Wanna trade? I got a patent for an elevated sitting surface supported by 4 pillars or "legs". Connected to this surface is a support plate for the back. (See sig for illustrations of this unique concept.)
Apparently the front window of an A10 'Tank Killer' can survive a 23mm projectile (1" =25.4mm). Not sure here though, because many web pages are very confused about the projectile and the hit location (window, armour, cockpit bathtub). I think the bathtub can handle 37mm projectiles with AP or explosive payloads.
I read in an old Swedish military manual that in general (rule of thumb), armour penetration is (speed_in_meters_per_sec/300)*caliber. It seems sort of correct looking at older figures atleast. A 80mm tank projectile travelling at 600m/s would penetrate 160mm of (steel) armour. A 5mm FMJ going at 900m/s would penetrate 15mm armour.
Of course nowdays we have kevlar, explosive armour and self sharpening DU bullets. Hit angle means a lot too.
Yeah, mindstoorm is nice, but the different engines and stuff looks a bit clumpsy. It would be great if they made some proper servos (like in those humanoid robot kits).
An artificial muscle system would be great too, using their pneumatics systems perhaps? I doubt they'll do it though, you can't even order individual parts from Lego. You have to order them from people that buy stuff and sort all the parts.
As for lego mecha builders, check out these crazy talented japanese builders Nakany, Zizy etc.. It would be awesome if these people could submit their designs to lego along with a description of the parts, and then Lego has a robot that collects the parts, packages etc. Lego kits on demand.
So, Servos, pneumatic controller, individual part ordering, fan made kits. Those are my demands!
This is an old topic now, but I just wanted to correct myself.
Life might produce an abundance of patterns and order.
'Nature' or randomness might produce patterns too, you might flip 10 tails in a row for example.
A compression algoritm would compress those 10 tails into 10t or something, so the absense/removal of order might indicate that someone has been using a compression algoritm.
That head looks a bit like Giger's Alien, I couldn't resist doing a bit of a redesign.
SDR and Papero looks pretty good, but most robot designs out there doesn't appeal to me at all. Maybe they're limited by engineering problems though. Right home robotics seem to be where the home computers were back in the 1970's, ie. expensive kits with no real screens and little use (KIM etc).
One day there might be kits in the local hobbystore containing a bunch of joints you can connect as you like, then the head (software) automatically develops movement patterns etc...
Well, yes, I didn't say life was alone in doing it. Life could be described a complex adaptive system, and a refrigerator would just be a somewhat complex system. There's also all sorts of 'dead' and simple systems in nature.
The defintition of the term Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) seem to vary a bit. The book The Quark and the Jaguar : Adventures in the Simple and Complex might be of intrest.
Yeah, I read somewhere that life, or "complex adaptive systems" tend to export entropy* and import/make order. Temporary local order is achieved at the cost of increasing the overall entropy in the universe. Maxwell's little demon might fit the definition of life?
*Entropy is lack of order. A really good compression algoritm would produce compact entropy data, and if we knew how to decipher that data we would get a lot of information out of it, more than we would get out of an equal amount of ordered data. If aliens compress their information we might have trouble finding them with SETI perhaps, as there are no patterns/order which we expect life to produce.
Case I: You buy a movie theater ticket. You have purchased the avility to view the movie. But because you can't make it to the theater that night, you instead set up a video camera on your seat, so you can time shift your viewing of the movie. Are you entitled to do that? No.
Maybe I should be.
Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. They are your property to use as you wish. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack. Are you allowed to do this? NO.
Allowed? maybe not, but can I do it? Certainly, check this out:
*snnfffft*
Aaaah... ngnghh!
...
oh~mama!
Case III: You own your car. You decide it would be cool to remove the windshield wipers and seatbelts. Can you do that? only if you don't put it on the road or try to sell it for such a use.
Karr... kar... kakakakak ka koo ka koooo kar-oh kar-oh kar-own kik kik kik blrlrrblrlbrb! ...
I spphyy with ma lil eeeyee... a beowolf khluster.. a lovely beowolf khlusterr... of
grannypanties... streching towards infinity ...
... ...
BATLETH!
case IV: you own some swapland. You want to drain it. can you do that? Not if it's considered a protected wetland.
Schumpland! A kingzdom fol a dlanied schwampz... land... I can see... Schteve Jobs schtandin in mah schlamp... land... teh overlords are attaking him! bhut he is... he is welcomling dem!
