Oh my God, I just lost a whole f@&#ing post full of constructive critiques because my attachment was invalid. Could this damnable forum not have saved the rest of my post? Apparently NOT.
Forgive me as I summarize what I can remember, and please know that the original post was full of disclaimers like "I hope you aren't irritated by my nit-picking; I love what you're doing and am just a raging perfectionist" and assurances like "fantastic work, I'm using these as they are, these are only those suggestions that popped into my head". On this re-write, however, I'm skipping straight to the constructive criticism, trusting that you already know I think both of you are doing phenomenal work. (I mean, would I be retyping this otherwise?)
First things first: PSD File for my agebook is here
The Three MystCraft Books
I love them, and I think they should definitely be the "official" textures for the three MystCraft books. Just two comments:
- There may be issues when you downsize those textures to 64x. I had the same problems, as you can see here:
I know 128x is "Sphax standard", but with the higher demands of the new 1.5 FTB packs, a lot of people are suffering out-of-memory errors when they try to load even incomplete 128x Sphax texture packs; I suspect 64x is going to get a lot more traction in the days to come. To make things as Sphax-friendly as possible, a symbol that takes up the majority of the front page might work better (as you can see, even my Sphax symbol wasn't quite big enough). I know you mentioned symbols you were working on, but the main suggestion here is to make it big, so that it doesn't lose much in the translation to 64x.
- Could the books perhaps benefit from a few more "magical" trappings, to better distinguish them from books we might see in tech mods? As I was writing this (the first time, ugh), I came up with this idea: How about using the five-pointed border I used around my book's Sphax symbol (unmerged components are in the psd, including an unreduced and un-skewed version)? You could make it bigger than I did and place it in the same location on all three books (perhaps centered vertically, but offset to the left to make room for the clasp). Then, variations in the border color/interior symbol could convey information about the significance/purpose of each of the books:
- Unlinked Book: Just the border, greyed out, with an empty, darkened interior---blank and turned off, with no symbol.
- Age Book: Similar to how I used it---vibrant gold, with a glowing MystCraft (not Sphax) symbol inside.
- Linked Book: Something in between---a silver color maybe, no glowing effects, with either a lower-key MystCraft symbol, or even the Sphax symbol instead (using the Sphax symbol could illustrate the more "conventional" nature of linking book travel, as opposed to the age-creation power of an Age Book).
Of course, this assumes you don't already have everything planned out---I'm not sure exactly what you meant by the symbols you mentioned, so perhaps you do. My only recommendation on that front is to make them big enough so they downsize well---I don't think limiting the symbols to, say, the top half of the cover will be large enough, as you can see from my example.
The Purple Agebook
Definitely---DEFINITELY---using this for the Thaumonomicon! I've always associated purple with ThaumCraft, probably due to the taint mechanic from TC2 (which is apparently making a
VERY creepy return in TC3.1---just
listen to those sound effects!). Even tried to create a (fairly awful, just illustrating my point) purple Thaumonomicon myself:
(Ugh, that is indeed ugly.)
Anyways, I suspect the same downsizing issue will hurt the beautiful symbols around the edges. Maybe consider replacing them with a gilded gold border, and using one of the runes as a bigger symbol in the middle? Or, you could sort of do what I did, and take a texture from one of ThaumCraft's more recognizable items (a wand, a crystal shard---I like that idea quite a bit, actually, a golem, one of the research symbols from the Thaumonomicon GUI, etc.), perhaps?
Okay, second time through writing this, I'm taking a nap. And may God have mercy on this server if anything other than "post successful" happens when I push the Submit button.