The trick was to turn down the flow.  Actually, that’s the solution to pretty much everything regarding brushes.

Opacity for painters is a weird mixed bag. Generally speaking, opacity doesn’t happen all that much in the natural habitat of traditional medium, so when I started out scaling opacity back in, what, 2006, I’d get that tacky transparent effect. Opacity is also very, very concentrated in terms of effect. Even with high pressure sensitivity on your tablet, you’d be hard pressed to make a strong stroke with 10% opacity.

Flow’s a lot different. For tools like the Faux Scratchboard Tool, it allows you to keep a sort-of-matte application while giving you uniform softness. Decreasing the flow doesn’t compromise color information as much. Even at 10% flow, you’re going to still have a pretty close cousin of the color on your brush. For me, 20% flow turned out to be a great place to be at with my brush for marker-sized strokes. When I got to tinier detail work, 30-40% flow was sufficient.

Most of my brushes are on airbrush-mode. You might be wondering what it does. I did too for a while. With Airbrush mode on, the number keys set flow rather than opacity. (You can still scale opacity with shift+number keys.)

Anyway, if you have a hard, non-opacity jitter brush, I’d give flow-scaling a try. It’s hard to explain, and since it’s early in the morning, I haven’t found a good visual metaphor for it just yet. I will, someday, but seriously, give it a whirl. You might be surprised at how it makes things magically work.

A wild contest appeared too!

I took a look at the tool and I came to the realization that it’s basically a rectangle with size jitter set to pen pressure and angle jitter sent to direction. I gave it a try and, sure enough, I got something that worked pretty similar to the scratchboard tool. It’s a little rough, but giving it pen-pressure roundness jitter helps smooth it out some. Overall, it’s not nearly as versatile as the standalone scratchboard tool, but with a little flow adjustment on the fly, it’s actually quite comparable.

Anyway, here’s screenies of the brush. It’s a large 1:2 rectangle with 5px of feathering and 10% spacing.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. Ahem.

Arena.net has stated before that they wanted to break down the trinity. Some MMO gamers probably can’t imagine how this works and automatically assume it’ll be a button-mashing fest of nothing but DPS. It won’t, because it’s entirely possible to create a game without a dedicated healer or a dedicated tank, yet still have a dynamic, active game.

The core problem with the trinity is that it bottlenecks player enjoyment by forcing people to wait for the specific role to be filled, but the existence of a tank and healer are not inherrently bad in game design. They are unfavored because tanks and healers traditionally level slower than the other classes, and therefore there’s less of them by the time endgame rolls around, creating a bottleneck for successful team compositions. It’s a problem that is almost universal across all MMOs, and it needs to be fixed. It shouldn’t be ignored.

In the case of Guild Wars specifically, random arenas helped impress the negative image of the trinity into the player conciousness. If you did not have a dedicated healing/damage mitigating support in your composition, you likely lost. Normally, this is a sign of good games design because it emphasized the importance of team composition, but in MMOs, team composition is not easily adjustable without a large pool of players because of how classes gravitate towards one or two roles.

Final Fantasy 13 comes to mind. For all intensive purposes, the game does not force you to play with a dedicated healer. When you blur the class lines with flexible class-changing opportunities mid-fight, the emphasis changes from strategic team composition to tactical thinking. Most MMOs don’t have a lot of strategic choices overall becuse you control yourself and only yourself most of the time, so class flexibility is a small price to pay to remove the inevitable team-composition bottleneck.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that players will overcome composition problems, as many of them will likely assert that they perform the damage class better and therefore do not need to switch, but it helps alleviate the stresses involved with being a certain role yet requiring another. Rift: Planes of Telara saw plenty of this. Despite the fact that a player could hold host to three completely different roles, there still was a healer/tank bottleneck in the overall community. Giving flexibility isn’t necessarily enough. Healers and tanks need to be fun, and they can be.

