Official Off-Topic Thread 2015

[ptoing]

A bit late, but yeah. Here is a new OTT topic. Will keep the other one stickied for a bit longer.

[Crow]

Anybody remember this? The new Inkscape release has this algorithm implemented. Haven't tried it yet, but maybe that's of interest to some of you.

[YellowLime]

Keeping with the topic of art tools... If I ever did know I could zBrush right from my browser, I had forgotten!

Let this be a public announcement that this still exists: SculptGL

Too fun, even with a stupid laptop trackpad, and it has a Wacom tablet plugin and all!
You can keep the mesh and stuff at the end, so it's always worth a try Especially if you're not used to creating 3D art, like myself
There's also downloadable versions for grumpy people who don't want to depend on tools over the Internet (again, myself) so that's an option if you want a simple, standalone zBrush tool

[Joe]

I am finally able to successfully grow grass in my aquarium! Here's about 3 months of growth:



Here's one of my blue rili shrimp



Full 10gal tank.



And food porn perhaps? Made some bacon-wrapped scallops.

[Ai]

I just found This free /OSS font, which should be of interest to all pixelers: not only is it designed to remain sharp at low res (lower case 'o' = 3px is taken as a base measure), it is put together from tiles, using another tool I wasn't aware of until now, fontile. It also has a range of variants, including ones that are specifically intended to look interestingly pixelly even at high res.
These two screencaps of the website show them pretty well:




(zooming this second shot illustrates how good a job the designer has done at making it render clearly when tiny)

@Crow
It's very variable. Personally, I have made some pixel art to put through, tried putting previous (not designed for it) pixel art through, and tried others pixel art, including pro stuff (eg from Capcom and SNK games, and smaller stuff like Mario).. I just can't bring myself to agree that the mix of crisp lines and blurred volumes that it generally produces, is a good aesthetic. I'd propose that both of those elements are ones that need tight control in order to avoid overdoing things. Tuning the parameters may improve things, I guess. They definitely need to find a way to fix that known crash bug (the GUI even tells you to save!) on larger canvases; crashing is far less acceptable than merely not working.

For those who are using the development / hg version of Inkscape, a number of interesting changes have been made since the release. My favorites are BSpline bezier mode / LPE -- it makes aligning curved features just as easy as aligning polygonal features --, Perspective LPE,  and Simplify LPE (yeah, this is just like the standard Simplify function, except nondestructive, so a lot easier to tweak level of simplification)

[tocky]

the new alien game is hot as fuck but im too afraid to play her beceause she is scary

--

so why you should let me write about the cults of teh old gods: i can map them to teh pixel artists on this forum

helm is a cleric of hastor, who is extinction of a differetn sort: www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/20143.htm
the yellow king in all his glory. a meditation on hastur, a meditation on meditations

ptoing is a cleric of demogorgon, and one of his monkey heds is helm the other is ilkke. so we can see that he is also hastur of a different sort. the c64 is hastur's strongest machine. when ptoing draws meditations on the robot he draws metitations on the flesh, hastur is the face hidden in the map which must not be seen, he is the face in the flesh, in the wood, in the metal, in the stone. but ptoing is funny where as helm is grim. ptoing knows jokes and what they're for, helm only knows PRAXIS, when helm makes a joke it is frightening. this is because he is not german but greek

---

anyway obviously i shouldnt put this in the off topic thread, i should start a thread for it. i did this but crow shut it down before it started. crow is ziz, or odin, or some such. he is a god of birds, this is plain. but he does not allow us to fly

--

im not gonna start the thread again without some mods permission, it doesnt have to be on wayofthepixel but i will write it somewhere if not here. hastur loves meat angels, he is himself a fallen angel

-- i do not wish to insult you doods, i wish to venerate you

[ptoing]

tocky, answer me this, what does this have to do with this thread?

[tocky]

the off topic thread or the tiamat one? tiamat is all gods, we should know them all. its a symbol palette for a pixel art that needs to know why it has chosen these symbols and no other, noone else udnerstands helm the way i do, even if he loves me not

[ptoing]

I will send you a PM.

[tocky]

ok i think i have intelleged your message ptiont though you speak in riddles

basically i need a CVLT of TIAMAT thread for this. it can extend the why we should listen to tocky, but i made with that thread and i need a new one to say what i wish to say. iff i am not allowed new threads i will post in the off-topic thread - the problem is i might make a new thread everyday because i am a tiamat cultist. i understand this. my plan is to not do this. not all threads should be tocky

i will relate it back to pixel art, the way of the pixel, more often. i will talk about the secret techniques

bruce lee also knows hastur but he is a fighter and not a cleric. in a way he is a mad monk, like the scribe who writes the necronomicon

anyway i havent read the whole thread, just the most recent posts. it is foolish to ask me to do all this. it is right that it should be in the old off-topic thread and not the new one

[ptoing]

OK, I do not see how I speak in riddles, but fine.

If you really need to make a CVLT of TIAMAT thread, go ahead, but keep it to that, please. No spamming new threads please. We want to keep this nice.

[tocky]

yeah me too. lets be nice an friendly an shit

THE FIRST PTOING RIDDLE IS THE ONE WHERE YOU HIDE TEXT ON COLORS THAT CAN NOT BE SEEN, IN TEH NOSPACE BETWEEN THEMES

THE SECOND IS YOUR REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THE YUS BIRD LEVEL, IN THRUST BURST, EVEN THOUGH TI BE ON YOUTUBE AND YOU HVE HEARD OF IT BEFORE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQJvajF89PI

noone even fucking cares about thrust burst anymore and still we do not talk about the yus bird level, the secret meaning of thrust burst.

THE THIRD, I DONT KNOW YET. ?? ??

i tell you, this is why im crazy. we can see that although thrust burst be mad and difficult and made by death cultists, it is in its own way just a subset of cave story

anyway, why clone canabalt if we are unwilling to clone thrust burst

i tell you i have read the apocryphas, all of them, and i know now

to wit, ptoing, stop telling me things that are false. i am cleverer than you and i will figure it out if i have been lied to

"There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours." there are no ugly combinations, there are not even ugly permutations

what i mean is that there are no levels in thust burst that are not expressed as levels in cave story also, themes of another world, but still a world within cave story

we should throw away teh book, i tell you do not fuck with me because i can fuck with people too, i am better at it than you are, but i do not wish to

if noone gets on my level i will have to teach myself

[ptoing]

Haha, ok. The hiding text in images is an old demoscene thing where people would do that if they had a colour left to spare. I just took it a bit to an extreme in the robot image and the 4 colour faces. Just being silly really.

When it comes to Thrustburst we only had a denial policy at the very beginning, because we thought that would be funny, since there is also a 1 in 1000 or so chance to trigger Yus Mode if you have not unlocked it yet. And that video in Youtube is there because I told the guy who made it how to unlock Yus Mode in the first place.

The ugly combinations thing is of course a simplification. And it is something that is a lot more noticable with digital images on screens because of how the additive nature of pixels makes them interact. Like greys next to very saturated colours look really weird on screens without blur, there is what I would call "colours biting each other" going on. This is less of an issue on natural media where the surface something is displayed on is not a lightsource but subtractive blending is at play.

I am not advocating for specific colour combinations not to be used ever, just that when it comes to combinations you have to be vigilant in how you use them and it has to be in context. In some images it might work and enhance the effect you are going for it you have colours that fight with each other, but in other contexts it will not work as well. Whatever I am saying, about anything, is never to be seen as dogma.

[tocky]

ALL GOOD POINTS. but what im advocating is permutations not combinations. all colors should be used to make all ordered sets of color. andi mcc and strangethink do this already, and we must fight them at their own speed if we are to keep up.

 i remember the old days of hiding colors and i remember thrust burst but what else has ptoing lied to us about withougt even knowing? lots of things, probably. your message is not the only message. you can be a better ptiong and i a better tocky. but the next thing is i have to be allowed to talk about the dragon types and the homestuck trolls and gengargate on here. it shouldnt have to relate to pixel at because pixel art is just an ordered set that can be used to represent any message even bad ones. because those dudes understand permutations. decks of cards. the probability of various poker hands. how to bluff with only the cards you hold today. fuck these shitty poker players honestly, i am bad at poker. fuck the HAMBURGLAR ENGINE. i will teach you how to build a better poker. what im taling about requires a radical new moderation policy.

http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=9443.0;topicseen

i am not the only person saying so, but i am the only person unashamed to say so. weve been taught that text is cheap and pixels not, i tell you both are cheap because they have been made so. why not thread necromance everthing that happened in the year 1999? we havent dealt with any of that shit, so how come we think we will rise to meet the new millenneum? i tell you we will not if we can not think about it. 9/11 obscures all this shit, it is framed: work for me like this, in this way, or die. all of us have been framed for the future crimes we may commit, because we love the past and do not want to lose it. it's all still here but it is already lost. we do not use it. can jet fuel melt steel beams? it doesnt matter because it doesnt matter. have you got what you paid for?

i came to you with the yus bird level and you told me it does not exist. how am i to trust you anymore? i didnt win the yus burd level, i found it on one of my thousand playthroughs of your shitty cave story clone. i have found yus and i hve found enlightenment and so can anyone. permutations not combinations, ptoing

[ptoing]

You are basically advocating for more off topic on pixelation than we have atm. And this discussion was already had and no, we wont have that. There are plenty of forums where you can talk about stuff that does not relate to pixelart already, you can take that stuff there. But please do not make threads about unrelated things here.

Also please do not necropost in really old threads unless it is something super pertinent, which I think is unlikely.

[tocky]

pertinent to what? pixel art? of course it will be. what are you trying to hide? by killing these peopel and their messages, by being unwilling to speak to the past and throwing away our own history, we kill this community.

we will not hear old messages and we will not hear new ones, and we will not hear new permutations of old and new. we will not listen to anyone. all of these dead games, anyone can make them. pick up where someone else left off. hug every goth, evey geth, every cat and every dog. all the gethdogs and catdogs and gothcats and gothgeths. lets reopen the discourse on aesthetic. why pixels and not some other thing? the pixel is all i've ever known but it doesnt love me.
 
we talk about DAISUKE AMAYA but we do not talk about SID MEYER or PETER MOLYNEUX. we do not talk about DANI BUNTEN. we worship vaporware not games.

if the sims is the most popular game theres ever been, every year for 20 years, why not talk about this? because its for girls. its not METAL. we could make a metal sim.

[ptoing]

I am not trying to hide anything, I just do not want threads which are very old get revived when there might not be something really helpful be added to the discussion as well as pushing newer threads in which people are being active and getting/giving critique being pushed down. The pixel-art subforum is for giving and getting critique to get better at pixelart.

And you are free to make threads about pixelart which are about M.U.L.E. for example and talk about the aesthetics of that game or whatever in the General forum. Again, as long as stuff is related to pixelart in some way it is fair game.

I reckon we do not talk a lot about Sims here because it is not a pixelart game, maybe. Just a wild guess.

[tocky]

what im saying is that there are not enough posts. if the new stuff gets lost in the old stuff, bump it. we have the technology, they dont talk about any of this shit on tigs either. they only make games that are subsets of cave story, we only make artists that are subsets of HENK. we can dream larger than this. why shouldnt it be pixel? kung fu isnt pixel either; it can be by analogy

[ptoing]

Yeah, but I do not want to get into some kind of bump war. Just saying. Please consider other people who are using the forum as well.

[tocky]

i do consider them, they are too slow. they are a fine and hearty people. we should talk to one another at the speed of talking, at the speed of thought, the speed of writing, the speed of the stream. otherwise we lose everything. a bump war is a fool idea, you made it up. make a better forum, make a better moderator. choose tocky if he is the only one who would advocate for good ideas. we dont all ahve to be writers but some of us do, in any case we must be faster. the faster people will come once they see tocky and see that they must argue with him at his own speed. these services are more like irc than we think, and these ideas take time to unpack. that's what the archive is for. but we can not do it if we will not. why not just make it so that my posts dont show on the new posts page or something? i could still show in the subforums themselves. even better, let the reader choose who they read, let them set their own policies by exposing these variables to them in their own interface, let them choose their own filters and moderate themselves. tumblr does this. twitter and googleplus. but we must map all inputs to all outputs. this community is worth saving.

 i do not understand you. when i run games i do not speedrun, unless by force. when i run forums i argue with people and not robots.

its not about drugs, its about speed. when i first followed mcc on twitter she made me uncomfortable and i had to unfollow her. in those days noone blogged that fast. these days all of us must compete with robots that can blog faster than we do.

Posts: 420. probably enough for today. i hope my brother gets back with some weed. i'll take a pill i guess. noone wants to share because they be afraid that what they ahve to say might make us uncomfortable.

we do not have to be as fast as tocky. tocky is not so fast on alldas. you know the episode of community where abed is jesus? ive seen it, i dont need to be that guy. i need to be better. all of us must compete with DAN HARMON.

but not on all days. im not JOHN GREEN. im better than he is. he is a cisheteromancer and i am a neutromancer. my message can be used for good or evil, law or chaos. suck a dick, put the killing thing in your mouth. i am the rectangle inside of round. pinwizz taught me this.

gayophanes teaches us that all things are gay. tocky teaches that all things are simply permutations. lets fucking hit it out of the park this year. climate change is easy. lets fix the discourse on gender and the pixel and net neutrality.

THIS HAS BEEN TOCKYS 420TH POST, GO SMOKE A CONE OR READ A BOOK OR SOMETHING

edit:
two conversations with my friend clay
http://evilbaboons.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/clay.html
http://evilbaboons.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/clay-again.html

edit, days later:

i wnt to write a new thread on extinction. i'll do it in some months. tockyockrates teaches us that all threads are tocky. icare about the discourse. i have good things to say. i dont want to just talk to myself.

[Ai]

I just proposed an addition to the experiment brush in Krita to support feathering. The experiment brush is similar to Contour-fill in GrafX2 or Cutbrush in TVPaint (ie. the user draws a freehand shape which is immediately filled with the pen color.).
The overall effect, with feathering, would be equivalent to using the freehand select tool in GIMP/Photoshop/etc with feathering enabled, then filling the resultant selection.

A very quick (5m) example of the effect:


I'm planning to implement this myself and am wondering if anyone knows of an application that already includes a drawing tool like this?

(in particular, I'm thinking about how the feathering radius ought to be controlled -- whether it can be modified automatically according to the relative size of the shape, or if there is a better way)

[tocky]

http://goblinwars.tumblr.com/post/110973727397/goblinwars-goblinwars-goblinwars-wreckmyshit

DCS HIGH LEVEL BULLSHIT (SPOILTERS FOR BATMAN AND JOKER AND SUPERMAN)

so yeah: they are robbing MOORE and he's not even in spinning his grave yet

i propose a new thread to discuss this problem.


yeah, crow culled the thread again so now i gotta argue for why its a good idea for me to write threads for this stuff, and not just post them here:

1-because spoilers (batman is important to lots of people)
2-because anonymization is relevant (why does dc have a goth subpublisher, dark horse? for us weirdos)
3-because the cult of the artist is relevant (why not moore)
4-because, and it pains me to bring this up, in a climate where they just announced 500 new super hero movies that are gonna make a bunch of money, they still own the trademark on the super hero, as an archetype - but there are ways around this

moore is our orwell, orwell with a troll mask on -- if i have to tell you why orwell is relevant to pixel art you are not paying attention. my art, the tocky art, has been made free and open source without my consent. and then still noone wants it. i do good pixels but i have to sell them to you dorks, even if they're free. and so i have become an open source developer wilingly, but also through force

so like all of this shit is relevant to pixel art. consider why it might be.

[ptoing]

DC and Marvel just own the trademark for the word superhero and quite a few alternate spellings like "super hero", "super-hero" and the like.

