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I never really got into Edd's movies, but it's a bummer whenever someone goes

shine on, bright star

At 44 minutes ago, sweet21 wrote: Hmmmm.....also problems uploading images. Perhaps I should have waited for the loading bar. ANYWAY! Argument still stands. And it's even weirder in the audio portal. Sheesh the score given on the top and the overall score plus information way at the bottom.

you have excellent taste in burglar-smashing games

ok, gonna come out and say what everyone is thinking

where is it, Tom?

where is it?

hot damn, look at all this gloss & glitz. I gotta look around and see what's new before I start preparing my list of grievances, but this is all very exciting

big thanks to the champions who updated all my submission icons!

For a minute I thought Jeff's Flash was a game demo ;_;

Just another reason to shell out for an ipad, I suppose

I love this story, Tom. It's so... relevant

I keep my brush smoothing at 40 -- it's low enough to not change the line shape too much, but not so low that I get those little fuzzy jaggy edges. after an initial rough sketch at ~actual size, I usually zoom in to 400% and use a fairly thick brush, like the 2nd or 3rd biggest -- helps me maintain smoothness + precision in linework.

So I just upgraded to CS5.5 and everything is cool besides this: Whenever I use the Flash color picker on my Cintiq monitor, the new fill color is slightly different. On my other monitor, no problem.

pic below is an example -- original color in the left, new color on the right. this shit is really cramping my style. any solutions?

managed to figure it out from the links in that thread. thanks!

So uhh in this game I'm making, I've got some dialog. The text is loaded into a text box from an array, and that's all peachy, but I'm looking for a way to make the text appear one letter at a time, left to right -- a pretty common effect in the vidjer games. Any suggestions?

Real bummed I couldn't make it to CC this year. O well, I can always look at the photo galleries and weep, it'll be JUST LIKE THE OLD DAYS

O SHIT, thanks for the link drop, Tom!

In littlefoot it's all FBF, pretty simple stuff since they're just single-color brushstrokes. Pretty sure that for Waterlollies, Phillips used some actionscript wizardry to animate them in a few scenes, but that's probably more in-depth than you need.

looks like you spent as much time editing the preloader as you did working on the actual animation. and i use 'animation' in a figurative sense because all you've done here is take someone else's artwork and tween it a few inches across the stage. if you want to improve your flash skills, skip the 'sprite combat' and start putting effort into your own art.

excellent thread, PiGPEN, bookmarked for future use/reference,

At 2/4/11 04:09 PM, BillyNapalm wrote: It's interesting that the original poster still uses Flash 8, since I use Flash CS3 and am considering moving back to 8. I find the newer versions don't appeal so much to animators, and have laggy bugs that tend to throw things off after a while.

I'd actually recommend sticking with CS3. CS4 and CS5 are all gloss, Adobe just slapped a fresh UI on top and added a few gimmicky 'features', but I tried going back to 8 once on a whim and the performance is just laughable. Multiple crashes within the first hour just from drawing with the brush tool.

At 11/26/10 08:42 PM, poxpower wrote: The stupider you are, the more rigid and blind your morality is. The smarter you are, the more adaptive and reasoned your morality is ( that's the trend, it's not 100% for everyone ).

I shouldn't have said 'we,' because you're right that not everyone undergoes that shift. I guess, building on what I said, the stupid KNOW they're right, and the intelligent THINK they're right. Both camps will believe their actions are just, but for different reasons: one based on facts they've learned and analyzed objectively, and the other based on morals they've been taught and accepted on faith.

Stupid people will follow moral laws because an authority told them to. That's not "being right", that's just mental laziness and can be easily exploited for evil on top of always being in the position of resisting social changes.

In the end, the judgment of the stupid depends on the morals that are impressed upon them, but you could just as easily say that the judgment of the intelligent depends on the facts they're given. I agree that logical thinking is preferable to blind following, but rational and irrational thinking are both subject to manipulation.

I almost went for Godwin's law and used Hitler as an example of an educated person who defied conventional morals. that would've been embarrassing.

I was mostly 'thinking aloud', as it were, but my basic idea is that as we become more knowledgeable, we undergo an unconscious exchange of intuition, morality, and other values learned from birth for rationality, logic, and other intellectual powers of reasoning that only come into play as we reach adulthood. Armed with these skills, we esteem our own intellect more and more, and with that self-esteem comes an inflated sense of 'rightness' and a corresponding willingness to judge others. Claiming that ignorance keeps us moral was flippant, but I stand by the statement that rationality makes us more willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. Whether this is a good thing or not is debatable, but my point was that Langan has reached something of a plateau of logical thinking. Antidisgenics is a modified and sped-up model of evolution, but where in nature the strong emerge slowly over millennia, he plans to deliberately purge the weak within a single human lifetime. He's not advocating any processes that would not occur naturally given enough time, but average people (myself most likely included) can't dismiss the fact that putting his plan into action would require a vast majority of the world population to give up their most fundamental biological right. Langan's drunk on logic and can't see that what is rational to him is repulsive to others.

