Non TCM "Red Marble"

[Green1]

He's already worried about needing to upgrade our hosting package.  I'm getting in the habit of clicking on whatever ad's at the top of the page once a day, just to help that tiny little bit to pay, when we need it.

I'll need to know more specifics, but the look of the terrain can be altered, for sure.

Careful with that! At one point I was doing research on adsense/Youtube/blogging income potential. (Since I would love to tell some of these employers I have had to go to hell and do stuff I love instead of doing drudgery so others can do what THEY love.). I came up on all these horrid stories where they banned folks from clicking on thier own ads or telling family + friends to click on those ads!

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, YOU can still do it - I close the windows right away, frankly.

We'll become friends later this evening, so that's okay.

[Green1]

I finally got gimp and I opened up and found the .pcx files. I tell you, GIMP is an air traffic control panel!

It seems the way they have it is indeed, templates. I even found one .pcx that had roads, various fungus, forests, and mag tubes. I think when I get time, I may head over to UMSF or sme of these other imaging forums and capture mars images and paste this onto the .pcx and see if SMAX does not puke on it.

[Buster's Uncle]

When you get to that, be sure to post the Mars picture - it'll save me time when SMAX pukes.

GIMP is indeed an air traffic control panel.  I find the interface user-hostile, but it doesn't seem to get any better on powerful graphics programs, certainly not Photoshop, and I'm used to it now.

[Green1]

I am thinking MRO or Google Mars. Just take a clipping that looks somewhat cool and line that up where the old terrain was in the .pcx since SMAC/X tends to like to do graphics tiles all on one page.

Speaking of which, someting that has always bugged me about map gen all the way up to civ 3. There's no poles! A prime feature of a planet would be ice at the poles. Oh well, lets just go with what we got and see if it works.

Also does GIMP convert modern .jpeg and other formats to .pcx?

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes.  Tell me when you're ready to try, and I'll talk you through it.  You may have noticed that I don't mind teaching.

I'm pretty sure that what you propose won't work, but it probably will be a good first step for something that will, so I'm not intending to discourage you at all.

[Green1]

Sure thing. Let me pound out this AAR and maybe another, then my attention can be firmly on that task.

I am thinking I may head out to a coffee shop that day and pound out it out there and be seen at the same time. I am getting to be one of those gaming hermits. Not good for the soul.

Well.. at least it is not as bad as something like WoW where if you are into the raid game, they damn near want you to have a bedpan and pee jug handy. Going to have to check out Pandaria at some time. I just detest the lack of sandbox and the huge time commitment you have to make to even get to play halfway competitive in WoW. I am a random BG/PvP guy myself. Raids are too damn boring. Same thing over and over till you get sick of it. I demand dynamic games.

[Kilkakon]

Hey let us know when something exciting happens.