Recent posts

#61

Engine Development / Re: Proposal: expand animation...

Last post by Snarky - Tue 22/07/2025 17:30:10

No, my meaning was frame timing. If the whole animation duration is represented as 1.0, the tween controls the current progress between 0.0 and 1.0, and engine would choose a frame based on that value.

I think I can imagine use-cases where this would be useful, but is it such a generally useful feature that it makes sense to build it into the engine rather than rely on some fairly simple scripting with the Tween module?

Personally I think it is better to keep things simple.

#62

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by Snarky - Tue 22/07/2025 16:54:53

And who knows, amidst that trash we might still find interesting creators and projects. A well written story does not (have to) become bad if it is acted out by machine generated sprites or 3D models, nor does a finely handcrafted visual style (have to) become bad if it is subjected to a wild and nonsensical story generated by a soulless machine.

A good example is The Roottrees Are Dead, a kind of indie adventure/puzzle game (along the lines of Her Story and Obra Dinn) where you are researching a family tree. A great game, it was originally released with AI art, which worked really well to produce the large number of family photos needed. When it got a commercial re-release, Jeremy Johnston hired an artist (Henning Ludvigson) to redo the graphics for the remaster.

#63

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by eri0o - Tue 22/07/2025 16:28:32

The cat has not left the bag, the way this works is that you can not actually violate copyright laws, but a bigger company, with a powerful team of lawyers can.

My prediction is that you will have to pay as a person to use the works from these models a forever increasing fee, and at some point that will include royalties too. At some point there will be models you can run locally and they will watermark their output in some way to be able to automatically force you to pay said royalties - some mechanism like what exists on YouTube.

Anyway, I think you are thinking about the individual benefiting, which frankly, I don't see it, and what I am seeing is that big companies will use this to get more from the individual while giving less. The individual usage is just crumbles given, while the big companies will be getting bigger and bigger, and try to insert themselves in everything until they will make you think you depend on them.

#64

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by WHAM - Tue 22/07/2025 15:58:49

I don't question that aspect of it, eri0o, but the fact also remains that it's absolutely nothing new. Stolen spritesheets, colour swaps, stolen audio, video, text and other content has been a thing for as long as the internet has been a thing and beyond. I doubt anyone would claim with a straight face that no game in the AGS database contains questionably sourced assets nor that it has been a major issue for any of us, save perhaps some more bold and unique cases that I've missed over the years.

Hell, if that is the issue than my very first game here would have to be taken down for using stolen audio assets I snatched from Counter Strike and Half Life 2 sound assets without permission, hoping nobody would notice, because I was a kid at the time with no way of creating or purchasing suitable sounds.

So what these 'machine created' assets amount to in is little more than a more efficient and easy to use asset bank to draw from, with a built in toolset of muddling those stolen assets so that they begin to border between the grey area of stolen and new. If I as a human took a bunch of screenshots and videos from AGS games, drew on top of them to create "new" walkcycles, animations and sprites, I doubt many would notice anything at all, yet it'd still be pretty much exactly what the machine asset banks now do: taking a bunch of stuff I had no right to take, jumbling it all up and calling it 'new creation'.

EDIT: let me put my view a bit differently.

The cat has left the bag and is not going back into the bag.
A human can take other humans works, be 'inspired by' them to whatever degree and then 'create' new art based on that inspiration. We accept this as being fine.
A machine can take other humans works, run an algorithm that tries to mimic being 'inspired by' them to whatever degree and then 'mixes up' new art based on that inspiration.

As long as we accept one, I think we have to accept the other. And if we cannot accept either, then we've got a pretty major creative issue on our hands on rooting out the art that was illegitimately inspired by someone else's work without permission.

#65

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: GAMESEEK - find old/missin...

Last post by Cyrus - Tue 22/07/2025 15:44:03

Slime Quest 2: Battle for Burgers demo is found!

Does anyone happen to have:

Lone Case 4: Epitaph
The Story of Joijo

Lone case 4 https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZoHlB5ZB9KXsp1Kq872NeqUKV1mCj8vctek

No luck with the other one, I'm not sure if the dev released it to the public or just shared with a few forum members?

Thank you very much! Does it run normally for you? I see that it starts in the middle (rather than the beginning), and crashes afterwards.

