Toolcast

Mr Grundislav and Mr 304 have got together and made a baby. A beautiful audio baby about making animations and other exciting stuff. And the autodoc that delivers this squidlike proto-alien is a NEW POSDCAT! There's also a forum thread on this exciting topic! Now, go and enjoy the sexy fusion of floridian and australian accents.

Sudoku

Nothing to do with AGS, but here's a fun animation from the BBC of Paul Merton talking nonsense about Sudoku on Just a Minute.


More here.

Bet you wish your GIF import was hot like this

SpacePaw has written an AGS Editor plugin that makes importing complex GIF animations a doddle. It imports sprites and creates a view and uses the GIF's timing information, too. You can read all about it on the Tech forum thread.

Making movies

Strange Visitor has shared with us the fun new(-ish) site for making animated movies. Its still somewhat limited, but some of the work posted by AGSers in the forums is quite entertaining.

Getting animated on youtube

Densming's excellent series of video tutorials for AGS has continued with some lovely gems on animation and sound:

Compo Update

• Background Blitz is open with the theme "Underworld"
• People want the Animation competition to restart (so go and do so, people!)
• No-one voted in the Tune Contest so Questionable will choose the winner himself

Inky

I was just looking again at Inkoddi's awesome flash animation page and just felt I had to link to it in case any poor souls out there hadn't had the joyful experience of viewing them.

Animation lets you have a ball

Evenwolf won the animation competition with this fun piece. There were only two entries but both were good so well done ew!

RONimation

The dudes over on the Reality-on-the Norm forums are appealing for people to animate the non-animated characters in the RON resource pack, so if you feel like animating, get over there now.

Animation winners unmasked

So, unfortunately only two entries in the "unmasking" animation competition, but the winner (seen here) is a pretty good effort from matti.

Insert mask/animation pun here

A new animation competition has started up, and derboo has set people the task of animating what is behind the task of his sprite. There's already an entry and the deadline in the 19th, so plenty of time for some more entries. Unfortunately, derboo won by default last time, although his idea was a good one and may have won anyway, but its always better when there's actually a proper contest.

You DO NOT talk about Animation Competition

Which is of course the first two rules of the Animation Competition this time, where the theme is "Fight". And although I'm being pre-emptive here, I have to say that the winner will probably be the awesome last minute entry by Ryan Timothy that you can see here.

Fluffy Pink Bunny DEATH

Ho, ho.. over in the Competitions and Activities forum, the Animation competition has taken a turn to black humour with a Bunny Death theme. Some amusing entries so far, so if lagomorphic mortality appeals to you.

While you're in the C&A forum, check out the Sprite Jam (rats!), Background Blitz (lighthouses galore!) and colouring ball (zombies!). Great stuff going on.

Adventurematography

One thing missing from most AGS games is a good bit of Cinematography. We see tracking shots when there's a scrolling screen, perhaps some parallax scrolling, maybe the odd zoom or unusual camera angle, but where are all those cool camera techniques we see in the movies? Here are some things it might be cool to see:

• SnorriCam
• Trunk Shot
• Dolly Zoom
• Follow shot
• A bit more camera movement in general

Now, its easy to say these things, but of course in 2D animation they are hard to do, much easier in 3D, but I'm sure some of these things would look absolutely fabulous in an AGS game if someone has the animating ability and time to do them.