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Dear everyone,

My company is working on a fairly big commercial project for which we need artwork. We already have an artist working with us, but we'll need at least one more (maybe two.) The work mostly involves creating cartoon-style still images and animations in Flash and Photoshop (most of the work will be done in Flash.) The project is done for kids between 8-11 years old.

If you're interested in working with us on this project and you're at least 18 years old (you must be able to legally sign a contract and a non-disclosure agreement), please send your portfolio to gbozoki at gmail dot com.

In your portfolio, please include the following information with each image:

• The name of the application that was used to create the image.
• The time it took to create the image, from start to finish. (No need to include exact times, just roughly how long it took.)

Feel free to add watermarks to your images, but please don't go wild - we have no intention of using images that we didn't ask for. The format of the portfolio can be PDF, a zip file containing images files with comments, etc. If we decide to work with you, we can work out a way to send payments to you (PayPal, wire transfer, direct deposit, etc.)

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding this project - you can either post here, send me a PM or email me.

Esper,

Here is what I recommend:

Word keeps all UI settings in a file called Normal.dot under

Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

Rename this file to something else (like Normal.bak) - this will trigger Word to create a new default toolbar layout the next time you run it (everything is reset to default.) Customize the toolbar the way you want it - open necessary toolbars, add/remove/move around buttons (and/or draw new button images if you need any) and then close Word - this will save the new layout in Normal.dot (Word creates this file if it's not there.)

Go back to the above folder and make a copy of this file (back it up) and then make the file read-only. This way Word will not be able to change any UI settings, since it won't be able to write the file. (If you want to change the UI, you'll have to clear the read-only flag on the file, too.)

Burn your backup file onto a CD - this way, you can easily restore it later, even if you reinstall your computer. This is how I use the same toolbar layout in Word since ~1995. (This method may not work with Office 2007, since the UI changed drastically there.)

Hmmm... I have a hard time understanding why anyone with half a brain cell would waste their life with something like this... 

I can understand why someone would play a game for some time - at least there is exploration, story, etc. But to talk to people this way - I mean, go to a pub and have a beer.  I must be getting old...

Man, I'd love to do sketches like that!  :o

Their *coordinates* are the same in both the new build and the last version... but in the editor they are clearly in different places. I have a label with 5 words, and have 5 buttons behind each word in the label, and now they don't line up anymore. Could it be related in any way to this new editor's font processing, or something? Does it process fonts the same way as the old one did?

Hmm, are you using TTF fonts? I think the TTF sizing might be off in this editor, I'll need to look into it.

At the risk of looking silly for stating something obvious: font rendering under .Net is very different from the normal Win32 font renderer - I had similar problems when I was working on a paint program. Text width & height values don't necessarily match the rendered text on screen for various reasons. Maybe there is a solution but after roundly cursing Microsoft and Bill Gates for a while back then I didn't find any. MSDN does have some articles on this.

Feel free to ignore this, since this is a .Net problem; if you use a 3rd party library, it may not apply.

I'd love to join, too, but real life won't let me do it - I have massive amounts of work.   

Guys,

Thank you very much for the replies; I won't be contacting you, as I'm not the one who actually makes the decision. I showed your messages here and my boss will make up his mind if he wants to contact you or not. (I don't know it for a fact, but chances are, we're going to end up with an agency/company in one country, since we really have to have a proper legal handling of matters and it's kind of hard to do with individuals all around the globe.)

Guys,

My company is starting a project for which we'll need some illustrations - images and animations. Since no one at the company has any experience in this field, I'd like to ask you here, what would be a normal salary for an artist? Are they paid hourly or by finished animation/still picture? How is a normal salary? (We don't want to be cheap but also don't want to be ripped off.) The company is in Dallas, Texas.

Thanks for any help!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

CJ, thanks for your reply. Strictly theoretically speaking , how hard would it be to increase this limit to a thousand or two, if there was a request like that? (Again, theoretically speaking.) I'm working on a plugin that will be the backbone of my game and it will have a lot of functions and I also plan on using other plugins. At this moment, I don't have anything near the current limit, so it's not a problem, but I'd like to be prepared if and when I get close to that limit, so that I can ask for more in time. Would something like that be hard to do or relatively easy?

I'm working on a plugin that is likely to have a lot of functions registered during run-time. Is there any limit to the number of registered functions (or in the script header?)

Is there a negative impact for having lots and lots of registered functions (like excessive memory use or performance degradation due to lookups, etc.)?

You mean like setting your own editor in this dialog:

or doing a text dump?

