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Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Tuesday August 11th, 2015 11:32am
by StratosVX
MichaelKruse wrote:I've finally managed to read through Baltar's Staff, and the only error I've found is that the quest notes for "O" on board 5 are missing - these aren't in the original files either, but I guess it was meant to say something along the lines of "This is the exit to the Town (board #2)."

Fixed.

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Thursday August 13th, 2015 12:42am
by drathe
StratosVX wrote:
drathe wrote:Phoenix and I had the Ramiah quest pack 95% complete. We even got Biff to do some new tiles for it. You can actually see the Ramiah tile in the background of some of the pics in this post:
viewtopic.php?f=191&t=1860&start=260#p35427

Would you by any chance still have the file for that tile? The one that is in the pack is nowhere near as nice as that one and I am not that artistic.

Yes. I'll see if I can upload the tiles Biff made to the gallery by the end of this week.
If I haven't posted here again by Sunday afternoon, post a reminder please.

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Sunday August 16th, 2015 9:29pm
by drathe
Added the Ramiah Statue and a few other tiles Biff made to update old Agin's Inn quests.

gallery/album.php?album_id=12

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Tuesday August 18th, 2015 8:45pm
by whitebeard
I finally created the Vector graphics for the Quest Book Parchment image.

In my adventures, I also discovered that the Mac default PDF viewer does not follow the PDF standard like just about every other PDF viewer and you cannot use alpha channel / gradients. Much the coolness that is the 5kb and 23kb image file replacements is lost on Mac users. You can view the image properly in Adobe PDF Viewer, but I do not recommend installing it, it is an absolutely terrible app on the Mac!

I recently switched back to Linux, so I'm quite happy with theses. Windows users will similarly have no issues.

Here is the Black and White version:
HQBannerBW.pdf


Here is the Color version with a gradient (solid color for mac users):
HQBanner.pdf


And here is my final attempt at a parchment texture without using any rasterizing (23kb):
HQBannerParchment.pdf



In conclusion, we may be better served by the ~230kb scan of the original. What do you think?

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Wednesday August 19th, 2015 10:07am
by StratosVX
I like these, with only one issue. Many of the quests I am converting have long intros. Very long. So I have to increase the size of the box by quite a bit. I can't do that with these without seriously distorting them and making the top and bottom borders very wide. Because I can't find a border for Pages that resembles this, I have been using just a plain rectangular border. It's boring, I know, but it looks better (in my opinion) than stretching something else way out. I do think these would be great for use in other quests where people can just edit their intros to fit into these though. What did you use to edit this? Also, when I pull these into Pages, the alpha channel is working properly. When I open these in Preview (the default PDF viewer), I am not seeing any difference in them than when I open them in Illustrator or Acrobat Pro. Maybe the Mac you were viewing them on had issues?

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Wednesday August 19th, 2015 5:50pm
by whitebeard
The Mac issue was documented... It was a 5 year old Mac Air, so I did not have the latest couple OSX versions (because I did not want to buy a new mac). Apparently they fixed the issue. Fantastic!

I stretch this image a bit for the typical range of quest intros with no noticeable issues. How do you fit the rest of the quest on one page? For extended intros I was going to do the Mentor Text page and another custom parts / rules page (in my HeroTeX implementation, but you can use my graphics).

The solution for stretching the image a lot is to cut the top and bottom out and only stretch the middle section. That should work great with no noticeable artefacts. Actually I can provide 4 images:

Boarder Top
Boarder Bottom
Boarder Sides
Parchment Fill

Will this work for you? Can you set up template constraints to allow this to happen automatically? Which image did you like?

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Wednesday August 19th, 2015 9:14pm
by StratosVX
HA! Fitting these on one page? Pretty much impossible. Seriously, some of the intros are half a page to a full page while the text notes can be several pages long. The one I'm working on now has nothing for an intro text, about half a page of special notes for the quest as a whole (before you get to the lettered notes), then letter 'A' is about a quarter of the page. The quest is almost two and a half pages long already and it doesn't look like I'm halfway through the text document.

I had used the black and white one to check the scaling issues when I was testing this out and that was the extent of the test that I did due to my lack of time this morning. However, I just imported the HQ Banner (the one with the simple gradient) into the current quest I'm working on and it looks odd with the gradient sloping off to the right. Any chance I can get that one with just a solid color fill for the color that you used on the left side of the gradient please?

As for using the individual images, I wouldn't worry about that too much. I'm working on the last of Dewayne Agin's quests now and his are the ones that have the really long intros and messages. (Don't get me wrong though, they look like they are pretty good quests. They are definitely in-depth.) After that, I doubt I'd encounter many that this would be an issue for.

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Wednesday August 19th, 2015 9:45pm
by whitebeard
Yes, the gradient would look weak if you pull it across an entire page. When you use it for HQ standard range of sizes, it looks sharp on the PC. It probably does not print too nice though.

I would have hoped that any expansion quests would follow the HQ design... E.G. The entire quest must fit on one page. I can easily fill pages upon pages with quest descriptions. The real challenge is capturing the essence of the quest in 3 to 4 lines of text AND fitting your quest notes in whatever is left. Quests which do not do this, should not be using the "default" graphics anyway.

The first quest I'm working on runs over one page in the notes, but I am avoiding this this by referring to an attached treasure table and the new monster (dragon) in attachments (rules addition page like any other expansion). If I needed a long intro, it would be a note from Mentor and the Quest intro would re-hash in 3-4 lines.

I will provide the requested image as soon as I can.

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Thursday August 20th, 2015 10:45am
by StratosVX
Awesome. Thank you sir. Definitely no rush on it.

Re: [Archived Quests]

PostPosted: Thursday August 20th, 2015 9:21pm
by leo
Thank you for doing all the work to put these quest together.