LSF @ 5 - Pledge Drive

[Jake]

*Sniff* I mean, your website is sooooo neatly centered and is always centered regardless of resolution. Any hints or point me to the right tutorials is highly appreciated.

It's been a while since I played with CSS, but the first thing that comes to mind is a div with left:50% and left-margin set to negative half of the width of the div. So for a 500px div, the left-margin would be set to '250px'.

[denzil]

*Sniff* I mean, your website is sooooo neatly centered and is always centered regardless of resolution. Any hints or point me to the right tutorials is highly appreciated.

It's been a while since I played with CSS, but the first thing that comes to mind is a div with left:50% and left-margin set to negative half of the width of the div. So for a 500px div, the left-margin would be set to '250px'.

On my pages I use CSS with "margin:auto; width: 45em;". Should do the same.

[lordcloudx]

mugenjohncel: thanks for reminding me, actually, I still need to fix most of the pages so that they're all centered.

Anywayz, all I did was place everything inside a table with a fixed width (you can also use percentage width so that the table resizes itself depending on the screen resolution... I think.) and centered alignment. like so. Ah... good old reliable tables. Who needs divs anyway?

Code: Select all

<table align="center" width=784>

All content goes in here

</table>

[Jake]

Ah... good old reliable tables. Who needs divs anyway?

People who want their content to start rendering before the page finishes loading.

[lordcloudx]

Ok thanks. hehe I made that comment expecting you to say something like that. It's my sneaky way of asking about the advantages of divs being a non-programmer and just plain lazy.

I'm getting off-topic, so I'll stop here.

[M12]

Well, here's a Black Pencil review:

http://tdomj.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/l ... il-review/

Please check it out everyone =D. Hopefully there'll be more to come. Thanks.

[Jake]

Well, hmm. I'm sure I can manage at least either a couple of paper-doll style character sets - one male and one female - or a set of... say, five backgrounds, over the course of a month.

So, yeah - since I said this, a number of character sets and/or dolls have cropped up. So my first instinct is to go with backgrounds, on the grounds that there aren't so many of those available. On the other hand, I wonder whether that's so useful to people anyway.

On one hand, backgrounds are far more tied to a sense of place and setting than characters are; if I draw a school corridor it's probably no use to people writing an office-based story; an office is probably no use to someone writing a supernatural drama, wheras a single character sprite could equally be a snarky bitch, a warm childhood friend or a total ditz in any number of places or stories depending on the writing. So characters are more flexible.

On the other hand, it's far easier to filter photographs you found in royalty-free archives or took yourself to get BGs than anything that can be done to get 'cheap' character graphics. So backgrounds are easier to come across.


So does anyone have any particular preference? I'm relatively indifferent, myself...

[Samu-kun]

I still couldn't get anything done... =_=;;

(soon, soon! >_<;;)

[herenvardo]

Since I first came around here, I've already made a few promises, and they are still pending (this doesn't mean I've broken them, except one for which I set a date and couldn't make it ), so I'm afraid of making a new one.

However, here is something I can be sure to accomplish (thanks to the abuse of "if"s, but that's all I can offer by now).
I'm currently working on a quite ambitious Ren'ai RPG based on Python + PyGame. One of the most prominent features of the project is its Emotional AI Engine (which doesn't use PyGame itself, only the stuff in Python's standard libs); and, coincidentally, it's come up to be the first major part of the code I'm writting.
Considering that: (1) I'm likely to have some alphas by the end of this week (Jan28-Feb03); and (2) it is, by its nature, an interesting feature that can be include in any romance-oriented game (be it a VN, RPG, Dating Sim, or whatever you want to put it on); I feel it would make an interesting apportation.

So I promise that if I can put it all toghether on time (this will include lots of testing with Renpy's save/load functionality, to ensure compatibility); and no external factors interfere with it (from hard disks getting corrupted all of a sudden all the way up to acts of God, so I'm properly covered); then I will publish a package consisting on (1) the entire EAI Engine; (2) a .rpy Ren'py script that handles all the compatibility issues (mostly save/load, as the core of the engine is a class definition) (this will only be included if actually needed); and (3) a well-tested, well-documented, Ren'py-based mini-game demonstrating the capabilities of, and how to use, the engine; on, or before, February 25th, 2008. The engine itself will probably be licensed under GNU LGPLv3, so it can be used for commercial projects as well as free ones; the rpy's would be tossed directly in the public domain.

From the two conditions on the promise above, I can't do nothing about the second one. To enhance the chances of fulfilling the first condition (which depends mostly on me), I also promise that:

• I will set aside the TWoB1:WoD project and set the above promise as my top development priority (this means all the time I dedicate to my projects will be dedicated to this project, with only very few exceptions).
• I will dedicate, at least, 20h/week (paying the rent and the bills is still a priority, you know ^^; ) to these scripts.

Finally to maximize the usefulness of the apportation, and taking in account PyTom's wise words:

If people can spend time from January 25th to February 25th on these sort of things, that means that many of the projects will be ready in time for NaNoRenO. This means that people creating NaNoRenO games will be able to benefit from your work.