[tocky]

yeah which means that anyone else has to do super heroes with out ever mentioning the word, the brand, which is worth billions - super hero genre movie money dollaz to dc, dollaz for the dollaz gods

what they do here is fuck over the artist in favor of the institution

[insert picture of krabs from spongebob crying over his lost millionth dollar]
edit:


they can bring back the joker wheneer they like but they cant bring back moore, who defined that character for us all

gender (the super hero) and net neutrality (dc vs marvel) and the pixel (the cult of the artist) are related

im angry because they shouldnt own a whole genre, a whole gender, a whole aesthetic. it should be for all of us to own

but listen; i will tell you how to run your own hmburger empire, one with more-and-better roles for women. where's arachne's ramble thread? would she host it here or on her own website? why or why not? bc ive read all of arachnes posts. i would also read that thread. arachne has stuff she can teach us about the pixel, about horror, and about how to learn and listen. i've never been a pixel artis on her level but she does listen to good ideas, same as me, tocky. why not let her weave those webs even if we dont want them in our house

tbh i think we all creeped her away --- but she is still here

[ptoing]

Actually I am good friends with Arachne, we chat quite a lot. And she is as free to write a ramblethread as anyone on here, as long as it is about pixelart.

[tocky]

i know that arachne is your friend, otherwise i would not mention her. you would not give a shit. you only care about your own friends.

she is your friend but she is not a mod here.

i have tried to write a ramblethread about pixelart and it is not as easy as it seems. people are unwilling to consider the good points i make here, for example, you have still not unlocked the joker thread, which indicates you do not agree with me, biut not that you are right. just that you retain the institutional power that lets you tell me im wrong when im not

i have only written about the pixel (by analogy) and you do not give a shit about the pixel truly. if you cared you would care about my analogies

we have one arachne and she does not post very often. how many should we have?

[yaomon17]

I don't see how potentially having Sups kill the Joker for money relates to pixels at all :\

[tocky]

have you ever been asked to kill your jokers for no money? because i have

if we have to do the same story over and over, lets at least be paid in the respect that we each deserve

there are non-canon batman comics. i remember one on deviantart that was better than any batman ive read, even moore's

but that dude isnt getting paid

http://terminaitor.deviantart.com/gallery/9268321/Batman << go look

this dude only has one arm, by the way. he does this shit because he loves it

there's no need for me to be helm. helm is helm. i'll be tocky. you guys quit moderating me so much

ptoing, or somebody, tell crow to fuck off for me. he does not listen to me

[AlexHW]

I don't see how potentially having Sups kill the Joker for money relates to pixels at all :\

Everything is symbolic, allowing interpretation. I think tocky is interpreting stuff on a very long wavelength. The relation is there, just difficult to grasp if you haven't stretched enough to be flexible to reach to such lengths.

[tocky]

i'll tell you the chain of logic that leads me to believe this. it is sound. just let me have a thread to write in for fucks sake

[yaomon17]

I get that, but I feel like he should be directly explaining the analogy when relating it to pixels. The word "pixel" doesn't even appear in the post. What he did was basically go on a forum talking about cooking and talked about the great basketball game the Spurs had last night. I'm sure there are relations, but he would have to expand his analysis. What would the basketball represent, how would the difference between steaming and frying something relate back to basketball. In this context, what does superman represent about pixel art, what the the Joker's death mean in relation to pixels. He shouldn't just post stuff and assume people know what he is talking about. The people on the cooking forum probably don't know the difference between the shot clock and the in game clock. The same principle should also apply here.

Edit:^ Should have done that from the start

[tocky]

what youre asking me to do is actually paint a pixture to illustrate each of my points.

which is time and energy you havent demenostrated is wort a cent to me, not one cent of time or energy or thanks, only neglect. only telling me to go some other place - have i done this? read my livejournal. i have done.

but you guys are the devils that i advocate for, BUT I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ASKED TO GO SOMEPLACE ELSE, even on deviantart. i am not making this shit up.

you guys are unwilling to consider i might argue with you and not against you. you love youselfs too much. you love each other too much. and i have loved you also. but who loves tocky? tocky.

ilkke does i guess. but he does not have a voice

[Ryumaru]

ptoing, or somebody, tell crow to fuck off for me. he does not listen to me

We have been more than patient with you. You have your Tiamat thread that should not exist in the first place. This forum is a community for bettering ourselves in the pixel art form in very direct ways, and is not your playground. The moderating staff has been lenient with you as you have claimed to have some mental disorders and heavy thoughts; but that is not a free pass for insubordinate behavior and  mouthing off against an administrator.

[tocky]

they have been more-lenient but not lenient enough. who are you, ryu, to say which threads should not exist?

you guys are filters, you are not gods. i can blaspheme on here, so long as i do not do it too often. its in your moderation policy.

insubordination implies that i know less than you. i have shown that this is not the case. in my 4-hundred posts i have made more good points, done more good. than in your 15-hundred

i mean you are good at fighter sprites, i guess. but ive never seen you say a thing i gave a shit about.

[AlexHW]

I'm really curious what tocky wants.. but it feels like he or she keeps putting a wall up when he or she speaks for others- kind of reaffirms in his or her mind that nobody is hearing what he or she says.

[tocky]

i want to be a mod, but it doesnt matter that i am not one. i am a fucking pillar of this community.

i want to be challenged less often. i want to be told new exciting ideas, more often.

that is, i want everybody here to fucking listen to me. or at least consider it. and why i might say this shit.

its because i dont have any money. i can fucking do this shit but its not worth money in this economy.

i have to sell every dude in turn on even the most basic ideas. i should not have to show you that what i believe is the fucking same as what you believe, but i am told to. constantly. there is not not-pixel-art that we should not discuss here. we can moderate ourselves

the mods on this forum act with impugnity, everyone else acts in fear of mod

in short, i am socratic and you are not. but you are not post-socratic, you are pre-socratic. we can speed this up. have you read plato? bc i have read plato and lets be more platonic on here. i will show you how.

[AlexHW]

listen to me. or at least consider it.

How do you discern when someone has listened to you? What determines that a person has listened to you?.. Can you give us specifications that we can meet?

[Ryumaru]

If we are not lenient enough for you, you are free to leave and go elsewhere. This is not about gods, but about practicality. It's not about knowing more or less, it is about authority and your lack of respect for it.

Any further blatant disrespect for the staff of this site will result in a strike from me. If you have any legitimate concerns, you are free to voice them in a private message. I implore you to think more about your words (actions) on here; I would much rather see you become a positive, contributing member of this forum, than continue to be on the cryptic, disruptive path that you are currently taking.

[tocky]

take any sentence i have written, rewrite it in your own words, make that a topic of a new post

how many strikes bans a dude?

what im saying is im a utilitarian pixel artist too. i want the most efficient solution to problems. so thats why i come here and not some other place. this is a community i have done a lot of good work for. i have not been treated well in return.

ryamaru, i do not like you. i care more about this community than do you. i do not mean you disrespect.

if you had heard me you would have written a nicer reply. you guys are wrong because you want this discussion to go slower and not faster. i am not crazy, you guys all are crazy samurai just swinging your sword dicks around. too many moderators here. or too few. not the right amount. you're younger than me btws.

so we teach the kids on this board to aspire to be moderators and not artists. new ways to be lawful, not new ways to be chaotic.

[AlexHW]

take any sentence i have written, rewrite it in your own words, make that a topic of a new post

what youre asking me to do is actually paint a pixture to illustrate each of my points.
which is time and energy you havent demenostrated is wort a cent to me, not one cent of time or energy or thanks, only neglect.



...See what I did there?


edit: fun aside, I still am curious about you, otherwise I wouldn't bother responding, but I just think you make it difficult to communicate with you because you repeat patterns in your mind that cause yourself to see the same interpretations, so you believe nobody is listening because nothing is changing for you.

[Ryumaru]

Three strikes is a ban.

Your words have been very far from efficient. They are cryptic and superfluous ;your message comes from connections that you have found and believe to be true, and are not absolutes.

You don't have to like me. You can not know how much I care about this community in the same way I cannot know that you do. However, your glasses are fogged if you do not see that every minute we spend making these posts could be better spent doing edits for other members in the critique forum and helping someone on their artistic journey. This is the problem you are creating; your actions are relatively benign, but the chaos you bring takes away from very real and practical time that could make huge differences in someone's path on becoming a better pixel artist.

Talk is cheap. It will probably be a while before I reply to you again. I invite you to give some mindful critique in one of the art sections. I will do the same. Consider the audience when you do so.

[tocky]

i believe you guys are listening but not enough. like 5% listening. listening only to the pixels and not the message

you can know how much i care by measuring how much i have written.

i disgree that edits are better than discussion. i did my time doing edits. discussion is faster

edits are cheap. talk is expensive. too expensive even to read, it seems like.

the ramblethread is the best thread we have so far. but we can do better than this

we should write many words about the pixel

[AlexHW]

on a side note, I think mods here can act a bit too serious. Banning one person for speaking their mind won't stop another person from coming and speaking their mind in the future. I don't really see any harm to what tocky is doing.
I don't see how it detracts from anyone being able to edit or critique other people's work here. If you just cut off the disturbance, how can anyone learn from it?..

[tocky]

howd you get your two strikes alex? (as you can see, the man who comes to my defense is only a strike away from being banned himself, he must care also)

[AlexHW]

I use to be a mod and admin here way way back before these people ran the place.. then things changed. I came back, spoke my mind and got banned.

[tocky]

arguing with ghosts. we are dead already.

speaking which you guys remember when ryumaru came in here from his roost in the editing subforum and told me to fuck off and act more in accord with the principles or hed try to get me banned

i tell you there is no book of principles but the one i am writing

but yeah, ryu can just sit here with his zero strike and argue with all of us as if he's god.

nobody fucking took any notice when i awarded myself a zillion bazillion points, if you remember

even ptoing and helm will tell you that my pixel art is good, but are powerless to do anything in my favor. they have to always point back to this thing, moderation, and how it relates to the pixel, i tell you it is unrelated

the pixel is not law but chaos

[AlexHW]

..I just see two perspectives. Nothing right or wrong about them, except maybe their belief with the right or wrong. I can't really tell- it's interesting from my vantage point though.

[tocky]

and alex will remain neutral, which is good, someone to advocate for the neutrals, the ghosts of the neutral planet.

so: me, arachne, alex and ilkke. four people what would be better than the current moderators here. the chaos gods are still mods even if they are chaos, so we should keep those guys because we need chaos guy and not law guys.

i mean if youre looking for guys to mod here i could do you a list of names. but we dont need mods.

we have too many already~~

[ptoing]

I don't really think this is about disrespect of authority, which I do not really care for. I want people to respect the community as a whole.

tocky, so far, since you came back from your 4 year or so hiatus, you have mainly written stuff which relates to pixelart at best tangentially and what you have written is very convoluted. I can empathise where you are coming from. I have dealt with mental issues in the past, I have had depression (still have to some degree) and I had a manic episode in my late teens. What I know from that time is that I thought I had some deep insight and everything made sense and I could connect everything to everything else with ease. But looking at it with hindsight I see that was just because I was manic. It messes up with your ability to self assess.

Everything you write seems to suggest that your way is the only right way and everyone else should listen to you. You so far did not demonstrate in which way the stuff you are writing is helpful in the least. To the community, to pixel art, to whatever.

I am all for using the Socratic method to ask questions and get some dialogue going, but I have to have at least the feeling that the party I am talking to will consider things I am saying. So far you do not come across like that.

I am totally up for people giving constructive feedback about what we could improve about Pixelation (for example in the future of pixelation thread). And if there are people that are willing to help implement these things, then that is cool as well.

I am sure there are things that could be improved. Crow is working on some custom forum software which will make things a lot more streamline in terms of features that we need or don't need. But that will take some time. All this stuff takes time, esp. when people are also studying or have to make a living.

Also, Alex: You did not just "speak your mind". You thought some terminology people used was silly (hueshifting) and then went on to rant about greyshifting (where value-shifting would probably have been a better term) in other people's unrelated threads. That is why you got banned, not because you simply spoke your mind. I am glad that you are back now and I have seen you give good critiques to people and be a helpful member of the community and I highly appreciate that. But lets be honest about our shortcomings here.

You can tell me what you think my shortcomings are, or the shortcomings of the forum in general. As long as things are kept constructive and polite.

Back to tocky:

I am OK with some chaos being inserted into the mix here. But there is a certain baseline we have established. There is a very good reason why we do not have a general chit chat type subforum on here. In general all forums that have this (pretty much all I know apart from pix) will have more drama because people will talk about stupid shit and get on each others nerves, as well as inviting people who are not at all interested in what the forum is about, such as games, pixelart, what have you, and are just being asshats. Which is more or less what killed Eatpoo back in the day. There was too much chaos, established professional artists who gave great critique left because the forum became too childish and was run by non-artist friends of the owner of the board. Let's avoid things like that. Hence no blah blah forums.

You are totally free to come up with some activities that people can partake in and post them in the activity subforum. As long as they have to do with pixel-art.

You can not seriously expect to come to some place, proclaim you are some kind of master-mind, almost messianic figure, and then only write stuff that is hard to make sense of. People will look at it and think "this is nonsense" and disengage. I don't think you can fault anyone for that. Though I am sure instead you could think that we are all just too dumb to get it.

About your suggestion for mods: Both ilkke and arachne have been asked before if they want to be mods by me personally. They do not have the time and/or energy to do this. If they wanted to, they could be mods.

[tocky]

my main concern with what you said, ptoing, is that if we dont talk about this shit, the mod wins and the other guy stays mad about it forever. a mod's word is law.

you are asking me to keep proving to you that my shit is related to the pixel, i tell you that it is, this is enough. if i keep arguing with you i will write a thousand posts about what is and is not and then i will be banned.

this math, which is set theory, discrete math, graph theory, is definitely pixel math. its too programmery for some, i understand. but its still worth talking about.

crypto, definitely related to the pixel. all symbols in pixels are anonymised, but you can still see where they come from, it's painted in the pattern.

the old gods. philosophy. related. all the new mods are weak philosophers, they construct weak arguments.

the way the guys in the business forum treat artists like trash, totally related.

i believe you that you asked ilkke and arachne back in the day, but the guys we have instead of them are fucking amateurs. tey dont know how to pixel and they dont know how to mod. and tehy have the fucking temerity to tell me i am wrong.

[AlexHW]

tocky,
I believe you when you say that everything you talk about is related to the pixel. I can see that. I also can see how everything is related to a paperclip or to a button or a shoelace. It's amazing how that is the case. Why others can't see it too, is something I'm unsure about even though I have my theories. I know it took me a long time before I realized these things. Sure, it is all perceptual and the workings of the mind, which some might use as a way to dismiss various claims or insights (I don't think they give themselves enough credit). That's their business, and their mind working for them. The thing is, it doesn't stop you or anyone else from seeing it. It's part of reality from our perspective, and is what allows everything to make sense rather than to just fall apart into separate facts that don't mean anything.. Those that deny it, can't live without it. It's there without you having to be aware of it because it is naturally a part of everything, under the surface, doing its' thing. I can see the reasoning behind why people would dismiss it, but it sure is a lot to dismiss.

edit: btw, I myself am unsure about whether it is good to force the sight onto someone else. I'm leaning more towards the idea that it is best to let people figure it out themselves, because then they feel it emerge from within themselves rather than having it appear like a distant echo. It's much more humbling when it comes from within- but there are a lot of outside conditions that can affect how a person reacts to it. It's better to do it in a supportive way than to be aggressive I think.

[ptoing]

OK, in what way is a paperclip or a shoelace related to everything? I grant that they exist in the same universe and their atoms were once part of probably the same, or at least some of the same, stars ours are from. Other than that, what relation is there, say between a paperclip on your desk and me. Or between my shoelaces and the pixelart you make?

[AlexHW]

That's up to you ptoing, honestly.
I'm not here to prove it to you. I tried it before, but it's nice that you're asking questions at least.

[ptoing]

Just tell me this. Do you really believe that my shoelaces have any impact on your life directly?

[AlexHW]

The fact that I even have to talk about your shoelaces is proof that it has some impact on my life in this very moment, assuming you even have shoelaces. If you're using shoelaces as something symbolic for something else.. which I think you are, considering we're just talking about something that may or may not be here or there, then what are we really relating ourselves with? Are we simply relating ourselves to each other? Are you impacting my life any bit right now? I guess so..

