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I'm a programmer but having worked in the game industry for many years I grew to know a lot about game art, both on paper (concept sketches and paintings) and on the computer.

First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.

I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.

Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:

Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.

Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.

Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.

Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site, for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)

Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.

I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and >this.

Sorry, but that last link looks like you just ripped off images from the web. The lightbulb and book are in completely different styles, for instance. One looks like it may have originally been created in Illustrator, the second is a cropped photo. If this is what you have to resort to when you use Gimp, I'll stick with my Adobe suite, thank you.

I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:

1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!

2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!

As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.

I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)

I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.

Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.

But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.

I'm rather shocked to see all the complaints about the Gimp here. The comments seem to be divided into two categories:

1. I've never used it, but from the screenshots it looks scary! It sucks!

2. I've used it, and it didn't work exactly like Photoshop. It sucks!

As a person who has used Photoshop (and a bevy of other paint programs, all the way back to the days of DPaint) extensively, I feel the Gimp is by far the best program available for creating (pixel-based) graphics, especially in the realm of web imagery.

I have used it to create from-scratch graphics for countless websites, including: this, this, this, and this. I have also used it to do many print items, such as this flyer. (Amazingly enough, CMYK is not really that necessary if you don't mind slight variations in the color on the final product. If you are doing serious print work, you should really be using a vector illustration program for everything but photo retouching anyhow.)

I think perhaps the Gimp's strength is how a non-artist (ie, me) can create pretty nice looking art with it - as I believe the links above will attest. It has a number of features not found in any other paint program, such as highly configurable tablet sensitivity.

Unfortunately, the hardest thing about using it for someone who has switched from Photoshop is that it looks _very_ similar to Photoshop, but yet it is really not very similar at all. Much like an expencied Windows user switching to KDE, they will find themselves fooled into expecting the interface to behave exactly the same way - and it doesn't. It's a different program, with a different interface.

But those who either have the patience to un-learn their Photoshop habits, or are not burdened by them to begin with, will find the Gimp to be one of the most powerful graphics tools available today. It is also quite likely one of the most impressive and mature applications available in the realm of free software - on par with Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution. I'm not sure why it doesn't get the same respect that these packages do.

Bah, who needs clients? This one was designed to be completely playable with raw telnet:

Blood Dusk MUD

'course it's mine, so I might be a little biased. :)

1. Only takes a few hours to build a character to a decent "level"

2. Non-addictive

3. Free

4. Fun!

Blood Dusk

My favorite of all time is Arctic. A close second is AnotherMUD, which lacks the quality and consistency of Arctic but makes up for it in pure fun.

And, of course, I must take this opportunity to pitch my own creation: Blood Dusk. It's offline for major upgrades right now, but check out the pages to get a feel for it...

In fact, I'll take this fine opportunity to pimp it. The webpage:

Blood Dusk

or connect directly:

mud.dusk.org 7000

PII's pretty much smoked the hell out of the K6-2. At the time, the K6-2 was mainly just a low-cost alternative. Along came the K6-3, however, and that all changed. (Unfortunately, the K6-3 seems to have slipped between the cracks, and is somewhat hard to find these days.) On an identical system I had both a PII-450 and a K6-3 400 (of which, I might add, the second cost about 1/3rd of the first). For floating point, the PII was certainly more impressive - Quake ran at a signifigantly higher framerate. But for most everything else, from running Netscape to compiling the kernel, the K6-3 pretty much rocked the PII!

So the K6-3 is now my server processor. My website, my mud, and in fact any non-FPE duties I delegate to those nice-n-cheap K6-3's. (You can get a K6-3/400 for $80 now, and there are 475 and 500 mhz versions on the way.)

If you have signifigant floating point operations, then the PII smokes anything in the K6 series.

On the higher end, the PIII is not much more than the PII - just higher clockrates and some FP enhancements. Coppermine gives it a nice speedy bus throughput, so certainly I would say that a PIII/copermine/SMP system would certainly make a very nice server - not cheap, but still cheaper than the equivilent in, say, Alpha processors.

The Athalon, on the other hand, destroys the PIII when it comes to floating point performance. Anything that relies on raw FP performance, such as ray-tracing or other 3D rendering, will show the vast superiority of the Athalon. For other tasks I believe that the Athalon and the PIII (w/ copermine, anyhow) are more or less equivilent.

However - and here's my big complaint - there's still no SMP Athalon! That really, really sucks. Considering that the Athalon is down to $1 a mhz for the mid-range speeds (eg, 700mhz or so), it's almost a crime that there's no SMP motherboard available. A two or four processor Athalon system costing less than $2000 could probably do the same amount of rendering as a $10,000+ Alpha system. It's a REAL shame.