League of Legends has a lot of examples of how supportive characters can be aggressive despite their roles. Sona is a support champion that provides a small heal, speed boosts, a safe means of poking with damage and a large AOE stun. That sounds like an offensive mage DPS, doesn’t it? It’s because it sort of is, and yet she still falls into a well-understood area of support. She’s fun to play for plenty of people. Even Soraka, who is the closest champion to the prototypical healbot, can be played aggressively. The primary reason why these characters are aggressive is because they cannot constantly spam heals, whereas in Guild Wars, entire bars are dedicated to healing. If you have a class like this, they will likely focus solely on healing because it is always efficient to do so. If you limit the potential for such a character to exist, you open up tons of variety for different kinds of supporting roles.

What is likely to set Guild Wars 2 apart from other games with class flexibility is the combo system. I imagine that Guild Wars 2 will not have a strong spike heal skill, but there will be ways to create a spike heal with player coordination. Someone setting up an AOE heal and having the rest of the team fire through the field at the wounded ally. Conversely, I could see a water elementalist contributing to DPS by passing her projectiles through an offensive aura while providing a small, but necessary amount of support for the front-line. This’ll prevent zerging because attack rotations will vary and will be based moreso on timing to be effective. Positioning will likely determine whether a strong party-initated heal will work as well.

Either way, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. The baseline is that there are real examples of what Guild Wars 2 has been talking about in the wild, and if there aren’t, they make sense in changing the formula.

To put it short, the Wacom Cintiq 24HD device is amazing. There is no better tablet screen out there, period. Can most people afford it? At $2,600, no, but do I want it? Yes. A million times yes.

I played with the Wacom Cintiq 24HD for at least 4 hours (And the video is of me doing one final drawing), which was enough time to get settled into a reasonable workflow. Much like it’s 21 inch sibling, the 24HD is basically a huge Intuos4 with a screen behind it. It has the same exact functionality as a normal tablet and the skills you acquire from using a tablet translate nicely over to the Cintiq.

Personally, I don’t use the express-keys on the side, mostly because I prefer keyboard. The buttons seem a little hard to press, but since you can rest your entire arm on the side, using the buttons was surprisingly easy and pleasant. It’s a clever way to reduce fatigue and I definitely appreciate it.

One of the key issues I had with the previous Cintiq model was its size and how it is difficult to get it into a comfortable position in relation to a sitting person. The 24HD does not have this problem because of the stand, which allows the screen to extend out beyond its base and over the edge of tables. This is the feature that makes it better than everything else.

There really isn’t much more to say about it. It works, is easy to use and makes plenty standard art tasks much more tolerable.

Back down to earth. Don’t feel bad about not having one of these. When I started drawing on it, the product did not immediately fix most of my workflow problems, but everything I knew and understood about tablet drawing transferred over to the experience. You’re not wasting your time if you have a Bamboo or an Intuos. In fact, you’re probably training to get better with a Cintiq. As a hobby-artist who has seen a lot of superior illustrators work with normal tablets, having a Cintiq is not a necessity, but it is one hell of a luxury. The bottom line is that if you can’t do something on tablet, the Cintiq will not magically make your weaknesses go away, so don’t sweat it.

Playing with the Cintiq really illuminated the importance of learning your program of choice and having a strong art-understanding in general, as opposed to being shackled by hardware limitations. While, yes, that 24HD is the best thing I’ve ever played with, it doesn’t necessarily improve your skill or comfort proportionate to the cost of Wacom’s current entry-level products. For the longest time, I thought if I got a better tablet, things would improve. This was probably true back when I first played with the Graphire back in the early 2000s, but now, Wacom’s products are surprisingly close to one another in quality.

Anyway, it was a pleasure working on the Cintiq 24HD, but it’s not a necessity as a hobby-artist. I’m glad I had the opportunity to cleanse myself of my morbid art curiosity.

I LOVE THIS THING.

Here’s something simple: The PS Vita is basically a PS3 in a handheld. At worst, it may be in the hypothetical realm of a PS2.5, but even then, it’s an amazing device. Out of all the things I saw at CES 2012, the Vita is by far the most exciting and impressive piece of technology of the show.

