#building component library

[justnshalom]

Building a Component Library for NextJS: A Guide to Reusable UI

Building a Component Library for NextJS: A Guide to Reusable UI Have you ever found yourself rewriting the same UI components over and over again in your NextJS projects? Have you struggled to maintain consistency and efficiency across multiple applications? If so, it’s time to consider building a component library. A component library is a collection of reusable UI elements that can be shared…

[werbooz]

Component Libraries: Should You Build Your Own or Use a Prebuilt One?

Component libraries are a vital tool in web application development in maintaining uniform design, shortening the time taken to develop web applications and improving reusability of the code. Some developers find this dilemma; should they create a component library or use an existing one? In addition, they help reduce the struggle while building well-designed and interactive websites because of the availability of animation-oriented UIs such as Accentricity UI among others. Now, let’s get more to the point in order to help you find the right way.

What is a Component Library?

Component libraries are collections of reusable UI elements such as buttons, forms, modals, and more— and are intended to reuse the components across several projects. Such libraries not only guarantee a consistent look of an application but also save time and costs during its implementation because the elements have been already coded. So, there's no need to build components from scratch.

Prebuilt Component Libraries

Prebuilt Component Libraries

Prebuilt component libraries are the ready-made collections of different UI components that are specifically designed and optimized for common use cases that developers can face during development. Some well-known examples include:

Material-UI (MUI):

A library based on React and it follows Google's Material-UI design, MUI allows a comprehensive set of components customization.

Ant Design:

It's an UI design system framework for enterprise-level products, ant design offers built-in themes and a rich set of UI components.

Bootstrap:

It's an widely-used CSS framework that provides basic components and a responsive grid system.

Pros of Prebuilt Libraries :

Rapid Development: Prebuilt libraries save a lot of time of the developers by providing pre-designed reusable components that you can quickly integrate into your project.

Standardized Design: They help ensure a consistent user experience across different screens and features.

Community Support: Many prebuilt libraries come with robust community support, providing a wealth of tutorials, plugins, and enhancements.

Cons of Prebuilt Libraries

Limited Customization: Customizing components to fit your unique design can sometimes be difficult, leading to constraints on flexibility.

Performance Overhead: Many prebuilt libraries come with extra features you may not need, which can bloat your codebase.

Pros And Cons of Prebuilt Libraries

Animation-Centric Libraries: Bringing UIs to Life

In recent years, a new category of libraries has emerged, specifically focused on providing built-in animations and smooth UI transitions. These libraries not only offer pre-designed components but also emphasize adding dynamic, interactive features to web applications.

Here are some popular examples of animation-focused libraries:

Lottie

Category: Animation Integration Library

Lottie:The industry standard for motion design

What it Offers: Lottie allows you to render animations created in Figma or Adobe After Effects as JSON files using the built-in plugins. These animations are then rendered natively on the web, offering high-quality motion without a heavy performance impact.

Why It’s Useful: Lottie is perfect for apps or websites requiring rich, scalable animations that are lightweight. It’s commonly used for logos, loading animations, and subtle UI effects. Unlike other component libraries, it focuses purely on bringing visual design elements from tools like Figma & After Effects into the web environment.

Accentricity UI

Category: Hybrid Component and Animation Library

What it Offers:

 Accentricity UI combines traditional UI components with built-in support for smooth animations and transitions. It offers a wide range of components like buttons, forms, modals, and navigation menus, but with an added layer of predefined animations, making it easier to create interactive, dynamic interfaces.

In addition to these standard components, Accentricity UI provides responsive behaviors and subtle animation effects like hover states, fade-ins, and sliding transitions that enhance user engagement. The library's components are fully customizable, allowing developers to easily adjust animation timings, easing functions, and durations to match the look and feel of their brand, ensuring both visual appeal and performance across devices.

Why It’s Useful:

Think about it, what would be easy for a dev? Making a custom component with tons of animation which the dev has to write from scratch and polish it before the deadline or use a library, where the dev can make use of the library with the built-in support to combine the custom designed elements with smooth animations and transitions offered by the library.  

It’s particularly helpful for developers who want the convenience of a prebuilt library but need polished, built-in animations to enhance user experience without writing complex animation code from scratch.

Framer Motion

Category: Animation-focused Component Library (React)

Framer Motion

What it Offers:

Framer Motion is a powerful library for React that allows you to create fluid animations and micro interactions with minimal effort. It supports interactive features like drag, scroll, and spring-based animations, which makes it ideal for interactive & highly animated UIs. It also provides easy-to-use APIs for gesture-based animations and layout transitions, offering developers extensive control over complex animations while maintaining simplicity in implementation.

