Rant #024 Wednesday, March 10, 2004

The Next Step

Page 64 will go up this weekend; I've been busy with planning out some future projects.

One of said future projects includes some animation; which I have been experimenting with using Adobe Photoshop as the cell development environment, and Ulead Media Studio 6 as the animation / compositing environment. Doing some relatively decent quality animation is possible, but time consuming.

My ultimate plan? To create a 2214 music video / trailer, preferably 1.5 to 2 minutes in length. Creating the art would certainly be possible within the span of a year; devoting enough time to it around the regular comic updates and of course the full-time job, but I really need to find some people who are willing to do some "in-betweening".

Those of you who are familiar with animation probably know what in-betweening is. For those out there who don't know, it's where you have the frames in-between the "key" frames (main art for the animation, done by the main artist) drawn by people who specialize in matching the key frame art but creating "halfway" points in the animation between the key frames. I know I didn't phrase that very well at all ?_?

In short, though, if any artists out there want to take part in helping create an original short bit of exciting animation, I certainly would be grateful for any help. At the moment, I'm still organizing the scripting for the animation, and getting ideas for the original music that will go along with it, which will be finished once it's time to put together the final edited sequence.

An interesting side effect of working on an animation project is that lots of artwork will be produced when creating the frames, some of which will be added to this site's galleries.

More details on this as they come.

Rant #023 Friday, March 5, 2004

Hey, page 62 is finally done, and other page (or TWO) is planned to be finished this weekend.

I'll post more news later.

Rant #022 Wednesday, March 3, 2004

Almost back on track!

I'd like to let everyone know why I haven't updated this week yet. It is because I have been helping Lynx on the new BV design stuff and de-bugging, and the new forums were a huge site upgrade and required a lot of testing to make sure everything went smoothly.

I would like to present to you the new and improved "Binary Vibrance", which is the name of Lynx's chat / forums / interactivity system for this site. The move from PHPBB to BBGun went fairly well and without too much trouble.

There's more smileys / emoticons than you can shake a stick at, too ^_^

Now that we've made this transition, I'll concentrate once more on producing 2214, and to make up for the lack of an update last weekend, I'll do one either mid-week or just do a double-page update over this coming weekend. I do hate to break promises.

I strongly encourage you to sign up in the new forums, if you haven't already. The people there are some of the friendliest you'll meet on the internet, and everyone is welcome. There's a real-time chat system and you can actually upload your avatar, so if you don't have a place to host your avatar then it's NOT a problem ^_^. Heck, basically another side-feature of BV is free avatar hosting, so why not sign up and check it out? Our privacy policy ensures that your email address will not be used for spamming or shared with anyone. Hey, real-time chat, instant avatar upload / hosting, and great forums with a million smileys. You're invited!

Rant #021 Sunday, February 29, 2004

Slight Delay

Unfortunately, there is going to be a small delay in this week's update for 2214. Worry not; I plan on having it ready early this week. It isn't often that there delays, but this time it was difficult to meet this week's deadlines.

Speaking of delays, the launch of the new forum system has been pushed back a day or two as well. The reason for this is that Lynx wants to make sure as many features as possible are available when the new system goes live.

The new forums will use a new module for Binary Vibrance, "BBGun". It's fast, easy to use, and has a ton of smileys and icons to choose from ^_^ There are other great utilities and features that will be integrated with the new release of BV, such as a cookie viewer, which allows you to browse the cookies stored on your computer so you know exactly what information BV is using and why. Your privacy is very important to us.

More nifty features include....well.... Lynx asked me to post all about it but I already forgot some of the other stuff he wanted me to say :/

Anyway, page 62 is due early this week; sorry it's not done on time but I won't let it go too long.

That's all for now!

Rant #020 Sunday, February 22, 2004

Anniversary Poster

The poster is done, posted in the CG art section, and available for purchase online! Notice the new 'Store' link at the top. Check it out. In addition to the new poster, there's a calendar, Fumacine hoodie, OJ-guzzling mug, and a bumper sticker. Please drop me a line if you have any suggestions for additional merchandise.

So, yeah, the poster took roughly 80 hours of work overall, but I think I'm fairly pleased with it. It's not perfect; there are some things that probably should have been done differently, and in order to wrap it up on time I had to make the decision not to include School Bus (because he is a supporting character; I'd have to add Azurat, Karen, Pleione, Grady... etc. if I included him). The four main characters get more room on the poster that way, anywho.

In other news, Binary Vibrance will be updated within the next month, with new features, including a brand new forums system. Don't worry, everything including the posts and member accounts will be transferred over. If you have any questions, email Lynx.

Oh, and yikes, looks like Virulyde's been hiding something!

Rant #019 Monday, February 16, 2004

2214 Turns 1!

2214 has managed to stand the test of time (and some poor behaviour on my part on the old, old site...lol) for an entire year! W007. It was my intent to release the 2214 poster on the 20th, but it looks like it will be delayed a bit. I'll keep you posted on that.

Hey, we're all settled in on the new server. Lynx has set up tons of new features and we are currently doing some testing on the development site. Doitsujin and I are helping Lynx test Binary Vibrance's new forums and some other utilities. Eventually, the PHPBB-based forum on this site will be replaced by Lynx's system entirely. I'm truly looking forward to it. And user accounts / messages will be transferred over, so you won't have to get a new account or lose any posts. ^_^

We've had a little trouble with the old URL (you know, the one that went to the old, old site) forwarding to Nitrocosm.com since the move to the new server. Hopefully everyone has long since updated their bookmarks / links, but if not, then I'm afraid there's nothing I could do about it :'(

In other news, random stuff. Since I'm on the brink of babbling nonsense, we'll just wrap up the update here. Enjoy page 60, and hopefully the new poster very soon.

Rant #018 Wednesday, February 11, 2004

New Server!

I apologize for the recent down time. We've moved Nitrocosm.com to a brand new web server! This server is bigger and better than before and will allow for further expansion as 2214 and the rest of the site evolves. There's also new toys for Lynx to use for Binary Vibrance, too ^_^

This should be the last major outage of the site for quite some time. I had anticipated moving the site for quite some time, and rest assured it had nothing to do with the previous host - they were great - but future expansion required it.

Nitrocosm.com is now hosted with Team 959 hosting, which hosts art / creative / web comic sites. Team 959 is run by Dan Hess, who is well known for Angel Moxie and a certain very popular animated music video that had been circulating the 'net recently! As a matter of fact, that's how all this came about.

Anyway, since Lynx and I have had to make some minor adjustments, please let us know if you discover any broken images or links, or problems with the site.

That's all for now!

Rant #017 Tuesday, February 10, 2004

If you see this news post, then the DNS has changed over to the new server!

More details about this later, once the move is complete ^_^