Vyoma

I am not sure if the processors - the architecture they are built would be suitable for giving an real time solution to the problem. (You did not say, it would be real time - but out of what I understood, that is what is required, I think). Anyway, let me see if I understood this correctly, because I am not familiar with the GP32 or GFX8 and such things. You would use this setup to take input from a musical instrument (a guitar), and also from a 'foot switch-board', and these signals would be converted to digitals (because I belive, guitars by default, gives rich analog signal), and then it would go to the processer to do the number churning to get a digital sample of the effects applied sound or music and that would be played or recorder out. So a general, very minimalastic data flow architecture would be something like this: Musical Instrument + Foot Pad -> ADC (Analog to Digital Circuit) -> Our DSP unit -> target Correct me if I am wrong, because the rest of the things that I am going to say are based on this assumption I made above here. Now if it is just the DSP unit you would want to work in real time, then I actually have my doubts. The reason is something as follows: The CPU processors that we use for our systems, have adder units and multiplier units. (The old ones only had adder units). Now using these units, the CPU is able to perform one calculation (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing) in one machine cycle (the actual time is the inverse of the speed given in terms of GHz). This is fine as far as normal computing goes. But for a DSP there are a lot of Cosine Transforms, Z Transforms and similar time-to-frequency-curve-converter functions involved. These heavily depend on what is called multiply-and-add units. The DSP is able to do a multiplication and addition in one machine cycle. This calculation is built into the hardware itself. And usually in DSP, as far as I know there are multiple multiply and add units, because each of these transformation functions that I am talking about has numerous such operation. Now if we were to implement it in software, we would need to do a lot many things. We would need to - in terms of basic machine operations - one multiply, one move and one add operation. And that is just for one unit - it would be required to be done for several such units. That would mean 3 times number of such calculation required for a transformation. And that is just for one transformation. All effects would require atleast two transformation - one to convert from time signal to frequency signal, and the other to convert it back (because only time signal can be played back). I would like to repeat that I am assuming here that what you require is a real time solution, and over that I do not know the speed of operation of the DSP units in GPX8 and GP32. If they are very low when compared to CPU, the speed of CPU would compensate for the round about methods and we would be able to pull it off. May be someone with more knowledge of these special effect units who also have the knowledge of DSPs would come along and clear this up.

sid.calcutta, I belive you posted a tutorial post, and that was posted with in the Tutorials -> Websites and Web Designing - am I right? If so, then it would take some time for it to be displayed. A moderator has to approve it and then that post would be displayed and you would get the credits for it. Hope I have answered it correctly. Else some moderator would come along and correct me.

I think I have to put it down here that I agree with Pyost and add a few things.If ones bandwidth is getting used up pretty fast, it means two things. One is good and the other is bad.The bad thing would be that it gets used up serving requests for some unwanted graphics like it would have been for some graphically heavy designs that are based on tables for positioning and layout. In such a case, one should think of optimizing the visiual elements, shifting to GIF or PNG, reducing the image file size May be you should consider shifting the design from a table oriented old-timer appraoach to the CSS designed standard complaint present approach.Or the good thing could be that you are getting genuine visitors that take up the bandwidth requesting for the textual data itself. Which of the two you face? That could be answered by doing some simple analysis on the WebStat analyzer reports. If it is the genunie bandwidth usage, then as Pyost said, your site must be really good.Take time to nourish it by shifting it to a paid hosting provided (Xisto - Web Hosting for example) and then think about monetizing it to complement the costs using Adsense or similar Advertisement network.

I was under the assumption that Xisto.com and Xisto.net were provinding same hosting as Xisto, one with out Ads, and the other with Ads. And I was under the impression that Xisto forums were more of teen crowd, with less of mature and intelligent discussions. I did not think that Xisto was for just technical discussions - it must have turned out like that because a majority number of people chose to discuss only that. Now, if we can have good, mature and verbose discussion about literature and such works here at Xisto forums, why should we not? It it does turn out to have enough good discussion, it would provide Xisto forums with quality content that Xisto can capitalize on. (May be through Amazon or such intermediaries). Ofcourse, this is just my opinion. The administrators, I think should consider this though. Why limit Xisto to only technicals, if it can attract and sustain people with talents in augumentary fields? Edit: Updated after some snooping around: It seems like OpaQue, the founder of these forums does want it to be related to Computer and Technical information forum. Then, I guess, my suggestion made above looses some value - I am letting it stay for record though. Moreover, I just got this feeling as to why restrict ourselves?

