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+====== Site ======
+===== Editorials =====
+==== Comment to Car Makers ====
+Hi guys
+I want to make a comment to all car-makers - well, as i only go to your sites, let's say to all the car-makers who submit to your sites. This is an open letter being sent to you in the hope that it could appear either in your news column or somewhere similar - I don't have my own site yet and I doubt if I could get the coverage that way anyhow - I may send this to Gouranga too, but for now I'll stick to these sites.
+I'd like to make a request to all car makers on behalf of all GTA add-on car users, in particular newbies to the scene. It's to do with the release of cars in ZIP files, specifically the files contained in those ZIPs.
+Single-image Bitmaps.....
+Guys, if you've made a super-spiffy spoilers-on-your-mirrors sponsored-by-everyone wondermobile out of your Sunday Best sedan, DON'T just stick the single image in the pack - you know it won't work with the deltas you've supplied. Even if the car uses basically the same colors (for example a soft-top of your latest coupe) it ain't gonna work unless we sit and redraw the deltas before we import it - and then it ain't the car you envisaged anymore but some really nice start car with big black blobs all over it. After you've spent the time to make the car, why not take that little bit longer and give us the deltas YOU'D like to see it used with? This is beginning to happen a bit now, but it's still in short supply.
+Delta Sheets - use the appropriate car!
+Again, you've just made the Ferghini Dinach in your favorite pearlescent puce, you've managed to draw in accurately the 3-way folding door mechanism - but you've built this 60 pixels tall, 35 pixels wide, car with it's 13 pixels of door movement, over the Repair Van. Sure, the Repair Van has a 48-pixel wide image, but if we play the game with the width of the car set to 35 we're gonna be hitting walls with thin air on one side, and passing through them without a scratch on the other! And if we decide to widen the stats to encompass the doors, well we can forget that cute back-alley getaway!
+Why not work out the size of sheet your car's gonna need BEFORE deciding which car it's replacing? The above example would fit perfectly centrally over the Penetrator in Liberty City. Sure it's an extreme example, but having just looked through all the cars I've downloaded tonight I've found 6 out of 10 will need to be centered on their deltasheets - and the worst thing is NONE of these even NEED to be off-center - there's space all around the door mechanism, in one case to the tune of 7 spare pixels AFTER moving!
+Come on, honestly - do you all play your GTA game expecting to hit the wall because your car's too wide for the gap even though you made it so thin? Is there really just one car you want to replace, no matter how much of a shoe-horn it is to fit the replacement in?
+Door deltas also NEED to be drawn for the back-door cars - and yet they seem to be forgotten by most. Hell, the double-doored cars seem to be shunned by most of you anyhow, and yet these are surely the cars that oofer most creative challenge? There are some lovely trucks being made with back-door deltas, Alfadog's 40th car had the most GORGEOUS sliding action with warning lights - shame it's on a car that doesn't allow the use of that door in that model, but still..... gorgeous.....
+The colors of a lot of newer cars on the scene leaves a LOT to be desired too - when building that new creation ask yourself are you SO in love with Dayglo Brown that you don't want anyone to remap the car to any other shade? Black, silver, and white MAY be technically wonderful achievements, but unless it's being used to modify a car with no remap colorschemes it's gonna make for a more boring game in the end.
+While on the subject of color - there's a resurgence of faulty transparencies, and scarily I'd say about 80% of the cars I've grabbed recently with transparency trouble came from long-established should-know-better designers. New car makers seem to not use the same tools, or to use colors different enough from black that their software doesn't bugger the pallete up. I used to go in and edit these when i found them, after all it only takes 1 minute tops..... but then I decided not to bother, if the designer doesn't think it's worth that extra minute then there's got to be better cars out there.
+Are you really so unconcerned with your images that you don't care if every user has to open and edit them just to use them properly? Have you slaved away for 8 hours shading that engine bulge better than Ray Larabie only to decide "they won't use it, so I won't make any deltas"?
+I don't care how many times your cars score over 90%, nor do I care if it took you 3 weeks of eating only freeze-dried coffee sandwiches with only a dead sparrow for company, and the fact that it's more photo-realistic than the real thing makes no difference either. If I need to do more than 5 minutes on it to make it work the way it's supposed to I ain't touching your stuff again.
+And if someone with car-making skills of their own isn't going to fix your car to use it, what makes you think a newbie will?
+Comments, criticisms, and copulatory requests (f**k off, etc) to justhere4coffee@yahoo.com