.:[I Came, I Polled, I Posted]:.
I plan to attach images of pages I had written as a plan and guide to make the whole thing. Ill get them up as soon as I can scan them and upload them. So there will be bits where I refer to something and you'll be thinking, "What?...where?" so you'll just have to be patient with me on that. I also maybe be adding some new things, probably just a couple of words or maybe images so this may not be the final version of the Journal Entry.
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After about a month and a half of actually having put in my profile, ive finally gotten off my behind and work on this journal entry on how it all came about. Special Thanks to Pompetti who gave me that last nudge to start working on this.
Hmm, so were to begin, well obviously the beginning. So where did I get the idea to make this profile? Simple, I had actually been thinking of making a new profile for AGES, but just left it at half done attempts and then not touch it for ages. I had first planned to incorporate a nice piece of art into the whole thing, but sadly I just couldnt find an artist who would work to my constricted financial constraints. So I ended up playing on one of my Graphical strengths which is Pixel Art. Sure im not exactly the next whoeverthetoppixelartistintheworldis but I was pretty decent.
So from there I had to pick what theme I would work along. Now during this time, IRL I had been tinkering a whole lot with the themes and settings of my entire Laptop and how it looked and presented itself visually. Heres a screenshot of what my desktop looked like, so basically I was totally into Customization of my computer looks. I had been looking at pages and pages of great looking Themes on DeviantArt (seriously, that place is great to get your creativeness flowing) and got my idea of having some sort of Gaia-Operating-System-GUI looking profile, that mixed in with my avatar having a yellow theme to it led me to have a color scheme of yellow-green, a lighter version of Matrix-Green.
So. Theme, Check. Way to Make the Graphics, Check.
Usually when I go onto something, say programming a new program, I totally dont plan for things. I pretty much go head first without thinking about it much and just let my brain process the whole thing as I went along. This time when I made my profile, I did the complete opposite. I pretty much created a checklist of what I wanted, and the possible size constraints it would have to fit certain things. Here is the first page of my "Designing".
So I decided on what things to keep in my profile, they were; Statistics (Post/Day, joined date), Info(Location, Birthday), Bar(Add, PM, Ignore), Avatar, About, Friends, Comments, Extension (its the extra section).
Knowing what I needed I started working on the first thing that I had thought of, the Profile segment, which is the Stats, Info, Bar and Avatar sections. So, I basically had a 250x300px empty box, and I had to think of a way to display all that information while following the theme. I got my ideas from a load of Sci-Fi movies and Sci-Fi in general, where Data about a specific something would have all these figures and statistics coming out of it. Let me just go through the chain of thought I went through when I made that part; Statistics, Graph, Pie, Pie Graph, Information, Options, Cables, Lines. That and a whole load of fiddling around I ended up with that. The loading bar in that section was first a space filler since I thought there was too much room and not enough action. The Add, Ignore, Trade, PM, Online, Offline dropdowns were pretty much an idea I had from the beginning. I had seen the effect so many times on Flash Games that I felt like copying it into animation form
So the next part, the about section. The whole thing was based around the idea of a console you enter in commands for the computer to do, in other words its like the command prompt on Windows. When I first made it, It was to be a HUGE animation that displayed a whole load of text....but unfortunately the program I was using, Photoshop Elements, told me that I had to many frames to make the animation. So in the end I decided to get rid of the animation and just use normal text. I didnt think of using normal text before since I thought it would be too big and I would be unable to fit in many lines in the box.
The comments section was a major pain to make. Because I had to keep on resizing the whole thing over and over again. I think I had about 5 different versions of the damm thing. First off the whole size issue came up, first the box I made was too small to house the comments, then too big. After that I decided to make a little gap so that some space would be taken up without lessoning the total width it had.
The part of where I tell you how I did the friends section should be here.....Once I do get to finish putting that section in.
Finally finished the Friends section, and it was a pain in the arse to align right. Seriously, if your making a profile measure the size of what your putting in and build the graphics or whatever around it, it'll make your life easier. So after a few helpful hints from Profile Discussion (Great Forum for all your profile needs!) and 20 minutes of aligning and re-aligning its all set and snug.
The "Core" of the Profile, featuring the G Tech 9880 Processor VII was inspired by the Admin VO. Who in his profile had this Microchip with the Words VO on it. From there I basically just made it looks like one of the black squares you find on a piece of hardware. I had this PCI card for extra USB ports as a reference on how it should look like.
The Extra Section along with the current Friends section were both pretty much just the shell of all the other sections. Just remove the insides and keep the outside border and status bar up top and thats what you get.
After all that and the animations set up for each segment, there was the annoying task of joining all of those parts together and make a large animation off that. Now i have to explain why this whole process bugged the living crap out of me. The Profile section had 5 frames of animation, the Comments Section had 10 Frames of animation while the About section had 6 Frames of animation. MEANING that if Combines only the Profile and Comments section they would combine easily to make a 10 frame animation, with the Profile section going again as the Comment section went on its 6th frame. BUT since I had to also add the About section in, it made it a whole lot complicated, since to get a smooth animation I would have to find the lowest common denomination of all 3 numbers, which is 30 and have that many frames of animation, the profile section looping 12 times, Comments 6 and About 10 times. Now joining all those sections to make one frame of animation was hard enough but doing it 30 times sounded totally CRAZY and impractical to me Construction Time wise and File Size wise. So I settled with just 10 frames, and if you look closely you can see the 3 circles forming a triangle in the about section skip every 10 frames, a compromise I had to make.
With the animation done, I set it as the background image and centered the whole thing and just did a whole series of trial and error to get the positioning of all the parts right. Surprisingly enough, I had actually made my Patch before I made the profile, which is kinda strange if you ask me.
So thats basically a general description of the process of making my profile, I could probably type for an hour on the intricate details of how I went about in making everything but that would not only make you bored but also me bored from all the typing.
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