the white drew carey

I, for one, like Samurai Jack. I think it's a fun show. Either way you look at it, though, $30 for a 13 episode set isn't something to scoff at.

A little progress update. I've fixed the boarder tiles, and also fiddled with the VF's. I think they look much better. I'm still working on blending the Moon tiles so that they go together a little better. Anyhow...

GianS, you silly goose!!! Look at the pinned thread at the top of this very forum.

Roycommi- I'm not sure if this is a Mac-specific problem, but while trying Sample #5, after moving around a bit, it starts to fall apart. The map starts showing up outside of the border and sections of tile simply disappear.

I disagree. I've always envisioned Olympus as being bright and colorful, but through a lot of nature, greenery, parks and whatnot. It seemed to me that the Olympus shown here is simply another large congested city.

I think it's at least a month old. The movie site has been up for a while. Although I strongly disagree with, once again, the alteration of character designs, from what the trailers show, it looks to be one of the best CGI movies with characters done in a cel-shading style.

Isn't it, though?

There was an amazing Gundam site called Gundam Project, but it shut down a while ago. Nothing even close to it has arisen in it's place.

I tried downloading the .rar file here at home but it doesn't seem to work on my mac. I should still have the images on my comp at work, so I'll see if I can grab them from there.

I'll fix the border tiles. Should I choose which lights blink and which stay on? I was thinking of making the blinkers red, and the regular ones look like windows, yellowish white. I can't view Example 4 here at work, I'll have to wait until I get home.

No, but he sure as hell hogs all of the guacamole.

Wes with wings? What a terribly frightening thought... Seriously, congrats!!!

72 x 72 is fine Is that right? I thought the character picutres in the status bar at the bottom of the screen were larger than the map tiles. See here: They look to be about twice as high and about 1.5-1.75 times as wide as the map tiles.

Not bad. I'm not really a fan of posterized images, though. I'd rather that the colors and tones were reduced.

How big do we want this latest batch of tiles to be? All of the ones I've done so far are saved as 72x72 pixels on my computer, but can easily be coverted down to the 48x48 you require. Also, I'm going to fiddle with the coloring and shading of the playing pieces. The smaller they get, the less clear the image is. I think if I hold back on the shading and what not, and keep it very basic, it'll look much clearer in the smaller modes. For the recent batch (status board images?), I'll do a bit more in the shading and detailing area. To make them look a bit better. Does anyone know of a decent, free, flash animator for Mac? That' ll really help me figure out the animation sequences before I finalize them. I plan on trying a full conversion set from Fighter to GERWALK to Battroid and seeing how that works.

I would still be fairly close to where I am now. After RT aired I had almost completely forgotten about it. But a year later a Japanese-American family moved in down the street and their two sons were big anime fans. They introduced me to the originals. Not the ones we saw on morning cartoons back then. You're argument is invalid. I don't owe Carl Macek one bit of gratitude. The one major thing he did for anime was to get Akira in an extremely limited, yet widely-publicized theatrical release. But by that point I was already watching more accurately translated fan-dubs, so that didn't mean much to me either.

Astro Boy, Speed Racer, StarBlazers and Battle of the Planets got me into anime. Robotech was just one of a long stream of anime shows that aired once in my area in a 6:00am timeslot (perfect for kiddies getting ready for school) and were never seen again afterwards.

Ditto that, Wes. Not exactly false, but not exactly true. HG had grabbed rights to many anime series in the hopes of marketing them and generating a profit. Macek suggled his way into HG even though he, admittedly, only had a casual interest in anime, and knew of Macross itself through friends. True, his original intent was to put Macross out in a dub dtraight to video, but Revell, as we all know, already was marketing the Robotech model line, many of the kits were comprised of Macross kits. It's true that Robotech introduced many people to anime, but it, and Macek, defintely were not as influental as this honorific makes them out to be. After all that, Carl Macek's one glowing credit was Streamline's release of Akira. So that's 1 for 2. Not really a great track record in my opinion. I like how it points out his important role with RT: The Movie, even though the man himself says he was completely against the idea and has personally stated that he wishes people would forget it. Macek isn't the villain many make him out to be, but then again, he definitely isn't the hero many want him to be either.

Here are some samples of the base buildings. I've made two sets, one with lights on, and one with lights off. If needed, and if it doesn't require too much computing power, the lights can be animated to blink. On... and off.

Here's a little update, as usual the original is on the left, new is on the right: The first is, of course, the re-drawn and refined VF-1S Player piece. The second is the border tile. Third is a moon surface tile. The fourth is a pic of those moon tiles together. The fifth and final is another moon tile. The moon surface tiles are simple the original tiles mixed with the blur tool. Right now I'm working on a couple of the bases to get a feel for them. It's going pretty quickly. The background tiles are really fast to finish. I'll keep you updated as things progress.

BTW- What's the limit on colors we can use?

There are basically three varieties of standard valks, The "hero" one, a high level NPC version that is blue like Max's, and the tan cannon fodder model for low level NPCs. All the "hero" valkyries sport Hikaru's paint scheme. As the Characters gain XP from kills and missions completion, they will promote to Super valkyrie and on and on to Strike Sirens. Level 1 primarilly has just the ones in the pack I uploaded. If you can create a scheme that has interchangable colors, I dont think it would be hard to give each "hero" a seperate color. Yeah, I'll generate a "blank" that can be adapted for the heroes. BTW- Which Max scheme? TV -1A, TV -1J or movie -1A? p.s.- Leave that .zip link up for a bit. I DL'ed it here at work, but have to re-DL it on my computer at home. Do you want me to also work on the graphics for the Status window on the bottom, or should we just stick with the grid squares for now? I can re-draw the characters and mecha seen in those windows just as they are in the original, but cleaner looking.

Roycommi- I noticed that the VF from Map 1 is sporting Hikaru-type colors. Is that the only VF on the map, or is there more? It won't be hard at all to do multiple VF's including Cannon Fodders (and other colors), but I'm not sure if using different images for the playing pieces would screw up the running of the game.

Roycommi- I'll DL the .zip file when I get home and fiddle around to see what I can do.

Batman: "I haven't. Plus, this should be in the Other Anime and Sci Fi forum."