Drawing: Mejas Doto, Dark Jedi Master
January 21, 2007 | 1 Comment
Here’s an image I did for a member of the Dark Jedi Brotherhood, a Star Wars club on-line with a focus on computer gaming, writing, and roleplaying. Anyways, this member collects images of his character and thus commissioned one from me. Here’s the final product:
Along the way, I saved various steps I took while creating the image…its interesting to look back and see the progress.
Initial sketch, general layout for the character.
Darkened in certain areas, defining key parts of the Jedi Master. Created the face and head markings.
Finished basic darkening, began coloring in the skin.
Defined clothing and colored under-tunics.
Defined cloak and clothing even more and continued coloring.
Finished clothing definition and coloring.
Thickened lines, shortened middle finger, filled in gaps, added a black background.
Fixed hand and added Force lightning…blue lines, Gaussian blur, faded brush strokes.
Drew lightsaber and added blade. Defined right hand a little more.
Original final rendition with sweet red background.
Re-done final rendition…aged Mejas Doto appropriately…he’s no teenager as the previous version implied.
Thats all she wrote! The picture took about 6 hours on my Wacom Tablet. Much fun was head and it was good to break the tablet in again! Its been far too long.
Colby Fine Dog
January 20, 2007 | 1 Comment
This picture is one (of many) that my wife took this past summer with her sweet camera. Thats Colby, my grandparent’s dog. He’s a brilliant piece of work - scared of outhouses and tiny animals. Anyways, I often find myself looking at this photo, its colors and composition look pretty groovy.
The photo was taken in Plymouth, NH at a beach along the Baker River.
Settlers of Catan
January 19, 2007 | 5 Comments
I’m a fan of Settlers of Catan. The game is ballsy and tons of fun…as a matter of fact, I played and triumphed last night :) Anyways, for those of you out there that haven’t a clue what the game is about, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:
As players establish towns and cities on the island, each settlement can receive resources for its adjacent hexes (with cities yielding more resources). The resources, represented by cards, can be used to build more roads, towns, or cities, and to obtain development cards for later use. Various achievements, such as building a town or establishing the longest road, grant a player one or more victory points. The winner is the first player to accumulate ten victory points on his turn.
Players are allowed to trade among each other the resources they have produced, and to trade “off the island” for a hefty price. It is difficult for any one player to produce all the resources necessary for progress, so astute trading is the strategic heart of the game. Player interaction is further complicated by the presence of a robber, which is used to steal from other players and hinder their production of resources. There is no combat. Apart from moving the robber, refusing to trade, and cutting off building routes, there is no way to harm other players. The settler theme and economy simulation gameplay are similar to the 1983 personal computer videogame M.U.L.E., though Teuber may have developed them independently.
Settlers of Catan has rapidly become popular in part because its mechanics are relatively simple, while its dynamics are quite complex. At a recreational level, the game is well-suited for family play. No one gets eliminated, and players who are behind can strive towards quantized goals that are within reach, such as building a city in a certain space. Home games generally take between one and two hours to complete.
The layout of the board and restrictions on building allow for a player to be boxed in through poor play or bad luck. Also, given the random component of board layout, it’s possible for players to gain a monopoly on certain resource, and demand steep trade rates from other players.
Along with the main game, you can buy a number of expansions that will really changed the game! The Americanized expansions are: Seafarers of Catan, Cities and Knights of Catan, 5-6 Players Basic, 5-6 Players Seafarers, 5-6 Players Cities and Knights. One thing that sucks in that regard is the fact that if you buy the 5-6 Player Basic expansion and the Cities and Knights Expansion…well, to play 5-6 player Cities and Knights, you need to buy another box…5-6 Player Cities and Knights. It gets a little expensive, but well worth it!
If you have the chance to try this game out…do so. Don’t be daunted by the rules as they seem complex at first, but they really are simplistic. You’ll thank me later.
World of Warcraft Motivational Posters
January 18, 2007 | 2 Comments
Inspired by Cruise Gazing and Despair, I decided to make my own Motivational Posters.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Trailer 2
January 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I must say, when the first trailer was released, I was psyched. When the plot and non-trailer screenshots came out I even more psyched. Now that the second trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been released…well, lets just say I wet myself. If you haven’t seen the trailer, check it out!
(Z let me know by posting)
WoW UI Mod: FuBar
January 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
When I played World of Warcraft before my hiatus, TitanPanel was all the rage. What did it do? Well, it put this sexy little bar at the top of your UI with a lot of useful information that would otherwise have taken up a large area on the screen with the default UI. Titan Panel was excellent in that it provided easy to use hooks for other User Interface developers to tie their mods in with TitanPanel.
