Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Three Kingdoms Badge Competition
The Three Kingdoms Badge Competition is now on! You decide what will be our next set of badges! Get creative and show us your best work and your badges could be the official badge set for Total War Center forums. The Submission time begins on today and lasts through 12 weeks ending on 24th of February 2019.
Feel free to open your own workshop thread in the Graphic Workshop, so that we can all work together and provide feedback on the work we are doing. After all, we are a community and that's what we're here for: to help each other out.
Competition Rules
The badges must be early chinese imperial dynasties-themed or, at least, clearly related to China.
Badges MUST remain within the 175 pixels wide and 60 pixels tall. They MUST NOT be animated. PNG files are preferred, in order to maintain a high degree of graphical fidelity.
For the 1st round of the competition, a set of 6 badges must be submitted to be considered as "complete". These 6 badges are:
Hexagon Council
Moderator
Citizen
Content Staff
Curator
Magistrate
For the 2nd round of the competition, a full set of 25 badges will have to be done by the 3 finalists.
Users may submit up to two badge sets in different styles during the 1st round.
Each badge submitted must have text that is easy to read, and font color must correspond to the name color of the usergroup involved.
Moderator badge must have a bold navy blue font,
Modding Staff and Modding Director must have the following green color code: #006600 or#006633.
Magistrate and Tribune badges must use a black font.
The "Feral Interactive" badge must retain their logo (the cheetah - at least partially) and their corporate color for the font: #E97016
The "Slitherine Dev Member" badge must retain their logo (the lizard) and their corporate color for the font: #125C1D
The "Creative Assembly" badge must retain their logo (the CA) and their corporate color for the font: #461C6E
The "God in Colchester" badge must use a representation of Confucius.
The "Stalker" badge must retain its current imagery and font.
Badges using the same color must have different tones. For example, the Gaming Staff font must use a different orange color than the Feral Interactive one.
Everything you submit must be your own work. Blank templates for use may be provided, but you are also free to create your own (for personal use in the competition and sharing, which is caring) or use open source material.
Submissions do not need to be 100% finished. Some small tweaking will be allowed for the winner.
You MAY NOT ask for votes. You MAY advertise this competition, but you MAY NOT advertise your own submissions. If you do so, you will be disqualified.
Submissions
Submission time for the 1st round ends on the 30th of December 2018 at 11:59pm GMT. Entries may be edited anytime before this time.
Submission time for the 2nd round starts on the 14th of January 2019 at 00:01 am GMT and ends on the 10th of February 2019 at 11:59 pm GMT. Entries may be edited anytime before this time.
Entries not posted in the Submission Thread will not be considered!
You may make two separate entries.
Polls
There will be two rounds of voting.
The first round will begin after the 1st submission period is over. The first round of voting will last two weeks.
A second, final round of voting will then begin with the top three entries from the previous round and after the 2nd submission period is over. This round will also last two weeks.
Awards
1st: TWC Glory for being the one to make TWC badges! Artist Badge" will also be awarded or a prize of 150 rep (one red flower) if the winner has it already. 2nd: 75 rep 3rd: 50 rep
Every participant will receive 20 rep points, provided they have presented a set of 6 badges.
Here is a list of the current badges currently in use:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Here are the different colours codes (decimal RGB and hex RRGGBB). Thanks to Araval for providing most of them:
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Hey Lifth,
Not sure if there is any chance I'd be able to put something together that would be worth submitting (you can bet I'll try though ), but I have a small question about submissions and voting. Above it says the following things:
Originally Posted by Lifthrasir
Users may submit up to two badge sets in different styles during the 1st round.
...
You may make two separate entries.
There will be two rounds of voting.
The first round will begin after the 1st submission period is over. The first round of voting will last two weeks.
What I was wondering is if voters are voting for a particular badge set, or if they vote for a particular member? The reason for my question is that if people vote by badge set, then it can be a huge drawback to submit two sets, as you'd cut the votes for yourself in half (at least, that is what one may assume). If votes are by member, then it doesn't make a different, but can be fun and/or helpful for voters if you show a couple styles you excel at.
