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At 8/7/09 07:15 PM, Duffalpha wrote: Im currently trying to put together a walk cycle for my game, and I'm having a hard time figuring out the smoothest and quickest way. Do you guys usually do frame by frame? Tweening? Or by using armatures and bones?

Does anyone have a good walk/run cycle tutorial handy?

Frame by frame is probably my best option as I have more control over the walk. Though I use a good combination of motion for symbols that going to just follow an arc

here is a walk cycle I had made http://devilsgarage.com/blog/2006/10/rob ot-walk-cycle-update.html. In the same post, you can also download the walk cycle. or here

I have created an extensive tutorial on how to make walk cycles which can be found at this link
http://vectoranimation.blogspot.com/2006 /08/simple-8-and-16-frame-walkcycle.html

PM me if you are still having a lot of trouble trying to figure thing out.

All the best

Ajay

At 8/6/09 07:05 PM, ForNoReason wrote:


anyone want to make a transition movie thing? Like a one sec movie to go in between all the parts. Like a transition.

I have sent you a PM for one clock transition that can be used between each move. I could work on another one sometime later today.

Yay! Clock day .. finally gonna send in my submission :D

From Pizza Tycoon all the way to the Sims, I have always love management based games, cant believe how much time I have invested in these games as they kinda emulate real life situations and how to run a successful business. And thus with all this excitement I gladly played your game. So here's my feedback.

Pros

1. Good game play, things went pretty fast and has a very short learning curve, not complicated at all
2. Anything that has a heavy legal tag attached to it is fun to sell, from guns to lemonade, rides to cigarettes

Area for improvement

1. I played the game for 5 days; though not having played much, I have to say that the game suddenly becomes quiet repetitive. Games that involve strategy should always have a long play with a large degree of evolution. This is one of the biggest reasons a game thats has only one replay value.

2. Staging, Staging, Staging.. its very important to create a game such that you can clearly see all the elements of the game and nothing looks confusing. For example, when the customers come on screen , they move too fast and sometimes its a bum rush (even though it was intended like that) this makes the gamer find it quiet difficult to read what each customer wants.

3. Use a different colored talk balloon to show visually show the gamer which customer wants which cigarette. The People who like 'Lights' should have a light blue Talk bubble, Slims may be gray and so forth.. this helps the gamer decided how much stocks he needs to buy that the end of that round

4. Variations to the BG may help one decide how long a day is or how long the Cig shop is open. Sun rise to sun set, may be eve a timer or a Public Clock on the BG.

5. Variables always make the game fun and unpredictable
Variables like
a) Rain, this brings in lesser customers, but they may buy more Cigs.
b) Petty thieves/shoplifters : this could cause you to lose stocks
c) fires which could cause damage because of cigs that have not been extinguished properly (thus you have the option of buying a portable cig disposer)
d) Sale of Chewing gum.. by default any cigarette shop will sell gum. Introduce this in a level later
e) small amount of money can be budgeted for advertising
f) sale! sale ! to get rid of week old ciggys.

6) A better splash screen. It is a tried and tested method that a really good splash can increase your chances of getting the user to play your game. If you are having difficulty as some one to help you out, after all Newgrounds is a collaborative effort =D

well these definitely make the game more complex, but its good to have a end to the game, thus implementing a mission based strategy like sell x amount of stuff or earn x amount of money by this number of days

Cheers

Ajay

At 8/2/09 09:38 AM, SmoG878 wrote: When i export a movie, it always show small boxes where i left something selected. How do i deselect everything so i can get a smothe movie?

I believe that if you have exported your AVI file as an uncompressed version with hight audio settings, thus basically making your file super heavy on the processor to play, this causes a strain on the media player (or whatever software you are using to render it) and thus can produce varied results on the playback, like choppiy framework , or blocks on images, skipping frames, etc.

At 7/22/09 02:30 PM, Bloodspill234 wrote: Hello
I am giving away graphics for people to use in thier flash.
I am good at cars.
Just give me credit in your animation or description if you make and publish an animation using my graphics.
I can give it to you in an .fla or .jpg.
Please give me a description of what you want (color, model, width, ect.)
Here is an example, but in .jpg form:

It does not matter what the rest say, I believe what you are doing is a very noble thing. Giving out assets for free are double benefited, those who receive get royalty free graphics to use and those who offer free art .. help create a huge art library of assets.

You can use the ng art link to drop in artwork that can be used as development resources and specify if your work is a character/ background or a prop

Keep the good work going.

