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People you might meet

PostPosted: 01 Feb 2011, 15:56
by Shevron
People who have been reading lately, have noticed the discussion brought back up for the People You Might Meet idea.

Here: http://forums.rnp-moonglade.net/showthread.php?t=547

The jist of the idea, is to have a banner about RnP members which you might meet while running around in Azeroth. Anything you wish to display about your character IC, feel free to chuck it in.

Also, it's a good place to promote events (if we find someone ready to make a banner for them - I suck at that).

The system is now in place after much work with Erethas (he made our shiny new logo too!)

Whenever someone refreshes the page, a random banner will be displayed of whatever it has listed.

So get yours going!
[list]
[*]Download the background template from HERE.[/*:m]
[*]Design your banner.[/*:m]
[*]Upload it to some image hosting site.[/*:m]
[*]Forum PM Shevron with the address pointing directly to the pic - I will include it in the rotation as soon as I can.[/*:m]
[*]Should you wish your banner, to point to a particular site when clicked, like armory, story section on forum etc, PM me that link too.[/*:m][/list:u]
Guildelines:
[list]
[*]You can make pics for your alts that you RP too, not necessarily your main only.[/*:m]
[*]The pic must be EXACTLY the size of the template, pixel for pixel. Any other size will get rejected right away.[/*:m]
[*]If possible, save in .GIF in order to minimise loading times on forum page.[/*:m]
[*]As usual, use common sense and don't use inappropriate stuff on image.[/*:m]
[*]Try to keep with the theme of the page, so be careful when choosing colours. Remember that this will be on the front page of our forums.[/*:m]
[*]Again I remind you, this is for IC profiles. I will not upload banners with the usual "Affliction Warlock. 550 Herbalism / 9000 Awesomeness"[/*:m]
[*]Be creative :D[/*:m][/list:u]

PostPosted: 01 Feb 2011, 16:02
by Tiermaya
Many kudos to both you for a great job done. I particularly like the logo.

Anywho I'll grab some software and have a play around with some banners.

PostPosted: 01 Feb 2011, 18:14
by Gergel
For what it's worth, I would recommend against GIF.

As an experiment I took both currently available banners, Erethas' and Sarani's, and converted them to JPG with GIMP, after converting them from "indexed" (256 colour) to "RGB" (full colour range) mode.

Results:

erethas_banner.gif 51814 bytes
erethas_banner.jpg 30319 bytes

sarawr-1.gif 54423 bytes
sarawr-1.jpg 16867 bytes

And looking at both sets of images, changes caused by JPG compression were pretty much completely unnoticeable.

PostPosted: 01 Feb 2011, 18:53
by Shevron
Hmmm I guess you're right.

My leaning towards the choice of GIF's for space, is perhaps due to the fact that I always default to PNG when possible, so the space may get a bit large.

.... and I HATE how JPG handles red colours.

PostPosted: 01 Feb 2011, 19:31
by Cherwina
Best: PNG 8 bit Indexed (essentially gif format but with compression in both vertical and horizontal planes)

JPEGs massively depend on the choice of colours as to whether they are better or worse than 8 bit GIF (Almost always smaller but sometime horribly messed up with artifacts).

Also, when my PC is working again, poke me for event banners as I have all the tools and do that kind of thing on a daily basis.

PostPosted: 02 Feb 2011, 07:08
by Pepple
Yeah, Chew's right about 8 bit PNG. A far far better choice for this kinda thing!

Maybe get one done for Pep soon, possibly do a couple more if I get chance.

PostPosted: 02 Feb 2011, 11:09
by Shevron
All hail Gergel for his contribution towards the banner randomiser. Code is MUCH cleaner now, and it makes my life a lot easier to add more banners.

PostPosted: 22 Feb 2011, 17:16
by Erethas
It's almost a month, so how about some retrospect, eh?

Personally it has become sort of a "background noise" for me lately. I don't mean that in any negative sense, especially this being my idea and all", it's just that I think the initial enthusiasm has died a bit and I find myself just scrolling to the chat box.

In any case though I did find it useful, and it has helped put some faces on the names, and even more. It shaped up not to be exactly as I imagined (I had the Stormwind City Watch model in mind), but it turned out to be representative of our guild's unique style, and even though you don't really get THAT much about certain characters from their banners, it does set a certain mood that I believe will be very positive for any outsider visiting out page.

PostPosted: 22 Feb 2011, 17:31
by Shevron
Well people stopped sending me banners, and nobody made any banners for the pub etc..

Of course you'll get used to it after a while. Mantits still make me cringe though :D

PostPosted: 22 Feb 2011, 18:25
by Cherwina
I'm still making mine... >_>