Thursday 30 October 2008

New Title Image

Last night I spent a few hours creating a new title image, as you can see at the top of the page.

Ok, so most of it is just BioWare’s logo for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I managed to find a high-resolution version of the image at VideoGaming247 and used that. Then I downloaded a Star Wars font from TypeNow.net and added the “Moon Over Endor” text.

I spent quite some time trying to get the text right. First in selecting the right characters (you’ll note that the two “R”s are different for example) and then trying to get the spacing right. I added a bevel similar to what the “Star Wars” text at the top has and then used masks and custom-made gradient fills to get the colors (though for the bevel I used an existing gradient in PSP). And finally a similar kind of brown smear behind the text. Though it doesn’t look exactly like the Star Wars text, it’s fairly close and I think it looks nice.

As I added the title image to the blog I also updated the background of the blog by using a starfield image I made a few weeks ago (combination of noise filters and brightness/contrast manipulation for the stars and some cloud filters for the nebula). The image was designed to show behind text, hence the stars aren’t too bright. Even so, I also added a partly transparent background behind the post text to set it apart a bit more.

If the background behind the text looks funky (like pure white I think it is) then you’re using a web browser that doesn’t support transparent png image files (i.e. an older version of Internet Explorer). If so I strongly suggest getting Firefox which is free and in almost every way superior to Internet explorer (IMHO).

Anyway, there you go. New title image. I hope you like it.

New SW:TOR Images

Over on the official forums Dexter posted a couple of new images; screenshots and some artwork.

Screenshots:

Artwork:

It might just be me, but the first thing I think when seeing that first screenshot is "I wonder if you can sit on those chairs".

[EDIT 20090425] Since the OnlineWelten images seemed to give trouble (most of them tended to be gone) I moved the images over to my own server. I also had to scale a couple of them down (by 50%) or they wouldn't work for some reason.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Star Wars: The Old Republic Links

Since BioWare announced their MMO last Tuesday there've been a host of articles across the Internet looking at various aspects of the game or just giving a general overview. I wanted to start off by posting a number of the links I've come across.

Official Site: http://www.swtor.com/

Live blogs of the announcement press event:
Articles at IGN:
Articles at GameSpot:
Articles at VideoGaming247; I'm not going to list all the articles, but there are a number of good ones at the link, including a video of the announcement press conference (that I've yet to watch since the audio is too soft to hear it here at work).

Articles at TenTonHammer:
Other articles:
Finally I also wanted to link an article from InformationWeek, which is an older article (from 2007) so BioWare is just talking about their MMO in general terms, but it's interesting because it's the only article I know that hints at a release date. Though the main content of the article is interesting as well.
Here's another one from 2008 stating "Fiscal 2010" for the BioWare MMO (note that they're wrong in when Fiscal 2010 is as it is somewhere between April 2009 and April 2010; they're off by a whole year so the title should be "BioWare Made MMO Coming in 2010"):
There you go, that'll do for now. I'll post more links as I run across them.

Welcome

Welcome to Moon Over Endor. This is a blog dedicated to Star Wars: The Old Republic by BioWare and (role)playing in general.

Since BioWare announced this MMO a week ago it's been on my mind a lot. So far I've always greatly enjoyed BioWare's games more than any other and generally enjoy playing MMOs as well, though usually only for a fairly brief time before the game gets tiresome. As such I'm quite excited about BioWare making an MMO, one in the Star Wars universe no less. However, I also do have a number of concerns that I hope to get into later.

The biggest thing to swallow will likely be that this won't be what Star Wars Galaxies was supposed to be, which is a shame. But maybe, just maybe, BioWare will manage to lift their MMO above other MMOs in the same way that they've lifted their single-player games above other single-player games.

And hence why I'm here and why I'm starting this blog.

So I bid you welcome; we're going to be in for a wild ride. :)