Frankly, I’m a surprised that the Vita hasn’t sold more. For once, there seems to be an emerging product that is under-hyped. Before I got to test one at CES, I was under the impression that the Vita was less spectacular in person than what was demontrated when it was first released. I figured it would either run slowly or look terribly compressed in live view. I was wrong. I feel like a fool. The Vita is the dream machine I’ve wanted since the PSP was announced. It feels like an actual miniature PS3. No, I’m not over-exaggerating. I don’t want to spend $250 in the next month, but I can’t deny that Sony has actually taken a full-fledged next-gen console and made it portable with some mysterious magic.

Before I go too far, I better talk about Super Stardust Delta. It’s basically asteroids with tons of gorgeous clutter and plenty of things to blow up. One stick to move, the other to shoot. The game showcases use of the front and back touch functionality along with the ability to tilt the camera based on the orientation of the Vita. Basically, everything short of the front-and-back cameras are utilized in the game’s core design.

When I fired up Super Stardust Delta, I quickly came to the realization that the game plays just as well as it did on the PS3. To my amazement, the experience was actually better than the console version. The framerate stays at an amazingly stable 60 through the craziest of clutter. The front and back touch are used for two different kinds of bombs, which are placed where you drag your fingers on or behind the display. At first, I thought it was a little clunky because I had to move my hand away from the right analog stick, but I soon acclimated to the new experience after a few tries. The gyroscope gives the game an unusually powerful sense of immersion while simultaneously showcasing the crazy viewing angles the display is capable of supporting. It felt three-dimensional without the gaudy, blurry effect that the 3DS is notorious for.

Granted, not every game is going to be as good as Super Stardust Delta, but that game really is an amazing showcase of the potential of the console. House Marque did a tremendous job at incorporating everything the Vita has to offer, and now I want one. BAD.

I had a rogue desire to draw something. Inspiration later ganked me.

Two straight days of this horror.

Last time I sat on the couch, I talked about losing. I return to the couch with the same topic.

This weekend has been an absurdly bad stretch in League of Legends. I cleared my recent games list of anything that resembled victory. There wasn’t anything particularily different than what I ususally do. Well, except for picking up AP carry for the first time since I started playing several months ago. You will not find a truer fact than this: I suck at mid-lane AP carry.

My friends are nice enough to stay silent when I’m ranting about how X and Y are impossible with AP carries, and that silence has slowly paid off in terms of allowing me to see how absolutely god-awful I am at the role. I over-extend all the time, my map-awareness is at the level of a stubborn dad on vacation and I can’t last hit even if I’m left with nothing but creeps. Of course I’m not going to be able to poke in lane if I keep spearing myself on the jungler.

Needless to say, I started raging after the third loss. My bitching and moaning was without end, and even when it subsided to a mild trickle, I was still drooling arsenic. Naturally, it was therapeudic in the short term. Merely expressing my disgust for the game, Annie and everything to do with the AP carry role felt good.

I’m not even sure what characteristics of venting and ranting are particularily soothing, especially when their most basic and common consequence is alienation by others who simply do not have an answer for your troubles. Maybe there’s some personal exploration that comes with exposition in general, but I was fairly cognizent that the only thing I wanted was to win. Perhaps I was unintentionally crying out for help, and when it did not come in the manner that I delusionally believed was correct, I tricked myself into thinking I was ranting for the sake of ranting.

My attitude towards personal growth wasn’t 100% terrible though. I knew that if I could develop a resistance to the frustrations inherent in losing, I’d become a superior player. This seemed like a good idea up until it started getting late and I unwillingly baptized myself in the midnight oil, which irritated me beyond reason. I remember telling others that I would not play games that involved keeping cool when I was sleepy, but apparently I am a pathological liar motivated by an insatiable desire to win.

I could go on and on about how bad it was, but now I have a sudden stroke of amnesia. (Not the scary game kind, thank goodness.)

This morning, I woke up, jumped onto League and hammered out a vicious win. I played it as smart as I possibly could with every memory of screwing up vivid in my conciousness. I conquered fear and blasted the crap out of my lane like a little girl, gilded numbers bursting out of the chests of fallen minions. To satisfy my spite, I transfered all of the malice I had been holding and lit up the unfortunate Lux, feasting on her entrails.