...
Matt. Damon.
*dokk*
It's the design that sucks, not the color. I redesigned it.
I think it would be really interesting if someone invented good ball-joint servos with full movement/rotation. Granted, they wouldn't be as strong as hydralics/pneumatics, but it would sure simplify construction a lot and give more freedom to the designer (ie. me, who is too lazy to draw real working joints). Maybe a combo would work.
The +5 informative department could gather things that sort of looks like facts.
The +5 Insightful & Interesting departments reinforce each other in the debates, while ruthlessly moderating the opposition down.
The +5 Funny & Offtopic departments could crack jokes if things are starting to look bad.
The +5 Flamebait & Troll departments could work together distract and smear political opponents.
I'm an artist who paints a lot digitally. I tried to learn GIMPshop but there's too many thresholds. The interface could be slimmer, and some tools could be faster (I'm talking to YOU size 200 airbrush). Here's a comparison of the interfaces:
PS5.5
- GIMPshop The load dialog crashed in the background and I don't even have everything open like in PS. GIMPshop is okay for basic image manipulation I guess; the functionality is certainly there, but the painting workflow isn't.
*The macro (mod/patch) merely rearranges and unlocks features ALREADY IN THE CONTENT supplied by ESRB.
I demand a complete withdrawal of all ESRB decals, and any future decals they design should not be possible to transform into pornography, violent scenes, pentagrams or curse words.
Sometimes I've wondered what would happen if we could (magically) replace our moon with Titan. It's larger than the moon so tidal effects and animal life here on earth will be affected of course, but what would happen to Titan's atmosphere? Huge greenhouse effect?
Europa would be an interesting candidate too... but maybe this sort of speculation belongs in the 'Who would win: Skeletor vs Dr.Doom' category.
It's a pity most of the video clips and audio clips on BBC (atleast the Doctor Who stuff) are in rm/ram format. Is there a VLC codec/plugin/gizmo for those formats yet? I installed realplayer a while ago (unfortunately), but now it 'expired' and I can't play/view anything with it.
Pure water is 1000kg/cu.m like others have said already, but apparently sea/salt water is slightly heavier (cuz of heavier minerals?).
Sugar is 800kg/cu.m and Salt is 1200kg/cu.m... (I'm assuming powder compacted by gravity and regular shaking)
Stone is around 2500kg/cu.m.
A cubic meter of steel, bronze or iron might be around 8000kg/cu.m.
Uranium and gold are close to 19000kg/cu.m.
Dalekenium (fictional metal alloy used in Daleks) might be around 600-700kg/cu.m (about 1/4 of aluminium) and this happens to be the density of wood, which the first Dalek models were made of.
What should humanity strive for? Everyone's right to make money, or everyone's right to have a quality life? What's worth more, your new sports car, or one million people slightly happier? If I invent an important medicine that is nearly free to produce, does my right to make money outweight the right of people to be cured and have a better life? Should I have the right to squat the medicine and like sell it for $10 000 per shot when I can cure 10 000 people for free?
Music/movies/games/books/art/inventions (MMGBAI) may not be a medicine or food, but it does increase the quality of people's life significantly, and potentially for free! How much would your health be worth without MMGBAI? Yah I know there's still sex, but not for everyone:(
The only way to be safe from piracy is to charge for doing stuff, not having done it. I can see how that can be tricky in many cases though.
Wasn't the idea with the original copyright law balance between: having people produce new MMGBAI - and having as many people enjoying MMGBAI?
The right to make money (for a while) is only there as a carrot for production of MMGBAI.
"No, it was because the came with a map leading to the first level printed on a piece of paper."
...which I didn't look at. What do you think the first thing a 10 year old kid does is when he gets a new NES game? Read the manual? Haha, No. He rips open the box, briefly ogles the golden casette, then plays 8hrs straight.
Exile II? Hmmm, are you talking about the topdown RPG Exile? It's new to me, I only knew there was a version of Myst called Exile. Apparently Exile II has a teleportation plot aswell, that might confuse my post further.
"The Right to Play." - Taste is like the bottom on this one (split). If the game promises gameplay and only have "intermission" videos then I'll be disappointed, but if I like stories and the game promises that I might enjoy it just like I enjoy a movie.