Why It’s Useful:

Framer Motion combines the simplicity of component libraries with the flexibility of advanced animation frameworks, making it easy to enhance user interfaces with dynamic visual effects. It’s a great choice for React developers who want to integrate animation without compromising performance or adding significant overhead. With its built-in optimizations for smooth rendering, Framer Motion ensures high-quality animations that enhance both usability and visual appeal.

Should You Use Prebuilt Animation Libraries?

The role of animations is really important in web applications to enhance the UX(user experience), by making interfaces feel more fluid and interactive makes user's remember the website due to its great experience. Since users are constantly getting used to smooth effects, micro-interaction and dynamic feedback, animations are no longer viewed as a good to have feature but are rather considered as a must have feature. Prebuilt animation libraries like Framer Motion and GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) simplify this process by providing powerful, flexible tools that allow developers to integrate complex animations without having to manually manage every aspect of motion or dive deep into animation theory.

Advantages of Animation-Centric Libraries

Advantages of Animation-Centric Libraries

Ease of Use

Prebuilt animation libraries abstract away the complexities of coding animations from scratch. Without manually writing keyframes, easing functions, or browser-optimized transitions, developers can simply use predefined APIs to implement fluid animations. This drastically reduces development time, as many animation details are handled by the library, letting developers focus on building features and interactions rather than tweaking animations for performance or cross-browser compatibility. For example, with a few lines of code, animations can be applied to any UI element, making the development process much more efficient.

Advanced Features

Many animation libraries offer advanced features that go far beyond basic transitions like fade-ins and slide animations. These include timeline control, scroll-triggered animations, physics-based interactions, and even 3D transformations. For instance, timeline control allows developers to create synchronized sequences of animations, which can be used to create smooth, coordinated interactions across multiple elements. Scroll-based animations enhance user engagement by triggering effects as the user scrolls, perfect for parallax websites or content reveal effects. Physics-based animations, such as spring-based drag-and-drop or object bouncing, add natural, realistic movement to interactive elements, elevating the overall experience. Additionally, 3D transformations provide extensive control over how objects rotate, scale, or move in three-dimensional space, something that is cumbersome to achieve with native CSS alone.

See What Happens Next

[luigilore]

girlllll that letter has derailed my whole day 😭 all i can think about is how important books would be to luigi and his kids <3 he’s definitely going to be an anti-ipad-baby dad. he will refuse to let your kids have iphones until they are in highschool i fear! would get them blackberries or something up until that point in case of emergencies (and you know, calling/texting you guys to know they got somewhere safely). and reading is suchhh a big component of your kids growing up hehehe <3 you guys take turns reading them to bed. just imagine him curled up in bed with your little toddler and he’s reading out loud to them before bed :)) it’s his favorite thing to do. he’s such a softie. and also he gets really emotional whenever he sees you reading to the kids too :’) there’s a lot of family pictures of you two just reading to the kids. and also this one is for giggles— your kids really love reading so much. whenever they are having tantrums, luigi and you would have to SCRAMBLE so fast to find the nearest book to start reading out loud to distract them LMAO. like ur kid trips and bumps their little head (not bad at all) and they are sobbing uncontrollably and luigi is like 😯😧🫨 “QUICK! GRAB THE CLOSEST BOOK!” and one of you is holding the kid trying to comfort them while the other is tripping over their own feet to get to the bookshelf. and then immediately he starts reading to them and they settle down sooo fast <3 okay that’s it sorry i have a lot of thoughts

AHHHHHH. emma. please understand i really read this like my morning paper omg what a treat bc same... it has been on my mind! 🤓 ugh he sooo would. he would be so determined not to raise ipad babies. is always reading new articles, studies, books on parenthood but esp re technology. even before they can actually read you'd be reading to them constantly... would build a bookshelf in the nursery before your baby is even born <3 and then later your toddler just carrying book after book to you both...

ugh imagine when your daughter is learning to read and she's in his arms and he's helping her and they both call you into her room like half an hour later to show off her reading skills <3 and luigi just looks so insanely proud, the way he looks down at her with an endearing, soft smile, like he wants to remember this forever!! also he'd be such an animated, fun reader for his kids like does voices, etc and they love it. he would read them all of his favorite books as a child. he would also really hate to be away and miss bedtime for any reason like he really does look forward to reading with them.

LMFAO STOP ur mind 😪... imagine your kids bickering and he's like "guys!!! look!!! who wants to read where the wild things are?!!" like bribing them with reading... omg stop my heart omg omg omg it's really a two person operation like your daughter just clinging onto you while he only has to go a few steps into the living room to find a random book lying around and does character voices and reads to her until she's smiling again.

omg imagine going to the bookstore with your kids like pretty regularly, maybe it's a really quaint, independent bookstore and they get sooo excited to pick out a book! (however luigi cannot say no so *books) and ofc the library!! they love the mangiones there :)

[rancidslime]

Magic as Metaphor: Witch Hat Atelier

I've seen a few people describer the magic of Witch Hat Atelier as being "like coding", which irritates me. One, I confess to a personal dislike of "coding" magic systems. I think they're overplayed and they strip the emotional component from magic in favor of making something easily wikiable. It's the kind of fictional magic that I think most appeals to what I will unfairly and derisively refer to as Reddit fantasy fans, the kind of people who seriously engage in powerscaling arguments at length. It also just exhausts me by virtue of its adjacency to Silicon Valley mythmaking about the unique genius of programmers and how they're the visionaries building us a better future. But, you know, that's an unfair emotional response.

