I know Andail has been discussing background illustration issues in a recent thread, and don't want to feel like I am infringing upon this, but I have had a number of requests from people in various places asking how I draw my backgrounds, and so in order to avoid doing up new tutorials each time I have decided to post something here as a more permanent reference for those interested in such a thing.
Before I go into any details, please be aware that I am not a trained artist and my techniques can be regarded as being full of bad habits. That being said, however, I do not believe that it is essential to study for years and years in order to simply make some nice backgrounds for one of your projects. What advice, if any, you choose to take from this guide is up to you, but be warned that some of the things I suggest may be "bad" advice when considered from the viewpoint of one who is familiar with more traditional painting techniques.
Before we start, let's have a quick look at the background I've painted quickly in order to demonstrate the steps I use:
(http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/953/exampler.png)
As this was simply done for an example image, I didn't worry too much about the following, but these are important things to consider before you start drawing your background:
- Where are my exits, and how many are there?
- What items, objects, characters and hotspots am I going to need to fit into this background?
- What sort of atmosphere is my setting designed to evoke?
Also, a quick discussion on hardware/software:
- Make sure your monitor is calibrated properly with the colours. If you use Photoshop, Adobe Gamma is rather good at getting good colour settings for your screen.
- Whilst it can be done with a mouse, this sort of thing is much easier with a tablet. I use a little A5 Wacom tablet - not too expensive for my little needs and big enough to sit comfortably on my lap. Pressure sensitivity and smoother line control is really helpful for painting your scenes.
- For backgrounds, a good choice of program is Photoshop. Because full Photoshop is so expensive, I use Photoshop Elements 8 - not only did I buy it for about 1/10th the price of CS4, it still has all the stuff I use (although I never really use much more than the brush and eraser tools) and isn't filled up with expensive filters and the like that I will simply never use anyway. Other alternatives include Paint Shop Pro and Painter. GIMP is a good free alternative if you simply cannot afford these programs.
And on a technique related note:
A lot of the things I do here are things I developed whilst doing pixel based backgrounds. I learnt a lot about things like atmospheric perspective and choosing interesting palettes by learning "pixelart" for a while. Playing around with colour palettes to see what works well is really beneficial to creating eye catching backgrounds, and learning to simplify your work with pixels can also speed up the way you work with brushes a good deal. It is not essential to learn these things, but it can help.
With regards to layers... I try not to use too many, and if I do end up using a few I always merge them whenever possible. Painting with lots of layers is easy, but not really all that necessary, and I often find I work slower when I try using lots of layers because I spend more time switching between them and trying to keep them organised. If you can paint your backgrounds on 1-5 layers then it will be a lot more manageable - and whilst layers make erasing things easy, I don't find it that hard to paint over things instead anyway.
With those things in mind, let's take a quick look at each stage I use to create a scene:
(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6494/step1copy.png)
The first step I use is to establish the main hue of the background. For an outside background this is often the sky, for an inside background it is the primary lightsource. Also, I draw my backgrounds at twice the resolution of the final image, and resize once I have finished drawing it.
For the sky, I use a gradient. Skies that are a flat colour work as well, but appear much less interesting and more flat. As Andail mentioned in his guide, the atmosphere is lighter towards the horizon and darker away from it.
I also copy in a 200% zoomed image of the main character sprite before I draw any structures on a seperate layer. This is a good reference point to ensure that none of your doors/chairs/tables etc look out of proportion with your main character when she/he is walking around. I always try to avoid character scaling, as it tends to look quite awful at the resolution I use for games.
(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/2351/step2copy.png)
The next step is to draw in the playable areas. This is the areas in which the player can move her/his character around and interact with objects. Using the reference sprite, I draw silhouettes of everything using a dark, desaturated colour. I try to avoid black as I feel dark purple/blue/green/red looks nicer, but it is all down to personal preference.
(http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/8971/step3copy.png)
The next step is to introduce secondary lightsources. These provide some nice variation of hue throughout the scene.
