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It's time for the bigun... or should I say the big two?
This time is the big two gifts, and they really had to launch at the same time.
The gallery website and the Digimon Style Guide.
The gallery website for now will just have the style guide, but in the next few weeks we will be adding quite a bit to it. For now... enjoy the massive style guide.
The gallery software has been tweaked in various ways for what we needed (during testing we had two different full galleries up with different software.)
Lost and I have been working on the gallery for quite awhile to get it as close to what we wanted as possible (it really didn't want to have SVGs working properly despite supporting them.) And lost had to battle with the gallery when it decided SVGs shouldn't be clickable on a mobile device when you are on the gallery frontpage.
Various bits of the gallery simply didn't work the way we needed them to work (at one point even the logo would randomly vanish in some browsers if your mouse touched it...)
Lost would even randomly pass out late at night on his keyboard while he was working on it.
Despite a few people guessing that I was going to mock-delay it each night to put it up on the last night, I actually did intend to launch it the first night, and then the second night, but random oddities of differing degrees kept popping up.
On the frontpage of the gallery the first thing you will see is the 8 newest images. After that 8 images at random every time you visit. Below that is the meat of the gallery website, all the various albums.
We started with over 1,000 files from the Saban Digimon Style Guide (all of season 1 and early season 2) in an old version of EPS.
Theigno helped me with various scripts so that converting the files wouldn't take so long. Anything that was a vector image we converted to a modern SVG vector. If a file was a normal image inside of an EPS, we extracted the image data at it's native size (which varied from image to image) and saved it as a PNG.
Due to the paths still existing in the files that had normal images (rasters) we were also able to remove the white/black backgrounds for these images and replace them with a clean and clear alpha layer.
Vectors were put up in the gallery in two ways. We put them up as SVGs for people who want the proper vector images. They were also rendered out as 600dpi PNG files (probably overkill.)
We ended up with over 2,200 image files.
Until we know how stable the gallery will be we made a handful of changes. About 80 of the largest images (all over 5 megs and didn't have alpha layers) were converted to 85% JPG files (this by itself reduced the filesize of the final output style guide files by nearly 33%.) Due to issues with uploading the files in the end, 3 of the largest images were output at smaller resolutions (2 were 500dpi and 1 was 450dpi if I remember correctly.) We plan to replace these with larger files sooner rather than later.
I also made a significant upgrade to the rented server hardware that should be able to more than offset traffic to the gallery.
Thanks to customizations by lost there is a download button on each image page of the gallery so you can download the source PNG/JPG/SVG/etc.
2000+ files at day 1 will be hard to look through, especially for people who want to find images of specific things...
So...
For the style guide we created albums based on how they were stored on the original disk, but made them a bit more logical (Including Tentomon and Kabuterimon with Izzy, including character duo and trios with groups, etc.)
Also, after a few days of planning and making sure we were on the same page for tagging, I became quite ill. While ill, using the guidelines we had made, TMS set tags/keywords for nearly every image in the gallery (I believe I was still around to help, but I was sick enough that I don't quite remember). So they are fully searchable. And we made sure terms used alternates which means you should be able to search with the most common names for characters with multiple (as an example, Joe is searchable with not only Joe, but with the 4 common romanizations of his name from Japanese.)
A few images have descriptions to explain oddities or other things with them. We may or may not add more of these for the style guide. The vast majority of them will be 'this is an image of x' type things, so probably only for images that need some sort of explanation.
File names for the style guide are based on the original EPS file names. Raster_ or Vector_ is added as a prefix for the type of file it is, and some files have content appended to end if necessary.
I'm sure there are some keyword tags and other little issues we will need to fix as we notice them, but the site is good to go. As an example... there appears to be 8 files that aren't tagged with 'Style Guide', but we haven't tracked them down yet.
There is a link to the new gallery site at the top of this post, but here it is again just in case you missed it up above.
Previous threads about the style guide are here- Part Zero/Announcement, Part One, Part Two
Every once in awhile I plan to do a news article focusing on some part of the style guide for people who don't feel like browsing through thousands of images.
Hope everyone enjoys it, we all put in a ton of effort on this one. It's probably the single biggest project we've done, outside of rebuilding the forum on new software a few years ago. And the style guide and gallery actually took more time.
Let us know what you think.
Donations would be appreciated so we can continue to do lots of new stuff (and to help cover the now increased monthly server costs.)