I guess neither. I meant it more like VC++ where the IDE is really just a file manager with a compiler. So all the script code would be in plain text files all the time. Since there is a tracker entry for the same with images, it'd also be consistent, if CJ implements that.

Would it be possible to keep the scripts as plain text files in the file system? That would be very nice, since anyone could use any editor at any time... AGS would simply load and parse the files when a game is opened and when the compiler runs. The .dta file would store a list of files and would let us add/remove files or rename them. Some kind of UI would let us match up event handlers with objects that raise that event. (Or alternatively, functions could be named in such way to give that information, like Room1_OnSomething ().)

So what I think is happening is that these black holes are ever expanding, since they attract more atoms, and more mass all the time. Since the mass is growing the gravity (and the radius) is growing.

If we manage to create a black hole with 10 atoms... wouldn't these 10 atoms be enough to pull a 11th into them? Then the 11 ones wouldn't be strong enough to pull another one and another one and another one...

No, it'd be impossible. Gravity is a very very weak force as compared to the electromagnetic and the strong nuclear forces. Imagine it like this (an example from Richard Feynman): imagine that there is the entire gravity of Earth, which is pretty strong, right? Try to jump up, you fall back right away because of gravity. Try to throw up a ball, it falls back. To leave the planet, the ball would need to fly by ~11 km/s - we need rockets to reach that kind of speed and be able to escape the gravity of Earth. That's strong, right?

Now imagine that you're standing on a concrete pavement. Concrete is made up of atoms, just like your shoes. These atoms are actually not very close to each other, because they repel each other, because of the electromagnetic force (like if you try to force together like ends of magnets, they repel each other, that's the electromagnetic force again.)

And now to the point: you standing there don't even make a dent in the concrete pavement, even though you're pulled by the entire gravity of Earth! That's how weak gravity is. The repulsion of atoms in matter (to resist being compressed) is so much stronger that our objects withstand the gravity of the entire planet. That's why our buildings don't collapse. That's why we can stand up and walk. Just imagine the strength of your muscles and skeleton: they withstand the pull of the Earth plus the weight of the atmosphere above you.

There is one big difference between gravity and the EM force, though: gravity does not repel, because it doesn't have two opposite charges: it always adds up. So if you keep increasing the mass, its gravity will grow ever stronger - slowly, but steadily. That's why you need the mass of ~3 Suns to create a black hole:  at that mass gravity becomes so strong that atoms cannot resist the pull anymore and they collapse into a black hole.

So to answer your question again: it'd be impossible for those 10 atoms to grab an 11th one. That's exactly the problem scientists face when they want to create such very small black holes: it's extremely hard to pack 10 atoms together so tightly so that they finally form a black hole.

Correction: you need the masses of ~3 Suns for that mass to collapse into a black hole. I fixed my previous post.

I was, of course, making an allusion to the betting that was done on the Trinity test.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize that. In that case, it was a good one.

Haven't you ever seen Event Horizon?

Unfortunately, I have. It was a bad, bad movie. I thought it was sci-fi, when it's really a bad horror flick. I rue the day when I watched it.

it scares me that it's out there at all, it terrifies me that anyone can actually try and create such a thing artificially. I have no guarantees it won't get out of control.

Same like some years ago when some scientists were trying to recreate the very first steps of the Big Bang... maybe it was a first step in this very experiment, actually. Anyway, that scared the hell out of me, for much the same reasons. How much can you control something like this?

It's very easy to control them in theory. In practice, it's technically very complicated (I mostly don't know/understand the actual details) but the most problems arise out of generating the amount of energy necessary to create the right conditions. Most of these experiments involve less than 100 atoms; in many cases, less than 10 atoms. Conditions at the Big Bang were extreme (just like they are in creating black holes) and achieving them is a big task even for a couple of particles: it requires a lot of energy to speed the particles up so that they'll have temperatures close to those in the Big Bang.

Now even if you imagine that an experiment goes wrong, which is certainly a possibility, what could potentially happen if ~100 highly charged particles get released? Nothing special, 100 atoms is nothing on our human scales. Of course, equipment (like generators, cooling systems) might blow up as well, that might cause some damage and kill some people, but that would be local and probably not much different from an oil truck blowing up. (It's bad, of course, since people die in such events, but my point is that such accidents are always very localized.) Even if the entire particle accelerator blows up (which would be pretty exceptional!), it'd still be mostly local.

With black holes, if scientist created small black holes from a few atoms (which is already very complicated), it could fly right through you and you wouldn't know about it. Absolutely nothing would happen, because the mass of it is very very small and so the gravity that it generates is miniscule.