Cheers

At 7/1/09 08:55 PM, NickabockaglorySpoon wrote:

At 7/1/09 08:44 PM, thedevilsgarage wrote: All the best.

Thanks a lot! And I mean a lot. That really helps. I'll add as much of that as I can and more stuff I'm thinking of. This might sound a bit cheeky but when I'm further though could I PM you for a bit more advise? I like the cut of your jib.

sure thing dude.

nickabockagloryspoon, great work on the art and programming of the game. I too was a bit turned off on seeing the splash screen, but loved the way the game played. Though I have to say it looks a bit like Grand Theft Auto 1/2, it had a good game play.I wish the character walked a bit more smoother.. cause I felt there was a bit too much of drag for that specific walk cycle. IMO ,, the basic walk cycle should have a slower walk and when holding down the shit, it should play the current walk cycle. I love the choice of weapons and the ploice chase and shooting back when my wanted leve lshot up. I also like the fact that the cars blew up.

Love the way things are developing, only hope it moves away from the GTA concept.

Couple of suggestions for this specific build
1. Like the other people around the level, When one blows up a car , their debris should remain there.
2. when people die (cop too) their dead body should slowly decompose, not disappear as soon as you go off screen, more like fade away slowly.
3. Even better if the bodies and exploded cars just stay where they are, showing the carnage.
4. once inside a building, keep it the same view, and the same zoom level. It just doesn't feel like it should be any bigger or the character should be any larger.
5. Keeping in mind the physics of the environment for eg: when carrying the Bigass gun, make the character go a bit slow, when walking on the grass, make him go a wee bit slow. more agile with the baton, The guns can cause some kinda physical damage to the building like bullet marks, bullet holes on the car.
6. When you shoot a person, the person next to him/her gets frightened and starts running away or towards the closes cop for help. This thus gives the user the challenge to kill the snitch, before they reach the cops and your wanted level increases more.
7. The Machine gun and flame thrower, being very powerful should have a cooldown period before its used again.
8. When ever you are hit/shot..depending on the intensity of damage on your character, the screen should turn red.. like a blood rush (like an iris red where the center is transparent).
9. Oh you have to have bullets flying out when any gun is fired.. and bullet shells that are on the ground when you use the machine gun. and a flame burn on the ground below.

All the best.

At 6/24/09 04:43 PM, 4urentertainment wrote: You need to give out information such as whether it will be a game or movie (you keep saying movie/game) and what cut the artist will have. As well as what this thing is about, the main plot etc...

You'd also need to give out samples of programming if it's going to be a game, however if it's a movie, then you need someone to animate it all, in which case you need someone to do all the work?

I guess running through the "news" section pulled out some info
" In 2002 scientists from the whole world were brought in to the newly founded Bureau of Paranormal Research's facility located in central Alaska. What these scientists discovered was so chocking that it triggered World War lll. However, this war was not fought amongst men, this war was fought against the true Earth-dominant species. This species called itself the Herron (more about these later). When the power of the Herron was discovered, thousands of people worldwide chose to join the Herron, forming the Resistance. The war was now split into a three front war, and something had to be done. Eight years later, in 2010, the BPR (read above) created the PDAF.
Paranormal Defence and Assault Force. The PDAF (more about this later) is a small elite army specialsed in fighting the Herron and it's followers. Meanwhile the war rages on all over the world, BPR continues there research and finds that the Herron actually originates from another planet, or so they thought. More recent theories points to the ssame planets, but in different dimensions, the truth is no one knows for sure. Eventually the Herron forces become to much for mankind and an elite PDAF team is sent out to find the King of the Herron, and destroy him. But is there a sole King, or have they been brainwashed by the Herron to belive there is? They cannot know, so they have to try. The PDAF team have five members (possibly one or two more later on) and are currently codenamed D-coy, Rabbit, Pacman, Destroyer and Apokalypse, and these are the ones that the series will follow (I actually plan to make more series out of this, but only if the first ones are succesful). More about this as progress develops."

ref: http://pdaf.newgrounds.com/news/post/331 584

Looks interesting , may be I could pitch in too

Mac cannot handle Flash or Flash assets well and probably the worst ways to test flash. There has been talks that Apple and Adobe are just rivals that don't really agree with each others practices, I guess this happened because Apples started making packages that compete with Adobe and this could probably be one of the reasons why Adobe really doesn't care much about. I guess if you think through it .. this could also have some averse effect of why the Iphone does not support flash ( rather FLV) , else wont it just be awesome to make flash games for the Iphone.

