I've been working on updating AdventureCreator to allow more interaction in my games. I've uploaded a series of tests of this new code here:

https://rapidshare.com/files/795254902/ ... yTests.zip

This isn't a game. It's just a series of test cases. There's no story, and the graphics are things I ripped from existing gifs (and the ripping process reduced their quality).

I'm looking for a few things here:
1) General impressions of this direction. Would a Keeley-like game with this kind of interaction be more or less fun?

2) I'd like to hear how they work on a variety of browsers. I use IE9, and I bang my head against #!$^ Firefox, but I haven't tested this on any other browsers. I'd like to hear if they work elsewhere. I'd especially like to hear what happens on non-HTML5 capable browsers (ie8 or earlier, etc). I know the sound in test 8 won't work, but I'm hoping the rest of the tests do.

3) While I'm really testing the capabilities of the code I wrote, if you have thoughts on what's good and bad, I'm all ears. For instance, the diagonal movement test is there to test diagonal movement, but it's pretty clear from using it that diagonal movement isn't actually something I should use.

4) I'm also interested in a conversation on the pros and cons of showing the cursor when not over the image. I hide it over the image (if that doesn't happen, I definitely want to know more about your browser, because I had to hack it to get %$#! Firefox to work) but show it when it's not on the image. Is that the right thing to do, or should I hide it everywhere? The tradeoff for everywhere is that I can't really tell you to click the image to continue if you can't tell if your cursor is on the image or not. So I'd need to make it advance automatically. But I suspect that people want to play at their own pace and not advance until they're ready. Which is better?


Things I already know so the feedback isn't necessary:
1) You don't need to tell me the graphics are lower quality than the originals in LWK and GtkC. I know. Don't worry, if we make a real game with this, I'll unleash the full graphical power of Phreaky on the images.

2) You don't need to tell me that some of the movements didn't seem perfectly appropriate for the animations. I know.

3) You don't need to tell me that the sounds don't work in Firefox. Unlike every other modern browser in the world, Firefox has chosen not to support MP3s. We haven't had sound in our last three games because I was waiting for those people to fix their damn browser. I'm done waiting. I'll test my games in Firefox, but I'm not going to keep crippling the rest of the world for it. So, if you choose to use Firefox, the game will work but it'll be silent. If the neo-hippies at Mozzilla get their collective heads out of their nether regions and start supporting industry standards like MP3, then sound will start working there too. If this seems harsher than it should, you haven't seen how much time I've wasted trying to get my code to work on that garbage browser.

Tlaero

Sorry, didn't have the time for a thorough test atm, but here's a few points:

I'm using Opera 11.60 and it's basically working.
It's flickering at the start of the movement, until all pictures are loaded.
The cursor does not disappear but changes to the "help cursor" (arrow with question mark).

Other than that, test 1-3 are passed.
There are minor issues with the timing in test 4-6. It seems, the timing at the very beginning of the scene is important. In Scene 4 I was not able to get the "Move faster". Appearently, I wasn't able up to now to get the proper movement in scene 6.
Scene 7 was no problem at all.
I didn't hear any sound at scene 8.


I post my opinion on your not so technically oriented question later, but I would love to have an interaction like this in your games. It's the one thing I'm missing.

All the tests appear to run OK using Google Chrome 16.0.912.63 under Ubuntu 11.04.

As far as Firefox and other Mozilla based browsers are concerned I would have thought it should be simple to get them to work by using Ogg Vorbis or FLAC sound files instead of the highly proprietary MP3 format that Mozilla is protesting against being used by default as the de facto audio tag standard in HTML5 -- no standard has actually been specified by the W3C for audio or video (thank goodness) but I'm inclined to side with Mozilla in promoting the use of a top grade format that is patent free and in the public domain rather than an obsolescent proprietary format with unknown future fees from licensing and algorithm patents.

1) General impressions of this direction. Would a Keeley-like game with this kind of interaction be more or less fun?
Seems nice to me, but if you want slow movement, you really need more picture in ordre to not have the lag impression (ie when playing a game you got only 6 fps instead of 60).


