Comments: 60
200379332 [2022-11-24 19:03:08 +0000 UTC]
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sawirros [2021-12-03 09:01:32 +0000 UTC]
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MrPRESIDENT65 [2021-06-09 02:36:38 +0000 UTC]
Why does it say "CE" when the calendar says Holocene. Holocene is definitely before the Common Era. Shouldn't it be BC or BCE? or does it have a different meaning.
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vectormoon [2020-08-04 18:01:07 +0000 UTC]
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vectormoon In reply to tomme23 [2020-08-06 04:10:41 +0000 UTC]
Oh and you may be interested in what I’m doing, it’s called Pandora. It’s a similar idea to Midgard except I’m adding more stuff and it focuses on kids’ rhymes and tales more than anything else. No Tamriel or Westeros though. The most up to date info on it I have on Scratch: I’m VectorV on there.
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vectormoon In reply to tomme23 [2020-08-06 04:08:26 +0000 UTC]
Also: why did you decide to base it off Earth? Just wondering. Also are you releasing an Arceus’ Eden map for this?
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Hiccaries [2020-03-20 23:55:04 +0000 UTC]
Do you do commissions?
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tomme23 In reply to Hiccaries [2020-03-21 13:21:26 +0000 UTC]
'fraid not, sorry.
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vectormoon [2020-01-07 17:22:31 +0000 UTC]
Why is this literally Earth?
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tomme23 In reply to Aldhissla1997 [2019-12-19 00:11:49 +0000 UTC]
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise some random group of sapients? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi priests would tell you. It’s a Sith legend scientific theory. Darth Plagueis Some random groups of sapients was were a Dark Lord of the Sith just magically inclined, so powerful and so wise he they could use the Force generically named magicka to influence the midichlorians basic code that underlies the entire universe to create life… He They had such a knowledge of the dark side totally neutral and not at all evil magics that he they could even keep the ones he they cared about from dying. The dark side of the Force totally neutral and not at all evil application of magicka is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He They became so powerful… the only thing he was they were afraid of was losing his their power, which eventually, of course, he they did. Unfortunately, he they taught his apprentice their daedra everything he they knew, then his apprentice their daedra killed him in his sleep them while they were awake. Ironic. He They could save others from death, but not himself themselves.
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vectormoon [2019-06-18 20:13:48 +0000 UTC]
Why are you using Earth as a base?
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PrometheanVisionz In reply to vectormoon [2019-06-19 10:02:44 +0000 UTC]
I don't know if you are just a blunt kind of person but you're sort of being rude or at least should ask your questions a bit more friendly-like.
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PrometheanVisionz [2019-06-18 15:17:00 +0000 UTC]
So I see you've used the textures from the blue marble map to create the westeros, tamriel...etc. I was wondering what program and technique you do this with because the way you've done it is so clean. The only way I've learned so far is to use a masking layer and then the healing brush tool to smooth it out. Any tips? this is in photoshop btw
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tomme23 In reply to PrometheanVisionz [2019-06-18 23:31:02 +0000 UTC]
I used photoshop elements.
While the blue marble textures (South America - the real MVP) were used for parts of Tamriel and Westeros, much of it was actually custom-made using the regular paintbrush.
For forests and grasslands you’d want a nice crystalline brush (under special effects) and set it to a small size, increase scattering and spacing, pick a pair of colours from the biome you’re going for, and increase the hue jitter. Then paint away but don’t fill it all in. After that repeat with a new layer underneath with slightly different colours until you’re happy with it. Then merge the layers, add distortions and noise, and sharpen until it resembles satellite terrain.
For hills you can use the same crystal brushes and add a small drop shadow. Sharpen those a little more too.
I never quite got the hang of mountains (and it shows in the Jeralls IMO), but you can get away with copying the blue marble textures wholesale for those. I’d avoid repeating the same texture and using bits that people would recognise.
I found custom deserts quite difficult to pull-off convincingly too, so mix up textures from blue marble too. Avoid repeating the same rocky areas though.
Coastlines tend to have this dark blue/blackish outline to them on the blue marble, which kinda blends the land and sea a bit, so definitely replicate that. Dark blue brush, size 1-2, hue jitter up, opacity ~50%.