The BIGGER reason for my dislike, of course, is I think that's an incredibly shallow interpretation that barely engages with what the text is very obviously communicating. Magic in Witch Hat Atelier is art.

The language surrounding magic in Witch Hat is consistently the language of artwork, specifically illustration. Magic is considered "beyond the reach" of people with vision and motor issues. The word most consistently used to refer to the act of casting magic is "drawing". Magic in this series is a very obvious analogue to making illustrations. (Imagine! A mangaka might be doing what a bunch of former programmer novelists did using her OWN area of expertise and internal conflicts with art as inspiration! I'm sorry, I know I'm being snide and that's not helpful, I'm just so exasperated by this interpretation, because it feels to me like such a demonstration of how people routinely devalue and diminish the skills of artists even when they don't mean to.)

Being a good witch requires being to retain knowledge on a wide variety of symbols, consistently make the correct marks, and have the whimsy and ingenuity to come up with new, helpful, or beautiful magic. In other words, having an expansive visual library, being a good draftsman, and having a unique artistic voice.

Coco and her friends are quite young and lack the finer technical skills of their superiors, but their inventiveness and youth are consistently pointed at as strengths. When they impress Beldaruit, it's not through an act of extreme technical proficiency, it's by making something simple and beautiful with the skills they have. One of Agott's biggest triumphs in the series right now is her knowing the curtain leech sigil off the top of her head, because she loves decorative magic and obscure magical minutiae! Even though it's not "useful" for "marketable" in ways other magic is!

Witch Hat isn't just about art by any means - it's also about academia, power, privilege, responsibility, and more. It's a rich text. But I confess to feeling frustrated by just how many people just skim over or outright miss what is, to me, a very core part of the series' identity!

[mercurys-minis]

I was recently struck with the urge to do the thing I do every 2 to 3 years, play a lot of dwarf fortress for about a week. I started off trying out the newly rereleased adventure mode, and after a few failed starts ended up with successful Brown Recluse Spider Woman as my adventurer (I was tired of dying to losing use of my hands, so I choose something with more hands).

I didn't know there was a quest tracker until I was nearly done with adventure mode, so I ended up literally keeping a diary. Long and short of it was that my only surviving companion was a black bear woman I recruited from the woods and led to a series of easy fights so she could earn a name, Riguade Metalnests. And I became a necromancer, they were actually quite friendly and just let me in to use the library. Eventually I decided to retire from adventuring and start a fort, but I was still kind of attached to my little spider. So I made the fort, quickly retired it, brought Seba there, and reclaimed it so she could be part of the fun.

The story in my head was that she hired some dwarves to build her a tavern to retire in, right next to the town of her former Lady and where Riguade now lived according to the legends viewer. I was hoping Roguade would come to visit at some point, but she never did.

I tried to keep an aesthetic that would be palatable to the customers I was trying to attract, so the fort was almost entirely above ground, with a mine dug into the hill across the way and stone delivered by minecart. After 33 years of withstanding constant goblin sieges, not making the elves mad due to having no nobles for them to negotiate with for a very long time (due to a bug relating to retiring and reclaiming the fort), and a forgotten beast attack that left over 50 citizens completely unable to use their hands or legs (dust that blistered everything, including all internal bodyparts like nervous tissue, lungs, and brains) Wiregroove became a mountainless mountainhome.

I used Vox Uristi to capture a render of the fortress at the time of retirement.

The primary building components were jet blocks, iron and copper bars, and wooden blocks for the roofs on the smaller buildings (though the initial tavern was constructed of imported nether cap and bloodthorn).

I'd always wanted to "beat" dwarf fortress with a surface based fort, and finally have.

[bubonickitten]

The ALA's State of America's Libraries Report for 2024 is out now.

2023 had the highest number of challenged book titles ever documented by the ALA.

You can view the full PDF of the report here. Book ban/challenge data broken down by state can be found here.

If you can, try to keep an eye on your local libraries, especially school and public libraries. If book/program challenges or attacks on library staff are happening in your area, make your voice heard -- show up at school board meetings, county commissioner meetings, town halls, etc. Counterprotest. Write messages of support on social media or in your local papers. Show support for staff in-person. Tell others about the value of libraries.