"The Right to Win." - I guess most of the offenders here are old shooter games with 100 or 255 levels of invading pixly monsters. Not sure if I have seen it in any new (big) games.
"The Right to Instructions." - I disagree about the "bad games, period." part here. I figured out Utopia K240 without instructions (read: I didn't own the manual *cough*), and a lot of other games, and they were very good games, I still play them. Most new games have pretty decent ingame tutorials/manuals or they are self explainatory due to the low complexity. I really miss games of K240's complexity. Just imagine what could be done with that concept today!
"The Right to Feedback." - I agree here, but I hope developers doesn't take this point as "Put as many numbers and bars floating over the head of the players as possible".
"The Right To Motivation." - I disagree. Adventure, Exile (2D game mind you), Zelda 1, Metroid 1 and ome older RPGs were good (appealing to me) just because they didn't herd and nanny you around. They just went like: "Here's a world and some stuff, have fun!". I remember first playing Zelda 1, walking straight to the first level right away. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe the map design was so clever that it tilted me in that direction. It felt awesome finding it all by myself anyways.
"The Right to Make Decisions." - I agree with this one, especially the mole-whacking analogy.
A shooting course with flat figures that pop up might be another fitting analogy.
That's how I feel playing most games today.
"The Right to a Swift Death." - Exile (old 2D game) didn't kill off the player if things were hopeless. The player was responsible for his actions and didn't get nannied by the game. If it's impossible to mess up without dying the game is probably too limited for my taste. I'm not much for 65536 damage invisible forcefields.
"The Right To Control Cut-Scenes." - I think most people agree with this one. I think another should be added, namely the right to skip ESRB notices and stupid DVD menus, but that's a different discussion. I just wanted to RAGE a bit about that. I'm done.
"The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game." - This is a tricky one isn't it? Being able to save anywhere makes you behave sloppy, the game feels pointless cuz you feel you just can reload anyways, and you never get the same feeling of excitement when you're SO near killing the boss.
On the other hand it's very annoying having to repeat things when you die. There's a few other solutions, like a limited amount of 'save-coins' you can use, or the Exile approach where you just teleport, or the Nethack-ish 'permadeath', to mention a few. In anyway I don't think being able to 'save-state' anywhere is an ideal solution.
2: When changing between the airbrush and paintbrush the program seem to forget what brush size I used.
The functionality I'm after is something like this: CustomBrush(i) / BrushSettings ie. each custom brush has its own settings and can be saved. I couldn't find anything like this in GIMPshop but the interface is still a bit confusing to me. PS 5.5 don't have it either but the Airbrush and Paintbrush remembers what brush they used.
Very large (100 radius or more) airbrushes are very very slow, even with some spacing, and even when not drawing. Not sure what's up with that. In PS (5.5) I use size 500 brushes sometimes. Using large airbrushes is good for making changes on major element in the painting, such as fogging an arm, or increasing saturation in an area, or laying down a base color, or making a sky gradient smoother.
The docks and menus are HUGE, especially the color mixer. There's many large gray areas. Compare with the PS 5.5 GUI: http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/psgui.jpg (@ 50%)
I'm an artist who paint a lot in Photoshop. Some of you might have seen the Flying Spaghetti Monster vs Adam (Sistine Chapel) painting I did.
Anyways, I've been trying to give feedback to GIMP(shop) for quite a while, but I can't find any feedback emails or forums.
I failed to register at "open usability". I couldn't activate my account, because of an error or I just got my password wrong (which I wrote down clearly). I also tried to register another account, but that didn't work since my email was taken by my previous inactive account.
So my feedback will have to go here. It concerns mostly my painting technique. Maybe someone could drop this in a relevant inbox?
1: Colorpicking has to be easy. I prefer temporarely shifting to the colorpicker while holding down a key. The colorpicker should be able to handle average colors too, in case you colorpick from an area with a lot of noise.
In GIMPshop it seems I have to switch to the colorpicker tool manually, then when I colorpick a dialog comes up that I have to click down. This takes several seconds and kills workflow. Basically thing single 'feature' alone makes it practically impossible for me to paint in GIMP.
I need to be able to colorpick once or twice per second. Yes I paint fast and I blend by using a 50% transparent brush and dabbing several times if I want opaque color, or I dab and colorpick if I want it more transparent. I use a wacom but have pressure sensitivity set to size so I can reach narrow places or fill large areas without having to change brush. Workflow and accesability is VERY important.
