awards

[bvanevery]

I notice some other people have small icons on their sidebar indicating various things they've done positively for this website.  I am guessing those are "awards".  How do I get one?  I'm thinking I should get one for "longest winded and most voluminous AAR writer ever".

[Buster's Uncle]

This could happen.

There IS an AAR writer badge, which I'm reminded to go award you now.

[bvanevery]

Thank u, now I feel meritous.

[bvanevery]

Oh, and if you've got a badge for editing smilies, shouldn't I get one for creating that snazzy "Chairman Yang is watching you" PIC icon?  Lord knows that was a lot of work, if only because I didn't know my way around GIMP or the SMAC game files.  Well and learning curve about what source artwork works at that size, what can be scaled and what shouldn't be.  The portraits turned out to be the best source art.

[Buster's Uncle]

Hmm.  The smilie badge was a 13 year-old kid, Blue Flux, I learned how to make and animate smilies, and he made a lot.  This one was good enough, and a good enough idea, that I made it official.  He made that square smilie-maker badge, too.

Hmm.  I don't want it to be too easy to get a new award badge, or it's worth nothing.  On the other hand, it's very good when free forum goodies like that make at least one person happy.  On the gripping hand, you've figured out the technical requirements for that kind of thing and mastered a bit of GIMP, so if you designed and made the badge yourself, it would cost me only the effort of installing and assigning it.  (I'm used to having to do that sort of thing myself, and often get put through numerous drafts and a lot of time.  I don't always feel like it when it comes up.)

Ball's in your court, I guess.

[bvanevery]

Ok so there's no badge already for making icons and badges, go figure.  I'll contemplate the 20x20 form factor.  Hey at least it's taller than the message icon format.

As for easiness of getting a badge, can't say there's anything to worry about.  Surely if I can get a badge for one AAR post, the understatement of the year in my case, I can get one for spending vastly more time on Chairman Yang's eyes.  Unless there's some desire to have rarity and exclusivity for some specific activity, like making badges.  Can't imagine why that would be.

Plus it took me 1 year to figure out that badges even exist.  That alone keeps it from being easy to get badges.

I am thinking it should be some kind of "website art assets" badge.  Your Smilie badge is a very specific kind of art asset.  I should probably make something more generally applicable, but it might still have some specificity like "Small Artwork Badge" or "Icons Badge" or something along those lines.  Makes me think of the Nanominiaturization tech, which unfortunately has a stupid logo.

BTW, on the subject of finding an excuse to use the good logos from the game, I would highly recommend you give Doctrine:Loyalty badges to people for some reason.  Like if they're still active in any forum after X number of months or a year or something?

Industrial Automation has a really cool logo.  Unfortunately with too much detail to make a good 20x20 badge I think.  But if you had some excuse to hand out IA icons to people I think that would be great.

Unfortunately none of the tech icons are leaping out at me as a good basis for solving the original problem, so it's back to the drawing board.

I'm now looking at icons used in paint or photo editing programs.  An icon of an artist's palette could work, for instance.

Nothing from SMAC is really jumping out as inspiring.  In fact, I'm realizing that the Visual Arts as a cultural process, are not mentioned in the game at all.  Literature, sure, plenty of quotes from old books and imagined books.  But this future has no painters or photographers.  Maybe not filmmakers or videographers either, although it does have news broadcasters.  You've got Yang's reference to "successive frames of a watchvid" and Morgan TV Live Interview.

Well I guess we do have The Virtual World.  That's the closest I can get to some kind of "visuals".  I'm doubting that any still frames from that video have something in the 20x20 size that would be useful and recognizable, but I'll contemplate.

A Propagandist badge, controlling people's visual realities through iconography, might be thematically in keeping with the game.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Some good ideas here.

[bvanevery]

I think the idea of a Propagandist badge has merit, although I'm not sure under what circumstances it would be given.  Similarly, the Placator badge from another thread has merit.

For the original "art assets" problem I posed, I've had a brainchild: a "Salvager" award.  This would be for someone who goes into the game's art assets and reclaims them for use on the website somehow.  Like the PIC icon I made out of Chairman Yang's eyes.  I'm not sure if "Salvager" is the right name.  "Archaeologist" might be better.  "Scrapper" is a related term.