[ptoing]

My point is that while I might have an impact on your life because we communicate on this forum, my shoelaces, my paperclips (if I had any) and pretty much all other stuff that is lying around in my house or exists in the village I live in has no impact on your life. Any connections you might draw there would be highly esoterical, if that.

[AlexHW]

Hmm, well that's debatable then. If you want to use such references in such contexts, you're going to have to prove them to me, otherwise I can only consider them as symbolic of something else.

[ptoing]

I don't think I have to prove anything to you. My point is that the connections tocky is trying to make are largely esoteric and not in direct relation to pixelart. If he can demonstrate that they are I am cool. He is claiming they are, the burden of proof is on him, not on me. And just saying that the connection is there without demonstrating it is not proof.

[PixelPiledriver]

but the guys we have instead of them are fucking amateurs. tey dont know how to pixel and they dont know how to mod.

Please be a bit kinder to others tocky.
And please do not refer to me as a god.
I ask you this personally, not as a representative as the moderators.

[tocky]

Just tell me this. Do you really believe that my shoelaces have any impact on your life directly?

ONLY IF EVERYBODY TRIES TO MAKE ME EAT THEM

AND YEH, PILEDRIVER, YR A REGULAR GUY. BUT YOUSTILL GIVE ME A LOT OF SHIT ABOUT DOUBLEPOSTING, UNDULY, ANY ROBOT COULD TELL ME NOT TO DOUBLEPOST.

BUT U I AM A CHAOS ROBOT. I WILL NEVER BE STOPPED

so yeah, i dont think of you guys as gods. you guys think pretty heavyy of yourselfves though. loffty responses to lofty ideas.

i havent written the sermon about ptoing yet, i think i t might be even nicer than the one about helm. i am more fond of ptoing i guess. ptoing draws hastur, helm draws robots. im a robot.

[ptoing]

Helm has drawn Hastur. I have not. And I think I have at least pixeled more robots than Helm.

you guys think pretty heavyy of yourselfves though.

All I can say is: glass houses.

[yaomon17]

The goal of the mods is the enforce the forum in such a way so that the forum is most conducive to people being able to receive critique and improve their art (which is the main goal of the forum). If you interrupt this in ways such as incessantly bumping posts that may or may not be relevant to the  goal of the forum with replies that don't contribute to any discussion pertaining to critique/improvement, you are harming the forum environment pushing the posts of others who may want critique away and filling the content of the site with posts that fail to contribute clearly and directly to art. The mods are just doing their jobs in keeping the forum in line. You can still voice your opinion about the Joker in the off topic thread, or anywhere else on the internet. Just don't walk into a church yelling about how much you hate DC comics and expect not to be escorted out while screaming about the oppression of the preacher and how you can deliver the sermons better.

[tocky]

point to ptoing. yeah i switched the names accidnetally but i left it that way just to get you to stop and think about it for a second

i think the discussion im having here right now, which is my critique of the moderation policcy here, is more important than any given edit of a musclebaby walking through a cavestory

firstly, i've got enough notes here now to write the sermon on ptioung. it will be kinder than the sermon on helm. because while helm is infallible, a pixel genius, he is not ptoing, who i am more fond of.

the next sermon of tiamat: expect that soon.

http://goblinwars.tumblr.com/ << i have started a thing. anyone can follow. anyone can submit, it will be chaotic neutral over there, no lawful goods allowedd

i might be shitting in a wider sine arc than some of you guys. you guys i will work for free but not for lawful good. there will not be so many ronin running around with their samurai dicks out

because what we need is fewer mods, not more

[Crow]

but the guys we have instead of them are fucking amateurs. tey dont know how to pixel

Oh, I don't need to. I'm not here for that.

[RAV]

An apoplectic seizure has something to do with your life. But you don't want a seizure. especially not when you're driving a bus with kids in the back.

[yaomon17]

Well great! Actual experience and training needed to become a pastor? No sir, not for me! I'll just randomly waltz in, jot down some notes and become a professional! Good on you to have that degree of skill 

[ptoing]

ó_o

[tocky]

but the guys we have instead of them are fucking amateurs. tey dont know how to pixel

Oh, I don't need to. I'm not here for that.

crow, youre a programmer, but this forum needs MORE PROGRAMMERS. you've got piledriver culling doubleposts but anyone could write a function that does that. piledriver can do something else instead. something more pixelly. i should mention that im not allowed to cull my own doubleposts because im not even allowed to delete my own posts

Well great! Actual experience and training needed to become a pastor? No sir, not for me! I'll just randomly waltz in, jot down some notes and become a professional! Good on you to have that degree of skill 

YOU ARE LEARNING MY YOUNG FRIEND

you dont need training to be a priest. in any case im a color expert and a writer and a programmer as well, a game designer, a hacker,  an animator, a movie expert. not to mention a skilled pixel artist

SOON WE WILL HAVE TO DISCUSS THE TAROT. I AM SORRY
http://goblinwars.tumblr.com/  << this is where ill do all my fight stuff from now on. fight me in the pixeldrome

[NowvaB]

You must have a thick pair of brass ones my dear friend Tocky, To come back for the first time in forever and say that the current mods are no good.

Pixelation is a message board about pixel art, first and foremost. Its role is to provide a setting in which people may sharpen their skills by posting work and receiving critique from others, and to offer critique when others request it.

I've read all of your sermon you've been trying to preach here on wayofthepixel and non of my skills have sharpened.
are you fighting the moderators or the mission statement?

I feel like you believe this is some sort of experiment in which you gain followers and take over the forum. (note your massive amounts D&D references)
You'r obviously capable of contributing greatly to the forum and I don't want you to leave. I see that you are capable because your knowledge of pixel art, palettes, and past critiques. You also seem like a pretty cool person. I can see that in your humor... when I manage to tell apart the jokes from the 'message'.

I know that writing stuff down keeps you "self-moderated", but I don't think this is the place. How about the Great color expert, writer, programmer, designer, hacker, movie expert, skilled pixel artist, Tocky, who sometimes refers to himself in the third person, take the "Tocky Way" to a website of his own and make as many treads as Tocky wants.

I will say this though... [Serious Mode Engage] The moderators have put up with enough of your shit, and need to stop appeasing you and your rebellious actions. We all know what happens when someone who strives for power gets appeased.

[tocky]

the mods here have never been good tbh. not since before i was here the first time. good pixels, not good mods.

ill respond to the other things you said:

tbh if they ban me i still win. the tocky heresy will be remembered and the mods will be smarter for it.

i already made my own website. it's goblinwars on tumblr

im gonna stille be here tho, they wont ban me. becaue they know im not just talkin shit. read my posts. from teh start, if you like. im a good pixel and im good to the newbs. people got long memories tough, they remember me from before. they arent good to me, but they will remember

i was right about photobucket, i was right about grotesques. and im right about the rest of this shit

you can have a point for being willing to mention d&d, even in passing

vote tocky for lizard pope. 2k15. i have started a (SMALL) power struggle on wayofthepixel, but i have already escaped to goblinwars

[Joe]

I'm surprised this has gone on for as long as it has. There have literally been 92 posts from tocky since this started, all lunacy, all pollution. No one has time to decrypt this stuff.
At first I just thought he was having a bad trip or something. But this is some fantastic trolling, intentional or not.
If this was another user, another time, they would have been banned a week ago. How many double posts? How many necro'd threads? Moderators shit talked?
Most of all, rule one is don't be an ass. I feel like 92 posts of raving fit that criteria.
What does all of this communicate to prospective members?

I had a crippling depression once myself. I pulled myself out of it and came back to reality. I've also tripped many times on many things. On none of those occassions did I think it would be appropriate to express myself in a rational forum like this. What a waste of time that would be for everyone.
Most people understand on a fundamental level when they're in a mental state that is not conducive to rational communication. Probably everyone here has miscommunicated at least once, or made a mistake of etiquette. But occasionally someone is continually blind to their lack of etiquette, or they don't care, and it always ends in the forum being without that member for a time. Which is good for everyone—the forum is quiet again, and that person is given the opportunity to gain perspective.

Joker can be related to pixels, paperclips can be related to life. I am open-minded enough to listen to this. But the connection must be drawn through logic. And to be relevant, it should probably have some use to people. Otherwise, who cares? It's just noise. If any of this were sound, even if it rocked the boat, or revolutionized the way we look at pixels, everyone would listen carefully and there would be a fruitful discussion, as has been the case so many times.
None of it is sound. It's just games with semantics.

This community, to me, is many things... among them, a group of role models, people who think more carefully than I do. I prize this forum because it's always been a center of rational, methodical thought. I speak for myself but I suspect there are others; all of this sudden, senseless noise is nothing but a distraction. I really don't see why this should continue.

Pollution is the word that comes to mind.

[lachrymose]

I have to agree 100% with Joe here and to add my own thoughts:

If I wanted to read conjecture, prose and bad philosophy while still retaining some semblance of an artists atmosphere I'd head over to the deviantart Philosophy and Religion forum, because I would have a whole lot more to read, without fear of losing quality(lol) in the content of the threads.

I personally enjoy this forum over others because there is no general discussion forum or sub-forums that tend to get polluted with nonsensical BS.

Mental disorders aside, the needs of one shouldn't be pushed onto a community that has largely expressed, in different forums and in different ways. That they are tired of all this.

[tocky]

OK, THIS IS THE MOST SANE TOCKY SO FAR.

i advocate for chaos? why. because i understand chaos theory. i know what it is for. it's to shake things up around here.

you're saying there is no safe harbor for the sick or for the dead.

you're wrong. this place is safe. i can make it so just by talking about it.

BUT NO, THIS TOCKY IS A POLLUTION ON OUR VERY EYES. A SICKNESS. GET THIS SICK PERSON AWAY FROM ME

actually im healthy. i am gonna trim this community into shape. and not even as a mod, i can do it as a power user. because i've always been better at pixel than most of you guys, you can trust that i believe what i say when i talk about symbolism. all of this shit is real on here, we make it real by believeing it.

i didnt tell you guys i was crazy so you could use it against me. actually im not even crazy. anxiety and depression, from being treated poorly. you guys are crazy though because you refuse to admit you do not understand the basics of design.

i personally prefer the discussion on here to the edits. the edits are fine, but the discussion is why im here.

[32]

I hope you're right tocky cause from where I'm standing I can't see the end game in all this.

On more on-topic off-topic the 25th anniversary of Voyager's Pale Blue Dot photograph was a couple of days ago. Click here to see my favourite rendition of Carl Sagan's wonderful monologue set to the tunes of Mogwai and the imagery from some great films.

[tocky]

ok: end games

either i get banned or i dont. i prefer not to.

if i do get banned, i keep posting on goblin wars and pixeljoint and probably opengameart. i can steal your best dudes, or even just my best dudes, because you dont appreciate them.

if i dont get banned, this still happens. but we get a nice cross-pollenation of ideas that this community surely needs.

BUT YEAH I DO HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY, DO YOU

[32]

Nope. I like it here, it's cozy and warm and it smells like home

[tocky]

A POINT FOR YOU 32, FORE BEING COOL
anyway i miss this community, i miss having an audience who gives a shit. they dont give a shit enought htough.

the other thing is it doesnt matter how many crazy posts i make. i paid for that shit already. if its not more than half, im still doing better than the next nerd.

[32]

I agree, and I hope you find your way back here. I truly believe the pixelation I grew up with is the place all new artists should cut their teeth. Much as you'd like to mix it up, this place is not for us.

[tocky]

the thing is we can't turn back the clock, but we can use the archive. it's all still there, just the words not the pixels -- but, if you're not paying attention, words are pixels too, a lot of the old chaos stuff is from before i was even here. but i still read it. and so can anyone

[32]

That's true, but honestly I never have. Ask me to 8 years ago and there's not a chance in hell

[AlexHW]

I don't think I have to prove anything to you.

you are asking me to keep proving to you that my shit is related to the pixel, i tell you that it is, this is enough. if i keep arguing with you i will write a thousand posts about what is and is not and then i will be banned.

I just would like to point out how similar you're posts are to each other.

He is claiming they are, the burden of proof is on him, not on me. And just saying that the connection is there without demonstrating it is not proof.

I don't think you're being perfectly honest with yourself ptoing. Try to look at what is being demonstrated more honestly without your filters on.

lets be honest about our shortcomings here.

Show me how your shoelaces have no impact on my life if you want to be perfectly honest with your shortcomings, otherwise don't try to play me as a fool. You're acting just like how you're claiming tocky to be acting.

Also, I said I wasn't here to prove anything to you ptoing, because I've tried it in the past, and you've recreated the same response you had back then- with making claims yourself without proving them to me. I have demonstrated already the relation- I have given proof, but you are refusing to see it and just want to see it your way. You want concrete proof, but you're using symbolism and thinking it is concrete. If you're going to misunderstand what both of us are saying, then it's difficult to communicate with you. I'm not trying to discredit you- because I realize what you're trying to say, but you're not saying it truthfully to me, which is what I'm trying to advocate here. I believe you can eventually see it, which is why I'm trying to help out here, so I hope you don't think I'm just trolling or messing around- don't just brush it off, because you'd be doing a disfavor to yourself. I care for you that much at least.

[Helm]

I guess we got some forum drama going after all, huh.

So here's the thing, why I'm glad tocky is not banned - I tried very hard to read and understand his posts. I get a lot of his reference points (philosophy, dungeons and dragons, pixel art obv., activism stuff) and I sorta get a few connections he's making but a t the same time it's clear to me that he's having a manic episode. If I could divorce the content of his posts from the state of mind he's in, I think he'd have valuable things to say about Pixelation. But there's a manic quality to this all that makes it easier to discredit. Tocky, if I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but that's why I told you you should seek help, not to make you disappear, but to tend to the problem and then return to the content.

When someone who has been here on Pixelation for a very long time, has helped people, has paid dues without asking for anything in return (the definition of pixelation peer, mind you) is struggling, it isn't right to just minimize them and wish for them to not exist just because they're going through an unpleasant thing.

This has happened on Pixelation a few times, usually with depression. Every time it has been very difficult to handle and I don't think just 'don't be an ass' is the solution here. That's a method useful for keeping the critique boards clean of assholes who like to tear other people down.  Tocky's been quite belligerent in this thread because he's not been getting the response he thought he should have to his posts. It'll probably get him banned and he thinks it'll martyr him but not really, nobody remembers that stuff besides the moderators that had to make the call and it's not a nice memory.

So instead of just spiralling down the cycle of minimization and belligerence let's do something else to not get Tocky banned: Tocky, I am not a moderator, I can't make you a moderator, but what else can I do for you? Would you like to discuss something in particular? Is it possible to have a lucid conversation to come down from your chaos sorcery trip of the past week?

[tocky]

well, im bringing the best stuff back. the CHAOS ENGINE COMMERCIAL CRITIQUE IS GOOD


preamble to the third sermon on demogorgon:

FIRST OF ALL, patrick psyduck actually wrote a response to my recent crusade, and you can see it on his blog. it's called 'in defense of dwarves' OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT, and also he writes lots of good stuff you guys dont really care about.

this means, and we can see this in the length of his reply, that he has thought about what i am saying and cares about it, more than zak does, even though it be zak i am emulating and not patrick.

so why let these two guys be two corners of my NEW TRINITY? i'll show you. but you dont even know patrick, why listen to that guy?

http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/on-osr-new-wave-patrick-stewart-of.html

SECOND OF ALL, i have argued with ptoing lately. but largely not about the-form-of-the-pixel. mostly just about the-form-of-the-forum. on pixels, ptoing is infallible. the man can not make a wrong move.

THIRD, i love ptoing more than helm. i love patrick more than zak. but i still bought zak's new book, because i understand why zak is worth money.

here is a defense of zak, written by patrick: find it on patrick's blog. falsemachine.blogspot.com
anyway, the first thing about patrick is he is more-of-a-poet than zak. zak is commercial but patrick, generally, is free. third-secondly, both of these dudes are commercial, but not very. STILL: THEY HAVE PUBLISHED BOOKS AND WE CAN READ THEM.

