Greetings fellow human beings. Click Here if you are human being. That link is important for all human beings who are currently reading this and have not already clicked the link. So, now we go onto what the heck this picture is. It certainly is not a work of my doing, but actually it is. Each of these pictures was made by a different artist (only one of whom are me, I might add) in a different style to produce a different effect. Each of them was posted on the web somewhere or another for free. I hope I don't make anyone upset by posting their image. E-mail me if I did. All of them have an interesting story for the background. Today's lesson is to learn why you do what you do. Why does your picture look different from any of these here? Can you figure out which is mine? The arrow is mine. What a beautiful picture, huh? The reason I made it was for a user interface that was in need of a pointer. But now I see that I need a pointer on this image. And wow, I just happen to have it handy, so here it is. Next up is Tycho in the upper left posing for an arcade game given for free as a demo. I played it a few times, and I almost forgot why I took a screenshot. But here it is and why did this person put Tycho in their game? Because people associate playing arcade games with arcade game web comics and Tycho is a character of Penny-Arcade. If you remember, the very first Making Of JF (before there was a Making Of JF) was Gabe and Tycho apologizing for me in 3d. Next up is the window of a brick building by a video-game texturer. It's a bit dirty, but is clean enough for a person to keep their lunch (unlike many video games that I won't name). I give it 4 of 5 stars for realism and beauty. Next up is Mike's Dragon in the top right. This screenshot is the only good frame in the entire video. I was ashamed to be a 3d modeller upon seeing this movie. Sometimes you just aren't meant to publish things... Anyway, I have no idea how it was made, except that it was originally rendered with POV-RAY. It looks really good actually and if the entire movie looked like that, I'd say that it was pretty good. Even if it all looked like that, the models were still terrible. You can't do much with geometric primatives in design-time. In real-time, geometric primatives (triangles) make up JF. Next up is the Optical Theremin Circuit in the lower right. There you see a photoresistor, a resistor, and a capacitor. That all is connected to a 555 timer and a speaker to make a musical instrument that sounds eerie. I was and still am interested in the possibility of making a musical instrument or player that can fit in the palm of your hand and make beautiful music for 20 hours using a pair of AA batteries. The optical theremin is one, a few mp3 players are also, but I'm thinking bigger. Yeah, a mobile MIDI player! A pocket turntable! A digital keyboard! Next up is the De Haviland Mosquito Nf30. That design was posted on a bulletin board for 3d modellers. The message said something to the extent of: "I need this modelled ASAP! It needs to be less than 500 faces with a 256x256 texture with accurate realism." You can guess the response. People said, "Shut it hoser!" Also "I would if I could, but I'm not very good," and "It'd be a full day project, but I don't have any time," and so on. The lesson is not to be rude when you're asking for something extremely tough or you won't get it. Even if you make it an easy project, what is someone going to get out of it if they do it? One guy asked politely for a bird, and I gave it to him sans copyright. He said, "Well... Nice bird, but I need something a little more cool. And I need it for my video game that I'm going to sell, so I need the copyright also." So someone else gave him something that looked like the one from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Ha ha ha. Next up is in small print. It says: "11 different stories about first-time love and desire". You may be thinking that I've taken you into my collection of pornographic reading. No, this was an advertisement for One Hot Second, by Random House Children's Books. Notice the words: "love and desire". Now notice the publisher: Random House Children's Books. Now if you don't see something funky with that, let me get your number. But get this, the ad was so small, so unnoticable, and so fast that I'd say that I'm the only one who saw it. Crazy, no? Why does someone make an advertisement that no one sees? Perhaps they hate their job? Next up is the center. I saved her for last because I know you want to hear what I have to say about this one. I got this one in an e-mail instead of a website. This girl was kidnapped (or so the e-mail said) and they were passing around her photo to see if anyone had seen her. Now, how many girls have I seen who look like her? 20? 40? Maybe more. A lot of young redhead girls look just like that with green bow in her hair and a green dress. It's something to do with the loving parent complex these days. Passing a photo around the net might get a lot of people to look at it, but I doubt that it will get them to recognize her. Send us a picture of her fingerprints or her DNA or something we can recognize her by. ^_^
Greetings fellow martians. Reading the above image, you might get the impression that I'm not talking to you. I am. You are a martian and so is your father (but he and your mother not native Martian like you). You're on Mars right now. You're looking west towards the remote HAB-01 (crew habitat). You are young and impressionable, but determined and sociable. In 2016, Earth is on the edge of global meltdown and Mars is humanity's only hope. Will you take up the task to save the 11 billion starving people? Ahead of you lies a huge mystery and sci-fi adventure that will leave you breathless in the RPG Sequel to the critically acclaimed 3d web comic Javantea's Fate -- Javantea's Rediscovery. More than an RPG, better than a story, a full multimedia experience with 3d pictures, audio, video, photos, and a text story. Javantea's Rediscovery will be compatible with all platforms with no download necessary.
Another Making Of JF page right after another? What's my deal? Well, I'm trying to get back into my good habits. This picture is pretty low, but it's something rather than nothing. It's also a continuation of yesterday's picture. It's also part of what I've been working on all day. Actually, I spent seven hours on making yesterday's project a lot better. I did. It goes with the clicking of a few buttons. The walls go automatically into place now. The map is saved and it persists. The content also persists and the map persists at the same time. That was a brilliant idea if I ever had one. So what am I blathering about again? Well, I have this system where you draw your map with ASRPG Map Creator, right? Then you put content onto each page using the ASRPG Content Creator. Then you click a button and it saves the output to disk. Then you repeat for each spot on the map. In the end you get something that looks similar to this text-based RPG if you are too lazy to draw a few pictures. If you are smart and draw a bunch of pictures, you'll have yourself an old-school graphical adventure game. Why is my system better than a proprietary system written in C or C++? Because this one plays on Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win 2000, Win XP, Win CE, Linux, Mac, and possibly even Amiga. How? Because AltSci HTML RPG is written entirely in HTML. All anyone needs is a browser and an internet connection, floppy disk, or CD-ROM. It's super-lightweight, very robust, very extensible (video, audio, CSS, and javascript), and super-cool. One unintended feature is one-way doors. The walls only work on the cell itself, so if there is a wall made by an adjacent cell that blocks your path, it doesn't effect you. That means that there can be pits of death, deadly decisions, and secret pathways.