To create these, I usually use a couple of layers - first I draw the white shape with a hard edged brush, then I either trace the first shape again in white with a softer edged brush or copy it to a new layer and use gaussian blur to soften the edges. Then, in a layer below this, I use draw the colour of the light with a softer edged brush. This creates a fairly nice feeling of glow.
(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/4277/step4copy.png)
The next step is to give some depth and form to the shapes we have drawn in silhouette. Here I use a brush at low opacity to highlight the areas that are facing the appropriate direction. You can do this with either a soft edged brush or a hard edged brush. Often I use both, but for the sake of speed I have used a hard edged brush here.
Learning to colour pick and use the opacity of your brush to blend colours is very helpful here, and is something well worth practising.
(http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/3613/step5copy.png)
Now I add the secondary lighting to the scene, using similar techniques to the previous step. Try to balance this so that the secondary lightsources don't look too strong or weak - doing it on a separate layer and adjusting the transparency of this layer is one way of getting the right setting. Doing this gives you some great opportunities to light places that would otherwise remain in shadow, so run with it!
(http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/6595/step6copy.png)
Finally, I add in some background detail. Although I am often tempted by the simplicity of simply drawing buildings as rectangles facing dead on, it is much nicer to rotate them a bit and have some nice angles in the background.
In order to make these buildings look further away I simply rely on atmospheric perspective. The buildings you see here are painted with a translucent brush, allowing the sky colour to show through, giving the appearance of atmosphere in front of these buildings. The more transparent the brush, the further away the buildings look. Simple, no?
From here, all that remains is the process of cleaning up your messy brushstrokes and adding in details and textures. With this done you can resize the image and import it into your game!
If you have comments/questions/criticism or something else to add to the discussion, I am certainly open to it, and look forward to seeing your thoughts. I hope this gives some insight to those who have been inquiring about the way I draw this style of background.
A really good read. It was very nice to get some insight on how you produce your art and I'm sure it will be helpful to a lot of people. Well done! :)
I'd like to give you some personal advice, Ben. Since you have a habit of resizing your backgrounds to a lower resolution you might want to considering changing the image interpolation setting to "Nearest neighbour" before you do the resizing. I'm guessing your current setting is the Photoshop default "Bilinear" which gives the resized image very smooth edges. If you switched to "Nearest neighbour" you'd get nicely sharp edges which would look way better with your pixelated characters. The change isn't that big but it's still noticable.
Just in case you don't know where this setting is, this is how to access it in CS4 (I haven't used Elements that much so I don't know if it's the same): Edit -> Preferences -> General.
using nearest neighbour would wreck his backgrounds.
They are smooth painted images, not pixel art.
(http://pabstuff.com/images/misc/benresize.png)
This is his 640x480 background resized with nearest neighbour and with the character copy-pasted from the first picture. I don't see how it's wrecked. The only thing that changed is that there is less blurriness on some edges which is good.
hmm fair point, I stand corrected
Nice Walk-hrough Ben.
I've played around with different settings for this, and sometimes I find that using certain settings when resizing can cause edges to get badly distorted when I downsize.
I actually use the bicubic setting as this seems to work fine. Still, I appreciate the input and will have a play around. For backgrounds where I actually draw sharp edges (which is admittedly a bit of a rarity) it would be nice to have them downsize with slightly more sharpness.
Misj' - the thought of backgrounds being a puzzle and this being a walkthrough now amuses me very much :D
Ah, but art is a puzzle, and one which I'm yet to crack!
Great stuff Ben, I'm sure I'll find it useful some time soon. :)
QuoteThe buildings you see here are painted with a translucent brush, allowing the sky colour to show through, giving the appearance of atmosphere in front of these buildings
Instead of painting with a translucent brush, draw each background building on a separate layer with 100% opacity brush, then you can change each layer's opacity individually. That way you don't have to keep the brush held down while drawing the entire building. :P
Anyway, nice tutorial. I hope it directs people to make more Ben304 style games... or just more games in general. ;D
Actually, Ryan, whilst that works, what I often do is draw a large translucent blob at the building's rough position and then erase around the edges to refine the shape.
