Arryn's Dominions 2 site news

[Norfleet]

Oh, there it is. yaaay!

[Arryn]

I've just put up on my site the mod "Unwise's & V'ger's Flags v0.1", which I highly recommend to everyone.

You'll be able to see screenshots of the new flags when I post turn #38 of my AAR later this morning.

[Arryn]

Unwise's & V'ger's Flags v0.11 is on my site.

Changes from v0.10 are:

• now uses a subdirectory for all .tga files.
• includes a re-done flag icon (by V'ger) of the one I made for the Ashikaga mod.

I have also updated the Ashikaga mod .zip file on my site with this re-done flag icon. It is the only difference between the Ashikaga archive on my site and that on IW's site.

[Vger]

Hi,

Hey Arryn, I noticed that you were able to change over and play a current game using the new flags. Is that correct? I'm curious as to how you managed this. I wasn't able to get my flags to come up unless I started a new game, so I've been stuck playing my current game with the old flags. (Argh.)

BTW, Unwise, wherever you are, I hope you don't object to my modifications of your flags. You did a fine job and I wanted you to know I appreciated it.


Thanks,
V'ger gone

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Vger:
Hey Arryn, I noticed that you were able to change over and play a current game using the new flags. Is that correct? I'm curious as to how you managed this.

That's because I manually overwrote the flags in my mod directory that were from the original Unwise mod. My old games don't see your new .dm file, but they do see Unwise's old one. In your case, if your old games weren't using the Unwise (v0.02) mod, then you're out of luck.

I just have one very mild request. If you ever do do anything more to the flags. Tone down the radioactive green of Man? Make it more of a rich or deep green would be my suggestion. The color matching on that particular shield makes my eyes hurt. Though others may like it.

[Arryn]

While on that subject, the Mictlan flag has insufficient contrast between the symbol and the background. IOW, it sort of blurs together. The R'leyh flag has a similar problem on the lower half where it becomes hard to see the symbol. Dark blue bordering a thin white spike against a slightly-less-dark blue is tough to resolve.

All the flags look great at close-in zoom, but if you zoom out to see the whole map the symbols tend to just fade against their backgrounds.

Finally, can you make the symbol for Vanheim slightly less bright? It's not "radioactive", but that color against that background does cause eyestrain.

TIA.

[Vger]

Hi,

Well, I'm just stuck then. I started that game before Unwise came out with his flags.

As to the feedback,

Thanks for the suggestions. Since I haven't been playing with it, I haven't seen these problems, but looking at the screenshot from Arryn's AAR, I can see that I need to adjust some of the flags so that they show up better when zoomed out.

When I created them I tried to make sure they looked decent at normal size, but didn't think about them being zoomed out.

Sad thing is I'll have to recreate them, since I didn't save them as PSP files but as TGAs. Ugh.

One of the things I was trying to do was to stay truer to the original colors of those nations, which is part of what causes problems when they're zoomed out. R'lyeh is one of the nations that suffers from this.


Vaya con carnage,
V'ger gone

[Vger]

Hi,

I decided to post again rather than edit to make sure y'all would see this. I redid some of the flags and just sent them over to Arryn.

The flags I remade are: Arco, Mictlan, Vanheim, R'lyeh and Man. (I'm keeping the Man I did in the mod I'm using, I LIKE the radioactive glow. )

I tried to make Arco and R'lyeh have more contrast.

Man I made less radioactive.

Vanheim: I made the shield lighter so that there was more separation between the shield color and the symbol.

Mictlan: I changed the fist to make it stand out better against the shield. The ghost affect I had on it looked good, I thought, but not at the sizes it's actually being used at. This one looks better, I think and is easier to see.

Unfortunately, there is only so much I can do with the fist symbol. It's just hard to make it clear (without doing something really lame, like plain black and white) at half its size.


Hope y'all approve of the changes,
V'ger gone

[Arryn]

Unwise's & V'ger's Flags v1.0 is on my site. It incorporates the 5 revised flags that V'ger sent me.

Vanheim is much easier on the eyes now, as is Man. R'leyh is improved, but only slightly, and probably as good as it can get. Thanks, V'ger!