=juzmental

So I finally released a build of Bleach for Trillian Astra. It's a beta version, so there will be bugs - but it's been ages since I did a real release.

Hope people like it!

Old Skool Gallery: [link]

My apologies for the sudden surge of images from me, and not my usual type of deviation at that.. So if you're looking for a Trillian skin or wallpaper, this isn't the update you're looking for!

For the past 20 or so years, I've always been careful to copy off some of my original art work from my early Amiga days. It doesn't matter if I've not used it, but I've always had a "Graphics" directory on my HDD and always had a "My Old Pix" dir..

I've always kept them easily accessible as they're a good nudge in the artistic direction that I sometimes get bored with. So when I've hit an artistic rut or just can't get the inspiration I need, I tend to load up this directory and go through all my old pics. There's a lot of memories surrounding a lot of these pics, and as time goes on, a lot of those memories are fading unfortunately.

When I started making these images I would have been in year 8 at school. I would have been with my girlfriend at the time for only a short time. I would have been right into the Demo scene on the amiga and enjoyed trading software with people around the world, all via snail mail! I still remember the excitement of jumping in my parents car in the afternoon after school to find a big parcel with a stack of 3.5" disks had arrived from Germany!

How things have changed since then. Back then, I was using (IMHO the best art app around) Deluxe Paint. Originally DPaint2 on my Amiga 500, but I moved through all the versions up until Dpaint4 on my Amiga 1200..

I remember getting my Amiga 500 way back when, as a friend of mine had just gotten an Amiga 1000... I had previously been using a Commodore 64, followed by a Commodore 128..

I still remember playing Starglider on my Amiga, and Defender of the Crown - those games just blew me away!

So yeah, all these images that I've uploaded are around 20 years old (believe it or not). They were all created during my Amiga times (86-96ish) using Deluxe Paint.

Back then I didn't have a scanner or a camera so all these images were created pixel by pixel in what has now been dubbed "pixelart" style.

I never thought I'd see the day when I'm going through my artworks and they're all digital! I wonder if any digital arts will be classed as "Classics" in the way that the Mona Lisa is, or anything like that?

If someone makes a cool image on their PC, and then prints it out and signs it, will that picture be taken along to an Antique Roadshow type show in 150 years?;

"oh yes, this is a classic juzmental image from the 1986-1990 period I do believe.. And, if I do detect my inks correctly, that's been printed on his very own HP printer at the time.. if you look closely at the lower right ink blotches, you can see a typical blurring that was in place in all of his works....I think you should be insuring this for about the cost of that frame - $12.50" lol

Bleach
for Trillian Astra


I've started working on my skin Bleach again. I started this a while back in unison while I was working on Aikon4. I found I was enjoying the development on Bleach more, so kept at it and used it as a learning experience so I could do a better job with Aikon4.

This skin is about 98% complete for all features that are currently in the alpha version of Astra. When audio/video features are re-added to Astra again, that will drop me back to the 90-95% mark.

The skin features a selection of themes, with the one shown in the screen shot being the Vista Glass theme which makes use of the glass feature in Vista (for the blurred effect). WinXP users won't get that effect.

The main functionality thing I need to fix at the moment is just the file transfer window - once that is fixed I will release a public alpha here on DA, although you can download it already from here.

After seeing and using many many many skins that are super shiny with super efficient layouts I decided I would make a skin that throws all these ideas out the window, and make a fun skin instead.

I'm one of the 9million+ WoW addicts out there, so decided a WoW themed skin would be cool. More specifically a Horde themed skin (Horde FTW!).

So during one of my days at work I started playing around with sketches of what I thought a Horde instant messenger would look like..

After a few versions inbetween serving customers, I came up with a sketch I didn't mind.. So I ended up refining it a bit..

Here's the initial sketch, and the refined version:



You gotta remember these are on the back of business cards and are done in a blue ballpoint pen.. lol.. High tech sketchery!

So I stuck these sketches in my pocket and kinda forgot about them for a day or 2, and then decided last night that I would get this into a working design - something I could put into action as a real skin.

The first thing I had to do was to get myself a decent wood/timber look though. I googled timber and wood etc, trying to find a decent looking chunk of wood, but nothing was particularly decent. So I decided to go snapshotting all throughout WoW, and I ended up making a decent wood texture from a few different ingame object screenshots (doors, crates, barrels)...

So today (my day off) while my daughter was asleep, I started to construct a real version of the skin. It's still missing little detailed parts and might not quite "work" (tiled resizing and/or stretch) but once I have the "real" version of the skin, I can then refine it so it can be skinned.

Here's the results so far:



I'm going to try and keep a running diary of this - it might interest some people as it will cover the process I use when skinning Trillian. The actual design phase takes a chunk of time, but the actual coding time is about 95% of the actual development time!.. Unless, of course, I make use of the new Astra feature "Custom Windows" and make just the main contact window... We'll see...



Next phase of development - added the area down the bottom where the user's avatar would be.. also a subsphere for where the connection status is showing..

Started fiddling with fonts for the list area, and added some other minor details - like nails etc... Most time was spent on the avatar surround.. A blood stained (or is it blood red glowing) elite dragon ring thing (almost)..

I'm currently working on the next phase of the skin, which is breaking it down into skinnable layers. The reason for doing this is that some things will tile or stretch without a problem, whereas some other things won't. So for instance, to make the skin work better, the angled pieces of wood on the bottom corners will be an extra layer on top of the rest, that way I don't need to allow for their size in working out the background slicing.