2) I'd like to hear how they work on a variety of browsers.
Using last Opera Next 12.00 version available with HWA activated (HardWare Acceleration). This is a nightly build, so don't expect too much
* Doesn't run smooth (I can see the refresh and the black-background, test : 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7
* Run perfectly, test : 5, 8 (display part)
* No sound on test 8.
* Cursor is not hidden.

Using seamonkey 2.6 (gecko based webbrowser). This is a final version, but i expect it to run like firefox for your test.
* Run perfect, test : 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 (display).
* Seems laggy to me, test : 5, 6
* No sound on test 8.

Using last Opera Labs 12.00 OOPP version available with HWA activated (HardWare Acceleration). This is a labs build, x64, so don't expect too much
* Doesn't run smooth (I can see the refresh and the black-background, test : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (display part)
* No sound on test 8.
* Cursor is not hidden.

3) While I'm really testing the capabilities of the code I wrote, if you have thoughts on what's good and bad, I'm all ears. For instance, the diagonal movement test is there to test diagonal movement, but it's pretty clear from using it that diagonal movement isn't actually something I should use.
Like Leon does on his flash game (a visual advice of the movement the user have to do) can be really interesting.

4) I'm also interested in a conversation on the pros and cons of showing the cursor when not over the image. Which is better?
I prefer you don't hide the cursor. Like that i know where it is (if i need it to do something else), if i do the requirement movement...
I think a good way is to add an option at start of your game. You can store the user answer in a cookie, which can hide the cursor if user is ok.


3) You don't need to tell me that the sounds don't work in Firefox.
Greebo is correct.
Right now, there is always one browser that doesn't support one format. (src : http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_audio.asp), so you have a choice to do :
* you only use one format. Too bad for people using a webbrowser which doesn't support this format.
* you use two format (mp3 & ogg), swichting between them depending on the browser (might be not a good idea): http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html ... io-player/
* you use fash as fallback : http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/quick/
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/audio/quick/

I didn't already test, but i would like to share my experience. I made an internet site from scratch for a association, as I didn't know anything in html. So i started by the beginning and red the W3C reference.

tlaero wrote:I use IE9, and I bang my head against #!$^ Firefox

tlaero wrote:I had to hack it to get %$#! Firefox to work

I'm a little surprised by your comments. IE is THE browser that... didn't follow the W3C reference. As far as i know, people have to make special command for their site working with IE, when they work with others browser, like Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

tlaero wrote:Unlike every other modern browser in the world, Firefox has chosen not to support MP3s.

I second Greebo on his analysis.

luke wrote:

tlaero wrote:I use IE9, and I bang my head against #!$^ Firefox

tlaero wrote:I had to hack it to get %$#! Firefox to work

I'm a little surprised by your comments. IE is THE browser that... didn't follow the W3C reference. As far as i know, people have to make special command for their site working with IE, when they work with others browser, like Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

IE has and mostly still is the browser that's worst at just about following anything but it's own ways (as others have stated)...it really shouldn't be used as a measure of what works and what doesn't and for a basis to write things, specially javascript and css...
While all browsers has its oddities you would be better off using any of the other 3 browsers (firefox, opera, chrome/chromium), in that order. They also have pretty good and easy debugging tools to find any issues with your scripts/css.

Anyway, not had too a detailed look at the script, but did some quick tests.
Mainly the cursor hiding fails, and this will be a problem to accomplish because mostly you're allowed to change the cursor but hiding it is less liked.
Losing the cursor might also be annoying and confusing to people, so might be better and easier to leave it or replace it with one of the directional resizing cursors depending on the required movement directions etc

For the image flickering, i didn't check if you already did, but preloading the images and making sure this has happened before any action is allowed might solve/limit it.
Sounds is something to be careful about, if people aren't fully aware of that there is such a thing (and when do people ever read all the nice and important notices etc ) it could give some interesting results, if sound is gonna be included, it really needs to come with a stop button or "turn off sound". I'm sure we can all see the situation of someone being bored at work deciding to kill a bit of time only to find him/her-self having to explain why there's loud moaning etc coming from their computer

One suggestion. It might help you in your work if you used something like jquery, it would save you having to create quite a few basic functions yourself, things would be easier/less to write and you'd have to worry less about cross browser support. A minified version of jquery would add very little to the code size as well so that should be no concern.
Browser, specially older ones ... the kind all developers constantly pray that people will stop using and curse about every time someone uses one... has very different ways of fetching stuff like mouse positions, window/viewport width/height, scroll offsets etc

Sorry for dropping this and then disappearing, folks. I came down with something and this is the first day I've been lucid since.

