Added 1 new A* page:Still experimenting with "vinyl" type surface effects for Selenis' space suit. And if you can make the hand gesture Vero's hiding from her, you're a better...hand model than I am.
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I got myself distracted today with some nerdy technical web image stuff, but some of it anyway will pay off for A*; the short of it is that starting with this page and from here on out, edges will be smoother, and images will load about 20% faster. Good deal, yah? It's all about bilinear rather than bicubic interpolation, and if *that* got you excited, then you might be the rare kind of person who will care to read and see all the gory details in the forum thread I wrote about it. Here's the relatively fun part:
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The other technical image nerd stuff that won't be of immediate use was that it was pointed out to me that resizing an image in most software results in edges being darker than they should be. Zut alors. Well I spent quite a bit of time trying various processing options to get around this with the ImageMagick command line image editor, and what I found is yeah you can correct for the gamma loss by switching to 16-bit depth, changing the gamma to a certain value, resizing, then switching back to 8-bit depth and setting the gamma back to the usual 2.2, BUT in doing that you lose color 1,1,1--it goes to pure black 0,0,0. Which is worse than having slightly darkened edges, if you ask me. Well, maybe someone will come up with a way around that, but until they do, I'll just generate dark edges like everyone else.
(By the way, if you're trying to follow the ImageMagick commands on that page, note that the "-scale" parameter in his jpg command should be "-resize" instead.)
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Yet more image nerd stuff: some fool on a webcomic forum started an animated GIF battle, so I thought I'd go through the animated GIFs I used to pop into the news as previews back when I was making A* for animation, and pick out the better ones. You can check out the parade of dancing pixels in this forum thread (high bandwidth).
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