Official Off-Topic Thread

[Carnivac]

Did my skydive a few weeks ago.  Was awesome.  I wanna go again sometime.  Right now though I'm trying to learn to tap dance for this play I'm in.  Not going well.  I sure can make a lot of noise in those shoes though. 

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Maybe I wasn't clear. I didn't mean idle patience. Usually, when you develop a piece, it takes hours, sometimes days for your work to form a pleasing (nice looking) shape (depends on the skills, but that's the case with me), the stage when it becomes very obvious (or probable) that it will develop into something good/usable. For me usually this "will I have to chuck completely what I'm working on ATM" phase is the worst.

[Kasumi]

Checked with ptoing to post this, so may as well.

Someone wrote a neat little native graphics editor for NES. You can get it here under Graphics Editor. Run it in an emulator of your choice, or the NES. Naturally, it's pretty tough to place pixels with a d-pad and four buttons, but if you import a tileset from elsewhere it can be pretty easy to put together a quick mockup. It even lets you edit pixels directly on the map and have them all update at once, like PyxelEdit.

May as well post about another homebrew NES while I'm around. Super Bat Puncher. It's a little old, but I haven't seen it posted about here before.

Video here.

Get it here.

I really enjoy its enemy animation, and its palette use is super clever. But even if it didn't have nice graphics, it's a very good (and short) demo worth checking out.

[Facet]

Yeah, definitely check out Bat Puncher, really slick presentation all round; an awesome soundtrack too.

Have you more homebrew suggestions Kasumi? as if I didn't have enough ROMs to keep me occupied forever  

[Kasumi]

Hmm... I collect a bunch of homebrew roms to check out my competition, but most aren't that complex or interesting enough to recommend checking out. Even mine! A Geometry Wars clone, but most did not like the controls. I did what I could to get eight buttons to control a game that used two joysticks + a button. I enjoy it, but it's basic. The highest score I've got is a little over 700,000 if you're feeling competitive. Most people quit before it starts to get intense at 10,000 because of the controls. Oh well! The real killer of the game is actually the green enemies. They lack a max speed check. There are strategies that make them a non-issue, though, if you spend some time on it. I wish I had the optimization knowledge I have now when I made it, I probably could have had a max speed check for them and still had ~40 of 'em on screen. 

Enough self promotion. Shiru has made quite a few neat ones.

Zooming Secretary is a great arcade style game that's pretty much totally adorable. Sweet pixels, good and original concept.

Alter Ego is a puzzle type game.

(Download links in the descriptions of the youtube videos.)

There are the two Battle Kid games, but I assume most have heard of them.

Lots of clone games too. Chu Chu Rocket is very technically impressive. There are Rodent's Revenge and Chip's Challenge clones as well.

Most of the scene is clones, or really short demos unfortunately.

The game I'm making now is a giant co-op platformer with slopes, but it's a while from release.

[Facet]

Great round-up thanks, I gave Galaxy a go today but didn't make 10,000 in 10-15 tries; I kinda suck at shooters. I spent almost all game-time turning tail whilst firing backwards, the Weavers are indeed right bastards .

Also playing Black Mesa which I'd almost forgotten about since the hype a few years ago; good stuff.

[Crow]

AVATAR~

[Conzeit]

IDK if any of you noticed, but I had stopped drawing. I started C&Cing myself in my head so much I didnt want to do art anymore

That ever happen to you? I think this post might help =)

http://chrisoatley.com/inner-critic/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChrisOatley+%28ChrisOatley.com%29

Incidentally, that's not what got me back into art, what got me back into art was a very eclectic design job I got....learning all sorts of shit, making up for all the years I stopped branching out and just stuck with pixelart & ink =)

[Grimsane]

sorry about the absence guys, have had quite alot of compounded PC issues including 1 which resulted in a forced complete format and re-installation of windows, also running Ubuntu now too because windows has gone whackodoodle, spent most my break fixing my PC issues, and now it's back to class, and it's getting pretty hectic assignment wise so won't be able to invest as much time in the forums as I'd like

oh and anyone who likes customizing and modifying graphical appearance in games might want to check out this graphic injector for dx9,10&11 games there is a tool/injector called SweetFX which can be found here essentially it's a compilation of quite a few fullscreen filters and shaderFX etc including HDR simulation,  chroma based edge sharpening, tonemapping, technicolor simulation and other FX and film type simulation

played around with it a bit and did this (warning it's quite a large image) didn't want to mess with the mood of the game too much so I just sharpened and tried making the lighting read more current gen.
the injector also allows for some SMAA (Sub-pixel Morphological Anti Aliasing) which can be much less of a performance hit than MSAA (MultiSample Anti Aliasing) and traditional AA, and can be applied to games without any AA support, so it's quite a nice tool. it's as easy as dropping files into your games folder, there are presets in the thread, and to do your own adjustments it's just adjusting values in a text file, also it updates in realtime without needing to restart the program/game

anyway I'll hopefully be hanging around here when I can

[Ashbad]

Been a few months since I've even logged in here, but I was incredibly busy with school, the last days of my internship and summer, and multiple other projects.  I've gotten the DotRSotB book a while ago, but I'm finally at peace enough to actually crack it open -- I'm hoping to get a read through of it and an attempt at every exercise by the end of the month.  That aside, I've been having some fun doodling shapes in class (mostly 3-dimensional ones, to practice perspective and shading on simple objects and such, which I'm getting down pretty well I'd say) -- not the most advanced art study, but I'm not the most advanced artist, by any means.  Anyways, probably not going to be terribly active with pixeling for a while (as I'll be doing pencil and paper drawing), but thought I'd drop by and prove I haven't died in the mean time, in case anyone remembers me