Get a library card if you haven't yet -- if you're not a regular user, chances are you might not know what all your library offers. I'm talking video games, makerspaces (3D printers, digital art software, recording equipment, VR, etc.), streaming services, meeting spaces, free demonstrations and programs (often with any necessary materials provided at no cost!), mobile WiFi hotspots, Library of Things collections, database subscriptions, genealogy resources, and so on. A lot of electronic resources like ebooks, databases, and streaming services you can access off-site as long as you have a (again: free!!!) library card. There may even be services like homebound delivery for people who can't physically come to the library.

Also try to stay up to date on pending legislation in your state -- right now there's a ton of proposed legislation that will harm libraries, but there are also bills that aim to protect libraries, librarians, teachers, and intellectual freedom. It's just as important to let your representatives know that you support pro-library/anti-censorship legislation as it is to let them know that you oppose anti-library/pro-censorship legislation.

Unfortunately, someone being a library user or seeing value in the work that libraries do does not guarantee that they will support libraries at the ballot. One of the biggest predictors for whether libraries stay funded is not the quantity or quality of the services, programs, and materials it offers, but voter support. Make sure your representatives and local politicians know your stance and that their actions toward libraries will affect your vote.

Here are some resources for staying updated:

If you're interested in library advocacy and staying up to date with the challenges libraries are facing in the U.S., check out EveryLibrary, which focuses on building voter support for libraries.

Book Riot has regular articles on censorship attempts taking place throughout the nation, which can be found here, as well as a Literary Activism Newsletter.

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom focuses on the intellectual freedom component of the Library Bill of Rights, tracks censorship attempts throughout each year, and provides training, support, and education about intellectual freedom to library staff and the public.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation focuses on intellectual freedom in the digital world, including fighting online censorship and illegal surveillance.

I know this post is long, but please spread the word. Libraries need your support now more than ever.

[vintagelasvegas]

Sahara West Library and Fine Arts Museum (1996), Las Vegas, Nevada, by Mayer, Scherer & Rockcastle. Photo by Jeff Green.

Excerpt from:

Mayer, Scherer & Rockcastle’s Sahara West Library and Fine Arts Museum is a world apart from the Las Vegas Strip.

Karan Slein. Architectural Record, 3/97.

While a new crop of attention-grabbing hotels and casinos that feature mock volcanic eruptions, roller-coaster rides, and facsimiles of Egyptian pyramids and the Manhattan skyline dominate tourist images of Las Vegas, another kind of architecture is emerging behind the scenes, where people live. It's a parallel universe of müre soft-spoken civic mindedness.

To respond to the region's tremendous population growth the city launched an ambitious program to enlarge its fledgling library system in the early 1970s. The first step of the initiative was the installation of a new director, Charles Hunsberger, who brought with him the lessons of his previous post in Bloomington, Ind., about 25 miles from Indiana's architecturally rich town of Columbus. It's in Columbus that he "got interested in libraries and architecture and in putting them together," he recalls.

Hunsberger's masterplan for Las Vegas called for merging the one existing city library and one existing county library into a single system, the Las Vegas/Clark County library district (LVCCLD). The two buildings would be gradually supplemented by a series of architecturally distinct satellite facilities that would serve as the focus for the communities sprouting up around them. In addition to providing traditional library services-book lending and research-many of these facilities would also provide a cultural component by including exhibition or performance space.

Now numbering 23 branches, today the LVCCLD is much as Hunsberger planned it would be. Hunsberger, however, has left the scene, having quit his job in ’93, a year prior to his scheduled retirement, amid mounting backlash to his agenda.

While the expanded role of the system was praised by other library districts around the country as visionary, in recent years the hybrid of library and museum caused an uproar in the local community for losing sight of its primary objective. "I did what I planned to do," responds Hunsberger to allegations surrounding his premature departure.

With over $120 million of bond-allocated money spent on its facilities in an 11-year period, what is clear is that city coffers are now empty for libraries. The 23rd branch, the Sahara West Library and Fine Arts Museum, by Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, which replaced a small and successful storefront operation when it opened to the public in January, is the last of its generation. Current library district director Darrell Batson concurs: "This is it."

Garth Rockcastle, AIA, of Minneapolis-based Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle (MS&R), the project's design architect, suppressed the split personality of the program on the exterior. Rather than make the building the amalgam of two distinct functions and parts, he and MS&R library specialist Jeff Scherer, AIA, conceived a 122,000-sq-ft whole that responds to site conditions such as views of downtown to the east and mountains to the west with an attempt to mitigate the effects of the harsh Nevada climate.

[shmoodlet]

One last trip to the library to make sure she's got everything right and then Susie is ready to build her time travel component. Not before she has breakfast though! A warm coffee and blackberry fruit cobbler make for a lovely fall breakfast!

[andmaybegayer]

a sort of general thing spinning off "static site generators kind of suck" is issues about ease of use vs philosophy vs productivity.