does that make more sense? :3

At 11/25/10 01:25 PM, Ansel wrote: rereading my post, I realized that the Biblical analogy I neglected to follow through on would've completely disproved my point. my mistake :(

been thinking this over a bit. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they learned the difference between good and evil. Before doing so, they would've acted as children -- not understanding the consequences of their actions or why doing a certain thing was right or wrong. In other words, they still would've "sinned" in the Garden of Eden, undoubtedly, but ignorance would've excused their transgressions. At least, that's what I assume, since religious types tend to gloss over the technicalities of life in Paradise. It still doesn't prove my point, but it's not completely incompatible either.

I think the correlation between education and 'hawkishness' is related to this, but it's also related to self-awareness and awareness of one's own educated state. Given the sort of knowledge a college-educated person in the USA is given, it's easy to begin judging, 'rationally' weighing the tradeoff between immediate loss and ultimate reward. If you explained Langan's theory of 'antidisgenics' to a young child, they'd be horrified, but a more cynical person like myself can't help but try to see his side. Langan believes his IQ makes him capable of deciding what's best for humanity, AND makes him capable of superseding traditional morality while doing so, and that's where he loses touch with the rest of the world.

Trying to ban or restrict music in the digital age is a hilariously stupid thing to do, which is why your alleged 'controversy' about violent music will remain just that.

That argument always reminded me of Asimov's Robot series, which included a fictional organization dedicated to preventing robot workers from taking human jobs and to shutting down robot research in general. Their rationale was that robots were killing human initiative, failing to realize (or ignoring) that robots themselves were a product of human initiative and that preventing their development was, of course, exactly the sort of ingenuity-stifling they claimed to be fighting against. This group held considerable influence in world government, using scare tactics and misinformation to prevent robot labor from replacing human workers. Essentially, humanity reached a turning point, where manual labor could've become a thing of the past and replaced by leisure and, more importantly, academic/scientific/philosophical pursuits. In short, an entirely new age for humanity, an entire new humanity itself! Think of the kind of advancements we could make, the kind of world we could have if the people of the world never wanted for food or shelter. Faced with that turning point, the conservatives of Asimov's future rejected it outright and restricted the robots to space, out of reach of even those who wanted them.

That was a bit of a tangent, but my point is that there will always be people who think progress is bad, for vague 'moral' reasons they cannot articulate coherently or fall apart under logical scrutiny. Gut reactions and superstition, fear and ignorance. Thankfully, the people who accuse modern science of 'playing God' don't (yet) have the influence to obliterate entire industries, but then again, we haven't yet reached robotics. Let them preach, but don't listen.

At 11/24/10 07:04 PM, poxpower wrote:

At 11/23/10 12:07 AM, Ansel wrote:

By all accounts, ignorance is bliss and also keeps one a morally just person

That's completely, 100% totally false.

rereading my post, I realized that the Biblical analogy I neglected to follow through on would've completely disproved my point. my mistake :(

ol' duke's lookin a little under the weather

everyone going after him for his argument about cranium/intelligence ratio must've missed his immediately prior statement that it was his own opinion AND the statement prior to that where he said there weren't enough human individuals matching his criteria to prove his theory scientifically. Yes, it's his opinion, but he knows it's not fact and says so clearly.

I read a survey once that revealed that, contrary to popular stereotype, those of us most likely to support war are the educated. By all accounts, ignorance is bliss and also keeps one a morally just person (there's a Biblical analogy here somewhere, but I won't reach for it), while knowledge leads one into judgment and lack of empathy. This dude is the perfect example of this phenomenon. Being the most intelligent man alive, or at least believing that he is, Chris Langan KNOWS that his opinions and ideas are what is best for humanity. He speaks of a moral future where everyone is kind and just, but his method for reaching that future requires dissolving our current concepts of freedom and voluntarily (or involuntarily) beginning a systematic purge of the human race. He avoids the loaded term 'eugenics,' but nevertheless describes a plan to 'thin the herd' by deciding who is worthy of 'breeding.' What he fails to mention (or what was cut out of the interview) is that such a decision would instantly polarize humanity into two factions: the 'worthy' and the 'unworthy.' undoubtedly, those he judged to be 'unworthy' would be in the majority, raising troubling concerns about whether snuffing out a majority of the variations in humanity is really the best way to bring humanity to enlightenment.

