Messages

It worked with Firefox.
And Hillbilly was really helpful.

And IE goes

* under boycott
* a date with a object named "Recycle Bin" (Well, not really, I know Windows & MS Liferuiners Crew too well, so I fight the temptation)

[could]

Welcome back to InCreator's "Weird viruses & problems show" !

In today's show... It's teh ultimat3 goddamn inteRn0t 3xpl0r4r!

The thing is not downloading. It is downloading, but it is not downloading.

Like this: I start a web page, it opens. Downloaded, right?
Even pages I do not have in cache. Search engines. It shows pictures, plays sounds, everything. IM's work too.

But wait! Whenever there's thing that browser itself cannot open right away, like some unknown file extensions (all picture formats too), just anything that opens the "save"-"open"-"cancel" dialog, won't download. It opens the "Getting file information"Ã,  window, "thinks" a little - and without starting to download, displays st00pid error, like

"Internet Explorer cannot download blah-blah from blah.com

IE was not not able to open this internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

Well, right. It has been tested on everything, there's no way that mistake was in particular download. I can't get ANYthing.
Then again Save Picture As... works.

This crap happened just yesterday, when I foolishly thought that updating windows XP once in a millenia just could do any good. SP2 and "critical security updates" stuff.
I did so. I restarted teh damn thing and reactivated windows.
What a fool, I am.
What a bastards work there, at Microsoft corporation.


Now, I gotta use internet. My own logic - as everyone's others would - suggested to switch to some more normal browser, such as Mozilla firefox. What a nice idea. Especially when you are not able to download files from internet, which, of course - includes freeware web browsers...

Nope, no internet firewalls here.
No bad IE settings neither.

Oh.
Someone, please say something helpful. Or do something.
Thank you.

More clean lines and less antialiala-damnthisword-ialasing is all what I can suggest.

At least, separate critical parts from each other: this vest blends into his shirt!

Ah, an on diagonal view, he has no neck!

And I got...
...
nothing?

Aw crap.

[erases]

Ah.
I should point out the question that has been asked sooo much from me - in the video - and ArtGem overall, when using brightness processor - LEFT mouse button brightens and RIGHT mouse button darkens.

When using normal color processor (Mix/Erase or Color/Erase), right mouse button erases.
Processor is something that tells program what to do with the brush at next mouse click. Draw or brighten or smoothen and so on.

All processors use two-mouse buttons interface, so LMB works always as plus and RMB as minus. For example - LMB adds saturation and RMB decreases saturation and so on.

Tree leaves were done exactly as grass - I used airbrush to make green void, then worked over it with brighten/darken.

To be honest, 99% of "my technique" goes like this: I make one-color shapes and then brighten/darken (SHADE) them to something cool.

Adobe Premiere is superb for any video work...
But then again, it's not free.

omg.


Next: Santa you wouldn't let in!

You're welcome.

I'm working on some video tutorials right now, so--

If you have wondered about how I did the grass, there's first of my tutorial videos, which shows how to do this.
It's based on drawing program ArtGem (which you can download from the link in my signature).
Video is in real time, i didn't cut or modify it any way - the grass I made in video DID take only a minute to do.

Video takes about 3 MB, is in quite high (800x600!) resolution and requires Xvid MPEG-4 codec to play.

http://www.terran-x.com/increator/tut/grass.avi

[totally edited]

A truly nice forest scene!
I used first version to edit.

Though loominous totally edited it (nothing better to offer now , at least not if it comes to proper shading ), I saw the tree-leaf tech *I'm using* on your picture and since I also just got an idea for new grass making style, this was great chance to test it:



* Grass was made just by drawing one-colored line mess, then using it as brush, I covered the grassy areas with this green stuff.
And then, started using same thing as 5% brightening brush, I made this green void randomly brighter and darker.
Easy.

* Road was covered with 10% of noise and some random paintover with 10% darkening brush, w/ antialiasing
* Door knob was desaturated a bit and 10% darkening ellipse became a shadow
* Trees are better on your picture. In tutorial, they were too blurry. Well, to make these leaves properly (using the technique you did), you have to make smaller bunches of leaves, and use smoother brighter/darker leaf transition. I started with pure green and darkened/brightened them by 5% at the time.
I think it worked out quite well.
* You can't really mix blur and detail. Blurry grass and road won't work with pixelly leaves. That's why I suggest to use one technique at a time.

extra notes:
I only worked with the grass and road, since it was most problematic part. Tree leaves were done to give you some idea about using pixel-swarm technique properly. It's quite clear that other bushes-trees-leaves must be fixed too.

Your second edit is alot better because you removed all this blur from door and trees.

Less blur, more detail. More detail, better image.