[Helm]

Haven't read that in a while, want to discuss what you thought was interesting in it. It's been a few years.

[tocky]

ok: but there's been a commercial critique on pokemon since last time i was here. im a huge pokemon nerd. so im tempted to read that one instead.

i will edit this post.

first of all, all of the BITMAP BROTHERS games are part of the pixel canon. anyone who will not consider them throws away what is good in life. we can see that even if the robots in Z have not been influences on ptoing, they might as well have been.

IN ALL HONESTY I PREFER Z BECAUSE I PLAYED IT WHEN I WAS A KID. people don't talk about Z even though its more fun to play than is CHAOS ENGINE. it's more-tooley, so we dont consider it a pixel game. BUT IT IS ONE THO, TAUGHT ME HOW TO PIXEL IN FACT

A LOT OF THE POKEMON CHALLENGE STUFF IS REALLY NICE.

so: back to chaos engine. GOAT was still here back then. what does GOAT have to say? well, first he tells us that the BITMAP BROTHERS DID EXIST, which is helpful if oyu didnt know. then he tells us all of the chaos art is still up on http://hol.abime.net/2985/screenshot and http://www.lemonamiga.com/?game_id=1848

which is good, because we can still look at it and we dont even have to play CHAOS ENGINE unless we want to (its pretty fun).

even just looking at the art i can tell you that even BITMAP BROTHERS can teach us what DAWN BRINGER has done: you can mix red and cyan (any two complimentary colors) to make gray. but also notice the lighting: its subtle but it is bedrock.

we can see at the time that GOAT was having image hosting problems, however, all of his art is still up. none of us need be plagued bu hosting problems now, anyone can just use photobucket, which will stay up forever and has done so.

he pulls apart the dinosaur, in doing so he pulls apart the palette. he also acknowledges the detail in the pontilist tiny people standing around the dinosaur. pontilist tiny peopel is its own whole branch of pixel art with its own conventions.

he notes that the space of colors here is very complicated, even though at first glance it just appears grey. they'e doing little points of interest with complimentary colors, which is nice. points of interest in a sea of grey.

he shows us that the ramp on a metal pipe is not just a flat curve, its very complicated - but so too is anything in a bitmap brothers game. complex ramps.


then helm comes in. what does helm have to tell us? helms' images in this thread are down but i can try to remember them. in any case the words are still up.

helm tells us we should play teh game instead of just looking at the thing. fair enough, point to helm. he even tells us why we should.

helm admits he is a comics guy really but has been forced to become a pixel guy (by the muse i think).

then helm starts talking about the palette again and shows us how to make our own tiles in the bitmap brothers style. unfortunately the images arent up anymore, but i remember them and they were on point.

ANYWAY helm has studied the game CHAOS ENGINE and is made better by this study.


adamtierny comes in. he says that the pixeling (subpixel and superpixel) is good but the form is bad. bad perspective, bad bad restrictions. i will add: a bad interface. but good enough for amiga at the time.


ptoing is too busy to right write away. this is ok; hes busy.

he comes back later and he takes apart the palette. the palette in this game is subnetted like a network, all these parts that do not speak to one another.

he says that the amiga only has 4096 colors on its color space, a cube, 4 shades each of red green and blue. but it is a space and not a scheme: it is not specialised. 4096 is actually big-not-small, but whatever.

the specialised scheme for CHAOS ENGINE changes as we change levels and stuff. 16 colors for teh hud, those never change and never get used outside the hud. these are constant. another however-many-colors for the player characters. so-many for the current level, so-many for enemies. this is good and in concert with good game design. we can swap all these palettes independently of one another. we cn animate them from one frame to the next. and this lets us animate the palette on just a dude who just got hit? did they do this? i dont remember. but they can, because they have subnetted their color space.

i should post this in the CHAOS ENGINE THREAD, NOT THIS ONE

WHAT IS GOOD IN LIFE?

[Helm]

I played Z at the time, was too hard for me but I really liked the art style, yes. Chaos Engine is still pretty fun if you play with a buddy and you put certain limitations on yourself (play it like a roguelike, death means game over for example, fixes a lot of problems with old games).

I wonder where Goat went. I bet he still exists.

I agree that the main asset of that bitmap brothers style, besides good design (which has nothing to do with pixels in particular) is going from a saturated color to another through a gray or three.

Good observation on the pointilist tiny people, I always adored stuff like that. I remember that there's an amiga game called Paladin I think where a sprite of a table and chair set that has one-pixel thick wooden table legs with another pixel thick shadow and I thought it was perfect somehow and would not be any better if the legs were two pixels fat with some other solution for the shadows. That has stayed with me since then.

Haha, my brain must be a bit tired, I wanted to find a picture of that and instead of going to mobygames, I google searched "paladin table legs".



Anyway, here's the actual item

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/omnitrends-paladin-ii/screenshots/gameShotId,260786/

[tocky]

nice, also hella points for being cool to me, i dont make it easy

as far as goat, he's your friend, you find him

[Helm]

tocky, if you were to do a commercial critique, which game would it be on?

[tocky]

I DONT EVEN FUCKING KNOW. YOULL HAVE TO GIVE ME MORE TIME

morrowind i guess. good gnosis game, not a great praxis game. at least as-relates-the-pixel. certainly the best bethesda game, cruelly under-examined

in fact im already planning to write that thread, on tigs if not here

MAYBE LOOM, MAYBE A BIG BROTHER GAME. SOMETHING THAT IS AN ADVENTURE, MANIAC MANSION? DID WE DO THAT ONE ALREADY?

[Helm]

Pixel arty game to do a commerical critique on though. Take your time.

[tocky]

I RECKON ITS GOTTA BE MANIAC MANSION. i prefer loom, and monkey island, but maniac mansion, or even zak mckraken, is prototypical (never played zak mckracken tho)

im tempted to say one of YAHTZEE CROSHAWS GAMES but it is the idea of being a fedora king i want to talk about truly, still he made good games back in the adventure game studio days.

he understands that if you put a number in the title it comes first alphabetically, old shareware trick.

if we do a big brother game, we venerate big brother. worth it.

something liek dangerous dave? wolfenstein.

[Helm]

What would you say about Maniac Mansion. The first thing that comes to mind is that I think it would immediately look more attractive if everything was half the size. It's flat and nice looking, but too much space and weird cluster shapes. Buy shrinking and making the world look like a toybox they'd have to come to terms with designing everything more intentfully and concisely.

re: Yahtzee, I've lost track. Is he a 'fedora king' or has he taken a social justice activism bent? I hope for the latter, he's a smart guy.

[tocky]

yahtzee lives in my city, i'll interview him for you if you must know. i think hes still man-hat and not lady-hat but he might be neutral. neutral is more his style i think. he does need to be the only dude in the room wearing a hat. HE RUNS THE TRIVIA NIGHT AT MANA BAR. he wrote a novel also: MOG WORLD, I HAVE READ IT AND ITS KINDA PRATCHETT BUT NOT AS GOOD. THE MAIN CHARACTER IS A RINCEWIND LICH. ITS SET INSIDE WORLD OF WARCRAFT

[Helm]

Oh, there's no reason to. He wouldn't be happy to be reminded of me and my curiosity isn't personal, just a 'how do people adapt to new circumstances' musing.

More on Maniac Mansion, if you will.

[tocky]

THE BEST THING ABOUT MANIAC MANSION IS THE LOSING IS FUN DYNAMIC

they catch you, they put you in the dungeon. if you have a dude in the dungeon you can use a second dude to get tehm to escape. it's always possible to escape.

it uses a 16-color subset of the ega palette, in fact it uses the cga palette i think. both are spaces not schemes. but listen: all 16-color ega permutations are good palettes for some purpose.

because of this it is forced into making good decisions as regards color.

[tocky]

on yahtzee: peopel i know have known peopel who have known yahtzee. i have played his trivia night and i have played his games. people think hes a good dude, i think hes too mean and too crude for me to seriously want to hang out with him. but um, they do dev meetups at mana bar, and i should go to those, even if not to trivia night. i shouldnt avoid the ghost of yahtzee crowshaw. just im a little afraid of him i think.

anyway, if yahtzee is hastur in this town, truna is eredis. truna scares me also. i took her game history class and she doesnt remember me. she didnt even talk about my game history, she talked about her game history. but all of this is fine.

anyway, from this marriage of hastur and eredis, we get vaporwave. vaporwave is the new metal. i am fond of it.

[Helm]

 
This is beautiful to look at. I love it when adventure games of a certain vintage have stable perspective points for all rooms, AGI-era Sierra did this very well. Makes the toyworld consistent and your ordering your little dude around more tactile. It's a play paradigm versus a cinematic paradigm that infected these games later, with dynamic camera angles and less importance in terrain navigation.



exploring my idea a bit, nm

re: Yahtzee he used to scare me back in the day as well, he's good at taking up space and doing things in it, some great some not so great. I don't think this is easy to control this reflex because it *is* about control to begin with.

[tocky]

YEAH, ITS ORTHO, ORTHO IS GOOD FOR US

ok, so im sorry all you guys are not as good at puns and irony as i am. or rather, im sorry im not better at explaining myself in few wods. more words is often better.

you can tell a lot about a person by the content of their characters.

[Helm]

Not as consistent but a lot of similar calming one point in space quest 1.

[tocky]

yeah, i never played it but same feel. kings quest, too. all of them.

um, but you can see that space has a forced perspective, it is not ortho. not exactly ortho. mansion is more-ortho because it does these long pans.

also larry loungelizards... i was too young to play it but also all of the error checking to make sure kids dont get in was trivia for a previous generation of kids that were too young.

the other thing about MANSION is it is very object-oriented.
you have a limit on how many dudes you have, a limit on how much they cn carry, and a limit on which dudes can do which actions with the things. so it's a puzzle in that way. the tentacle game is the same. but it does not let you choose yur own dudes. any-3-dudes can solve it

CGA monkey island is the best monkey island. the vga port is pretty, and the modern one is interesting. but they aint the same

[Helm]

ok, so im sorry all you guys are not as good at puns and irony as i am. or rather, im sorry im not better at explaining myself in few wods. more words is often better.

Sure. I think you may want to reconsider polemics PLUS irony/doublespeak at the same time if you're trying to affect change as an outsider coming in a social space. You've been here a long time but you've been inactive for 4 years, hence being outside which seems to have confused you as to the response you got. People won't give you time of day if you keep telling them you're better than them and that you're trying to help them and why are they ungrateful and and and. Being flexible in how you approach people in itself gives them the message that you care about them on a basic level and that you're relatively sane (flexibility is sanity, generally), you don't have to actually attest to that, you just do it.

[tocky]

you gotta understand that its good for me to be esoteric. its more chaotic, it puts the newbs on edge. the tocky newbs, i guess. it means that my writing is something that must be contemplated and not rushed through. also its funny, it has at least the promise of a punch line.

i want dudes to be like: hmmmm i think i git it. but do i really get it..... hmmmm

i stayed away because i wasnt treated well. i also had to wait a long enough time for peopel to forget me in order to play the heretic. tbh noone would really remember me anyway. the message is this: the young people will not learn to read but we must teach them either way

[Helm]

But you can do that in clear-ish language and form -- in fact that's what lot of philosophy and occultry is doing. Meanings are hard enough, you don't really have to work extra for it.

The way you do it is with this affected kind of internetalk, mispellings left in, sentence fragments, seeming disinterest in form with is intensely formalist in itself and which connotes well-established meanings to the internet denizen. And that meaning has nothing to do with clarity of message, it's a big 'look at me'. Not look at what I'm saying, but look at me. I can't be even bothered to format, but I've spent this amount of time very meticulously un-formatting my format. It's the equivallent of messy hairstyles that take two hours to get 'messy in the just right' way.

Which isn't a dealbreaker by itself. But then you throw in actual mania and the reaching between one sentence and another becomes waaay bigger, and the delusions of grandeur pop up, and the bursts of what looks like anger and you can totally justify whatever you write to yourself and your form completely, while the reader on the other end is getting a very different experience and they're evaluating even bothering to read what you have to say.

So if you want a following, if you want people to benefit from what you have to say, make the meanings as hard as you like, but make the format inviting to them. Can you do that? It's very difficult in itself, I'm not saying I can, but then again I don't want a following.

[tocky]

i am a known esotericist. if you need a hacker dictionary there is always the jargon file. i will try to be more straightforward.

every mispelling is important - a small failure. why did you fail to spell the word correctly? let people wonder. i can usually think about why i spelled it wrong if i think of it as a tiny panic attack. like, writing a thing that must not be said. very cyclopean. soemtimes you have to keep teh bugs in so others can find them. this is why i dont liek to be moderated.

HOMESTUCK teaches us that spelling is voice. if we all spell things the same we lose all that. for waht? the pursuit of a neutral point of view? i prefer chaos - in pursuit of a kinder discourse

[Helm]

Your mispellings are important to you but not for many other people. That you leave them in connotes to them that your own self-analysis is more important to you than communicating with them.

[tocky]

it is at least as-important. im going to read all my own posts, noone else is - im leaving notes for future tocky

[Helm]

Don't be so dramatic, I read your posts, others did certainly.

[tocky]

then congratulations, you are future-tocky.

now um... games arent just pixels. they're texts as well. the text is what makes the game work. and so i must teach all of you to write code. shiffman can teach you processing. i will teach you jokes. shiffman for basics, tocky for esoterics.

yudokowski will teach you how to be rational. read HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

typos are puns. puns are jokes.

and yeah - what alex is saying below. if you can read it quickly youre speed-reading, youre not really reading. Aim to be done in 10 years time, or 10k hours, whichever is first. it's science. ask your doctor if science is right for you.

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I SHOULD MENTION THAT WE SHOULD OFFER A PREMIUM SERVICE BUT ALSO A BASIC SERVICE
youre gonna get these fast guys in, they'll pick up some tips and power through
guys with money, they will pay for it
other guys are lifers, grognards, dwarfs. they are the best of us. bless us all

[AlexHW]

I think tocky is talking more symbolically, Helm. The misspellings he says are important, is a symbolic gesture towards what he is communicating- which is useful for people in that it allows them to find a way to follow him. Without the misspellings, by filtering himself, it removes the texture that is a part of him, so others would not be following him per-say but rather something else that doesn't represent him wholeheartedly.

[Helm]

Everything we do is a performance, everything we believe isn't about a deep truth but is a social construct, as far as I can tell, so there's no full representation of anything to be precious about. Your mispellings are not precious, even if you take them to a therapist, they will probably cut to the chase and deal with much more overwhelming issues than 'why did I mispell this word?'. 

Tocky wants people to follow him, he wants to be a moderator, he wants to have a legacy, he wants to help people. These are concrete goals which will take a lot of performance to achieve.

[AlexHW]

I think you're misunderstanding something Helm.

[tocky]

Everything we do is a performance, everything we believe isn't about a deep truth but is a social construct, as far as I can tell, so there's no full representation of anything to be precious about. Your mispellings are not precious, even if you take them to a therapist, they will probably cut to the chase and deal with much more overwhelming issues than 'why did I mispell this word?'. 

Tocky wants people to follow him, he wants to be a moderator, he wants to have a legacy, he wants to help people. These are concrete goals which will take a lot of performance to achieve.

yeah. all this shit i learned from you and zak and eleizer. how to be a chaos mod. you only have to act slightly outside the existing moderation. the community will cull its own ghosts.

i mean i learned this shit from you but i also took a screenwriting course and played d&d and whatever. chaos theory is hard to learn. you gotta pay attention to mystics and absurdists. humorists.

[tocky]

anyway, might as well move all this stuff into other threads. 'why we should listen to tocky' and 'commercial critique the maniac mansion'

[ptoing]

Woah, lot of stuff happened since I went to sleep.