Also don’t leave out coastal diatom blooms on shallow carbonate platforms (like off the Bahamas). They really stand out from the surrounding ocean but I’ve never seen them included in other art like this.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask me anything
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vectormoon [2019-06-17 04:02:11 +0000 UTC]
What's the point of including Britain anyway?
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tomme23 In reply to vectormoon [2019-06-17 10:56:10 +0000 UTC]
A world without Wales is a world that's not worth living in.
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vectormoon In reply to tomme23 [2019-06-17 15:34:14 +0000 UTC]
Well just affix Wales to Middle-earth or something or move it somewhere crazy like you did with Italy and Greece. I mean, the Shire is already supposed to represent Britain.
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vectormoon In reply to vectormoon [2019-06-17 15:34:50 +0000 UTC]
Also, I want a new Arceus' Eden map.
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Elvinkin66 [2019-06-08 14:23:32 +0000 UTC]
I wonder what would happen if say the Noldor and the Altmir met... I mean their both elves by different... one is Quendi and the other Mir.
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tomme23 In reply to Elvinkin66 [2019-06-09 00:36:41 +0000 UTC]
Good question! They’d both recognise each other as the same species at least (maybe*) but what they’d do about that really depends on who’s meeting who, when and where they’re meeting, and if there are any humans around to alleviate the situation (or any dwarves to mock I guess).
*From a strictly line of descent perspective, the Altmer and the Noldor are actually more closely related via human ancestors than elven ones. The two elven populations diverged about 200 ka ago while the humans that eventually interbred with them only diverged about 100 ka afterwards.
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GRIMBLETOOTH [2019-04-08 01:47:21 +0000 UTC]
Haha, God I love this project.
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Lediblock2 [2019-03-19 06:13:19 +0000 UTC]
What's new in this update?
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tomme23 In reply to Lediblock2 [2019-03-19 10:25:15 +0000 UTC]
Reprojected into the Equal Earth projection, made the border area look nicer in general. Just aesthetic stuff really.
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NestieBot [2019-03-17 21:42:53 +0000 UTC]
This World is Amazing!
but this is different than our Planet Earth.
God Job though.
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tomme23 In reply to Lediblock2 [2018-12-30 22:30:50 +0000 UTC]
Funny you should mention that. If you zoom in real close to the ocean south of India / east of Sirayn, you’d see a tiny little island there. That be Peter Jackson’s Skull Island there.
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Lediblock2 In reply to tomme23 [2018-12-31 02:53:03 +0000 UTC]
But is it natural? I could honestly see the Skull Island 'dinosaurs' being not daedra, but a bizarre lineage of pseudosuchians.
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tomme23 In reply to Lediblock2 [2018-12-31 16:17:00 +0000 UTC]
Not with that many dinosaurian apomorphies. You'd need a ridiculous degree of convergence with tyrannosaurs (and various other theropods), ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, sauropods, and a stegosaur for that to work. Plus they'd have to survive the K/Pg anyways (while durzogs are descended from Crocodylia itself and shares many similarities) and not get outcompeted by all the other animals that live there (which would probably be somewhat smaller than depicted in the film/book).
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Lediblock2 In reply to tomme23 [2019-01-02 21:44:46 +0000 UTC]
I mean, you could easily have Skull Island be part of a larger landmass that was sunk in Arceus' Eden, explaining the size of the organisms, the broken terrain, and the level of competition as all of these animals were forced together. Plus, some non-avian dinosaurs already survived in Tamriel already.
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tomme23 In reply to Lediblock2 [2019-01-02 22:08:07 +0000 UTC]
I’d use their geological explanation for the island sinking more than the post-Eden sea level rise, but even the original landmass would’ve been too small for that much megafaunal diversity.
I made the point that the non-avian dinosaurs in Tamriel were all descended from a single species of squirrel-sized ornithopod under special circumstances (lived in Atmora, hibernated, asteroid struck in the early winter). The diversity seen in King Kong could not have been derived from that. The geothermal explanation the tie-in mockumentary gave I always thought was bullshit.
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Lediblock2 In reply to tomme23 [2019-01-06 04:44:25 +0000 UTC]
Hang on, hear me out.