enough of straying off the topic. Here is some informationthat could be really helpful from Author Tommy Lacroix, quoting him:

________________________________________
________________________________________
___

"Based on my experience, the especially slow things are:

Alpha transparency
Redrawing portions of the screen with alpha transparency is significantly slower than without.
When doing alpha transparency, avoid medium-large MovieClips that are moving, or underneath, above or very close to moving objects, as they need to be redrawn often.
Redrawing large portion of the screen
Clipping mask don't reduce the redraw region. If you have a 1000 x 1000 clip masked on 100 x 100, the hidden region is still redrawn if something changes in it.
Scaling increases the actual size of the redraw region.
Solutions: disabling scaling when dealing with slow computers.
Vector graphics
High quality complex vector graphics usually requires more CPU processing than bitmaps.
Solutions: cache vector graphic as bitmap, and reduce quality when dealing with slow computers.
Here's more. I discovered that:

Flash 8 and above uses OpenGL on Safari to speed up scaling and alpha rendering 1
G3 and old G4's with ATI cards can't use OpenGL because the card isn't compatible and doesn't support the necessary features 1
Single or dual G4 apparently doesn't change a thing (forum talk2, and personal benchmark with the problematic site)
Newer G4's with NVidia cards, G5 and Core Duo Macs will use OpenGL on Safari and will run just fine.
A dual G4 1Ghz with 2 GB of RAM and an ATI card runs slower than a single P-III 866Mhz with 512 MB or RAM (personal benchmark with the problematic site)
________________________________________
________________________________________
___

Cheers

At 6/23/09 06:22 AM, fhqwagads wrote: I'm trying to animate a sprite of my own I designed the sprite sheet which so far contains a run cycle in a program called Gale Graphics. I saved it in a .gif format, and tried following a tutorial on youtube when I attempted it didn't look right when I tried onion skinning it would just onion skin the rectangle I cut the image in and the image was really blurry, I'm pretty sure I messed something up, if someone gets what I'm doing wrong please help.
here's the sheet

The reason it created rectangles when you onion skinned it is because when you import an image in to Flash, flash just treats it like a rectangle, but if it were a vector thats when onion skinning works most effective.

Suggestions:
1. As everyone else above had mentioned, try tracing the bitmap with curve fit to "pixels".
2. If you have the patience try drawing that art in Flash using the Free Pixel Tool Plugin
3. Just use the ol' school method of flipping frames to eyeball each frame sprite.
4. A lill longer method and may not be the most efficient. First make sure lal the GIF's are off the same size. Import all the gif's . convert each of them into a symbol and in frame 1 drop in the first gif, drop the 2nd gif over the first and drop the alpha value of the 2nd gif to a low value such that you can see through it to the first gif. position it correctly, and cut 2nd gif symbol and paste it in the next frame. repeat for all the other gifs.

Hope these inputs help.

very cool stuff and well renderd. I like the swish lines you have used for the punching, my only suggestion is to make the hand feel likes its originating from the side and not from the resting position

here is a quick rough: Link

The second is a game called 'Run For Your Life!' which is a larger game and will require a lot more from the artist. At the moment the base system is completed and what is required is display programming, level design, art, sound and music. You can see a sample level here: RFYL (controls: WASD to move, N to jump, M to roll; customizable)

Ha! I loved this game! (though I didn't get too far). I could probably help you out with some run cycles provided that you don't have a very tight deadline on this project. I think it RFYL has so much potential to turn in to an really good game.

PM me and we shall talk about what we can do about this.

Its got a good style. I like it! =D

Once you feel a bit more comfortable with that software you should check out the tutorials up on coldhardflash.com

link : http://bbs.coldhardflash.com/viewtopic.p hp?f=2&t=459

All the best!

I always recommend Storyboards.
Even thumbnailing something really quick will help so long as you do the whole board.

We, the community at newgrounds is here to help.

if you PM me your mail id I could send you the flash file so that you can view it properly

I highly recommend getting into the discipline of completing your whole storyboard before jumping into the animatic. Its just an animation industrial practice of doing that. Though I would suggest taking one scene that you have boarded out and creating a test animatic for that scene to get a feel of the pace or speed of the animated shot.

And All the best!

