Fallout Resolution

Just so we are all on the same page, the title of the post refers to the image quality of my game.  Mind you, it does sound like the title of a new game or storyline...

So after a few attempts to find my FO3 GOTY edition in my rather packed storage unit, I finally found them on Saturday.  Now I can play around with the image quality settings of the game, hoping to improve it for The Phoenix Imperative.  I have tried changing the settings before, and all I got was CTDs.  I thought I would give it a go again and see what happened.

The first thing I changed, was setting the view to "window mode".  I thought that having a smaller area for the graphic card to render game resources in would help avoid any more crashes.  Next was increasing the quality to "ultra" and crossing my fingers as I started the game.

Well slap me silly!  No crashing!  And things seemed to be much better looking to my impaired vision (I'm near-sighted).  But hey, this could just be my hopeful imagination playing tricks on me, so I started messing around some more with various setting combinations and screen sizes.

Here are four screens I took while messing around in a new game I started.  I thought I would explore the Outcast alternative start option in FWE.

Here are two images of Amy Wong:

And two of Clover using Chrome Hamster's companion mod:

What stood out the most to me was the detail of the armours that each of these ladies (and I use the term very loosely in regards to Clover) is wearing.  In the year that I have been playing this game, I have never had the textures come through so well on my laptop.  This alone made me quite happy.  The quality of the faces is also a marked improvement.

Now, before any of you start thinking that this level of quality still isn't the best, I remind you that my laptop's graphics card is an NVIDIA Geo Go 7600: its at least a year older that the FO3 game.  This is about as good as it is going to get for me without getting a new computer system.

The next thing I was wondering about, was how will this quality affect one of the editting steps I do.  I loaded all four of these shots into my main editor and ran them through the enhancement filter.  One of the images of Amy was verging on being washed out.  The detail of her face began to disappear.  The other three shots had negligable levels of change, so I left all four of them unenhanced.  It looks like the improving of the graphic quality has practiacally eliminated the need for me to run the individual screen shots through the enhancement filter.  This is good, since that cuts down on the time required to edit the project as a whole.

WTF?

Ok, after the original posting of Episode one on the FO3 Nexus Image Share, I posted the re-edited version again on the Nexus, as well as here on Comicville, f3Underground, MegaPix and DeviantArt.  After receiving notification that there was a problem with the posting here on Comicville (thank you Herculine and Nos), I checked all the postings for problems.  Initially, the one here turned out to be extremely undersized and unreadable and the posting on MegaPix was blurry enough to render it useless as well.  Postings on DeviantArt and the Underground turned out to be of the same quality as the original on my hard drive.  A second look at the MegaPix posting resulted in it being of acceptable quality, as long as I remembered to click the "original size" option in the size drop down menu, duh.

So, whatever went wrong is isolated to the Comicville upload only.  That is both a relief and an annoyance, but will reduce upload time by eliminating one upload out of five.  From now on, I will just post a direct link to a completed episode, but single screens will continue to be direct postings.

So, for those of you that depend upon Comicville to view my work, I provide you with this link:
Episode One: Someone's at the door

Remember to click on the "Choose size" drop down menu and choose "original size", otherwise you are stuck with the blurry version.

It Has Begun

Alright folks, your patience (or lack there of) has paid off.  The first episode of The Phoenix Imperative has arrived!  And this happened after more hours, screw-ups and cursing than I cared for.

The episode was originally posted on the FO3 Nexus Image Share earlier today, and much to my dismay, the comic was a mess visually.  I forced myself to get it completed before I headed off to bed Friday night/Saturday morning.  By the time I was finished, I had been awake for around 20 hours.  This left me too tired to notice the mistakes I made in editing, and too tired to properly revue the completed work before I uploaded it.  It was still met with much enthusiasm, to my delight, but I was not happy with it being as broken as it was.

I reviewed the strip itself and went over my editing process in my head and found out where I messed up.  Thankfully, I still had the comic-edited versions of the stills, so I loaded them back in the editor, fixed there sizing, re-stacked them and then compressed the whole strip by 15%.  I think that it looks rather good now, given the limits of my graphics card.  What do you think of it?

Research

I believe that there are a number of things that make a good, or even great story teller.  First off, you need an imagination, and a good one at that.  If you can't be creative within your chosen frame work, then you're doomed right from the start.  Writer's block won't be a hurdle to get over, it will be a mountain.  Secondly, you need to do research.  It doesn't matter if you are writing fact or fiction, in a historical setting or something of your own making.  You need to know what you are talking about.  For instance, "techno babble" sounds interesting and may get you past the average reader, but if someone educated about your chosen topic is reading your work, it probably won't go over very well.  One thing you don't want is a reputation for pulling words out of your ass and throwing them on paper.

I bring this up because I realized yesterday that I really didn't know all that much about the Fallout universe.  I forget exactly what it was specifically I was curious about, but I headed off to The Vault-Fallout Wiki to look it up.  The next thing I know, I'm three hours into reading up on the entire Fallout mythos.

My first exposure to Fallout was with Fallout 2, and my time there didn't last very long before I was exposed to Fallout 3.  I didn't know that Harold was in the first Fallout game, nor was I aware that some of the areas in Fallout 2 were originally in Fallout.  Now I know.  I also learned a great deal about what is considered canon/lore and what is not.  My digging around in things not cannon turned up a rather interesting co-incidence: some of my own lore-unfriendly story elements bare a striking resemblance to elements that were planned for Interplay's Fallout: Van Buren.  If you happen to be familiar with that story line, you will recognize these elements once they appear in The Phoenix Imperative.  Having learned this, I think my lore-unfriendliness might not be as far off the mark as I originally thought.

Anyway, enough yakkin' for now.  I wish to present to you the second teaser for The Phoenix Imperative :)