Other Systems

On Mandravia now but my Wacom Bamboo CTL 460 won’t work

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/07 22:20 Posted in Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Other Systems, problems | Comments (0)

I have been off line for quite a while now , something like three weeks actually – an eternity for me. But where on Earth have I been? Have I been working on lots of new illustrations?

Erm, well, no.

My absence has been hardware related, oh and my translation “day job” got in the way too, but mostly – like I said – hardware related. What happened was that my chunky, robust, seemed-like-it-would-live-forever laptop died.

Well, just the screen died, but that was enough to take it from being the centre of my world (sad, I know), to a medium-sized lump of plastic with some exotic metals inside that makes a noise when you plug it in.

There was another XP machine here at base camp, a seven-year-old one, and wouldn’t you know it. It picked almost the very same day to finally give up the ghost too. It had had mobo troubles for a long time, and in the end it gave in to its terminal mobo blues. So, on the same day, both Windoze machines died.

But I had another computer, thanks to a donation from a generous friend who lent it to me when it got full of viruses and needed its OS wiped. I had been playing with Linux on that machine. More than just playing, I had been getting quite enthusiastic. I had added Puppy Linux after downloading it and putting it on the machine via a USB stick.

But I broke that one too – this time “just” a software issue though. The laptop doesn’t have a battery, well it does but it can only store 2.8% of the power it should. Without the power cable in, this brave lappy tries its best, but only manages to stay awake long enough to boot up. If it had to boot up a monster like Windows it wouldn’t even get that done.

So I booted it up to post about my troubles with the other two laptops and, you guessed it – I’d forgotten to put the power cable in, and it made a “poop” noise and died while I was connecting to the Internet. No problem, I thought, I attached the cable, booted up again, but the Internet dialler program had been broken by the unexpected power out while it was loading. Aaargh! With the other two computers pushing up daisies, that meant my only access to the web was gone!

Without web access I couldn’t download a fresh Puppy Linux to put on the USB and start again either, so I went to the newsagent to buy a magazine with an operating system. First I made a quirky choice, and paid money for a magazine with the new Google Chromium OS. But of course that turned out not to be an operating system at all, just a front end for their web tools. So back to the newsagents.

I then bought a cool magazine that had two double-sided DVDs, with bootable versions of four different flavours of Linux, called respectively, Kubuntu, OPENsuse, Knopix and Mandravia. First I tried Kubuntu. It didn’t do much of anything at all. It just froze at the boot screen. Apparently this is a known issue. Ubuntu-related OSs just won’t boot on some machines. Next I tried Mandravia, with a KDEdesktop (on boot up you can choose between KDE and Gnome desktops). It booted but it was so slow it would take 20 mins to open a document. So next I put OPENsuse on the laptop – and this time I chose the Gnome desktop (a good choice as it turns out, KDE seems to big and resource hungry for this five-year-old laptop). OPENsuse booted up nicely, and behaved itself well, it connected me to the Internet too. I used it for our latest translation job and it was quicker and more pleasurable to use than XP had been. But there was one issue.

I couldn’t get my super-new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet (a CTL 460) to work. It’s one of the real new ones, and although some people have gotten it to work, it just isn’t really supported in Linux, yet. I’ve been trying and trying, and I replaced OPENsuse with Mandravia (this time I chose the Gnome option so that it would work) on the off chance that it was supported. Which is where I am now. Quite happy with Mandravia on my machine.

So that’s what I’ve been doing folks. Instead of illustrating, like a good little artist, I’ve been installing operating systems and playing with graphics tablet drivers (to no avail). But now I’m back illustrating, using a good old pencil, pad and scanner. All supported by Linux.

So more pictures soon.

PuppyLinux: GimpGraphics

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/14 14:52 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Software | Comments (0)

I recently installed Puppy Linux on a laptop, and now not content with that epic victory of trial and error over open source software, I want to actually install a program onto my newly functioning machine.

OK so I decided to try and install GIMP on the Puppy Linux machine, and I found a version of GIMP that seemed to suit my needs. PuppyLinux: GimpGraphics. Uppermost in my mind was the hope that it wouldn’t turn out to be too hard.

Of course it turned out to be more difficult than I had hoped with page after page leading me to zip files that wouldn’t open. But this GIMP link seemed to be more useful. This page has a few versions to download in the Puppy Linux .pet format, and I chose the smaller version without help file because I always Google for help anyway. And…

It worked, it worked, it worked. But I did have this problem, where I couldn’t find Gimp once it was installed, but the advice here helped me sort it. It was working, but with an ugly default desktop logo. So I found a copy of the GIMP icon file to drop into the box Puppy Linux provides if you click on the old ugly icon.

