User talk:Anonanon

Glazed UI

I love the skins, but you missed a spot :P. You need to change the trade box thing. It's only messed up when you "submit" or whatever. Thought I'd give you a head's up. ~Farlo Talk 21:31, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Ooops. RavenGT 21:52, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Hopefully you still check this from time to time

Any chance you'd be willing to release the texture files you used to create your texmod? I've got a few nitpicks with a couple things, and a additional mods I'd like to add in, if you'd be willing. Hope to hear back from you! ··· Danny Pew Pew 15:52, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, people wanted to change/add some stuff ever since it came out, they just added their stuff on top of the tpf. RavenGT 16:12, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

eh. true. just means longer initial load times when you stack too many tpf's. Just thought I'd ask - no harm if you don't want to. ;o i've been working on a personal TexMod for a while now, but it keeps getting delayed due to 2 jobs and additional features. =p ··· Danny Pew Pew 17:28, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll release the source files if there's demand for it. RavenGT 14:09, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

It would make me a very happy troll if you did. Also, you should add a 50% health marker sometime, I think it's the only thing this mod leaves out (I'd do it myself, but I don't know how to make one because am and idort). --Jette 01:36, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Image

Hmm, do you know where you got this image? I smell copyvio on it, sadly. Though I have no idea as to whether it is. (i know that made no sense, bear with me). Anyways, do you know the images origin? -- Wandering Traveler 03:34, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

So it wouldn't be okay if it was just a screen cap (edited, of course) from a TV broadcast? RavenGT 03:51, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Sadly, no. It still is incompatible with our liscensing. -- Wandering Traveler 03:53, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

If it is indeed a copyvio then it should be removed (no offense). Somebody will mark it as one or you can, but if you choose to do so you can mark it as U1. DrogoBoffin 03:55, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I'll choose to remove it. Thanks for the heads up. It'll be gone soon when I finish a replacement. RavenGT 03:58, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Happy to help. If you want, check out the wikimedia commons for a list of images that are compatible with our liscensing. :) -- Wandering Traveler 04:03, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Alright, this can't be copyrighted since I just drew this from scratch. It's sort of cheating, heh. RavenGT 05:09, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually it is. The character is copyrited since its a tv show and its just a scetch of the original. DrogoBoffin 05:12, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

since its techncially not original work....I think the copyright still applies. I think. -- Wandering Traveler 05:14, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Its a derivative works, and as such is still under the same copyright. Sorry! Dominator Matrix 05:15, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Well then, sorry for the trouble. Is case closed now? His name is Bob. Original creation. RavenGT 05:36, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Are those Lucky☆Star screensshots from a game? Either way, those would need to go too as far as i know XD.--Fighterdoken 22:07, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Now that I'm not going to do anything unless I get chased after by officials with pitchforks. It's just a puiny screen cap of my blog. RavenGT 23:16, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

(Reset indent) The point is no matter how small of a screen cap it is if the images violate GWW:IMAGE or GWW:COPYRIGHT its still a violation of policy and need to be marked as such. DrogoBoffin 23:22, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Alright, this should do it. RavenGT 23:49, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

iLol'ed...--Fighterdoken 23:51, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

when in doubt, ask Auron - he's the one who's had to deal with all of the copyright bullshit at PvX. afaik, however, images who's quality and size are such that reproduction would be impossible to any point of value are not in violation of copyright - though this would apply only to the screenshots at best. ··· Danny Pew Pew 16:27, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

TexMod handbook

I've always used .DDS for my output format. It's extremely crisp, and, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty certain, you can create vector DDS's from SVG or EPS files, which is fantastic if you're skilled with Illustrator. It would be interesting to have a completely or even mostly non-raster UI. Depending on the Graphics card you have, nVidia has a texture-editing Photoshop plug-in that they offer for free, so most of the time it should be easy to create vector textures. (By vector, I mean of course super-resolution images, since pure vector can't be achieved without core program controls.) ··· Danny Pew Pew 17:38, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

