AdmiralFishface

Card submitted, Mad. Ramoth, now that the card is online, I see it's been wrongly credited to be mine. I suppose that's automatically done because I submitted it. Hope that doesn't bother you too much. @Evaders: Can that be corrected? EDIT: In a less grumpy mood today, so I changed my mind. If anyone experiences further trouble with uploading, feel free to send your cards and previews to the address supplied on the previous page. Be sure to include the Encyclopedia text in the mail, please.

Fine. But that's the last one I'll take care of...

Submitted to Expanded Universe section. No trouble encountered.

Agreed. Mail to riesstiuiv @ yahoo.de

Here it is... What I'm working with: Adobe ImageReady 7.0. I've been working with 3.0 until a month ago, differences are not too great. I can't give specific info for other programs, sorry. The basics: Umm, I'm gonna have a hard time explaining that, I find it difficult to effectively explain stuff I'm well aquaintained with and use without thinking about it. So, I'll keep this short. ImageReady allows us to generate animated gifs (as well as quicktime animations and some other stuff) from a multi-layered picture. Most of the time (and when an animation is imported into IR), one layer equals one frame. Layers can be used to much greater effect, though. More on that later. The process of creating a simple animation is easy: Open a new document, paint or paste something into the canvas, and use more and more layers to alter the pic into a sequence that will give you an animation. For a multi-layered pic, use the Make Frames From Layers option in the drop-down menu in the Animation Window. Well, since a picture says more than a thousand words (and several pictures even more so) I'll create an animated pic in a short tutorial now. Step One: Find your source material You could paint everything yourself, but for the sake of simplicity (and, ultimately, sanity), we'll be using material from existing pics. Google is your friend. Be sure to have a clear picture of what you're going to do so you can choose accordingly (me, I have no idea right now, so I'll make something not quite imaginative). I chose a screenshot from TIE Fighter, a toaster, a jawa, and a hastily done starfield. Now, the boring stuff. For the toaster and Jawas we can simply select and delete the background with the rectangle selection and magic wand tools. The TIE Screen is going to be more trouble. I like to use the eraser to get rid of everything but the cockpit, but the lasso or polygon selectors will work just as well. Paste the cockpit over the starfield. This is the part that will stay the same during the animation. Step Two: Flying Toasters and other Magic Tricks (The Tween Tool) Resize and paste the toaster to a starting position (perhaps outside the canvas) over the starfield but below the cockpit. Make a new frame and move the toaster in the middle of the screen. Note that in the first frame it retains its position. Now choose Tween from the Animation Dropdown, select Tween with Previous Frame and an approriate number of frames; I took 6. The program now interpolates the position of the toaster layer in each frame, creating a fluid animation. Make another frame. Set the layer opacity of the toaster to zero. Tween with 1 frame, and voilá, the Toaster disappears. as soon as it's in the TIE's crosshair. Read Step 4-6 for how to blow it up in a simple way. Step Three: Jawas in Space Make two new frames (one will be for an empty starfield between the toaster and the jawa) and paste the Jawa in the latter. (NOTE: It'll now appear in all earlier frames, so make him invisible in those.) I want this Jawa to revolve slowly in space. Which is tricky, because for rotation, the program resamples the image, which makes Tweening impossible. We're going to do it anyway. Do the same stuff we did to the toaster. Make the starfield and Cockpit layer invisible for these frames. Now paste the Jawa again. Several times. One for each Frame. Move them all to the position of the one-layer-tweenes Jawa in the corresponding frame. You should have a lot of Jawas in a lot of wron positions now. Make all the useless ones invisible, so that the newly-made layers create an animation similar to the Tweened one. Now we proceed to rotate each layer. Rotate the first one by 10°, the second one by 20, and so on. The result could look a bit like this... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v436/RiesstiuIV/movement.gif Step Four: Flashies! That's the artsy part. Make a new layer. Give it a Hard light Blending Mode (NOTE: For all Frames - Blending mode isn't taken to other frames automatically, either), and fill it with Orange. Make it invisible in all but the frames where the Toaster and Jawa are faded out. Make the Orange fade by reducing the opacity over time (or tween some more). NOTE: This is your time to decide whether the orange filled layer is over or under the cockpit. Each give its own effect and can be used to your preference. Make another layer, fill it green, do the same stuff, but make it visible for only one or two frames before the orange becomes visible. That'll be our flash of light for the blaster cannons. Step Five: Blasters Away! Now for the blaster bolts themselves. On a separate layer, make two simple lines symbolizing the path of the blaster bolts. This is just there to help you for the next steps, disable or delete the layer after you're done. Along these lines, and on a separate layer, use the line tool for two thick short green lines. Give them a (Filters - Gaussian Blur - 1 or 2 px], and paint a thinner line in a brighter green inside. Hard Light or Screen Blending mode work well. Make it visible on one frame. Do the same for later frames; until it looks like the laser bols we want (NOTE: Imperial Lasers tend to have a bright yellow core) Two or three frames of laser animation will do. Step Six: A bit of Explosion I have some full explosion animations somewhere, but I'm too lazy, so the explosions will be nothing but a bright ball of light. Make a new Layer, grab a BIG paintbrush with a yellow or orange color, click in the middle of the pic. Give the layer a nice blending mode, fade the effect as you please; done. NOTE that pics created like this tend to have large file sizes; I resized the final pic to stay within Photobucket's requirement of 250 KB; Removing the Flashy effects, which enlarge the color palette of the gif somewhat, helps a lot there. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v436/RiesstiuIV/complete.gif That's all for today; maybe I'll come back later; maybe I'll even dress this post in more pics...