The screenshot that you can see at the top of this post is also the first thing created on the unlucky virus infected laptop since it was brought back to life with Puppy LINUX.

With luck there will be a lot more to come, especially after I install Open Office. I just have to find a .pet file and everything should go pretty smoothly from there.

I wonder if Puppy Linux has a version of Live Writer and ActiveSync as well.

Photoshop is making me fat so I’m going to go GIMP.

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/09 11:59 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Software | Comments (0)

Whenever I switch Photoshop on and get that ugly grey screen followed by the splash screen, I know I’m going to be sitting and staring at it for a long time. I sit staring at the credits and I feel I actually know Thomas Knoll and the rest of the development team because I’ve been sitting looking at their names for such a huge chunk of my life.

And I recently noticed that I was using this dead time while Photoshop loaded to go and make myself a sandwich. That’s really no good for the waistline. So I’ve decided to go GIMP if it can do everything I need.

A friend recently gave me a dead laptop and the only way to bring it back to life was with an injection of Linux, after that I installed GIMP and now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t play around with it a bit and see what it can do.

I downloaded a pdf snapshot of the GIMP documentation and turned it into a MobiPocket book for reading at my leisure – on the tram mostly – so I could get an idea of what GIMP can do.

The real proof of the pudding will be in the image editing of course, but from what I have already read it looks encouraging. Gimp can work with layers, vectors and seems to have the functions I’m using right now when I add colour and interest to a pencil sketch or add the finishing touches to a render of my latest 3D spaceship mesh.

I do sometimes also use Photoshop for animation, but the animation files are so huge and unwieldy that I’ve even given that up recently. So animation aside I can’t immediately see a reason not to switch and there is a huge advantage to making the jump to GIMP. It loads in about five seconds instead of fifteen minutes (subjective time, I’m sure it’s shorter than that but it does seem like an absolute age).

Can Ubuntu Linux save my zombie laptop?

By The Illustrator | 2009/10/26 14:52 Posted in 3D, Other Systems, Review, Software, Tutorials, illustration, problems | Comments (2)

OK, I’ve decided to try my boot USB stick with a bigger Linux, but which one? This online test zegenie Studios Linux Distribution Chooser recommended that I use Ubuntu, and it does seem like a good choice, but the download is 600 MB big. I only have an internet contract that allows me 1GB web surfing per month – and so 600 MB would be a huge chunk of that.

I hate the way companies impose these stupid small limits on internet use. Is it significantly more expensive for a company to provide 10 GB of service than 1 GB, or is it just a scheme to make money from us powerless idiots who have to use the service? I know which I suspect.

Anyway, as my ancient Viao laptop doesn’t even have Wifi I’m going to have to hop on my girlfriend’s computer to download the file. Right now though she’s working on important things – read FarmVille – and so it’ll be a while before I can do my Doctor Frankenstein impression, jump on top of the laptop, look up to the imaginary film camera in the sky and scream… “Live! Live! Live!”

Or make the boot USB and switch on the computer – not as dramatic but probably more accurate.

I’m reusing the 3d image of a laptop with skull and cross bones on the screen being attacked by files, it seemed to fit and I like it very much. I made the illustration with the Blender 3D suite, and I was wondering if that will run on the new Linux laptop, assuming I get it working. It appears that the Blender 3d visuals creator will run no problem on Ubuntu, so the plan is on go ahead. That 600 MB is taking a long time to download though.

Features

By The Illustrator | 2009/09/18 17:45 Posted in Editorial, Features, Other Systems, Review, SEO etc, Spaceships, role-playing game, spaceship | Comments (0)

All blogs have permanent bits outside the usual day to day business of posting and this one is no exception. I have decided to call these bits a feature section and divide it up into different themes.

Role-Playing Game Art Gallery

This collection of game related images, illustrations and renders has been made a more permanent feature of the site because this is basically the best of what I do. I really enjoy imagining the outlandish visuals of a role-playing game and trying to capture the results in an illustration.

The Mongoose Traveller Sci-fi RPG

Traveller has of course been one of the leading lights, in all its many incarnations, of table-top sci fi role-playing games since the very beginning. When I found the free to download designer’s pack on the Mongoose website I was so excited that I produced a lot of content to use in Traveller games, all in one burst of creativity. It can all be found in this feature section of the blog.

