to want to use them. I agree though, one could have a lot of fun with them. I can see many situations where this feature could come to good use.

Calin has a point though. Lossy image + alpha does ring warning bells in my head. It could result in some pretty awful artifacts.  (Though flash games do this all the time and get away with it somehow, it's obviously not rocket science.)

Nice! I really like the overall style, good job.

Best of luck!

Lookin' good, cianty!

Don't be afraid of casting shadows. PI noir is all about shadows.  8)

Keep up the good work.

I like the new characters. Keep up the good work!

Nice!

Looking forward to seeing the plot unfold.

Hey, just wanted to drop a line and say I've finally taken the time to give this game a spin and I gotta say I'm loving it so far. Only a couple of hours in yet but I can tell awesomeness is building up big-time. Amazing work. Congratulations!

I will gladly host a streaming and downloadable HQ version on the AGSArchives server.

That would be awesome. I'd love to easily be able to share this with all sorts of people.

Thanks everyone for your support during the awards campaign and also a huge thanks to duals + team for making the absolutely mindblowingly awesome AGS IRC client for the ceremony! It was truly an odd yet awesome event.

Thanks Tarmstorm! Here's another spankin' new Swedish Journey Down interview if you're curious.

Also:

AMO just finished a delicious interview with Simon D'souza, the games' musician! Don't miss this! It's a good read.

I'll also take this chance to thank everyone for your support during the AGS Awards! I figured JD would win a couple of awards, I had no idea however, that it would win so many.  :o

mode7: I remember spending hours just looking at the blood island overview map and drinking the ambiance with my eyes and ears. Good times! Bill Tiller has truly contributed to the adventure game scene.

If you by 2.5D mean pre-rendered 3d characters, yes. If you mean real-time rendered 3D characters on a 2D backdrop, no. We actually discussed going the real-time 3d path several times but in the end we realized we'd be spending half of the project battling exporters if we did that and, well, it's just not worth the effort unless you already have a working pipeline.

Anyhow, don't worry. If it looks shite, I won't release it  8)

We are currently trying out different rendering techniques to find something that blends with the backdrop style nicely. Currently, it feels very promising. (Though we've only done stills so far, lord knows what it looks like when we start animating it.)

This sounds absolutely balls2walls awesome. I'll definitely do my best to participate in the event. (sort of depends on my somewhat dodgy internet connection in the deep forest though)

Thanks Ouxxey for clearing that up! Laptop graphics cards tend to truly suck. :-

Also thanks everyone else who helped out testing this! I'm very glad to hear we had no issues with the codec. That was my main concern.
We will most likely be doing more tests in the future - there are definitely more things I feel might screw up.

Timing .ogg movies with audio for one thing... that's doomed to mess up. Also, if and when we finally get the chance to run AGS at hihger resolutions, that no doubts will need to be tested extensively as well.  Hopefully these are both things we will get the chance to test in Sharkfighter 3!  8)

Too bad it doesn't run smoothly on your computer Arj0n, but honestly I'm not surprised. Good to know though. Thanks!

Again thank you everyone. This preliminary testing phase is critical to say the least, all help is greatly valued and highly appreciated.

I couldn't test it using D3D9, though. I had to use DirectX. Otherwise the chipset fails to initialize 1024x748x32. That's common to every AGS games if I'm not mistaken.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping not to run into. What a shame. As Knoodn pointed out, DX5 offers way crappier scaling than D3D9 - Not to mention the fact that it would be nice if the game could run "straight out of the box" without any manual settings done by the player.

I still haven't figured out where the choppiness in the animation comes from. When looking at the walkcycle in the view editor I see it's smooth as heck. Something wonky is going on when the animation is being played.

Thanks all!

I appreciate it very much!

The only thing that bothered me was, when looking at the feet of the sharkfighter, they seemed to stutter strangely. When I didn't look at the feet the walkcycle looked great. I'm not sure what's causing this, but I don't think it really matters.

Yes, I too noticed this. Anyone have a clue why it's doing this? I first thought it had something to do with the continuous scaling, but I tried ditching that but it didn't help.

I can proudly announce that this project has now become an official SLX GAMES project, which means I will be dedicating some of my day-job-time working on it.

As a first way of trying out what the higher resolution lets us do, we have now released a small tech demo, which I would be very grateful if you took the time to run - and give me your feedback on.

If all those things run smoothly, the only thing truly stopping us from going full on with this project is the display resolution issue.

[DOWNLOAD HERE]

DOWNLOAD HERE

Me and my colleague Henrik have just begun preliminary work on the JDHD project and are currently experimenting with codecs etc to see what works technically, and what doesn't. We've quickly thrown this slightly moronic "tech demo" together, to try out running Scotch's theora plugin together with some high res character stuff, on top of each other.

So why am I posting this here?

In short, I'd be very thankful if anyone out there would like to download the "game" and see that it runs properly on their computer. We are afraid we are about to spend a couple months working on something that later will turn out not to run properly on the average home computer.

* Is the ogg movie showing and looping in the backdrop? (it's short and isn't supposed to loop seamlessly.)
* Are you getting a decent framerate?
* Does it initialize in fullscreen? (does it crop oddly?)
* Is the character scaling smooth or are you experiencing any nasty tearing/artefacts?

Walk to the bottom right corner to hear my own brilliant voice acting!
Quit the game with good ol' CTRL+Q

THANK YOU!