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I'm currently experimenting with this plugin to draw animated backdrops for chapter two of The Journey Down, and am experiencing two issues, I was hoping someone here might be able to shed some light on these:

* No matter what method I use to crate my .ogv files, the game ALWAYS starts out by rendering the first frame 100% pink. Once it's looping, it's gone. Just the very, very first frame of the first time. Any thoughts on this?

* As Willdon (I think) stated, walk-behinds override the animation, is there any way to work around this problem?

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Is this plugin perhaps not the way for me to go? Are there any alternatives?

Sorry for digging up this old thread. I realize this may cause some confusion but this was the obvious place to post my questions.

Glad you like the method Dualnames! It's great if you feel you want to focus on composition. Which I often do.

I just posted an article on hardydev that people who enjoyed might find interesting, check it out here:
http://hardydev.com/2010/09/11/the-journey-down-background-art/

The atmosphere in this story was top notch! Lots of nice little mood animations in the backdrops too, I'm a sucker for those.

Also Impressed by the voice acting. How come it doesn't feel amateurish? it bothers me. hmm.

garagegothic: Glad it hit the spot!

mouthuvmine: Here, have a look on top, I have updated with some thumbnails. I couldn't find a good enough collection of them for any of the scenes that I finished for chapter one, so here's a sneak peek from chapter two instead where I now have millions of thumbnails! The room covered here went through a lot of different angles before I settled in a final design.

Congrats on the coverage man! Well deserved. I'm usually very hard to catch with melodramatic depressing droning monologues, but this game really hit the spot. It made me sketch mansions and mausoleums for a couple of hours. Good stuff.

inspiration +1

F1ak3r, Khris, AndyfromVA, wisnoskij : thanks!

Lyaer: Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I had a brief run with theora when I first started making cutscenes but it was SO unreliable it drove me nuts. If this plugin does what I want to do it is worth a lot to me.

Wersus: Thanks! I hope to fix the "glued on" feeling in chapter two by shading the characters some more. We'll see how well that goes heh.

tzachs: Yeah voice acting would have been awesome no doubts!

CaptainD: Thanks for the kind words and coverage! Much appreciated exposure.

blueskirt: I agree. the cleaned up look theyve got on the backdrops in FT are gorgeous. They must have spent incredible amounts of time on sharpening them up. I have in fact, mostly been sitting on my laurels regarding this. Post downsampling work has been very limited. The journey Down does suffer a bit from the same thing as mi2 in that respect, as many details blur out into nothingness. I too believe my backdrop style would do good of being shown in higher resolution (provided I spend more time on detailing). I am however battling myself about this issue over and over again. There are so many pros and cons.

Unless paople start raving against it it seems like I will end up making chapter two in 640x400. A rather odd resolution no doubts, but it seems to fit my needs better. Does anyone know, by the way, if that resolution for some technical reason is a bad choice? Do monitors in general have a harder time fullscreening at it because of its odd dimensions?

Nlogax: most rooms are safe to save in. The charter overview always works for me. I can't swear that this bug behaves the same way on all computers though.

Dualnames: I do all sorts of wacky stuff with my mousemodes. Dont think there's a connection there though but who knows? Number of objets? what objects? where?

Thanks david!

Markbilly: No, I will most likely have a 3-4 second long animation at 24 fps, thus ending up at roughly 90 frames.
This definitely won't go for all my backdrops, but several of them will be heavily animated. It will add up to quite the large pile of assets.

Best would certainly be if someone explained to me how to compress these things as an animation, ogg for an instance, and have them run at the right speed, with the right size, and most important of all, without crashing the game since people don't have the required codec.

This never-ending hires vs lores discussion never seases to entertain me.

It seems some of us have a built in anomaly in our reptile brains that make games with big chunky pixels make us feel right at home, while some of us, through cold reasoning state that higher resolution gives a better canvas to portray beaitiful imagery upon. For some reason I have a bit of a split personality /schizo thing going on there where I love 'em both.

The way I see it the most important thing is that its easy to work with, so it gets done. The lores alternative therefore wins by a mere few points since lower res means less time spent on drawing details.

HOWEVER - I am considering a completely different technique when drawing characters for chapter 2 that might turn the whole thing on its flipside. The hard edges on the characters have given me a lot of headache and extra cleanup work when drawing them. I might consider switching to proper alpha transparency so I can make them smoother. That should ease my workflow a whole lot. My theory though is that this may result in a smudgier look, and for the game not to end up blurry, I might have to up the resolution on the whole thing. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I'm seeing other problems with higher res as well though. Chapter two will have loads of animated backdrops. Since I'm having a hard time finding a good way of compressing animation so it works properly on all computers, I simply use raw, uncompressed images in a sequence. This means big filesize, and in the case of upping the resolution, it means huge filesize. Won't people whine and gripe about the game being a 900 mb large download?

