Random Chat Thread

When I had a DS Lite, the battery life was never a problem. I've seriously considered buying the 3DS, but I decided to do nothing with my moneypre-order Portal 2 for the PC. I'd like to get 3DS Max as well for editing Source games.

...I caved and bought the markers I wanted.  COPIC Ciao 72 A-Set, and they're coming in a week or so.  They had a 20% off sale, I couldn't resist!  And they have so many more lighter colors and delicious Earth tones than my 72 Sketch A-Set, which I want to sell/thin out now (ahaha, anyone wanna' buy some markers for cheap?  XD ) .  I'm really excited about them though; I have officially become a marker convert, and I even bought some nice marker paper along with my markers =D .

There's this contest for this liiittle fangroup in dA, for a minor character from an old show (Beyblade, that's right), but the prize list is ridiculous, and (most... oh, that one girl... she's TOO GOOD DX ) of the competition kind of sucks, so I thought I'd try it XD .  I ended up getting too into it and must have drowned over 24 hours into this silly 3-page comic.  COMICS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS, LET ME TELL YOU.  There's SO MANY STEPS.  And you have to go through them for EVERY page, EVERY panel.

1.  Thumbnails
2.  Paneling
3.  Sketches
4a.  Inking (brush & ink)
4b.  Ink neatening (liner pens)
4c.  Digital ink cleaning
6.  Coloring figures (marker)
7.  Coloring backgrounds (watercolor)
8.  Photoshop magic (scanning, cleaning, adding sparkles/special effects, etc.)
9.  Scripting
10.  Speech bubbles, text, final touches.

Art is pain!  A roller coaster of self-doubt and despair!  Art is also love!  And love is also a roller coaster of self-doubt and despair!  And pain!  It's a full moon tonight and I'm still up at 5:25 BD !!

<3 ali

Nintendo REALLY should have added an option to save Battle Videos to an SD card...

Keep in mind that the Battle Videos probably aren't actual video files per se, they're probably just the instructions for the stats of the pokemon involved and a specifically seeded RNG.  As much wicked lossless compression a Pokemon Battle could get, that's the most efficient way to share data, assuming you have a "cached" copy of all the resources on hand (that is, you have the graphics needed to generate the battle already on your cartridge).  I'm not up to speed on the DS's capabilities, but Screen Recording usually isn't a lightweight task when it comes to processors, too.

That said, there really isn't a reason that Nintendo could use the data they have stored, and create videos that are viewable through a web browser via flash, other than it'd probably cut into profits of the next Pokemon Stadium-esque game slightly.  Oh, and also it'd require work, I guess.

Bear with me for a little bit longer on the wait.  I'm going to try my more complicated method to get you a good-quality video, but I'll need to do some file conversions.

Here's the source video for the DS Recording.

Uh.

Now I know you're probably going to look at that and say "No way that file's that big."

Well, uh, actually, for source video, that's a pretty small file.

...

So, um...  You can either wait until I can work up the courage to post process it into something... Sane, or download it and upload it to YouTube, 'cause I mean, they're just going to transcode it ANYWAYS, and it saves everyone the headache of post-processing.  Either way, let me know, because I hate tweaking video codecs.

Link.

Here's the source video for the DS Recording.

Uh.

Now I know you're probably going to look at that and say "No way that file's that big."

Well, uh, actually, for source video, that's a pretty small file.

...

So, um...  You can either wait until I can work up the courage to post process it into something... Sane, or download it and upload it to YouTube, 'cause I mean, they're just going to transcode it ANYWAYS, and it saves everyone the headache of post-processing.  Either way, let me know, because I hate tweaking video codecs.

Link.

Yeah, that's a pretty damn big file. Now, before I decide whether or not to download it, let me just confirm this: Is that the video of my battle with Tyler, or something that will allow me to upload it? Yeah, I'm not very smart when it comes to stuff like this.

After disappearing from what I think were 2 months (can't remember, lost track of time 2 weeks ago), missing the opening of the new site and probably disappointing anyone who asked for my help or cooperation during this time frame...