How many programmers do you know who want to make a game but refuse to use Unity or Godot or even like, löve2d because it's Ideologically Impure to use an existing engine, so they have 50 git repos with seven features bolted on to an SDL2 demo and no meaningful game design.

Part of why I don't like Static Site Generators is that they add a lot of friction. I'm writing this on my phone while waiting for a kettle to boil at work, and this ease of use is a big part of why I blog on Tumblr multiple times a day but the old SSG that hosted my website got a post every couple years.

Increasingly I'm happier to take shortcuts and borrow from other people in order to get Things Out The Door. I don't have to design/pattern/program/calculate everything myself. I care much more about end products.

I still have some philosophies I guess. I won't use VMware even if that means fighting with otherwise worse VM solutions. There are still plenty of things I enjoy designing and fabricating myself rather than buying or copying. For some people building the game engine is the fun part! But it's worth asking yourself whether that's you, or the person you wish you were.

I like embroidering and backstitching by hand. This doesn't mean I can't use components from the esp-idf components library.

See Also: How To Make Good Small Games, Do It Scared, etc.

[ebi-noodle-doodles]

Do you have any advice/tutorials on how to make healthily round characters? You do them so well!

Hi I really want to answer this with like my doodles and stuff but I’m out (might reblog the stuff later) but so want to say just use a LOT of references. I got used to not using references most of the time because Ive build a somewhat small mental library in my head but certainly its not absolute or perfect, but If I want to focus on a certain piece I really look for references! OR use the mirror.

My main advice

Build a mental library full or references; Even if the reference you compiled are not the same body type/shape, you soon learn to incorporate them in actually drawing round characters.

You can try building this mental library not just by searching online but ACTUALLY STUDYING ONESELF, by that I mean your body. Try taking videos of yourself and pause on frames that could potentially make a good dynamic reference!

Build a habit of drawing different character bodies. I cant say I’m an expert nor really follow this rule since I lack understanding, really but one of my discovered inspirations before I drew characters like these is the Dungeon Meshi Artist. They draw different shaped characters so well, take inspiration from them!

Pay attention to distribution of fat and muscle. (again I’m not an expert!!!) Pay attention to HEIGHT and WEIGHT of the character. What I usually do is that sometimes I estimate how much torso is going to on or legs so it looks proportionate

I learned that chibi is similar to what Im doing. I guess I learned chibi with round shapes aka bunch of circles and ovals, but irl those are more of chunky sausages(?)

BE CONFIDENT on your SKETCHES. I usually start small in sketching like big canvas/paper small lil “chibi” characters. Practice a pose u like then choose what you want to focus and render on

I feel like I’m saying this more for myself hut fundamentals! fundamentals, fundamentals fun d a ment a l s ! In anatomy, lighting & generally in art is key component to everything really!

Welp might reblog this with some visuals hopefully when I get home! I do think I still need more practice despite all the drawings I made, I feel like it still lacks dynamism that would be appealing at first glance.

if it contributes to anything, I think my coloring also makes the piece “look” soft.

[bluerhapsodist]

Meditation in Jedi Professions

Breathing in, a Jedi seeks peace.

Breathing out, a Jedi finds the path.

The guard takes up his lightsaber pike. Breathing in, he opens himself to his surroundings. Breathing out, he sees everyone in the Temple under his care. He remains still until the Force whispers in his ear, and he springs into action to intervene on a threat or a fight. In his robes and mask, the guard surrenders his identity to the Temple and its safety. Every breath grounds him in his vigil.

The healer attends to her patient lying in bed. Breathing in, she takes in the patient’s pain and sickness. Breathing out, she pours her strength into the patient’s body. What the patient suffers, the healer takes into herself, but she lends them her peace and comfort in turn. Her patience and persistence restores the damaged cells and tissue from one breath to the next.

The artisan kneels before their gathered lightsaber components. Breathing in, they find the design for the weapon. Breathing out, they bring each part together. They are one with their creation, attuned to the kyber crystal and the electronics. What they build is not for themselves, but for their fellow Jedi and their protection.

The scholar reaches for a text or an artifact in the library. Breathing in, she holds a question in her mind. Breathing out, she follows the pattern and detail to find answers. A dialogue forms between her thoughts and the material. She reaches across history and finds knowledge to preserve and share with future generations.

The pilot grabs onto the controls and sets his course. Breathing in, he feels the ship and the space in which it moves. Breathing out, he races toward his destination. Each obstacle in his path is part of the flow he joins through the Force. He is attuned to the swirl of hyperspace and the warp of gravity. He ferries himself and others from one star system to the next.

The teacher gathers her students and children together. Breathing in, she takes in their moods and their questions. Breathing out, she shows them her care and understanding. Every lesson is a chance to connect with the mind of a pupil and aid their growth. Each child shines in the Force to the teacher, and she listens to them as readily as she listens to the Force.

