Part 82: Another Very Brief Intermission (Vector Madness)

Another Very Brief Intermission (Vector Madness)

Hey guys. I've gone through Enigma, and the video is ready to record commentary on... but I've had a bad cold the past few weeks, including losing my voice at one point. While my voice has now recovered, I still have the cold - and as Enigma's the longest video to date (standing proud at 44m44s... which is still a significant cut down from over an hour of raw footage) I feel like I should probably be fully functional again before I try to talk over it.

In the meantime, have something very silly. See, there's this program called Vector Magic that's designed to turn bitmap images into smooth-lined vector ones. While its ability to do this with any kind of accuracy or common sense when confronted with good-ol' pixel art is debatable, the results have an amusingly impressionistic quality that I thought you might like to see.



Here's an example I posted in the Sandcastle, using the version of the software on the Vector Magic website. It's probably the best quality one of the bunch, to be honest - for the later shots, I downloaded the free trial program and for some reason things didn't come out quite as well. They're still pretty entertaining, though:



Here's Andy beating up some of Olaf's tanks. All of these pictures (including the first) were done on the medium detail setting, as high detail left a few too many blocky pixels to really "look" properly smoothed.



Here's another map shot - and yeah, things don't really look as smooth as they do in that first shot. Ah well. These first three shots were from It's War! NC. Vectorised arrows still seem to come out fairly well.



Max's B copter takes on Grit's missile launcher, striking revenge for all air units everywhere. From Sniper! NC. Looks like Grit's sweatdrop made the transition in one piece.



Sami's rather long-faced mechs get to grips with Sonja's tanks in Sami Marches On! NC. Note the crazy explosion clouds - some of the vector curves can't work out which way they're going.



And finally, Eagle's crazy A-10 "fighters" take on a very blocky-looking Sturm's bombers during the "Operation Golden Ending" variation The Final Battle! NC.

A bit of a silly aside - I'd just seen Vector Magic and similar programmes crop up a few times in the Sandcastle and the Experimental LP thread, and wanted to give them a whirl. I hope they were worth a look .