Mabinogi

I have played a few hour of Mabinogi today, I must say I were impressed. I have play so many free MMO including the Runes of Magic that commonly know as one of the best f2p mmo, but i find that Mabinogi beats it hand down at least at beginning level.

What i find so good about Mabinogi

1. Very polish, many details has well thought out, for example rewards system, this don't required to walk all the way back to quest npc to claim rewards and don't present the reward from no where just blink into your inventory, it uses owl to deliver your rewards. and it has age system to let your grow your avatar in the magical world and allow you to reborn! just like the intro telling you, only your soul is travel into the magical world.
2. Very simple and fun combat system. I don't just lock a monster and sit to see auto attack or button mashing, instead it uses scissor paper stone system, very nice.
3. Class free mmo, finally i could customize my own skill set, no just grown a predefined character
4. low system requirement, not necessary an attribute for good mmo, is important to me, for my integrated gfx cards
5. many part time jobs, although i only did some of them, they feel like mini games in facebook, very relaxing.

Overall i finally find a good mmo worth for the space on my PC.

Color blend mode that used in photoshop and gimp

chatting with my colleague one day regarding skin color selection for avatar creation and customization in rpg game. one of the solution is to create 1 skin color per texture which is obviously very labor intensive. one of my artist colleague suggested to use photoshop color blend mode to create different skin tone. so artist only need to create a gray scale image for the skin tone and the game is client enough to tint color to the grayscale texture. great idea, it works perfectly in photoshop, but how to do it in game client in realtime? after much reading the internet, most of the algorithm were very hard to understand my programmer, because those algorithms were based on HSV (hue, saturation and value) or HSL (hue, saturation and luminance). but for us programmer, all we had is RGB!

after googling awhile i found a great article, it shown the operation in term of rgb, and it is easier to understand than the algorithm based on HSV or HSL.

the basic steps for color blend mode

1) assign 2 textures to the program, a base and a source texture

2) calculate grayscale (luminance) value of both base and source textures

3) base illuminace minus away source luminance to get delta luminance

4) result color will be source color's rgb = source color's rgb + delta luminance.

that's all!