Also I'd like to change resolution since nowadays most people use wide screens of one sort or another. 320x240 is nice, but it gets squished heavily on most monitors. I am considering going to 640x400. What are your thoughts on this?

Please, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You seem to have nailed the issue. I tried simply removing the bg music (mp3's) in the faulty rooms and it stopped crashing.
However it does not crash for all rooms with mp3's - for some reason. It appears switching to ogg is the safe way to go though. Hopefully my musician has all his raw files intact so we can bounce them all to ogg!

Thanks for the explanation. My angst is fading.

Glad y'all enjoy looking at this stuff! I've got more sketches and all sorts of work in progress stuff I can post if anyone is interested.

markbilly: yeah I really want people to understand that making art isn't about magic, it's about loads and loads of hard work. If you are willing to spend many hours on your art, it will pay off. I hope someone learns from this and makes an effort instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying "I'm no artist".

Ben304: hehe sadly I've had to remove quite a lot of things I have liked. It hurts but in the long run such decisions tend to turn out to be the right ones.

Interesting, probably the only way to investigate this is if you could upload a copy of the game that I could reproduce the problem with?

You can reproduce it easily with the current release of the Journey Down, it's just a matter of saving the game in the right room. Incidentally, the first room with real player interaction is actually the first room that has this issue. (Standing by power box) Try saving the game there and then loading it again. The quite hefty 125 mb download of the game can be found in my signature.

I'm having this bad feeling that I'm just doing something stupid with my save code but I can't for the life of me figure out what that might be.

Thanks for looking into this! It has put my n00b brain in a spin.

Hey all!

I just pseudo-finished a new section of my website and I figured it would be fun to get some response on the stuff, hence I'm making a bit of a mirror here of my "sketches and thoughts" page. Also as a bonus goodie I'll throw in some deleted scenes here for you to mock and laugh at. Primarily I removed them from the game since I didn't need them. But had they looked better I might have tried harder at keeping them in the game I guess. I think it's probably good for people to see that behind every good looking backdrop there's a million ones that didn't turn out as nice. Brute force does the trick!

I hope someone enjoyed this, I sure had a good time going through my sketches and reflecting about them for a while!

heheh I died 23 times and then got insulted for quitting. What a hilarious way to start the day!

Thanks ZayanM and Jimbob!

TheJBurger: Thanks for the kind words, bug report and tip. I'll try your cutscene idea and see how it feels.

I will most likely be accumulating bugs and fixing them this coming week, will try to have a new patched up version online by next weekend.

Hey guys!

I've encountered a strange problem in my game. When loading a saved game that was saved in certain specific rooms, it crashes.
Most rooms I save in don't do this, but some certain rooms do it every single time without fail (upon loading them again).

I'm using a simple SaveGameSlot(30, "save game"); and RestoreGameSlot(30); so there's nothing fancy involved whatsoever.
I use the exact same slot every time i save and load.

The game shuts down and throws this:
An exception 0xC0000094 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00483D9D ; program pointer is +220, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (1,0)

Does anyone have a clue as to why it does this?

thanks!

Thanks Lyaer! I think hires/lores doesn't really make a difference. What really matters to me is that i have a good workflow so things actually get done.

Arj0n. I've now managed to reproduce the bug. It only does this in a few selected rooms. I have no idea why those rooms should be more problematic than the other ones though. The whole savegame routine is sadly very much beyond my powers.

Where you are when loading doesn't matter apparently, what matters is what room you saved in. Very weird. If anyone has any clues regarding what might be wrong please drop me a line!

nice clean style! I just played through it and liked it a lot. It reminded me of "another world" in its brutal "act now or die" type interaction. You could easily just cram more rooms in there. They have no visual connection whatsoever so you'll get away with it bigtime I'm sure.

Thanks all!!

Arj0n. Did you by any chance try to load a saved game from the previous version of the game?
If you could please try to resave and reload with the new exe and drop me a line on how it works that would be much appreciated!

thanks!

yep. We knew that one was lurking in the depths somewhere! it's fixed now though:)

regarding the double click on exit and possibility to abort an exit action, I couldn't agree more!  This would be a great fix. If someone could explain to me how to do this I'd gladly implement it and upload a new version with this fixed. It has bothered me a long time! I have learned a lot of basic scripting from working with this game but I haven't gotten that far yet. (I bet it isn't even complicated, I just haven't figured it out that's all...)

regarding the load issue, I have NO IDEA whatsoever is going on there. It seems to be working for people who are playing the game in general. Or have I managed to break it in the most recent release? Thanks for the heads up anyhow, I'll look it up!

Thanks again everyone!