2: Brushes. It would be useful to be able to make several brushes that are just a click of a button away. When painting I generally use a few hard brushes and a few soft airbrushes, and some for multiplying on base colors onto line art. I do not want to manually set these up everytime I'm changing brush.
3: Photoshops 'Fade' is very useful. It brings up a slider which allow you to fade the last change, which can be a brushstroke, a curve/level, a hue/saturation change, or almost anything. This is very handy since it's realtime and you can fade your change until it looks balanced.
4: Photoshop's history can be useful. Some artists also make a new layer to experiment, paint a little and if they're happy they merge, otherwise they delete it. I use the history brush occasionally to erase changes I made with a soft or hard brush. This is useful if I for example painted a lot of cool armour details, but ruined the head, then I can just history erase the bad changes to the head. Theoretically this can be done with layers though, if the old layer without the changes is perserved somewhere.
5: Brushstroke quality is important. There might be an option for it but my version of GIMPshop made irregular little blotches on my lines. Giving any changes to pressure some sort of weight might prevent this, so transitions to thinner lines goes smoother somehow. Flimsy and chaotic does not look good unless you're Pollock.
Adventure is a very old Atari 2600 game that probably inspired games like Zelda and played a prominent role in the creation of the whole graphically represented adventure/rpg game genre. If I remember correctly the program code/gfx was limited to 4096bytes (ROM), and 128bytes for variables (RAM), ie. not much to work with so the gfx was very simple. The coder made the graphics himself, that's why the dragon ended up looking more like a duck. Since it was 2D, the dragon could be drawn as a 'slice' with a hollow belly.
It might not look like much, but it's actually very refreshing and new to get physically trapped inside the belly after you've been eaten. The enemies also leave permanent corpses (unless you restart). In most new games stuff just go 'poof' when it dies cuz they don't have processing power for persistance with the level of detail/framerate they're going for.
Maybe the moderators wanted the post to be insightful to game developers, who tend to have tunnel vision?
The poster, being an artist himself, certainly doesn't mind good graphics & designs, as long as they're actually good and not generic or uninteresting... *cough*
Something that's aggravating to many (probably including moderators in question) is that although graphics are cool and all, a huge slice of the game idea cake has been abandoned or is being ignored, or is just inaccessible from a 3D viewpoint. Maybe I'm stretching it with this analogy, but imagine if suddenly no more imagination tickling sci-fi short novels were written, or no sci-fi books at all, instead you only get expensive hollowood productions like "I, robot" full of nicely rendered but "didn't look as cool as you imagined them" designs, and "look we're climbing on the walls" and "landing crouched like spiderman causing the floor to crack", and maybe a little "there was a cool scene described with 5 sentences in the book but we couldn't do it cuz it would take ages to model and rig the stuff".
I was playing a pretty good fantasy adventure game the other day. I started out near a castle where I found this awesome spear that I walked around with for a while. Suddenly a dragon ambushed me! I tried to defend myself but I held the spear akwardly and the dragon swallowed me whole!
I was thinking Game Over man, Game over, but instead I was trapped inside the dragon's belly where I struggled for long to no avail. Then out of the sky swooped a giant bat, picked up the dragon with me inside its belly! The bat flew high into the sky, and actually gave me a nice little sightseeing of the fantasy world from above.
Why does it take a 27 year old game to Shock and Awe me? It's funny how an abstract little square can look better than a 20 million polygon monster. But after all, what's all that detail worth if you fail to do anything interesting with it? Detail is only limiting the expression to something very defined, and the more you define something, the smaller is the chance that you push the right buttons.
So no thanks, I'd rather be a attacked by a lowrez duck-dragon.
Slashdot Mirror
Wanna trade? I got a patent for an elevated sitting surface supported by 4 pillars or "legs". Connected to this surface is a support plate for the back. (See sig for illustrations of this unique concept.)
Apparently the front window of an A10 'Tank Killer' can survive a 23mm projectile (1" =25.4mm). Not sure here though, because many web pages are very confused about the projectile and the hit location (window, armour, cockpit bathtub). I think the bathtub can handle 37mm projectiles with AP or explosive payloads.
