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So Rob

PostPosted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 6:55 pm
by DOC_Agren
So how comes the new and improved Icar?

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:51 am
by Rob Lang
DOC! Sorry for the slow reply.

Things have been a little tough over the past few months. My wife and I have been suffering from migraines and then my Dad died at the end of March. He was very ill for a long time, so I've spent a fair amount of the time on the road giving him as much time with the children as I could.

So, progress has been kinda slow. There is progress, though...

I've got most of the new website built: http://www.icar.co.uk
I'm still moving old pages across but the core of it is there.

And I'm doing well with my Blender learning; although that's kind of slow right now.

One issue I have had is making everything open source. Scribus isn't very good for big documents and I seem to be having huge problems stitching the resultant PDFs back together with a contents page and index. I might have to stick with Indesign, which is a barrier to others producing their own variants but I can't get Scribus to do what I need.

I'm keeping myself organised using this Trello board:
https://trello.com/b/46BJhlX1/icar-the- ... wwicarcouk

And doing a little social media stuff on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/icarrpg

I'm trying to get back into the swing of it; v5 is numerically ready; I just need to write and edit the words again!

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Thu May 02, 2019 12:02 pm
by Onix
Sorry to hear about your dad and the migraines Rob :( It would be nice if writing games was the most pressing thing we ever had to deal with but, yeah.

I recently got into using Affinity Publisher. It's still in Beta and currently free. I found it to be stable and very capable. I don't know what the final price will be but they usually price their software around $50 which is much more doable than Adobe's tools. If you're interested there are some good youtube walkthroughs that show how to use it. I was lost until I watched one.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Sun May 05, 2019 9:48 pm
by DOC_Agren
Sorry to hear about your Dad Rob, may he rest in peace

I hope that you can move forward when you can. ICAR was an interesting game system, and we had fun playing in your universe, even if randolph like all good GM tweaked it a tad for us.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 2:52 pm
by Rob Lang
Thank you all! I'm still plodding, snatching half an hour here and there.

Onix - I'll check out Affinity. I would love Scribus to do what I need but it's just not it. When it comes to open source, I might just have to upload everything - source text, images and project files and then leave it to the contributor to sort out.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Tue May 14, 2019 5:00 pm
by Onix
There's some game designer that is really good with Scribus. I can't remember who it was though. If I could remember, I could try and hook you up with him. I'll keep an eye out.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Wed May 15, 2019 2:28 pm
by Rob Lang
That kind, mate thank you. However, I fear that the problem I have with Scribus is a problem with the software itself. Icar is always going to be 160+ pages and Scribus isn't designed to handle that load, so it runs progressively slowly and crashes. The developers "hope" that the next big release version solves it but it's not really their target market. I'm afraid I'm going to have to move on from it.

I'm going to start by writing up v5 in markdown text then that should be a good enough base to build onto.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Thu May 16, 2019 4:30 am
by Onix
Ah, got it. That's kind of sad.

One possible solution would be to create all the chapters and then stitch them together as PDFs. It would kind of defeat the purpose of using all open source software if there isn't an open source solution to do that but I know that Acrobat can.

Before I started playing with Affinity Publisher, I saw some publishers using LaTeX to typeset small books. I'm not sure if the LaTeX readers could handle Icar though, might run into the same problem.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Sun May 19, 2019 7:40 am
by Rob Lang
The stitch-together solution was offered but then indexes and contents become a pain - especially if someone wants to replace the text in another language and publish themselves. That extra nonsense will truly put them off.

If I have all the text written up and then imported into layout, then it should make it the most accessible. I don't like the idea of people having to spend money to make their own version (it sort of defeats the point) but if they are going to then £55 once is much better than £120 a year.

LaTex should be fine, my friend did his monstrous 400-pages-of-images PhD in it but I found it, well, arcane. I also checked out Quarkxpress, which is as old as the hills and didn't give me much confidence that it would work for my big documents.

I've watched a bunch of Affinity tutorials as you recommended and I'm going to go with them. It's really, really, really, REALLY, REEEEALLY similar to InDesign. I mean... it's REALLY similar. VERY similar. You know what I mean? Steal-your-customers similar. :) Which is good for competition, Adobe has owned this space for too long.

Re: So Rob

PostPosted: Sun May 19, 2019 11:30 am
by Onix
Yeah, LaTeX is definitely not a casual tool to pick up. I hope you find using Affinity effective. A big part of the process is getting your master pages nailed down first. You can't easily go back and swap out masters later. Something I tried and it took a decent amount of work to fix.