I’ve been interested in art since I can remember, the marriage of computers and art has always fascinated me. I would spend math classes (sorry Mr. D) fiddling around with my calculator, drawing pixel art and saving them in the storage on my calculator. I would hack up BASIC programs or marvel at ASM based games and sub-shells. Later these activities moved over to computers, websites, software, the internet and open-source video games, such as Nexuiz or Xonotic. My brain has always enjoyed trying to pull the worlds of art and science together but it wasn’t always viewing the two alike.

Originally my feelings about art were 2 dimensional, as I’d expect many to view it. It’s easy for art to be a fleeting glimpse. You see the final product, the lines of the creation process are blurred, the definitions of “source” gets lost.

When I first started contributing 2d art to Nexuiz, I was submitting PSD files. I didn’t realize at the time but I was deterring other artists who were without Photoshop the ability to properly edit the file because of some advanced settings in the file that could not be read by open-source software. This hindered others who were trying to expand on my work or create derivative works.

Now that isn’t a completely fair comparison because source is still being provided, only limited to a number of people. However, the reason I bring it up is because it was the beginning of a turning point for me. As I delved more into Linux and the world of Free Open-Source Software (FOSS), I was realizing how important source is to a community. How source code teaches, how knowledge of techniques are passed on. My involvement with Nexuiz and other (at the time) open-source projects, are what kept this message strong in the back of my head.

GPL Superheros

On Art in Video Games

Source of some art is almost impossible. A hand draw sketch for example, in the digital world however, things are different and art source becomes a very powerful teaching tool. Often, for the creation of maps for these games is not the most straight forward process. The mapping software and map entities require some critical thinking. The most common way to learn to add a feature to your map if you don’t know how, is to identify a map with the feature you’d like to implement, open its .map source file and study how it was done.

The reason this all came up for me today was because of a popular open-source ioquake-based game called Warsow. The code is licensed under GPL and the art has a proprietary, closed-source license. As a core member of the Xonotic team, we faced the decision of how to license Xonotic when we forked from Nexuiz. This decision was not as easy as you’d think because of ‘techniical’ license issues. The code must be GPL because of its lineage, GPL is not so keen on art. Creative Commons is an art license, not so keen on code. They seem like they’d be a good merger but from what I understood they could cause issues for distribution. We’d have to distribute the code and art as separate packages. In the end we licensed everything under GPL to make things easier for ourselves.

I thought Warsow was facing the same problem and today they had a developer Q & A, I decided to ask about this, pardon my bias phrasing.

[-z-] asked: do you think distributing warsow as one package is legal under the licensing terms?
crizis answers: Yes, it is. Even Richard Stallman himself blessed way of having open engine and restricted artwork. All code in Warsow is open source, artwork is not.

I found this interesting and with some conversation with with fellow Xonoticans, I came to learn how Richard Stallman, the founder of free software, feels about art in FOSS and I couldn’t disagree more. How is requiring the source for compiled programs any different than requiring the source for art?

Expanding On My Feelings

In my opinion, non-free art in free software is not in good spirit, it does not help others learn and it can hurt the growth of the game. The distinction between art and code gets further blurred when you see how interactive the artwork is.

I can argue that maps are code. They are a meta file, you can open them up in your text editor and edit them, they are filled with coordinates of brushes and entities, that hold keys with settings for the objects references to textures and can even contain some mild programming. Shader files are used to enhance textures and brushes. It’s not conventional programming, it’s closer to “virtual circuitry” as MrBougo called it.

This information is lost if source is not provided. Mappers have two choices on how to de-construct such features. Reverse engineer or decompile the map. The former likely being a waste of someone’s time and the later being an example of two wrongs not making it right.

I do not mean this as an attack on Warsow, it was only what re-lit my interest in the topic and the views I found by RMS were shocking. I think this should be a topic for discussion because in my eyes, art should fall under a similar license as code in FOSS, especially in software such as a video game where media is more advanced and interactive.

Internet standards, including HTML, CSS, and Flash, are based on a gamma of 2.2, making colors partway between black & white appear darker and higher contrast than 1.8 gamma makes them appear.

