Hey.

[Alecto]

I'm Alecto, and I like making things. You may know me from other avatar sites, but I don't frequent them.
Someone linked me this site and I decided to take a look.
The avatars seem interesting? I'm not sure why the images are so large. Are they going to be high-resolution, CG avatars?

[Diana]

Hello, and welcome.
I am also a maker. One of the best things to be. C:

Thanks for stopping by and signing up!

Right now, the avatars are in a transitional phase. I havent been able to rework the system because of school and other life hinderences. Within the next few weeks I should be able to work on the system more.

The avatars are large because of a few reasons:

One being that, as an artist who does a lot of commission work for avatar sites, I know how hard it is to look at a 100 X 200px (if that) icon with detail and have to draw it. It's easier to have soemthing larger to use.

Also, a lot of people from other sites (like tinierme) like to be able to see a large image of their avatar, so having the images large to start lets us give that functionality. It's easier to start with a large image and scale down rather than with a large image and scale up. (no loss of quality.)

A big reason though, is we're considering having the avatars with more of a painted/drawn look, instead of rigid, pixelated, vector art.

As they are now, the images are 1000x500 px, with I think 350 dpi? ( not sure. I have to check, but I'm at school right now.) So they're already high resolution.
I have intentions to animate them later as well, and having larger images allow for more detailed items and movements.

[Alecto]

Having worked on animation before, I seriously urge you to scale down the images should you choose to animate them. Large images may look nice for stills but they will put unnecessary strain on the system if they are animated. Avatar sites are already resource intensive and you do not need to make them any more. Gaia can get away with it because they are 1.rich and 2. have miniscule avatars. Tinierme had flash avatars, which are vector based and are what you should be using if you want something that can be scaled up easily without being pixelated or straining the server that much. That, or the SVG format, which is the standard vector format.

Also, will there be male avatars, or are these avatars unisex?

[Diana]

Having worked on animation before, I seriously urge you to scale down the images should you choose to animate them.
Large images may look nice for stills but they will put unnecessary strain on the system if they are animated. Avatar sites are already resource intensive and you do not need to make them any more. Gaia can get away with it because they are 1.rich and 2. have miniscule avatars. Tinierme had flash avatars, which are vector based and are what you should be using if you want something that can be scaled up easily without being pixelated or straining the server that much. That, or the SVG format, which is the standard vector format.

I've worked with animation before as well, and we are still considering due to the complexity and the work needed to do them. The purpose for animating would be to be able to use an avatar for a sort of "in town" chatroom function (which is still being designed) To do that, we would need to save a "walk" and a "stand" and any other movement functions for each image. Those of course, would be smaller (at least the "walk", if we decide to animate avatars anyways) since they would only need to be called from one location- the town. Being rich has nothing to do with it. I host everything on my own server, do the art myself (with help of Lime) and am building the site on my own.
Gaia's avatars aren't all that small. They just seem that way because the images have large amounts of empty space around them, so background/foreground and hand items can have higher focus.

It's more efficient (space wise) to save one large image on the database. That way, only one image is saved per user so that I can call it separately and modify as needed. Even if we animate, and have to have multiple "actions" per user, APNG's are much smaller than gifs, and don't cause extra strain. Only downside to them is that an APNG will load the first frame and then play the animation, while a gif will try to load one frame at a time so its a slow, choppy animation and then a smooth one. But: for the user, if they don't have the ability to see or use APNGs, or if they just don't want to see animations, they can turn off the ability for it to go any further in the animation and just stop as a still. Without extra images having to be called.

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It makes an object with code behind it and an image that displays. With SVG, and its competitor Flash, they're not images themselves. Flash/SVG images are saved as "movies" that run, the images used are set into the files that are played. So they're not much better than just having images on their own. SVG isn't in image type, but a filetype that runs an image, and it's not the reason an image can be rescaled (that's in the definition of vectors.)

Gaia and Tinierme/atgames both have flash avatars. Gaia, however, only loads a flash object after an animated item is selected or the user has tried to enter towns/zomg, while tinierme kept the one flash avatar to run the entire time the user was on the site.

We won't be switching to a vector format because of stylistic choices. Like I said in the last post, we're going for a painted/drawn style, only representable by bitmap images.

Also, will there be male avatars, or are these avatars unisex?

we're going to keep unisex avatar bases, but they will have both male and female clothes, hairs, and faces.

[Alecto]

Oh, I see. I was a little worried because I was assuming that the animation aspect wouldn't be handled with APNGs and was going to be done in Flash/HTML5 with various body parts being compiled and rotated in real-time.

I wish you luck with that. I haven't seen many avatar sites that implement animation well save for Tinierme.

[Cookie]

Hello Alecto! Welcome to Windlyn, do you go by the same name on other places? I don't think I have seen you before...

[Alecto]

Yes, but it's my handle for games. MMO type things.

[Cookie]

Oh! Then that's probably why, I don't get to play lots of MMOs cause my computer sucks lol Which are your favorite?

[Lime]

Hello, welcome to Windlyn!

Yes, we're pretty unique in certain aspects, and we plan to make this site something personalized that not many others can boast. But these things take time, with only two people. But we're working on it as much as we can!

I'm glad you decided to check us out! It means a lot. I hope you decide to stick around, and I see Diana has already covered a lot of things. So I will simply say, welcome! Enjoy your stay at Windy!

[Ghost]

Welcome, welcome! Glad you could join us. c:

[Edelinlenalilacblue9]

Hi