I read in an old Swedish military manual that in general (rule of thumb), armour penetration is (speed_in_meters_per_sec/300)*caliber. It seems sort of correct looking at older figures atleast. A 80mm tank projectile travelling at 600m/s would penetrate 160mm of (steel) armour. A 5mm FMJ going at 900m/s would penetrate 15mm armour.
Of course nowdays we have kevlar, explosive armour and self sharpening DU bullets. Hit angle means a lot too.
Yeah, mindstoorm is nice, but the different engines and stuff looks a bit clumpsy. It would be great if they made some proper servos (like in those humanoid robot kits).
An artificial muscle system would be great too, using their pneumatics systems perhaps? I doubt they'll do it though, you can't even order individual parts from Lego. You have to order them from people that buy stuff and sort all the parts.
As for lego mecha builders, check out these crazy talented japanese builders Nakany, Zizy etc.. It would be awesome if these people could submit their designs to lego along with a description of the parts, and then Lego has a robot that collects the parts, packages etc. Lego kits on demand.
So, Servos, pneumatic controller, individual part ordering, fan made kits. Those are my demands!
This is an old topic now, but I just wanted to correct myself.
Life might produce an abundance of patterns and order.
'Nature' or randomness might produce patterns too, you might flip 10 tails in a row for example.
A compression algoritm would compress those 10 tails into 10t or something, so the absense/removal of order might indicate that someone has been using a compression algoritm.
That head looks a bit like Giger's Alien, I couldn't resist doing a bit of a redesign.
SDR and Papero looks pretty good, but most robot designs out there doesn't appeal to me at all. Maybe they're limited by engineering problems though. Right home robotics seem to be where the home computers were back in the 1970's, ie. expensive kits with no real screens and little use (KIM etc).
One day there might be kits in the local hobbystore containing a bunch of joints you can connect as you like, then the head (software) automatically develops movement patterns etc...
"This may be a dupe, but I wonder... how many of the people who whine actually PAY to support Slashdot..."
Ads.
(Unless you block them.)
Well, yes, I didn't say life was alone in doing it. Life could be described a complex adaptive system, and a refrigerator would just be a somewhat complex system. There's also all sorts of 'dead' and simple systems in nature.
The defintition of the term Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) seem to vary a bit. The book The Quark and the Jaguar : Adventures in the Simple and Complex might be of intrest.
Yeah, I read somewhere that life, or "complex adaptive systems" tend to export entropy* and import/make order. Temporary local order is achieved at the cost of increasing the overall entropy in the universe. Maxwell's little demon might fit the definition of life?
*Entropy is lack of order. A really good compression algoritm would produce compact entropy data, and if we knew how to decipher that data we would get a lot of information out of it, more than we would get out of an equal amount of ordered data. If aliens compress their information we might have trouble finding them with SETI perhaps, as there are no patterns/order which we expect life to produce.
Hmm... let me try to give this a sober response.
...
...
...
Case I: You buy a movie theater ticket. You have purchased the avility to view the movie. But because you can't make it to the theater that night, you instead set up a video camera on your seat, so you can time shift your viewing of the movie. Are you entitled to do that? No.
Maybe I should be.
Case II: You buy some ephedrine, some lithuim batteries, some drano and some Acetone. They are your property to use as you wish. You decide to whip up a batch of Crack. Are you allowed to do this? NO.
Allowed? maybe not, but can I do it? Certainly, check this out:
*snnfffft*
Aaaah... ngnghh!
...
oh~mama!
Case III: You own your car. You decide it would be cool to remove the windshield wipers and seatbelts. Can you do that? only if you don't put it on the road or try to sell it for such a use.
Karr... kar... kakakakak ka koo ka koooo kar-oh kar-oh kar-own kik kik kik blrlrrblrlbrb!
I spphyy with ma lil eeeyee... a beowolf khluster.. a lovely beowolf khlusterr... of grannypanties... streching towards infinity
...
BATLETH!
case IV: you own some swapland. You want to drain it. can you do that? Not if it's considered a protected wetland.
Schumpland! A kingzdom fol a dlanied schwampz... land... I can see... Schteve Jobs schtandin in mah schlamp... land... teh overlords are attaking him! bhut he is... he is welcomling dem!
...
Matt. Damon.
*dokk*
It's the design that sucks, not the color. I redesigned it.
