Joining the club (avatar/sig related)...

Makes me wish you could add motion to "Kitty."

rockefeller wrote:Does this rule still apply for avatars?

Only one image can be displayed at a time, its width can be no greater than 150 pixels, the height no greater than 150 pixels, and the file size no more than 21 KB.

I ask because despite the fact that in the past I've had to adhere to the rules of the forum, I noticed the Cub's avatar is roughly 463Kb - have the rules changed since the last site-update?

Bests, Rockefeller

That rule applies to avatars that are uploaded to the server. If you link to an external image, it can be as large (filesize-wise) as you like.

James LeMosy wrote: That rule applies to avatars that are uploaded to the server. If you link to an external image, it can be as large (filesize-wise) as you like.

Exactly as I interpreted it.

I figure if I want to use something so bandwidth intensive I would host it on my own server, on not James'

-Cub. =o)

Mr. Thomas Malloy wrote:After fourteen hours of staring, and lots of beer consumed ... I have come to the conclusion that they must be running in a circle on some kind of spacestation like the moonchild ... Their A.I. was fried somehow, and they keep going in circles. Only ... you'd think the background would change. So then I thought, maybe they're running a constant treadmill, but then I was like "The wall behind them keeps moving" ... so I gave up.

No, I think they're on a treadmill and they're moving the wall continuously. But then you'd expect that they'd run out of wall at some point. Nobody has that much wall just lying around. So I thought that maybe they just have a huge amount of wall, but not infinite, and they've connected the beginning and end of it, like you'd do with a fax machine prank. Or maybe they're in front of a blue screen running on a treadmill and they have this system of lights above their heads moving around to make it seem realistic. I must investigate further.

Yeah possibly a treadmill with a roll of wall wrapped round a sort of vertical treadmill (like they do for films where they wrap a screen around two rollers and have them roll round and round). If you look at alot of old films or whatever when they're in a car and have road going behind them, its quite obvious they used a screen.

How are these things powered, anyway? They have to run out of juice at some point, don't they? The question is, will it take days, months or... years?

If I remember right, the treadmill screen thing in All Dogs Go To Heaven was ran by a spectacled dog on a bike (could be wrong though its been awhile sicne I saw it). Could be a robotic spectacled dog off screen on a bike.

Okay, but what powers the off-screen spectacled robotic dog...?

The special "Nuts and Bolts" edition of Alpo?

Once again a part of the new avatar club. Had fun with this one. Lots of strange looks from bystanders filming this one. However I think it turned out alright. There's a surprising amount of editing and effects put into this stupid Avatar. Plus my buddy kept throwing rocks at me as I walked by. Ah, good times.

Electron Stu wrote:Once again a part of the new avatar club. Had fun with this one. Lots of strange looks from bystanders filming this one. However I think it turned out alright. There's a surprising amount of editing and effects put into this stupid Avatar. Plus my buddy kept throwing rocks at me as I walked by. Ah, good times.

Was worth it, its good work, looks very nifty.
Haha, friends, always there to lend a hand (or a rock).

Ah you graphics designer types... never a care in the world about how large the result is. 1.5 MB, oh man. I bet with compression and some tricks it could be condensed to about 300kb!

The end result is great, though.

Actually it's funny you mention that. Do you know how long it took me to get it down to that specific size? I must have spent about 2 hours just messing with the ratios. Keep in mind the amount of frames and resolution of the picture. I mean it's coming from a HD camera cut together in Adobe Premiere and taken straight off the timeline. I really have no idea if it is even possible to be made smaller at that quality. I am not a web guy so maybe someone else can teach me a trick to getting it smaller.

I'm not an expert, but I know there exist some very sophisticated ways to shrink stuff like this. After all, most of the frames resemble each other. I've read about some of the things they do in the game development industry to get everything on one DVD and you can manipulate images so that they compress better without noticable loss or they use custom algorithms for the compression most of the times, I think. It's an entire field of expertise on its own.

That said, I remember when 300KB was a huge file back when we used 2400 baud modems.