Mad: Was a bit shorter than I expected, but well done. I suppose it's planned as one scene of a longer animation? Jahled: Want to know any specific stuff or should I make a general Fishface's Animation Tutorials thread?

Red Hot Chili Peppers - On Mercury

But then again, he's the one with the pink lightsaber. A Goodie! And thanks for all the kind words... What I did was really not hard to achieve. I can fill you in on all my secret PS techniques, if you want...

I just uploaded a card; didn't get any kind of error message.

Did you include a -what was it? 200x100?- jpeg file for the preview pic? Whee, my new cards are online! Thanks, Evaders! EDIT: Pity I didn't bother to check them for blue-aura-errors before uploading... *slams head on keyboard*

Don't mind if I do. Hope you don't mind the added line, either. If that second trooper had binoculars, it'd be perfect. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v436/RiesstiuIV/nosequals1pt1a.gif

Yeah, this is a problem that has arisen sometime last year, and hasn't been fixed since then, it seems. I think I've been one of the last people who submitted cards successfully (and the last bunch, if I remember correctly and did really send them, never made it online). Keep annoying someone about it.

Whoa Yeah. I loved GTA2 and Alpha Centauri. Gotta bookmark this... EDIT: Does AC by any chance offer multiplayer?

Yah, I agree there's not much to do; I prefer this over online games where you'd have to be online every five minutes or you'd get stomped by the resident bullies, though. If there's similar games out there, I'd like to try them too. Got Links, anyone?

Me. Hey, we could start an SWR region!

Congratulations! And what's better to celebrate this with than a custom-made WOO! ? http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v436/RiesstiuIV/Krempel/3000Woo.gif

Haha, very cool, kaja, I was just listening to the Boss Battle music of Sonic II a minute ago...!

King For A Day by Jamiroquai followed by Endgame by R.E.M.

Nickname: AdmiralFishface Biggest Problems With SW Reb: Low moddability, ancient graphics (I don't care about 3D, just kill the darn color palettes!) Features You Liked the Most About SW Reb: The character and mission system, the overall scale of the game. Features In Other Games You Want Included: A trade system, more controllable research (as in Civ, MoO, Alpha Centauri, and all those) Other Must Have Features: Third party factions, better AI of system governments (them building garrisons, ships, defenses, better interaction with player (or any at all) A diplomacy system that goes beyond 'send character on mission' A unit experience system Maybe a unit morale system Assigning characters to fighter squadrons, troops, specific ships, production facilities Nothing we haven't heard before in this forum...

mawshiye: Glad I could help. No problem not knowing that stuff, though, I didn't understand or know all of it until i got it explained in the first year of university physics lectures last year. And, to be honest, it's not the kind of everyday physics you really need to know (though it's interesting for sure). Mad: Interesting thought. I'm not really sure if mass increase would matter much, because you'd have to view the events from the pilot's point of view. From his point of view, he's not moving at all (let's say he doesn't accelerate, either). So his mass increase (if I remember correctly) is not noticable to him, only to observers. As it is with our current airplanes - it only matters how sharp your turn is. (To survive, you'd probably have to fly arcs the size of solar systems . I'd go and calculate, but I'm lazy)

