Halloween Paintings Redesign (2018) - Vote

[razorxxred]

The new paintings should literally be new paintings. I think this has a negative impact on content by undermining confidence in the longevity of items in game. I would also vote no.

[Buzzo]

wow lime you have a really nice way of putting things, you old wordsmith!!! best i could come up with was "please dont take my stuff!"

[Tyclo]

No one is losing anything. There's no undermining, period. I've made this very clear. Everyone keeps their stuff. Nothing is getting nerfed, nothing is being removed. This is a fix at worst, improvement at best.

So, why is this being done now? For the next patch, I've rigorously been going through our existing tre files, consolidating, fixing issues and pruning anything that doesn't need to be there. I dropped our custom tre files down from 2.19GB and ~34,500 files down to 1.19GB and ~2,400 files. - Yeah, no typo, I removed thirty thousand unnecessary files.....

During this process, I looked for anything that was immediately troublesome and one major offender was the Halloween images. They had multiple problems.

General:

• Lore: Most paintings were not consistent with the Star Wars lore. Some were just ghosts with "Sith" on them, some were trick or treaters, others made no sense at all.
• Copyright: There were some major copyright violations in these images, we may not charge money, but we do accept donation which in itself is slippery slope. Some images were copyrighted to Disney, which could actually get us in more trouble than I'm even going to discuss, others were from independent artists. And as someone who has had their work stolen before, I never, ever, will do that to an artist. Sure, I could "track them all down individually" and ask but that would take days or weeks and by then Halloween would've already passed and 7.3 wouldn't be able to go live until January. I don't have the time. - Not sure if anyone noticed, but some of the paintings even had copyrights and watermarks on the paintings... Regardless of legality, it's a dick move. You don't do this to artists.

Technical:

• Texture Sizes: They were broken. Most paintings in SWG are 512 pixels max. These were 2560 pixels. I put all the old paintings in a house and walked into it, my game was noticeable laggy until I closed it. I tried this with the new textures and game ran fine.
• Scaling: Most of the Halloween paintings didn't scale properly, they were of the wrong aspect ratio and wouldn't fit properly even if I tried. Half of them needed to be replaced regardless

This was meant to be a surprise, but for the sake of this particular grievance, let's ruin it for everyone. These are the new paintings. I tried to keep them similar, the only one that kind of got the shaft was the Rebel helmet to an Ithorian, but I couldn't find something that would fit.

What about this post? I made it over a week ago to gauge the communities opinion of what direction I should take in handling this. I made my intentions clear, let people vote and they did. It's been at 10 "Yes" and 2 "No" for almost four days now, so I called it because I actually needed to do the work required and voted upon by the community. It's done, the tres are final.

The work was about 3 or 4 hours of just swapping textures for 20 paintings, which is "EASY." New objects? Double that. I don't sit in the matrix here and tell Siri "Hey, go piss off 2 players on our server and change all the textures on the Halloween paintings," then it's finished in 5 minutes. No, I have to manually do everything in a tedious fashion. It's a lot of work that I do for free and for fun.

Lastly, every second spend on drama like this is pushing back 7.3 double or triple the time. Over the past two months it's been non-stop drama, whining and complaining and I've spent almost equal time dealing with drama as I have coding for SR. It's not only exhausting and disheartening, but it's hurting the server as I can't dedicate the time needed to code. In the time that I've spent writing this post I could've had the beta version of our new launcher released, but guess what, now that's probably pushed back until tomorrow.

I have the textures and I can send them over to you. You can extract them to your installation folder and will see their old artwork, but every other player will see the new art work.

Legal Disclaimer: I'm distributing them for personal use and no way connected to Sentinels Republic or SWG Emu.