I'm back.

Yeah, that's a pretty damn big file. Now, before I decide whether or not to download it, let me just confirm this: Is that the video of my battle with Tyler, or something that will allow me to upload it? Yeah, I'm not very smart when it comes to stuff like this.

It's a .zip that contains a ~750MB avi File (Yes, I know, I said already I hate fiddling with video codecs) that certainly sounds like your battle.  Triple Battle, Rough Skin KO, and all.  You download it, unzip it, and you can watch it in Windows Media Player or Quicktime or whatever, and you could edit it in VirtualDub, Windows Movie Maker Live,  Adobe Premiere, iMove, or whatever, or you could just send the file over to Youtube and then go watch a movie or something, assuming you have a reliable connection and aren't afraid of hitting a bandwidth cap or anything.

The big thing stopping me from just plopping it into a video editor and doing just that is... Well... the MacOS version of Desmume is a piece of crap.  I actually ended up using the Windows version of Desmume through VMWare Fusion, and running the emulator through a virtual machine like that was faster, more responsive, and not as prone to locking up as the native version.  As such, the original video file is on my XP Virtual Machine, and VMWare will only let me share files from MacOS to Windows XP and not the other way around.  IN SIMPLER WORDS, I'd have to download the file if I wanted to edit it.   

Well then I'll just download it, upload it to YouTube, and delete it from my computer to save space. Thank you very much for providing me with the file. Do you have a YouTube account? I'd like to credit you.

Yeah, I got a YouTube account.  As you can tell, though, I don't use it a whole lot.

So many frogs.

Here it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fbFOAa2apo&feature=feedwll

Thank you very much, Oracle. Can you teach me how to do that?

Made by a brilliant anonymous artist who's name has a "o" in it.

After disappearing from what I think were 2 months (can't remember, lost track of time 2 weeks ago), missing the opening of the new site and probably disappointing anyone who asked for my help or cooperation during this time frame...

I'm back.

Hey Luyren! Nice to see you back. Now that I think about it you were away for awhile. Sad how I usually don't notice someone has been gone for a while until they come back...

Here it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fbFOAa2apo&feature=feedwll

Thank you very much, Oracle. Can you teach me how to do that?

Actually, it was done on an emulator, so you might want to fix that in the description.

Basically, GameFAQs has a Gameshark save file with the whole game completed for the European version of Black.  So, I converted the save from a .duc to a .sav for my AceKard 2i here.  Then After making sure all of my firmware and AKAIO was up to date, because I never update it because I only use that thing for playing DreamZZT and other homebrew which doesn't need the most up to date stuff I loaded up a European Pokemon Black on my DS using that save file, and downloaded the battle video from a Pokemon Center.  I then saved the game, turned off the DS, and plugged the memory card from the 2i into my computer.  I then had a huge mess up with the MacOS version of Desmume, which stores its save files in a hidden folder on the user directory, would not play well with my joypad or keyboard inputs, and would stop accepting responses altogether if I looked at it the wrong way.  To top it all off, it wouldn't import the save file.  I then launched VMWare Fusion to start up my Windows XP virtual machine, and grabbed Desmume for it.  I reconfigured all of the file paths it uses (Particularly for save files!) to my Desmume folder, and copied the save file from my 2i to that folder.  I then loaded up the European Pokemon Black, and my save file was immediately recognized.  I then loaded up the Battle Viewer, and used Desmume's built-in AVI recording function which was also not in the MacOS version to record the battle, using I believe Microsoft Video 1 compression at 75% quality.  I actually had sound disabled, so I was pleasantly surprised that the output included the sound, and was running at full speed instead of slightly lagging when particle effects occurred.

Now that I've done it once and gone through most of the hoops, I could probably do it again more quickly, and probably grab an external drive so I wouldn't have to upload and download from the net to actually work on the video, and probably crop out the bottom screen, too.  So, like, thanks for being the guinea pig here.

Started a little webcomic thing. http://apwb.smackjeeves.com/