ALICE (was: funny softwarez)

[Glasskitten]

Suggestions...suggestions...Ooh! I know! Gothic Lolita and a traditional kimono! Yay! I think a good start would be one or two outfits for every popular genre, i.e. traditional school romance, fantasy, science-fiction...
And something that Amatire would wear if she were not a giant stick woman! Wait, can I say that?

[rioka]

:jots down suggestions:

Hey everyone! I'd like to introduce you to Alice:



Alice is my first line of females for ALICE. As I make more, I'll move down the alphabet (i.e. next female, with a different pose, will have a name starting with "B", and so on).

I've attached two versions, a black and white and a CG. B&W for printing and drawing over and the CG version for the final product (or if you want to draw directly to your computer).

I still have to complete Alice but I'd like to get her out asap so you guys can start drawing stuff for her. Seriously, the girl needs some clothes quick! (PyTom, I'll get the rest of her to you before the 16th, for sure.)

[mikey]

OMG, this is really progressing!
Excellent idea with the doll names, the doll itself and... everything!
Regrettably, I have more or less exhausted my contribution options, but anyway... great work!

[Dre]

Wow, that really cool! Couldn't have done it better myself.(most likely worst ) I'll try to contribute sometime in the future, with a little more free time.

[PyTom]

Nifty. Looking forward to the rest, so I can get ready... should be getting the laptop tomorrow.

I did some experiments with HSL modification, and as you can see, they seem to have worked okay. (Well, at least as a proof of concept. My concept of skin color is probably a bit off. Never was that good at eugenics.)

[ShiraiJunichi]

Are you saying that you will be able to adjust lightness and saturation in addition to adjusting hue?

[Guest]

Excellent idea with the doll names, the doll itself and... everything!

Thanks! The name was actually inspired by how scientists name Hurricanes. I thought it was pretty neat how they would interchange between male and female and run down the alphabet.

I'll try to contribute sometime in the future, with a little more free time.

Cool! Another artist on the list.

Btw, I've started getting the word out about ALICE starting with MangaTutorials. I'll visit some other places soon. =)

Are you saying that you will be able to adjust lightness and saturation in addition to adjusting hue?

Yup, I think that's what he means by HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) and wow, nice results PyTom! This gives me hope for results on everything else (clothes, hair, etc).

Anyways, PyTom, if it'll give you an idea on what to expect, I'll be making the following for Alice:
1. Back of hair
2. Front of hair (i.e. bangs)
3. School Uniform (I'm debating whether to make them seperate - any thoughts, PyTom?)
4. Socks
5. Shoes
6. Ribbon
7. School bag (optional for now)
8. Accessories (optional for now)
8. Undergarments (optional for now)

Btw, what's with the confirmation code? We have to enter that everytime we post?

[Guest]

Excellent idea with the doll names, the doll itself and... everything!

Thanks! The name was actually inspired by how scientists name Hurricanes. I thought it was pretty neat how they would interchange between male and female and run down the alphabet.

I'll try to contribute sometime in the future, with a little more free time.

Cool! Another artist on the list.

Btw, I've started getting the word out about ALICE starting with MangaTutorials. Hopefully I can get some folks there interested. I'll visit some other places soon. =)

Are you saying that you will be able to adjust lightness and saturation in addition to adjusting hue?

Yup, I think that's what he means by HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) and wow, nice results PyTom! This gives me hope for results on everything else (clothes, hair, etc).

Anyways, PyTom, if it'll give you an idea on what to expect, I'll be making the following for Alice:
1. Back of hair
2. Front of hair (i.e. bangs)
3. School Uniform (I'm debating whether to make them seperate - any thoughts, PyTom?)
4. Socks
5. Shoes
6. Ribbon
7. School bag (optional for now)
8. Accessories (optional for now)
8. Undergarments (optional for now)

Btw, what's with the confirmation code? We have to enter that everytime we post?

