How I spent MY day...

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Fake Star Trek v real

So I was inspired to do a version of the Federation with Picard not swapped out for Kirk.

Ol' Jean-Luc was like a big flat orange neon cartoon and needed shading bad. And that led me do the same thing for Shaggy of the Cannabis League.

The results are mixed- Picard is much improved, I think, but Shaggy looks a bit strange, never having been a photograph. I like the shading, but making a realistic depiction of Shaggy that still looks like Shaggy is way above my graphic pay-grade.

For fun and playtesting I commenced a game with my most recent faction work, both Federations (federate and federateD) and both my Borg (Borg and OtherBorg). -And ended up altering the logo for Borg v.6.66.

Below is a Planetary Council screenshot. At the top you can see the headquarter Bases for both Federations. I'm very pleased with how the NextGen bases turned out. They, at worst, no longer look exactly like Spartan bases.

Below that, all youse fake Star Trek fans enjoy.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Atlantis

I was looking at an ACDG6 thread this morning, and a screenshot inspired me to have a run at doing something about the look of the Atlantis bases.

I did. -And- I ended up making Alvea look 15 years younger and, I daresay, beautiful. She's gone from Meg Foster to Lauren Holly- word- and looks less like an altered photograph and more like a painting.

Attached is a zip of atlantis.pcx, my way. Enjoy.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

No longer quite twins

I realised yesterday that somehow in my makeover of the New University Commonwealth, a different faction's stage one bases got mixed in- I had wondered why they were different, but since a giant egg could conceivably hatch into a weird starfish base, not thought much of it. How embarrassing. I had to do something about that.

Par for the course, I got sidetracked. Now, the Empaths and the UniCom no longer have -quite- twin leaders. I made modest alterations to both, one to the face and the other to the hair. Probably all you can make out in the thumbs is that, as with my previous posting of them, they still face in opposite directions against different-colored backgrounds, and still must be sisters.

-Hey, I didn't change them all that much.

[So I added the fake ad to show the difference, (and because the fake ads tickle me. There are two more on my factions webpage.)]


Also, I did throw out the eggs and fiddled with the lighting on them there starfish bases some more. They look pretty good in the game now.

[vyeh]

Any chance we can get you involved in modifying resource icons to show negative values?

I was thinking along the lines of surrounding the current resource icons with a red border.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Sure

That sounds like something I can do in a couple of hours. I'm on it.

[vyeh]

Pyramids:

Of the 3, I think Swimming Pool fits in better with the SMAX color scheme.

Empaths:

I like the fact that the on and off for the small report logo have better contrast.

The face looks more natural.

[Darsnan]

Par for the course, I got sidetracked. Now, the Empaths and the UniCom no longer have -quite- twin leaders.
Also, I did throw out the eggs and fiddled with the lighting on them there starfish bases some more. They look pretty good in the game now.

Probably a side effect of runnning the Cloning Vats SP: you keep running into people you kinda seem to have met before....

Anyways, I really like the Empaths: what is the origin of these graphics? Did they originally come from the Network Node? Regardless, I'm assuming we can download these and use in any mods/ scenarios?

Also, just throwing some thoughts out there on the Planetary Archives, in case your interested in fiddling with those graphics:

1) Pimp My Punishment Sphere
2) Silicon Implants: how much is too much By Aki Zeta
3) What happens to failed Probe Teams, and other discussions not commonly held in polite society
4) Transcendence in 5 simple steps
5) Psi Gates: what the governments not telling us.


D

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Pyramids:

Of the 3, I think Swimming Pool fits in better with the SMAX color scheme.

Really? That's the one I hue-shifted when I put together a set of four variations to post on the webpage. I guess I'll substitute it for the yellow-glow one and update. I like Lupe's house the best.

Empaths:

I like the fact that the on and off for the small report logo have better contrast.

The face looks more natural.

A thing that I didn't like when I started playing SMAniaC was the full-color icons in the F4 screen. -That ain't the way Brother Lal did it back in the day, and it don't look right.- So it's a standard tweak of my customized factions, along with making the mouse-over icon intermediate brightness and jumped-forward a pixel. That last, Lal didn't have, but should; it just looks better.