Layers I know I will need:

The main back layer (with all the main wood bits)
The corner bits of wood
The list area banner
and the avatar sphere thing.

By layering all these it will allow me to place object underneath other things, adding to the actual look and feel of the skin... Next screenshot should be of a working skin... rough - but working..

And here it is:



Needs polishing (obviously) but it's working...

Some details of the conversion to a working skin. I had to separate the top piece of timber from the main body of the back layer as the placing of the slice lines (where it resizes) didn't work well for both pieces if they were all one big chunk. By separating the top from the main timber parts, I was able to make it's own resizing area which looks a lot nicer.

The actual location of the slices isn't as tidy as I would normally like, but I had the advantage of knowing I was going to be overlaying the red banner over the top of most of it, so it covers over the bad tiling.

One thing I forgot I would have to do was when adding the avatar globe/dragon thing is center it. When I first placed it there I had fixed coordinates in place, so that when you resized the message window it would stretch the avatar thing all out of shape.. Oops. So a bit of skinxml maths was needed! Basically to find the left coordinate for the object we needed to get the width of the window, minus the width of the avatar object from it, and then divide that by 2. A simple way to calculate the right hand coordinate is just to use that exact same formula, and then add the width of the avatar object to it.. Pretty simple really, and it doesn't get messed up with any numbers being rounded up or down causing your coordinates to be out by one pixel.

So assuming my avatar object was 152 wide:
left coord = (%window.width%-152)/2)
right coord= ((%window.width%-152)/2)+152)

The end result was perfect (yay!) and the avatar thing (I really need a technical name for it!) was placed perfectly.

Next step I had to cut a hole in the avatar frame (but keeping the orbs shine) so I could place the users avatar behind the frame. You can see in the last screenshot that my Astra avatar is inside the orb, and it has a glassy look (thanks to that shine).. I'm quite happy with how that turned out, with the only issue being that the angled pieces of timber appear in there as well if the window is resized too small.. I might place a plain background colour in there to cover them up (or I might limit the minimum size the window will shrink to horizontally)..

So the next step will be tidying things up. That will mean somehow adding the iconholder for connection icons (I really should have factored them into the design!) and adding your connection status to the mini sphere thingy on the avatar frame. It would also be cool to be able to set your away message on there somewhere.. I might look at making a few different "banners" that can be toggled on/off in the layout.. That should work..

One of the biggest needs is going to be a WoW Horde themed icon set, as the typical Trillian Orbs are just not going to match the whole look! Anyone feel the urge to make some icons?

I'll also need to do a Horde sound pack, which I started looking more into last night - I've managed to extract a bunch of speech, just can't find some of the standard sounds (like the auction noise, the whisper noise, etc)... Anyone know where they're hidden in the game?

Another day, another update - nothing to show just yet though. I managed to find all the standard sounds in the WoW files - the mpq viewer/extractor I was using seems to have been the problem. I found a different one and it managed to load the 3gb+ file where the sounds were.

So I quickly threw together a soundpack last night - I definitely need to refine it though, as a lot of the sounds I'm using would confuse the hell out of everyone if it was running while playing WoW. I think I need more speech, and less common noises. I'll stick to using some of the lesser heard sounds instead I think.

I also got the connection status orb thing working. It's the smaller circle near the avatar and it shows your current connection status. Connected, Partially Connected, Disconnected, Away, Invisible, etc.. So far I've only got the connected, partially and not connected icons done (using the wow server status icon from the official site). Looks pretty cool actually. I'll do the rest of the icons tonight (my WoW server's 48hr maintenance period should be finished finally!)...

Yeah so I go and start to update this occasionally and then realise that I really have nothing of any interest to anyone out there, and usually delete what I've written..

I've done that once already tonight.

I've actually uploaded a new image tonight, something I've not done in a while. The image I upped is actually part of my work that I am doing for Cerulean Studios. I've been contracted to them to do skins and widget stuff, and the console controllers are part of a widget that I have been working on.

I'm also working on writing a tutorial (or 3) on skinning Trillian. The next release of Trillian (Astra) has some extremely easy skinning options, so I've been writing a tutorial on things in the hope we can kick start the skinning scene for Trillian again soon. Check them out here: [link] - but remember these are still a work in progress and they tend to reference files that don't exist yet!

I discovered my brother shanus has a page on here. That's one of the reasons why I decided to update a bit! I don't know how to link a name to a page here, so just go to [link]

My wife and I bought a new house recently - we just moved in on Friday.. It's been hectic getting things set up again etc...

Hmmm, how do I make subtitles?

I've had a few requests to make the Nevermind/Bart Simpson/Rolling Stone magazine cover image a print. I'm not sure if I should, or would be allowed to do this though.. Here's why:



Firstly, I created this image, however it's based on an original image created by Matt Groening which is a spoof of the Nevermind album cover. It was created for Rolling Stone magazine (they did 4 different collector's covers from memory). I was just stupid enough to recreate the image using 3DS Max as I really wanted a wallpaper version of the image.. The upside of this is I can make a HUGE resolution image ideal for printing... But it's not my "own" creation.. It's my "own" re-creation... Hmmm...

Secondly, It's the Simpsons - it's a licensed item owned by Fox. I remember back in the days when I was running a South Park site laughing at all the Simpsons fan sites who got given Cease & Desist letters.. You can guarantee that if I made this available as a print, I'd get hit with a take down fairly quickly.

Third, I don't think DA would actually allow this to be made into a print anyway...

It's a pity reallly as I would love a full size poster version of the image. Is there any way to make a deviation a limited print (short of adding it, ordering a print, and then removing it?)...