But yes, your suggestion works well also.
Nice work Ben! But how do you draw those diagonal lines so straight? This isn't the brush tool is it? :P
In photoshop, with the brush tool, hold down shift and it will draw lines from point to point.
That technique also works for the pencil tool too. And you'll get perfect lines without the double pixels that their ACTUAL line tool does, which is retarded.
I use it all the time.
Yep the shift button feature is a god send! Lovely tutorial Ben. I might have a go at drawing a background in your style when i get my hands on a tablet. :)
Yeah, i thought it could be that...
And what about transparency on the light layers? I can't get any result *almost* ('cause i can't make lights this good as you!) like yours with 100% opacity on layers. How much transparency?
I hate the transparency problems with shading. What Ryan suggested earlier works if you only have one shade (or maybe 1 shade and 1 highlight) per thing, but yours is better if ben's want to fine-tune the shading, or want inbetween stuff, etc.
But then Ben's method ALWAYS gives me the problem that once I've done something with a translucent brush, and then I realise I missed something, or I want to add something, I have to draw that part VERY VERY carefully, because overlapping makes it less translucent, and patchy.
Maybe i should post my bg here to show you the transparency problem...
Babar: One thing I find useful in this sort of situation is to take the colour you are painting with at the opacity you want it, paint a blob on a layer and use the colour picker to pick the colour of that blob as your new painting colour. Then undo, change brush opacity back to 100% and paint the image without having to worry about translucency later on. This works really great, but can look a bit strange if you have a very strong sky gradient.
Jakerpot: Are you talking about the lightsource itself, the highlights on the ground.. the highlights from the secondary lightsources? I'm not really sure what you're asking, but will happily help if I can.
Quote from: Ben304 on Fri 05/02/2010 09:50:41
Babar: One thing I find useful in this sort of situation is to take the colour you are painting with at the opacity you want it, paint a blob on a layer and use the colour picker to pick the colour of that blob as your new painting colour. Then undo, change brush opacity back to 100% and paint the image without having to worry about translucency later on. This works really great, but can look a bit strange if you have a very strong sky gradient.
That's what I do for shading. Do it using transparency, then either take a screen-shot and paste over the original image on 100% or just select the new colour it produces and add that to a 100% layer.
Great tutorial, Ben. When I get a tablet I'll also be having a go at some 'painted' backgrounds. My style at the moment is more line tool based.
Hey Ben, just wanted to say thanks. This is very inspiring :)
Quote from: Ryan Timothy on Thu 04/02/2010 12:23:16Instead of painting with a translucent brush, draw each background building on a separate layer with 100% opacity brush, then you can change each layer's opacity individually.
Quote from: Babar on Fri 05/02/2010 01:09:07
I hate the transparency problems with shading. What Ryan suggested earlier works if you only have one shade (or maybe 1 shade and 1 highlight) per thing, but yours is better if ben's want to fine-tune the shading, or want inbetween stuff, etc.
I wanted to write something down on this matter, and I ended up creating a single (big) image. I happen to like working on with layers...so hence the abundant use of layers in the approach outlined. The examples were done in Photoshop CS2. But most of it should be possible in Elements as well. Oh, and I ruined Ben's image as an example (sorry, the windows turned dark when I separated the layers).
-- click image to enlarge --
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Misj_AtmosphericWithLayers_small.png) (http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Misj_AtmosphericWithLayers.png)
-- click image to enlarge --
Approach 1 shows Ryan's approach, which works well in certain cases. Approach 2 is an alternative approach (you can also do similar things with effect-layers, but they are not available in Elements (I think), so I presented an approach more generally applicable) that gives the user a bit more control. Also, it should work - with some tweaks - for all 'painted' images (independent of the amount of highlights and shadows).
Although there are some things (like linking layers together) that I think is not possible in Elements, but I couldn't test it here because I've only got PScs2 installed on this computer.