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Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Originally Posted by Lifthrasir
It might also change the vote as a popularity contest instead of a graphic one
Let me think about your point and I'll revert asap
That's true, and I hadn't thought of that. "Choose your favorite badge set" does make the voting more centered around the works themselves and not as much the authors, which is what you'd want for this sort of thing (I assume). I guess then you can just leave the option to submit two sets, with submitting artists recognizing that they may split votes for their own work over two different sets. I can imagine that causing some potential issues for a "fair" tallying of votes later though (What if one author gets most votes on two sets? Are there then only two finalists?; What if one author gets more votes than a finalist, but those votes are evenly split over two sets of badges, making neither set a winner?).
At any rate, whatever you decide will I'm sure be good.
EDIT: I'm also wondering if there are any special rules/regulations about using things from online? Obviously, if I download a base image that has a copyright attached, that is assuredly out, but if I just find images on google (that aren't from some copyrighted source) and use them to work with, is that alright?
Last edited by Kilo11; December 02, 2018 at 01:33 PM.
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Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Regarding the competition, it is obvious that people votes for the badges and not the member, so it's up to the artist to decide what to do: having two sets of badges allows for more opportunity to be liked but in the same time you risk having votes splitted on your works, that is. It's not obligatory, though, so up to the submitter to choose his path.
I guess then you can just leave the option to submit two sets, with submitting artists recognizing that they may split votes for their own work over two different sets. I can imagine that causing some potential issues for a "fair" tallying of votes later though (What if one author gets most votes on two sets? Are there then only two finalists?; What if one author gets more votes than a finalist, but those votes are evenly split over two sets of badges, making neither set a winner?).
Once again, people vote for the sumbissions, not the artist; so all the sumbissions that will end up in the first 3 positions will make to the finals, no matter who posted them; it can even happen that one artist has 2 sets in the finals.
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
About the copyright point, even on Google, most of the pics are copyrighted. I think it would mostly depends on how "heavily" you will alter them for your work and what the conditions of use are. In case of doubt, feel free to post the link here or to PM it to me. So I can check and let you know
Under the patronage of Flinn, proud patron of Jadli, from the Heresy Vault of the Imperial House of Hader
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
What the competition rules don't mention is the fact the badges have to have around 4kb each or something like that, for bandwidth purposes. The current set has been ultimately ruined by the decision to downsize each badge from a quality stand point, from roughly 24kb to 4 kb. All that time and effort invested into these badges rendered useless because of that decision. Up til now there have been submitted two sets: Cedric's (10k) and Katsumoto's (20k).
Last edited by Maximinus Thrax; December 05, 2018 at 03:33 PM.
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
I can get it down to 10kb with this website - surely that's enough?
"I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." - John Adams, on the White House, in a letter to Abigail Adams (2 November 1800)
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Thanks Lifth, would be a shame if we had to cut it down more.
"I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." - John Adams, on the White House, in a letter to Abigail Adams (2 November 1800)
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Initially it was proposed to simply remove Artifex and Civitate badges to save bandwidth and thereby money for GED. Ultimately the size of badges was reduced to <5kB instead. http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1#post11851426
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Originally Posted by Lifthrasir
So I'm afraid that we will have to set the limit to 5kb
I'm still waiting the confirmation from the Tech Staff anyway
Well, that's unfortunate. I can't make anything as high-quality as that of you fellas here, but I wanted to try my hand nonetheless. However, there is no way I could keep my images to a size that low. My sigbars themselves are between 15kb and 20kb, so there is no way I could make a badge that is under 5kb.
If anyone has simple suggestions for how to cut the size down dramatically, I'd still love to try, but I myself simply don't know what to do.
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Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
There are some sites that allow to compress png or other formats to drastically low size, however, if you want such a low size, there will be a loss of quality
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
I've sent a PM to Squid this morning. Hopefully, he'll give an answer soon
But yes, 5kb seems quite low for something of quality. Let's hope that we'll be allowed to go to 10kb
Under the patronage of Flinn, proud patron of Jadli, from the Heresy Vault of the Imperial House of Hader
Re: Three Kingdoms Badges Competition - Discussion Thread
Great find Cedric, with a bit of extra compression in Photoshop that's done it for me with practically no loss in quality:
"I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." - John Adams, on the White House, in a letter to Abigail Adams (2 November 1800)