I think though that you should try the PBEM or PBP (Play By EMail or Play By Post) methods of roleplaying. I have not tried the PBEM approach, but I sure have qutie a bit of experience both as player and as GM in Play By Post roleplaying games. They do not get you the experience of table top or pen and paper ones that you play with your friends but it does give a very rich experience. The reason it does not come close to pen and paper games is because it is a bit slow. But that can be taken as a disadvantage or an advangatage. Disadvantage, because - as I said - the adventure moves slowly. Advantage? There are quite a few: (1) Players may live anywhere in the real world - they need not be geographically in one place (2) They can be in different time zones - the players need not convene at a point of time (3) Develops a literary joural of adventure - if properly played, the write-ups come close to the level of quality of works written by fantasy/sci-fi/horror novel authors. They cannot replace them, but they come quite close. (4) Scope for broader exposure - thus more people can co-exist in that realm, and a lot of realm-crafting or world-building can take place. Now, coming back to the topic, I have played pen and paper RPG rarely. In parts of India where I stay, I could not find a bookstore that sold a DnD book. It is not even common here for people to come together and play pen and paper RPG. Thus, all I played were my own homebrewed system and campaign with some of my friends and cousins.

Well, it all depends on what you want to do with the site associated with that domain name. If you are going to keep a corner of the web, as a detailing or profiling of yourself, with some spice up of your literary works (which I presume you want to show), then I would suggest you go for the nigaiamai-yume.com.Yes, it is hard to spell it, but do not expect people to come to your personal site by typing the exact domain name. It will usually come from referral and organic links to your site.And if you want to keep a website for the display of your works itself, I think that would require some brainstorming. Try to grab a domain name that sound literary or fantasy (which I belive is the genre of your literature). I would suggest you keep the two of them seperate - your personal site, and where you would be displaying your literary works.By doing so, when you market your literary works with the domain name it would not look a bit cheap and ameturish. It would come hard on one with literary flare to do it, but so is the world. Well, those are my opinion ofcourse.

Well, Yume. As I said in the introduction post, I too would love to discuss such things here. The question is, where do we ask?I have been around here, and this seems to be a technical related forum, with an inclination to softer creative edges. I am not sure I can answer any of your questions about where to post, but I would like to second you, and let the moderators/admin know that I too would like to where do I post such things?Coming back to the subjects you mentioned there, I too am interested in some good discussions on character building, planetary mechanics and such world-building related stuff.

How in the holy cosmos did I miss this thread. I have been lurking around these forums, trying my best to get to the 100 credit mark, and I did not even notice this thread here. Here, we have Dhanesh, called as the Arabian Rat, christened so by our good old admin, m^e, has found me worthy enough to insert my name among the ranks of the elites of Xisto! Thank you Dhanesh! :sniff: I am so happy I am crying. PS: I think this particular post of mine could be considered the most spammy post I have ever done, but I just could not help it. With the admin and the mods spamming it with spurts of words, I thought it would be wrong and would be a case of insubordination if I did not follow the leader.

Ah! Finally we have some more who have interests in writing around here in the Xisto forums.I have been here for quite sometime, and I will tell you that people here are very talented. I have seen a lot many talents here, and I can say that I have found my place among AstaHosters. I too am presently involved in literary works, but I have not been able to actually create a work that is long enough for publishing. I am involving myself in lot many activities and that is why my time is stretched thin - I program and webdesign, I do some art, and as I said, I write.You seem to be in quite same lines as I have been in terms of literary work - though ofcourse, you are quite ahead of me. I enjoy reading intricate and long plots - both fantasy and science fiction. From the great introduction you have give, I can say right away that we are going to enjoy our time here with you. Come to think of it, may be we can work out something together too.Once I have some works to show in the realm I have created, I would also like to do some literary works on your world. May be you could write one in mine. But that would requrie time though.Anyway, welcome to Xisto and enjoy your stay.