For the icon itself, I looked at the Alien Artifact.  However, unit artwork in general is too large to use for 20x20.

BTW does anyone know what "Baron-Krypto Space-Puppy" is about?  I found him in icons.pcx.

Details spacepuppy

spacepuppy

I extracted a minerals icon from newicons.pcx.  This suggests a different award name: "Asset Miner".

Details mineral20x20

mineral20x20

Seems like the Police fist would be useful for something, but I'm not sure what.  Took it from socwin.pcx.

Details policefist

policefist

Ok, since I couldn't find any other applicable game art, I'm going with the "Asset Miner" idea.  Here it is with a different background.  I'm not sure how one does transparent backgrounds.  I can go up that learning curve if it is helpful.  Would also like to come up with a short tagline for what an "Asset Miner" is.  Although in a pinch, one could instead have the award be tagged as "Miner of Art Assets" and leave it to the community to explain to someone what the heck that means.  Not ideal but I'm having trouble compressing the idea down to a simple tagline.

Details assetminer20x20

assetminer20x20

Ok I think I got transparency working.  Let's see.  Yep!  Well, except it's not blue anymore.  GIMP has "aquafied" this somehow.  Yeah, reading more about it, GIMP's "Color to Alpha..." function is too brainy.  The result would look perfect if I put it on a Magenta background again.  I just want a mask of transparent pixels.  Working on other methods.

Details mineral20x20

mineral20x20

Ok I think I've converted the entire newicons.pcx sheet into a correct RGB with alpha channel thing, magenta removed.

Details newicons

newicons

In GIMP that conversion was based on the following procedure, although I did turn it into RGB.  Someone on the internet said:

My advice would be to use the Select By Color option to select the color you want to make transparent. If it is a single indexed color, instead of various shades of it, you can set the threshold parameter to 0 - otherwise, experiment with the Threshold and select by controls until you mark all parts of the image you want transparent. After that,just perform Edit->Cut (don't forget to add an Alpha channel to your layer before doing that Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel), and export your image as a GIF file. You won't need to convert to RGB and back to indexed mode if you just want to add alpha, and choose this method - it should work with the image in Indexed Mode.

So here finally is a mineral done right.  Just need to wordsmith what to call it.

Details mineralalpha20x20

mineralalpha20x20

[Buster's Uncle]

-SO- you're asking for that last as your badge for contributing two (including that one) forum icons?  And I'm to wordsmith a catchy justification?  My subconscious will work on that, if so.

[bvanevery]

I actually hadn't thought of it quite so specifically, but "Badge Maker" is a pretty clear idea about what you have to do to get the badge.  It loses the whole "recycling SMAC assets" idea though, which is what "Asset Miner" was about.  In other words, I'm not sure I would pick a minerals for a "Badge Maker" badge.  But the minerals is still a good idea for a badge, because it comes from the game and the orignial artwork is the right size for 20x20.

I will think about what a "Badge Maker" badge would look like.  I think it should look really "badgy" somehow.  Not a mineral.

Minerals are used for production.  Don't know if that helps brainstorming.  Too many minerals cause eco-damage.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh - for that one for badge making, my subconscious tells me "Forum art resource creator" is the correct answer.

[bvanevery]

Sounds right.  I will try to think of an icon for it.  A mineral is wrong, as it isn't "artsy".  Closest in-game I can think of for "artsy", is all that groovy hippie skippie video stuff when Deirdre is trying to talk to fungal relays.  Wonder if Deirdre's flower logo exists anywhere small enough to be recognizable.

[bvanevery]

Well at the risk of overdoing things with eyeballs in them, let's see if this holds up to critique.

Details Deirdreye

Deirdreye

Hmm.  Not completely wrong but not completely right.  maybe someone else has a better eyeball.

Details Miriameye

Miriameye

[Buster's Uncle]

Dunno.  That says "keeping an eye on things" or something watchy/looky.  Not seeing as to do with art...

[bvanevery]

People look at Art.  It's a visual medium.

Details Talenteye

Talenteye

I'm not having good luck with the eyeball approach anyways though.  Doesn't seem to be enough surrounding context to make sense of this as a "Talent's eye".  I suppose I could try sampling the smaller portrait artwork.

Details Telepath

Telepath

Let's see if a face does any better.  As an image, yes, but doesn't really mean anything.  Good icon, but for what?