More natural than the original or Unicom? They both have heathier-looking skin tone the original shot, certainly, and I surely didn't leave enough whites in the eyes on the Unicom portrait. For the Empaths, other than color manipulation I mostly left her face alone. It's a great face. But her hairline was not the most beautiful thing about Oleksandra Nikolayenko (the original model), so when I pasted in the lightened hair, I had at that.

Probably a side effect of runnning the Cloning Vats SP: you keep running into people you kinda seem to have met before....

-Or a side effect of getting involved in the mod community. Me, I'm looking to run the Merchant Exchange.

Anyways, I really like the Empaths: what is the origin of these graphics? Did they originally come from the Network Node? Regardless, I'm assuming we can download these and use in any mods/ scenarios?

Paging Maniac...

They're from SMAniaC, of course. They appear to have been stitched together from at least three different sources. I've seen the bases in the Mars mod with the Unionists/Collective (where they were already turned the wrong way), the logos with some Network Node faction, and the portrait seems to have originated with Cybergod for Unicom.

Of course you can use any of them. (This particular faction has had so many contributors that no one ought to feel very proprietary anyway.) If any signifigant alterations are made to the graphics, please take credit in the empty space in the .pcx. Or if something I did is pasted into another faction, credit me. I just don't want credit/blame for stuff I didn't do.

Also, just throwing some thoughts out there on the Planetary Archives, in case your interested in fiddling with those graphics:

1) Pimp My Punishment Sphere
2) Silicon Implants: how much is too much By Aki Zeta
3) What happens to failed Probe Teams, and other discussions not commonly held in polite society
4) Transcendence in 5 simple steps
5) Psi Gates: what the governments not telling us.

I can use these. I'll try to tackle the project soon. I like getting requests.




--Nothing about the Texas faction?

C'mon; it's Foreman Domai. In a cowboy hat.

Also, a good-looking faction overall, if I say so myself.

[Darsnan]

--Nothing about the Texas faction?
.

My ex-wife is Texan. Nuff said from my perspective.

I can use these. I'll try to tackle the project soon. I like getting requests. .

Cool! I'd say if your really into this, then put out a call for ideas and see if you get anything else people have thought of: I'm sure others have had some really good ideas over the years.

D

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I spent considerable time in east Texas in the late ninties. One regret I had working on the faction was that there was no way to implement the behavior "While you're stopped for a left turn, give you a heart attack by passing you on the shoulder without slowing down.'

However, they're good sports as long as you don't slag the Dallas Cowboys or Texas itself. They'll laugh when I suggest the roadside signs ought to say "Don't mess with Texas- we're drunk and heavily armed."

Like hippies, Texans are funny. But then I was never married to one.

Cool! I'd say if your really into this, then put out a call for ideas and see if you get anything else people have thought of: I'm sure others have had some really good ideas over the years.

So let it be written; so let it be done.

[Russia4Life]

I started out opening/saving them with PhotoShop 5, a program I don't care for much, and doing most of the work pasting back and forth between Microsoft Paint and Lexmark Photo Editor- which came with my printer.

Between them, the later two are good for most of what I want to do, save color manipulation. Paint isn't bad for drawing and pasting smaller elements of an image in or moving them, but won't do a lot of things at all. Photo Editor is lousy for drawing and pasting/moving, and won't do a lot of things at all, but great for things like cropping, rotating, and altering brightness/contrast.

I later found out that Photo Editor will open/save .pcxs, but I think saving with it is what caused a brief rash of blue boxes around my bases.

Increasingly, I'm tweaking colors in PhotoShop. I'm slowly learning how to do stuff and using it for more, despite its over-complex interface.

We're off-topic for the thread, now. If you have any more graphics questions, (and I hope you do,) you might want to start a new thread in the creation sub-forum, or ask in "How I spent MY day". I know two ways to do scan lines that I've never seen anyone describe...

I found a program a while ago that I used for editing civ 2 files, figured I'd ask since I have seen you make quite a few files lately. You may find it useful plus it is free you can't beat that. I am not sure the rules on linking to stuff and I don't want to read them (I'm a little lazy. That's also part of the reason I don't make scenarios or anything anymore for Civ2 or AC). I will send you the link to the program in a PM.

-edit- Sent the message I hope it went through. I am used to getting a confirmation message from other forums, there wasn't one on here so I do not know.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I got it.

[vyeh]

I suppose you've seen the announcement.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Of course.

I don't know how it will impact my fun, so I'm just keeping my eyes open...

[vyeh]

FYI, (deleted).