Clearly this is a problem, as referenced by Ron, even Apple recommends you change your default gamma from 1.8 to 2.2, where they also link to some further reading.

If images are delivered with the lower gamma information embedded, web browsers on macs tend to* (not all see note below) display them incorrectly if it’s not reading the color profile properly.

As a webdesigner / web developer / photographer, this might worry you. You’ll want it too look the same to everyone or at least the majority (95%+ of the world uses windows). The easiest way I found to fix this in my work flow, using Ubuntu Linux was with pngcrush, a cross-platform application that allows you to not only reduce image filesize loseless, but allows you to remove information that can cause confusion with the way images appear in mac web browsers.

All I had to do to install it on Ubuntu was:

sudo apt-get install pngcrush

Then I wrote the following command to strip all gAMA, cHTM, iCCP and sRGB information from all png files within a directory and move them to a folder called “crushed”

pngcrush -d crushed -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem iCCP -rem sRGB *.png

*It’s important to point out that this does not effect OSX 10.6+ (snow leopard and beyond). Further reading on why apple chose 1.8 gamma as the default can be found here.

sudo apt-get install feh

feh is is lightweight image viewer that you can call from the command line. It can recursively view files with the following command for example:

feh -r *.jpg

You can navigate through the images with your arrow keys or space bar and backspace. Use the window close button or press esc to quit.

That’s all good and fun and I’ll probably use it from time to time but it’s not what really got me excited about this tool. It has an option for a “list” of image attributes as the screenshot below shows.

By typing for example

feh -l *.jpg

I would list all attributes for jpgs within a specified directory. In my screenshot, I had a text file multiple image extensions, so I did a subshell with an ‘ls’ command piped to ‘grep -v’ which negates whatever pattern that follows it. To rephrase, the command inside $() is run first and that list which has all files minus those ending in ‘.txt’ is called by the ‘feh -l’ command.

I find this very helpful for when I’m slicing images for web pages. When I’m typing out css for example:

#my_image {
  display:block;
  height:25px;
  width:120px;
  background:transparent url('img/my_image.png') 0 0 no-repeat;
}

it’s very handy to have the image dimensions. The nice thing about this raw dimension output is that I can script it further to generate CSS like above.

There are many other tricks this command can do, just type ‘man feh’ to learn more.

By the way, I’ve started using gThumb as my default image viewer, it’s still lightweight and quite powerful. It’s essentially the same as eog with some minor differences and a few major enhancements

sudo apt-get install gthumb

Looking to get the most power out of this application, I headed over to this messy repository that is the official plugin registry. Doing a quick breeze through to see if anything caught my eye, it quickly did with this page about Liquid Rescaling. The picture was enough to catch my attention but the video below dropped my jaw.

Looking to learn more, I went to the official page to learn more. On the download page, I found out that it’s included in the Ubuntu repsitories:

sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry

After installing, I went to the help >> plugin browser in gimp and found that it was under the ‘layer’ file menu. I gave it a shot and It really is magic!

Panoramic Sunsets are so much nicer, aren’t they? :-P

Step one, original picture:

Step two, mark the area I’d like preserved:

Step three, magic:

Quoting the change log:

Almost a year of hard work, 3000 single changes, new developers and players, a few tourneys and lots of matches have passed since the last release.

Today the Alientrap team is proud to bring you a new and improved Nexuiz! Still trying to achieve this fine balance between fun and a challenge, you will notice lots of small additions that will make playing even more fun.

Some larger changes like the new guns and particle effects will make you want to dive into the great and friendly Nexuiz community, while the large additions including the race game mode, some new maps and improved netcode will take away lots of hours of your free time.

Do you dare to take a look and see for yourself what a totally free and open source game can be?

