Backup! Backup! Backup! Always remember to backup!

So part of my thing is making covers, and I spend a lot of time setting these up and "photographing" them. Then editing the images to "yellow" them and give them a bit of a painted look.
To do this, I make a non-functional mod that has all the characters. Well around a month ago, Skyrim was starting to run slow. So I decided to essentially remove everything and reinstall it, as I couldn't be bothered to go through the script folders and meshes and textures etc, and do it that way.
Come to a few days ago, when I realised that I had deleted the 'mod' I used to make the covers. Of course by this time it was long gone, and I checked all the storage devices I backup my stories on. Turns out that I hadn't backed it up.
Re-making the characters from scratch wasn't something I was looking forward too. While the first book "Old Wounds" didn't show any faces, the second cover showed Valerie, and the cover for the third book had already been made (And I didn't want to have to remake it)
Anyway, in making new faces, I'm quite satisfied at how close I was able to get. I also "enhanced" the faces using a HD texture from the nexus and a modified custom normal-map, to give them that extra nudge away from that "vanilla" look.
Anyway, here are some pics of a select few characters.

 

Valerie uses elements from the "femaleold" normal map texture and dropped parts in as a new layer, making them almost transparent before merging them into the layer, giving a slight wrinkled look. Val also has elements from the Redguard (Nose and cheeks I think) and Breton (eyes and forehead)

Rontag uses elements from all over the place, including wrinkles from both maleold and femaleold. he has an Altmer nose.

Magoza was the hardest to do. I had to make her young, while having her look both Orcy and Altmery at the same time. her skin colour is custom, and is closer to yellow, than normal Orc skin-tones. Her normal map I found on the nexus (can't remember where now, I think it was from one of those mods that make the women look freakishly young. Took the Normal map and deleted the file :P[sorry to the original maker of the NM]) I then modified that texture adding in an Orc brow and more Altmer-like features around the eyes.

Tam uses dark elf elements for wrinkles as well as the female old map and some Breton.

Meratur uses Altmer, Breton and Redguard normal maps all skillfully crafted together.

Normal maps for anyone reading who doesn't know, is essentially a texture that tells the engine to give fake shadows/lighting/bumps to an object. It enables an object to have more detail and make it look more 3d. The illusion is often shattered though. For example: looking across a stone wall from along it's edge. It's clear that the stones are not "bumpy" but are flat.

What I aimed to do here was to make them look "real" and not like supermodels. (and yes Rontag is supposed to be tanned. He spent five years in Hammerfell. At somepoint I will make a small correction to Old Wounds mentioning his darker skin due to being in the desert for so long.)

I've backed all of this up :)
JG

Tales of the Bold and the Brave to be Renamed.

The title of my Elder Scrolls fan fic series has been bugging me for quite some time. "Tales of the Bold and the Brave" is a long and clumsy title for a series, and I think sounds a little dumb to be honest.

As the idea of this series is a long one, and I have a lot of ideas about it in the future, I've decided to re-brand it as "An Elder Scrolls Saga" (I went through several title ideas, and this one I think this one is simple and to the point.)

"Tales of the Bold and the Brave" to me, always sounded like a title you'd give to a compilation of short stories, with different characters. Perhaps I will use this title again, for a series of short ES stories, that do not have enough material for a proper novel length story. Or perhaps this title will fade into distant memory. Who knows.

Here is what the cover will look like under the new title /\
I feel it's less cluttered than before, and I prefer it . I have no idea if this will help with views, but it will help put that gripe about the title out of my mind.

JG Pliskin (Sorry, I had to)

JG

Been Playing GTA V Along with the Billion Other People

Been Playing GTA V (I've heard people pronounce it GTA Vee, which seems dumb to me. V is 5) Liking it so far. They addressed a lot of complaints people had, reducing the amount the euphoria physics affects the player and the heavy cars and heavy damage. Problem is now people are complaining again that they removed all the realistic driving etc, that was in IV. Truth is you'll never please everyone.

Anyway, so far the experience for me has been solid. The graphics are pretty good, considering it's on old hardware, and it appears R* are pushing boundaries, regarding what you can get away with in a video game.
Textures can get a little muddy (Blame low RAM) and the frame rate seems to hover around 30 (With drops here and there) The resolution is also 720p with very little AA, so it can look a bit bad at times, but never awful.
The amazing thing is the countryside. Leaving the city on a highway/freeway and it 'feels' like you're leaving a city. Everything looks sculpted, and I have to say looks better than Skyrim in terms of the wilderness. (But Skyrim is doing a lot more things in the background that can slow a machine down, so graphics take a hit for performance.)