Apart from these notions of 'antidisgenics,' I think he's got some good shit to say and that the whole concept of an 'intellistocracy' has been blown out of proportion. His most important vision seems to be a removal of the un-logical in mankind, an institution of the rational in place of the mystical, trying to see the universe on a scientific plane. Personally, I'd like to see the same thing. His ideas and intentions are good, but I think he fails to see the madness in the methods he suggests to make those ideas reality, and lacks the self-motivation or the ability to attempt to institute any change himself. Hell, if he ran for office in the USA he'd probably attract at least a small following, but I think he spends a lot of time convincing himself that humanity cannot be saved -- after all, he continues to work as a bouncer, exposing himself to idiots, drunks, criminals, and scum of all varieties. Of all the possible ways for him to make a living, he chose the one job that would be most likely to bring him in contact with the very people he'd like to see removed from the gene pool. Guy's got a god complex and a martyr complex to boot.

all else aside, it's worth noting that he definitely combs his hair to make his head look bigger

posting in Programming would probably be a better bet. this seems a little technical for the Flash forum, but you never know, someone in here might know the answer.

your stuff varies a lot, but I think the giraffe is my favorite thing in this thread, mostly because it's got a sense of volume that the other stuff lacks -- the head in particular's got those nubby little horns and tasty rounded lips. Try redrawing the skull or the hungry-eyed blue man, but do an outline sketch first to get the forms and shapes down. a skull is a very round, tactile thing. Also, I'm dwelling on skeletons here but using a reference is always a good idea when drawing bones of any kind. they're surprisingly hard to get right, the skull especially.

you don't seem to be going for the realist cel-shaded approach (for example, a vectorized trace of a photograph) so I don't know if I'd bother with perspective. The shelves (tables?) inside the building look practically cubist already... just ditch the vanishing point and go for the flattened look.

BMK, I feel belittled, and that cuts deep cause I think you're a cool guy who does his job well. Never meant to attack you personally or as a moderator. I actually think you've kept a level head through the whole thing, and dealt with it better than most, myself included. My problem isn't with any individual forum members or the forum as a whole, just the private-club mindset that rears its ugly head at times like these. Believe me, I value the art forum. I'm sure you haven't forgotten, but I used to be something of a regular myself, though I might not post as much these days -- this board was a welcoming and forgiving place to post my art when I started out here in 2006, no matter how horrible I might have been, and I did not hesitate to spew 5-minute Flash scribbles into every crevice. Looking back on it, this board arguably nudged me into the downward spiral that led me to making games today, and I'm not arrogant enough to forget that. Those were fun times, and I'd hate to see this community dissolved or harmed or to see other aspiring artists denied that kind of constructive atmosphere. It might just be my nostalgia goggles blurring my vision, cause I know the young art forum didn't always run as smoothly as I remember it, but dropping in for the first time in a week and seeing this shit unfolding was very uncool and it threw me into a blind, frothing rage that I was powerless to control.

The few dedicated mods that tend this fragile oasis have been doing so practically since the beginning, and I have great respect for your diligence and patience. I also love the NG staff, and hate to see friction between them and the rest of the site. It's not hard to see this issue from either point of view, and I think the responses from admins, mods, and ordinary users were all a little overboard. Re-reading my own posts in this thread, they seem more than a little overboard, and honestly now I'm feeling pretty embarrassed about my unwarranted hyperbole, and about dispensing judgment about this forum and its users when I barely do anything to contribute these days. Sorry, yo. Probably ought to start posting more art and fewer opinions before acting like I own the place.

At 11/21/10 03:59 PM, Luxembourg wrote: And I hate to tell you this, Ansel, but what the "regs" think DOES matter. Why? Because the "regs" are the people who actually use this forum.

it DOES matter what the regs think, but visiting a forum daily does not give them (or you) a 'be an ungrateful ass and get away with it' card. most of you guys are acting like children who've just had their favorite toy taken away and don't know what to do besides sit on your ass and, quivering wetly. Even one of the forum moderators, instead of responding reasonably or directly, started with sullen sarcasm and passive-aggressive personal digs at liljim when this whole shitstorm could've been resolved through a few private conversations and a modicum of sense.

Besides that, I don't see why people are still arguing this issue. It's over, and what's done is done. I'm fairly certain the admins aren't even reading the responses in this thread anymore, and there's no point in arguing with people who aren't there.

If people want to interject their two cents, why not? It's a single thread that you can easily ignore if you'd rather not read it. I doubt this thread will have any real lasting impact (besides, of course, the rule change) but the discussion needs to run its course or this completely unfounded atmosphere of bitterness will persist indefinitely and turn everyone into GIANT ASSHOLES FOREVER

At 11/21/10 03:51 PM, Knocturne wrote: I don't get why you wanna use five dollar words but ignore grammar, not trying to be rude it's just weird.

If we're going to start playing the grammar game instead of addressing discussion points, you might want to proof-read your own posts a little more carefully.

if there's a university near you, they may have life-drawing sessions open to the public where, for a small fee, you may observe and sketch a nude fat man for hours as he reclines luxuriously before you.