You guys have some really complicated workarounds for the transparency! Why not just paint it with a 100% brush on a separate layer and then turn down the opacity of the whole layer? In Photoshop, you can even use several layers, put them all in a folder and turn down the opacity of the folder, which is easier than Misj's method for avoiding bleed-through.
I was talking about the highlights, i'm confuised because i don't know if i should use totally opaque collors that fit well in the highlights, or you use a darker collor and change the opacity to look like it is brighter and do the same in other layers that are upon it. It doesn't works for me in either ways! If you could show us a step-by-step guide of doing the highlights, i would pleased, because this is my biggest problem :P
PS: I don't know, i have a feeling that i killed English language right now...
Markbilly: Yeah, that works. Glad to hear it's interesting :)
Kaioshin: Nice to hear that, thanks.
Misj': Cool, interesting ideas. I've used some of these other techniques before (and have been playing around with them a bit lately as well) but there's some new ideas in there as well, so thanks.
I'm not really that "anti layers", but I know some people who use like 30-80 layers to make the backgrounds for their games... which I consider totally insane :P
Snarky: Yeah, that does work, and it is something I use a fair bit. Folders are something I never use (I actually think that Elements might not support them), but if I do the buildings this way I simply adjust the opacity of each building in the background individually, then flatten them all into a single layer. There's no "right" way of doing it, I don't think, but depending on how much detail you're planning to add (one can often get away with using very little detail on elements like these) you can often get away with doing this quite basically.
Jakerpot: The opacity to use depends totally on the situation - there's no magical "right" opacity to use, you need to adjust it depending on what you're painting. If you're at step 3 and looking to move to step 4, try this: Select the sky colour as your brush colour, set your brush opacity to somewhere between 25% and 50% and draw with that brush on top of the silhouette, where you want it highlighted. I colour pick all the time while shading, so I often start out with the highlight colour quite bright, and then colour pick the area I've painted to get a darkened tone.
If that confuses you, post a picture for us to look at :)
If anyone else wants to edit the image, I've included the final .psd here (http://www.mediafire.com/?n2jjnxlygta) - and I even refrained from flattening the layers while drawing it, just to make your lives easier (usually I'd flatten this down to just a few layers - but I thought it might be handy to have the "everything on a seperate layer" version)
And just to confuse everyone and to show that there are as many exceptions as there are rules, you can get away with doing your background scenery without any transparency at all:
(http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/379/screenshotcopy.png)
Hooray for exceptions to the rule :=
Very smooth lighting. Very nice.
When I paint with transparency the gradients are very patchy
So I end up taking a lot of time to get them to look good and smooth
But some times its good to have some not too smoothed lights too.
o/
Yeah, i know that is no 'magical opacity' but i mean, how you selected the opacity in this bg :)
Also, don't you have a "everything on a seperate layer" version? ;D Oh my gosh, i'm so boring >:(
Thanks for the tutorial.
I have loved your background style for a while now.
Here is my attempt at a mountainous background.
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/mountain33.png)
I think there might be a flux of games with your art style soon lol :D
Excratus: If you're doing highlighting or shading, often you can paint with a softer edged brush to get much smoother results. If you do this on a new layer, you can then erase around the edges (as softer edged brushes sometimes are a bit harder to draw accurately with)
Jakerpot: I selected it by guessing :D
As for a version of the background without everything on a different layer.. why? I drew it like this on purpose so that if people wanted to edit it they could. If you want elements merged, can't you do it yourself?
Revan: Cool, glad to hear it helped.
I wanted the diferent shades of light in diferent layers to study them ;D
But it's ok, now i think i'm getting it, soon i will post a background done for shading test (almost exactly like your example).
That would require painting each brushstroke on a different layer, which seems a bit excessive by anyone's standards.
Just keep experimenting, you'll find that it is not as hard as it looks.
I generally approach digital painting the same way you would approach regular painting. Sometimes. Other times I have used 80+ layers. It really depends on what I am making. 4 Is a good amount for your backgrounds. Background, mid, fore and any overlapping details. Unless you are one of those people who draw in greyscale (something I have never understood) Then you will need far more layers to achieve the same effect.
