November Entry: Idiots Guide to the Solar System

**Steel General** · 11-12-2008, 08:09 AM

I think that new font is great, very readable - even at the smaller sizes.

Love the inclusion of the fleet breakdown!

Man this month is gonna be tough to judge, lot's o'fantastic entries so far.

**Redrobes** · 11-12-2008, 09:49 PM

I like the black lines running across the page like a VDU and I do think it works really well on the left side font but I am finding it hard to read the small stuff. The small font characters are made up of about 4 lines of VDU scans which is a bit small really. If the whole image was bigger but with the same res of lines then it would be great. Alternatively, is it possible to have the dark bands less dark on just the text areas as though it were bleeding the phosphor out because of the bright text ? I dont know if that would help or not.

**Ascension** · 11-13-2008, 12:22 AM

Thanks for the feedback as I know what to work on.

I've considered just dumping the scanlines entirely...if future technologies can use wormholes then they should be able to get rid of scanlines, right? I had em scaled way up at first (500%) then I've scaled em down 50% and might do so again before I'm done, I dunno. BTW, they're just a 1 X 2 pixel pattern of white and medium gray set to color dodge (this brightens up all of the light colors and leaves the darker ones alone so this really helps out my mass of bright clouds).

Alternatively, I've been messin around with a 1-pixel black stroke around the letters in the main viewing screen and it really helps them to stand out so I might take that over into the menus as well. Also all of the lettering is at 50% opacity so I might up that as well. Mainly I'm just thinking about things to put into the image to make it look like a video game (right now I'm doing a buildings menu) and for me the tedium like font legibility and spacing things and frames all comes at the end after I have the look I want.

With all of that said, I gotta remember to work on my fonts and scanlines

**ravells** · 11-13-2008, 09:43 AM

This map is now officially delicious! I really like the feel that the scan lines give it, but I'm a sucker for scanlines!

**Ascension** · 11-13-2008, 10:04 PM

Here's an update: lots of stuff tweaked but no major additions...still working on building ideas. Aligned, centered, and spaced all the text and images properly, put in the window frames, pattern and color overlays for the window backgrounds, scaled down the scanlines, changed the colors and styles on the text, etc. It's coming along rather nicely now, I think. Might put one more window in the bottom for something, occupations or maybe resources.

### Latest WIP ###