Ramblings of Pathogen David

Why buying Adobe CS5 was the best thing I’ve done for Hooves of War

This week has been a really great week for Hooves of War, but more on it later.

Today I want to highlight a recent plunge I took that is only resulting in good things.

First off, I am a programmer, I am not an artist. That is why I write code for the game and my friend Tucker is making the art for the game! As an programmer, I like open source software a lot, I could rant about how I can change something if I don’t like it, but what it all really boils down to is that it is free after all. (Ok, I also like the community aspect a lot and being able to hack away if the need arises.)

As such, my image editing software of choice is GIMP (and Inkscape!) GIMP does everything I want it to, and is works pretty great! Sure its UI sucks, but breaking down user interfaces into patterns is one of my interests (and I am really good at it) so GIMP has never bothered me. I do wish though that the developers of GIMP weren’t so cocky and would just accept their UI is pretty people unfriendly though.

Anyway, I’m gonna avoid this turning into a FOSS rant or something. Now, for my work, I use Microsoft Visual Studio Professional (with Visual Assist X) for my code. Why? Because I do it a lot. I actually get a lot out of these tools that rivals like Eclipse and other open source IDE’s dream about. I have yet to find an IDE with auto-complete functionality that rival’s Intellisense (and when you throw Visual Assist X in there its not even a contest anymore.)

Similarly, Tucker isn’t making Hooves of War art in GIMP or Inkscape, he is using his industry standard Adobe Illustrator. Besides Illustrator being what he knows, Illustrator is also a more professional tool compared to Inkscape and has a much more diverse feature set. This barrier between us was created some pretty serious problems in our programmer <-> artist communication. I would either try to import an Illustrator file directly into Inkscape or have him send me an SVG export, but then I’d also always have to have him render it out so I could be sure it was coming up correctly in Inkscape. This created many issues, the primary ones being:

• If something was wrong with the level, it was hard for me to describe how to fix it.
• Inkscape’s AI importer is pretty great, but it does crash and mess up at times.
• Illustrator’s SVG export isn’t perfect either
• Inkscape has very poor handling of missing fonts, making it hard for me to figure out what fonts I was missing on my machine in contrast to Tucker’s.
• Describing to Tucker exactly how he should render parts of the level to make them suitable for the game engine was a nightmare.

So, how did we solve all these problems?

Me getting CS5 has completely eliminated all of those problems in the past week.

However, it had another unintended side effect! As a result of owning Illustrator I can now also write extensions and scripts for it! Already I have written a script to help automate the exporting of levels from Illustrator! The script was very easy to write and took pretty minimal effort to get going. (I’ve only tried to automate GIMP once, and I remember it being an unpleasant experience.) The script’s current output for the above level can be seen in-part below:

So what does it do/how does it work? The basic gist of it in its current state is that it exports every top-level group in every layer as a PNG, but why not see for yourself?

Since these scripts have been useful to me, I figured that maybe someone else could use them (or learn from them!) Basically, why keep them internal for pretty much no reason?

Anyway, here they are, hosted on Bitbucket!

Anyway, that’s all for today! Happy Friday, everyone!

Data

I got super philosophical and realized just how amazing it is that we live in an era where artists can be given the tools to create data which is rendered into more data that is a long series of pictures and is combined with more data that represents sound and music, and that data in that order creates a work of art that tells a story that provides entertainment and evokes human emotions in the form of what we call movies and we all undervalue and under-appreciate the huge scale and work contributed towards making it all possible.

Everything can be represented with “just data”, but true works of art, expression, social iteration, and entertainment are more than “just data”.

Once Upon a Time, in the Magical Land of UTNA Combat Forces Manufacturing Plant C

WHY PONIES?
One question I get a lot when I talk about Hooves of War to people is “Why ponies?” Excellent question, actually!

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AN ENTRY ABOUT SOMETHING

Ok, lets see, I haven’t made a blog entry since…OCTOBER!

Anyway, with the much cleaner interface, hopefully this will mean more posts by me!

Well screw that! Whoops. I need to ramble more, I guess.

Hmm, what to ramble about.

OH! I know, something about game design. Yeah! I do that sometimes!

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Forums are Quarantined

The forums got attacked by spam bots and I don’t have time to deal with it right now. I’ve been meaning to do away with them soon anyway.

Sorry for lack of updates, I’m thinking I want to start some non-Pathogen Studios stuff soon, like reviews of game design and what makes games fun and stuff like that. Help keep content going when Hooves of War is in that “technically good but uninteresting” stage.

Gogo loved that file…

I’m slowly making our website less…bland and useless and turning it into something nice and useful! One of the easy things I saw was the 404 page, which before looked like this:

What are we, a bunch of soulless geeks? Oh..yeah…I guess that describes us pretty well. But we are exciting soulless geeks who have a bit of a pony obsession.

So I set out to replace it with one of the ponies in our current work-in-progress: Hooves of War! Anyway, here is the result:

Say hello to Gogo! The gal with the big guns. Even though Gogo might not have all the lights on up stairs, when a big threat arises: Gogo is the girl for the job.

From now on, Gogo will be inform you that the file you were looking for was LOVED TO DEATH. No more “=( SADFACE!” from now on!