The diplomat sits at the table with the warring parties. Breathing in, they read the pain and desires in conflict. Breathing out, they look for the path forward. The Force brings them to each dispute with the patience to listen and the courage to speak. They form a bridge between cultures and individuals. Even negotiations that fail brings an insight to apply later.

[celira]

tagged by the fantastic @beyoncesfiancee (whose stories you should go read like yesterday)! ...this list reminds me i never finished reposting the rest of my whumptober 2023 ficlets... they're even all edited and ready to go whoops

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your latest fanfics (or up to if you have less!) & tag 10 people.

(it's all TLT, surprise surprise)

1. none of us (here) (Gideon & Harrow whump ficlets)

"Skin hunger" is a curious name, at once evocative and clinical, sordid and distant.

2. a fowl diversion, unnamed (pre-canon TLT x Untitled Goose Game, crack treated earnestly if not exactly seriously)

A new day dawns.

3. language of its own (pre-canon Campal dealing with erotic poetry finals)

Camilla dropped the sheaf of flimsy at the end of the table, sat heavily, and didn't move.

4. per my last email (academia AU Campal semi-epistolary...sort of)(so what counts as the first line??? i included the headers but did not count them)

From: psextus@gs.canaan.edu To: chect@gs.canaan.edu Subject: latest articles for JINO cam. tell me you’ve seen this trainwreck

5. lend me some sugar (i am your neighbor) (Juno Zeta/Pyrrha crack. arguably canon-compliant)

Meeting Minutes [n.b.: Full meeting was not called. Only one group member was present upon arrival of dignitary. —JZ]

6. Disaccharides (cloyingly sweet - in multiple senses - modern AU Campal)

Baking is a science much in the way that chemistry is an art: precision and observation spool out the thread that weaves their components together, and past a certain point, the ineffable sneaks in through the spaces in between scales and measures – the student draws from trial and error that slowly takes its own form until at some point, repetition becomes experience; instruction turns into memorization turns into ritual turns into instinct, and creative intuition elevates it all.

7. in this, too, i am steadfast (As Yet Unsent/pre-Nt9 gapfiller Camilla whump)

Words had never been Camilla's main wield.

8. self-immolation to save on heating (modern AU Pyrrha having a stream-of-consciousness crisis over Cam & Pal)

The thing about loving landmines in human form is–

9. set me in your threshold (Nona-era Camilla-centric magical realism, shades of Campal, ambiguous Campaldulcie)

The Building had plenty of its own mythos before it encountered the likes of half a former Lyctor, the necromantic heir of the Sixth House, the person who was more than just his embodiment but less than her own entity, and their collective ward.

10. Stereography (worldbuilding-y Camilla character study borne of my Paul feelings, Campal-flavored, first TLT fic)

The listening room rested in the outer edge of the Library, far enough from neighboring research spaces to avoid showering them with what few frequencies – some in waveforms coherent enough to hint at songs or dialogue, some that could only be tactfully called noise – might escape its soundproofing.

exposition, babeyyyyy! or something. tagging the ineffable @fortjester @arithmonym @theriverbeyond @thesaintofpatience @scholar-hect @heliocharis hmm i feel like some of you have already done this guy before so i will leave it there

[urlknight]

Hi there, Love your work! I'm also doing stuff in Unreal and it feels like it's rarer to find other indie devs using it. I love how clean all your UI feels, and UI is something I seem to really struggle with.

Do you have any recommendations for workflows / tips / sources etc for getting better at UI?

Also I'd love to know more about the material / shader workflow for your latest post if you have more information anywhere.

Thanks :)

Hello there! Thank you!! I hope you don't mind me answering publicly as I feel like some people might be interested in the answer!

I really appreciate your UI (User Interface for those not knowing the acronym) compliment as it's something I've spent a long time working on and specializing in, in my career as a software engineer. UI/UX often goes completely unacknowledged or taken for granted even though it takes a lot of time and hard work to create and develop. In the engineering world I frequently had to advocate for and explain user experiences to those who didn't have as deep of an appreciation for UI or a very sophisticated understanding of why a good, visually appealing user experience makes, or on the flip side, can break everything. I think it's a very challenging, overwhelming topic to grasp and communicate, but just by being interested in it you're already way ahead!

There's a lot going on with UI. From visuals to knowing common design elements to successfully conveying a story to the user to implementation to testing to designing for accessibility to animation and I probably didn't cover everything with that run-on sentence. There's frontend engineers out there whose role is solely to maintain and improve UI component libraries for companies. And that's without throwing games, whose UIs are all uniquely visually tailored to their experiences, into the mix... I could keep going on about this honestly, but I'll get to what I think you can do personally! 1. Learn about common design patterns. What's a toast? What's pagination? What's a card? Little things like that. These apply to all software UI/UX, including video games- and knowing these off the top of your head will make it so much easier for you to invent your own UI designs and patterns.