My new love in minimized data display in a sexy-little-bar format? FuBar. Why? Well…its basically the same mod with a slightly uglier texture behind it…but it has one amazing benefit that sold me on first use. You can have more than one bar!!!!! There’s a bit more than that so I’ll list FuBar’s features below:
- Drag and drop rearragement of plugins.
- Any plugin can exist on left or right.
- Automatically adjust frames (can be turned off)
- Any number of bars (not limited to just 2), you can attach to the top, bottom, or detach any amount you want.
- Can detach a tooltip and pin it to the UI.
- Object-oriented design.
- LoadOnDemand capabilities for plugins.
- Modularity (absolutely no plugins are intimitely connected to the core)
- Minimal resource usage
- Lots of handy features for developers.
- Well documented API.
- Skinning support
- Can change the thickness, font size, transparency, spacing through simple sliders on the right-click menu.
- Can place plugins on the minimap, which will function like standard minimap buttons.
Yet another mod you should adopt.
Charlie the Unicorn
January 16, 2007 | 20 Comments
My cousin subjected me to the following video. She mentioned that everyone at her high school is watching it…I’m scared. It’s pretty funny and a little annoying (Like It’s a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake). Check it out:
Monster Rabbits Feed North Korea
January 15, 2007 | 31 Comments
Spiegel.de writes that a German rabbit breeder has bred rabbits the size of dogs! This breeder, Karl Szmolinsky won a prize for breeding Germany’s largest rabbit, a 23 pound “German Gray Giant” called Robert, in February 2006. Now that is quite a feat in breeding.
The article discusses the deal struck with Korea:
Each of his rabbits produces around seven kilograms of meat, says Szmolinsky, who was so keen to help alleviate hunger in the impoverished country that he made the North Koreans a special price — €80 per rabbit instead of the usual €200 to €250.
“They’ll be used to help feed the population,” Szmolinsky told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “I’ve sent them 12 rabbits so far, they’re in a petting zoo for now. I’ll be travelling to North Korea in April to advise them on how to set up a breeding farm. A delegation was here and I’ve already given them a book of tips.”
These rabbits are huge and, as rabbits love to have bunnies, rabbits as a food source in Korea isn’t the worst plan around. Szmolinsky states that he’ll be sending 12 rabbits to Korea and within a year, those 12 can create 60 more rabbits. Do the math, if that trend continues we may be seeing Rabbit ranches soon :D
If you’re curious how much food you can get off of one of those cuddly monstrosities…you can feed a family of 8 a good proportioned meal off of just one bloated bunny. Not too shabby!
Steve Jobs Announces the iPhone on SNL
January 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Freaking awesome. SNL is really pulling out of its slump…to get Steve Jobs to come to SNL and really advertise the iPhone! w00t!
DotA 6.40 Released!
January 13, 2007 | 5 Comments
Surprisingly, a new version of DotA has been released! You can get it here or here. Here’s the changelog:
Reworked Neutral Creep abilities and mechanics to better balance them out
Improved Leshrac’s base str
Reduced Chen and THD movement speeds
Mangus’s Shockwave cooldown reduced from 12 to 11/10/9/8
Increased Shadow Fiend’s movement speed
Improved Berserker’s Call AOE by 25
Increased base armor on Harbinger
Lowered initial wait time before drafting starts in -rd
Improved Presence of the Dark Lord AOE
Lowered level 1 Hawk ms and vision
Removed entangle from level 1-3 of Spirit Bear
Reduced Sanity’s Eclipse cooldown from 200 to 160
Fixed Radiance Effect in center of map when Spirit Bear dies with it
Improved HP on Spiderlings
Lowered Siege units armor
Increased Razor’s base damage a bit
Reduced Watcher’s cooldown
Fixed some bugs with Shallow Grave not workling properly on units that morph
Sent and Scourge are now colored in -rd text display
Lowered Hawk HP and gave them bounty
Fixed a rare but serious bug with Geomancer leveling up
Satanic life steal increased from 23% to 25%
Increased Eye of Skadi slow duration from 2 to 3 seconds when used by melee heroes
Restored normal hero name display
Fixed roshan exploit with Geomancer
Reworked Shallow Grave a bit, it has a duration now
You now see a decline message when someone refuses to swaphero
Fixed an old bug with level 3 Elder Form attacking gem
Fixed a few typos
Fixing Firewall & Router Problems With Warcraft
January 13, 2007 | 10 Comments
My friend Bude just started blogging and his first post was a good one. Topic: Fixing Firewall & Router Issues With Warcraft…but more specifically; If you’re having issues creating Warcraft III games, the fix is really quite easy.
If you’ve every attempted to host a Warcraft III game and your friends are unable to join no matter what the map…well, you’ve got a problem, although the fix is pretty simple:
Bude takes you step by step through setting up port forwarding on your Linksys router so that ports 6112 - 6119 point at specific machines on your network so they each can host games. That’s typically half the problem. However, you may find that people are still unable to join your hosted games.