I agree with the issue of using bgcolor, bordercolor, b, i, u and such tags in the HTML. We need to ensure that when we teach people in these times of seperation of content and design, we should seed the understanding of hook ups so that style and content can be seperated. This would help in not making their learning curve difficult by asking them to later switch to the new school. (I know this, because I happened to learn HTML quite early before CSS came to picture, and it was quite hard for me to move on to seperate content and style). As for tags, you could teach them <strong> to make the fonts bold or something like that and <em> to show emphasis. But I think explaining the table tags are fine, as long as it is explained that they may be used to represent only that - tabular data.

You can add the following to the list: http://www.3dtotal.com/ - Nice site with lots of articles and tutorials for putting up 3d model aswell as 2d concept arts.

Adding to what Pyost has said, you could actually make the different borders (top, bottom, left, right) differently coloured. Using this you could actually create a sort of 3D effect to your bordered box. Now, how to specify these attributes induvidually you may ask. Instead of the code: .box { width: auto; height: auto; border: 1px solid #FFFFFF; text-align: center;}You have to use an altered one, where, instead on just one 'border' property for all the borders, you can have for specifics: .box { width: auto; height: auto; border-top: 1px solid #FF0000; border-bottom: 1px solid #00FF00; border-right: 1px solid #0000FF; border-left: 1px solid #FFFF00; text-align: center;}Here ofcourse, I have chosen colours to be all different (red, green, blue and yellow - in that order), but that is just for illustration. What you could do was, if you had the box with background colour of blue, for the top and left, choose a light blue colour, for the right and bottom, choose a dark blue colour. That would give the effect as if the box was embosed and there was a source of light at top-left. The choice of colours for seperate borders may also be used for other design methods.

OK. After that, I then start one one form at a time. I arbitrarily choose the elf form. I copy it out of the previous image (in the previous post), and then I put it in a new image file. Deviant Art Link Next I go ahead and choose a pallete. I place it on the image itself so that I can easily pick it up whenever I want. I use the lightest colour to fill up the base. I like to start from the hightone, and then work down to the shadows and detail the object. Deviant Art Link I then choose the second darker shade, block out the cell and then begin filling it up, to create the medium tone are on the form. I assume that the light is some where roughly on the upper right of the object, and with that assuption, do the blocking out. Deviant Art Link Next what? Well you guessed it right, I go to the darker shade, and repeat the process. I keep in mind how the light creates bright areas on the top and right had side of the object, and at the same time creates shadows to left and bottom. Deviant Art Link More darker, and repeat. As you can see, as we do the process, it creates the shapes that were not earlier detailed out in the line art. All the subtler features that requires to be detailed should come out by now. Deviant Art Link Next step is simple, but time consuming. There is no necessacity for the outline to be black in colour. I choose the darkest hue of the skin tone itself, and replace the black pixels with it. As you can see, the result is a smooth base: Deviant Art Link I pick up two gray tones for the eyeball, and two blue tones for the iris, and tweak it into the little space I have for eyes there. Deviant Art Link That nearly seems to be done. But in the next step, I would try to do some Anti-Aliasing and 'Selout'ing (Selective Outlining). That would nearly double the colour count but I am not actually that much worried about such constraints now. Effort Spent on Basic Bases: 4.5 hr Effort Spent on Elf Base: 2.5 hr Total Effort: 7 hr