Umm... Have a crash-course in relativistic physics. (Warning: Long post ahead) Travelling near the speed of light is not a problem at all, theoretically. Of course, we need particle accelerators of a few kilometers across, but it's really possible. As for the speed of light itself... Well, it all comes down to mass. Mass is the deciding factor here. The mass of a particle or object increases when the object is moving. (Yes, that is 'moving in relation to something. I'll cover that.) Now, for normal speeds, up to several tens of thousands of km/h the increase in mass is negligible. When approaching light speed however, the mass of an object tends to increase dramatically. As in: It becomes infinite for the speed of light. See, that's the problem. say you're applying a force F of a certain strength to an object, accelerating it constantly. F equals acceleration a * mass m. Meaning, if the mass increases (as is proven that it does) and F remains the same, the acceleration will have to decrease. Or, in other words, to maintain the same acceleration, you'd also have to increase F towards infinity. To achieve lightspeed, you need infinite amounts of energy. Now how about light? Why can it move at c while we can't? Isn't that unfair? Not really, because photons have no mass. It's that easy. No mass to accelerate, no problems reaching speed of light. Actually, light can't even move slower than the famous speed of light. Nor faster. It can only move at one speed. To have anything move faster than light, it'd have to have negative mass. Those babys would be the famous Tachyons. They, unfortunately, have not been proven to exist yet. That's the part of relativistic physics I especially like. Nope, you're wrong. In fact, the Theory of Relativiy says the exact opposite of what you said. Light always moves at the same speed. Always. No matter where you are or how fast you move. c is a constant at all times. Enter: time dilatation. (is that the word? my scientific english isn't that great.) Say you're cruising the galaxy in your starship at half the speed of light, while out there someone's measuring the speed of light from your ship from another perspective. Now you turn on your headlights. What does the other guy see? Well, from his point of view, he's not moving, while you are, at 0.5c. And you send a beam of light that moves at exactly the same speed as ever, the speed of light. What do you see? Well, from your point of view, you're not moving, the rest of the universe is . And you fire a beam of light that moves at exactly the same speed as ever, the speed of light. How is that possible? Why didn't the light move at 1.5c and if it didn't, why didn't anyone in the space ship notice? Put simply, you're being slowed down by your speed. Sound confusing? But that's the way it is. The faster you move, the slower does time pass for you and everything around you moving at the same speed. If the observer asked you how long your flight was, and compared the results with his own, you'd see your figure is a lot lower. You wouldn't notice if it weren't for the guy out there to tell you your watch is way off, because it moved slower thanit should for quite some time. Because you were slowed down, you didn't notice the light emitted by you was slower in relation to you. That's what the theory of relativity (the general one, I think) said. That time is relative, depending on movement relative to some observer. Lightspeed, however, is a constant, no matter how you look at it. It gets even more pretty. When approaching lightspeed, apart from becoming infinitely heavy, you also get slowed down infinitely. Were you moving at the speed of light, time would not pass for you at all (while moving faster would mean you'd travel back in time, causing some ugly paradox situations connected with causality). That's why light moves at exactly that speed. Light is known to take, out of an infinite amount of possibilities for movement, the fastest one. Light speed is simply the speed at which, from the point of view of the photon, no time passes at all. Any other speed would require time to pass, and would hence not be the fastest. Relativity is just so beautiful. So, couple of nice thoughts there, but unfortunately not quite correct. Feel free to continue the discussion.

Yes, but the technology has already been used to send data on a line that is 100% secure. Very interesting links here. (Austrian scientists - a bit of patriotism won't hurt, hm?)

That teleportation thing is interesting - just what was teleported is not that easy to answer. Via quantum teleportation methods, the electronic quantum state of a given particle can be transferred to another particle of the same kind, which takes the information of the original, which loses its 'identity'. So, while matter wasn't relocated from one place to another, information was. The new particle, in posession of all the properties of the original now, 'is' the original now. Indeed in 2004, objects as complex as calcium and beryllium ions were teleported. It is estimated that within some years, something as large as a molecule will be able to be treated that way. Read this article for more detailed info.

Because it wouldn't risk sending him to a blockaded planet?

So far, though, all experiments and mathematical approaches are supporting the theory of "nothing can go faster than light". You're right, though. Maybe new theories will prove something else. That's why I put "As far as we know" at the beginning.