WIP - The forest's map

[markem]

My first WIP! :-) This is VERY early stage. I'm only getting a few minutes here and there. This is a framed map which is more of a picture than a traditional map. I'm thinking of using it in my game. I scanned the image (B&W) in at 300dpi but my lines are so faint I'm not sure anyone will be able to see them. Right now I am working on the two threes which surround the interior image. Haven't started on that yet. Been drawing - erasing - get new piece of paper - try again. So really not a lot to look at but I wanted those who have encouraged me to do it to know I am working on this. Just - 14 hour work days don't leave you with a lot of energy. Mainly, you just want to go to bed when you get home. :-)

Background: Somewhere in the mountainous region of Kilarn there are two mountains (La Toreno and El Captiane) which mark the passage from the world of beauty to the world of death. The map is to show the world of beauty. To put it bluntly - there are two mountain ranges which meet and end with these two large mountains. On one side of the mountain ranges there are forests, grasslands, etc.... On the other is nothing but a desert that stretches for hundreds of miles past the mountain ranges. This map is used to just show what the area is like outside of the desert. More as I make decisions on exactly how to show everything. (Still trying to decide orthogonal or what. Also just how large I should depict the two mountains.)

Anyway - here is my current sketch I'm working on. Not much to see but like I said - just wanted those who have encouraged me to "get on with it" to see that I am SLOWLY making progress. :-)

[markem]

Left tree's bark sketched in. No shading/shadows/or anything else done to it.
I don't know why my scanner is changing the paper to be grey. I've got it set to do color scanning at 300dpi but I had to send it through Photoshop just to make it so you could see it at all. I'll have to work on that. I'm using a Visioneer 7100 scanner and not my Fujitsu scanner. Shouldn't make that much of a difference. :-/

[markem]

Today's work :-)

[Azélor]

Not that I see this as a problem but is this a map or an illustration? A map with an unusual perspective ?

[markem]

Not that I see this as a problem but is this a map or an illustration? A map with an unusual perspective ?

Yes. What I am going to do is to finish up the two trees and then get two other pieces of paper out. Via Photoshop I'll make the area between the two trees transparent and then put the actual map behind the trees so it looks like you are looking through the trees at the map. The map is going to be two different images. The first one is a face-on image of the mountain range and you will be seeing the two main mountains surrounded by forest. An old wheel rut will show the way in to the forest that wagons took. The second map I'm hoping will come out (because I either get it right or horribly wrong) as an orthogonal map showing the mountain range, forest, and lead-in to the desert beyond the mountains. The two maps will play a part in my game. The first one is what you see normally. If the players figure out how to activate the painting then the second image (the real map) shows up. The real map shows where possibly dangerous areas are located.

[markem]

Sorry for the delay. One of my cats is sick and I am working on that problem right now. She is 23 years old so it might be her time to go. Hope not. The other cats were not letting her eat anything so now I've given her a room to herself and I am feeding her Blue Wilderness canned cat food which she is slurping down and putting weight back on. I may be able to post again this weekend. Have to wait and see how the cat is doing. :-)

[markem]

The death of Jeanette Manning.

Jeanette is a cat I rescued in June of 1993 from the intersection of Bay Area Blvd and El Camino Real located in ClearLake, Texas. (Now a part of Houston, Texas.) She was a little dark brown, grey, and white kitten. When I first saw her, she was in the middle of the intersection trying to escape the intersection but every time she started in one direction a car would whiz by and the air would knock her back in to the center of the intersection. I prayed to God that if he would allow her to survive that I would take her home. She did, I did. Through the twenty-two years she was alive she was a fiesty runt. Her body length was only about seven inches. Her tail's length was ten inches. She didn't put up with anything any of the other cats did and she was a queen of cats throughout her life. A week ago I noticed that she was walking about as if in a daze. I figured out that she wasn't eating and decided that the other cats simply were not letting her eat. So she was starving to death. I took her out and kept her with me. I bought top-of-the-line canned cat food and for three days she ate, drank, and went to the bathroom normally. Then she stopped eating and drinking and potty breaks were where ever she happened to be standing. So today I made the very hard decision to let her go. I cried so hard and so much that the vets were concerned for my health. Then I came home and cried myself to sleep. I only woke up a few minutes ago. I've taken a sleeping pill to help me sleep through the night. Peace unto everyone. I don't think I will be posting for a few days.

