[COMMUNITY PROJECT] Developer Logos Database

[stigzler]

Inch by inch...

The product of labour:

tbc... (tthurman's been a star, but seriously - any of you GameEx Users want to help out? )

[nullPointer]

That collage is an awesome touch Stigz! Looks great. Apologies for my recent absence . I have a RL project going on (assigned by the wife no less!), and two trips to prepare for within the next 3 weeks. I've been a bit strapped for time, but I've not forgotten. Thanks all for doing such a fabulous job on this project!

[tthurman]

That is super cool Stigzler!

I certainly appreciate the kudos, but the real stars will come out when you talented gents take some of these very rough logos, and polish them up and make them presentable. Perhaps some day I will learn this talent, and who knows it may be this project that gets me started, but for now I'm doing what I'm most capable of.

I'm up visiting my folks for family reunion, and will return to the hunt the first of the week.

[stigzler]

Ah, null - a three line whip from the missus? Wisdom prevails over folly - good man.

Don't minimize the value of what you've done so far, tthurman - what we've got is both useable and invaluable. As for gfx editing, I think it might just take knowing a few tricks. I mainly use magic select, Gaussian blur, cut, pastes, rotate etc - all the basic tools. I know I aint getting gold standard, but once we've done a full set of sources, I shall return to seek the advice of those more ninja'd in the art of gfx.

[stigzler]

Update: Few more done this morning:

[Draco1962]

I applaud all involved, especially Stigzler for bringing the project back from the dead(or at least out of a coma) and taking the organization and sourcing to the next level. tthurman, well, what can I say - you are a machine!

[stigzler]

Thanks Draco - heavily kickstarted by your original hard work!

UPDATE: Changed the OP (1st post) to hopefully make it all a little clearer (I tinkered with it a bit on others' suggestions since making the OP!)

[stigzler]

What a way to spend a Saturday night...

[tthurman]

Wow, I never knew TDK got into this market, interesting for sure.

WTG Stigzler!

[nullPointer]

Thanks for updating the main post Stigz! I plan to be jumping back into this project in full once I get my fence built, and return from my upcoming trips. I'll have to get the updated links and whatnot, so I'm posting images to the proper places!

Hey I have a suggestion that I've been mulling over in terms of this project. It seems to me that if you have an image in a vector format that it's slightly redundant to try and maintain that image in both a vector format and a separate bitmap format. The vector image can arbitrarily be scaled and converted to any size of bitmap (without loss of quality), so it just seems that at that point it only introduces extra overhead (not to mention HD space) to try and maintain both formats.

In any case, you've been doing an excellent job as project manager on this project, so feel free to bin this suggestion at will. Just something I'd been thinking about. Carry on! Onward and upward to even greater peanuts!

[stigzler]

Nice one null, and happy fencing... Be great to have your assistance once more, so once you have a bit of spare time, let me know and I'll re-forward the links.

On the bitmap/vector issue. My plan was to enable users just to grab a folder and drop it onto their local machine, with all the logos correctly named in the GE format. This can be for whatever project they are doing (in my case - gonna use it with Adultery's GameTagger plugin). However, because of this, I think it's better to preserve different vector and bitmap folders to ensure end product is essentially 'drag-and-drop' without any user work at the end.

Nice one, chaps

[nullPointer]

That makes good sense Stigzler, and thanks for the clarification. I suppose if one were uploading vector images it should be their responsibility to convert the image and upload in both bitmap and vector formats. Under that circumstance what's the general recommendation on image size for bitmap versions of vector images? The bigger the better? Is there an upper limit? (Like say no larger than 4000px on the longest edge or something?)

[stigzler]

Hmmm... I was going with the recommendation from the original project of 600px longest edge for a developer image. I was thinking that there must have been some rationale behind this, so stuck with it....

[nullPointer]

Cool sir! Thank you again.

[Draco1962]

Ray and I were originally sizing the finished images to fit centered on 800X600 as this looks pretty good in most setups. So the closer the source image is to this on a minimum the better. Larger sources are easy to scale down. Smaller sources are hell to upscale and look decent.

