Nice place you got here....

[Stratadrake]

...mind if I lurk?

[Rman Virgil]

----------------------->

* Fair is fair.... been lurking at Fanart Central for a long spell checking out your art.

* I mainly post info here, Richard, but do lurk over at warzone2200 dot com where I other folks you'll know
put all our work on WZ - code, binaries, art, music, yarns, designs, etc....

L8r bud, Rman

[Per]

Good to see you back.

[Stratadrake]

Oh no I'm not "back", just . . . the ol' caught word of this place from a discussion topic and thought I'd stop in and say 'hi'. Somebody during a FurAffinity forum discussion about free/freeware games posted a link to here and I had to do a double-take to make sure.

That being said, I don't prefer to be called by my IRL name across the 'Net these days . . . just 'Stratadrake' (more often shortened as 'Strata').

I haven't touched any of my WZ stuff in absolute years. Too busy with my 40-hour grocery job, gaming and drawing on the sides... 'retro' is an addictive genre.

On a day-to-day basis there are two forums I check up on regularly, one of them being FAC due to my moderator position but when subjects of discussion are concerned I still avoid the topics of religion/politics/philospophy, which I could still attribute to the flamewars that erupted after 9/11/2001. As much as I'm a staff member / moderator / developer on the FAC site these days, at the same time I do like deviantART quite a bit -- strangely it has come to hold the most of my submissions anywhere across the 'Net, and that's not just because of the "no photos" rule we have on FAC.

I participated in the 2007 NaNoWriMo, it felt very odd at first because I saw a discussion thread posted about it perhaps one week before November, I signed up on October 30th or so with only a basic premise for a story and the main character's name by the 3rd where I actually started . . . and despite only 27 days of 30 spent actually writing I managed to finish a 55,000 word story with a cast of about a dozen named characters (of which I've since drawn illustrations), and I keep mulling over the idea for creating a 'graphic novel' or comic version of it. In fact I still want to learn to do some decent digital sketching/coloring for my art in general, I do have a tablet but so far still only use it for an occasional touch-up, my latest inversion-style drawing included.

Which does definitely remind me of that one drawing I have sitting in my drawing pad, which is inked and all it needs left is to be colored (and then inverted). The one most-popular piece in my deviantART gallery is over two years old by now, and while I can't complain about the over-100 people who've +Faved it, I want something new that can knock it off the top.

I still have that bad habit of delaying, shall we say "side-questing" my days off work with other than what I get up in the morning and think to myself I want to have done.

[Rman Virgil]

* Cool, Strata.

* I use "True Space" for dig art. It's free these days. Used to cost about grand with the tutorials. Solid, powerful proggy you
can definitely do anything with inc anime, graphic novel, etc.

* All the best with your journey and side-quests.

- Regards, Rman

[Chojun]

Hey strata

What's Draconus been up to these days..? xD

[lav_coyote25]

you cant prove it! just because they havent been seen together... xD

[Buginator]

I haven't touched any of my WZ stuff in absolute years. Too busy with my 40-hour grocery job, gaming and drawing on the sides... 'retro' is an addictive genre.

Food? check.
Gaming? check.
Drawing on the side? check.
Redoing pie slicer on your break? Priceless! xD

[Stratadrake]

I doubt Pie Slicer (or WZCK, whomever still uses that) will ever see any updates, computer I use has been through one or two reinstalls since those days so atm VB6 isn't even installed at all.

Hey strata

What's Draconus been up to these days..? xD

That's another username I haven't touched in many years. I do have a few 'muses', characters I've designed with special meaning to me, however only one of them was given a proper name, the other two of which are essentially nameless. Now if the name was one syllable shorter I might've been able to use it in my Nanowrimo novel -- a little trend I decided on where almost every character in the novel had either a one- or two- syllable name (and with one exception, every name used the letter 'a' somewhere)

* I use "True Space" for dig art. It's free these days. Used to cost about grand with the tutorials. Solid, powerful proggy you
can definitely do anything with inc anime, graphic novel, etc.

Never heard of it. Photoshop gets a lot of talk, of course, but personally I do a lot with GIMP.

[Rman Virgil]

---------------->

* Know GIMP, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Freehand, Painter and ArtRage from many years of use.

* When TS became Free, GIMP came off my HD. TS development began in 1986, GIMP in 2001.

