Pics in IWD 1 and 2

[Pyrius]

Can you use the same picture format in both games...If not, where can I find some good IWD 1 pics.....And on a side note, Micah I miss your portrait site, are you and your friend gonna redo the site??????

[Micah Foehammer]

All of the pics in IWD and IWD2 must be in BMP format but the sizes are different. The IWD2 pics are 210 x 330 (L) and 42 x 42 (S) while the IWD pics are 110 x 170 (L) and 38 x 60 (S); so the pictures are NOT interchangeable. It's not too difficult to reformat an IWD2 pic for use in IWD but the converse is NOT true. Expanding an IWD portrait by 100% (i.e. virtually doubling the size) results in VERY grainy and pixellated images.


Pyrius, I wish I could tell you for sure that the site was going back up. Here's the story:

The site went done due to some billing issues with our old website provider. It stayed down because my partner, Mike, had some committments in the Middle East with the US Army that required his attention and quite frankly, I had time constraints of my own. Now that he is back in the good ol' USA, and my schedule has relaxed a bit, we are talking about getting the site back on line. I thought we would be further along at this point but Mike has finished his military obligations and his time is being spent adjusting to life as a civilian. I would definitely like to get the site back on line as we have a LOT of new portraits to add. The NWN custom portrait count is now well over 200, with a high percentage of those being totally new and NOT seen on our site previously or for that matter from content that neither Mike or I have seen on ANY other site. So, right now I don't know what to tell you.

As a further aside, I tend to do most of my portrait work on NWN portraits. It actually simple to create a IWD2 portrait once the H size .tga portrait is done for NWN. So almost all of the IWD2 ports that I do are conversions from my NWN work. That isn't always true as some ports do NOT work well for NWN but make great IWD2 ports. It's more a matter of size and subject matter. [img]smile.gif[/img]

If you are looking for something in particular, send me an email or a pm and let me know what you need. I'm sure I have something that will work for you.

[Luvian]

I still don't understand what is taking so long to revive your website. It seem to me that no more than 5 mins would have been needed.

1 minute to subscribe to lycos.co.uk or another good free host
1 minute to put all your files in a folder
3 minutes to upload the content of the folder to the new host.

[Micah Foehammer]

Luvian,

Our old site had thumbnail previews so people could actually get previews of all of the ports and pick and choose what they wanted. Some other sites just offer huge folders or zip files with NO preview capability. Just "dumping the pics into a folder" doesn't allow for preview capability.

Also, a lot of old the FREE sites simply do not offer sufficient bandwidth for downloads. Our old site had almost 56 gigs of download capability per month and we were STILL bumping into that on occassion - and that was with considerably fewer pics than we now have. Most free sites only offer 16 gigs at most and are frequently shut down when there limited downlaod capacity is exceeded. We wanted to avoid that, so the type of site you suggest doesn't meet our needs.

We were also hoping to expand the site to include scripts, voice sets and other content and that requires further resources.

A small but important point, but we also had a page devoted fully to recognizing all of the artists whose work we were using. We both felt that it was absolutely essential that the original artists receive credit - a simple folder site doesn't give us that capability. As an aside, none of our editing is done on ANY work that we have not received permission from the original artist to use.

Finally, this has been a collaborative effort between Mike and I from the beginning. Mike's departure for the Middle East was SO abrupt that he didn't even have time to contact me to let me know that he was leaving (we don't live in the same city or even the same state). SO, until I heard from him when he returned in early May, I didn't know for sure WHERE he had vanished to (although I did have my suspicions). To be honest, I thought Mike might have lost interest in recreating the site and it wasn't until his return that I now know the reasons for his "disappearnace". Additionally, Mike is now OUT of the military so his time has been spent getting acclimated to civilian life - and quite frankly his top priorities are NOT on getting the site back on line IMMEDIATELY.

While the process you describe does indeed seem simple, it's not the type of site we want to build. So please try to bear with us. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Pyrius]

Its cool yo, you two had a pretty kick arse site,
I missed it...I can completely understand the whole getting used to civilian life before anything...If you know a good site for IWD1 i would appreciate it..Take your time though. Waiting will make everything seem more worthwhile

[Luvian]

Originally posted by Micah Foehammer: Luvian, Our old site had thumbnail previews so people could actually get previews of all of the ports and pick and choose what they wanted. Some other sites just offer huge folders or zip files with NO preview capability. Just "dumping the pics into a folder" doesn't allow for preview capability. Also, a lot of old the FREE sites simply do not offer sufficient bandwidth for downloads. Our old site had almost 56 gigs of download capability per month and we were STILL bumping into that on occassion - and that was with considerably fewer pics than we now have. Most free sites only offer 16 gigs at most and are frequently shut down when there limited downlaod capacity is exceeded. We wanted to avoid that, so the type of site you suggest doesn't meet our needs. We were also hoping to expand the site to include scripts, voice sets and other content and that requires further resources. A small but important point, but we also had a page devoted fully to recognizing all of the artists whose work we were using. We both felt that it was absolutely essential that the original artists receive credit - a simple folder site doesn't give us that capability. As an aside, none of our editing is done on ANY work that we have not received permission from the original artist to use. Finally, this has been a collaborative effort between Mike and I from the beginning. Mike's departure for the Middle East was SO abrupt that he didn't even have time to contact me to let me know that he was leaving (we don't live in the same city or even the same state). SO, until I heard from him when he returned in early May, I didn't know for sure WHERE he had vanished to (although I did have my suspicions). To be honest, I thought Mike might have lost interest in recreating the site and it wasn't until his return that I now know the reasons for his "disappearnace". Additionally, Mike is now OUT of the military so his time has been spent getting acclimated to civilian life - and quite frankly his top priorities are NOT on getting the site back on line IMMEDIATELY. While the process you describe does indeed seem simple, it's not the type of site we want to build. So please try to bear with us. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Are you saying that you don't have a full backup of your websites on your computer? I have a local copy of every html files of any websites I ever made both on my hard drive and on cd roms. Every website has it's folder, with files separated among subfolders just as they would be on the webhost. All I have to do is connect to the new ftp and drag and drop the files to the new server. You should really do something like that, having no backup copy of your website is really a bad idea.


As for finding a good free host, you could try this one, here's what they offer:

50MB Free Web Space (and more if you need it!) Free Guestbook Free Chat Board Free Form Email Free Web Page Builder Free Web Page Templates Free Clip Art Search Engine Submission Fast Server Simple URL (http://dreamwater.com/yourname) Free subdomain (http://yourname.dreamwater.com) Unlimited Bandwidth Unlimited Hits No Annoying Pop-Up Banners ! Best of all, ITS ALL FREE FOR EVER !

[Micah Foehammer]

Luvian,

That site was ALMOST perfect - except for the no file greater than 200kb limitation. I am trying to contact the dreamcast folks to see if that is a hard and fast rule. I'm also checking out some other issues such as the 50 mb storage space limit. I need almost 80 megs of storage just for my NWN pics and Mike needs about the same for his IWD2 pics. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Thanks for the tip on that site though. It might be a winner. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Edit: Mike has all of the archives, not me. So I was unable to access them during his absence. I DO have all of my portrait file backed up in multiple locations, however. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 06-06-2003, 07:41 AM: Message edited by: Micah Foehammer ]