, I also promise that, if any participant at NaNoRenO, NaNoRenO+, IntRenAiMo, or any other challenge of similar features run through the LSF on these dates is using the engine, I will dedicate a minimum of 1h/day and 10h/week to assist such participant(s) by answering any doubt, issue, bug report, and similar posts that might arise. In the event that there are not enough support request to fill the time quota, I will use at least the remaining time (probably more) in related tasks such as writting additional examples, adding new features, improving efficiency, and similar tasks, around these scripts.

This is my most recent promise, and probably the first one you all will see fulfilled.
Note that I've also personal interest on this, as the lack of fulfillment of my previous promises on these forums makes me feel quite bad .

[Kura]

Alright, I've been nervously avoiding this thread for a while because I didn't want to say I'd do something and then not finish it, but it's about time I make at least a small commitment. I don't think I have the time/focus/etc to make an entirely new piece of character art, but I did start to go through some older drawings and there's one I'm currently in the middle of fixing up to have multiple expressions. I'll also try to get together some backgrounds; I have a small stack of photographs from a Japanese garden/tea place (I suddenly forget what it's called D: ) that might be interesting for backgrounds, which I'll hopefully scan soon.

I have a question, though. It seems that most people are making .psd files for their character art. Would a .pspimage (Jasc Paint Shop Pro) be of use to anyone? I supposedly can save PSP files as .psd, but I don't know if it would transfer into Photoshop right.

So does anyone have any particular preference? I'm relatively indifferent, myself...

I'd recommend working more on character art. Like you said, backgrounds are much easier to come by, and probably don't need to be too specific. Generally, a school hallway just needs to look like a school hallway. Variety is more imporant with character art; it needs to be able to fit the personality it's depicting. Unless the personality is built around the art, in which case variety is still important to have more opportunity for inspiration. Then again, the same principle goes for backgrounds, I suppose.

So I basically jsut reasoned myself around in a circle, but to summarize: Character art is probably a better idea to work on, if only because backgrounds are more readily available. Unless you're planning to do something unique or just plain awesome with your backgrounds. Of course, though, I have much less expreience with all of this than most of you here, so chances are my advice isn't the best anyway.

[DaFool]

I have a question, though. It seems that most people are making .psd files for their character art. Would a .pspimage (Jasc Paint Shop Pro) be of use to anyone? I supposedly can save PSP files as .psd, but I don't know if it would transfer into Photoshop right.

The "industry-standard" I'm familiar with that saves layer information is TIFF (*.tif) It's pretty heavy, though. Else png should be alright, even with layers rendered separately.

Thanks for the contributions (hehe, I barely did anything myself).

[Jake]

It seems that most people are making .psd files for their character art. Would a .pspimage (Jasc Paint Shop Pro) be of use to anyone? I supposedly can save PSP files as .psd, but I don't know if it would transfer into Photoshop right.

I'd suggest that it would be less useful to have PSP-specific files than Photoshop-specific files, simply because the Photoshop file format is so widespread; the only thing that can open .pspimage files is PSP itself, and PSP is also perfectly capable of opening most PSD files...




(The other thing I was considering myself was a paper-doll style set of backgrounds... like, a building one with various doors and windows that could be turned on or off, etc., to make different buildings. I'm not quite sure how much work that would be to get right, though...)

[Jake]

The other thing I was considering myself was a paper-doll style set of backgrounds... like, a building one with various doors and windows that could be turned on or off, etc., to make different buildings. I'm not quite sure how much work that would be to get right, though...

So, I had a quick go at this, to see if it's viable. Anyone got any comments on how useful this seems? Bearing in mind it's all rough sketch at the moment, of course.



Rough building doll-BG (PSD/2.6MB)

[herenvardo]

So, I had a quick go at this, to see if it's viable. Anyone got any comments on how useful this seems? Bearing in mind it's all rough sketch at the moment, of course.

It looks really useful, good job. Actually, if it fitted the theme for any of my projects, I'd already be using it. Anyway, there is a small technicall issue: it seems that the file is being served with a MIME text/html... I know, I know, most people here won't be caring about that (and I bet there are many people who don't even know what MIME types are, and probably will never need to know it); but it seems that browsers do care about it. Just clicking the link from either Firefox (2.0.0.11 Spannish) or IE (7.0.5730.13, also Spannish) shows me a "page" of lots of scrambled text (in detail, what it's happenning is that the browser tries to interpret the bytes that form the file as ASCII characters, because the server tells it that it's a text file). The "save link as..." option in Firefox allows me to save the file to my disk, but it seems that the browser messes it up, as both Photoshop and GIMP fail to open the file. On IE7 a long-time bug (IE ignores the "text" type definition and interprets all streams as binary data) allows it to save the file properly, although it defaults at putting a .htm extension on it... it's ironic that a bug is actually circumventing the problem ^^; I don't know if somebody else is having this issue, but a psd file should normally be served as "image/photoshop" or "image/psd"; I can't understand why your server is giving a wrong MIME, most webserver software are aware of common filename extensions and normally choose an appropriate MIME. I suggest you to check your server's configuartion.

[Jake]

I suggest you to check your server's configuartion.

Mm - I suspect I'd have to fiddle with the config files to get it to force .psds to a binary MIME type of some kind, I have no idea what they're playing at. As it is, though, a much easier solution is to simply zip the file, since I know the hosting people serve zips with a correct MIME type. I'll try and remember to do that, next time.