* TS is a fully loaded top of the line Mercedes Benz to GIMPs Yugo. Fact, not opinion. That it's
now free, still boggles my mind.

- L8r, Rman.

[Stratadrake]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSpace ?
(My frequency of linking to Wikipedia articles has become something of an in-joke on FAC....)

If that's the one, then TS vs. GIMP is not an accurate comparison because these are two distinct natures of beasts.
After all GIMP is essentially a FOSS Photoshop....

I also toy around a bit in Inkscape, vector work just 'feels' a lot faster and easier even though it's similarly more limited. I particularly find Inkscape useful for performing trace-tests when processing reports about tracing, simply because you can point-and-click-resize whereas with every raster based program you have to input some kind of scalar.

I also like how GIMP is extendable through scripting and plug-ins, GIMP uses Scheme as its scripting language so the syntax takes considerable getting used to (and troubleshooting a script is a downright hell-in-handbasket PITA) but i have been able to write a few useful ones. My favorite is a YCC inversion, inverting the Luma channel of an image's YCC colorspace, and I have for several years used this trick to create some awesome coloring from traditional work.

Though if I may tie this in to WZ for just a moment... back in the day when I experimented with a cel-shaded appearance, now if any WZ engine had the capability to auto-generate a cel outline for its 3D objects then that could be used for a number of informative purposes.

But I will ask, what other interests do some of the WZ oldbies do on the side and what sites can they be found on?

[Rman Virgil]

----------------------------->

* While I too use Wikipedia I must confess I do so with strict reservations in that I question (and seek answers) through PRIMARY sources and 1ts hand experience with stuff rather than a purely second hand source that is mostly not vetted before publication for objectivity. In short, I evaluate proggies by actually using em. It can surely be subjective, your choice of what works best for you (even HOW GUIs are designed can sway me, everything else being equal), what you're specifically trying to achieve and, frankly, that is the bottom line really as progs are nothing more than tools for your own expression and for meeting challenges - intellectually and artistically. In sum, whatever floats your boat and rocks your world.

* warzone2200 dot com is where many of the old-timers congregate and share their work and collaborate - including re-creating WZ 2100 (Source Code and Data) and making WZ 2200. All my work across multiple disciplines/arts is there. That is the best place to get into details about anything under the sun - strictly within WZ AND correlating to anything from the rest of reality at large.

- Regards, Rman.

[Chojun]

GIMP uses Scheme as its scripting language

I took a programming languages class in Fall-2005 at the UofU. In that class I created a Java-like language using Scheme. That was the worst experience of my life. Scheme is (IMO) a purely academic language and has little-to-no practical use in the real world aside from, well, scripting (but at that, it seriously constrains the user-base). I'm disappointed to hear that GIMP uses Scheme. What a crappy, crappy design decision. Python or Ruby would've been much better.

As for me, I'm still making music and am still busy in WZ with my cohorts in crime over at warzone2200 O_O

[Buginator]

GIMP uses Scheme as its scripting language

I took a programming languages class in Fall-2005 at the UofU. In that class I created a Java-like language using Scheme. That was the worst experience of my life. Scheme is (IMO) a purely academic language and has little-to-no practical use in the real world aside from, well, scripting (but at that, it seriously constrains the user-base). I'm disappointed to hear that GIMP uses Scheme. What a crappy, crappy design decision. Python or Ruby would've been much better.

Gimp uses Script-FU, and also can use perl & tcl also, and I think some others as well. It just that it installs Script-FU by default.

Though if I may tie this in to WZ for just a moment... back in the day when I experimented with a cel-shaded appearance, now if any WZ engine had the capability to auto-generate a cel outline for its 3D objects then that could be used for a number of informative purposes.

But I will ask, what other interests do some of the WZ oldbies do on the side and what sites can they be found on?

Just how far did you experiment? Did you have any pics or anything?
Adding cell shading would be pretty easy if we were using GLSL... maybe when intel finally makes good hardware/drivers. :rolleyes:

[codybuff05]

WOW 0_0! soooooo many acrinyms in those sentences >_> i think im gonna have a headache after reading that tell me where in the hell did you learn all this stuff at? buginator, how old are you btw? j/w ^_^ oh and plz tell me a lil about yourself, im interested to hear this...