My Kingdom for a... (Shaeram Discussion).

[Spec8472]

Spec, how about letting us use remote images for avatars then? I'd love to use the spinning Shaeram for an avatar, but it is 500k in size.

It's not a matter of storage or bandwidth on the site's end. I've got over 15GB of free disk space and 200+ GB of month of bandwidth available.

For a lot of people - especially those on dialup or other low-bandwidth services - downloading 500k just for an avatar really isn't acceptable.

In any case, remote avatars arn't good for two main reasons:
1) Many people don't have fast and reliable hosting on which to put their avatar.

2) In experience with the previous (YaBB) forums, externally hosted avatars were often very large (800x600 in one instance) and/or poorly optimised.

This ends up hurting page load times, as your browser uses up time and bandwidth trying to connect to an additional site. HTTP 1.1 allows your browser to keep one connection open to send multiple requests.

Also, If the site is down, or slow (eg on dialup/isdn/capped cable) then your browser may end up trying to load the image multiple times as you navigate through the forums.

Think about the "What if someone else wanted a large avatar" aspect of it too. Even on a fast connection, if you've got 4 people who all decide that a 500KB animated avatar is great, that's 2MB of data just for avatars.

2MB Transfer Comparisons
56KBit Dialup: Approx 6 minutes 50 seconds @ 5KByte/sec
64KBit ISDN: 4 minutes 54 seconds @ 7KByte/sec
128KBit ISDN (2x B channel): 2 minutes 26 seconds @ 14KByte/sec
256KBit DSL: Approx 1min 22 seconds @ 25KByte/sec
512KBit DSL: Approx 38 seconds. @ 54KByte/Ssc
1.5MBit DSL / T1: Approx 14 seconds @ 150KByte/sec

NB: These speeds are based on what I've, personally, experienced with each of the above types of connections on optimal conditions.

Spreading those avatars over multiple sites only makes it worse unless the forums are performing particularly poorly.

[azarah]

I played around in Blender, and made this. I have the .blend if anybody is interested, but its 4.6MB, so I'll rather not post it here.

[Hallmist]

I like.

I couldnt figure out how to get a six pointed star without making it look like a star of david. That! thats how!

its amazing how it seems so obvious once someone's already done it.

[Shadowhawk]

huh. thats really too bad that the animated GIF is turning out 1MB+

the original avi was 80KB, over 10x smaller! So I guess using an animated GIF as an avatar is kinda out of the question.

the .avi format's gotta have some great compression algorithms for if one frame is very close to the next one, while GIF must enumerate every pixel of every frame or something.

Animated avatar is bad from the good practices point of view: it is only a bit less annoying and distracting than BLINK tag. And yes, even .4 MB avatar is I think too large.

Techically, it isn't AVI format (which is container format) but DivX 3 codec (compression) that makes the movie small in comparision to animated GIF, which is just sequence of images, compressed using lossless LZW algorithm. I don't know what GIMP does optimizing animation for GIF; probably it has something with storing only difference in frames.

[Hallmist]

<shrug> I guess that animations will just have to be relegated to 'wow that's so cool but so not useful'

[Blyker]

My mothers christmas star is a 6 pointed star as well but its triangles are a lot longer then the symetrical triangles of a davids cross.



For the middle i thought it was a star that we had there as well i see a lot of rounded curves there in pictures. Shouldnt it be something like this?

[Shadowhawk]

For the middle i thought it was a star that we had there as well i see a lot of rounded curves there in pictures. Shouldnt it be something like this?
(...)

Well, I also thougth so, but in the Tower of Sorcery, Chapter 1 we have:

inside the six-pointed star was a four-pointed star, its points going in the four compass directions, with concavely curved sides.

[Metatrone]

OK, here are the attachments

[Spec8472]

Can anybody see the images? I'm not sure that the host is open for foreign access.

Yes, but for speed, please use the file attachment options here, or via the Wiki.

[Spec8472]

Shaeram discussion from Tower of Sorcery...

She reached into the
bodice of her blue dress, and withdrew an amulet made of ivory. It was
rather unusual, Tarrin noticed, a circle holding a six-pointed star inside
it created by two triangles resting over each other in opposite directions.
And inside the six-pointed star was a four-pointed star, its points going
in the four compass directions, with concavely curved sides. At the
center of that inner star was a small diamond.

[Metatrone]

Aww.., I was hoping that there wasn't a such an acurate description, and I couldn't find one when I looking for it.