OK folks, this is a weird one (to say the least) <LOL>... the "Space Warp" Skins for LockJaw. It has been previously reported that the aging Hubble Space Telescope has snapped-off a few photos of a distant star formation whereby tetrominos (akin to the "2001 Space Odyssey" monolith) frolic about <G>! Direct from the included readme: Code: The skins feature a new background image created from a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (with pit borders created using graphics from the pit portion of the "Story" mode background images of THQ's "Tetris Worlds" game for the PC), two types of block images, and color scheme. The original picture used for the background image (95-44A.JPG) was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, and is a picture of the "Eagle Nebula" (also known as "M16", the 16th object in the Messier catalog), which is a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years away in the constellation "Serpens". Visit the Press Release site for the Eagle Nebula on the Internet at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1995/44 and read all about this phenomenal looking outer space wonder! The skins also include replacement background music as well (one of my own older music compositions "Space 1", originally composed for Team LUC's unfinished and unreleased retail add-on for id Software's "Quake II" game for the PC). Note that this so-called "music" is more akin to ambient background droning sound effects rather than music, and is really not melodic at all... but it sounded quite "spacey" to me <G>! Yer files: Readme -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... _Skins.txt Preview screenshot (regular blocks version) -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... p_Skin.jpg Preview screenshot (sticky blocks version) -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... Blocks.jpg ZIP -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_ ... _Skins.zip Beam me up, Scotty... there's NO intelligent life here! P.S. Forgot to include in the readme: Set LockJaw's "Shadow" option to anything but regular "Color" (i.e. "Faint Color" looks the best) within the game (the shadow blocks use transparency).
Hey Rich! Love the tetromino images, but that nebula is horribly distorted! It's supposed to look like this, but you made it look more like this! Any chance of seeing a version where the twinkly stars are round instead of oval? EDIT: I made a corrected version for you, all the images I could find have these three big blocks cut off at the top-right, so I used a technique called inpainting, used by museum people to restore old paintings, to reconstruct the missing parts of space. Here you go! (Warning: 667KB!)
OH MAN! That corrected version looks awesome! Unfortunately, I used so many layers and plugin effects for the backgrounds (and didn't save the layered PSP image) I'd never be able to recreate the skin in a million years with your corrected image <aarrgghh> The distortion was due to me cropping out the part that didn't have the three big blocks in it, and then doing an 800x600 (non-aspect ratio) resample on the cropped image. BTW, those blocks are in the original simply because Hubble didn't snap off any photos of that area of the galaxy <G>. Like I said above, your corrected image looks great... the added sections look *flawless*! How did you accomplish that (what imaging editing programs/techniques and such)? I've accomplished similar things throughout the years with other various images with almost perfect results (hehe, I didn't know there was an actual term for it <G>, "inpainting"), but didn't have much luck with the nebula photo.
Well, lots of clone brushing and some clever layering. I wasn't the only one who had done an inpainting of this, there were a few inpainted versions in very low quality JPEG lying around the internet, so I took one of those as a starting point and worked from there. The only program I used was Paint Shop Pro 6 (I also own PSP 9 but for these kinds of simple jobs PSP 6 is more than adequately suited). The final image has 7 layers, 2 of which are simply backups. I could send you the PSP file so you can see how it all comes together but I'm afraid it's 14.7MB (that is with LZ77 compression turned on). WinRAR only manages to chop that down to 11MB. You mentioned you have dial-up, so I think that's a bit much, isn't it?
Thanks for the detailed info, mufunyo Yeah, it would take me a year to download a large file like that, thanks for the offer though. BTW, I use PSP 6 and 7 as well (hehe, even still have 3 (16-bit) on this old clunker -> http://tang.cmoo.com/~snor/weeds/Weeds_486DX4-100.htm <LOL>). I'm assuming by your description that most of the work is accomplished with the clone brush? I'll have to play around with that one a bit
I just had an idea: I'll just document what I did step by step and compress the screenshots in JPEG so you don't have difficulty downloading them. How's that sound? Here's my twelve-step recovery^Wrestoration program: Step 1 - ripping off someone else's work I'll admit from the get go here that I was lazy and didn't want to spend much time on this; usually i'd do this myself, but hey! There were people on the internet that had already done half the work, so what the hell. Google image search came up with three inpainted pictures, one of which was a halfway decent resolution and wasn't cropped to 4:3 aspect. Step 2 - loading the image Well, as you can see, it's horribly artifacted and hardly usable. Step 3 - clone brush! I wanted to blur this, so to make sure I'd get a clean blur, I cloned out the stars and most of the nebula shapes. Step 4 - blur! With the stars gone I could get a good looking blur to remove the nasty JPEG artifacts and create a basic spacey background so that I wouldn't need to airbrush/clonebrush that myself. Step 5 - overlay! So now I overlaid the big high res lovely quality nebula over the blurred background to see if it would fit in. It did not, so I'd have to adapt it. Step 6 - darken! Here's a small crop out (because the rest of the image didn't change, so I'll save you the bandwidth) that shows how I darkened the image to make it fit the surrounding image better. If you take some distance from the screen and unfocus your eyes you can already see that this is a pretty good fit. Step 7 - more clone brush! The hue on step 6 wasn't quite correct, so I clonebrushed some sections over from the high quality nebula image, of which I'd only use the hue. Step 8 - hue! This is the clonebrushed image with only the hue applied. To do this you go to Layers->Properties->Blend Mode:Hue. Step 9 - noise! Now, to match the grainy look of the original image, I added noise (Image->Add Noise->Uniform 10%) and then softened it (Image->Blur->Soften) The image you see is a 100% crop (the other images are downsized), because otherwise you wouldn't be able to see the noise. Step 10 - seamless! Here I softened the edge of the original image boundaries and added stars to integrate the inpainting into the rest of the image. Step 11 - do you see a seam? I don't! Here is a 100% crop of the merged image, right on the seam. Looks pretty good to me! Step 12 - tah-dah! And here's the merged image in its entirety (although downsized). If I wanted to win a prize, I'd have also recreated the space dust, but whatever, this is just a quickie and it's only going to be a Tetris background anyway. If you're going to look at the background too much you'll misdrop a tetromino! I hope that helped, there's lots of fun to be had with the clonebrush (removing people from photos, making people's faces look prettier, removing pesky copyright notices, etc.), so experiment away. There's also a lot of tutorials on stuff like this on the internet, but most of it is geared towards Photoshop (which I only use if I have to).
MANY THANKS for the tutorial and pics! Saved on my hard drive for futre reference, looks to be a fairly simple method for inpainting that I'm sure I'll use quite a bit in the future Again, many thanks
Ohhh man! I'm no expert on PSP, but I pretty much know most/many of the features and ins-'n'-outs of the program... that is, except for the "clone brush", never used that one before for anything. 'Twas twiddling around with some pics on my hard drive (family, friends, etc...), and laughed so hard at the results I almost fell on the floor and busted a gut <ROTFLOL>! Who says that *only* the terrorist extremists can lop off heads, and generally disfigure <LOL>?! Man, I had some real "mad scientist" experiments going on over here <G>! Anyhooo (wiping tears of laughter from eyes), I can see where this tool in PSP would be EXTREMELY handy for image work, thanks again for the tips