I'll have to investigate the cursor change more. I did what W3C told me to do, and it worked in IE9 but not in Firefox. I stumbled across the adding of the ? as a way to trick firefox into doing it (I was trying to use that to debug it), but apparently that trick doesn't work in Opera either. It did work in Chrome though? Chrome is pretty close to Firefox's share now. Maybe I'll just switch from supporting FF to Chrome. It's got better developers behind it.

The flickering is strange, because I am pre-loading the files in the head. Is it that it flickers at first and then works or does it keep flickering as your going back and forth?

I agree with the web standards argument for IE8 and prior, but IE9 does a good job. In the years I've been creating AdventureCreator and these games, I've never had a consortium standard say I could do something I wanted to do and had IE fail to do it. That's happened to me with Firefox, literally, 7 times now. Nothing has held back the creation of AdventureCreator games more than Firefox. And we're not talking minor little things here. They had a documented bug in their own database that their <audio> tag didn't support the "loop" argument for _5_ versions.

I know the interent is the kind of place where you hear impressions similar to your own all the time, and you start to think that makes them fact. So it's easy to believe that everyone hates Microsoft products and that Open Source is a great thing. I'll be a contrarian on this. There are hundreds of millions of customers who buy, use, and like Microsoft products. And I'm one of them. (-:

Tlaero

Right, let's take this one step at a time. First the technical stuff. I haven't done enough webdevelopment lately to really comment on the standard compliance of IE9 and firefox, although the sources I did find seem to indicate that firefox is still better (for example, http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/02/mozillas-modern-browser-attack-on-ie-overlooks-firefox-shortcomings.ars, it also shows the subjectivity of the matter). I know in the past IE was definitely more lenient with standards and let you get away with crappy coding, i.e. your code wasn't totally standard compliant, but it worked in IE anyway, while firefox for example would not accept it. And it remains difficult to judge your sources, perhaps the guy saying his "standard compliant" code doesn't work in firefox just didn't understand the standards fully and did something wrong. Or maybe those that praise firefox' standard compliance just don't test thoroughly enough.
Anyhow, I don't think browser support is really a choice. If you don't want to annoy a significant portion of your players you will have to support IE, firefox and chrome at the very least. The only thing you may assume is that they use the latest version of such browsers.
That said, I use firefox and had little issues. The cursor did disappear although wasn't locked to the game as I would've expected (although I don't know if this was actually supposed to happen). Btw, I don't know what issue you had with firefox, but I see you use JS to hide the cursor, what also worked for me (in firefox) was to use the CSS style cursor:none for the image (for example adding style="cursor:none" to the img tag). As for the sound issue I personally would go for a dynamic switch between ogg/mp3 depending on the browser (but more on the actual sound later :P).

Now for your first question, would a game benefit from these type of interactions?
I'm having difficulty coming up with a straight answer. On the one hand I want to say, yes, it's the way forward. Combining the interactive animations from the games of Shark and Pusooy (which have been very linear) with the dating genre (which focus more on branching, non-linear stories) seems like a logical step. On the other hand, I'm very weary about this. One reason in particular is that I haven't found animations to add much to the dating games. Or in the case of IllustratedLoveStories, where you can't skip the sometimes lenghty animations, I found it interrupting the flow of the game.
I think a large part of it comes down to whether the animation adds to the game. For me personally, if you're gonna add animations of the type "wiggle 10 times with your mouse to fill a pleasure bar" (like leonizer's games), then you're better off with just a fixed animation or no animation at all. But if you start using concepts like in your later tests, where you can imagine a possibility of either failure (not being gentle) or added success (doing something special, having good/consistent timing, reacting to her desires, etc.), then it might actually add to the game. Both can easily fit into the dating scenarios: Not being gentle when asked is a strong negative, the sex scene either stops or shortens, any successive dates the girl will be more reluctant. On the other hand doing something special can unlock bonus scenes.