What if Skull Island was once part of a Lustria-style continent, one that was originally host to a few surviving dinosaurs? Like Lustria, a daedric lord terraformed the entire thing's ecosystem to be as deadly as physically possible to keep out any invaders, modifying those dinosaurs into the menagerie of beasts upon Skull Island as well as stuff akin Warhammer Fantasy's beasts and the ones from Dinosaurs Attack and The War That Time Forgot? However, rather than take the continent by force and feed troops into the meat grinder that the land had become, the powers of the Pacific just sank the entire fucking thing, leaving only the shattered tip of Skull Island as well as a few other small islands. Kong's species would be a remnant from a population of apes getting washed up on the island and catching the tail end of the lingering magicka that caused such mutation.
I mean, it'd explain where the hell South America went, while also giving Moana's gods and spirits an awesome moment of their own to enjoy. Plus, it also sheds light on something that I've been meaning to point out...
Namely, that having all of the daedra be created from nothing doesn't make a lot of sense. Why spend so much energy to make entirely new beings, when it would be far easier to just modify existing daedra or even using existing organisms as stock? I mean, it's already canon in ASOIAF that the dragons were bred from a smaller wild creature, while Morgoth's own beasts were modified from natural organisms in LOTR lore; hell, there's already a bunch of modified organisms in this setting that don't technically count as daedra in the saxhleel and the khajit. It also makes more sense from a practical standpoint - why spend so much time making an entirely new tree of life for each dragon, when you could just take the original naturally-occurring species and modify it in the way that you want, then modify the different daedric lineages that you've ended up with to what you want, like how companies use their base software to make new products? Hell, even using new genes from other organisms wouldn't muddle classification that much - horizontal gene transfer happens all the time in nature IRL.
Even with the Pokemon, it would make more sense to just have one family tree, with all of the Pokemon being modified from a base organism like Mew; just modifying what he had made would have been a lot easier for Arceus, especially without anything to use as a base.
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tomme23 In reply to Lediblock2 [2019-01-06 18:44:12 +0000 UTC]
I'm gonna have to break this down point by point. Sorry.
What if Skull Island was once part of a Lustria-style continent, one that was originally host to a few surviving dinosaurs?I take it you're using Kong: Skull Island's Pacific island here. I'm using King Kong (2005)'s Indian Ocean island. There isn't space there for another continent. Again though, how would non-avian dinosaurs have survived there across the K/Pg boundary?
Like Lustria, a daedric lord terraformed the entire thing's ecosystem to be as deadly as physically possible to keep out any invaders, modifying those dinosaurs into the menagerie of beasts...Over what timescale? The oldest daedra are 'only' a million years old, and haven't exactly been active during most of that.
However, rather than take the continent by force and feed troops into the meat grinder that the land had become, the powers of the Pacific just sank the entire fucking thing, leaving only the shattered tip of Skull Island as well as a few other small islands.Again, over what timescale? You can't sink a continent (in the Mundus anyway) as that...
Goes against the laws of physics - can't just push lighter continental rock down into denser oceanic crust. The closest thing we have to a continent sinking is Zealandia, which has been ongoing since the Late Cretaceous and involves a much smaller landmass to what you propose after this.
Requires an astronomical amount of power that no one can possibly possess. Sure, there are some ludicrous displays in the setting but they don't compare. Giant window in space-time? No biggie, doesn't take too much to keep it self-sustaining. Barriers that keep the ocean back at certain points? Easy enough too. Utilising 4.6 billion years worth of stored-up magicka to build a liveable space over thousands of years? Especially easy when you have that much juice to play with. Altering the climate on a global scale? We're doing that ourselves right now! Meanwhile pushing a continental landmass (with an approximate mass of 2*1021 kg, which doesn't even include the mass of mantle displaced) six kilometres downwards (based on the height of the Andes), and have it not immediately rebound (and destroy itself) is completely impossible.
