Firstly – I don’t have the time to do an update to the How to section at the moment, please hold onto your horses for the next instalment. Or practice your tetris skills…

Instead a quick ramble and play with photoshop

One of my recent extravagances has been upgrading from using Pixelmator to purchasing CS5 (albeit the cheapest version I could).

I was in town a few days ago and in a bit of a rush, so didn’t set myself up properly for taking a panoramic and instead just snapped away fairly arbitrarily. Using the utterly amazing photomerge feature of photoshop (which has been in there for a few versions now) it managed to stitch them together pretty convincingly:

It’s done such a good job I decided to see how well content aware fill would do to try and make the image more… normal:

Not as well as I’d hoped (though what I was expecting I’m not sure). So I decided to try and give it a bit more of a chance, and segment the work load down into chunks:

The thing that surprised me here was how similar the result was – evidently I’ve got a lot to learn about how the fill system works. The only bit that really looks anything close to “real” is the top right corner (the red outline on the second picture), but when zoomed in that falls apart as it’s all wobbly.

Ultimately I’m asking an amazing amount from photoshop, but it was an interesting experiment. I’ll remember to take more photos next time!

It’s been a pretty crazy week for various reasons, but I’ve now added the next chunk to the “How To” section. This talks a bit about how the tools work, where they sit in the development of a game and hopefully how to move forwards. Hopefully it makes sense!

(13th Sep) – I’ve updated this section as it kept playing on my mind, I squeezed it into 3 pages when ideally it needed 4. So it’s now been rewritten to enjoy the extra space.

Note that if you did read this before you may need to force a refresh / empty your cache as I’ve simply overwritten the previous images with new, smaller, ones.

Really minor update but, spurred on by an email, I’ve now added an RSS icon (and, thus, feed) to the site (look to the top right).

It’s very basic (just feeds my ramblings on the blog) and clicking links in the feed will only bring you back to the front page. But it’s the future, or so I’m told.