Alex, my sole point was that whoever claims a thing and especially if they claim it is something important has the burden of proof. Whether my shoelaces have impact on your life or not is not important to you and trying to prove it one way or another would be pointless. Let's leave it at that.

tocky, I am glad to see that you seem to have calmed down a bit. That is going to be a lot more productive.

About Maniac Mansion, you REALLY have to take into account that MM was not made on IBM machines first. It was made for the C64, same with Zak McKracken. On the C64 those 2 games are a massive achievement, esp at the time. A friend of mine who is active in the C64 demoscene has done some enhancements for the C64 version, such as better saving and things like that, and he had to take a close look at the engine. If we do a CC on MM it should be first and foremost the C64 version and then the other versions could be taken into account in a comparative manner. But a lot of the reasons why things are layed out as they are is because it is C64 first, other systems later.

[tocky]

ok yeah. but the cga/cpc/ega/vga palette is better than the c64 one. i, tocky, have taught us this

tocky, or ibmocrates if yu prefer, has taught us this. color spaces not color schemes, 2015.

whats the difference between 'yes' and 'yus'? the answer: its a pun.   yes: yus:

this suggests that somewhere there is a YES BIRD

A LUIGI TO YUS' MARIO

but who else can we get? waluigi, wario, toad, daisy, peach, bowser, pink toad, etc

all of these characters are canon and all of them are locked in endless combat

who will win? the pixel will always win

somebody unlock the map everything thread for me so i can talk about this shit on there. someone tell crow to fuck off for me. let me delete my own posts if its so important that all my posts should be deleted

anyway all this shit goes on my hacker resume. pacified and moderated a pixel forum. give me a new subforum to talk about code

[AlexHW]

ptoing, you interpreted the shoelaces in a way that doesn't allow proof for you. If you saw it differently, you'd see how it relates and then you'd get the proof you asked for. Asking for the proof and then denying it when you get it is confusing- it makes me think there's some sort of preconditioning in your mind, or some pattern controlling you, so it makes it difficult for me to communicate with you.

edit: plus when you add stuff like "let's leave it at that", it makes me believe you're not even interested in what I have to say in the first place.

[ptoing]

ok yeah. but the cga/cpc/ega/vga palette is better than the c64 one. i, tocky, have taught us this

Putting the VGA palette in there is a bit pointless, since it is RGB666 and not some small subset of colours.

As far as cga/cpc/ega being better than the C64 palette, I would argue that it depends what you are doing. For most intents and purposes EGA is just the full CGA palette (16 colours) since not many games used the 16 out of 64 colours thing (where you still only have 2 possible greys.)

When it comes to making interesting and subtle ranges of colour the C64 palette is imo a lot better than cga/cpc/ega.

At the end of the day this stuff comes down to personal taste as well though, so it is kinda pointless to argue whether palette a is better than palette b. The only thing we can argue about is objective values such as: How many colours total are there, how good is our value range, how well can we blend between ranges with the given colours and so on.

If you want to make a new thread about colour theory or something, go ahead, do that. Try and keep it related to pixelart. Most of the statements you made in that post past the first sentence makes little to no sense to me.

Alex: I am done talking about that kinda nonsense with you, sorry. This is not the forum for that and I don't feel in engaging in pointless arguments (you might think there is a point, I don't see it though, shoelaces do not concern me outside the fact that they keep my shoes on my feet).

[tocky]

i feel like i should side with alex here because he's on my side. what do the shoelaces represent?  threads? cobblers? i nearly made a game about a cobbler once, but i never made my own shoes, not yet.

yeah, rgb666 is big. so is rgb333. depends on the restriction. if we work in 1bit rgb222 is big. we only focus on the 8-16-early32bit era - everything pre-doom, pre-rogue, pre-doomrogue, post-adventure, post-zork, post-adventurezork

there are three paradigms: text. arcade games. and doom. we only talk about arcade games here.

but any of us can do a lot with not many colors. antialiasing and dithering and cellular automata. chaos again. we shouldnt require it. we should focus on it.

[AlexHW]

Alex: I am done talking about that kinda nonsense with you, sorry. This is not the forum for that and I don't feel in engaging in pointless arguments (you might think there is a point, I don't see it though, shoelaces do not concern me outside the fact that they keep my shoes on my feet).

Then shut up about it then. Be quiet for a moment and reflect on what you have done instead of regurgitating your lack of understanding. You don't have to shit all over what I say just because you don't want to talk about it. If that's the case, then moderate yourself for a change. Jeeze..

[Helm]

Tocky actually it'd be really cool if you did a commercial critique of maniac mansion.

[ptoing]

I am sorry to have been rude, Alex.

[tocky]

we just already did one in this thread, move it over there could be all 13 pages, just move the thread

[Crow]

Shoelaces? Really?

[Helm]

Tocky, that's not enough, heh. Needs format, needs history, needs enticing hooks, needs ideas to inspire. It's fine if you don't want to, but since you seem to like writing about this stuff, it's worth a shot. Have you ever had somebody edit your output? It's a useful experience.

[tocky]

just move my posts, piledriver will edit them. good editor, knows formatting

Shoelaces? Really?

isnt this ptoings example? is it alexs


let's have +1s for everybody on here. one for helm one for ptoing, one for alex, one for me, one for 32, oen for piledriver why not

piledriver caught on faster than anybody, give him one at least.

crow only just got it just now.

[ptoing]

just move my posts, piledriver will edit them. good editor, knows formatting

Sorry, but that is not what the mods are there for. PPD is quite busy outside of Pixelation. Let's not assume he wants to do extra work to make your stuff more readable. Put in some more effort of your own to do that.

[Helm]

I'd give you a +1 for our last conversation to even you out at zero karma if I could, but you'd have to agree to not let avarice be your ruin (and to not insult people on the forum because you're upset). In my heart you're now at 0 

[tocky]

AWR. thanks helm, anyway you gotta be rude on here to get shit done. all of us are rude. i'm nice tho

[Helm]

Now that you've been rude and gotten shit done, imagine what you could achieve if you were nice and discreet!!

[tocky]

just move my posts, piledriver will edit them. good editor, knows formatting

Sorry, but that is not what the mods are there for. PPD is quite busy outside of Pixelation. Let's not assume he wants to do extra work to make your stuff more readable. Put in some more effort of your own to do that.

cant move m own posts or delete them. has to be a mod. piledriver owes me a favor because i did all this shit, it helps us all, but it helps him most, because hes not gonna have to edit my doubleposts anymore. i was discreet last time i was here assertive is better than passive

[Helm]

Rewrite the thing, Tocky. Format it. Make it useful for everybody. It's fun. Less lonely.

[tocky]

i guess i can copypste as good as anyone, sure. ok i'll start it, but not right away

[Helm]

Thank you 

[tocky]

[TITLE SCREEN]

ok, maniac mansion is not my fave. but i will talk about it because its better than 99.999% of games, including its own brilliant sequel, and this is good enough.

[insert the actual art from the game, THE STUFF HELM POSTED BEFORE]
[insert link to where you can play the game in a browser.]


i will talk about 3 of my fav topics:

the ega-style palette
ortho mode
chaos theory (how to escape the grid)

i will also talk about OBJECT ORIENTATION, MANIAC MADNESS, THE TAROT, THE CRITTER CODE, DRAGONS, ERIS, ETC.

ask me anything.

obviously im not allowed to make this thread

[ptoing]

Tocky, line out a proper first post for a CC thread. Ideally come up with a nice activity to go with it. Make banners for it (150x65 pixels each). Then pm me all that and I will make the thread and put the banners in the news box.

[Helm]

Do it do it it'll be fun!

[tocky]

that is at least as proper as goat's first post in the chaos thread. im just exposing useful variables to you the user

I DONT LIKE MAKING PREVIEW IMAGES BUT YOU GUYS DO


the activity is: design an ortho map of connected rooms using a small rgb palette. MANICMAZE. i will do as little work as i can get away with, MAKING MAPS IS EXPENSIVE but its fun, ive already done it before, but i like writing, writing is cheap for me

[Helm]

Perhaps provide a room-template and a character sprite from the original game so everything's to the same scale? Like, "The endless rooms of the Mansion" or something. Put them all together at the end as a sprawling game map.


(This could easily lead to explaining a few basics of AGS to get more people interested in actually making an adventure game. )

[tocky]

nah, it doesnt need to be the same size. let the artist choose their own restrictions beyond mine. it doesnt even need to be 2d. they will know it's maniac-mansion inspired. call it MANICMAZE. you must believe me when i tell you i am good at puns

like MANICMAZE is what it'd be called in DOS, but with 9 characters, transcending the limitations of the form. function (text) and object orientation (books) and open source (wiki) as three sides of the same coin (the forum? the pixel?)

wayofthepixel is a better operating system than DOS - but in the chaos thread remember we only got in three good posts before tierny came in and tried to shut the whole thing down


HELM
(This could easily lead to explaining a few basics of AGS to get more people interested in actually making an adventure game. )

my money's on twine. I CANT MAKE AGS GAMES REALLY, I ONLY KNOW HOW TO PLAY THEM

but i cant talk about twine without first talking about borges.

thats basically a whole different commercial critique, of zork maybe. probably something more recent - I WANT TO SAY 'with those we have alive' by porpentine, or 'the tower' i think is the other one, by max something. THE BARON if thats what its called. lots of pacian games. i can do a twine subforum - also ascii and petscii. call that Textual Art - i tell you, crosspollenisation

[Helm]

Don't sell that to me, sell it to the mods. I come to Pix for Pixels and pixel theory, personally, but if you've got something salient to say about text adventures, why not use your blog.

[tocky]

yeah, or i could do it on some adventure forum somewhere. but i like this audience. and this the off-topic, is the best place to get those mods attention, also, you are one, look at all them fucking stars under your name

those twine guys got twine skills but you guys dont

im definitely gonna post about it, maybe not here. but its time to learn twine. the twine war is over. also: girls like twine

we need to embrace eredis, embrace the vaporwave

500 posts. enough for today.

[Helm]

The ninja stars are for post numbers (I have many posts). They fly everywhere and ricochet and so on. I have no sword to cut people with, though, therefore not a mod. Do you like the stars or the sword more?

[tocky]

tbh its the same thing. a sword is a vote but a bunch of stars is a vote of another sort, being helm, you outrank a lot of mods you got more power to do shit around here than i do (though im not sure who holds power here anymore, the rogue samurai system seems kinda weak at quashing rebellion. i dont think we should reunite under a single pixel-god-king or anything i just think we should do more with what we have already ) tbh im an accelerationist not a kingmaker... i dont trust ptoing to be king, none of these dudes. not helm, not tocky, not ilkke, not arachne. so its better than whatever. but we can do a samurais thing but with more friendly samurais. the brush instead of the blade. build bridges

i think i may be advocating for traditional family values again. ill come back later and check to see if im still right.


ok yeah. utilitarianism. communism. friendly communism. guy with nothing to lose and a finger on the nuclear button that returns everything to samurais. basicaly what we have now but i ramble more. more rambling. let me protest the shitty mod policy by being like 5% too shitty about it. then dont ban me. the mods will get better at this. you just need a tocky in to kick the tires on this old girl, its gonna be ship shape. non-commisioned officers. a security specialist. the wolf in the henhouse. doesnt have to be me. also we need a christ figure if we need an antichrist. if im the devil then we need arachne or ilkke or somebody to restore balance. make them come here and do a ramblethread


find the ghosts and bring them back and ask them questions

in short:
-maniak mansion commercial crtique (we already did this! here in the off-topic. just move my posts and helm's into the appropriate subforum. and i will run the thread. i am self-moderating. someone make the preview images, i dont want to )
-more mods i like who are friends of me, tocky
-texts are pixels too, a subforum for text. where its ok to ramble
-stop telling me to go somewhere else, ive done that before and it only makes me more mad
-more chaos less order.

street catholic.


treat arachne, helm, and ilkke as three popes. the trinity.

treat me as a ghost who we must listen to. the devil.

treat me, arachne, helm, and ilkke as the four epistles. more-or-less infallible even though not mods. still banable if we get out of line.

who is jesus? the pixel is jesus.

the father-and-son is hastur. helm.

the virgin (sorry) is arachne.

the holy spirit is ilkke.

actually we're all the holy spirit. ilkke is just the most neutral duder we have. we need him for non-binary ideas. ptoing will listen to helm and ilkke and arachne. maybe even tocky.

then who's jesus? we dont know yet, we havent met him yet.

tocky is only a false jesus. the rundlr.

 i guess ptoing is the current pope. what ptoing says is law/ ptoing said we must care about the c64 and so we have cared about it.


we need 12 mods: 3 helms, 3 arachnes, 3 ilkkes, 3 tockies. strong triads that support themselves. representative democracy.

fire, air, earth, and water. benders from every nation. the zodiac. let each triad have dominion over its own domain. edits for the dwarf people. girls for the elf people. neutrals for the neutral planet. ghosts for the void. chaos.

alex is a tocky. ptoing is a helm.

lets get more girls and neutrals and ghosts back in here we already got dudes to spare. too many helms. we need the cult of eredis to counter the cult of hastur. this completes the trinity, and completes the cult of tiamat. listen to some vaporwave or something. listen to grimes. scrap princess teaches us this.


ill make preview images for manicmaze and the commerical critique of maniac mansion, if noone else wants to. 150 by 65. i give you like three days to sort this out. maybe three hours. im not sure.

shout out to my friend  Clementines for the lizard people stuff. she developed all of the thought technologies for this campaign. i just pushed them.

kitty it, even though it has me blocked, because it represents the cult of eredis and hastur

[NowvaB]

Well I guess you clearly made yourself leader of the chaos here. I don't see what's wrong with order though. Do you think order is the reason good people left?
wanted to make D&D references but I don't play it. Is it fun?

[tocky]

i made myself the devil, we still need jesus. the cult is important. its the way we have always talked to each other. i just want to be a precursor to the newb prophets. its about time we celebrate the new gods. women, neutrals, and ghosts.

i put this last post up on the tiamat thread. crow, i want the mappin thread back. otherwise i will write about it everywhere but there.

d&d is a good game and i recommend it. yeah. too much order not enough chaos. nobody appreciates the old gods. nobody cares about the lizard people, not even the lizards in charge. not the lizard boigoisie. not even the dreaded lizard proletariat.

my d&d >> http://evilbaboons.blogspot.com.au/

but i am the void and i will advocate for anybody. im the devil's advocate. the rundler. a ghost lawyer and not a meat lawyer. i am the dad of dads. i am the beast gnash gnash

66666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666


505 posts. a pun on the number of the beast.

5 is not quite six. prime instead of square. sinful.
0 is the void. chaos. unwanted.

i am not the true beast but i got chaos inside me. i have learned to be the void. i can play any role. bc i am multiple and i am endless.

i am a humble and gleeful cultist of tiamat.

thanks for playing u guys

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13/tocky/mvth.png

[Helm]

If you're not gonna make the commerial critique thread and make it useful for everybody and we're back to the chaos magic shtick again that's not to my interest. The way to survive in Pixelation from any vantage is to be useful to people (not being an ass is the bare minimum, and you're not exactly doing that either). If you don't want to be useful you know what'll happen, sooner or later.

[Crow]

crow, i want the mappin thread back. otherwise i will write about it everywhere but there.

No. It doesn't work like this, and you need to understand that. I'm having a really difficult time with you here. You're overstepping far too many boundaries. Please stop trying to push your ideals onto others. You're not getting any special treatment here, so don't be surprised about any bans if you overdo it. You're free to go on with that Commercial Critique, of course, and I'd really appreciate that as well.