While treehouse looks very pretty in artistical way -- in reality, tree looks actually very flat. And when taking door's size into account, tree seems to be too small to even contain a toilet, not to mention any rooms/house.
So, it would be quite weird if opening the door in your game takes character to a huge room inside the tree.

I'd also add that hands are way too short in all cases, both sketch and sprites.

Just try it - when you keep your hands hanging rested, they get very close to knees, hands reach/cover about half to 3/4 of thighs, depending on human.

On your pictures, hands are about crotch height or on first quarter of a thigh. And that's short.

Also, feet are too long. On sprites, it's just matter of 2-3 pixels, on man sketch, much more.

Nostrils.
They're too thin.

Thank you.

You're getting better!

Well. I remember my first(?) bg posted at AGSforums...
It was same quality, looked much the same too.
And was about my room. Even had same problems.

Well, I tried to add some variety to your bg and ended up with this...



I kept same false perspective, because this was not exactly what I wanted to work on.

* I added some texture to the closet
* Changed/added shading here and there
* Added some noise to floor and walls to give them more life
* Tried to reflect whole room on the lamp (failed, too low opacity, but tech worked anyway)
* Added some lousy shadows just to see how much detail they add.
   conclusion: They add a lot!
* Tried to play with this and that. Since you probably scaled the image for this thread - pixels are double size - modification of some things, like blanket and door didn't turn out very well and I'm too lazy to spend much more time on them, but yeah, few more shading tones would make picture better, and that's what I needed to check.

Compare the original with the edit, Viktor.
Even such a lousy edit with so tiny improvements in coloring changed whole thing, so there's the point - even picture is pretty, coloring does the trick.
Correct the perspective and then explore the palette, there's hundreds of cool things you can do with a simple background if coloring and shading them well.

Easy.
HOW?

Tried that awhile ago...
But I didn't like it much.
Perspective help is useful, but at least *I* love to draw things without pre-set lines and restrictions, it's just blocking creativity somehow.
But you actually don't need to render wireframes.
Just build 3d room with simple materials and add a light source too, with shadows enabled! Then you can even measure how light falls and how shadows go. Also, solid objects should be gouraud shaded, so you can see how much light is here or there. Flat-shaded objects just have darker and lighter edges

Render the whole scene and use it as a background layer (paint program with layer support needed), onto which you completely redraw your own picture.

Helpful, yes.
But time consuming too. And not that fun.

This is hard to prove, because it's not like that.
As I said, most contacts come from rate.ee.
People do have pictures there.
Fake pictures are not accepted (it's pretty easy to determine), plus most users update their pictures weekly.

And there's no cure to disease anyway.

[week]

Yeah, I got 200Mhz pentium, in woking condition.
Enough for her to play Sims.

About firefox idea: whatEVER my mom only knows, sister will suck out along with mom's nerves. I tried this and that. Sister sees mom surfing - sister surfs half a hour later, while mom is taking antidepressants. I set a system password and told only mom. I erased all shortcuts to MSN. I did... eh. Nothing worked yet.

Other computer?
Internet. She wants to surf!

There's a horrible disease at Estonia, rampaging through teens, and It's called www.rate.ee
A place where you can make an account and post pictures. And people rate your pictures. And you can rate theirs. I know people who spend most of their day sitting at the damned site. Who get up in the middle of the night just to check if there's any comments added to their pics. The site also comes with isometric game-like Flash chat, e-mail account and forum.

And - the site earns about 7000 euros per week just for a single 468x60-pixel banner and SMS-es which people send to get more personalized account mainpage or a bit different character in this interactive chatroom.
The makers of this horror say there's average 4 million views per day!!! Hell, there's 1,3 million people living in whole country...

This is sick. And my sister has the disease too.Ã, 
So there's no way she's gonna accept a machine without internet.
From rate.ee she hooks up with all kinds of strange guys, which later bombard her with all kind of crap through MSN messenger.
There's no way to keep her away from rate'ing, if there's any possibilty to get into my machine. Just like a drug addiction.
Well, she's not the only one, as much as I have seen... when two Estonian teens meet at the mall or school, they won't ask "did you see that movie?" or "did you watch Formula race?". They ask "Did you see my new pics at rate.ee?". When they arrive home after school, they won't eat lunch or rest. No, the first thing they do is checking out if there's some positive ratings or comments to their pictures! I don't know if there's equal things in other countries, but here - a brilliant business idea has grown into quite a problem.
Well, it has been beneficial to internetizing whole country, hardware dealers, and of course, various ISP's. As media tells, the site is visited daily more than ALL other estonian sites in summary!
But the site brings out even smallest pieces of vanity which people have. And enslaves them. The user ages vary from 5 to 50!
Sounds like a sci-fi story? Well, it's not.
Ah.