New features include:

• Completely redone HUD and user adjustable scoreboard
• Totally rewritten Client/Server communication to cut the bandwidth usage in half
• New gamemode “Race”. Try to get from start to end of a level as fast as possible. Available as free-for-all and team variant. Further allows to play with or without a qualification period.
• Added several new weapons (on-hand Grappling Hook, Port-O-Launch, T.A.G. Seeker, Heavy Laser Assault Cannon, Rifle)
• Map editor NetRadiant included
• Improved all effects for eye candy and tweakability
• All maps recompiled with external lightmaps which allow for much crisper shadows
• Added maps desertfactory (DM, TDM, MinstaGib), racetrack (Race) and made aggressor support Key Hunt
• New player sounds, announcer sounds/voices, textures, crosshairs, weapon models, effects and menu skins
• Added support for video capture to OggTheora
• Integrated the Havoc mod into the menu! Havoc servers use quite different physics and weapons, give it a try!
• Fixed a crash with ATI drivers on shutdown or vid_restart
• Fixed several problems with lagging gameplay/crashes/wrong display of effects
• Improved bots (teamworking, bunnyhopping, swimming, better way finding, support for ladders, less CPU usage, faster map loading)
• Better visual display of carried items (Strength, Shield, flags and keys)
• Better parental guidance support with cl_gentle and cl_nogibs
• Lots of tourney-related features (timeout/in, spectator-slots, allready, warmup mode, lockteams, unlockteams, movetoteam_red/blue/…, nospectators, records, cointoss)
• Added some effects customization options like cl_casings, cl_weaponpriority
• Many more map entities allowing for more dynamic maps
• Restructured and improved menu: demos menu and multiple campaigns are back, also added an advanced menu containing ALL settings of the game

For a more complete list of changes see: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=672474&group_id=81584

As usual, you can download the newest release from our download page.

If you are providing a mirror of the release, please notify us so we can add it to the official mirror list. For any comments, suggestions or questions, please refer to our forum or the FAQ.

Because of many major changes there is NO PATCH available.
To make sure nothing breaks, you should use a new directory to unzip Nexuiz 2.5!

If you use 2.5 and see a server with no gametype it’s an 2.4.2 server, don’t play on those. :)

Alientrap is also currently looking for new coders, modelers, mappers and people experienced with creating sound effects. If you feel like helping improve Nexuiz or Zymotic please contact the team via forum or IRC.

You can Download Nexuiz Here. To run Nexuiz, extract the files anywhere on your computer and run the executable. Try GLX first and if you experience problems, you hardware maybe better suited for the SDL version. The main difference between the two is the software libraries they are compiled for.

If you’d like to spread the word, it’s a good idea to share the Nexuiz 2.5 release on your facebook account. You can digg it here: http://digg.com/pc_games/Nexuiz_2_5_is_released

I present to you my first two pieces of work released under the creative commons, 100% XHTML/CSS valid resume templates.

Resume Template – Modern v1 by Tyler Mulligan

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Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).

To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.

Resume Template – Neo v1 by Tyler Mulligan

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Released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License you may freely use and modify this resume template as long as you leave in the credit to me in footer, don’t sell it and release it under the same or similar license (see the link for details).

To use it Download the zip from the Resume link in the footer, extract the files, edit them for your liking and information, upload them to your server and then upload the zip so others may easily download the template from your footer.

If you make any changes to these, I’d be glad if you told me. The XHTML is pretty solid but I was pretty conservative when it came to the CSS to keep the classic look and feel of a document.

Porting the application was easy… I just had to change a few variables. What I’m more concerned about is all the back links coming from my sites, I have to go through and change all those before google docks me for linking to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

Live and learn I guess. It boggles my mind… around the same time I renewed 5 domains I didn’t really care about. Everything happens for a reason though I guess, right?

The new version will be released shortly, I’ll be sure to let you all know when. Check the site for screenshots, videos and more details.

Here’s a sneak peak:

I’ve been busy with some design work the past few days, finishing up a few more entrecards and working close with clients to get a design that properly represents their business:

The ninjaz have been making some headway and we’re testing out a new host for ~5 game servers which will run NANL configs on. I go back to school in less than a week.

To give you an idea of the quality of my work, here are two cards I’ve designed for forum goers who took advantage of my free offer. There are 2 spots left… if you’re interested, act fast. Otherwise, it’ll cost you 400 Credits.

Congratulations to the rest of the winners and too readers uninterested in Entrecard, I have some more how-tos and lifehacks on the way!

I you’d like a check check out My Entrecard Page.

Happy New Years 2008!