Wing Commander Chronicles ... first page

Highball

Spaceman
As I first posted in this thread, I am writing a chronicle, of sorts, of my re-acquaintance with Wing Commander as an adult, after having first played it as a kid in the early 90s. I plan to write a page of material with photos, commentary, comparisons (childhood to adult) and such for each of the WC games I have played. This is just a project I wanted to do so that I could look back on it after awhile as a story or part of my life I could reflect on. Anyway, I have finally managed to finish the first page, and get it to the point where it is the way I like it. Please feel free to take a gander.

Even if you read it in the previous thread, it has undergone several changes since then. I have added lots of new pictures and text, and revised some pre-existing text. It's worth a peek to see what I've added. I will post again here when I have the next page worth of material up and running.

Chronicles of a Wing Commander

I welcome any opinions or commentary, negative or positive. Thanks!
 
Great project! It's every much like the Community Replay we did 2 years ago. (Which actually might not be a bad idea to start back up this summer....)hmmm......
 
I can officially say "HOLY COW," now that I am done with the Secret Missions 2 page. Over 100 screen shots and several hours later, I might add. The total number of new screen caps on that page is 104, which is close to 1.75 times the amount I took for the first two pages combined. You can check it out here:

Http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/tuck/sm2.html

I also changed it up a little bit at the beginning, re-naming the whole thing "The Wing Commander Project" and adding an "intro" page, which includes new text and can be seen here:

Http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/tuck/wcintro.html
 
Looks good! I'd still recommend gifs for the pictures. Both smaller file size and more crisp accurate pictures (they will be pixel-perfect recreations rather than color-blured jpgs).
 
It's funny, I tried GIF files, and paint.net makes them look fuzzy. Maybe I'll try some GIFs here soon, but I don't really want to go through the work of re-doing all those other ones, heh. When I am done with the whole thing, I will go back and re-do them just to clean things up a bit. I just got done moving, and I haven't gotten everything set up yet, so progress on the WC2 page might be slow going for a little bit.
 
It looks like Paint.NET automatically dithers when saving to GIFs - I had a quick look around, but I didn't see anything to control this behaviour. GIMP will give you the ability to cleanly save 256-colour images, but it is rather daunting if you're unfamiliar with it and I'll grant it's probably overkill for just saving images.
 
Probably, GIMP really seemed to me to be like a free Photoshop-like software with somewhat different commands used to complete the same actions.

Although, these are more initial impressions since I haven't used either program in-depth.

A quick search however tells me that there is no built-in patch editing, but there are plenty of 'fan'-made mods/add-ons that can be added to allow for such conversions.
 
Yes, my understanding is GIMP is meant to be a free alternative to Photoshop, but not a clone - it is its own piece of software.

I haven't really needed to do batch conversions before, though, so I don't know if it's possible to do so in GIMP.
 
I have found that .PNG files are working great for me. No more garbled .JPEGs. I am going to go ahead and put the progress of the WC2 page on hold so I can go through and re-do all the screen caps I took in .PNG form, and also make the sizes of 2x2 and 4x4 images the same. I have done some work on the WC1 page, but I had 11 teeth pulled today, and I am pretty doped up on Loratab by this point in the evening, so I think it is comic books and then bed time.
 
They had to go. The top 6 front teeth were very unseemly and full of cavities. Non-savable. Two of them had just broken off at different points in my life, and one was very close to breaking off - it could've gone at any time. I had two molars on top (one on each side) that gave me daily pain, so they had to go. Same story with two wisdom teeth on the bottom (one on each side), so they had to go, too. They gave me a "flipper," which is replacement teeth for my front 6, so I can smile again, and after my gums heal, they will give me a permanent partial. They gave me a prescription for Loratab, so whenever I am in pain, I take one of those but it tends to make me kind of loopy. I have been sleeping a lot. Thanks for your concern. :)
 
There. Finally got everything on the first page converted to .PNG files, except for the chalkboard, which was taken before I transferred my character over to Secret Missions, and is thus unchangeable without re-playing the entire game. I also managed to tighten up the cast photos to make them look more uniform. Now, it's bed time before I pass out from pain meds and wake up with a serious case of "keyboard face." :eek:
 
Cool! PNGs are heavy on the file size, but certainly about as high quality as you're going to get for something like this.

Hope the mouth heals fast!
 
Uh, no, Chris. PNGs are more often than not more efficient than GIFs in terms of file sizes. That is, if the PNG is in the same 8-bit format as GIF. If you're trying to save it as a 24-bit colour image, then yeah, the PNG will be far more bloated than the equivalent GIF. :)

It's why I always convert GIFs to PNGs in my personal collections.
 
The .PNG files I've been using have not been abnormally huge; they are less than 500kb so far, I think.

I'm pleased to say that I've finally converted the Secret Missions page. I have also tweaked both pages so far to get rid of those annoying blue lines that were on the sides of the images, which are from me taking the screen grabs while DosBox is not on full screen. For whatever reason, I can't take screen caps when it's on full screen, so I have to take them in the smaller window. I've edited a lot of caps so that annoying blue line is gone.

All the images I've redone so far look so much cleaner and crisper than they did before. I even added a couple of new screen shots to SM1 and re-did some of the text. As much as I wasn't looking forward to the workload of converting all the caps to .PNG, I have to say that I am pleased with the results so far. I am actually looking forward to re-doing all the stuff on the SM2 page, because looking at it from this perspective, the whole page looks so hodge podge, and the images are crap. I will feel a lot better once that all is done.

But for now .... Bedtime!

PS: Thanks for the well wishes, fellas. I am doing better day by day. Hopefully, I will be able to get some before and after pictures up.
 
Did you mean 50 KiB each? Or 500 KiB in total?

Either way, crispy pictures taste better. :)

Again, hope your recovery continues.
 
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