[rioka]

Uwahhh! No wonder I had to put the code... It logged me out (or I didn't log in? O_O). Eeehhh, anywhoo, that was me above... double posting... sorry! <.<'

[PyTom]

3. School Uniform (I'm debating whether to make them seperate - any thoughts, PyTom?)

In general, you'll want to make everything with a dominant color a separate layer. For example, say you have a seifuku school uniform, consisting of a shirt, neckerchief, and a bow. You'll want to make each of them their own layer, so the user can adjust the color of them separately.

Now, this doesn't mean we'll be letting the user allow the doll to wear the bow with nothing else (H_H), but instead ALICE will turn on the combination all at once, but let the user modify each image individually.

In conclusion, the more layers, the better. We can always merge layers as we go along.

[ShiraiJunichi]

Should each layer be submitted as it's own png file?

[PyTom]

That would work. It would also work if people sent me psd or xcf.gz files, which I could then tear apart myself. The latter would keep the layer ordering right, which is a nice property to have. (But it may hurt collaboration.)

[ShiraiJunichi]

I'm not quite sure how things are going to work... I asked about submitting, because that's how things are going to get started... But once the program is out, people will be able to create and distribute their own "add-on packs", right? Of course, I imagine people will send you their image packs, and you'll host them alongside the program download. But people will still be able to create their own image packs by themselves, right? They won't have to rely on you to put it in a format ALICE (is that name official yet?) can understand, will they? I don't imagine you'll make ALICE able to interpret .psd files... So I guess what I really want to know is how to format image packs so the program can use them directly. Perhaps part of ALICE's functionality should be to allow the user to import images, and use those images to create image packs.

Perhaps it's a little early to be bringing up things like this, but at some point we need to develop some conventions so that there won't be naming conflicts or whatnot when you try to put everone's submissions together.

I was wondering if you were going to have any sort of minimum quality requirement for submissions that you accept. It's probably something that doesn't need to be worried about, but I was just wondering...

[PyTom]

But once the program is out, people will be able to create and distribute their own "add-on packs", right?

Yes, I plan to support this. While I'll probably host a repository, and encourage people to contribute, if people want to host their own stuff, that's there problem, not mine.

They won't have to rely on you to put it in a format ALICE (is that name official yet?) can understand, will they?

Alice is official.

I'll be documenting the image pack format that ALICE understands. I'd expect each image pack to be either a directory filled with files, or a zip file of such a directory. The directory would contain a number of images, and a control file governing how the images go together to form a doll.

I expect that it will be possible to have multiple image packs that contribute to the same doll. So Eclipse could release alice.zip, and then you could release alice-beach.zip, a collection of swimsuits for Alice.

Or something. This is all very much in the air, TBD as I begin the coding process.

Perhaps part of ALICE's functionality should be to allow the user to import images, and use those images to create image packs.

I would expect that building image packs will involve editing some sort of file, rather than being gui-driven, at least for early releases. I haven't 100% decided how it will work yet, though.

Perhaps it's a little early to be bringing up things like this, but at some point we need to develop some conventions so that there won't be naming conflicts or whatnot when you try to put everone's submissions together.

Hm... each package will have its own directory or zip file, so naming conflicts should be minimal. Perhaps for the names of the files, we can adopt the reverse-domain naming convention. So we could have something like net.renaigames.alice.

Or perhaps that's overthinking things for now.

I was wondering if you were going to have any sort of minimum quality requirement for submissions that you accept. It's probably something that doesn't need to be worried about, but I was just wondering...

Hm... I haven't thought about this. My gut feeling is that there is a cutoff point in art where it begins to look professional. (Lines look inked, rather than sketched, for example.) It's just tough to define such a point.

My gut feeling is that some subset of the best packages will be included with ALICE itself, and the rest will be made available for download separately.

[Otaku Dash]

This is great! The only thing I regert Is don't having a tablet.... taht way I could submit something... oh well....

I'll give ideas for it soon (preparing a list).