However, I think it's important to keep in mind that you're mixing genres. Pusooy's and Sharks games work because they're consistent in the speed of interaction and the type of challenge they require. I think the linearity of the games is mostly due to the amount of work required, but it also makes sure the slow interactions are not a burden. An example where this did become a burden is HA3 (if I remember correctly), where you had a fairly long (multiple scenes) linear start with a 3-way choice at the very end. That choice required replaying the linear bit 3 times to see all content, and since that content was all static it's 3 times doing the same thing, and actually waiting on the progress bars (when you do it the first time, it doesn't feel like waiting, any repetition will). What I mean to point out with this is that adding non-linearity will cause players to replay content. In dating games many of these situations can either just be clicked through quickly (I can probably still optimally click through the intro of Dating Ariane...), or will have choices involved that can change the further game. In an interactive animation neither may be the case, unless you specifically keep it in mind while designing it. I would find it annoying if I'm looking for a specific ending, trying out different combinations in the dating aspect of the game, to have to wait for say a 10 second interactive animation that I have done before and has no impact on the game.
Another issue that may arise is that the game may not feel as a whole. For example, Pusooy's cut-scenes involve smooth transitions from the story bits to the interactive bits, it feels as one continuous story, even though in the story bits the characters are not necessarily animated. I think that putting interactive scenes like these in a dating game, as a replacement for an image with choices, may detract from the game feeling as a continuous story (like, suddenly things are moving and animated, while at other times the interactions are discrete (i.e. you click and the image changes)). In the same way you couldn't take one of Goblinboys (or any AIF) games and add point and click gameplay to the graphics without it being out of place. Perhaps integrating scenes like these may require a shift towards Pusooy's style altogether, by leading the rest of the game up to the animations, keeping it in the same style, etc.

If I'm totally honest I imagined "the way forward" more along the lines of Pusooy/Shark adopting non-linearity (Sharks 'Babysitting' was a nice step in the right direction) than dating games exchanging their primitive animated sex scenes for interactive ones. I think part of this is because these interactions are hard to get it right. For example I wasn't able to perform the action in Test 6 consistently. I got it right a few times, but that felt more like luck than anything else. In this case having the cursor visible, or having some other visual cue, may actually help.
But back to the point, considering the effort required to make these animations (take the development time of Sharks and Pusooy's games as an indicator), you may consider whether it adds enough to a dating game to be worth it.

Finally this leaves me with the matter of sounds (I feel like I'm going all over the place with this post... :P). Besides the technical issues, there have been a few games that tried to add sounds by using a sparse "oh" sound. This never seemed any good to me, an "oh" in the middle of otherwise silent gameplay is just gonna be out of place. If you do sound, do it right, don't just add moaning, also add sex sounds, make sure it isn't repetitive, etc.
Oh (pun intended), and please don't use over-the-top loud moaning from porn. That sort of stuff is one of the things that keeps me away most porn in the first place. Some soft moans or heavy breathing are much more arousing in my opinion.

</long post which took way too long to write :P>

Hey Tlaero,
My first reaction is FANTASTIC! I love that you're working on this, and I loved controlling Christine's head in the first blowjob animation. I don't have the technical skill to comment on much here, but I will follow up on the question of having the cursor disappear, and I'll comment on some of TheBrain's points too.
First, the cursor. I understand that some people will want to know exactly where the cursor is at all times. What I propose is having a relatively small hotspot for someone to find and click on, wherein the cursor disappears but wherein some body part on the character moves with the mouse movements to give the player a fairly exact idea of where the mouse is on screen. And, the cursor would reappear, and the animation drop, as soon as the mouse movement left the hotspot. The size and shape of the hotspot would vary according to the movement possible in the character's body part. I.e. moving a characters hand up and down on a penis would involve an elongated, rectangular hotspot without a lot of width, whereas moving a tongue against a pussy might have a fairly round hotspot, small in diameter. Bigger movements have bigger hotspots, but the starting hotspot could always be fairly small, centered around the exact point in the character's body that would be moving. There would be some room for error so that the player doesn't get too frustrated always dropping animations, but not enough room for error that the cursor is way out of it's intuited position when it reappears.