/rotation. Granted, they wouldn't be as strong as hydralics/pneumatics, but it would sure simplify construction a lot and give more freedom to the designer (ie. me, who is too lazy to draw real working joints). Maybe a combo would work.
I think it would be really interesting if someone invented good ball-joint servos with full movement
Why doesn't /. start a political party?
The +5 informative department could gather things that sort of looks like facts.
The +5 Insightful & Interesting departments reinforce each other in the debates, while ruthlessly moderating the opposition down.
The +5 Funny & Offtopic departments could crack jokes if things are starting to look bad.
The +5 Flamebait & Troll departments could work together distract and smear political opponents.
I'm an artist who paints a lot digitally. I tried to learn GIMPshop but there's too many thresholds. The interface could be slimmer, and some tools could be faster (I'm talking to YOU size 200 airbrush).
Here's a comparison of the interfaces: PS5.5 - GIMPshop
The load dialog crashed in the background and I don't even have everything open like in PS. GIMPshop is okay for basic image manipulation I guess; the functionality is certainly there, but the painting workflow isn't.
Here's what a simple Photoshop macro can do to their 'early childhood' decal. Is this the kind of 'content rating' imagery we want our kids to see?
Repulsive hidden pornography unlocked!*
*The macro (mod/patch) merely rearranges and unlocks features ALREADY IN THE CONTENT supplied by ESRB.
I demand a complete withdrawal of all ESRB decals, and any future decals they design should not be possible to transform into pornography, violent scenes, pentagrams or curse words.
Sometimes I've wondered what would happen if we could (magically) replace our moon with Titan. It's larger than the moon so tidal effects and animal life here on earth will be affected of course, but what would happen to Titan's atmosphere? Huge greenhouse effect?
Europa would be an interesting candidate too... but maybe this sort of speculation belongs in the 'Who would win: Skeletor vs Dr.Doom' category.
It's a pity most of the video clips and audio clips on BBC (atleast the Doctor Who stuff) are in rm/ram format. Is there a VLC codec/plugin/gizmo for those formats yet? I installed realplayer a while ago (unfortunately), but now it 'expired' and I can't play/view anything with it.
Pure water is 1000kg/cu.m like others have said already, but apparently sea/salt water is slightly heavier (cuz of heavier minerals?).
Sugar is 800kg/cu.m and Salt is 1200kg/cu.m... (I'm assuming powder compacted by gravity and regular shaking)
Stone is around 2500kg/cu.m.
A cubic meter of steel, bronze or iron might be around 8000kg/cu.m.
Uranium and gold are close to 19000kg/cu.m.
Dalekenium (fictional metal alloy used in Daleks) might be around 600-700kg/cu.m (about 1/4 of aluminium) and this happens to be the density of wood, which the first Dalek models were made of.
Found this link some time ago. Weights of stuff
Works well in conjunction with Volume calculator page
What should humanity strive for? Everyone's right to make money, or everyone's right to have a quality life? What's worth more, your new sports car, or one million people slightly happier? If I invent an important medicine that is nearly free to produce, does my right to make money outweight the right of people to be cured and have a better life? Should I have the right to squat the medicine and like sell it for $10 000 per shot when I can cure 10 000 people for free?
:(
Music/movies/games/books/art/inventions (MMGBAI) may not be a medicine or food, but it does increase the quality of people's life significantly, and potentially for free! How much would your health be worth without MMGBAI? Yah I know there's still sex, but not for everyone
The only way to be safe from piracy is to charge for doing stuff, not having done it. I can see how that can be tricky in many cases though. Wasn't the idea with the original copyright law balance between: having people produce new MMGBAI - and having as many people enjoying MMGBAI? The right to make money (for a while) is only there as a carrot for production of MMGBAI.
"No, it was because the came with a map leading to the first level printed on a piece of paper."
...which I didn't look at. What do you think the first thing a 10 year old kid does is when he gets a new NES game? Read the manual? Haha, No. He rips open the box, briefly ogles the golden casette, then plays 8hrs straight.
Exile II? Hmmm, are you talking about the topdown RPG Exile? It's new to me, I only knew there was a version of Myst called Exile. Apparently Exile II has a teleportation plot aswell, that might confuse my post further.
m
The Exile I'm talking about never had a sequel, just a lot of ports. Some fan page:
http://exile.acornarcade.com/index.html
My own Exile project page:
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/exile/exile-ish.ht
"The Right to Play." - Taste is like the bottom on this one (split). If the game promises gameplay and only have "intermission" videos then I'll be disappointed, but if I like stories and the game promises that I might enjoy it just like I enjoy a movie.