I am not sure if I mentioned it at the DeviantArt display, but I had created it using MSPaint, and I wantent it to be kept true towards Pixel Art - hence I used as less colours as I could. I do not remember, but I think it has less than 10 distinct colours in it. Now, coming back to the project at hand, I have a bit of progress. (Again, I am using MS Paint only to do the Pixelling). The basic base I had earlier, I take it and put it in a new page, and make 3 more copies. I scale them differently, owing to the different features the end-bases of different races would be having. As you can see, scaling produces unwanted anti-aliasing pixels that have shades of intemediate colours. In this case, it has some gray pixels for the left three figures. So, with what I have at disposal (MS Paint) what do I do? Well, I useImage -> Attributes And in the colours panel, I choose the 'Black and White' radio button. I again use: Image -> Attributes And switch back to 'Colour' mode because later I would be using some colours. After a few clean ups, it looks something like this: DeviantArt Gallery Link I know, there was no reason to put the two shades of gray for the background in there, but it is just my personal preference and I like to work on a canvas with some features. (That means, those who are going through these pictures from the project can ignore that particular detail). Anyway, the next step is the actual pixelling. Here is draw the bases of the four different races so that I can get a good set of base for them. I use the earlier picture as a reference, and I draw the line art over it, erasing and modifying (mostly erasing) whatever was there earlier. The earlier picture is just for the sake of getting the proportions right, because when you are working in CG using a mouse, it would happen quite a number of times that the proportions go wrong. Atleast, they do for me, and this is the technique I found to counter it. The end result is as follows: DeviantArt Gallery Link Total effort till now: 4.5 hrs.

Yes, great pieces of work indeed. But it is a pity that I have a long way to go to come to the league of Jaeden. As said earlier, to create works in those level requires a lot of patience and work. I have a day job and it takes a lot of energy out of me by the end of the day. I get home and all I want to do is snuggle into bed.

Yes. They were used in old RPG, fighting and platform (or side-scroller) games. It required the artist and the programmer to work in a team to create such resources for the games. But these days, it has surpassed the field of games and become a medium of art. To show few of the best works in this medium, I would like to quote two works of a Pixel Artist who goes by the name Jaeden: A Sojorn of Sages Traveling the lands of sillis And also Bahamut perched by St0ven. To do those kind of work though, patience is required, and more than that, skills with pixeling is also required.

That would be quite right jlhaslip. CSS is meant for presentation, and it styles the HTML content. So, where one would put a image depends on what it is? Is it a content or is it a styling element. Now, if it is a content, then it definetly should go in with the HTML content in a <IMG> tag. But if it were a styling image, it should get hooked with one of the HTML tags, and go in to the background-image property.

That is quite true. It may though effect your revenue rather indirectly. There is something called localized ads which means that some ads are shown to people of only some part of the world. These localized ads would be the factor for difference in the revenue one gets because I belive traffic is effected by the localization of the website. In case of websites like Xisto, that would not be true becasue I think there is a proper international mix in the traffic here. But say for someone's personal or semi personal blog site - quite an amount of traffic would come from the people of that person's country. Now if they were provided localized ads, then it would be effecting your revenue. But karoldz, I do not think you need to worry too much about it. Just see that you get good traffic to your site - a good mix of unique visitors and repeat visitors and you have quality content. You would get revenue from Adsense quite naturally.

Yes. To be honest, my posts seem to have missed the scope of Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS games or similar category of games. I actually do not have any exposure to such platforms, and all of the games I played were on PC. But due to the reviews I have read in quite a few magazines, I am fairly aware of the hardware capabilities of such games. I think the same is quite true in terms of mobile games too - where one mostly needs to program a game in the Java MicroEdition platform. In such cases, yes, not many hands are required for the making of games. Graphics I belive is just one part of the content package that I was talking about. It does serve its purpose of hooking the players initially to the game, but I think in the end players do care about a good story line. This is where the other parts of the conent of the game come into picture. Now in terms of how I am thinking of approaching it is to really get a good content base. I have been working on getting a good content base on my own, from which I could choose to spawn concepts for games and interactive entertainment. Creating games for Gameboy or NDS would be a choice I would not take, because we would get constrained by the proprietary technology of these companies. If I base my ideas on those systems, they would be dependent on those systems, and it would be difficult for moving to another system if I get a chance. Hence, I am aiming at content creation. Making a good and vast detailed concept. Gaming is not the only thing that I am aiming, and hence choosing of the approach of a good content base seems prudent to me. PS: A really good discussion indeed.