Even if you could theoretically do it, the resulting tectonic activity would make the Siberian Traps look like a fire cracker and almost certainly wipe out all life on the planet. lingering magicka that caused such mutation.Undirected magicka does not cause mutations in DNA, as DNA's structure and the cell's repair mechanisms are specifically resistant to its lightly ionising effects. That was one of the factors that contribute to Midgard's 'deathworld' perception by the wider galaxy. Enchanted items (objects with magical patterns (spells) infused into them) cannot contain such a complex spell that could alter a genetic code. I will have to do a write up on what magicka is and how it works (and simultaneously doesn't work and isn't supposed to) at some point.
it'd explain where the hell South America went, while also giving Moana's gods and spirits an awesome moment of their own to enjoy.We don't need a South America. We've got enough landmass already, its species are covered by Westeros and Akavir, and it looks like a decaying fish. The Polynesian gods (the Atua) aren't particularly powerful either, nor important in the grand scheme of things.
Why spend so much energy to make entirely new beingsMagic is easy compared to actual work. In Skyrim for example any random scrub can throw around fireballs with no discernible effort. Also the motivation for most daedra-creators is "well that guy's doing it so I've gotta one-up him because he's tacky and I hate him and I can rub it in his stupid face."
I mean, it's already canon in ASOIAF that the dragons were bred from a smaller wild creatureNo it isn't. That was a hypothesis given by an in-universe source.
Morgoth's own beasts were modified from natural organisms in LOTR loreAgain, up for debate. Tolkien's earliest writings suggested otherwise and he never definitely decided where they came from. The elf origin was published after his death.
there's already a bunch of modified organisms in this setting that don't technically count as daedra in the saxhleel and the khajiitMinor modifications to anatomy (such as gills in saxhleel (expression of latent genes already present) and limb proportions in both species - quadrupedal khajiit forms still have hands in Midgard 'canon') can be achieved by hormones in hist sap and whatever the hell Azura was doing (probably something to do with skooma... I just had a thought and will have to do another write up, but Azura didn't alter anything herself - she just got them hooked on moon sugar! Holy shit.). Said hormones affect gene expression but not the code itself. These modifications are not passed on vertically via the genetic code either.
I've gotta come up with something for Aslan's uplifted animals - watch this space.
why spend so much time making an entirely new tree of life for each dragon, when you could just take the original naturally-occurring species and modify it in the way that you want, then modify the different daedric lineages that you've ended up with to what you want, like how companies use their base software to make new products?
They have time, and modifying a living organism to that degree would most likely result in its death, especially if its more than just a zygote.
Molag Bal did something like that to create his 'daedric titans' from the dragon Boziikkodstrun, who was very dead at the time. The titan also only incorporated the bones of the dragon, not any genetic information which would've been created from scratch when the titan's flesh was created by magically-infused goo-water (in a plane of Oblivion where stuff like raw magicka can stick around).
Hell, even using new genes from other organisms wouldn't muddle classification that much - horizontal gene transfer happens all the time in nature IRL.You seem to have misunderstood just how organisms are being created here, and to be fair I haven't actually thought too much about it myself before now (nor written anything down). The creators in question don't know anything about genes or how inheritance works. Nor do they know anything about DNA structure, proteins, epigenetics, cell structure, microbial life and viruses, what organs do or how they work, ecology, evolution, or even the basic concept of a common origin of aedric life. They aren't considering any of that when they do their thing. They just have a mental image of what they want the result to be and use magic to brute force (in computer hacking parlance) the universe until it comes up with a workable solution. All spells follow that same basic principle. It sounds hacky and contrived because it is hacky and contrived. Magic is not supposed to be a thing, but it is a thing because the universe was poorly coded.
Even with the Pokemon, it would make more sense to just have one family tree, with all of the Pokemon being modified from a base organism like Mew; just modifying what he had made would have been a lot easier for Arceus, especially without anything to use as a base.That's exactly how the common Pokémon were created. They are one family tree.
Wew lad this took longer than I thought it would and I've probably left out some of my brain farts. Hope you enjoyed!
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Lediblock2 In reply to tomme23 [2019-01-08 05:40:33 +0000 UTC]
Location: Okay, yeah, I didn't think that one through. However, there is a workaround - the now-sunken continent of Zealandia. Skull Island could just be a big chunk of the thing that stayed above water. It would also allow for a decent amount of speciation, keeping the dinosaurs relatively geographically sheltered... or you could just use something completely different. Mekosuchines and notosuchians were all across the Southern Hemisphere during the Cretaceous, it would be easy for a few of them to survive and diversify. Hell, you could even use lizards for the Brontosaurus' ancestors, going with the Squamozoic route. Flashman had a similar idea on the Speculative Evolution forums with his A Million Years BC project.
