AndroGhost

Saw a really cool looking program last night through steam, recently approved through the Greenlight program.  It's called Black Ink, and its a GPU based art tool.  After seeing a couple of the videos, I figured, what the hell - it's half off right now.  

For those of you that don't know, I'm not an artist.  Yes, I have an art gallery here but 3d art is different - requires much less hand-eye coordination - at least for me.  I can't sketch to save my life without having the final result come out looking like a 4 year old drew it.  However, with this program, I was able to actually make some neat looking stuff, and fairly quickly.

I turned this into this in about 10 minutes, which I like.  My wife, however, is fantastic.  She did this in about 20 minutes from scratch:

The program makes extremely high-resolution pictures.  Too big, in my opinion.  The originals come out 4000+ pixels wide, and the original PNG file was 46 MB.  By shrinking it for display here, some of the detail was lost, but it's amazing what can be done so quickly.  Maybe my art gallery will start expanding again soon :)

Considering how badly I remember tearing into Sid Meyer's Civilization V (in a review for the mac version) a few years ago when I played it on my MacBook pro, it feels strange that I can personally attest to the addiction factor it still has for me even now on my PC.  I can't blame myself - I had screenshots like this, and trust me - it was frustrating at the time.  (Yes, this is my original screenshot from my own experience.)

On windows though, the game runs fairly flawlessly for me, with a few rare exceptions.  Even in the instances where it does crash, the autosave is a godsend.

Now, my major gripe is simply that the game is cutting into my development time, and I needs my development time.

I can't help it - I love video games.  Always have.  I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.  I just need to go a bit more in moderation.  With the new car payment, I can already rest assured that my mad money for games is a bit lessened nowadays at least.

That's all for now.  Back to the grind :)