GrogCast Season 3 is escaping into the wild!

[MetalDog]

I have NEEDS!

Again, not my problem ;)

[mirth]

I'll tell ya what. This is more interesting than watching baseball.

[bayonetbrant]

Artist Tim Allen (avrotim here at GH) is our guest this week on the podcast :)

[avrotim]

Uh oh...

[bayonetbrant]

Uh oh...

Don't sweat it.  Mirth is capably filling the lunkhead role for this one ;)

[mirth]

That's why the bring me in.

[avrotim]

Just a quick little expansion on one of the questions covered  in the interview-  Do I have any say on where and what charts and ancillary bits go on a map?  The short answer is I usually put then where they are already located on the beta-test map I get sent.  The longer answer would be that  I am reluctant to make those kinds of choices.  The way I see it, I am just the map-guy.  The designers and/or developers should know the game waaay better than me.  I should not be telling them what should and should not be on the map, they should be telling Me. 

[BanzaiCat]

Just a quick little expansion on one of the questions covered  in the interview-  Do I have any say on where and what charts and ancillary bits go on a map?  The short answer is I usually put then where they are already located on the beta-test map I get sent.  The longer answer would be that  I am reluctant to make those kinds of choices.  The way I see it, I am just the map-guy.  The designers and/or developers should know the game waaay better than me.  I should not be telling them what should and should not be on the map, they should be telling Me.

Hey Tim...I usually co-host with Brant and do the production work but couldn't that night thanks to illness. Great interview. Wish I was on, as I do graphic design (I'm an instructional developer by trade) and have done plenty of map reworks just for myself, for older board games/VASSAL...though nothing I've shared. I agree, Illustrator is a pain; it's not nearly as intuitive as Photoshop is. And I've had to learn every piece of Adobe software from scratch on my own without any course work (except PageMaker and Photoshop around 2003 or so for my return to college). Illustrator makes beautiful vector graphics, but it's like wrangling cats to get it to behave sometimes. :)

[avrotim]

I know right?  And the really annoying thing is, when you open up Illustrator, it Looks pretty much like Photoshop.  So you expect the buttons and tools to be in the same place and work the same way, but they dont!  For me the biggest hurtle so far is not learning Illustrator, but having to Un-learn how to do things The Photoshop Way.

And!  Why why why can't I open Illustrator files in Photoshop when I can open Photoshop files in Illustrator??  Com'on Adobe!  Get yer act together!

[BanzaiCat]

One reason why I'm more clicky with Adobe interfaces is that a lot of the key commands don't transfer from one program to another; I drove my first supervisor crazy because I wouldn't learn them ('why don't you just click X and X? Dude, come on' was something I heard a lot). Illustrator would be much less a pain in the butt if it had similar commands or structure. I don't use it nearly often enough to maintain familiarity with it, unfortunately, but find that it's not too difficult to get back into it when I need to - at least, when doing basic designs anyway. Or when following a tutorial.

As far as PS files in IL - as far as I know you can indeed open them. What I've usually done is just drag the PS file into the IL stage area and it will pop up a window asking you about layering (that's another annoying thing about Illustrator is that layering doesn't work the same as it does in PS). I can't recall if you can import a multi-layered PS file, but I do know it will at least drop it in there. At least, it does with CC. We switched over to it last year. (Another gripe is having to pay monthly to access all Adobe CC products instead of licensing each version...but oh well.)

[avrotim]

Ah!  So its easier with CC.  I am still working with CS4 (and CS2 at work).

[BanzaiCat]

Ah!  So its easier with CC.  I am still working with CS4 (and CS2 at work).

Oooooooouch...



LOL  ;D

Seriously, maybe that's a limitation of the earlier versions. I'm lucky to have a company that doesn't mind shelling out $200 a month just on licenses for the four of us so we get to stay on the edge of their latest versions, but...I've worked with Adobe products a long time (since early 2007) and I STILL barely scratch the surface with most of them, though PS, Premier, and Flash are probably the ones I feel most at ease with.

[bayonetbrant]

New episode up today!  Yes, it's late.  Blame B_C

http://grogheads.com/?podcast=grogcast-season-3-episode-seven-ooooooo

[Barthheart]

Holy gush mode Mirth!  :o 

[mirth]

I got a little carried away.