Regarding TheBrain's points - good points. I do think that adding these kinds of animations can improve your game, but I think he raises good issues about disrupting the pace, the workload, and replay. As far as replay, you may allow a cookie to be set that keeps track of what animations you've already played, and allows the player to skip those on replay if they choose (though I thoroughly enjoy replaying many of Pussoy's and Shark's scenes - the hottest ones). Another possibility is to use animations sparingly in the most rewarding situations. I.e. ending scenes, or especially erotic scenes.

And keep in mind that another way to make the sex scenes more interactive is to have branching pathways in the sex itself, like choosing to start and finish fucking before removing her top, versus not having sex until fully naked. Or if the guy lets himself cum during the blowjob, and then goes down on her to reciprocate without any penile penetration, versus holding off, and then having full sex.

One more thought. In shark's and Pussoy's and Leonizer's game, the interactive part of the sex is often the big challenge of the game, whereas in your games the challenge is more about discovering the right series of decisions. I would preserve this distinction to some extent by not making the interactive aspects of the sex very challenging, but rather, simply making them engaging - a visual, embodied and psychological pleasure.

tlaero wrote:The flickering is strange, because I am pre-loading the files in the head. Is it that it flickers at first and then works or does it keep flickering as your going back and forth?

Both in my case. I wasn't able to identify why it's work in some test and not in other. It my be a HWa glich or a vega issue.

I'm definitely thinking along the lines of pre-sex the player needs to have found out what the character likes so that he can do it right during the sex. Kind of like how in a dating RPG you need to have learned that she likes flowers but hates perfume before the date so that you brought the right thing. I'm also thinking, though, that controlling the animation is more enjoyable than just watching it.

Regarding Ogg, there's no way I'm going to encode all of my sounds into multiple formats just to support firefox. Firefox users will just have to deal with silence. If you don't like that, don't play my free games. Or vote with your feet on firefox itself. Like I said, they have no patent trouble sending MP3s to the native APIs. They've just decided they don't want MP3s to exist anymore and are trying to use their marketshare to sqash the format. Considering the billions of hours of MP3 music already available on the web that would need to be converted to Ogg to meet their demands, I think they're insane. I'm not going to support them in this.

ttant, that's interesting. I had similar flickering until I started preloading the images. What kind of machine are you running (what OS, which version, and how much RAM do you have)?

Tlaero

There's debate on the cursor. Some people like it being hidden, some people don't. Would a good compromise be to make the cursor something small but still visible? Maybe a single dot or a square of 4 dots, etc. That way you generally don't see it, but if you need to figure out where it is, you still can.

Tlaero

I think the question is: Why do you need/want the cursor to be invisible?

What does it add to the game by removing that as a visual guide to the player?

I feel that it gives you more illusion of control. You move the mouse and the character on the screen moves, so it seems like you're in control of the character. If, on the other hand, you move the mouse, the cursor moves, and the character on the screen moves too, it feels like you're moving a mouse and the screen is reacting to you. Of course, that's what's happening in either case, but the illusion is stronger in the first one.

Shark, Pusooy, and Super Deep Throat all hide the cursor.
Leonizer games tend to show it.

Although I like Leo's games, I've felt that the others were more immersive.

Tlaero

tlaero wrote:ttant, that's interesting. I had similar flickering until I started preloading the images. What kind of machine are you running (what OS, which version, and how much RAM do you have)?

* For the long answer : http://www.sysprofile.de/id11180
* For the really short answer : Win 7 64 bit, cpu : Fx8150 (8core amd), ram : 16 Go, GPU : 2* HD4670 (i'll change them to HD7*** in few month) using catalyst 11.12.

As i said, i use a nightly version of Opera, as they (opera desktop team) say :
WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.
So don't loose time on this issue for the moment, It might be more important to check (and maybe find a workaround) when HWA on opera 12 go to beta/RC.

Anyway, have you look to canvas possibility ?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial
http://www.canvasdemos.com/2009/10/09/h ... animation/
http://operasoftware.github.com/Odin/demo.html <- don't open it if you don't have HWa/webGL support.