I disagree with that suggestion - if you're working with a large level, I wouldn't want an overlay affecting how it looks. I think it'll be obvious enough.

There's no reason to do 640x480 anymore, it's way outdated. I suggest using 800x600, as it seems to be what a lot of casual games use. These days though, I think 1024x768 is the standard, and this analytics company seems to agree: http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox31.html

Regardless, lots of people playing your game are going to have different resolutions, and it's an annoying problem, because you have to either change the amount of viewable area, which could change the gameplay for those with widescreen/higher res monitors, and program the UI to work with them, or stretch/shrink the screen, which can look bad on some monitors (LCDs in paticular. CRTs look fine, but not many people use those anymore).

Wow, congrats.

I hope they'll work with the car behavior because you're DRIVING US BANANAS!

The only problem I've encountered on my RPG (aside from the vram issue, which is taken care of in the next version) is how long it's starting to take to load/save/run files. I've got about 1/10th of the graphics in for my game, and it's already starting to take a while. Loading/saving/running when it's nearing completion could take minutes.

I find the best way to do it is to create all the animation frames the same size originally, so when they import, you can alt-click which sets the point on all the frames to the same spot. Then you alt-click crop.

I would love to have a button to collapse all the groups. I use dozens of them and it would be very handy to have one button that could collapse them all instead of manually having to collapse them one by one to keep things easy to scroll through.

Actually, Maya is very well designed. It's clever, the UI is still pretty good even though it's over 10 years old now and you can do so fucking much in it. Node-based design, it's very expendable, you have MEL or Python as scripting languages, its polymodeling toolset is halfway decent, the mental ray integration isn't too bad...

It's a matter of opinion. For what it does (which is quite a lot), perhaps it is well designed. But for the artist, I have to disagree - it's like trying to paint using a calculator. Of all the graphics programs I've tried, even the buggy ones, I dislike Maya by far the most. Especially when hidden invisible nonsensical features show up, like one that my teacher warned the class of. But again, it's my opinion, and I respect anyone else's opinion if they like it.

[quote:2bmet845]Arima: What are you using instead now? I have to switch back to Max in a couple of weeks, I'll probably miss my Maya config, but Max has a much better modeling toolset anyway - especially with release 2010 (polyBoost integrated, yay!).

I like Carrara a lot, though it is quite limited in comparison to other 3d packages. It's not powerful enough for anything serious like a movie or a tv show, but it can mostly do what I want, and most importantly, I find it both easy to use and easy to get the results I want. If you're already comfortable with Maya/3DS Max, I doubt you would like it very much.

Like he said, there was an episode of top gear where they got tractors, and one of them had so many features and gizmos it took one of them like an hour to even turn it on. That's what some 3D programs are like. It's got wheels and a gas pedal, but that sucker is no car, and nowhere close to as easy to use.

Choice of 3D software makes a huge difference on your workflow. Maya, for all its incredible capabilities, is worthless to me because it's ridiculously hard to use. I took a class on it and can't understand what they were thinking when they designed it. I've used a lot of 3D programs, and finding one that's easy to use (or one that you can even use at all) makes a huge difference.

At the moment we can get the RGB values of a pixel, but we can't get the alpha. Could that be implemented?

You could also have a shadow object that would tell the x/z and the distance between the sprite and the shadow the y. If you don't want a shadow you could make it invisible.

Also, there's a command dist(x, y, x2, y2) that gets the distance between two points.

Adventure games, I think, have more untapped potential than any other genre. However, they seem to have gotten stuck in the 'guess what the developer wants you to do' rut. It's like reading a book and not getting to read the rest of it until you guess what the character's supposed to do. And in some games, if you guess wrong, you have to reread a few pages.

Lame.

I think the solution is that adventure games shouldn't rely so much on 'use item with something else' to continue, AND they should do it better when they do. Look at Zelda. You see a cracked wall, what do you do? Everyone knows you use a bomb on it. What makes it interesting are times like in link to the past, that one wall that you could bomb, but there didn't seem to be any way to get to it because of a gap in the floor.

The important part is that it wasn't necessary at all. The game didn't stop there if you couldn't get to it, but you were rewarded if you could - and you were driven crazy if you couldn't, which would make you want to get to it more.

Adventure games are practically made ENTIRELY of game-stoppers. That's not fun. Or really a game. I suppose you could call it a guessing game, but there's no element of skill, and the actual gameplay isn't fun. All the witty writing in the world isn't enough to make up for bad gameplay, and that's why I think the adventure genre tanked.

Summary: For adventure games to improve, they need to have gameplay other than guessing what to do, because not knowing what to do next is high on the list of gamer gripes, and making a game based on that is ridiculous.