So, what would we need on this chunk of Zealandia to get this started? Well:
- A couple of theropod-like crocodilians, maybe an herbivorous one, or a small theropod that rediversified into bigger forms
- One or two big herbivorous lizards, maybe a tuatara that developed a full-on beak like the ancient rhynchosaurs.
- Some large flightless birds
- A few flying multietuberculates
- A myriad of big arthropods, which could likely get to their current sizes in the films via using magicka anyway.
- Some varanids
So far, these are all fairly simple creatures - hell, maybe one or two of Tamriel's ornithopods drifted onto this proto-Skull Island, giving rise to what would become the Ferrucuttus.
Now we come to the next part - modification.
If we subscribe to the idea that Morgoth primarily modified aedric creatures into daedric ones, (Or even that instead of making entirely new organisms from scratch, attempts to create original life just conjured up the closest aedric equivalent to the intended beast and warped it into the desired shape), then modifying this chunk of Zealandia wouldn't take much time at all, considering the rate at which daedric diversity seems to have exploded across the board. Good old-fashioned selective breeding would be useful, too, sped up by, well, magic. If it can turn shape Argonians from lizards to humanoids, or turn one into an eight-foot-tall wolfman, or make werevultures or werecrocodiles or whatever else is in Elder Scrolls lore, it can mutate organisms in ways that can be passed on to their young.
And what happens next? Well, that's obvious, isn't it? Nature takes its course. This chunk of Zealandia is running upon borrowed time, earthquakes gradually sending piece by piece of it into the sea. The daedric lord is pulled away to elsewhere or loses interest in its pet project, and this ecosystem of monsters is left on its own, maybe adapting a bit more over the thousands of years but unable to keep up with the rate at which the island shrinks.
But of course that still leaves the biggest question: The Kongs. For them, I postulate that they were either the product of intense natural selection upon another island like what Den Valdron has suggested in the past, or were bred from already-large apes (Think Mighty Joe Young-sized) by some civilization or another, maybe even the forebearers of Moana's people, through both mundane methods of selective breeding and magicks meant to increase size and healthiness. This civilization attempts to colonize Skull Island, then the big collapse happens, leaving the Kongs stranded upon the only island that had enough resources to sustain them, and even that's not uncertain given how the island continues to fall away.
As for magic, well... it seems a bit boring to me, is all. With my idea of such spells just conjuring up modified versions of existing beasts or ones that are hodgepodges of different creatures, you allow for a lot more leeway. You could have the movie-version of the mumakil be a variant bred by Morgoth when he wanted a variant that was even bigger and badder, but quickly died out in the wild due to there just not being enough food to sustain such titans (Sidenote: The Great Beasts of the movies could just be a warm-weather member of the Elasmotherium genus). You allow for the cold-drakes or whatever the ancestral species was for these dragons to be in Middle-Earth, a cousin to the wamasu with large wing-like sails along its back that it could raise in a threat display and the ability to utilize stores of magicka to exhale fire and warm itself - hell, it could be extinct now, leaving only the artificially-derived daedric lineages behind. You allow for LOTRO's snow beasts to just be daedric trolls, while Morgoth's trolls are either even farther derived orcs or descendants of mutated dwarves or even humans. Sea serpents would be a lineage of fish or marine reptile that were forcibly melded into a new clade that displays traits of both and was further modified into the wide range of forms around now, while krakens would be the result of a fairly large type of squid being blown up into a true colossus.
What's more, you could also give a new origin to Godzilla and other kaiju: rather than being made from a bunch of orca dreams, the Big G could have been awakened and bound to the whales by their spell, rising from his sleep upon the sea bed and being mutated into his current colossal form. He and the other kaiju would be relics of a time when magicka-using giants were all over the place, only laid low by the K-T Extinction.
...Okay, wow, this was an unnecessarily long reply. Apologies if I come across as an asshole...
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