Hey Beatup99

I agree with 4urentertainment, every one starts as noobs, its all in time and a lot of practice that this idea may come out way better than what everyone things.
For starters,
rough out your ideas.. thumbnail it out. Thumbnail because it does not have to look all finished and awesome, it should just convey the idea of the story. Once you sketch that as a story .. you will be able to get a better idea of where the strength and weakness are in the storyline. Thumbnailing/storyboarding also helps you understand film theory like composition and camera angles. Its all a process. This could inevitably turn out to be a graphic novel and Im sure you will put all the effort into it just like you did to those character sketches.

All the best.

One of the best ways of selling your story is to thumbnail it out. Thumbnail out the best or funniest part of your story pitch and see how every one reacts to it. If its really funny, Im sure there would be users out here who would love to work on it.
By doing this it also helps you figure out if the story is strong enough to go into production.

All the best.

At 6/17/09 01:33 PM, Luis wrote: The framerate on that set was 30fps. I actually hate that spriteset lmao

Good to have Luis over to answer questions.
When I was working on Disney's preschool 'Higgly Town Heroes' I had a bit of a starting trouble working on 30fps. Though it took sometime to get adjusted, I did find out that working on higher frame rate helped make some of the effects animation really smooth.

My question:- Working on a higher frame rate does cause a lill lag in animation meant for online games. How did you pull that off so easily on portal defenders and why did you guys decide to stick to 30fps?

Thanks

I think I could make some time to help you create a 3d tunnel.
I guess if you upload the art somewhere like yousend.com or something similar and post a link here so I can download it, I guess I can work on it over the next few days.

> If you are a coder, I would say Flash 8 and above due to the support of Action script 3.
> If you are in to all the new effects/filters flash can do I would say CS3 and above is good, Flash 8 also supports filters, but the next versions support it better
> if you are in to just ol' time animation (traditional or tween based) I would say stick to Flash 5,6 or8. Its the most stable of all the releases and Flash 8 can handle bigger import files and art work with more points easier as compared to the other two.
> If you love flash plugins and find those nifty tools to die for, go for Cs3 and above
Personally I cant stand MX2004 as it was an upgrade that did not make any difference to us traditional animators.
> If you like the new 3d stuff you can do with Flash, go with CS4

I believe SWF Decompiler does a great job on retrieving your source files from a SWF. It even creates a FLA file with the action script, Though I must warn you taht if you have invested a lot of time naming your symbols, its all defaulted to 'symbol' or something like that.

I could help you create speed lines, Its quiet simple, require a bit of timing and a technique.

Luis is an excellent artist and animator and has some really good work out there. As for framerates, most animation for broadcast and games are generally 24 frames per second (fps) .

I wont be able to answer exactly how many frames are used in these specific animation cycles by Luis but I would say that its appriximately 6 -12 frames for the swishes. (24 frames make a second so run a stopwatch to see how long each sprite takes and reverse engineer how many frames it would take)

Cheers

That is an excellent resource, knugen! Thanks :D

Its just three different styles.

I personally like drawing out characters and sometimes love sprite based animation or animations that are pixel art.. I believe some one how has a good command over their animation skills can make anything look well animated, even using basic lines or sticks.

Flash is just one of the mediums used to create animation, for example South Park .. even though it looks like its just basic cut out animation , is actually made in Maya since the guys created were very familiar with Maya and used that.

Cheers

Humm
Advice: the best way to sell a story is at least simple thumbnails of the story so everyone here has a good idea of where this project is going and how serious one is while pitching an idea like this.

something as simple as this example or this example

and here is a template to help you thumbnail it out if you are going to draw it.

On the contrary,

I'm an animator and I would love to have a good knowledge of programming. Its not that I want to make my own games, but when I collaborate with someone who is programming; setting up things for a programmer, dropping in simple code, understanding the pipeline of producing a good game... always streamlines the workflow.

I know it may be sometime before I get the hang of programming. :D

It's super to know that newgrounds has so much of talent floating around, but to my understanding and industrial experience, the best writers are those who can thumbnail or draw out concept storyboards of their story, at least that way community users and contributors here who want to pitch in to help get a clear sense in a shorter time if a project is successful or not.

Everyone grew up with a set of crayons, its never difficult to draw.

Ajay Karat | devilsgarage.com/blog

If you are going to start on the creative site like Animating, and have the patience to learn Flash from the interweb.. here is a post which has a ton of flash tutorials

If you want to learn basic walkcycles and how to set up your movie ready for flash you can go
here : walkcycles, Pipeline for Animation Example of Character Coloring

Hope that helps

Ajay Karat | devilsgarage.com