Mark

[ChickPea]

I'm so sorry, Mark. My thoughts are with you. Losing a much loved pet is devastating.

[markem]

I'm so sorry, Mark. My thoughts are with you. Losing a much loved pet is devastating.

Thank you! I will never forget her. Tuesday and Wednesday I had a terrible scrap with the creeping crud. I think being so down because of Jeanette's passing made me very susceptible to getting this stuff. I hope no one else gets it. Sinus's running like a river, lungs bringing up junk. Hard to breath, etc... I did the only thing I know to do when I get something like this - get out the blankets and bundle up, sweat it out, and get over it. Took one night to kill the virus and one day to cough/blow/spit out all of this nasty stuff. Feeling better but still not back to full capacity. More like 65%. It is now 3:21pm CST and I'd like nothing better than to just go back to bed and sleep another twenty-four hours.

And before anyone says anything - remember - antibiotics only work against bacteria. Not viruses. I am also taking both Wal-Act (Actifed) and Ny/DayQuil. The Wal-Act dries out your lungs and sinuses and the Ny/DayQuil loosens and brings out all of the junk in your sinuses and lungs. The two prong approach quickly kills any left over viruses and helps to get rid of any kind of lingering junk. Might seem a bit weird but it works. Whereas, if I just use Ny/DayQuil this stuff would last a week. Same with the Wal-Act. But the two together seem to really give this suff the old one-two.

Anyway - thanks again to ChickPea. I'm going to see what I can do about posting tonight (if I don't just fall asleep). :-)

[markem]

I have been trying to scan in my artwork so far but my system was freezing up. Finally decided that HitmanPro was conflicting with Avira and got rid of HitmanPro. I kind of hate to do that because HitmanPro finds things that no other program seems able to find and it is the only program listed on www.majorgeeks.com that can get rid of some spyware. Anyway, the system has continued to freeze up. Not freeze and die but just stops for a few moments. Decided that PerfectDisk (my favorite disk defragmentor program) was causing this. PerfectDisk is only one of two programs that will reorganize your hard drive like Norton used to do. Before I installed it, my system was running very slow. After defragmenting my system ran considerably faster. The problem comes in when the Smart Defrag starts working. Because PerfectDisk seems to use the standard file copy routines provided by Microsoft and it can cause the system to hang while a large file is transferred from one part of the hard drive to another. So I finally uninstalled PerfectDisk last night. The system is really running fast now.

So why no upload? I have been trying to get the sketch scanned in at 4800dpi but my scanner can't do it. So I have been trying various dpi's and finally found out that 3000dpi is the maximum size. So tonight I will be doing a 3000dpi x 3000dpi scan. Once done (and saved) I will be doing more touch-up and finally upload a new image. Probably not at 3000dpi since that would be extremely huge. I'm doing this because others here have said that if you can get the image in at an extremely high resolution that you can then do more to the image than if you just brought it in at 150dpi (or even 600dpi). So I'm going to give it a try. If I can't do it or just decide it is a pain in the rear for me to do this (I only have a dual core system) - then I'll go back to the sketch and continue on a bit more before uploading.

Anyway, hopefully tonight or in a day or two. :-)

PS: What I mean by "standard copy routines" are that there are routines you can call to move a file (or copy a file) from one location to another on a hard drive. These are fairly fast but still can suck up all resources on a system and thus cause it to "freeze". Compare this to RichCopy which uses and internal set of routines to move files. It does it very quickly but does NOT cause a system to freeze up (unless you try to copy thirty or forty files all at once).