This time is the big two gifts, and they really had to launch at the same time.
The gallery website and the Digimon Style Guide.
The gallery website for now will just have the style guide, but in the next few weeks we will be adding quite a bit to it. For now... enjoy the massive style guide.
The gallery software has been tweaked in various ways for what we needed (during testing we had two different full galleries up with different software.)
Lost and I have been working on the gallery for quite awhile to get it as close to what we wanted as possible (it really didn't want to have SVGs working properly despite supporting them.) And lost had to battle with the gallery when it decided SVGs shouldn't be clickable on a mobile device when you are on the gallery frontpage.
Various bits of the gallery simply didn't work the way we needed them to work (at one point even the logo would randomly vanish in some browsers if your mouse touched it...)
Lost would even randomly pass out late at night on his keyboard while he was working on it.
Despite a few people guessing that I was going to mock-delay it each night to put it up on the last night, I actually did intend to launch it the first night, and then the second night, but random oddities of differing degrees kept popping up.
On the frontpage of the gallery the first thing you will see is the 8 newest images. After that 8 images at random every time you visit. Below that is the meat of the gallery website, all the various albums.
We started with over 1,000 files from the Saban Digimon Style Guide (all of season 1 and early season 2) in an old version of EPS.
Theigno helped me with various scripts so that converting the files wouldn't take so long. Anything that was a vector image we converted to a modern SVG vector. If a file was a normal image inside of an EPS, we extracted the image data at it's native size (which varied from image to image) and saved it as a PNG.
Due to the paths still existing in the files that had normal images (rasters) we were also able to remove the white/black backgrounds for these images and replace them with a clean and clear alpha layer.
Vectors were put up in the gallery in two ways. We put them up as SVGs for people who want the proper vector images. They were also rendered out as 600dpi PNG files (probably overkill.)
We ended up with over 2,200 image files.
Until we know how stable the gallery will be we made a handful of changes. About 80 of the largest images (all over 5 megs and didn't have alpha layers) were converted to 85% JPG files (this by itself reduced the filesize of the final output style guide files by nearly 33%.) Due to issues with uploading the files in the end, 3 of the largest images were output at smaller resolutions (2 were 500dpi and 1 was 450dpi if I remember correctly.) We plan to replace these with larger files sooner rather than later.
I also made a significant upgrade to the rented server hardware that should be able to more than offset traffic to the gallery.
Thanks to customizations by lost there is a download button on each image page of the gallery so you can download the source PNG/JPG/SVG/etc.
2000+ files at day 1 will be hard to look through, especially for people who want to find images of specific things...
So...
For the style guide we created albums based on how they were stored on the original disk, but made them a bit more logical (Including Tentomon and Kabuterimon with Izzy, including character duo and trios with groups, etc.)
Also, after a few days of planning and making sure we were on the same page for tagging, I became quite ill. While ill, using the guidelines we had made, TMS set tags/keywords for nearly every image in the gallery (I believe I was still around to help, but I was sick enough that I don't quite remember). So they are fully searchable. And we made sure terms used alternates which means you should be able to search with the most common names for characters with multiple (as an example, Joe is searchable with not only Joe, but with the 4 common romanizations of his name from Japanese.)
A few images have descriptions to explain oddities or other things with them. We may or may not add more of these for the style guide. The vast majority of them will be 'this is an image of x' type things, so probably only for images that need some sort of explanation.
File names for the style guide are based on the original EPS file names. Raster_ or Vector_ is added as a prefix for the type of file it is, and some files have content appended to end if necessary.
I'm sure there are some keyword tags and other little issues we will need to fix as we notice them, but the site is good to go. As an example... there appears to be 8 files that aren't tagged with 'Style Guide', but we haven't tracked them down yet.
There is a link to the new gallery site at the top of this post, but here it is again just in case you missed it up above.
Previous threads about the style guide are here- Part Zero/Announcement, Part One, Part Two
Every once in awhile I plan to do a news article focusing on some part of the style guide for people who don't feel like browsing through thousands of images.
Hope everyone enjoys it, we all put in a ton of effort on this one. It's probably the single biggest project we've done, outside of rebuilding the forum on new software a few years ago. And the style guide and gallery actually took more time.
Let us know what you think.
Donations would be appreciated so we can continue to do lots of new stuff (and to help cover the now increased monthly server costs.)