"The Right to Win." - I guess most of the offenders here are old shooter games with 100 or 255 levels of invading pixly monsters. Not sure if I have seen it in any new (big) games.
"The Right to Instructions." - I disagree about the "bad games, period." part here. I figured out Utopia K240 without instructions (read: I didn't own the manual *cough*), and a lot of other games, and they were very good games, I still play them. Most new games have pretty decent ingame tutorials/manuals or they are self explainatory due to the low complexity. I really miss games of K240's complexity. Just imagine what could be done with that concept today!
"The Right to Feedback." - I agree here, but I hope developers doesn't take this point as "Put as many numbers and bars floating over the head of the players as possible".
"The Right To Motivation." - I disagree. Adventure, Exile (2D game mind you), Zelda 1, Metroid 1 and ome older RPGs were good (appealing to me) just because they didn't herd and nanny you around. They just went like: "Here's a world and some stuff, have fun!". I remember first playing Zelda 1, walking straight to the first level right away. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe the map design was so clever that it tilted me in that direction. It felt awesome finding it all by myself anyways.
"The Right to Make Decisions." - I agree with this one, especially the mole-whacking analogy. A shooting course with flat figures that pop up might be another fitting analogy. That's how I feel playing most games today.
"The Right to a Swift Death." - Exile (old 2D game) didn't kill off the player if things were hopeless. The player was responsible for his actions and didn't get nannied by the game. If it's impossible to mess up without dying the game is probably too limited for my taste. I'm not much for 65536 damage invisible forcefields.
"The Right To Control Cut-Scenes." - I think most people agree with this one. I think another should be added, namely the right to skip ESRB notices and stupid DVD menus, but that's a different discussion. I just wanted to RAGE a bit about that. I'm done.
"The Right to Quit, Pause, Save and Resume the Game." - This is a tricky one isn't it? Being able to save anywhere makes you behave sloppy, the game feels pointless cuz you feel you just can reload anyways, and you never get the same feeling of excitement when you're SO near killing the boss.
On the other hand it's very annoying having to repeat things when you die. There's a few other solutions, like a limited amount of 'save-coins' you can use, or the Exile approach where you just teleport, or the Nethack-ish 'permadeath', to mention a few. In anyway I don't think being able to 'save-state' anywhere is an ideal solution.
Thanks for the reply!
5: Spacing fixed the blotches on the lines.
1: CTRL worked fine for colorpicking. However, I can't CTRL colorpick in the drawing window right after selecting a tool from the tool menu.
Made this: http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/gimpd.jpg (@ 50%)
Problems remaining:
2: When changing between the airbrush and paintbrush the program seem to forget what brush size I used. The functionality I'm after is something like this: CustomBrush(i) / BrushSettings ie. each custom brush has its own settings and can be saved. I couldn't find anything like this in GIMPshop but the interface is still a bit confusing to me. PS 5.5 don't have it either but the Airbrush and Paintbrush remembers what brush they used.
Very large (100 radius or more) airbrushes are very very slow, even with some spacing, and even when not drawing. Not sure what's up with that. In PS (5.5) I use size 500 brushes sometimes. Using large airbrushes is good for making changes on major element in the painting, such as fogging an arm, or increasing saturation in an area, or laying down a base color, or making a sky gradient smoother.
The docks and menus are HUGE, especially the color mixer. There's many large gray areas. Compare with the PS 5.5 GUI: http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/psgui.jpg (@ 50%)
I'm an artist who paint a lot in Photoshop. Some of you might have seen the Flying Spaghetti Monster vs Adam (Sistine Chapel) painting I did.
Anyways, I've been trying to give feedback to GIMP(shop) for quite a while, but I can't find any feedback emails or forums.
I failed to register at "open usability". I couldn't activate my account, because of an error or I just got my password wrong (which I wrote down clearly). I also tried to register another account, but that didn't work since my email was taken by my previous inactive account.
So my feedback will have to go here. It concerns mostly my painting technique. Maybe someone could drop this in a relevant inbox?
1: Colorpicking has to be easy. I prefer temporarely shifting to the colorpicker while holding down a key. The colorpicker should be able to handle average colors too, in case you colorpick from an area with a lot of noise.