In nature, a black hole may be born under extremely hot conditions or when a very large mass is involved. For mass, you'd need about 3 Suns to create a black hole - this would be a sizable beast, but given our resources (and the size of our planet), this is not going to happen anytime soon in a lab.

Under extremely hot conditions, a black hole might be created, if atoms are smashed together - this is what scientists try to do. But nature doesn't make it easy to do this: atoms don't like to be that close to each other, so scientists have to use a lot of energy to really smash them together so they stick. This is the reason that large black holes cannot be created in labs: even creating a small one is a challange.

If you're willing to read (and spend some time understading it), I'd recommend "Black holes & time warps" by Kip S. Thorne and "The brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking. These are very good books that explain a lot of the theory behind astrophysics, without using a lot of math.

I'm sorry for being so long-winded - I find physics fascinating, because it makes one understand the world. I'm not a physicist but lately I read a lot of physics and it gives me a sense of accomplishment when I look at something and suddenly realize that I understand it (well, mostly    .) It's most definitely better than being scared of nature.

Edit: fixed typo and factual error.

Lets just clarify, as most people who say that fall into this assumption. Did you hear their singles loads of times, and then heard the album songs only a few times? What I'm getting at is, did you let them grow on you? If you tried and indeed they were still rubbish, I am going to conclude it's the kind of artists you buy that are different to the majority of the stuff I purchase.

Maybe you're right. I used to try albums at stores, but randomly looking for music this way is very tiring and time consuming. I tried listening to radios, but (at least here in the states) they're mostly up for ads and sometimes there is music in-between. (I don't like pay stations - I'm cheap and I really don't care about radio.    )

After living in the US for a few years now, it appears to me that most music stores carry only the completely generic 'American Idol' type of music - 'music' from generic, untalented 'bands' created by marketing morons. I even tried their recommendation system (if you like this, try this and this... - well, that was pure, 100% miss for every single recommendation.    )

I'm actually quite desperate to find good music: I'm either completely missing the good stores where it's easy to find quality or it's just easier in Europe. I honestly don't know. Every once in a while I see something good on public television, those I try to get. (Last week there was a superb concert on air from Celtic Women - that's a CD I'm going to buy.) The end result is that nowadays I'm listening to movie soundtracks and to my old music. Unfortunately - as much as I like them - this gets boring after a while.

I'm not saying that it is fair, as I think that the companies are indeed taking the largest share and the distribution is not fair at all, but still even if the CDs prices droped to 12$ (max), nothing would change I think. Who is crazy enough to abandon free, for paying stuff? Nobody! 

I'd be glad to buy CDs again. When I hear good music, I still buy them, but it happens ever more rarely. I bought the last few CDs from directly the artists at festivals.

I have lots of mp3-s (I converted all my CDs to mp3 so that the disc itself is not used and doesn't get scratched) and I prefer listening to music on the computer. But I also prefer having the CD. (I could also download movies, but I don't, because I like having the DVD if the movie is otherwise good.)

I don't mind paying for something good, but it must be good. Most CDs have at most 1 or 2 songs that are anywhere near good, the rest are trash. There are exceptions, rarely.

I don't think there is anything wrong paying for music - the artist will only make other good pieces, if (s)he has something to eat. What RIAA, Sony, BMG and the rest of the maffia (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe included) does is highway robbery. I think it's outrageous that no one went to jail for the Sony virus. 

It's a sure win for you. I didn't take his bet because it felt unethical, knowing that.

1-2USD Darth??  :o I might as well give my album away when it is ready! For I would be losing out overall from the costs of making it in the first place at that price. And I don't even have advertisers, mixers, producers etc to pay, or a record company taking a large cut!

That's because you don't do it on the same scale they do.

But I'd be willing to pay up to ~$15 per CD as long as the music is good. It is, however, harder and harder to find full CDs that I would even consider listening into, let alone buying it. I still buy CDs every once in a while (back in Hungary I have ~200 CDs), but in the past 6 years I only bought maybe 15.

I also wouldn't mind buying downloadable music as long as the format is fully unprotected mp3. I tried iTunes (which I hate along with Apple) but I refuse to pay even a single cent for music that is locked down and low-quality. (AFAIK, the compression iTunes uses is below even CD-quality mp3 to keep file sizes down.)

(BTW, if any of you can recommend good music, I'm all ears. I listen to Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, etc., so if you know something that's good and similar to these artists, please let me know.)

I fully agree with RickJ. And when we talk about DRM, let's not forget about the virus Sony was kindly distributing.