Well, Pixel Art is just a medium. I do other forms like sketching, oils and such - but it was about recently I go involved in some of Pixelling. Yes, it does take a lot of time and patience. Depending on the size and complexity of the work it can take as less as 1 hr and can take any more amount for complex ones. Here is a previous work of mine: http://vyoma.deviantart.com/art/Vyoma-Avatar-24810299 It took about one hour for me to do it from scratch.

Ok. I have mentioned this elsewhere here in the forums, but I thought this particular site deserves a mention seperately in this forum. Pixel Joint is a mediocre looking website. But it is the content that makes it stand out. It has a community of Pixelers that keep submitting some great pieces of art. This site here could add to the list of sites that you might visit once in a while if you have a thing of gems of art. http://pixeljoint.com/

OK. I am putting it here so I can have a record of the gradual process I am going to follow to create a handful of Pixel Art works. I am strating a particular Pixel Art project for which I need to first create a base. I will be using this to create other bases - and thus it is a bit with lesser details. The next set of bases I would be doing would be of more detail. So, just for record, here is the deviant art link to the image: http://vyoma.deviantart.com/art/Nara-Base-39169461 Reference photos used from stock photos and other artists to get the proportion and some amount of style right. Created using MS Paint. Tools used: Line Tool, Pencil, Eraser Colours: 2 (Black and White) Resolution: 194x555 Those who are unaware of the technique and form of Pixel Art, can refer to the following good article on Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art A good amount of quality Pixel Art works can be found at: http://pixeljoint.com/

tommydanger, you are quite right on everything you said. It was one of the reasons that I started this thread - to get the realization of how complex it is these days to start a game. I have seen a lot of people come over here at the forums and ask how to do it - which of course is too difficult these days as you said.It involves a lot more than coding. As I said in the first post, technology (which you worded as coding) is just a part of the gaming. What requires now is a lot more than that. That said, one may ask, is it not possible to create games like they used to in the last decades? Ofcourse it is possible, but it wont stand a chance against the phletora of games out there. The ones of the last decades were really gems in themselves - small and beautiful. But that is not the case in present times.Design - or in a bit of broader terms, content design itself is the key to the success of a game. And as you said, by the trends of the games of these days, people (target audience) just do not take any inferior detailed content in any game as passable. They just move on to next. Content is everything these days. And a lot of work goes into building these days, and as you correctly said, it takes more than one person to create a good game.So, is there any hope for a single person to create a game? Well, if the drive is only passion for gaming, then no one can really stop someone from making a game. But if there is even a bit of financial motive in it, what I find as a plausible solution is to get more people like yourself who are interested in creating a game. I doubt there is any drought for such kind of people due to the number of threads in the Game Programming section here at Xisto forums.Once you get a group of people going in for it, you would be able to pool your set of talents to a broader base, and then be able to divide work and then the game that would be created would have some chance standing in front of the rich featured rich content games created by behemoth companies.

Of course, responsibility does imply more stress, and thus does require more reward that should be given in terms of income package.I am not sure about other countries, but in India, I belive, at these times, the scaling is way of the scales. A techie with a Bachelors Degree would get about 250$ to 300$ per month as a starting package. Now the same for a B-School graduate on an average would be anywhere around 1000$ to 1500$ per month as a starting package. That would be about 1:4 scaling that I am not sure is fair or not - no matter in which country that may be.

I am not sure if it is greed or not, but that I think is the way things are run around in the world. The Google are capitalizing on their market share, with the unique system they pioneered. Ideally speaking, if you have a really good site, then I would say do not go for Google Adsense. You can hunt out for Advertisers themselves and strike a better deal for them cutting of the middle man (Adsense). That way, you would be getting better cut, while the Advertiser may need to pay lesser for the eyeballs. But it all depends on how entreched you are in your niche market.