ℹ Cross-Post of my Twitter-Thread You may know PureRef for gathering references but I use it as Photoshop alternative. Let me show you how. Sometimes I want to combine 2-3 pictures and add simple notes to communicate something to colleagues (see image below). But starting Photoshop (or similar) takes forever and the workflow feels in […]| Simonschreibt.
ℹ Cross-Post of my Twitter-Thread We all know it: Photoshop, 3DsMax or any #gamedev Engine stops, freezes, turns white and doesn’t even let us press the X to close the software. Waiting for the “Close program”-dialog is annoying. >:| Here is my workflow how I kill every software. WITHOUT. WAITING! In my Taskbar, I have […]| Simonschreibt.
ℹ Cross-Post of my Twitter-Thread In most studios I’ve been, at some point coworkers asked me “Simon, how do you create so many videos/gifs/screenshots so quickly?” (because I make a TON each day to show work results, visualize bugs or explain workflows) – Here are my 3 main tools for my 3 main usecases. General […]| Simonschreibt.
You can choose! Read the article or watch the movie. Both contain (almost) the same content. I don’t know why but when I started learning to do game art I thought a good artist must be able to draw/model/sculpt anything by memory without using references. That was stupid and took me nowhere. It just made […]| Simonschreibt.
++ Update ++ Not only for Notepad++!! ëRiC pointed out that there are ways to use this functionality with every selected text. Independent from any text editor! Click here to read how. Preface This article is about an easy-to-use plugin for Notepad++ which makes it possible to work in a TXT or XML and directly […]| Simonschreibt.
Thanks a lot Egosoft that I’m allowed to publish these internal infos about the in-house tools. Foreword Game Development is complicated an it’s just common that mistakes happen. For example: Can you see the difference between the upper and lower screenshot below? Answer: In the lower image the green highway tube is a bit brighter. […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Choose your weapon Before you start creating the script you have to choose a scripting/programming language. I started with BAT-Files but later ported everything to C# because it runs faster and you have more functionality. The BAT-Syntax is sometimes a bit cryptic. For example this %%~ni […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Make the game make Screenshots The first step is to make the game create screenshots. In X:Rebirth we had already a screenshot function that could write out PNG, BMP or JPG and we had a scripting language BUT both were not connected! So the first step […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Game Setup The first thing our program/script must do is start the game and tell it to create screenshots. For that it needs some parameters which were handed over to the wd.exe/watchdog.bat (described here). The minimum setup for us looks like this: XRebirth.exe -module effecttest -screenshotmode […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Compression The next step is necessary because we had to use BMP (instead of PNG) as output format. There are two reasons for that: We could not use PNG because of problems with the transparency channel.You’ll find more details in the problem section. Not all screenshots […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Compare Comparing the shots is relatively easy. First we have to iterate over all screenshot-directories which begin with “bait_” in their name and get a list of all PNG files in that folder. It’s important that you receive the files ordered by date. If you made […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Mail Content Sending mails as an status or error report is essential because you don’t want to manually check all the folders and images for an error every day. Whenever a higher pixel difference (than our threshold) appears, a mail is sent out to a responsible […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. Why? In theory you don’t need to create a gallery but I think it’s important to not only have a lot data but also have a good overview about it. Also it’s very important to be able to show other people a problem by just giving […]| Simonschreibt.
This post is one part of the Watchdog Series. PNG Transparency I don’t know if this is the standard, but when our game stored a screenshot as BMP it had an Alpha-Channel – which was not empty! This is how the BMP looks: And this is how the Alpha-Channel looks. This is some our debug […]| Simonschreibt.