The Almighty Doer of Stuff

Quoted for emphasis.

So my shirt shop is officially going dormant. While this thread is here though, who knows ornithology? Try to identify the birds! Some of them are based on specific species and some are not, but they're all based on real-world birds. I hope they're at least recognizable as birds, even if they're not identifiable for what birds they're based on. Zoomed in 3x for visibility. Answers, left to right, from top row down:

I exclusively use print on demand shops - Zazzle for pinback buttons and Galloree for everything else. My mom bought a shirt a couple weeks ago. Otherwise literally nothing has sold for over a year, and even then it wasn't more than about three customers. (Except one hipstery recently-legal-to-burn plant design sold three copies on the Spreadshirt marketplace before I switched to Galloree. It frustrated me because I have no interest in the subject matter but it was the only one selling.) Some of these, especially the very low-res ones, may fit well enough in a a computer game I'll hopefully be making in the future with a friend. If the game sells, THEN attachments to elements of it might form and people might want to buy some of it. I can even group all the gameish things together on a page and have the other stuff still available once people are drawn in by the game merch, and even if now hopefully I'll be making enough money from the game and merch that I won't need it.

Sylae, is there any chance you'll become active in the development team again? You seem like you're still at least somewhat enthusiastic about the project.

Oh, so you'd have to download the trilogy from the official site under the freeware license as usual, and BoE doesn't actually convert it into a scenario but just plays the original program like it was a scenario once you plug it in? Interesting idea. Does the Exile Trilogy's license allow for that?

If we don't lock the 9x9 tile interface for legacy scenarios, it breaks the visual styling of those scenarios, which assume a 9x9 tile terrain view.

I think the second link doesn't really make sense for Wonder Woman, who is supposed to be agile and athletic. Shot putting is athletic, I mean, but it's a different kind of athletic. Wonder Woman engages in extended, fast-paced bouts of melee combat. On the other hand she's a superhero so I suppose physics go out the window, but there's still the need for suspension of disbelief, I think. I saw a sumo wrestler attempting to do MMA once. He was huge and super strong, as most sumo wrestlers are, but he still got his behind kicked because he couldn't move quickly or make sharp turns. There's no reason Wonder Woman can't be very muscular, or black, though, or not "conventionally" cute.

We have no plans to combine BoE with Exile 3. Although the Exile Trilogy are now freeware, they have not been released under a Free license and therefore it would be illegal to do so. As for Exile 3 itself, there are ways to run it using things like virtual machines or DOSBox or something, although it may not work perfectly or at all; see the Exile Trilogy forum for details.

I've thought idly about that, but it might be good, actually. Lock the player in the classic interface, or possibly one more moderately modified than what I did here, for legacy scenarios, and offer a full-screen terrain view option like in newer games, for new-format scenarios. If that's what you mean.

I'm not sure the folks at Marvel are SJWs. I suspect most SJWs were just as puzzled by the Thor move as anyone else. (I say this as an intersectionalist feminist, a.k.a. a SJW, myself.)

Thanks for the feedback, Triumph and Sylae, although there are more options than just the pineapple...

The chainmail bikini lady is a pair for the fur bikini dude, for barbarian-type characters, I presume. FWIW the chainmail bikini lady is ripped, which tempers the just-for-sex-appeal factor for the character. I suspect she'd intimidate many weaker men.

Well yeah, definitely. I neglected to mention that, sorry. The idea from the beginning was to have a toggle in Preferences to use either the classic multi-window interface, or a zoomed-in and/or rearranged alternative. Classic interface is going nowhere as long as CM is in charge, and I agree there's no reason to ditch it, especially if for some reason someone is using a really tiny monitor, like a tablet attached to a keyboard, or maybe just wants other things visible on screen simultaneously.

I'm telling you, it's blurred. The pixels are not crisp which could play heck with designer's custom graphics, even if they look okayish with the default graphics. Also, at least at the moment, CM can't figure out how to 2x zoom the graphics, much less apply an interpolation. Not that current programming limitations are the long-term issue, mind you, but we talk about maintaining the designer's vision with one corner of our mouths and then try to find some way to contort small-res, carefully-planned pixel graphics in ways they're not supposed to go with the other.

It's blurry when you do that. What it's doing is taking two pixels, separating them, and putting half of each in the middle pixel; that is, if it's not blurring it even more than that. EDIT: By which I mean, if you have a red pixel and a blue pixel next to each other, a smoothing algorithm will put a purple one in between them, for example.

I've added the answers to the first post in a spoiler tag. I forgot I could do that.

Indeed. *facepalm* I don't remember what it was before so I just picked a different one. I've more or less given up on my shirt business for the time being, anyway. Marketing is too stressful, which is why I have done so little of it, and therefore my business being a non-starter. But it may be not starting because I haven't put gas or the key in it, rather than the engine being dead. I don't know right now. If nobody recognizes my art or likes it, that'd explain it being a nonstarter, but few people want to be honest. They'd rather see a friend struggle endlessly with something pointless than hurt his feelings. People here I'm hoping will be more up-front. I've more recently been hired by a friend to make sprites for her computer game she's designing, so I'm trying to focus on that unless there's some big revelation about my shirt shop. It's tough making animated humans, but I can learn.

Triumph, 11 is the same as 6, yes. I accidentally saved it over another. Hold on, I'll fix it. EDIT: fixed. Slarty, that's the thing to do of course, but I've been doing this for over two years with maybe four or five customers, one of whom was my mother. I'm trying to separate out the different parts of the puzzle so I can isolate problems.

Smoothing algorithms will dramatically alter the appearance of the game and how scenarios look compared to how their designers envisioned them. It would appear blurry. There are no algorithms in existence that will stretch two pixels into three without looking awful in one way or another.

Everyone, could you do me a favor, please, and be honest? I have a series of 11 works of pixel art here, zoomed in to about 1000x1000 pixels. If you view them full-size, can you identify what they depict without being told or zooming them out? If you can identify them, what do you see them as, and how difficult was it to see it? This is approximately how I present them on T-shirts I attempt (and fail) to sell, and I am trying to figure out why. I figure Spidweb is about as close to my target market as I'll ever get, so if nobody gets it, I'll know what the issue is. http://almightywebsite.com/misc/picturesurvey.php Thanks for helping! EDIT: Here are the answers:

http://www.OpenBoE.com/ados/badstretch.png This is 1.5x. Every other pixel is doubled.

You can't make it 1.5x. It's impossible. I made it 2x and everyone said no. What am I supposed to do?

http://www.OpenBoE.com/linkfile/GUI04.png From Slarty's suggestion. Important question though: Has any scenario ever relied on the player being able to see the map, terrain view, area description, text area, or action buttons, at the same time as reading a dialog box? If not, it could fit comfortably in that area and there'd be no need to have extra windows popping up.

I've seen many complaints that the game was too small to see, and that it swims in larger monitors. That's why I've been trying to double it: People have been asking for it. I love zoomed-in pixel graphics, and I am not the only one; they are becoming popular in games lately, from what I've heard. Of course, if I'm mistaken, it'd probably explain why my for-profit shop isn't making me any money. Maybe it's just because I've been editing BoE graphics since the late 90's and only I am able to see what a zoomed-in picture is without any trouble...

I think this is all I've got in me. http://www.OpenBoE.com/linkfile/GUI03.png