In GIMPshop it seems I have to switch to the colorpicker tool manually, then when I colorpick a dialog comes up that I have to click down. This takes several seconds and kills workflow. Basically thing single 'feature' alone makes it practically impossible for me to paint in GIMP. I need to be able to colorpick once or twice per second. Yes I paint fast and I blend by using a 50% transparent brush and dabbing several times if I want opaque color, or I dab and colorpick if I want it more transparent. I use a wacom but have pressure sensitivity set to size so I can reach narrow places or fill large areas without having to change brush. Workflow and accesability is VERY important.
2: Brushes. It would be useful to be able to make several brushes that are just a click of a button away. When painting I generally use a few hard brushes and a few soft airbrushes, and some for multiplying on base colors onto line art. I do not want to manually set these up everytime I'm changing brush.
3: Photoshops 'Fade' is very useful. It brings up a slider which allow you to fade the last change, which can be a brushstroke, a curve/level, a hue/saturation change, or almost anything. This is very handy since it's realtime and you can fade your change until it looks balanced.
4: Photoshop's history can be useful. Some artists also make a new layer to experiment, paint a little and if they're happy they merge, otherwise they delete it. I use the history brush occasionally to erase changes I made with a soft or hard brush. This is useful if I for example painted a lot of cool armour details, but ruined the head, then I can just history erase the bad changes to the head. Theoretically this can be done with layers though, if the old layer without the changes is perserved somewhere.
5: Brushstroke quality is important. There might be an option for it but my version of GIMPshop made irregular little blotches on my lines. Giving any changes to pressure some sort of weight might prevent this, so transitions to thinner lines goes smoother somehow. Flimsy and chaotic does not look good unless you're Pollock.
Adventure is a very old Atari 2600 game that probably inspired games like Zelda and played a prominent role in the creation of the whole graphically represented adventure/rpg game genre. If I remember correctly the program code/gfx was limited to 4096bytes (ROM), and 128bytes for variables (RAM), ie. not much to work with so the gfx was very simple. The coder made the graphics himself, that's why the dragon ended up looking more like a duck. Since it was 2D, the dragon could be drawn as a 'slice' with a hollow belly.
Screenshot in this Wikipedia article about Adventure
It might not look like much, but it's actually very refreshing and new to get physically trapped inside the belly after you've been eaten. The enemies also leave permanent corpses (unless you restart). In most new games stuff just go 'poof' when it dies cuz they don't have processing power for persistance with the level of detail/framerate they're going for.
Maybe the moderators wanted the post to be insightful to game developers, who tend to have tunnel vision?
The poster, being an artist himself, certainly doesn't mind good graphics & designs, as long as they're actually good and not generic or uninteresting... *cough*
Something that's aggravating to many (probably including moderators in question) is that although graphics are cool and all, a huge slice of the game idea cake has been abandoned or is being ignored, or is just inaccessible from a 3D viewpoint.
Maybe I'm stretching it with this analogy, but imagine if suddenly no more imagination tickling sci-fi short novels were written, or no sci-fi books at all, instead you only get expensive hollowood productions like "I, robot" full of nicely rendered but "didn't look as cool as you imagined them" designs, and "look we're climbing on the walls" and "landing crouched like spiderman causing the floor to crack", and maybe a little "there was a cool scene described with 5 sentences in the book but we couldn't do it cuz it would take ages to model and rig the stuff".
I was playing a pretty good fantasy adventure game the other day. I started out near a castle where I found this awesome spear that I walked around with for a while. Suddenly a dragon ambushed me! I tried to defend myself but I held the spear akwardly and the dragon swallowed me whole!
I was thinking Game Over man, Game over, but instead I was trapped inside the dragon's belly where I struggled for long to no avail. Then out of the sky swooped a giant bat, picked up the dragon with me inside its belly! The bat flew high into the sky, and actually gave me a nice little sightseeing of the fantasy world from above.
Why does it take a 27 year old game to Shock and Awe me?
It's funny how an abstract little square can look better than a 20 million polygon monster. But after all, what's all that detail worth if you fail to do anything interesting with it? Detail is only limiting the expression to something very defined, and the more you define something, the smaller is the chance that you push the right buttons.
So no thanks, I'd rather be a attacked by a lowrez duck-dragon.