DDS is an excellent format for most texture purposes because it's the DX default, meaning there's no additional conversion process, but it is not lossless. 75% of the time it's so close to perfect you won't notice any loss of quality or detail, but there will be artifacts (usually in the shape of a square) in that other 25%. --Jette 18:43, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

And we're talking about output in Texmod (Logging Mode) right? I don't know the technical details for DDS, except it contains data that engines use (mip maps, etc.), so I keep those as originals. Now about vector UI's, I've never seen much vector menus in games, except for Source engine based games. From what I know, anything Half-Life 2-based depend on vectoring for menus, the fonts, and even the HUD. It's actually great because it scales beautifully when you increase your resolution, but when I don't really see it happening in Guild Wars. First, games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft have really detailed fantasy-themed details with bevels and engravings and such, which I'd imagine would be pretty hard to draw. Secondly, with RPG games, you're going to have alot of interface elements, with many windows displaying all at once. If all these HUD elements were in vector, I'd expect the frame rate to drop quite a bit. Hey you know what, passing around knowledge like this is great. RavenGT 19:57, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Would the frame rate drop? I would think the interface would only need to be drawn using vectoring once as the game starts (or when you resize your interface), which could be converted and stored as an ordinary, compressed .dds raster files in the active memory that draws on screen -- all the speed of raster, with all the precision of vector! Then again, I'm pretty sure the people who care about what the UI looks like are a microscopic minority, so the chances of anybody bothering are quite slim. Unrelated issue: you should probably register the account "anonanon" sometime, otherwise some cranky bureaucrat will delete your page without warning. --Jette 20:03, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, this red important looking message telling me to register this name...eh, how do I do that? I'm not too useful when it comes to wiki. About the frame rate drop, this is solely based on what I've seen in the past, but I recall frame rates shooting up a bit when you hide the interface, common with alot of games. RavenGT 20:08, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Click log out, click log in, click register. --Jette 21:12, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh I didn't know they meant it that way. Your signature goes perfectly with your response. Anonanon 00:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I've only recently begun experimenting with EPS vector images, so this weekend I'll put together a quick texture and test to see if it will function in Guild Wars. Vector drawings would only need to be loaded once, as with the rest of the images, so there should be no frame rate decrease whatsoever, unless your graphics card has issues handling large images anyway. The only significant change would be initial load, which could increase rather noticeably. As for DDS, there are several different output formats, one of which is lossless, if I recall correctly. The nVidia Photoshop plugin is pretty expansive when it comes to texture editing, and I've been able to use it to remedy many of Guild Wars' innate alpha issues (hairstyles under certain lighting, to be specific). As for Jette's idea of vector drawing conversion to rasters, that would probably be more memory intense than actively re-drawing vectors, since re-drawing would only occur on resize anyway. Guild Wars doesn't "unload" an image once it's been loaded. ··· Danny Pew Pew 18:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for the wall of text. :< ··· Danny Pew Pew 18:08, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to the result because I still don't understand the concept of a vector texture. I would think that once you save it, it will rasterize and it will show up in-game as a regular 1024* or whatever resolution texture made out of plain pixel data. Anonanon 19:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean, exactly? That the file type would automatically rasterize the image? If that's your concern, I can assure you that the EPS filetype would never do such a thing. At worst, an EPS image would be forced to display its rendered preview image, with is generally a 72 dpi raster that is created solely for preview purposes. At best, an EPS image would display in true PostScript style. (EPS stands for Encapsulated Post Script.) This would likely be dependent on a user's graphics card and processor since EPS files are basically a bunch of binary data describing mathematical functions with a preview image tucked in up at the top. If you wanna read up on it more, try here. Personally, I've come to love the EPS format, but I'm not sure if it's flexibility inside a newspaper would translate to flexibility inside Guild Wars. ··· Danny Pew Pew 20:07, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I know what EPS is, I use it for graphic design and prints. In a nutshell, it's a format that contains mathematical data, so the graphic can be scaled anyway you want without detail loss (pixelation). I was just wondering how this "indestructive detail" would be beneficial in games, from what I see, it doesn't. When you run the game, textures are loaded into memory, but those textures will be static 1024x1024 textures. What difference will EPS textures make? It still will be the same 1024x1024 pixels. The only scalable graphics I've seen in games that are vector are some menu and HUD elements, see: Source engine games. That being said, I will understand when you get the result and put up a comparison or something. Anonanon 21:17, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha. That is the issue - how does Guild Wars load images? If EPS doesn't work or isn't satisfactory, I'll probably stick to using DDS files myself. It's a shame more games don't use vector interfaces. ··· Danny Pew Pew 21:31, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh okay, so you never confirmed this. I see that you're just thinking it in a logical way using theories. Now it's not like I work for Anet, but I'm pretty sure you can't change a game engine's behavior like that. So far this is what we know, the Guild Wars engine (and pretty much 98% of other games out there) use rasterized pixel-based textures. Well actually, the term "texture" means a raster graphic anyways. I believe the maximum texture resolution Guild Wars supports is 1024x1024, but this is just by observation, don't quote me on it. However Guild Wars does use vector in its custom designed font. You can tell when you use a large interface size, the font does not stretch and look pixelated, it retains perfect crispness and proportion, although it does get a little bolder for some reason. The only games I know that are made completely in vector are Asteroids and Geometry Wars, and maybe some older arcade games. Edit: And to add on to what I said, I don't think using vector for gamesl ike Guild Wars is a good idea. You can't achieve fantasy themed art using vector drawings and shapes. Even if it's totally possible (well, it is), it's still not practical for the game developers, as you have to put together hundreds of shapes and hours of using the pen tool to get an effect, as opposed to just a couple of pixel-based brush strokes in Photoshop.Anonanon 22:27, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