[tthurman]

Sorry to switch gears here, but I felt I should mention how I am completing fields on the form.

Some developers that I thought where somewhat obscure are in fact rather large. In this case, many seem to have logos that have evolved over the years, in some cases several times. When this occurs I link the one that is newest unless an older one is more relevant to the era of the games for a particular system, or looks considerably better based on either color, design, and perhaps most importantly, the resolution. This is my opinon of course, and something you all may wish to evaluate.

In the case of multiple logos I will include a link in the "Notes" section that goes to the page with all the other logos, and in the case of a single alternate, I link straight to that image.

In the event I am unable to find a logo, I try and find a page that lists the games they developed. When I do I put this link in the notes section so we have something to refer to in the event we are forced to resort to looking for box art.

I'm simply moving down the form, and I'm currently in the "I" section, and coming up dry quite often. This is one of the reasons I'm posting this, if you're looking at a long section I've gone through, and sudeenly there is nothing noted, my searches didn't get any hits.

[Draco1962]

Maybe make a note "Unable to source" to flag those so that others will skip that one and move onto the next. We can try to source those at a later time once all the rest are complete.

[stigzler]

Ah great, Draco. I'll change the OP at some point to 800x600 - but just one q - probably my being stoopid - but what does "centered" mean?

Great practice putting a comment against games you've already searched. I've been doing similar - saying can't find logo ("no logo?") and anything my 'research' had showed up (e.g. 3 games on spectrum - game names etc...).

Guess we should strive for consistency, thought. tthurman - could you put future comments against the actual game name in the cells in column (column A)? Right Click > Insert Comment. This allows a thread of comments, rather than just one in the box. Also shows little orange triangle to indicate issues. Lastly - once probelm solved, can choose "resolve" and flag disappears!

Great work chaps - and monster session tonight, tthurman!

[Draco1962]

Ah great, Draco. I'll change the OP at some point to 800x600 - but just one q - probably my being stoopid - but what does "centered" mean?

Some images may be more horizontal in layout while others are more vertical. When resizing them to fit 800x600 specs, we were ensuring that the width was no more than 800 and height no more than 600 and centered within an 800x600 transparency.

[stigzler]

Ah, thanks - that clarifies and makes perfect sense now! Guess that's for end result positioning purposes...

[Draco1962]

Yep! You are correct! Have a peanut...

[tthurman]

Guess we should strive for consistency, thought. tthurman - could you put future comments against the actual game name in the cells in column (column A)? Right Click > Insert Comment. This allows a thread of comments, rather than just one in the box. Also shows little orange triangle to indicate issues. Lastly - once probelm solved, can choose "resolve" and flag disappears!

I have been using cell A to comment frequently, but I've been using it to indicate what the link in the notes is pointing to. You can look at several of the sources I've found that have multiple links mostly by looking for that triangle in cell A.

Check that out and see if it works for you, if not, I'll start putting the alternate logo links in that comment.

[KRC]

Noticable by his absence: KRC.

Thought you were the graphics guy?

( scuse me a few beers and calling the poor community response )

Yeah been a bit busy with other projects and real life. I may help in the future though.

Oh and by the way, its a nice little topic you got going on here. If there are logos that are missing I think it would be better to redraw them.

[tthurman]

Problem is, especially with a lot of the pinball guys, is these are just fellows that designed playing fields and/or the mechanics for them. Many of them are icons in their field, but regardless, they never had a logo. Then again perhaps just creating one may be the path of least resistance.

Sourcing for the really obscure developers, which is proving to be difficult, could result in the same thing, no logo to work from to begin with. I don't want to exaggerate, but I believe there are going to be quite a lot missing sources. Creating one may be the only solution.

[Draco1962]

I would not be too concerned about the playfield/mechanics designers for the pinball programs. At least for MAME, most of the "mechanical" games will be filtered out by GameEx anyways as the roms for the same are likely not to ever work in the foreseeable future.

As for the rest, if no logo is to be found, then a no image found image will be pulled from within GameEx. Source what you can, make notes, move on. You are doing great!