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Well, logically, the highlight is wrong, as you say. Such a hat would probably produce a huge cast shadow most hours of the day. That's the artistic freedom you must allow yourself; in return you get distinguishable facial features and some sort of sense of shape.
To have any sort of lighting and shading will always be a matter of compromising, since the character will undoubtedly find himself in various environments with varying light conditions.

Well, first of all it's not yellow. It's the same colour as his shirt, as I didn't want to increase the colour count.
Secondly, well...would yellow be wrong? Which colour do you prefer yourself? Exemplify!

I'm afraid I must say it's slightly dramatic for my taste. I think you can achieve the same level of angst without using so many clichés. You don't want to end up in the same box as teenage metal songwriters or suicidal goths.

I think the crux here is how you say "...would feel like". The cardinal rule about poetry is write what you know.
Your poem could just as well be about a gigolo of flesh and bone, as the experience of not feeling or breathing can be figurative speech. Someone reading that text would simply assume that it's about a person feeling shallow and unable to commit or develop any strong feelings.
Well, have you lived as a gigolo?

My best advice when it comes to creative writing is to never write about a feeling that you never felt. Never write that the sun was like a lemon, if you haven't at one point beheld the sun and thought "wow it looks like a lemon".

If the feelings expressed in your poem really are yours, then the above c&c don't apply.

x2

backdrop:


Tried to be subtle in the changes. I hope he's not changed in style.

* Changed face. Brought up some highlights, adjusted facial features
* Adjusted posture a bit. He looks more relaxed this way. Note how your original pose was not really balanced. I could explain this further if you wish.
* Tiny changes in proportions.
* Tiny adjusted colours, to get rid of that sickly greenish hue.

Bwahaha. That should tell you something about Norway.

Seriously though, you'll enjoy it for sure. I studied in Brighton last year and I had a blast. Of course, it's not warm-warm, but it's nice anyway.

That's funny. In Sweden you don't have to tag anything with copyright (c). Everything you make which falls under the definition of original artistic material (or whatever the definition is) automatically becomes copyrighted.

True satanists burn churches and make sacrifices, like in Sweden!

That's just prejudice. I haven't burnt any churches for years.
Not intentionally, anyway.

This problem has always been there, but it seems to never wear off, and it's becoming increasingly blatant now with all the blogs and whatnot.

But as soon as people can leave comments anonymously, the atmosphere turns so damn hostile. Are people really so full of surpressed anger? Does everyone just feel like smacking every other commenter in the face?
Check a random youtube page; every other comment is just about taking the piss. Any site which doesn't require people to register thoroughly ends up with chidlish, uncalled for aggressions.

So here's a mission: Go to a particularly inflamed board/forum/site and offer a comment that is all about being considerate, polite, mature. Take a screenshot and publish it here. We'll see who can make the biggest contrast - who can offer the most friendliness in the most hostile environment.

Or, if you just wanna discuss this phenomenon and try to explain why it's come to this, you can do that too!

Awesome safari clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

GarageGothic's last version, trust me.

After all, you want to make some sort of cliffhanger, convey some sort of mystery, and his un-aligned typewriter font does the job perfectly.

Also, the first few versions cut the upper part of the image in a way that is totally no-no compostion-wise. The statue appears crammed into the picture, whereas GG's version is given lots of space. And that space, in return, is perfect for having text on it.

Don't ask me what I did here. The anatomy and perspective have gone hay wire. I tried to make him in a more top-down view, but he ended up with a very small lower body and looking like he's standing on his toes.


x2

I actually play World of Warcraft, believe it or not. I bought it a year ago and I'm only on level 62 (on my first character) so you can probably guess I'm not playing too often. I had a break this entire spring, for instance.

I enjoyed it in periods, like when I made some very good friends in the beginning, and we'd explore the very nice scenery of the more "terrestial" landscape you could find back then.
In the expansion (which I bought for some inexplicable reason) the lands are horridly depressing. They're either boring beyond comprehension (vast marshlands and grey desolate forrests) or extremely hostile and alien and full of weird purple spikes.

My best times in WoW were when I had hit 60 and could join my guild to various raids. I was in a guild with very mature (many around 25-30) and friendly players, and those who only thought of treasures did not last long.

Last time I logged on, my guild had disbanded. The prospect to wade around those marshes to kill hundreds and hundreds of ugly pathetic trash-mobs (who don't differ from the very first monsters you ever fried with your starfire, except that the numbers following every blow they strike are higher now) is simply too dull to cope with. 

That's the boring aspect of such a game. After 62 levels, hundreds of dungeons explored, hundreds of bosses subdued and God knows how many hours played you're still faced with extremely primitive and poorly designed creatures that fight just as unimaginatively and dumb as always, and the fights are still as monotonous and the local quests are just as meaningless (kill 30 of this, kill 20 of that, bring this enchanted bucket of goatmilk to that one-legged unicorn in the Windmill of Damnation), and everything is so repetative you feel like a robot. It's completely impossible to care for even one of the featureless NPC's that are sporadically thrown out in the most illogical locations around the gameworld.
At one point the NPC's of the humans' largest town were hailing my name and greeting me in awe, but now, a dozen levels later, I must still find lost kittens for demented villagers.