Now, when I link these two machines with some LAN cable to share internet to other computer, I know what happens.
Happens that most of the time she's sitting behind her machine, MSN-ing, or with her weird crowd of friends + downloading crap/photos and there's no damn way for me to download anything even at 1kb/s, not to talk about multiplaying something, where every bit of data speed counts.

Uh. I also use MSN Messenger. So uninstalling it won't be too good idea.
There MUST be someone who had similar problem and got few good progs to control whole thing.
Anyone?

Thanks for so fast answer, LilGryphMaster, but it's not the spyware or viruses I'm worried about.

It's "teH Virus" - my own sister!!!

I don't tell her to use this or another browser.
What I keep telling her is to STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY MACHINE!!!

I would have simply used power-on password for a looong time already, but since my mother needs computer for her job, and somethimes extremely fast (to make some critical second-before-deathline tax paying at internet bank website or other stuff - bookkeeping as a service is bizarre business) so I can't just set a load of passwords to the system. She has to be able access internet any moment she needs to - or consequences would cost a LOT of money to some of her clients. Especially the ones who cheat government with tax.

But as soon my sister sees that mom has access to the computer and even more - TeH inTarNet - she eats mom's nerves until she gets to her everyday crap downloading and my life/data ruining action.
I decided to cut the ties which make her want to use the computer.

These are
- MSN messenger, where strange guys send her strange trojans disguised as "funny/my car/my birthday movies" - and which she always foolisly opens
- and some internet sites, mostly about posting your own pictures and rating other's pics and of course, chatrooms.

Now - there's the things I have to protect. Her english is just about enough to count to ten, so she answers random answer to every system dialog. "Format fixed hard disk?", "nuke asia?", "cause mess?", "get a virus?"... there's 50% of chance for her to answer "yes" if there's choice between yes and no answers.

And whenever something happnes she won't understand - she just hits the reset button. Just like that. During scandisk, game loading, a month of downloading something fom P2P client program (which usually deletes partial download!), no matter. Reset. It's third installment of WinXP on my machine. Just because someone messed up some system files.

That's the problem.

Maybe, just maybe someone has experienced somethig similar...

Okay, imagine this.
Every day when you arrive from work, tired and exhausted, you feel a little of bit of relief while turning on your computer, expecting some relaxing moments filled with creating or playing.
And just then, you realize that while you were away, some funky stuff has happened...

* BIOS has absolutely random settings
* CPU temperature is weirdly 52C, yet the computer was supposed to be "cold" yet
* and BIOS gives "CPU overlock fail" error thus halting the system.

Which - can be get rid of - only by reboot, quick BIOS enter and "load optimized defaults" choice.

Okay. The fun goes on.
Windows XP Professional loads...

Next "happy" notes you take - are:

* desktop is filled with photos of cute boys (in most girls opinion cute, I actually cannot imagine a cute male)
* a load of spyware, adaware and equal crap.
* savegames of your favourite games are OVERWRITTEN!!!
* MSN messenger's "My received files" folder contains loads of files named like "funny.exe", "myphotos.exe", "jokevideo.exe" and so on, each infected with some trojan/virus, usually with a name starting with W32/...something.letter
* I don't even have to mention another IE hijacker which has successfully overwritten IE's start page with some ad&virus related crap.
* Some things have deleted themselves!!!Ã,  :o

What a powerful and destructive virus, that is.
This virus is 20 years old, dumbest that anything on this ble and green ball we're living on...
...and incidentally my own sister.

Now, what I beg for - is all the help to avoid these frustrating evenings I have, cleaning up that whole mess she causes while I'm at work.
I definetly need:

- something to absolutely restrict some certain web pages.
- something to restrict access to certain folders on hard drive (about 99% of it!)
- something to avoid her downloading/installing any kind of software

I made a new "limited" user account, but since Windows XP help does not say a thing about it and all kind of toubleshooters lead to "Contact your ISP/system administrator" result... (which makes me really angry towards idiots at Microsoft, even if they think that every home user has some shady character named "system administrator" which turns computer on and off for him, Well - I DON'T) ...I have no clue how to do this from windows control panel.

So, freeware programs are welcome.
(No shareware please, I really don't think that I'd be safer if license just expires at some moment when protection is needed most.)
And also good instructions how to prevent/restrict this or that.

I can't just set a power-on password or close down whole Internet for "dumb user account", because my parents need sometimes my computer too, but JUST for some websites at internet and MS Office. That's all.

Indeed.
Besides, nobody gives a heck about F1.

Right.
Right?
...
Right.