Don’t worry though, I’m not letting it go to my head. I did not have the highest CS in the game and I died once to over-extending post-lane phase. I botched about 2-3 solid ganks from Rammus and, overall, much of my victory came from Lux’s inability to push me out of lane, allowing me to be a bonafide jerk with an organic money farm. I still have to improve, but goodness, it’s nice to see improvement manifest itself into green text, extra XP and IP.

Contextually, League of Legends is probably not the hardest game, but it’s still a reasonably difficult one, especially when you lose a lot. No matter what, the feeling of conquering your own personal hurdles with other people watching feels absolutely fantastic. You know what? Who cares if it doesn’t have that high of a skill ceiling. People still screw up incessantly no matter how easy the game appears.

However, I still need to make a resolution because despite winning in League, I definately came off as a huge jerk to my play-group. I will not complain about a game with my friends unless we’re complaining together. This must be done before I consider grinding League again, because ultimately, my goal is to play with my friends and not be the negative, unteachable scrub.

This is the first time I used the various chalk brushes from Enliighten (Actually, you should just go there for everything because it’s an amazing resource).  They’re pretty damn good at blocking in things and, frankly, I’m kinda’ addicted to that rugged, rich texture that it produces.  Helps me visualize nice and easy.

I also colored differently. I used a standard overlay layer and just splashed on some #FFC58D.  Afterwards, I decided that it looked terrible, Ctrl+U’d it and just adjusted the huge slightly and dipped down the saturation. Suddenly, looked a lot better.

The moral of the story is, well, try new brushes when you feel like it and don’t worry about being an absolute color-picking god in photoshop if you’re not adept at finding the exact one you’re looking for when using something like an overlay layer or a color layer. Ctrl+U’s got you covered most of the time.

You would think CES would have more things related to gaming, but the reality is that software doesn’t get pushed all that much in CES and it appears that most companies that produce gaming related goods already have comfortable contracts with retailers. Make no mistake, CES is not E3, Penny Arcade or Tokyo Game Show. If there are game-specific things, they’re in relatively small numbers. Not to say that it’s sad, but if you’re purely driven by gaming-related stuff, you can blow all the time you need in a day or so.

That being said, what am I looking forward to? Tons of stuff, most of which I’m unaware of at the moment.  Hopefully, the showcases will have show-room demos available because I don’t really look like press, nor do I have a large press background. (Sadly, in the world where credentials matter, I’m probably not gonna’ be able to sneak into a Wii U screening.)

First and foremost, SuperMicro is hosting a League of Legends 3v3 showcase, featuring ColbyCheese and SKocelote. SuperMicro basically assembles computers like any other company, but they have acquired contracts for events such as Intel Extreme Masters and other eSports related events, which is why they had access to Day[9] last year and SKocelote this year. Needless to say, it’s a small but very potent taste of eSports, especially when you’re playing, being commentated upon and feeling the pressure of a small crowd.  For me, it’s the most socially satisfying place to be and I’ll be bound to make a few friends, assuming I don’t feed excessively. Either way, I’ll try to get myself to appear on stream during one of the three days I’ll be present, and we can all laugh at how absolutely terrible I am at the game afterwards.

Mad Catz is going to make a showing at CES, and I’m very eager to feel how the M.M.O.7 mouse feels, since one can only guess at its ergonomics from a glance. Last year, they had a few Street Fighter 4 stations as well, and hopefully they’ll be demoing the new Soul Calibur V stick in the process.

Still on peripherals, Razer and Logitech will also be present. I don’t know what Razer has been touting, but I can only hope that it’ll be worth a little more than a curious glance and a cringe at the price tag. (I’m looking at you, Hydra.) Roccat will also be making an appearance in the US market, but I suspect their product pricing will slay many-an-enthusiast.

And of course, people keep whispering about the PS VITA making a showing there. Hopefully there’ll be something hands on, but I’m not really going to hold my breath. Sony generally spends more of its showfloor space showing off more typical electronics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case this year as well.

Outside of the realm of gaming, Wacom is going to make their customary appearance at the show.  I suspect it’ll be the only time I’ll be able to try out the Cintiq 24HD, which makes me quiver in curious and inappropriate ways.

Either way, it may seem like slim-pickings, but I’m definitely keeping my eye out for surprises. Hopefully I’ll be able to stay awake long enough to keep updating once I’m down there.