There's quite a bit you can do with gradients, but I see what you're saying. Also, I'm not nearly suggesting that game developers start attempting to vectorize every single texture - just UI elements. =p I could never imagine drawing out one of my own characters, much less each of the faces, hairstyles, and bodies, and even less so each armor set. It's worth a test with the UI, though. I've got an nVidia 9800 GTX, so chances are if Guild Wars will show it, my card can handle it. Even if vectors do work, however, I think I'd still support using DDS much more, since DDS is natural to the environment. ··· Danny Pew Pew 23:01, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I phrased part of that poorly - I should've said, I'm only suggesting that it'd be nice if developers would use vectorized UIs, but I certainly don't expect them to put the hours in for it. Though, if they were to host contests, I'm sure they could get people like us to gladly contribute our time and efforts into their production, and for free. Haha. ··· Danny Pew Pew 23:04, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Now that just got me thinking, even if it's possible to use vector based interface, is there really a benefit to it? Is it really worth pouring the hours into it? The only real benefit is having crisp lines when playing with larger interface sizes, that's really it. But even right now with our bitmap interfaces set to large, the quality isn't too terrible and isn't worth moaning about. Anonanon 23:15, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

You could just make the source files vectors, then convert that to bitmap at the size you need it to be. That'd be easier than reprogramming the whole system. --Jette 01:13, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Jette is right, that is the only option you have with vectoring -- To spend 4 hours making a vectorized graphic for this tiny part of the interface, only to be forced to rasterize it into bitmap at the end. For me, it takes me ten minutes or less minutes to create it and then align it with Anet's originals. You might as well work with raster from the very start. Anonanon 05:16, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, I have discovered that the maximum size is actually not 1024x1024, it's at least 2048x2048, as proved by the monster I found that's apparently used to make some floor textures in Hell's Precipice. --Jette 19:27, 16 August 2009 (UTC)