#66

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by eri0o - Tue 22/07/2025 15:36:37

That equivalency is false, A.I. can and do use Copyrighted material ignoring it's license. For instance, my AGS modules have mit license, so if you use it I expect you mention me in your game credits. If you instead ask a machine to write the same module, the machine can spit the same, since my modules are open source, but it won't have my license, thus now you are using my work without mentioning me. I know since a significant part of the AGS script stuff on GitHub is written by me I see it trying to use just copy pasted code I wrote depending on how I prompt.

So you are not doing it "all alone" as you mentioned, the work is built on other people's work, you are just letting the machine washout the copyright.

I am really burned by this weird freedom A.I. companies suddenly got to ignore copyright and licenses, and struggle to get excited about tech these days. Most of tech related things I do at home now is playing with old equipment that is offline and requires none of these things.

#67

Engine Development / Re: Proposal: expand animation...

Last post by Crimson Wizard - Tue 22/07/2025 15:29:14

"tweening" into the engine (at least to functions like Animate).

This looks interesting but I don't understand how tweening works in a frame by frame animation. Is this for the frame offsets?

No, my meaning was frame timing. If the whole animation duration is represented as 1.0, the tween controls the current progress between 0.0 and 1.0, and engine would choose a frame based on that value.

#68

General Discussion / Re: Your thoughts on A.I. art ...

Last post by WHAM - Tue 22/07/2025 15:24:42

And, for a change, a non-judgemental look at the increase in GenAI being used in games recently released on Steam.

In a way this is quite interesting. It shows there are tons of people out there who want to make a game, but lack a team to work with. They might have a story idea but little programming skills, or they might be programmers capable of creating a game but lack the artistic talent to create even passable materials to fulfil their vision.

Sure, these people might have been able to find a group of people to work with or hired outside help, but in bringing in a group of people to work with you either need enough funds to act as an authority on the project, or you need the social skills and flexibility to navigate a team of equals that might lead to altered visions and outcomes, for better or for worse. As someone who is absolutely terrible at collaborating in projects, I can see a kind of value in there.

Now these people or smaller, more limited teams can be as antisocial as they want and create what they want, using machine generated content to patch up the gaps and release something where previously they might never have released anything. Seeing the state of Steam in the past years I do not see how the influx of games created with machine assistance would make thing any more bloated or worse, it's just a different brand of mass produced junk thrown onto the platform. And who knows, amidst that trash we might still find interesting creators and projects. A well written story does not (have to) become bad if it is acted out by machine generated sprites or 3D models, nor does a finely handcrafted visual style (have to) become bad if it is subjected to a wild and nonsensical story generated by a soulless machine.

To try and find some positive to this trend: it gives people who would not have created a finished project in the past a chance to create a finished project now. It might enable solo creators and smaller teams to achieve more than before, though this sort of broadening of the playing field always creates more trash as well, as we've seen with every step towards making art creation easier for the masses.

In this context I see this machine created content as a tool similar to AGS itself: it's a tool that enables people who lack the capability to program their own engine to create something they would not have been able to create otherwise. We might just as well scoff at one another for using AGS and not being REAL programmers who create their own engines, just as we might scoff at the creators of games who had to resort to machine generated content to patch up their project.

From "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." to "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is using machines to create their games instead of doing it properly themselves."

#69

AGS Engine & Editor Releases / Re: AGS 3.6.2 - Patch 2

Last post by Crimson Wizard - Tue 22/07/2025 15:24:23

I'm observing a seam between contiguous walkbehinds.  (I noticed this with patch 1, and I'm seeing it with patch 2 as well.)

You mention patch 1 and patch 2, did it happen before, or started only with 3.6.2 patch 1?
Does this appear with particular graphic driver / graphic filter combination, or all of them?
Which is the game scaling ratio which you run with (native game res vs window size)?

I've seen a similar issue in much older games, and that was caused by uneven texture scaling which caused subpixels. The only way to fix that seemingly was to either adjust walk-behinds by couple of pixels or replace walk-behind with an object and let it overlap another a little (although I cannot tell if that might work in your case).

#70

AGS Engine & Editor Releases / Re: AGS 3.6.2 - Patch 2

Last post by greg - Tue 22/07/2025 13:58:16

I'm observing a seam between contiguous walkbehinds.  (I noticed this with patch 1, and I'm seeing it with patch 2 as well.)

Here are the applicable screen shots: https://imgur.com/a/r0gBqEx

The first image shows how the room appears when rendered.

The second image shows the walkbehind map.

In the first image, you can see the object appear (as a thin blue line) along the border of the blue walkbehind and the green walkbehind.