Regarding the current vectorized VFD Artwork, I've noticed that, compared side-to-side, they sometimes are not very accurate to their source.
This is specially noticeable when looking at certain cartoony figures, which sometimes look like they've been drawn by using tracing paper over the original art (kind of how other artwork in MAME would look if it was replicated by hand, I guess).
I ignore how these are being made, but perhaps there may be some alternative way of creating more accurate vector files out of the originals?
I fear that this could be a problem that will be carried over to all future supported handhelds, and will be specially noticeable in those with more elaborate graphics, licensed characters, etc, so now that the ball is just starting to roll, it may be a good time to look into it...
As I've already said, I'm sorry if my criticism ended up feeling too harsh to anybody, it was not my intention to bash anybody's work but to point out the incorrections I had observed at the time. Can we please move on now?
It'd be nice if we could... But this was Kevtris' response to what you wrote, in case you missed it:
Originally Posted by kevtris
I will let others vector them from now on I think, since it takes a huge amount of time to do this that I could spend REing and dumping stuff, and some people were complaining about the quality. Let's see if they can do better :-)
So now we have no one creating the artwork required to play these games. It's not that the criticism was too harsh, but that someone was making an effort to make useable graphics so we could play the games, and you made it sound like the work he was doing wasn't being appreciated since it wasn't perfect... There was no reason to suggest that these were going to be final graphics or anything, anyone is welcome to improve them (which I assumed people would, even adding the layers to make them look like VFDs with the little screens and such). Hap mentioned that not everyone 'agreed' with the artwork? I don't really remembering anyone else saying anything bad about it, but I haven't followed a lot of the artwork conversations... I was just ridiculously happy that someone was making these games work at all...
A better approach might have been to _provide_ better graphics, rather than complaining about them. And offer your services to create them to your liking in the first place.
If you can't, we just have to sit and wait until (hopefully) someone else steps up and figures out how to do it... Or maybe at least create a detailed how-to on using something like Inkscape for this specific purpose... I've tried a couple of times, but am really at a loss as to where start.