The D20 System

My musings on this game system, and more specifically, how it can be used in science fiction role-playing environments such as Traveller. I like the fact that the D20 system is popular and simple. Once I have created a spaceship illustration I like being able to generate the information needed to use it in a role-playing game quickly, and D20 is a good solution to this need.

Spaceships Gallery

My favourite subject for both 2D and 3D illustrations is spaceships. This feature section of my site brings some of the images of spaceships produced for various reasons across my site together in one gallery. These are some of the best spaceship illustrations I have produced, but they are by no means the only ones.

Classic BattleTech and other mech games, what’s the best?

By The Illustrator | 2009/06/07 17:08 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Role-playing game, role-playing game | Comments (1)

I am so totally into mechs and mech-based RPGs; I’m not even averse to mech combat games and I’m currently trying to decide which is the best. Judging by these forum posts I’m not the only one on the same quest.

Classic BattleTech and other mech games – Page 2 – RPGnet Forums

Battletech is of course one of the first giant mech combat games to come to mind – and it has a very elegant robot combat system – but it does take an awful long time to design each mech, and I was hoping to find something a little less math intensive.

Following some of the suggestions in the posts I found something new to me called Jovian Chronicles, a sci-fi mech game and RPG, but it seems to be stuck in our solar system. I like things a bit more space opera so I’m putting that on the back burner while I keep looking for that perfect system. There is another game published by the same company called Heavy Gear which sounds like an interesting mech game. Again it doesn’t sound space opera enough for me as the background material for the game seems to be limited to a single planet. I kept searching and found that a lot of people (well at least one) were talking about Mekton Zeta.

And there is a free download of the rules called Mekton Alpha which does a great job of letting you know what the flavour of the game will be. And I think I like it. I kept searching though, and this site mentioned Dirt Side II. Apparently these rules can be used for any bit of science fiction technology, and it does include rules for combat walkers; nice. I’m not certain I’ve found the perfect rules system yet though, so I’ll keep looking.

I’m also reading The Temporal Void by Peter F Hamilton, I’m a big fan of his work and I’ve raved about his books before in this blog. This is the same hard-core SF as ever, set in the same intricately imagined sci-fi universe. There is a lot more sex in this one than usual and I was worried that Hamilton was entering some kind of dirty old man phase of his writing career but there does turn out to be a reason for it all as you keep reading. It’s to do with DNA.

Blender Noob to Pro saves my bacon, and my giant robot

By The Illustrator | 2009/06/02 22:14 Posted in 3D, Other Systems, role-playing game | Comments (0)

I just bought a magazine called 3D Artist at my local book store and it has gotten me all fired up about producing role-playing game illustrations in 3D again. I have been thinking about mechs and all things Battletech and MechWarrior and so it was natural that I would be producing giant mechanoid images for my RPG materials.

While I was working on my latest 3D RPG masterpiece I came across a little promlemette, I was wondering how to make a photograph appear as the background to a 3D mesh I am creating. It’s a 3D model for use as a mech in sci-fi RPGs like Traveller the role-playing game, and it wouldn’t be the same without a futuristic game world skyline. Thankfully wiki books comes to the rescue again. The solution to my problem was really quite simple, but finding it myself would have probably taken half a night’s frustrated and increasingly desperate button clicking.

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Render Settings – Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

So now my giant mech can rampage across some of the more futuristic bits of my city – Vienna – without me having to do too much work in Photoshop. The architecture in Vienna is pleasingly futuristic and perfect for the sort of settings you find in RPGs, as long as you point the camera upwards or go out on photosafari on a quiet day. It spoils the effect if too many very ordinary looking passers by are wandering about munching on kebabs, walking the dog and doing other totally non fantasy role-playing game type things.

My giant RPG monster robot is far from finished but you can bet I’ll be doing a lot more work on this crazy 3D creation, it’s fun!

Mech design gets colour and D20 Dungeons review

By The Illustrator | 2009/06/01 01:06 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Role-playing game, role-playing game | Comments (0)

The drawing of my new mech design that I started in my last post is slowly taking shape. It has some basic colours now, but I do like the black and white look of the original Battletech Technical Readouts, so I hesitated a little bit before adding any colour at all. But the rest if the designs in my RPG resources sections, for Traveller and D20 are in colour, so it’ll fit in better. I haven’t created the stats for this design yet because I have been reading the D20 rules I downloaded, after I’m done I’ll be reading the RPG rules for D20 Rifts that I downloaded at the same time, and then I’ll be getting round to creating stats for this giant mech for use in sci-fi RPGs. I’m enjoying reading the free D20 stuff and the latest one I read was;

D20 Dungeons

What a cool document, dungeon designing is one of the highest expressions of the game mastering art and this document is a lovely overview of out-of-fashion craft.
It goes into excruciating detail – it includes rules for different types of door, and different hinges, locks, etc, etc – and this might not be to everyone’s taste, but my inner nerd loved it. There is so much detail that you can really imagine yourself creeping through the dungeon noticing every detail.
There are nice sections on traps and why a dungeon might be inhabited at all. I particularly liked the idea of natural caverns full of deep subterranean creatures connecting an abandoned dungeon full of wandering monsters with a dungeon complex that was still in use by its builders, a more uniform collection of monstrous creatures who use this redoubt as a base to terrorise the local area.