You may be choosing a stupid map…or it could be a firewall problem. Bude explains how - on Windows XP - to open a hole in the Firewall to allow incoming connections to War3.exe. After thats solved, all should be right in the world and you can host Warcraft III games to your hearts content! DotA for the win!
A Guide to Druid Forms
January 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Over my time off and on World of Warcraft, I’ve seen a number of questions regarding Druid Forms. Well, the other day while reading a random WoW forum, I stumbled on an animated signature image that detailed some of the key forms a Druid character can become. Here are the words of wisdom:
Amazing descriptions to live by. Thank you. That is all.
Wowhead, The New ThottBot
January 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
If you are a fan of World of Warcraft, there’s a high probability that you have found yourself at Thottbot - a search engine for WoW data - a time or two. My wife and I have used that as a resource for quite some time when trying to find the optimal monster to kill for a given item, the location of a hard-to-find NPC, etc. Thottbot was our one-stop-shop.
Enter Wowhead. (Yes, that’s the correct spelling)
What is Wowhead? Its basically a sexy-looking Thottbot. It provides:
- A clean and usable interface
- Colors that more closely jive with the feel of WoW
- Item/Profession/Class information
- Embeddable Talent Calculator (you can put the calculator on your site)
- Periodic contests
What is really exciting at Wowhead is that they plan to create a set of APIs for Developers. I have some ideas that I’d love to accomplish with WoW data, however, it would seem silly to re-create the wheel and create my own Thottbot/Wowhead. Creating a WoW mashup would be much more desirable. I’ll be watching and waiting with fingers crossed.
WoW UI Mod: MetaHud
January 10, 2007 | 8 Comments
MetaHud is an addon that adds a HUD to your UI, showing all the information normally displayed by the Player and Target frames and more. This is a derivative of Drathal’s HUD with some added features that are pretty useful…some of the excess stuff has been removed.
Here are the features:
- Health/Mana Bars colour levels.
- All Bars are animated.
- Shows Level, Name, Class and Elite/Boss, Pet, NPC.
- 4 Alpha Settings for: Combat/Target selected/No Target/Player is regging.
- 4 Displaymodes for Health/Mana.
- Many positioning and Scaling Options.
- Hide Blizzard Player/Targetframe.
- Target Menu with Leftclick on Targetname.
- Player Menu with Rightclick on Playername.
- Castingbar with Cast-time.
- Option to hide Petbars.
- Option to hide Targetbars/Text.
- Load-on-Demand configuration display.
- Target’s Target display - click to switch to that target.
- Aggro alert - audible and visual warnings.
- Target PvP status.
- Self PvP status.
- Status icons for Rested, Combat, Raid leader, and Loot Master.
- Target distance display.
- Support for Mobhealth, Mobinfo2, and Mobhealth2.
- FlightMap support.
- myAddons Support.
- FuBar Support.
So what’s the use of MetaHUD? You’ve got your health and the mob’s health at the top left of the screen as per the default World of Warcraft interface. Well, thats the problem. I play with a high resolution and a small UI which places that information at the far top-left of the screen, well away from the center of the screen. In tight situations, the act of pulling my eyes from the center of the screen - however easy that seems - can be the death of your character. You know…that idiot Alliance Rogue that’s creeping around to back-stab you and had your eyes remained in the center of the screen rather than checking your target’s health - you would have seen the little bastard appear for a split second and you could have reacted appropriately, pwned him, and continued on your merry way. But no. You find yourself pissed, dead, and rezzing at a graveyard.
Thats why MetaHUD is useful. Stop crying and download the mod. You can thank me later.
iPhone is a Reality
January 9, 2007 | 1 Comment
Engadget has a nice summary of the iPhone:
Gizmodo is at MacWorld and has confirmed that the iPhone is a reality…here’s some of their play by play!
9:47: The solution? A giant touchscreen interface. Multi-touch! You can do multi-gestures on the screen itself.
9:51: The iPhone syncs just like the iPod to your PC and Mac.
9:51: It syncs not only music, videos, but all your data! Bookmarks, email setup, contacts.
9:52: Just like an iPod.
9:52: Runs OSX
9:52: Thinner than any smartphone out there.
9:52: 160ppi
9:52: Controls on the side, volume, silent. The Back: 2-megapixel camera.
9:53: Top: headset jack, SIM, sleep-wake.
9:53: An iPod connector, just like the iPod (on the bottom).
9:54: Proximity sensor on the face, turns off the screen so your face doesn’t press the buttons.
9:54: Ambient light switch and accelerometer to switch from portrait to landscape.
9:55: Built-in speaker.
1. Widescreen iPod with touch control.
2. The Apple Phone.
3. Internet communications device.
All in one! It’s actually going to be called the iPhone!