The game allows you to take pics in game. Not as good as "Print Screen" on PC. (Or other image capture software) The resolution of the images just plain sucks.

Declasse Tornado. Based upon the 57 chevy Bel-Air with some Cadillac Eldorado influences. (Look at the ground. Muddy/blurry textures are everywhere in the wilderness. Still looks amazing though considering the age of the hardware)

The thing I've always liked about GTA is that it's a showcase of the worst parts of American society. Be it Misogyny/Murder/Robbery etc. It takes the piss equally out of Liberal ideals as it does Conservative ideals. (Both tending to go too far one way or another)

It certainly won't keep me as long as Skyrim has due to the fact that GTA even on PC is inherently less moddable.

JG

Fan Fiction and Me

I was thinking recently about the misconceptions and biases towards Fan Fiction. To those who have never read it, or know what it's about, they usually see it as something "Nerds" or "Wierdos" do. They see it as badly written, and also as mostly slash fiction, that is there solely to quench some sexual desire that the writer has.

In the late 90's (I would have been 10-13 at the time) I wrote fan fiction on half A4 sheets, that I bound with glue in a cardboard, and tried to make books. They were Star Trek DS9 stories and were absolute trash with no merit to them whatsoever. They usually involved them flying somewhere in the Defiant, finding some-thing and then flying home again jiggidy-jig. At some point I stopped doing it as I grew up and the very memory of it vanished until recently.

Jump to 2005. I thought that fan fiction was trash. I'd never read any, but I thought it was trash. I thought that Fan Fiction prose was just Kirk/Spock stuff that I had no interest in reading that.

Around this time I saw a Fan Production by the name of Star Trek New Voyages: Come What May. It was truly terrible. I thought it was nothing more than a stupid 'High School Play' level of production. I shook my head and thought that fan-made stuff was simply garbage. (Come What May is still truly awful)

It wasn't until I caught their episode To Serve All My Days, did I start to take notice of what fans were capable of. I waited with a strange excitement when I saw their trailer for World Enough and Time, which at the time I kept calling "World Not Enough and Time" for some reason. In fact my last name appeared in the e-mags they used to release, with my short forum review and my forum name (which was my last name) misspelled in it.

Anyway, this took me onto the Audio-Drama side of things. Things I could listen to when walking. I caught something done by Darker Projects, but they mixed in other Sci-Fi universes and I didn't like that. I also listened to Star Trek: Defiant (Which has since vanished from the face of the internet) and then later Star Trek: Outpost (Which I still listen too)

But before Outpost and after Defiant, I read my first full Fan Fiction. It was a TOS fan fic detailing Scotty's time at the academy. I think this was 2009 or 10. I wish I knew what it was called. All I know was that it wasn't on the Fan Fiction site, and on another with a load of other fan fics. I know the cover image was of a bridge or something. I really enjoyed it and now am quite sad that I cannot find it again.

Then As I'm writing this, I found the story on Ad Astra, an archive for Trek Fan-fic. It's called On the Nature of Wind. This was the story that made me second guess the legitimacy of prose in Fan-fiction.

Jump ahead (or maybe this happened before reading On the Nature of Wind, I can't remember) I wanted to do something with Audio. It never came about, but instead Ideas for writing came about. I think in an earlier post I mentioned it when discussing my Trek story that is sadly on hiatus right now.

Anyway, at this point I still had no real interest in reading it, even if I wanted to start writing it. Though it wasn't for a year or two till I started writing, and strangely enough it was Elder Scrolls and Fallout that I started with. I continued with ES and Fallout kind of fell by the wayside, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add a Trek story to the mix (Don't try and write more than one story at a time. You'll either lose interest in all three, or two of them won't see an update for MONTHS)

At some point I started to take a gander at other fan-fics. I would tell you my first favourite (Which I favourited to know what stories I was reading, but I cannot remember and I'm getting a 408 time-out error when I try and access my profile on FanFiction.net. and has completely ruined the end of this post.

JG

Edit:
Heh, my first favourite is a story I've not actually read.
Second is Solace in the Sand by Banger1897, a Fallout Fan-Fic that I haven't read any of the updates in a few months.
Third is Accident and Destiny by SuperGreG. The first Elder Scrolls Fan-Fic I saw that wasn't "The Ever Repeated Adventures of the Champion of Cyrodiil/the Dragonborn" Four days later I favourited his second.
My foray into the world of written FF is a rather new one, and I'm glad I found it.

JG