D20 RPG mech design, the Swamp Viper

By The Illustrator | 2009/05/29 19:00 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Role-playing game, role-playing game | Comments (0)

I’m having real fun with my new D20 Mecha rules, I downloaded some D20 Rifts rules at the same time, but I haven’t even looked at them. These rules for mechs have sent me back on a wave of nostalgia to the days when I was regularly playing Battletech and MechWarrior the role-playing game.The thing I didn’t like about those rules though was keeping track of the tonnage as I designed my mechs, and switching between rules sets to design different stuff like aerospace fighters was no fun either. Designing something big like a spaceship was flat out impossible. These new rules (actually the are so old I found them on an archive site for a website that has now disappeared, but they’re new to me) solve all those problems, and that lets me have more time and inspiration to doodle and sketch hardware.

This giant mechanical beast for example is a mech in the old Battletech tradition, designed for the Tarazet D20 RPG. I haven’t got the stats yet, but I have made a start on the fluff. For a long time mechs have been employed as the primary means of exerting control on the ground in the Tarazet sector. But it’s not just on the ground that mechs have won their place. In one form or another they are versatile enough to be deployed in any environment.
Grav tanks for example are at a severe disadvantage in space boarding actions and starfighters often don’t have the streamlining to survive planet side, but mechs operate in both environments.

This is one of the most ancient of all mech designs. The cockpit, located in the head, was obviously envisaged for some kind of creature much taller and narrower than a human and has been modified to fit the human anatomy. It has served as a template for human mech design for eons and although it was eventually bettered by newer designs, the shear number of Swamp Vipers in circulation guarantees that they will never entirely disappear.
The mech is armed with missile launchers, (equating to 2x SRM6s, for old Battletech and MechWarrior fans), heavy particle beamers, blasters and medium lasers. It has the bottom-heavy look of an old school mech designed to be a stable firing platform, and it’s enormous, heavy legs can turn whatever gets in their way into scrap and ruins very quickly indeed.
The weapons are all mounted high on the torso, the arms or the head, to enable it to live up to its name and wade deep into the swamp, presumably an important consideration for whatever strange alien creatures initially designed it.
Whether this design was captured by humans from an invading, or knowing humans invaded, enemy alien species or was a gift of some kind is lost to the history of this far, far future sci-fi setting – but one thing is for sure, it is still a dangerous opponent.

D20 spaceships for gaming: and MegaMek: A BattleTech Video Game… for Free?!

By The Illustrator | 2009/05/25 19:43 Posted in Other Systems, Review, Role-playing game, Spaceships | Comments (0)

Outsyder is another cool gaming blog which I found because it links to one of my posts.

Outsyder Gaming: MegaMek: A BattleTech Video Game… for Free?!

This blog has some really, really nice stuff. For example he links to this D20 rifts site, eeps!! And this games blogger has somehow found this other cool D20 Rifts site, I’ve downloaded the stuff and it looks good. This is a blog with a lot of nice stuff to click about look at and download. The section on tools is obviously the result of a lot of research by a dedicated gamer and is very useful.

I’m rapidly falling for this D20 system and I’m keen to create a version of my Tarazet science fiction RPG setting for it, as soon as I’ve worked out how. My only problem is finding a good set of RPG spaceship rules. It seems this game master had the same D20 spaceship requirements and got a lot of useful advice. This led me via Wikipedia to an archived version of some likely looking free D20 spaceship (and other mech stuff) rules.

This very nice looking game Dragonstar is unfortunately dead, and I need to find a version to download because it looks great. The current game company site is very nice looking but there is no hint of a surviving Dragonstar game to download, at least not fro free. This RPG forum is filled with others who are also looking for this interesting sounding game. This site seems to be people keeping Dragonstar alive. As I haven’t found a downloadable version of these old rules I’ll stick with the Mecha rules for now. Hopefully a new spaceship featuring the new stats will turn up soon.