Entry: 72

This question might seem sound stupid to some of you Photoshop Pros, but I have a little problem, which I never thought could be a problem, just to find out that there would not be a quick and simple answer as I would have expected. ..

I already hear the first shouts of "Stop talking in riddles and ask your god d*$m question already!" so I will get straight to the point.

I would like to use a brush... one that does not automatically anti-aliases, one that does not use varying intensities based on "pressure" and all that fancy stuff. NO, a brush that lets me set ONE pixel (or may be even 4 (2x2) and so on and so fourth) ... in the color that I picked and maybe the opacity that I selected, if I don't want to apply the selected color to a 100% strength.

Illustration of my Problem


[link]

I have not found a way. I tried to create a brush myself, but they all kept setting pixels around the pixel that I set for anti-aliasing. I pump into this issue frequently, curse for a second, press CTRL-A (Select All) and then Shift-CTRL-C (Copy Merged) to paste the visible layers as a flat image into a plain and simple paint program... do my "precision pixeling" and then copy and paste the results as a new layer back into Photoshop. Not very efficient... not to mention that you effectively do a "flatten image" at that stage of your creation process, which becomes almost like a "no turning back point" ... that sucks, if you reach a point where you would like to turn back, but cannot, at least not without redoing a lot of stuff that you shouldn't have to redo, if I just could have do the pixeling within Photoshop (on a separate layer for example).

A tip how to do it would be appreciated... A link to a brush that does it also works. It would be a nice Christmas present. This issues haunts me for way too long already and I have not found anything on the web.. Well, It's a very ambiguous question to ask a stupid computer application like Google, so I decided now to ask humans .

Thanks a lot and Happy Hollidays!

Roy[SAC] .oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog

Entry: 71

I finally did it! It just took me 3+ years or so. All SAC art pack releases can now be enjoyed by anybody who is interested in it directly from the web browser, no special plug-ins other than Flash are required. I had to convert everything into web compatible formats to make this possible.



For all of you who hate reading, check out the video that I created to show off the new stuff. You can find the video embed in this blog post of mine about the release.

The SAC homepage was up for a long time already and had a little bit of art content but SAC members produced several thousand pieces of ANSI, ASCII, VGA, Tracker Music and Intro artwork. The intros can be enjoyed as video capture. All tracker tunes were converted to MP3s and can be listened to via a single click on a "play" button next to each tune. The ANSIs were converted to images and ASCIIs are available in two different formats, 1) the image snapshot version (like the ANSIs) and also the Unicode text version of it as well.


- Browse by Artist
- Browse by Pack File

or browse the SAC Packs Overview Page and from there any of the pack release files as you go.

I created earlier already pages for the crack intros that SAC created for various scene groups, bulletin board systems or scene events. That means that those things are kind of duplications, but then. The special intro listings have features that I could not integrate into the SAC pack browser yet, goodies like download links to used resources, like the original MOD tune or Logo graphics. I also show not just the coders credits but full credits instead, e.g. the work of the graphicians and musicians. In those special intros pages are you also able to find productions that did not make it into a SAC art pack for any reason.

Cheers!

Roy[SAC] .oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog

Entry: 70

It has been about two months since my last post, which is by coincidence the announcement of the release of my Scene Logos Collection Volume 1.

I just released Volume 2 of the collection, because I added tons of new logos to it within the past weeks. You can find the download links and more information about the release at my personal blog here.

The collection has a whopping 9,000+ logos from the various popular computer platforms, such as the PC, Commodore Amiga, C64 and Atari ST. The collection is about 300 MB in size. My latest deviation is actually a collage of scene logos that I created for that release blog post.



I also released Volume 1 of the Pixel Art Collection by Artist, which contains many full screen pics by artists from the PC and Amiga for the most part. This collection contains over 5,000 pieces of pixel art created by over 350 different artists and is almost 600 MB in size.

It contains images from legendary artists such as: Acryl, Alien, Angeldawn, Antony, Archmage, Asphyx0r, BenJ, Boo, Bridgeclaw, Cougar, Critikill, Cyclone, Danny, Desktop, Dream Design, Facet, FadeOne, Fairfax, Flood, GfxTwins, Haplo, Hof, Inferno, J.O.E., JCS, Joachim, Kenet, Lazur, Lord MX, Louie, Mack, Made, Mantraz, Mermaid, Norm, Orome, Peachy, Pixel, Prowler, R.W.O., RA, Reward, Rodney, Saffron, Suny, Tenshu, Typhoon, Unreal Hu, Visualice, Wade, Walt, Ward, X-Man, Zaac, Zebig and Zone.

Again, you can download this Pixel Art Collections here.

Some of them even have a deviantART account. Guess who? (Tip: checking who I am watching might help a little with that hehe).

Roy[SAC] .oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog

Entry: 69

Good news for collectors like me who are interested in pixel art from the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and PC scene.

