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Topic: Black and white silhouette pieces (Read 7380 times) |
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Tachyon
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #15 on: Dec 7th, 2008, 9:18am » |
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Being a specialist at usability design rather than art .. I am acutely aware that the ultimate judge of any product is the users themselves. I am satisfied enough with what we have at this point to put it to some kind of test with users. How could we do this ?
Would it be possible to post a few questions about the designs and elicit a voting response from the Arimaa community using the voting tool used by the mob ?
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| « Last Edit: Dec 7th, 2008, 9:21am by Tachyon » |
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Janzert
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #16 on: Dec 7th, 2008, 10:11am » |
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Yay, this is really coming out nice.
on Dec 7th, 2008, 9:10am, Tachyon wrote:| OK ... If I understand correctly you would prefer to have the Capital letters used for the black font and small letters for white ? ... I could do this quite easily. |
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Pretty sure he meant black pieces with small letters and correspond to silver. White pieces with capital letters and correspond to gold.
Quote:Huh ? ... Sorry ... I do not understand this statement ... I have never seen any reflection  |
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The silver pieces face toward the left, while gold faces right.
Janzert
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BlackKnight
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #17 on: Dec 7th, 2008, 10:45am » |
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on Dec 7th, 2008, 3:54am, Tachyon wrote:I have used the latest design as the basis for an Arimaa font.
This is a board done in MS Word
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Is the MS Font also based on coordinates? I'm asking because I would like to use an Arimaa font in LaTeX.
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Tachyon
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #18 on: Dec 7th, 2008, 11:08am » |
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The MS Font is a postscript font based on vector based images. If we can get to a point where there is broad community consensus that this font is working well. I will be happy to release the source images for the community to use in other projects such as LaTeX
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Tachyon
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #19 on: Dec 7th, 2008, 11:11am » |
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Janzert wrote:
Quote:Pretty sure he meant black pieces with small letters and correspond to silver. White pieces with capital letters and correspond to gold.
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Sorry .. my mistake ... your'e right 
Quote:| The silver pieces face toward the left, while gold faces right. |
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Oh ... OK .. no problem ... I can do that .
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #20 on: Dec 9th, 2008, 10:57am » |
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on Dec 7th, 2008, 9:10am, Tachyon wrote:| I know that print is a science in its own right and not one that I am an expert at. The font has really been designed for printing and I can only judge by the results I get on my own little HP Printer. The font used in a printed document looks quite good (I think). Ideally we should elicit advice from a printing service at this point. |
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Yes, it would good if we could get feedback from someone who knows about printing, by which I mean the production of plates that are put on rollers for the production of large quantities of books. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_printing
The images can look great on inkjet and/or laser printers, but after a few hundred copies, that kind of printing becomes more expensive than printing with plates. The appropriate technology depends on the size of the print run, so I should ask Z-man how many he was considering making, but I would think at least a thousand.
I don't think you can have gray with printing plates, unless you make one plate for the black and another plate for the gray, which jacks up the cost. So gray would have to be a bunch of little dots. But how fine can the dots be? Surely not as fine as with inkjet printing? That is what is worrying me.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #21 on: Dec 9th, 2008, 10:59am » |
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on Dec 7th, 2008, 9:18am, Tachyon wrote:| Would it be possible to post a few questions about the designs and elicit a voting response from the Arimaa community using the voting tool used by the mob ? |
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The Mob actually uses a public voting tool, so any preferential vote you would like to stage can be done there as well.
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clauchau
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bot Quantum Leapfrog's father
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #22 on: Dec 10th, 2008, 5:22am » |
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Here is a cat I've just drawn, inspired of one of the many pictures of real cats my wife decorated my office with
I find it quite noble. Maybe it's another possible start for the Arimaa cat in Black & White. Maybe the whiskers ought to be thinner. Here it is as a png file :
The original svg file is at http://clauchau.free.fr/cat.svg
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omar
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #23 on: Dec 10th, 2008, 8:20am » |
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Claude, what program did you use to get SVG output.
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Janzert
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #24 on: Dec 10th, 2008, 12:12pm » |
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<!-- Created with Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) -->
The ones I did up were made the same way if anyone wants them as well.
Janzert
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The_Jeh
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #25 on: Dec 10th, 2008, 1:26pm » |
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Come to think of it, the graphics Arty originally designed for use on iggamecenter.com are good silhouettes.
     
They are, however, not what we're used to. I think I'd prefer graphics that focus more on the heads.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 10th, 2008, 1:30pm by The_Jeh » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #26 on: Dec 10th, 2008, 1:46pm » |
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Both Arty's pieces and clauchau's cat look nice. One think to keep in mind, though, is that we need white and black pieces both, i.e. two sets. I'm wondering what the black cat would look like that corresponds to clauchau's line drawing. Scalable vector graphics do allow for filled regions, right?
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IdahoEv
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #27 on: Dec 11th, 2008, 12:31am » |
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Here are the silhouettes I created for my handmade boards, including the sets used at the tournament I ran at Gateway 2007 and the prize set I gave away to the tournament winner.
My design criteria were:
* shapes should be clearly distinguished, i.e. cat can't be easily confused with dog
* stronger pieces should have increasing linear dimensions, aiding recognition
* stronger pieces should fill increasing fractions of the disc, further aiding recognition
I found that empty "white" silhouettes didn't show through the glass gems I used for pieces very well, but it wasn't necessary because I made the pieces by laser-printing them on either gold or silver metallic art paper. With the colored paper, solid black silhouettes worked fine, though I did right-facing gold and left-facing silver to match the orientation of the pieces on the online game.
You can download PDFs of both the right-facing gold pieces and the left-facing silver pieces in two different sizes at my arimaa site, if you like)
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clauchau
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bot Quantum Leapfrog's father
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #28 on: Dec 11th, 2008, 3:59am » |
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Wow, Arty's and Idaho's are splendid as far as whole bodies are concerned.
We may also try designing simple heads similar to Adobe Chess figures below :
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Tachyon
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Arimaa player #3433
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Re: Black and white silhouette pieces
« Reply #29 on: Dec 11th, 2008, 4:37am » |
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OK Here is what the Arimaa board could look like using the gold=white=first move=bottom of board=capital letters standard.
I have also re-scaled the size of the cat slightly to bring it more in line.
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| « Last Edit: Dec 11th, 2008, 4:40am by Tachyon » |
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