Free Worlds League Guillotineart by Chris Daranouvong
Hello, everyone.
It has been a long time since the last update. We have been busy with the holidays, and I am sure the rest of you were as well.
Progress…
- Bill has passed the baton on to me as regards the layout of the TRO. We spent some time going over the various commands, and I have my Dummies book to help me with anything odd that comes up.
- During the past two months, I have been collating errors in the TRO prototypes. I am happy to announce that the first fourteen pages of errors has been corrected.
- I have gone through and formatted every entry to standards set by the company’s products. We still have our own look, but the data is arranged in a familiar way and most of you readers should have little trouble navigating.
(Click on image to enlarge)
- We resolved the issue of pixelated art in the InDesign program – with one or two exceptions, it was the way InDesign handles the image. The actual hi-rez printout looks fine, regardless of what we see in the assembly program. I did discover that a lot of the images were huge, but at 79dpi or 200dpi. Converting those images to 300dpi seems to have corrected problems we were having with sizing as well.
- I have updated the MUL to include the Star League version of the White Knight, and found a way to import tables directly from a Word document into InDesign. The result is quite crisp (the Prototype version looked like crap).
- The Index is in place; the Table of Contents has been undated. We dropped the last Section Introductions into place.
- I have begun work on an additional section. Right now, we have the TRO proper, ending with the Index. Then we have the Master Unit List (MUL). Then we have a section titled ‘The Art of TRO:3063’. So far it runs about 25 pages, and should top out at about 30-35. It includes a lot of stuff you folks might find interesting - things we’ve posted on the blog as the years went by, but now all collected in one place and annotated.
- Don’t worry about me killing time with this addition – I have been waiting for our editor to proofread the errata’d version and he has provided me with another six pages of things to fix (so far…)
- The time we are taking for the errata and art allows me to catch up on payments to the artists. I still have a couple of hundred dollars to go, but we are nearly there.
- We are re-doing the cover. Hah! Yes, someone brought it to my attention that the machine on the cover does not actually appear on the inside of the TRO. We are changing that with the help of Chris Daranouvong. The header for this blog post is the proposed replacement for the current Guillotine art.
NEW MINIATURES!!!
This is how the Aurora and the Claymore look, prior to becoming miniatures available on Shapeways! Thanks for the hard work, Dorian!
What follows is the final re-issue of the Free Worlds League Thug:
That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned and please, hit the PayPal button to help move things along. I always respond, and the money always goes to the artists.Thanks for stopping by.
Steve
PS: Does anyone else notice something about the Company Forums? Whenever they ask a question about some bit of fluff or fact mentioned in a TRO, nearly everyone tries to justify it 'in-universe'. That is, they try to give reasons why such a thing might be true or false inside the storyline itself.
When someone like me comes along:
and suggests that the writers might simply have made a mistake, or that the company did not choose to go in that direction, there is (usually) dead silence. I have ended whole threads with this type of comment. In the case above (click on link), my comment was simply ignored.
I love to write in the BT universe and make no mistake, I have a lot of fun playing the game. But some of those people hanging out on the forums are in a bit too deep, if you ask me. I mean, c'mon. You have to read some of the comments to believe it.
A writer makes a mistake twenty years ago - or writes about something that never amounted to anything outside a single book - and it's clear as day after two decades of hindsight that that's exactly what it was.
And ten fanboys immediately leap to the author's defense with Byzantine explanations as to why all of it makes perfect sense in universe. That ranks right up there with the apologists explaining why there are typos and other glaring errors in the company writing - because that was what the in-universe author intended.
Just thought I would see if anyone else has noticed this. It seems awful silly to me.
Just thought I would see if anyone else has noticed this. It seems awful silly to me.
S
