Official Off-Topic Thread

[Jorund]

I know it wasn't the point, i should've said "That's also great...".
Isn't it clear plastic? If it is, you could put some lamp in the lower part and the drawing you want to trace in the top with another paper on top.

Nevermind...

PS: Its looks great but it still looks a bit uncomfortable. Doesn't the pen touch the top part?

[Mathias]

Nice handywork, Indigo! Already got a v2 eh? It looks very cool. I have no laptop. If I get one, I'll keep your innovation in mind.


Speaking of tracing, Jorund, here's a handy-dandy trace-board I whipped up. Pure plexiglass and hillbilly ingenuity. The ones in the stores cost way too much and they're wimpy. Plus I worked in a hotel maintenance shop at the time and the right combination of available materials and boredom came together just right. Behold the monstrosity:






On another note, I would just like to express something, as an artist. Most of us here are a creative person of some sort. Most of us have intentions of creating great art and improving in what we do. Amidst disagreement on whether or not your workspace "quality" matters I would have to say that what you have to work with, as far as hardware specifically, truly does matter. I recently upgraded my monitors and wow, it's had a tremendously posotive effect on my workflow.


updated my desktop thread post for fun

At the time I got them, I was down to one subpar 1280x1024 native res LCD. What a wonderful difference they make. Everything seems more pleasant, and easier. I have no desire for more screen-space, which is a first. I actually feel compelled to practice my craft more, more motivated. I enjoy my time spent in front of my computer more now.

Just thought I'd pass that along. If you're dealing with a poor workspace, poor display especially, and spend a lot of time at your computer, why not pay a little to make it better? I think a lot suffer along disregarding how good a better setup can be for them. I was surprised. I think you will be, too. I got some pretty pimped out Samsung's. Worth every penny.
It reminds me of my friends with bad mattresses. You spend 1/3 of your life in bed, it's worth the money not to sleep on a back-cruncher.

[Rydin]

I prefer to pixel on my old gateway 2000 crystalscan 1024x768.  Would go worse if I could.  It's like a time-traveling sort of thing.  Sometimes I even set my macbook resolution (native 1280x800) to 640x480 when pixelling.

[Conzeit]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4594/center_of_mass_tools_and_.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraFeatureArticles+%28Gamasutra+Feature+Articles%29 an article with a few physic formulas for calculating natural motion in animation....I dont know if I'd ever use these formulas but reading the damn thing cant hurt 

[.TakaM]

You guys seen Paul Robertson is behind the graphics for the upcoming Scott Pilgrim game?
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2010-scott-pilgrim/101459

Looks pretty neat.

[crab2selout.png]

looks like a neat rivercity ransom clone. Lol at the toonies at the end. wtfcanada.

[Rydin]

I decided to build my hobby RPG in Multimedia Fusion 2.  I was making an engine from scratch so I could use some of the basic features for later stuff down the road.  The engine had scrolling text, grid based movement, an inventory system, buying and selling from vendors, chests, a naming system, sokoban, inns, randomly moving NPCs, equipment--basically everything but the battle system, which if I kept working at the pace I was going, would have been finished by the end of the weekend.  After the battle system, I would have been ready to call the engine done and ready to make games with.  Then this evening my laptop hard drive ceased up.   Didn't back anything up.

So now, I am starting from square one.  This time I'm going to do a few things different: Mainly, plan the entire project from start to finish.  I had been making stuff as I went along, and this made my arrays of data very messy and necessarily time consuming to wade through.  Secondly, todo lists.  I discovered in the past week of working on the engine that it's very easy to keep a synergy going when you don't really have to think about what to do next--there's been lots of time wasted staring into space.  And, of course, the biggest lesson learned is: back things up.  EVERYBODY: BACK THINGS UP.

[Jad]

On the other hand, though, making everything messy-as-you-go is great for creativity, now that you're redoing it, you can remake the stuff you want but with much better structure.

Except for it all being completely tragic, it's a good thing, that.

[Indigo]

Very cool light table mathias!

So I think i'm done with these lapdesk things.  This is the final version - which I may add some grip surface to the top or something, but thats about it.  It works even better than the last.  The plastic is thicker and there's no bending going on.  This one is made from two solid pieces of plastic rather than 4.  the Top shelf is all one piece with bends to form the side walls.  I messed up a bit when gluing them together and left some smudgies.. ah well.



EDIT:  I'm wondering.. is this a sort of product that other artists would be interested in, or just me?

[JJ Naas]

I haven't played much games for almost a year, now I finally got seriously hooked on a game Desktop Dungeons. Nice graphs by Derek Yu and all.