2. Study the UI in the everyday applications you interact with. Step through menus and think about how you got from point A to point B. Take a moment to think about the why someone put a button where they did. Study the UI in your favorite video games, too! Take a lot of notes on what you think works really well and what you think doesn't. And also there's online resources that are great for inspiration. I personally spend a lot of time on the Game UI Database. - https://dribbble.com/ - https://www.gameuidatabase.com/ 3. Don't be afraid to start with basic sketches or even just simply representing everything with grey boxes. All my UI starts out as really crappy sketches on paper, or tablet sketches on top of screenshots. Visualize your ideas and then keep iterating on them until you've got something. For example, I went from this:

To this. (And come to think of it I might actually still want to make those cooler looking buttons in my sketch) 4. Break everything out into pieces and individual components. A good UI is made up of building blocks that you can reuse all over the place. That's how it stays consistent and also saves you a lot of stress when you need to go in and update components. Instead of a million different looking UI pieces, you just have to update the one! These individual components will make up your very own UI Component Library, which will be the standardized design system and source of reusable components for your project. This also applies to your visual elements that don't do anything (like I personally have a whole mini library of diamond and star shapes that I reuse everywhere).

For reference, here's a breakdown I made of my Inventory UI. On the right, I've labeled most of the individual components, and you might be able to see how I'm reusing them over and over again in multiple places.

5. Spend some time listening to designers talk, maybe befriend some designers! Many of them have an unique, interesting view of the world and how we interact with it even beyond just software. Their perspectives will inform yours.

6. Test your UI on users whenever you can. Get feedback from others. This is the best way for you to see what works and what doesn't. As game devs we spend so much time with our games it's easy for us to lose sight of the full picture.

7. Be patient and don't give up. Continue to be open to expanding your knowledge. These UI skills take time to develop. I personally am still learning even after like 10 years of doing it. Coming up with the visual elements is very challenging for me and I spend a lot of time rearranging things in photoshop before I actually start coding anything at all in Unreal.

Whew, that was a lot, but I hope that gives you some thoughts and a place to start!

I don't have any posts out there about Blender/Unreal shader workflows right now, but I'll consider making another post sometime soonish. I appreciate you asking and you're welcome! :)

[em-ira]

From The Human Realm Spiderweb thing, the Internet.

Welcome to Historic Gravesfield

We invite you to come to Gravesfield and visit one of Connecticut’s oldest established townships.

Gravesfield is deeply devoted to preserving our authentic New England heritage, now over 375 years in the making. Heritage tourism is an important component of the community’s identity.

We think you’ll find that the Historic Gravesfield district has many things to offer visitors from an extended weekend getaway to a pleasant day trip. Visitors to Gravesfield can rediscover our nation’s heritage in an authentic, living New England village whose artifact-rich museums, historic homes, shops and places of interest offer experiences for all ages.

Walking along these quiet streets, with brick-paver sidewalks shaded by mature trees, you’d never know you were just a stone’s throw from busy I-91. The historic district of Old Gravesfield is a little world unto itself.

One early building is the old Wittebane House on Main Street. Believed to be built in the 1650s, it’s the setting for the historic mystery of the Wittebane Brothers, who both mysteriously disappeared during the 1662 Hartford witchcraft hysteria, the first widespread witch panic in New England history. There is a statue, reputed to be of the Wittebane Brothers, in the town square.

Two separate but equally disturbing incidents triggered the panic: the “diabolical possession” of Hartford resident Ann Cole and the fatal illness suffered by eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly.  Young Kelly’s damning last words “Goody Ayers chokes me!” were enough to set witch accusations flying.  In all, eight people were formally charged; three, and possibly a fourth, were executed. 

The disappearance of the Wittebane Brothers occured at a high point of the witchcraft hysteria.

The legend that is most often cited these days recounts that one brother had got involved with a witch, and had been spirited away by them. In this story, the other brother is reputed to have followed after the witch and his brother, in an attempt to save him.

Whatever the truth of the mysterious disappearance of the brothers, the story has continued to excite interest in the centuries since. The statue being erected by public subscription in 1866, to commemorate the township's involvement in the witch trials.

The fund also opened a new subscription lending library in a building near the church.

[hashimasims]

Micah: So how'd it go

Isiah: More or less uneventful not what I had planned but we had a really good time all the same.

Micah: oh . . . well that's good at least. So are things serious between the two of you now?

Isiah moves to sit on the couch near the window

Isiah: Come here Bunny

Kevin: Are you alright Mint?

Minthe: Of course, did you enjoy your time at the library today?

Kevin: It was fine, are you sure? Nothing happened to you? I heard you were out with Isiah alone.

Minthe: And? We just continued looking into the Time Traveler Mystery.

