Guild of Writers

We've seen lots of people donate to Cyan Worlds, and while that's important - I've done that myself recently, a little - I get the feeling that the GoW members could get more actual content made than Cyan Worlds could, per dollar invested.

So that's the question I'm going to pose to the fans here. If I were to invest in your (collective) productions, and I had a few dozen dollars with which to do so, where would it be most effectively invested?

Training materials? Software? What could I give you that would help you to make better ages? What do you need/want for your world development projects?

In what ways could ordinary fans - including fans with no art or technical skills but with some amount of money, time, and social influence - efficiently support the work the Guild of Writers is doing?

We use a lot of free tools right now (obviously). Here are a few things money might be useful for at some point:

• Paid-for texture packs for artists to use--of course there are lots of free textures out there, but there are also some beautiful and quite reasonably-priced packs that might be worth investing in for a particular Age.
• Bandwidth/hardware costs of running a testing server, if we are able to do so in the future
• Um, I thought this list would be longer, but that's all I can think of...

Unlike Cyan we don't need much money to work. We mostly need time and motivation. You can't really buy time, and you need a lot of money to buy motivation.
A server might definitely be useful in the future, but that future is probably a bit far away.

Paid-for texture packs for artists to use--of course there are lots of free textures out there, but there are also some beautiful and quite reasonably-priced packs that might be worth investing in for a particular Age.

Oh.. that's a good idea. Something I haven't investigated in a while.. *Googles 'textures CD*

Okay, what texture packs would you suggest as good value, and who (in the fanbase) would like them?

I'm fine with the idea of buying a few low-priced texture packs for members of the GoW.

So if you guys can come up in a line and say, I'm working on ___________ age, and I need ___________ texture pack, could you buy it for me? I'll definitely consider your requests.

The only thing that bothers me about that, though, is that each texture pack would only go to one GoW member.

I think it'd also be good to assemble a group resource - that is, textures free to everyone in the fanbase.

I have a couple of seamless texture packs I made myself, and I think I'll try to get them all into Uru-usable proportions (256X256, 512X512, etc) and post them for free for you all to use (if you find any of them useful, that is)
They include a lot of organic surfaces.

If anyone else wants to submit textures and post them in this thread - textures you made, that is, not someone else's - you can do so too.

I'll post my personal collection of textures tomorrow; today is something of a problem - I'm very busy preparing for a job interview with a local game studio.

Anyway, if anyone wants to suggest a texture collection they'd like to have, I'll see what I can do, but don't expect me to be able to respond immediately.

Speaking personally, the best investment I ever made in Age creation was the copy of "Blender for Dummies." It costs $20.00 new on Amazon.com and it has truly accelerated my progress in the Art. No more digging through out-of-date, incomplete, unfriendly tutorials on the internet--this book has all the information, complete, in one place, in a clear, user friendly format. Another book I recommend is "3D Game Textures," which teaches you how to build textures in Photoshop. (Many of the techniques are applicable to Photoshop Elements) Used, it costs $10.00 on Amazon. However, perhaps a book on how to use GIMP would be money better spent? Anyway, "Blender for Dummies" and "3D Game Textures" are two books that I wish every new Age creator had.

http://www.amazon.com/Blender-Dummies-Jason-van-Gumster/dp/0470400188/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267152159&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/3D-Game-Textures-Professional-Photoshop/dp/0240807685

@matthorn,
a texture database certainly is very usefull! There are many databasesaround, but still it remains difficult to find the right one.
Often making them yourself is quicker then endless searching.

@ jennifer,
thx for pointing to these books.
I agree with you that the book "blender for dummies" is not dumb at all, it was a great help for me while learning Blender.
I am very interested in the second book which seems to be exactly where i was looking for!
This will be a great help to grow to more a professional "in game" look .

Glad to help. Just fyi, there's a second edition of that book out now. It's a lot more expensive, so I linked to the first edition. I figure it probably doesn't matter which one you get, since Uru's an older game anyway. (Then again, I haven't looked at the 2nd edition book yet...) The "3D Game Texturing" book really helped me get over my intimidation as regards texturing. Here's one I've been experimenting with recently... The leaf motif needs to be shrunk down and redone as regards the style of vector lines I designed it with (so that it looks more like it was carved into stone) but the algae scum and base rock texture turned out well. I still want to try to get more scum into stone pattern. This texture was completely made from scratch from pictures I took or drew. I learned how to make it, and how to evaluate how well it will work as a texture, from reading "3D Game Texturing." So yeah, it's a great book.

Do you think it would be a good idea to have a community funding drive in order for a bunch of newbies to get "Blender for Dummies" books all at the same time? The way I'm imagining it, once some number of interested newbies signed up (say 15), the call would go out to the community to sponsor books for them. Once the funding goal was reached, they'd all get their books at the same time and have a thread or subforum for working through the book together. Even if only a third or so actually got to the point of making high-quality Uru ages, I think it'd be a pretty good return on investment...

Exactly what I was thinking.

Buying reference materials, resources, etc, for the fanbase would produce a great return on investment in terms of worlds created.

I have more time now for this (sort of) and will post the textures in a few hours (once I've converted them all to the right resolutions.)
That'll be tonight.

Tommorrow we'll talk about gifting Amazon.com books - I'm willing to do that for a few of you.