Great tutorial Ben, it really shows an unimpressive way to draw your impressive backgrounds, also got me into thinking seriously of buying a graphics tablet! So cheers!
Excellent tutorial, yes. I love your background style and am so impressed how you seem to get the palette right from the very beginning - once I finish drawing a background I usually end up playing with the hue and saturation settings until it looks nothing like the original colors.
But my real reason for posting, was to recommend anyone who digs Ben's art style to play through IWWHIIWWHITOMIROTPG: The Game (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=39436.0) and download the bonus content (or did you have to cheat to get the link, I forget?). There are .psd files of Ben's backgrounds where you can see all the layers n stuff, really interesting to study.
Actually I often up the contrast a little once I finish working on a background as I paint at low contrast all the time.
You do have to cheat to get the bonus content for the IWWHI stuff. Of all of those, the Caverns of Meat .psd file is probably the best to look at; because I was doing these in a rush I didn't spend time flattening layers and just kept sticking more and more layers on top. If you turn on the layers one by one in the caverns of meat bg in their numerical order it's almost like watching a step by step of how I painted the background. The green head one is the least instructive because photoshop froze up while I was working on it at one point, so I print screened the image, pasted it as a single layer and thankfully managed to save myself a lot of extra painting time.
Glad you folks enjoyed the tut :)
So... How can i cheat????????? ;D
...
I'm serious, how can i see the psd files?
Same way as in SoMI:
Spoiler
Press CTRL+W. Don't worry about copying down the link on paper, it will be saved as bonusdisc.txt in the game's folder.
It was done in like 5 minutes. So mind that..I think it's just remniscent of the style that's all..
(http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q53/JustLedZep/112d.png)
It's terribly rough, but I think I'm in the right direction. I'll start when I'm having a cool idea, but so far it has brought sort of fast results. This was done in like 2 minutes. I was just having fun.
EDIT: New attempt
(http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q53/JustLedZep/12bgro23und.png)
I'm still forgetting to paint some parts, and I stupidily leave them as they are, but I really have my fun with lighting the place (though yellow lights didn't work as I wanted..
i paint exactly like dualnames (If i try ben's style). I will post something when i go back home :=
Hello! Nice tutorial!
I love Ben style too, so I tried something last night. This is what i got:
(http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/4198/nemlil.png)
But the edges are really bad (espacially the tree-lamp on the left). I resized (with "Nearest neighbour") from the original, wich is that:
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/1339/nembig.png
The Sinc (Lanczos3) interpolation option in Gimp tends to preserve sharp edges better than the other algorithms. Although, depending on the type of the original, you might often prefer the smoother result of Cubic (or bicubic) interpolation.
This is mostly relevant to the earlier discussion on resizing and edge sharpness, but let's pretend I'm just "fashionably late", ok? ;)
I know this thread has been dead since february, but here goes anyway.
Thanks for a great tutorial Ben! It has been a great help. However, my brush-based work tends to scream made-with-photoshop-brush. Any idea how to make it more organic and less photoshop?
Any chance of an indoor scene tutorial btw?
You knew how long the thread had been dead for but posted anyway? Breaking site rules knowingly must certainly be worse than doing it accidentally, so don't do this again. If you want help from ben, send him a private message. Don't dredge up a 7 month old thread (or any thread older than a month, generally) unless you're the original poster.
Quote from: ProgZmax on Sat 11/09/2010 23:47:59
You knew how long the thread had been dead for but posted anyway? Breaking site rules knowingly must certainly be worse than doing it accidentally, so don't do this again. If you want help from ben, send him a private message. Don't dredge up a 7 month old thread (or any thread older than a month, generally) unless you're the original poster.
That's overreacting for you.
Overreacting and quite rude actually. Who says I knew about that rule anyway?
I don't normally speak out on such issues but let's not put the poor guy off...
If this was a usual critics lounge post I would understand the point of bringing up the thread rules - the author will have finished or abandoned the piece they were working on by this later time.