Also, I belong to the diminutive group of people who reason that attacking someone (another human player) preemptively is wrong. This results in me trying to wave friendly at some bypassing enemy and jump merrily a few times to indicate that I, even if I could, would not attack him. I then return to my own business, which is killing a bunch of screaming monkeyfish (which, despite their intelligence being seemingly comparable to that of seaweed, have established a clergy - every fifth individual is a priest). Of course, as the group of mobs have brought me down to half my full health, the human enemy makes a sneak attack from behind and murders me. He then Laughs out Loud and spits at my body, and sits down to patiently wait for me to resurrect.

That was very nice, Evil. The guitar sounded really good, nice mixing there.

Nice to see a thread by you here, Snarky

You're still a bit early in the process, but I can still share some thoughts.
The background has a good, slightly dramatic composition (the rapids coming towards the viewer and all).
From the colours and techniques used, I suspect (quite strongly!) that you're using a photo reference. Basically you're trying to find methods to render realistic textures.
The problem with this method is that, at best, you're going to end up with a fairly realistic but almost mechanical and very generic landscape. This is the exact opposite of "fairy-tale" style. You're not really painting the background, you're emulating textures piece by piece like the clone-tool in photoshop. It's not going to be personal.

I'm going to wait with c&c on the character, since I think we should try to sort out the background first.

Quick question; Snarky and Mills, would you like to join the panel?

Snarky, the speed issue isn't primarily because it has to be done before a certain date, it's because the project is more likely to die out if it turns into a very lengthy process.

Also, this current interest is a reaction to my initiative. There have been plenty of discussions in the past, but they never really had any fruitful outcome. Sure, people have done a great job uploading and mirroring various catalogues of games (Scotch among others), but the official AGS database has only slowly deteriorated.
To make things happen you sometimes need more decisive actions and less talk.

I'm not against input (I'm very willing to give up my initial ideas about the rating - and have evidently done so in the designated forum to give room for better ideas) but if every single member of this community should be able to bring the progress to a halt just because they envision how their favourite game will be rated low, nothing will happen. After all, this is CJ's personal site, not the UN.

All that will happen is that the games database will have more working links, better classifications and a rating. People should be very happy that there exist a group who will deal with this.

PS:
What Limping said. There should be a more objective evaluation of the games, without looking at how many fans they gathered in the community at the time it was created.

[guidelines]

Some quick responses.

First of all, what we have on our hands is a situation, that needs to be solved, preferably quickly.
The situation is basically that 1/3-1/2 of the database entries are dead links, and another 1/4 are made up by games so bad they're not worth downloading.

Another part of this situation is that we have a system of rating games now (the users' percentage) that is far from consistent; some games have a hundred votes, some have only one, and people most often just vote 100% for their favourite games and 0% for games they hate, or games whose authors they hate. Furthermore, people don't have any criteria to weigh their votes against.
Considering that so many members are suddenly very concerned with how the rating is carried out, I find it peculiar that this voting has never been brought to attention. Sure, the verdict of an official panel will weigh more, but the users' percentages have for very long been the only system, and bound to have made huge impact on people's downloading habits.

In order to finally deal with this situation (which nobody has really cared about, since AGS-ers themselves rarely deal with the games database) I've suggested to put together a group of people who will, besides fixing dead links and classifications, also provide a simple rating of their own, that will co-exist with the old ratings.

This group is small enough to allow for quick decisions and close-knit cooperation, but large enough to ensure some sort of validity.

This group is, as we speak, trying to design as good a rating document as possible. Trust me, they are working hard and the results are promising.
And yes, any official document the group will present will be regarded as guidelines and not a set of rules. The guidelines will cater for consistency and the integrity of the individual panel member will cater for common sense.

To allow every single member of this community to have their say is simply not viable. Everyone has their own favourite game, and everyone will be subjective, and everyone will want to argue a bit for argument's sake.

We have some 800 titles to wade through. We need to be effective and professional. We're trying a method now, and this method has been approved by CJ. If, in the end, your very own favourite little darling game ends up with one cup less than you had expected, it's not much to do about it. We can't accomodate for all. In return, we might end up with a games database that looks like somebody actually cared about it.

PS:
The document I presented first was only to have something to start out from, something to look at. The panel members are presenting their own ideas and we'll try to agree on something asap.
Not every AGS-member can have their wishes accomodated for, especially when they aren't prepared to take part in the very labour (signing up for the panel) of sorting the database themselves.

Dibs on a bed with a women in it!

Don't worry, LimpingFish, this is brittens! Good luck finding a bed that is not full of attractive women!

The three sentences of the first post were hardly random, Andail, they were all part of a coherent complaint about MMORPGs and the state of the gaming industry.  I think it's a fairly decent post coming from a 13 year old Hungarian, who is obviously trying his best.  Sheesh, it's like the mod gestapo around here sometimes.

If he's unable to act like 16 he's not allowed to post here at all. It's not like people can't be told to compose comprehensible threads just because they're young, when that in itself is a violation to the forum rules.

I also fail to see how writing without punctuation (I believe I could form proper sentences when I was 13) is to be "trying his best" especially seeing all that chat-room lingua and fifteen vowels in a row instead of one. Being an English teacher, I think I can spot when somebody is "trying his best" to compose English.

The only reason this thread turned into a real discussion was because SpacePirateCaine wrote a very good post on the topic. As you can clearly see, the posts before that were all about expressing confusion. Would you prefer it if all subsequent posts were like that as well(which would by the way just end up in the thread being locked)?

I think her face is absolutely perfect now.
However, her breasts look like they extend one foot straight out from the body, while hit by a spotlight. You need to tone them down a bit.