I packed my collections of scene pixel art logos, over 6,000 images for over 1,500 groups, bulletin board systems, demos, intros etc. and also my pixel art font sets collection of over 600 font sets from the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and PC into TWO large files and made them available for other collectors for download.

I packaged them like an official release, with NFO file, file_id.diz and even created an intro for them as well. If you happen to run a BBS or FTP server or use any of them for swapping, feel free to download the collections and spread them around. The logos collection is over 160 MB in size and the font sets collection about 37 MB. Easy Credits

You can find the download links, more information and a video capture of my intro for the collections at my personal blog. So check it out!

Cheers!

Roy[SAC] .oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog

Entry: 68

I saw Patgroove's journal post about the never ending problem of submissions to the wrong categories by fellow deviant's. He believes that the name of the categories are the issue and suggests the renaming of them. You can see some of the suggested titles for a combined ASCII and ANSI art category here.

I don't think that the renaming of the categories will do much good to improve on the problem. I just took the time to have a closer look at the current process of selecting the category for your deviation and tried to put myself into the shoes of a newbie, who is not familar with dA very much.

I show my findings in two illustrations with screenshots of the current process and comments added to them. see:

.oOo. and .oOo.

I try to illustrate how the category selection for deviations at dA could be improved to make it easier for people to find the right category and avoid the submission to wrong categories.

The current "Gallery Info" button only appears at the final submission category, which can be several levels down the category tree. The user who navigates the tree has no clue, if he already selected the wrong parent or even root category, because there is no information or guidance available to him.

Furthermore, the button at the bottom left on the screen is easy to overlook. I never noticed it myself and only "found it" when I was browing the category selection to see if there is anything more than just the name of the categories available in the process.

My Suggestion

The category browser should show the short description of each category that the user select, right then and on the same page, for example in the lower part of the category selection window (as shown in my illustration)

It is hard to miss and the user is able to see that he already selected the right or wrong top level categories before he navigates further down and there maybe finds a root category that sounds correct again. Also, the "Category Info" page does not reflect the actually hierarchy that the user is browsing. I am illustrate that fact graphically in my first (larger) illustration image.


Tweaking the name might also help, but I think that my suggestion in combination with well formulated short description for each category would help improving on the issue much more.

Here are for example my suggestions for the short description of the categories "Text Art", "ANSI" and "ASCII".

Text Art
Current Description:

Text art is imagery in which type either stands out on its own or relays a message through its visual appearance.

My Suggestion: Text Art is the creation of visual images made of text characters (such as letters and numbers) where the meaning of the letters is irrelevant and reduced to a tool or method, like the brush-stroke of a painter.

ANSI Art
Current Description:

ANSI art images created using an extension of ASCII art in which art is created by block and line art.

My Suggestion: ANSI Art is specific ASCII text art created in MS DOS on a PC, making use of the DOS extended character set and control sets of the archaic ANSI.SYS driver, which was depreciated with Windows 2000 and later OS versions.

ASCII Art
Current Description:

ASCII art images created using the 95 ASCII (out of 128) characters found on standard computer keyboards.

My Suggestion: ASCII art images created using the 95 ASCII (out of 128) characters found on standard computer keyboards and/or the MS DOS extended character set. The characters meaning is irrelevant, they are simply the means to create a visual image of some kind.

Now I will try to figure out how I can send my suggestion to the dA staff via the help desk. What are your thoughts and oppinions to my recommendation?

---

Now to another issue, that I just stumbled across because of this news article [link] about the lack of respect and community and the issue of trolls that seems to be increasing more and more. I have a suggestion for that as well

Trolls and trouble makers are hard to detect by any technical and automated system. Unlike mass spammers are trolls much less active, but more targeted and specific than a blatant spammer who just wants to self-promote himself.

The only weapon against those fellas is the community as a whole. Other social networks have the same problem and deal with it in different ways. One approach that seems to be highly successful is the ability for any member of the community to flag any content created by another member as inappropriate. In the case of dA would it be the deviations, the journal posts, forum posts, news articles and most importantly ANY COMMENTS made by another deviant ANYWHERE on the site.

A troll will become exposed quickly, if his comments (mostly) will be flagged as inappropriate by multiple deviants and not just the deviant the comment was directed to. If somebody writes a bad comment at somebody Else's deviation for example and I see that, I should have the option to "flag" that comment.

dA will need to figure out the threshold of "inappropriate" flags (frequency, from how many deviants, flagged vs. not flagged items ratio etc.) at which point a users behavior should be manually reviewed and decided, if the termination of that user account might be in the interest of the community as a whole. One "flag" or one comment should not be sufficient to trigger a review. This is going to happen to any deviant one day or another, without being a troll.

Enough of this. This post is alreadt way too long hehe.

Roy[SAC] .oOo. ASCII & ANSI Text Art .oOo.Blog