Messages

Anti-virus software does mess up sometimes. About half a year ago, one morning suddenly all my IDEs started acting up, all the built projects no longer ran and debuggers stopped working. Obvious virus check - nothing. I re-installed the IDEs, no luck, then thought I'll just update the GDB (gnu project debugger). Still nothing. Then for some reason, it started to complain about some corrupt or missing file, I think, in the system32 folder or something. Some very basic file anyway that most apps need to run. The error message also contained some error code but Googling that turned up nothing. Then I tried a bunch of other things and got pretty desperate and thought about reformatting the drive and reinstalling Windows. Luckily, then I had to go out and got back that evening and decided to give Google another chance before reformatting. And what turned up, searching for that error code again, was that the last virus update my AV automatically installed was messed up and started interfering with Windows. The update had been released literally hours before I had installed it, so no-one had started a topic anywhere about it, hence I couldn't find anything usable when searching. But by the time I got back home in the evening, a thread had been started on the AV forums (somehow somebody linked the error to the AV software by uninstalling it or something, luckily) and a solution was provided by the devs. I had to disable automatic updates for a while, until they worked out a fix, but it helped. I mean, who could've thought AV updates can do that ..

What does the Task Manager say? What other processes are running?

I'm sure this "bug" will be less noticeable once you have more questions, but make sure you don't show the same question two times in a row. Even with thousands of questions, there's a chance for that. But the idea behind the thing is excellent. I like it!

Also, there are some questions which may not be quite suitable for non-English speakers, eg. "What is a group of whales called?". This is not trivia but knowledge of English language, which isn't the same thing. "Are games art?" is definitely not a trivia question either .. In related, how many "no" votes does a question have to receive in order to be not shown at all, presuming it's a percentage of all votes cast?

Internet mourning is useless, in my mind.

Why should I be sad about some dude dying I may or may have not seen in some videos. People die every day, I've come to accept it. I once tried counting the deaths in a week (based on news and such) but it became kind of depressing, so I stopped. If someone close to me dies, I'm devastated; if someone I know loses someone close, I'm sad, but it most other cases, with a few exceptions (and even then I wouldn't go starting topics about it), why should I care? Plus, drunk drivers are idiots. All of them. Simple as that.

Sorry for the off-topic (not that it was on-topic anyway..), but it needed getting off my chest.

MySQL databases are extremely optimized and most certainly faster than PHP file I/O (for reading an xml file) + XML parsing. Also, most of the time, queries are cached (unless you use some funky dynamic query strings), so I would go with option A.

Haha, I also read it as 'board game'.  It's long been an intention of mine to develop one... I scrapped my design, Pregnant! after a friend put me off by reminding me that I am nearly 30 years old. 

Don't let that bother you. Designing a game, doesn't matter if it's a computer or a board game, is quite a task and definitely not a "child's play" as your friend seems to think. I'm not quite sure what age has to do with anything we do. It's all in people's heads that you can do this or that until that age and after that you're only allowed to do this other thing. BS.

Oh, hey, Don. Glad to see you're back. I was just playing The Great Stroke-Off a few weeks ago and started thinking how everybody was doing and how I was really lucky to work with the great team we had, even though my part was really small. If you ever want to make a sequel, or want music for some other game, maybe I could help you out. I've gotten better at it by now, I promise I really didn't know what I was doing back then.

Again, welcome back!

Also, penises.

I like the piece has a whole, but for me there are few tweaks to be done in the sound. What bugs me the most, is the sound of the snare drum or what's it, I think it sounds a little to wooden, almost like the MIDI taiko drum. I think you should soften it somehow to make it sound less like hitting a piece of wood. The second thing is the timpani roll or something like that near the end before the part where drums come in more. I really like what you're going after there, but the timpani could definitely use some reverb, so it wouldn't fade out so quickly. Think of thunder for that part.

Also, I was listening to the song with my headphones and the strings on the right side sound a little too quiet, especially when compared the instruments on the left and the brass. Take a look at the waveform and I'm sure you'll find the left side is dominating the song. Fix the mix

I hope these comments help you in any way. Now go finish the whole thing because I like it

I just blended the two images, the black lined one on top of the first one. Blend mode was Luminance (in paint shop pro) .. around 30%

Also, lovely background. I like it.

I would go with something in between. Not black lines, but just darker edges. Like this:

The best Christopher Walken impression I've ever seen .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06BU6Fj6Qs

Also, this is the real Tom Cruise .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL-8SL8cFVQ

BEST impersonations ever.

