Rook's Collection O' Splash Screens

lilbud

@edmaul69 Part of me hates you right now. Looks good. I'll be in my corner if anyone needs me.

edmaul69

@Rookervik thank you. i made the pic the exact same size as the original. it was by pure coincidence that i made the word "retro" was the exact same size as "mega". i was expecting to have to stretch the word pi out but i didnt end up changing the size. yes the word "pie" appears stretched but actually isnt.

@lilbud 8-bit pixel art i can do. its just sooo time consuming. and this one was hard. trying to keep the words fitting to how it would actually be able to fit in the game. (it is double sized in the game so a single pixel appears as a 2x2 pixel square) trying to mantain that aspect ratio i did as close as i could. and i have to say, no need to "hate me" :D i wish i had your talent in art computer graphics. i could make all the splashscreens you make but as a pixel artist you can only imagine the time they take me to do them.

so my hats off to to both of you for your mad graphic skills. just glad to be here to enjoy the cool stuff you guys make.

lilbud

@edmaul69 I am no artist. Never had any training or prior experience. My first one, Super Mario 1 (NES), took about 3 hours in MS Paint. I then moved to Gimp learning from YouTube and tutorials online. Can't use Photoshop because...

Can't afford it for myself. My school puts a copy on our school-issued computers. But I prefer my setup.
My computer will crash running even the demo of Photoshop. So Gimp as a replacement for that and Inkscape instead of illustrator.

I appreciate the comments. But alot of these are trial and error. Doing things and praying that gimp doesn't crash on me. I go by the seat of my pants learning as I go. Doing these started as, "Can I actually do this?" I've seen Rookervik's work and that is what got me started. I just do these as a hobby, sometimes even do one in Study Hall just because. Thanks for what you said, and I am glad that people enjoy what basically started as a, "Hold my beer and watch this" moment.

edmaul69

@lilbud its been a hobby for me. And until about a year ago i only used ms paint until i got paint.net. The only reason i use paint.net is for invisible areas (not sure what you call it?) and for paint fill on stuff that is not a true solid color. That has changed the time i spend on artwork. But for mega man was done 100% in ms paint. If ms paint had a few extra features i would never use anything else. Having the snap feature photoshop has on either program would be nice. However i am lost when it comes to photoshop.

lilbud

@edmaul69 Alpha Layer is what you call that transparency. Might want to try Gimp, bit difficult to learn. It has that snap feature you talk of.

edmaul69

@lilbud i will look into it. Most graphic program i get to try im like a little boy happily eating his ice cream cone in the mall then notices his mommy aint around.... I get so excited to try a program then pure confusion and panic. I wish i could figure out inkscape but i dont know how to do one single thing and i have no clue how to. Ive clicked on all kinds of stuff and i cant figure crap out. I wanted to figure out vector graphics for the carbon theme controllers and no clue....

Rookervik

I've tried both Gimp and Inkscape. Gimp I can use but it takes, on average, twice as many menu clicks to perform any action as compared to Photoshop. And Gimp is very hacky. It's very slow, and crashes a lot. But it gets the job done, albeit slowly.

Inkscape is totally different from Illustrator. I've tried to use it but the time it would take me to learn it, I could put into actually working on stuff. So I haven't bothered. :D

Blender though, there is way too much going on in Blender. Even simple actions I have to keep going back to tutorials to remember. I'm not sure I'll ever get any better than I am now. -_-

Another program you might try is GraphicsGale. It has a free version that works wonderfully. The paid version gets you the ability to save GIF, ICO, and CUR files. That's all. I used Graphics Gale for all of the pixel art in the Pixel theme.

edmaul69

@Rookervik thanks. I will give it a whirl. I also do use paint.net for intellivision game graphics because i have a tile grid for it and a custom palette that i setup with only intellivision supported colors. (Which is only 16 colors) makes creating game graphics a breeze and when i make a whole title screen and stuff i can count and adjust to make 64 or less unique tiles. I kinda wish i went to college at a much younger age because i wanted to be a graphic artist back then.

lilbud

@Rookervik I could say the same about Photoshop. The speed of the program that is. Funny thing is that it will take forever to open, freeze up alot. But close at the speed of light.

edmaul69

@lilbud said in Rook's Collection O' Splash Screens:

@Rookervik I could say the same about Photoshop. The speed of the program that is. Funny thing is that it will take forever to open, freeze up alot. But close at the speed of light.

Will someone get this guy a better laptop?? We need him pumping out more art!!

lilbud

@edmaul69 The laptop I made the first one on was bad. This is the computer that gave birth to most of my splashscreens. https://www.amazon.com/HP-15-f305dx-15-6-Screen-Laptop/dp/B01420TKBI. Never needed more than that. I buy what I can afford.

edmaul69

@lilbud hey i had been using a laptop from 2007 until about 8 months ago when a friend gave me a newer laptop that he cracked the lcd on. As a former electrical engineer it was nothing but the $40 cost of a new lcd for me. I even looked at it that i never needed anything better. The mouse and keyboard were dying and the battery was dead so it was absolute perfect luck for me cause i would still be using the pos if i didnt get this one.

lilbud

@edmaul69 Good thing I use GIMP. If had to make any of these with MS Paint, I'd be insane right now

Rookervik

SO MANY LAYERS! Modeled after the Cruisin' USA Arcade Machine Side-Artwork.

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edmaul69

@Rookervik latest pic is bad image link.

kplkeith

Could you do a metal slug video intro that would be awesome. I love that game.

Rookervik

@kplkeith Might have trouble with a video intro, but I can try a wallpaper. Thanks for the suggestion.

kplkeith

@Rookervik I have yet to find a decent Metal Slug intro, im sure what every you do will be awesome . Thanks for the reply.

enderandrew

Stupid question here as I haven't built my Pie yet (though I've been reading a lot of the wiki in preparation) can you use all of these in a folder and rotate between these as random splashscreens instead of just having one? If ES doesn't support random splashscreens, could we request that as an upstream feature?

Or could you have a simple bash script that ran after boot that swapped the splashscreen for the next book randomly from a folder?

backstander

@enderandrew

I've never used it but yes it does have the option for random splashscreen in a directory.
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/splashscreen

This is the default location for the splashscreen:
/home/pi/RetroPie/splashscreens/

Or at least I think it's built into RetroPie, if not try this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/4e8fra/new_splash_screen_randomizer/