It is a tutorial post, though. Surely it is not beyond reason for people to post comments of thanks or curiosity at any time regardless of how old it is?
I don't want to cause any trouble or single anyone out on purpose, but the attitude with which forum rules are upheld here has caused contention in the past and it can't be healthy for the community. Surely the general atmosphere and welcome we give as a forum is more important than the unforgiving protection of rules?
It is far more rude to join a website and start violating rules you agreed to uphold in the registration, so ignorance is just no excuse. Read the rules at the header of every forum thread and obey them and you will have no problem; pretend they aren't there or show a disrespect for them and you will be called out on it. Fullstop. Ignorance of the rules is never a sufficient excuse.
If you have anything further to say about this, send me a PM. This thread is not for discussing whether or not you agree with how the rules are enforced. If Ben has nothing to add to the thread, I'll give this a lock in a few days.
This is more of a sticky-about-to-be kind of topic. So I found it rather unjust. I was thinking of consulting this topic, at some point.
And he was aware how old the topic was.
I think its incredible stupid to let a troll just walk on by for days/weeks and remember the rules on somebody that actually knows them.
I think he should shot on the wall of justice. So he never violates any rules anymore. Yay, for the welcoming party. Now let's find who forums part of AGS iceygames is violating.
This tutorial is also linked to in the Tutorial Redux announcement. So it is not possible to add comments on any of them? ???
I just get the feeling we should all take a step back and grasp some perspective. Yes, rules are important but there needs to be room to apply some common sense, too. At the end of the day, it's just a forum. A forum full of friendly enthusiasts. I think any action that threatens that atmosphere is more grave than a little rule breaking...
Anyway, I'm going to draw a big line now so people can continue the thread on-topic (i.e. about Ben's art)...
'Till Ben answers in person, I hope I can help this 90s man:
From what I know of Ben's art, the particular background drawn in the tutorial is incredibly typical of his style, being a strange mix of matrix-punk and something else. His style isn't fully explained in this tutorial, as it only lays out the basic structure from which he builds the final image. This additive process isn't something that can be easily explained in a tutorial, and practice is really the only thing that can help one add the fine details which are what turns the art from the tutorial into that which you see in his games.
With a few exceptions, Ben's indoor scenes seem to be made much in the same way, simply replacing the background with a more appropriate view.
While I don't pretend to be a Ben-Art-Scholar, I hope this has been helpful.
Quote from: markbilly on Mon 13/09/2010 01:25:07
If this was a usual critics lounge post I would understand the point of bringing up the thread rules
...
I don't want to cause any trouble or single anyone out on purpose, but the attitude with which forum rules are upheld here has caused contention in the past and it can't be healthy for the community. Surely the general atmosphere and welcome we give as a forum is more important than the unforgiving protection of rules?
Quote from: ProgZmax on Tue 14/09/2010 01:18:17
It is far more rude to join a website and start violating rules you agreed to uphold in the registration, so ignorance is just no excuse. Read the rules at the header of every forum thread and obey them and you will have no problem; pretend they aren't there or show a disrespect for them and you will be called out on it. Fullstop. Ignorance of the rules is never a sufficient excuse.
Well, there is one
tiny little detail to consider:
There is no rule against posting to old threads on the Critics Lounge.Maybe you've got this board confused with the Games in Production forum, ProgZMax, but like you say, ignorance of the rules is not a sufficient excuse, and is never a reason to be an asshole.
True.
Not digging up old threads is kind of a universal rule pertaining to message boards in general, and not explicitly mentioned here, so we probably shouldn't be too anal when enforcing it.
Well then, gentlemen, as you were. :P
StillInThe90s, you will have to overlook the various squabbles of those with power.
No hard feelings, eh? :D
Sorry for the late reply, I've been out of town for a few days!
With regards to making a picture more organic and less "photoshoppy", it really depends on how you work - what brushes you use, whether you use a mouse or a tablet (or trackpad), how you blend your colours, how you lighten and darken... that sort of thing. If you want to post an example with a specific question I might be able to help (you can of course PM me about it).