[tocky]

i understand  that this is hard to hear.

heres a proper mod structure:

a zodiac is 3 promoters, 3 programmers, 3 dreamers and 3 canonists
we need 12 mods on the developer end, those guys should get paid
then 12 more mods on the player end, who work for free - these guys are sergeants but they are essentially deputies.

thats how you have to run it. otherwise a guy like me can come in and wreck it all in 3 days or so

at the moment we're only recruiting canonists fighter-clerics with no central govrnment, paladins, and we need to push dudes into other roles. your new guy is a druid. piledriver is some kinda thiefcatcher wizard. security, but hes on my side unfortunately.  this is very good.

but yeah. i need a thread where i can talk about the zodiac, and it should be the same thread.

otherwise i can easily talk about it somewhere else, but its not as good.

im excited to do the commercial critique thread. i will not abandon the principles of chaos magic. i have to be chaotic neutral, noone else here will. im gonna run grey ops even if i get banned. i prefer it doesnt come to that.

its better if i talk grey ops and chaos in the grey ops and chaos threads and commercial critique in the commercial critique threads

all this stuff is above board, i will call all my shots well in advance. but if i dont run spy games some filthy capitalist will, they are here already

separation of church and state

BEHOLD THE TRITATON

[Ai]

(could post to creativity thread instead, but I don't quite consider this artwork. More of a filter-facilitated injoke.)

[Mathias]

Hey look, Paul Robertson.
What an awkward dude, haha.






Simpson's pixel intro referred to:

[rikfuzz]

  For some reason I expected him to be pretty confident.  Kind of endearing, though I think even I could fake it for the camera a little bit and I'm quite shy.

Really like that Simpsons intro.   

[Mathias]

Yep. Agree.
The thing that's always amazed me about Paul is what an tirelessly hard worker he is. The guy never quits.
The other dude even happened to mention that Paul would wake up and start pixeling straight away. No breakfast. Just gets up and starts pixeling. hehe

[surt]

The other dude...

Calling iSTVAN the other dude... 

[Mathias]

ohhh
yeeaahhhhh it is

Was lazy about figuring out who it was. Didn't make the connection.
Internet monikers don't translate into real life too well.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Rip to one of my favorite comedians, Harris Wittels 

[PixelPiledriver]

Rip to one of my favorite comedians, Harris Wittels 

Unfortunate.
RIP.

[Seiseki]

Froot, froot...   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l5Cxv-boPc

Reminded me of pixelation.. 

[Ellian]

Welp, I think I'll watch this series just because of this short video. Thanks!

On a different note:
I'm officially a fulltime freelance pixel artist, as of today. Yesterday I moved in back at my parents, and I barely finished unloading the truck at 7pm that CATAM investor jumped on my back with special work to do. I feel like a real freelance already :'D

[CelioHogane]

Welp, I think I'll watch this series just because of this short video. Thanks!

On a different note:
I'm officially a fulltime freelance pixel artist, as of today. Yesterday I moved in back at my parents, and I barely finished unloading the truck at 7pm that CATAM investor jumped on my back with special work to do. I feel like a real freelance already :'D

Ç

High five!

[surt]

Krita 2.9 released: https://krita.org/krita-2-9-the-kickstarter-release/

[Ai]

This doesn't seem offtopic enough, so I guess it's OT for this thread :

I wrote a color-cycle expander. That is, you give it an image and tell it what areas of the palette to cycle, and it works out how many frames that will take and renders them all to a sequence of images, which you can then assemble into an animated gif or spritesheet.
It was prompted by this post on PJ about rendering colorcycling as an image sequence.

It requires Python 3 and Pillow.


The script is here
(or raw here)


It's not ready for formal release yet: I want to improve help and error handling first. That's why it's only on bpaste for now.

Example output animation:

created with

Code: [Select]

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/an.gif 0-23
gifsicle --delay 10 /tmp/an*gif > /tmp/ancycle.gif

Here's another example demonstrating custom cycling sequences.
This second example simply does several consecutive cyclings forward at different speeds. the ccycle command used is

Code: [Select]

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/ar.gif 0-23:0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,0,4,8,12,16,20,0,8,16

It supports any of the following forms of specifying cycling:

* '0-2' cycles the first three colors in the palette, one step forward per frame.
* '0-2:-1' cycles them backward once per frame
* '0-2:2' cycles them forwards 2 steps per frame
* '0-2:1/3' cycles them forwards 1 step every 3 frames.
* '0-2:-1/3' cycles them backwards 1 step every 3 frames.
* '0-2:0,1,2,1' cycles forward then backward (ping-pong), over 4 frames (explicit offsets given)

and as many cycling regions as needed (automatically synchronized and rendered over an appropriate number of frames to give a correct looping.)

EDIT:

I just made another example, but won't link it here because it's huge (6mb gif, 240 frames)

Code: [Select]

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/ac.gif 0-7 8-11:1/2 12-16:1/3 17-20:-1/4 21-23:1/5

this one:
* cycles 0-7, 1 step per frame
* cycles 8-11, 1 step every 2nd frame
* cycles 12-16, 1 step every 3rd frame
* cycles 17-20 backwards, 1 step every 4th frame
* cycles 21-23, 1 step every 5th frame.

[surt]

Did some more work on my colour cube toy: http://img.uninhabitant.com/colourcube.html
Auto update preview.
Added HSV/HSL colour spaces.
Gain/bias adjustment.
Gimp palette and JASC palette export.
Call it finished I think.

[Ai]

Did some more work on my colour cube toy: http://img.uninhabitant.com/colourcube.html
Auto update preview.
Added HSV/HSL colour spaces.
Gain/bias adjustment.
Gimp palette and JASC palette export.
Call it finished I think.

* GPL export is pretty neat.

* I can't get HSV/HSL/CMYK/Gray to work : the color cube simply doesn't update (also, the component order selectors still show R G B rather than HSL or whatever, but I figured that might just be a cosmetic bug). If I manually click Update, it reloads the page and sets the colorspace to RGB.

* Bits works okay for RGB, other options(levels/step/custom) do not appear to affect the display. Hitting update just reloads the page with default settings. These numeric selectors also are limited to a maximum of 8, which suggests to me that they are not being updated when levels, step, or custom is selected, either.

* If you ever get curious about it, HSI might be an interesting option. Photoshop and MyPaint use it for colorization, because it performs far better at maintaining perceptual brightness as you change hue/saturation than HSV or HSL do.

* Gain/bias are basically equivalent to contrast/brightness controls, so it might be more artist-friendly to rename them accordingly.

EDIT: the two problems above do not occur on Midori, only Firefox. Not sure what to conclude about that yet.

[surt]

Oops. Should test in Firefox on occasion. Wasn't specifying the event args on a couple of event handlers, which chrome seems to be fine with (Midori is WebKit based too).
Those problems should be cool now.

Isn't HSI just another name for HSV? Intensity = Value?

I was thinking about HSY (Y being perception weighted brightness), but I couldn't find it described in code, just maths which hurts my brain.

[Ai]

Oops. Should test in Firefox on occasion. Wasn't specifying the event args on a couple of event handlers, which chrome seems to be fine with (Midori is WebKit based too).
Those problems should be cool now.

Isn't HSI just another name for HSV? Intensity = Value?

I was thinking about HSY (Y being perception weighted brightness), but I couldn't find it described in code, just maths which hurts my brain.

Hmm. Seems like HSY is actually what I meant -- it seems to be what MyPaint's code refers to.

HSI is not the same as HSV though, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV shows a comparison of a fireball that demonstrates that hsV, hsL, hsI, hsY and Lab are all different.

I suggest you check out the HCY_to_RGB + RGB_to_HCY functions in gui/colors/uicolor.py of the MyPaint source tree. To me, the RGB_to_HSY function seems very similar to RGB->HSL conversion, pretty simple. It will probably produce best results if you convert your sRGB values to linear RGB first. The HSY_to_RGB function is roughly on the same order of complexity as a HSL to RGB transform, too (and of course the inverse applies: convert the linear RGB values to sRGB afterwards)

It also includes RGB_to_YCbCr_BT601 and YCbCr_BT601_to_RGB,  which are quite simple and relevant to NES-like colorspaces.

I can confirm the different colorspaces seem to be working fine now.

[Friend]

does anyone know of a sort of 3d virtual cube that can be rotated?  Im trying to practice drawing cubes from any perspective and am having trouble getting a feel for how much edges should converge. 

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

I'm not sure if there are any online, but you could always load one up in blender.

[32]

Yeah if you've got a 3d program that's the easiest way to go. Alternately I found this, has some pretty extreme 3 point perspective going on but the code is editable so maybe you can change it somewhere in there.

[Friend]

Thanks Mr. Fahrenheit and 32.  I have another random question...

Do you artists actually see images in your head before you draw them?  I've been a musician for years and 24/7 have a song playing through my head that is sensitive to all timbres, subtle peculiarities, every note.

But for the life of me I just don't see images in my head.  Is it absurd to have a passion to learn to draw if I don't see mental pictures?

[Ai]

Sometimes. But it's not a persistent thing. My opinion is that graphics are too complex (and our visual imaginations too simplified) to have that kind of experience with them. I can imagine an animation sequence, for example, if I actively focus on it,  but when not specifically focused on it, the best I get are visual 'flashes' (which can be quite intense but usually are rather unsophisticated.)

[PixelPiledriver]

Do you artists actually see images in your head before you draw them?

Sure.
I can visualize things.
It can be slightly useful for inspiration.
But it's of no use to think of an image for extended periods of time if you have drawing tools nearby.
It's best to get things on paper and work with them from there.

Is it absurd to have a passion to learn to draw if I don't see mental pictures?

Nope.
It's not really necessary.
And maybe you'll develop it.

[surt]

Not really, best I can manage is a dim blurry pinhole where I may crudely structure small parts, but I have had a couple of anomalous neurological events which have demonstrated to me what the brain is capable of in this regard such that I have an informed envy of those who can.

I need the feedback mechanism of putting something to screen/paper and refining it until it is an actual thing.

[Friend]

At Ai, ppd and surt,

Oh! I thought I was heavily handicapped since I assumed the typical artist can see mental images with comparable clarity to how I can hear. But I guess it is humanly normal to have much more aural imagination.

surt, I experience this too... It's usually in a situation where my mind is very relaxed and my eyes have been closed..I can start to see highly imaginative images then...often times with spontaneous and ceaseless animation and extremely original images.

The same about my dreams. They are always impossibly creative and inaginative "worlds".  In good moments Ive been able to write down these details before I forget them.  And when I now read the details, the images come back in a blurry form.

But in my normal consciousness I can't even visualize a cube

[Cyangmou]

Doublefine Released their KS-Documentation free to watch for everyone.
Thought some of you might be interested in watching it as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdXvZgIV1Q0&list=PLIhLvue17Sd7F6pU2ByRRb0igiI-WKk3D&index=1

Rock Paper SHotgun Article:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/04/double-fine-documentary/#more-274203

[Friend]

drawing cubes is beginning to click ^_^  I know it seems like a trivial thing to be happy about, but I can do something I couldn't do  this morning

[Ai]

HUSL is a rather interesting colorspace. It's like a more sRGB-friendly version of Lch, intended as a fairly direct upgrade on HSV/HSL/HCY. It maps the part of LCH space that contains the sRGB colorspace to/from normalized H/'S'/'L' coordinates, so that all valid coordinates in HSL space are valid colors in sRGB. I quote 'S' and 'L' because these are not the same S and L used in HSL.

Seems to be quite useful for calculating color ramps. The page includes Javascript, Python, and Lua implementations of RGB <-> HUSL conversion, as well as an interactive color selector.

I am a little puzzled as to why they are using Lch(uv) as a basis when Lch(ab) is generally more consistent. Still, it's  rather clearly a step up from HSL.

A snip from the page, which gives a simplified comparison of HSL/LCH/HUSL characteristics:

[PixelPiledriver]

This came in handy while talking about some code with Probo today.
Try it out.

http://www.codeshare.io/

[Alex Sinigaglia]

Have you seen this?

[CelioHogane]

Have you seen this?
*Video of crosscode*

plenty of times, actually im one of the people that watch every single stream they do and i keep searching ways to get this guys funded.

[Alex Sinigaglia]

I see.

Hey, guys, what about the "Good Reads" childboard? It disappeared.
Hopefully Cyangmou can tell us what happened.

[Crow]

Hey, guys, what about the "Good Reads" childboard? It disappeared.
Hopefully Cyangmou can tell us what happened.

Merged with the Feature Chest. It's all in there now.

[32]

Just found out my graduate film (animated short) is going to Cannes

[PixelPiledriver]

Congrats 32!
Post a link to it sometime.

[32]

Thanks PPD

Not online yet due to film festival exclusivity or some such Not really my decision but I imagine we'll put it up eventually, I'll post a link when we do.

[surt]

Anybody know of a way to per-pixel render marching ants that it looks okay on lines of any given angle?

[Ai]

Anybody know of a way to per-pixel render marching ants that it looks okay on lines of any given angle?

Probably you need to be a bit more specific. For example, if I was doing this with Cairo, I would simply use cairo_set_dash , then disable antialiasing and render the lines in question. I'd move the ants by cycling the offset parameter. If I needed proper two-color marching, I'd probably draw the line twice, the first with a solid color and the second dashed with the second color.

For the most general/lowlevel case, you should be able to just use bresenham's algorithm and a dash array (eg [0,0, 1, 1] for 2px-long dashes); each new pixel you visit, you take dasharray[curoffset] as the color to plot, then set offset = (offset + 1) modulus 4. The same method of 'walking' the ants as in my Cairo example applies. Pretty simple, the only thing to keep in mind is that you only count whole pixels for purposes of plotting dashes (ie. you treat a 1px 45-degree move as the same distance as a 1px 90-degree move)

This is the algorithm I am currently using (manually) when drawing icons.
Here's what it looks like applied to the mask icon I drew recently:

If displayed on a high resolution screen, longer dashes than this appear to be appropriate, for better visibility.. maybe as long as 8. Of course, on smaller contours, you need to use a smaller dash size to make it read well, so there is probably some compromise involved there -- 4 might work for most situations.

BTW, while I was making this animation I discovered that GIMP 2.9 has an improved Animation Playback plugin: notably, it allows you to zoom the animation 51% -> 300% size, override the layer application mode (combine vs replace), and refresh with any changes you've made in the meantime.

[surt]

Prefer to be able to do it in fragment shader so ideally no extra geometry. With the traditional (x+y)%2 diagonals can render as a single colour which is a problem.

[Ai]

Prefer to be able to do it in fragment shader so ideally no extra geometry. With the traditional (x+y)%2 diagonals can render as a single colour which is a problem.

Yeah, as far as I know there aren't any 2-color patterns that satisfy that criteria (BTW, GIMP at least implements marching-ants via pattern fill, and displays the same general problem. That's why I thought patternfill was something you wanted to avoid). I think that tile/map theory may have even proved that no such pattern is possible.

Of course, a larger pattern is robust against higher slopes, with the caveat that what you get is more 'sparkly' than 'crawly'. 4x4 pattern:

Resulting animation (done by taking the base pattern and offsetting it 1,1 pixel each frame):


Was going by the arbitrary rule of thumb that to handle a slope of 1 in N you need a pattern that is 2N in size. It also seems to be true that the pattern must not have an 'orientation' -- it needs to be something that is symmetrical in both axes and varies continuously along all known diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines.

Other types of pattern are possible (eg a Bayer matrix), but don't necessarily look crawley.

EDIT: Come to think of it, Plasma fits the criteria I specified . Seems to work pretty well:


A sudoku would also do (but in all likelihood wouldn't look at all like marching ants)

EDIT2: probably the simplest solution, but one I guess you probably can't use, would be to just thicken the lines to 2px.

[surt]

Got implicit instancing-based wrapped rendering and painting with shader-based brushes working in my very WIP editor:

[PixelPiledriver]

Looking nice
Is that tool open for testing?

[surt]

It's open, but very far from ready for any testing.
I have a bad habit of never quite finishing any component before moving on to the next so the bits that work at all only do so in a broken manner. The OpenGL contexts are very fragile and probably won't work for you without manual changing the request in code.
If you do want to try it, you just need Qt 5.4 to build, no other dependencies as yet. Currently targeting OpenGL 3.3 so probably need a not too very shabby GPU, I would guess that older laptop integrated graphics would be a no go (I eventually want to use it on my tablet PC so this might be revised down in the future).