Thanks guys for the feedback.

Easy alpha channel/transparency handling, anitaliasing (though this is not a must), gradient, you can always try a tracing tool, like Adobe Illustrator has, but instead of vectors, pixels are drawn... 

Sound like sensible features, though I haven't used Adobe Illustrator, so what's that tool?

It sounds like a fantastic idea. If you can get the hotspot animation feature working, to allow one to attach an animation to another- I'm sold. That idea alone would likely double my productivity, not to mention open up a huge range of posibilities for complex animations on the one sprite, without the legwork of doing them all simultaneously frame by frame- which I find extremely tedious and difficult to do with any level of complexity/dynamism.

Yes, this was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about what this program should do. Seems useful.

You may also want to consider using QT as the basis of your project.  It is cross platform (the same source can be compiled for Win, Linux, Mac, and others), it has an extensive 2d and SVG drawing capabilities as well as web/network libraries.

QT seems a little excessive for what I want to do. I tried it out though, and seems it's more useful when dealing with vectorized graphics rather than pure pixels. Having a 3x6 set of pixels (for a foot eg.) attached to a "bone" and then rotating it would probably not look nearly as good as with vectors. For a first prototype I'm using GTK in which I have a little test app running already.

There's a feature I've been wanting in a decent paint program for ages; the ability to shift the whole image in a direction and have the pixels you moved off the page appear on the other side; really useful for making seamless tiles.
I believe the only program I've seen to have it is the built in RPG Toolkit tile editor and in other respects it's quite an unusable program.

Sound simple enough. Thanks for the idea.

I'll check out these programs you guys mentioned.

Hey.

I have never been really active here but I used to hang around a few years ago, anyway. So, what's new? The reason I'm posting this is because I'm looking for suggestions and ideas for a little plan I have. I'm thinking of writing a program as a final work in university to get my degree. I'm not sure yet, if that plan goes into action, but nevertheless I want to write a little paint program especially for PIXEL ART. I'm posting this here because I know there are a lot of artists here. I looked around in different forums where people were discussing best software for pixel art and it was mostly either heavyweight Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro, GIMP or MS Paint, so mixed results. I like Paint best myself, but it lacks layers and other smaller features like gradients, dithering and such (and alpha channel).

Then I thought to myself "hey, I can write a paint-with-layers-plus-other-stuff (tm) myself". So, here I am. I gather that besides being able to paint and zoom in (man, the features of this thing ..), the software should be able to handle loops and frames for animation, preview animation, export sprite sheets and sequence of images. Sprite sheet import would be nice as well, at least for uniformly sized sheets. Ability to manage palettes would be nice as well. So, going from daytime to night would only require changing the palette not repainting the frames.

Also layers for sure and attaching animations to another animation. For example, you animate a walking character and want it to hold a flaming torch. You assign a hot spot to character hand on each frame of the walking animation and attach a torch animation to it and export the sprite sheet. Done. And when you want, you can replace the torch with an balloon or a blue cup without having to redraw the character's frames.

I looked around and there's nothing specifically for pixel art, so, is this idea worth pursuing? If it is, post your ideas what else this program should include If you think this idea is rubbish, I'd like to hear about it as well.


Eigen

Also, he seems to be looking up rather than in front of him.

Tapping is a pretty nifty technique.

Funeral For A Friend - Roses For The Dead .. that intro is the perfect for practicing, if you're interested.

Here's a list of pretty scary games. But I don't know what game has scared me the most .. I guess Doom for one and also Resident Evil.

It's a really nice background. I like inconsistence in thickness of the line work. One crit that I have is that the ceiling seems to be really high, perhaps lower it a bit.
The shower fits nicely. It's a part of the room where as the hallway is not so I think it makes perfect sense to keep it that way.
So, finish the rest of the coloring. I'd like to see it.

Anyone tried the "name that theme song" game on the site? It's pretty fun.

I haven't read a single Harry Potter book and I think I'm not missing out on anything. But as for the article .. does it matter what she does or how she does it .. everybody will still buy the books the first second they get anyway. It's hard to say why fan-fiction of something really popular is considered a bad thing by the authors. As long as no profit is made off of it I'd say it's great. Maybe it's just putting out a fire in early stages and fear of it getting bigger and having to deal with it then.

Oh .. and money has done worse to people.