As for indoors scenes, I'm not shy about the fact that I don't really like doing them very much; but have been doing a lot more of them lately. The concept is basically the same - instead of starting with sky, start with a whole screen of your shadow colour, place your lightsources and shade with them, basically. Like anything, I've worked out a method of doing them through trying again and again to draw indoors scenes, picking up little bits as I go :).
Hope this helps - like I said, feel free to PM me if you want.
I could've sworn the registration page had a note about this, but it's still always been that the necroposting rule applied to all forums of the site. If that's not clear in the registration than that sounds like an oversight that should be corrected for the future; as it stands, I've added the rule here in the CL to make it clearer that this forum follows the basic rules of the GiP and General Forum like all others do. Sorry about that!
Sorry to continue the off-topic argument. Maybe best to split off some of the posts in the thread to a new one in another forum?
Quote from: Andail on Wed 15/09/2010 11:20:19
True.
Not digging up old threads is kind of a universal rule pertaining to message boards in general, and not explicitly mentioned here, so we probably shouldn't be too anal when enforcing it.
This varies enormously from forum to forum, and I don't agree that it's a universal rule. Some forums automatically lock all old threads, others want you to dig up threads that are years old if your question is at all related instead of making a new one (e.g. The Digital Fix, most technology forums).
Quote from: ProgZmax on Thu 16/09/2010 04:40:10
I could've sworn the registration page had a note about this, but it's still always been that the necroposting rule applied to all forums of the site. If that's not clear in the registration than that sounds like an oversight that should be corrected for the future; as it stands, I've added the rule here in the CL to make it clearer that this forum follows the basic rules of the GiP and General Forum like all others do. Sorry about that!
There's no such rule in the General Forum, either, and I would argue that it is not and should not be the general rule for all the boards, or for this board particularly. It makes sense for the Games in Production board because a game that hasn't been updated for a long time is likely to be abandoned. The more nuanced rules for the technical forums (do not dig up old threads to answer questions, DO dig up old threads if you have the same problem) make sense because old bugs and problems are likely to be fixed in newer versions and to just be confusing. And obviously there are good reasons to lock all old Competition threads.
It certainly doesn't make sense for the Hints and Tips forum (better to have all the hints in one thread), or for the Completed Games forum (you're always encouraged to leave your comments on a game you play, and shouldn't start a new thread for that when one already exists). As far as I'm aware, no one has ever suggested that this so-called rule is in effect on those boards.
For Adventure-Related Talk, the Critics Lounge and Gen-Gen it's more subjective. In some cases there could be very good reasons to revive an old thread (for example, if I came across something - let's say an insightful article - that was very relevant to this thread (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41151.40), I think posting it would be a Good Thing). In other cases it should probably be discouraged (reviving bitter old arguments, say). In my opinion the rules for these boards should tell people to be aware of the age of the thread they post to, consider if old threads are still relevant, and point out in their post that the thread is old so other posters don't get confused.
I think this is a great example of an instance in which reviving an old thread does make sense. It's a tutorial, so it's relevant to many readers and not really "dated" in any meaningful way (I'm sure quite a few people appreciated it showing up again), and Ben is still around and active on the forums, so he's available to answer the question. And like cat says, it's linked to in the sticky tutorials post, so it's not really something dredged up from deep in the archives.
All of which is to say, I don't think "StillInThe90s" deserved any abuse, or anything sterner than a "Well, why don't you post your work and we can have a look at it?" And I think it's a bad precedent to use as the basis for the mod policy going forward.
I agree with snarky, If a post is *directly relevant* to the OP then it is completely absurd to create a new thread only to reference the old one.
[/apologies for OT]
Apology accepted. No hard feelings, but a bit less enthusiasm about participating in the forum.
Thanks for the on-topic answer. Sadly, I don't have any artwork worth posting at the moment. It is just too bad. I guess more experimentation will pay off eventually.
Cheers!