[Ai]

I just had a quick idea WRT your 'marching ants' problem, Surt:



This is a standard 2x2 Bayer matrix:

Code: [Select]

0, 96,
160, 255

And the 4 consecutive frames of the first image I posted are the four possible offsets you can apply to a 2x2 pattern:

(0,0) , (1,0), (1,1), (0,1)

(possibly, using only two frames might work better, I haven't tested that.)

I suspect it's mathematically provable that this is the minimal pattern that one can obtain a reliable 'marching-ants-like' rendering with, that maintains its marching-ant quality on any angle of line or conjunction of lines.

[Ellian]

Hi everyone~

I want to have some pixel art printed as inspirational posters for my new room.

I'm going through my reference folders right now, but I figured I might ask around if anyone had ideas about what to actually print? I have no idea what to choose there's so much good shit out there ahah

[Probo]

cool man, like printing off huge screenshots as posters? thats what id do i guess. id narrow it down to a few games you really love or that had an effect on you, and then think of the best looking areas in those games. you could play them on emulators and take screens of the action.

[Ellian]

... I honestly forgot about games altogether. I'm mostly having, like, "pixel art" printed and that's what I was asking about XD
Like I have Paul Veer's vespa girl, and Ilkke's secret santa on my list for example <3

[Kasumi]

Grandpa, it was this big by junkboy has always been a favorite of mine. Two more Vespa Girl images.

Desconsolo by Jinn

Almost anything by panda

Almost anything by Snake

An Isometric thing by cocefi. I realize cocefi's stuff is usually animated, but a still frame would still look good. I feel isometric art should be represented, but I usually don't like it. Cocefi is an exception.

Well, fool does isometric as well, but a lot of my favorite things by him are animated. Browse, though.

Gameboy Fun by cow

Undertale Story Card by tuyoki


There's some pieces all by the same person I've got I'm trying to find the source for. I kinda just save and don't source things, and I regret it now. I... get the impression I have a lot of stuff in my collection that isn't on the internet anymore... May still post it, maybe someone can tell me who did them. Some nice low color environments.

Edit: Found him: Slemsvamp. A good one and Another good one

This is lacking in more retro/tiled stuff, but that's a decent start, maybe. I agree about it being hard to choose. My pixel art collection gets more massive each day...

[Ellian]

Yessss thanks Kasumi that's the kind of stuff I need to help me narrow it down. <3
I'll post pictures whenever I get everything too (that could take a couple months, but eh!)

[Probo]

woops! sorry, i guess i think of games when i think of pixel art. those that kasumi mentioned are pretty freaking awesome.

[Chilly]

Good to see that Pixelation is still around.  A lot of stuff seems to have changed though ... I still recognize some old names too. It's literally been about 10+ years since I was last here. 


Is Peppermint Pig still around? Fry Chico? St0ven?  Fill me in~

-Formerly l3lue

[yaomon17]

I don't think so.

[wzl]

st0ven oftentimes hangs out in the #ludumdare irc in irc.afternet.org. the other ones i don't know 

[Chilly]

 

Well I guess I need to make some new friends...

Learning pixel art all over again. Feels pretty refreshing. Avatar was a warm up ... Now to try tile making again.

[API-Beast]

There is this GIMP python plugin that still works pretty well. It allows to change the hue and the saturation completely, while preserving the perceived brightness, e.g. not destroying the picture like the normal Hue/Saturation tools.



http://registry.gimp.org/node/25522

[uristmcguffin]

I didn't really want to make my own thread.


It is a hobby of mine to make joke little games on my computer. I enjoy the coding aspect and I love to learn programming by making little games. My issue is that I SUCK at making pictures. All the sprites in my games consist of colored boxes and shapes and I'd like to move beyond that.

After pouring over many guides accross the internet, learning about creating pixel art, learning about contrast and hue and form and whatnot. Now, I feel like I have an understanding about how a sprite should be made, but when I open GIMP, I'm at a loss for what to do. I want to make a guy for my game, anything that would look even a little decent, and I just can't. Everything I throw on the page just looks like a blob and it's disheartening.

What should I do?

[Ai]

I didn't really want to make my own thread.


It is a hobby of mine to make joke little games on my computer. I enjoy the coding aspect and I love to learn programming by making little games. My issue is that I SUCK at making pictures. All the sprites in my games consist of colored boxes and shapes and I'd like to move beyond that.

After pouring over many guides accross the internet, learning about creating pixel art, learning about contrast and hue and form and whatnot. Now, I feel like I have an understanding about how a sprite should be made, but when I open GIMP, I'm at a loss for what to do. I want to make a guy for my game, anything that would look even a little decent, and I just can't. Everything I throw on the page just looks like a blob and it's disheartening.

What should I do?

A few suggestions:

* Get references, use them. Like, all of the time. There are lots of different ways to use references, but it's almost always good to use them somehow.
* Try GrafX2 or another program that is specifically oriented to pixeling, It makes experimentation easier and does not complicate things with tools that have no relevance to pixel art.
* If your traditional art skills are not good, work on them. Get some art books, read them, they will get you thinking about the right things. (which art books are good is beyond the scope of this post, but for a start, Loomis' books are good and freely available on the net.)
* Keep things simple -- 2 or at most 3 colors, till you've got that working well.

[surt]

If you're not actually into making arts yourself you could try using/adapting some free arts from places such as Open Game Art.

[NowvaB]

@uristmcguffin
Well I'm sure you know already that if you want to get better you have to keep at it!
Work slowly and try to implement the things you have learned. and when you think a piece has got as good as possible... start a new one!
eventually when you go back to your old pieces you'll see the improvement and that will inspire you to keep making new things.

And don't forget if you need help, you kinda just signed up for a forum that specializes in that.

Now on my part:
I'm pretty excited to start re-mastering this thing I made while I was still an "okay" pixel artist.
Spoiler

[Daimoth]

When you're working with a SNES-like resolution you basically have to make every thing read correctly at 200% zoom, and there are certain things you can't get away with at 200%. Certain details become noise, you may end up resorting to a massive palette, etc.

[Ai]

When you're working with a SNES-like resolution you basically have to make every thing read correctly at 200% zoom, and there are certain things you can't get away with at 200%. Certain details become noise, you may end up resorting to a massive palette, etc.

?

Have you posted this to the wrong thread? It doesn't seem connected to anything here.

[Ai]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a little measurement/factorization/drafting problem, which can be summed up as 'how do you divide an established line into N uniform divisions without a measuring device'.
N may be up to 20.
Ideally, you can do this via a simple projection (mark out N same-size divisions on another line, then project lines to the ends of the target line, which establishes a vanishing point you can use to locate the other divisions on the target line.), or even a digital drawing tool that automatically marks divisions.
However, this isn't always practical, and it's preferable to be able to do things in a minimum of calculations / lines.

So I started working on this table, based whereever possible on divisions of 2 or 3, since they are easy to eyeball.

I'll post a few entries and explain the meaning, for a start:

* 4 : 2x2
* 5 : 2x2.5

So, to divide a line in 4, you divide it in 2 twice and you have the correct size for a segment. Easy to understand IMO.
Non-integer divisions are harder. When I write '2x2.5', I mean:
* first, divide the segment in 2, and consider one of the two sub sections you have made
* then, place a line that defines a unit such that 2.5 units fit into the subsection. One can start on this by first dividing it in half -- then you need to visualize how much to shrink the new half by so that 2.5 of it will fit into the subsection. This may seem a little fuzzy but you get the hang of it.
* If you placed the line correctly, you now have the correct unit size for dividing the line in 5.

Here's a gif showing the process:


Okay, going on with a few more entries from the table:


* 6 : 3x2
* 7 : 3x2.33...
* 8 : 2x2x2
* 9 : 3x3

Here, I'd further comment that I'm trying to limit the precision of non-integer divisions to no more precise than 1 in 4. This is because I don't really trust my eye to judge well measurements more precise than that. Here, the measurement for 7 is a third divided by 2 1/3.


* 10 : 3x3.33
* 11 : 3x3.66
* 12 : 3x2x2

Some of the more horrifying entries -- 3 1/3 is fairly hard to judge.


* 13 : 2x2x2x1.5
* 14 : 2x2x2x1.75
* 15 : 2x2x3.75 or 2x2x2.5x1.5
* 16 : 2x2x2x2

In comment on 15, my experiments suggest that smaller divisors are easier to cope with, so the 2x2x2.5x1.5 formula is actually easier than the 2x2x3.75 formula, IME. Probably because the relation is more gross and hence easier to judge.


* 17 : ??
* 18 : 2x2x2x2.25 or 3x2x2x1.5
* 19 : ??
* 20 : 2x2x2x2.5

This is where I'm currently stumped. I don't know of any divisors that are remotely nice for 17 or 19.
The best I have for 17 is 4.25x2x2 (which works, but judging the 4.25 size is pretty hard.)

19 is even worse -- the best I have is 4.75x2x2, which so far I've completely failed to estimate even once.
All other measures, I have successfully drawn using these formulas.

That's what I've got so far. If you have any suggestions on how to cope with 17, 19, or easier formulas for other numbers of divisions, I'd be interested to hear it.

[Tourist]

Ran across this today.  Some cross-stitch patterns as tattoos.  Could just as well be pixel art as the images are grid based.  People have unusual tastes.

http://www.ellf.ru/creative/35502-tatu-krestikom.html

Tourist

[surt]

If anyone wants to pick up ProMotion for cheap it's been added to the current humble bundle.

[Ai]

Just spotted this on the GMIC google+ page:

New Grid (Triangular) filter.

Closely related to the Trixel idea that has been posted here.

Another recent update improved preview for particularly small images, by enforcing a minimum size for the preview; this should also be relevant to pixellers.

[Joe]

Surt: thanks for the heads up! I've been wanting to pick that up for a while.

Though for anyone considering, it won't get you a free upgrade to PM7 when it comes out, since it's bundled.

[surt]

Oi, ProMotion people.
Is there any way to pan the canvas with mouse movement?
For panning I can only find keyboard cursor keys and (bullshit-for-2-axis-scrolling) scrollbars.
Why MMB is mapped to undo rather than pan is beyond me.

EDIT:
Nevermind. Further search tells me it's Shift+Alt.

[PixelPiledriver]

Nevermind. Further search tells me it's Shift+Alt.

Cool, thanks for that. 

I'm also learning Pro Motion.
Working thru the documentation one bit at a time.
But I've hit a problem. 

I have a TileMap Project with 5 layers:
+Character
+Objects
+Level
+Sketch
+Backdrop

Everything works fine when I draw stuff.
But the program crashes when I use:
TileMapping -> Optimize
or
TileMapping -> Remove Empty Tiles

Anyone else getting a crash like this?
Any solution?
Can't find anything about it googling.

Having a TileMap project with only 1 layer works fine.
Doing some tests to find the source of the problem and a good workaround.


Ok so...
Apparently it is not that I'm using layers.
It's something else...
Still working on it..............


Got it figured out.
Should have been more specific.
Pro Motion doesn't crash, it throws an error.

Dirty solution:
- TileMapping -> Optimize
- Pro Motion throws error
- Click 'Continue' the program
- un-sync and re-sync the tilemap
- tiles are optimized, seems to have worked fine

Clean solution:
- Layers -> un-check Layers On
- TileMapping -> Optimize
- Pro Motion does not throw an error
- tiles are optimized

Still not sure what causes the error to be thrown.
Unable to duplicate it in a new project.
But whatever, this works.

[Ai]

I published my GIMP-Python plugins yesterday. The most notable IMO is 'copynauto', which provides a simplified (two-key) interface to GIMP's 'Named Buffers' concept.

It abstracts Named Buffers into a stack of clippings that you fill (by copying) or empty (by pasting).
When you take a clipping, it records where you got it in the name, and when pasting that clipping, it names the layer accordingly. I have been using it a lot and it's been making collage type stuff much easier and quicker for me.

My tumblr post about it explains copynauto in more detail. Synopses of the other plugins are available at the github link.

I've been considering renaming it to 'copynaut' cause that's cute; I didn't really think about naming at all, I just went... 'copy   named    auto... ok.'

[LarkoftheRiver]

Don't really have much to say, other than how is everyone today?

[Vagrant]

Just, hype.

[Joe]

On language: the fact that we call it pixel "art" as a mode prevents it from ever being taken seriously as a medium.
Not saying "pixel art" would never be a proper term, but how often do you hear oil art, acrylic art, charcoal art, chalk art etc, versus drawing/painting... in x medium.
Its close relationship with games will always make people biased toward it, but a simple language shift would be a concrete step toward accepting pixel as an legitimate medium.

Just a thought.

[Ai]

On language: the fact that we call it pixel "art" as a mode prevents it from ever being taken seriously as a medium.
Not saying "pixel art" would never be a proper term, but how often do you hear oil art, acrylic art, charcoal art, chalk art etc, versus drawing/painting... in x medium.
Its close relationship with games will always make people biased toward it, but a simple language shift would be a concrete step toward accepting pixel as an legitimate medium.

Just a thought.

TBH I think there is a qualitative difference between things like pixel and crossstitch, and things like CG, painting, collage and sculpture. Very constrained mediums like pixels and crossstitch don't lose the artistic aspect, but they gain a craft or algorithm-design aspect -- A lot of the thought that goes into making sprites goes not into 'what is really there in the real thing I'm observing' and 'what of that I should show', but optimization: describing a complex system with a minimum of elements.

I'm not sure we have a word for this thing between craft and art, but I think it misrepresents pixels to describe them simply as another medium, much as I wouldn't call a sculpture a drawing.

[Joe]

Hmm. Well said, I'll have to think about that. On the one hand it's true that at smaller scales, most of the work is shifting pixels around to find their right position, to form the image you already more or less know. On the other, I'm not sure that there is a lack of optimization in other mediums, just that it's not discrete (for example color count). Aren't the masters of any medium renown for their economy of element? That seems to be a goal in any medium.

Interesting that you lump pixel with cross-stitch... it certainly shares some aspects but it surely is a digital paint. A digital paint/cross-stitch hybrid

Sculpture is not drawing as pixel is not medium doesn't make sense to me. You acknowledged cross-stitch and pixels as mediums, but you're saying they're more than that?

[Ai]

Yeah, I should have said 'a drawing medium' rather than just 'a medium'. CG and traditional painting have a lot more in common than pencil/charcoal and pixels.

Cross-stitch is a comparison which has been brought up before on Pixelation. The constraints of the two media are different in nature but similar in degree, IMO.

I guess what I mean , more than just optimization, is the narrowness of choices -- there are many ways to efficiently represent a given human figure, in high-res or traditional art. In pixel art, there are enough that each person's way of doing it can still be unique, but the amount of options is many times smaller, so, for a lack of a better term, the 'face of the system' shows itself. In things like, for example, the limited number of body-plans used for small character sprites, or the small range of views on a tiled landscape. Discreteness, like you say.

Perhaps this view is overly focused on art that will be used in games, but IMO that makes up the majority of pixels.

[Joe]

Tablet users: do you pixel exclusively with the stylus? I find it great for sketching but prohibitive for precision work.

[surt]

Same for me.

[Ai]

Yes. Zoom more.
Seriously, once I got more comfortable with heavy zooming, stuff just worked. Doing things at the right zoom level (which is often higher than you feel 'comfortable' with) makes things so, so much easier to draw. Draw big things at a low zoom and small things at a high zoom.

IMO most zoom commands don't zoom enough -- GIMP's 'Zoom in a lot', 'Zoom out a lot' actions are about right, they zoom in big steps like 100% -> 300% -> 800% -> 2300%. I modified Grafx2 to get a similar effect[1].

I've tried mice old and new, they're not relevant IMO.

The angle that you set the tablet up at can make a big difference, but I'm not sure whether there is an optimal angle (aside from ones that prevent RSI). Personally mine is almost vertical -- 80ish degrees.

[1] Actually very simple. src/engine.c lines 1036 and 1040 are 'Zoom(+1);' and 'Zoom(-1);', you just change them to read 'Zoom(+3);' and 'Zoom(-3);' and recompile.

