Leandro

About the camera movement: rotations are a pain in the neck to do by hand, pans are a lot easier (especially if you use hover, with flight enhancements to get the perfect speed). There's a trick, though: use the keyboard or a gamepad. The game will rotate the camera at a constant speed if you use a button for it, instead of using the mouse.

You control the speed of the turns in Settings -> Controls -> Control Sensitivity -> Turning; and the actual keeys used with Settings -> Keymapping -> View -> Look Up/Down. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than trying to control it with the mouse.

Added to the events calendar: http://bit.ly/NNSzsW

I set it to repeat for the following 11 weeks (until November 24); PLEASE send me a PM if some dates are cancelled.

If you want to make a group shot with all your characters, check this thread for a quick guide. You can leave a single character in the Characters folder and run around a very tiny area if you want to position it in a specific place, and still have full control of the camera.

I quickly put together a picture to promote this event. Hope you like it!

Well, I was idly humming and singing "My Way" while explaining the script to Angelus Animi, so she can most likely tell you that you are all crazy. There is something in the Enriche that alters your ears, I think.

By the way, if you want hilariously inaccurate subtitles, try the automated transcription YouTube made. It's so wrong, it's funny.

Episode 2 is up: place crowds facing different locations, place specific characters doing emotes, and make the camera movement smoother. Watch it here.

I put together a video to show people how to use my scripts to quickly assemble a crowd with the characters from your supergroup, global friends, or whatever. I explain things quickly, so feel free to pause and go over things at your pace.

I didn't edit the video at all because I've had no time (life decided to get busy all of the sudden), so you can hear me stutter and backtrack a couple of times. Sorry about that.

Thanks goes to Stephanie, who tried to use my scripts for the last 2 days and found them horribly user-unfriendly, so this is my attempt to make sure EVERYBODY can use these scripts to make nice screenshots or videos.

This video only covers the basics (extracting characters and placing them along a path); if there's interest, I'll post other videos explaining more complicated things that the script can do.

Without further ado, here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNIlFDngZto

ActivePerl: http://activestate.com/activeperl/downloads
Paint.NET: http://www.getpaint.net/
Script: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37952257/crowdscript.zip

Added to the events calendar in my sig: http://bit.ly/NNSzsW

Maressa, if you want access to the calendar so you can edit it, PM me your GMail address.

I might make it for the Saturday one, but this week suddenly got complicated on me, and I won't make it to the Thursday one. Let me know if the timezone's right.

Doctor Leo is better at wearing them than I am... Must be my gigantic ears.

Note for anyone using the script: the reason why it wasn't taking 256 color images was indeed a trivial bug: $map = GD::Image->new("$file.png"); doesn't like truecolor images, and should be replaced by $map = GD::Image->newFromPng("$file.png",1); for everything to work right. I edited the post where the scripts are to reflect this change.

Achivement: Freedom server was completely sucking at the Hamidon raids after the redesign; there were some attempts but they just failed horribly. I figured it was a morale problem: people just weren't showing up, knowing that the raids keep failing. So I decided we needed a few successful raids to get the ball rolling again. I transferred my main to Justice and asked help from the regular raiders there; a bunch of players, including Enrious, Mermoine, and a lot of others that I don't remember (sorry guys, I have a lousy memory for names!) transferred back to Freedom to help.

They taught me and a bunch of people in the ULTRA channel what to do. The first attempt took a while and we teamwiped, but we completed it, and that was the big victory that we needed to get the ball rolling.

December 26th, 2009:
18:24 EST: We start killing monsters.
18:35 EST: Hamidon spawns.
19:00 EST: First attack wave. Everybody in the goo.
19:11 EST: Team wipe! The order to regroup is given.
19:18 EST: First attack wave goes in again.
19:28 EST: Hamidon at 75%. First bloom.
19:39 EST: Second attack wave.
19:52 EST: Hamidon at 50%. Second bloom.
20:03 EST: Third attack wave.
20:10 EST: Hamidon at 25%. Third and final bloom.
20:18 EST: Final attack wave.
20:25 EST: ULTRA has defeated Hamidon!

Yes, it took two hours, but it was a victory. Eventually we got it down to about 30 minutes, which was the average time before Incarnates.

We did it again, with no wipes, on January 10th. And again the next day, and then again the next week. The Justice folks left back for their home server, but we had successful Hamidon raids in Freedom ever since.

I don't like being the visible head of anything, so in March, when it was clear that people had the hang of it, I stopped leading Hamidon, and in fact took a break from the game for a couple of months; I was burned out from Hamidon, and every time I logged in, people asked me to raid. So I disappeared, and hoped someone else would take over the raids.

I'm happy to say that they did. Tanknation from ULTRA and Starborn from the Star Alliance have been leading raids and doing pretty well since.

I've done a bunch of other things in the game that are achievements for me or my character, but getting support from Justice to get the Freedom Hamidon raids going is one thing I did that helped the entire server, so that's what I'm more proud of, even though the Justice folks deserve far more credit than me, for transferring away from their home server to help us.

Biggest regret: I joined the game in May 2005, just in time to get the Celebrant badge. But at the time I didn't even know what a badge was, so I didn't think about it as I deleted my early characters.

My main, who became my badgewhore, was created a week or so after Celebrant stopped awarding. Eventually I got every single other badge in the game, including Bug Hunter on two different characters. But I'll never have Celebrant, because of my hasty delete finger, and so my character sits 2 badges behind the top badgers of the server; Celebrant, and the associated gladiator.

This is totally freaking awesome.

OK, I got your image. There are multiple problems, which I'll address here so other people running into them can see the solutions.

This is your image:



Problem #1: it's 16 million color. I said in the post where I put the scripts that the Perl library that parses images doesn't like 16 million color for some reason. Use 256-color only.

Problem #2: The green line is color green=71; remember, green indicates elevation. The more green, the higher you were walking. Yet, the red you used is red=237, green=28. Since 71-28=43, the characters will spawn 4.3 units *below ground*. You'd only see their heads. The color also has some component of blue, which would trigger the Flight animation if you copied the script as-is. You should use red=128, green=71, blue=0 if you want the characters to spawn in the ground in a neutral pose (different shades of red = different rotation, remember).

Problem #3: the tool you are using to draw antialiases the lines. This means they "soften" at the edges, turning a different color. Because colors mean very precise things for the script, this is bad. Characters that spawn in those edge lines will spawn at different elevations and with different rotations. You need to use pure colors only, no aliasing.

This is how I cleaned up your image a bit:



Note that I didn't address the aliasing problem. And after running the script:

You might want to look at this thread, where I posted the exact tools I used for the latest version of the video. I didn't edit a single line from the final demo by hand, or messed with any numbers; I just "drew" an area in which the characters would be in game, tweaked it in a graphics editor, and a script sprinkle the characters all over the place.

It doesn't work so well if you want precise control of where your characters are, because it drops them randomly in the area, but it gives you a good starting point without having to worry about entity IDs or position numbers.

By the way, if anyone wants to host the original WMV file, which is 106MB and slightly better quality than YouTube, I can send it to them. It's on my Dropbox, but I don't want to distribute that link because if has a bandwidth limit that I don't want to hit.

Sweet, the new version of the video made it in time. Too bad you're still using an screenshot from the old version.