An elf calls the deepest wood his own,
A human everywhere may roam,
But a dwarf just wants a house of stone.
—Old children’s rhyme in the North
That Sgt. Pepper taught the…no, wait.
So today marks the 7th anniversary of this blog, which now means that I’ve had a blog for just about the same length of time that I had a website of some sort before it, which is to say that I had webpages before this blog started up in 2003. I’ve been crudely hacking together HTML of one sort or another since 1997, when the web was a much wilder place, and I got infinitely more web provider spam than I do now. I’m going to talk about that for a little while, so bear with me.
As once more regards that most excellent Oblivion mod, AFK_Weye:
1. Because I am dumb, I forgot to note (here, anyway), that the public release of AFK_Weye turned a year old on February 27th. It’s garnered, over 4 versions and with a couple of patches, slightly over 10,000 downloads. Considering I never really expected it to be a hit outside of about 5 people who read this blog, I’m pretty happy with it, and I’m pretty proud of what’s been accomplished. It perhaps goes without saying that having thousands of people enjoy your work is a pretty good rush, never mind the ego boost and the affirmation that maybe you don’t suck after all.
2. With that said, as some of you know I’ve been working since November on what was supposed to be a patch to fix some bugs, but is now essentially a whole new version of the mod. It’s in alpha testing right now, and given the zillion other things on my plate it’s going to be a while, but there is a new version coming, and it will be big. Among other things it includes are:
- Dozens and dozens of bug fixes.
- Several new quests, at least two of which are fairly large.
- New ways to solve older quests.
- Reworked manor interior spaces with choices – don’t want the display cases? You don’t have to now.
- Fallout 3 style companion management for manor guards and others.
- Configurable automatic lighting in the manor – turn it on or off as you like, or have the maid do it for you.
Among, well, other things which I will leave you all to speculate about. In the meantime, I have screenshots.
New Verres Manor, now retextured in Imperial City style.
A dark and stormy village, crawling with undead carrying farm implements.
Purple Halls, now with 100% more lich.
Ancient Halls with toggleable lighting.
New manor sitting area, now with toggleable fireplace and lighting.
Not precisely how I had planned to break my latest long silence, but I sort of needed this for something, and it would be wise of me to remember how I did it. So.
Basically, I want to create these:
Which could be better, but aren’t bad for having started life as low-res book scans. For those of you not in my D&D game, those are house arms for noble families in Waterdeep. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them, but they’re shiny.
1. Open image
2. Layer/Transparency/Add Alpha Channel
3. Select exterior white area, delete
4. Move each color to new layer via selection
5. For each of the layers:
- Hide all other layers.
- Use the select by color tool to select the transparent area.
- Invert the selection with Select/Invert
- Delete the selected area. Should have a transparent outline now.
- Select a paint chip of the appropriate color. Paste it into the current layer using Edit/Paste Into.
- Move the chip around in the selection until it looks good, then anchor it. Try to give a little color variance.
- Repeat for all other layers.
6. Unhide all layers. Right click in the Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo box and Merge All Visible Layers.
7. Select the whole image using Select/None. Add blur with Filters/Blur/Blur. Add a drop shadow with Filters/Light and Shadow/Drop Shadow. Use the default settings.
8. Make sure the shield layer is selected. Use Filters/Light and Shadow/Lighting Effects to give the shield a lighted effect. Play with this, but a Type None Light 3 at distance 0.175 seems to work well. [edit] Actually, a Point Light 1 at distance .246 works better. It’s also worth messing with the material properties for effect. [/edit]
9. Merge visible layers. Save.
So, having finished up all of Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, I figure I ought to say something about the experience. This is going to ramble a little. Or a lot. Because I am me, and this is 15 seasons of television plus three movies I’m talking about. You have been warned.
Do click through for the large version.