[PixelPiledriver]

Try a Cintique.
I find it to be a good balance.
Never did learn to use a tablet all that well.

[Ai]

Also on the tablet issue, there is a fair amount of training involved. Styluses aren't really like traditional media at all, and it took me a long time to realize the extent of this and adapt my workflow to it.

Main topic of this post:
I just implemented silhouette, reduced opacity, and alpha inversion (aka 'negative space') display options in my fork of the image viewer sxiv.
Here is a small run through. It's shown in thumbnail view here, but works in image view too.


(they are all combinable, but I didn't bother to go into that too much as the effect is fairly predictable.)

I'm considering implementing a 'tile view' next (tiles the image 3x3 times).

[Ai]

Just implemented tiling view in my sxiv variant. Here's a gif of browsing through some pixeled patterns with tiling mode on.



I'm pretty pleased with this as I have always wanted an image viewer supporting tiled view, not only for tiles but also to help spotting errors in images in general.

Currently alpha-quality : panning needs some tweaking, and limiting the total number of tiles seems to be necessary to prevent slowdown.

Am also planning to implement an alternate tiling mode that incorporates V/H-flipped variants of the tile.

[Joe]

Holy crap that's awesome. Should be standard in image viewers.

[Ai]

Thanks, it's good to hear that someone other than me is interested in this

I went ahead and implemented a few alternate tiled display modes, intended to test out tiles in the widest range of configurations.


Another example -- more interesting IMO -- surprising how much organic-ness can come out of 6 transformations of the same tile.

The 'all adjacencies' option uses a 6x6-tile layout that places every possible permutation (4: original, hflip, vflip, hvflip) of the tile in contact with every other permutation along every possible edge.  There isn't a full (6 tiles: original, hflip, vflip, hvflip, rot90, rot270) version of that yet, but I intend to make one, since they are usable as generic 'tile matchup' testing patterns in a normal tilemap.)

EDIT: Also, IMO This font deserves more exposure. The way it's designed means it renders hard-edged very well:

Since it also is quite readable, it's my current go-to font for annotations down to 10pt in size, along with Fantasque Sans. Both are OFL licensed.
(note: font rendering using FreeType with the Infinality patchset. Different font renderers -- for example, Windows or MacOS UI renderers, or to a lesser extent, FreeType without Infinality -- may result in different output)

EDIT2: Sorted out most outstanding bugs -- tiling now works for opaque and transparent, static and animated images, in combination with any other modifier (silhouette, lowered opacity, gamma, negate alpha).
Next: panning could be better (should be infinite in all 4 dirs, and behave reliably for more complex tilings); and we could use any spare space in the thumb 'square' to display bordering tiles, to produce a moderately tiled thumbnail.

[Ai]

[yet another post about sxiv mods]
Tell me if I'm being spammy, okay?
I've been running sxiv with this 'auto-pixel-upscale' modification of thumbnail mode, for some time now. I posted about it earlier in the thread, it looks like this:

(sxiv in thumb mode)

I'm beginning to have a more mixed opinion of it, particularly how it affects the sense of scale.
I know that 'mixed resolution is icky and weird' is a common sentiment on Pixelation, but does that apply here?

There are a range of other ways to attack this problem (pixel art having uselessly small thumbs), so if you have a definite opinion on this, feel free to speak up

[RAV]

For the purpose of an pixel image preview tool, scaling up is useful. Yet comparing true scale also can be useful. However, I'd say the first one is probably more useful in most cases. So either that, or make an option for both, with auto-scaling the default. Otherwise it depends what you want to do with the auto-tiling feature, which might shift the balance of importance back again. Good work anyway, looking good.

[Ai]

whoa. almost forgot about this place. what's new?

If I had to pick one thing, I would recommend you Howard Day's recent thread about realtime 3d-rendering 'pseudo-pixelart'. Very interesting and potentially very useful -- both short term and educationally -- to pixellers, if he chooses to release it.

For the purpose of an pixel image preview tool, scaling up is useful. Yet comparing true scale also can be useful. However, I'd say the first one is probably more useful in most cases. So either that, or make an option for both, with auto-scaling the default. Otherwise it depends what you want to do with the auto-tiling feature, which might shift the balance of importance back again. Good work anyway, looking good.

Thanks for the feedback.
I hadn't really considered having a toggleable option.. that might be good, since there are many different strategies to try out.

For example, you can try to preserve relative scale by considering the whole page of thumbs at once, picking an auto-zoom level accordingly. This would preserve their relative scale at the cost of not zooming the smaller ones as much as you can. And you can execute that particular strategy in a few different ways (absolutely prevent all distortion by using the maximum size as basis, or prevent most distortion by taking median or average size as basis) too.

Actually, that helps.. I just realized that only the current page of thumbs has guaranteed known dimensions, so probably I must limit the checking to that anyway.

The auto-tiling feature does not interact with the thumb autozooming, as 'image mode' runs off different code than thumbnail mode. Do you think it should?
I'm finding that the auto-tiling in combination with the silhouette modes (renders the image as a single color) is a nice design feature, it shows the flow of the image very clearly and can also help spot readability problems.

I also have a modification partly completed that intentionally distorts the image in different proportions -- 1:1, 1:2, 2:1, 1:3, 3:1 etc.. (to help see if the proportions you are using are actually optimal.). I've found it useful so far but it's definitely still buggy:)


EDIT: I've now implemented a compromise strategy, which can be summarized like this:
"Pick a 'global zoom' level based on the average of the base[unzoomed] dimensions of all currently visible thumbs. When drawing each thumb, calculate how much zoom it could have.
If that factor > (global_zoom + 1), then clip it to global_zoom+1."

This curtails some of the more gross excesses (really tiny 8x8 icons like the skull would previously get huge magnifications that would make them feel way too big.)
I feel like it puts each page in good context with the other members of the page, although some mental adjustment is required to the fact of thumb sizes changing..

Overall it feels like one of those graphical docks where the icons get bigger as you approach them..



Bugs shown here:
* Thumbnail outline is using the wrong size cause it's not using the adjusted metrics yet.

Features not shown here:
* Images often 'bounce' (pop out towards you) cutely when you scroll. Totally unintended, an artefact of how the display is rerendered during scroll.

A tunable option, I guess, would substitute that value 1 with 2, 4, 8, or 64 (or 0, or maybe also -1024), which would let you choose relative importance of 'correct relative scale' vs 'easily see pixels'

[Rydin]

whoa. almost forgot about this place. what's new?

[RAV]

You. and I. Hi.

AI, I had a somewhat related problem on another feature, the so called Smart Select. It is most useful, even necessary, in the very most use cases. And yet still, the little occasions in which the Smart gets in the way itself with being "too smart for its own good", make it just as necessary to have the ability to turn off entirely for a more regular and predictable method of selection. Being smart itself is but an option among others. While smart functionality is a desirable convenience often, it can never be quite smart enough to be in undisputable supervision on the relevant task of your every choice; automatons need a kill-switch. But don't worry, AI.

[rahulyadav]

I will send you a PM.

pls even send me

[Ai]

just found this bunch of ascii-art fonts. Most of them seem to have designs which are quite compatible with, and easily translatable to, pixel art.

[surt]

Why on earth doesn't Pro Motion allow even diameter circles? 

[Joe]

Can Graphics Gale draw with the second color instead of pick color for right click?

[PixelPiledriver]

As far as I know, mouse input isn't customizable in Graphics Gale.
I put Swap Colors on the 'Z' key.

[32]

I also just use a swap colours key but if you really want it and you've got a little time to tinker I've managed to insert a lot of functionality into graphicsgale using AutoHotkey.

[Joe]

I've got swap hotkeyed too, thankfully there's that.

32, I'd love to know what kind of tricks you've implemented.



Also is it just me or are spambots getting smarter? I saw a post the other day that scraped content from the first page, and at a glance the sentence actually had context. The only giveaway was the same 1 post, no av, website link to something completely unrelated. If we're at the point where a human has to make a judgement call, spam's getting pretty good. And maybe I've only just started to pay attention, but we get spam pretty regularly here apparently.

I don't know SMF's features and I'm not familiar with its panel; I use IPB. But I think two very simple measures can be taken to make things easier/cleaner in the future. One, only allow members to post a backlink after ~25 posts. This is the simplest deterrent as it removes all incentive. (Again, don't know if SMF has this ability but it's almost certainly doable with all the forum scripts). Two, replace the current registration hoops with reCaptcha. The problem with multiple forms is they're annoying for people but easily defeatable by spammers. The questions are the same every time. Unfortunately the answers to the forms can be solved and shared across spam networks. They're fine for outdated scripts, but we can see smarter bots slipping in through the cracks now.

Simple fix. Peace of mind. I would do it myself if I could.

What I love Google for is how they've destroyed any credibility coming from non-relevant backlinks. As the other engines follow suite it removes all incentive entirely... it's a beautiful thing. And I wonder what the next counter-tactic will be. But for maybe the next 5 years this will still be a thing, as people with outdated knowledge target outdated search algorithms.

[32]

Mostly I just wanted to get it to control a little more like photoshop. So pan with space, and setting up hotkeys to change brushes were the main ones. I set up my custom brushes to go from small to big so it just lets you +/- the size of the brush quickly when you're painting. I also set up some keys that temporarily switch to the colour swapper or pen tool while they're held and then flip back to the other on release. Nothing super special but that's because graphicsgale has most of the stuff hidden away in some nook or cranny. There's a thread over here where I posted the script for the brush changer, and a bunch of other graphicsgale nonsense

[surt]

Another question for you Pro Motion people:
Is there anyway to pick a single tile from the canvas with a colour picker like single click rather than the hassle of having to drag a brush selection box around it?

[Ai]

Just want to give Directional Cubic Convolution Interpolation some attention.
garagecoder has just made a GMIC-based implementation of it, and it achieves results that are generally crisper than all other 'simple' upscaling filters I've tried (bilinear, bicubic, lanczos, lohalo, nohalo).
Conceptually, it's like HQ2x. except intended for smooth images rather than pixel art.

If you already use GMIC plugin for Gimp, then refreshing your filters should make it show up in Testing->Garagecoder->Dcci 2x resize.

[PixelPiledriver]

Another question for you Pro Motion people:
Is there anyway to pick a single tile from the canvas with a colour picker like single click rather than the hassle of having to drag a brush selection box around it?

Sort of.
I set Grid Snap to '~' key and Brush Select to 'W'.
With Grid Snap on you only have to click drag the mouse a pixel for it to snap around the whole tile.
Single clicking wont work.
It selects nothing.

[surt]

That's basically what I'm already doing. I could probably live with it if it weren't for Pro Motion being "clever" and automatically turning off snap if I accidentally select a zero width brush.

Unfortunately Pro Motion has altogether rather too much such "cleverness" for me to continue regarding it a power user's tool.

On the other hand version 7 is looking promising. Looks as though all the floats are dockable so hopefully it'll become usable on linux with wine.

[PixelPiledriver]

Yah PM has a lot of quirks like that.
As I get more used to the work flow it imposes, bothersome things like this become less visible to me.
But still, there's so many times I'll be PMing happily and then I feel like... wtf... just happened?

Happy to hear of v7.
Reading thru the notes.

[Tourist]

Critical bug found in libpng.  This is a common library used to load and save png images.  Application developers should update their libraries.  Image applications and web browsers (and anything that opens an arbitrary png image) are the most vulnerable.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/15/png_pongs_critical_bug_patched_in_ubiquitous_libpng/

[Atnas]

A happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate, I hope you think of how you'd dither that turkey skin in front of you when it's time to eat, or how you would use subpixels to animate the rich gravy flowing down your mashed potatoes and pooling at their base.

[surt]

New version of Pro Motion is released with free limited version. I thought it was going to have dockable tool windows so it would be usable in wine, but unfortunately not. Still its better than it was as at least the float stay on top of the main window, they just happen to also stay on top of everything else. 

Mouse pan has moved to space bar, which is better but still no MMB.
Still impossible to make even diameter circles. 

[0xDB]

at least the float stay on top of the main window, they just happen to also stay on top of everything else. 

Clicking the little "pin" icon (the one with the slightly misleading tooltip considering the initial state already is "always on top of everything") in the upper left of the floaty windows fixes that and only makes them stay on top of the main window but not on top of other windows from different programs. In Wine, I have to use it without a Wine-Desktop or otherwise the floaty windows will keep disappearing behind the main window.

[Friend]

will pixelation ever have an option for a neutral grey BG?

[32]

I've been using Joe's forum skin. Indigo is working on an official reskin as we speak.

[Atnas]

The one issue I had with Joe's temporary solution is you can't see the unread posts/new replies links, and I'm not sure if you can see the unread PM count. Did you find a solution for that, 32?

[32]

I never used that so I didn't notice. The link itself still works so you could always just bookmark it or something.

And yeah you can't see pm's unless you hover over the button but there's a setting to get an email notification. Probably not so good if you're getting a lot of them though.

[Ai]

On the topic of forum improvements, it would be nice to support Imgur album embeds -- would work very well for Daily Sketch thread, for example

Unsurprisingly, simply pasting in the HTML imgur provides doesn't work:

<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/6ytgw"><a href="//imgur.com/a/6ytgw">Jan 1 2015 draws[/url]<script async src="http://s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

(link to the album I was using for testing here)

Seems to be of comparable simplicity to existing Youtube embeds.

Prompted by seeing this post : you can go there to see how album embed looks/works interactively.

[Crow]

You got it:
[imgur]6ytgw[/imgur]

Code: [Select]

[imgur]6ytgw[/imgur]

[Ai]

Wow, thanks Crow!

EDIT: Here is my first try at an 'album' icon to go next to the 'video' icon:


Maybe too rounded. I had it with sharp corners before and it was very blocky / hard to read. Colors probably still need a little tuning to best fit the forum theme.

[PixelPiledriver]

Thank you Crow! 

[Atnas]

If anyone is in or around Philadelphia, Kasumi and I are going to Philly Dev Night tomorrow.

[Ai]

Mypaint 1.2.0 has been released.  PPAs for Ubuntu are up to date. Windows builds are underway

Summary of changes:

    New intuitive Inking tool for smooth strokes.
    New Flood Fill tool.
    Automated backups of your working docs, with recovery on startup.
    Improved symmetry-setting and frame-setting modes.
    New workspace UI: two sidebars, with dockable tabbed panels.
    Smoother scrolling and panning.
    New brush pack.
    New brush and color history panel.
    New layer trimming command in frame options.
    Added layer groups.
    New layer modes: several masking modes added.
    Add display filters: greyscale, simulate dichromacy for trichromats.
    New color wheel options: Red/Yellow/Blue, Red-Green/Blue-Yellow.
    Uses dark theme variant by default.
    Clearer icons, prettier freehand cursors.
    Device prefs allow glitchy devices to be restricted.
    Eraser mode no longer changes the size of the brush.
    New vector layers, editable in an external app (Inkscape recommended).
    New fallback layer types: non-PNG image, data.
    More kinds of images now work as backgrounds.
    Improved Windows support
    Ported to GTK3.
    Accelerator map editor has moved to preferences.
    Many other bugfixes, translations, and code quality improvements.

I tend to use the git version, so I'm familiar with many of these already. Almost all of them are quite solid. I especially appreciate the 'edit in external app' functionality, for text and vectors. Not super keen on the flood fill tool -- the way it interacts with an infinite canvas can be surprising and aggravating. Inking tool is getting there , needs a bit more polish (simplification options, tweaking multiple points at once). Layer improvements are really good, particularly the different ways you can mask layers / groups.

[Full 2D]

great oportunity for anyone who creates platformer game:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/54188

thanks for Your time

merged from portfolios. please don't advertise there. - Atnas

[Ai]

The "Spray" tool in recent dev versions of Inkscape is looking like an interesting design tool.. with this "no-overlap" option, it gets a nice distribution of the shapes.. based on Voronoi, probably. This is the video that illustrated the basic function to me:


Seems like there are quite a variety of options and videos demonstrating them, linked in The release notes for 0.92