Kevin: I thought we agreed we were done with that?

Minthe: I was and originally our outing was supposed to be a ruse to keep Micah out of trouble, she compared us to Mystery Inc and wants to solve more mysteries and that girl doesn't know when to say no, she's going to get herself in a world of trouble one day. Anyway, we went to the Willowcreek Archive so at least that part wasn't a lie but then new things came to light so we did do some investigating on the matter.

Kevin: Care to elaborate?

Minthe: We followed a bunch of clues, found items called Shards of Time and now at Emit's request I'm supposed to build a Time Machine following the Schematics in a book he gave me.

Kevin: YOU'RE WHAT?

Minthe: My sentiments exactly. He can't possibly be serious.

Kevin: And nothing happened with Isiah?

Minthe: No, he asked me to show him where Sixam was and got a bit cozier than I probably would have liked but it was fine and then we came home. Is everything alright Kev? Is there something I should know?

Kevin: I just . . . I just don't trust him is all. He doesn't seem like a good guy.

Minthe: There's still something you're not telling me.

Kevin: You're right. He's been -

Braden: You guys talking about me?

Minthe: No we were just talking about Isiah.

Braden: I love that kid! He's so cool! Doesn't seem Nerdy like the rest of us as all!

Kevin: Yeah cool is one way to put it. I'm grabbing something to eat, you hungry Mint?

Minthe: No, I'm good thank you though. I think I'll get started reading this book, see what it says about the Time Machine.

After reading through some of the book and learning what components she's going to need, Minthe heads out to take care of her garden. She collects a few Microscope samples and heads upstairs to use her Microscope.

Finally raising her Logic skill to Level 10 she finishes the first of her many goals

Beginning|Previous|Next

Watcher's Notes: I was not trying to complete any of the objectives before she became an adult but these things happen. I should not have kept fulfilling her wishes to use the microscope but c'est la vie

Challenge graphic by @emilybluejaye just in case you couldn't read it in the corner of the graphic

[endlessmidnightcreates]

Finally was able to finish the character sheet of my girl, Opal Skai for my most recent DND campaign. It's going super well so far!

Can you see all the lil notes I made, I had a lot of fun doing those :3

Here's the low down on her below the cut

She is a Fire Genasi Druid who is all smarts and like 2% fight despite her ferocious appearance (some would say). She is sometimes seen smoldering or glowing. But she is a Huge Nerd and Babygirl and a bit odd.

Opal is a Bookshop Keeper in Baldur’s Gate. Even though the town is regarded as a nest of vipers, she values knowledge and community and takes pride in the family library/store that she runs with her mother. People around it respect her and the store and it’s seen as neutral ground and is both used for gang negotiations and occasional toddler reading circles, sometimes in the same day. 

She Spends 50% her time in the store, 30% in nature and doing #HotDruidShit (like hot girl shit but with druids) and then the other 20% vibing. She’s quiet, but not shy and actually quite talkative when the moment is right (someone asks her a question about a book–or she’s drunk). She will talk and say hi and bye to people on the street. When it comes to fighting, she prefers not to but that won’t stop her from slapping a bitch (with her hand or staff). But like she reeeeally prefers not to (int. modifier Is -1). Mainly cus she’s Genasi and she is mostly untrained so she would rather not kill someone. But she’s capable.

More Deets

Occupation: 

She owns a small bookshop specialty store. Well, technically it belongs to her mother, but it will go to her once she retires or dies (god forbid).

Denizens of Baldur’s gate can get a wide range of books and scrolls as well as several common herbs and spell components. Everything from eye of newt to various animal bones. She partly keeps it stocked with her own foraging as well as having a supplier and an elderly mother (human npc) who watches over the shop and manages logistics. She manages the front of shop. Having read all the books and catalogued everything in the store, she has begun to work on her every-expanding growing “To buy” list that consists of various rare books and magical items. 

She has started to take on minor mercenary/adventurer jobs to build up capital. There are expensive texts and components in Elturel that she wants to get her hands on. These jobs have ranged from delivering 20 rabbit pelts to serving court papers in creative ways (read: transforms into a cat and tricks them into letting her in). Though, for some of the more rare artifacts, she figures, the easiest way is to tag along with one of the many Adventuring parties in BG to gather information on its whereabouts. 

Class: Druid

Why is she a druid. Druidism runs in the family. Opal’s mother and a few aunts and uncles are and were druids. Her grandmother was as well. It was only natural that Momma Opal taught the ways to her flaming baby. But Opal was resistant to the lifestyle as a young one. The spells, the philosophy, heck, being around leaves as someone whose average body temperature could easily reach 300°C made it difficult for her to find the value of the practice. She figured that blacksmithing would be more useful. Being a Druid helps her live more in harmony with the energies and elements that swirl around in her blood. She’s a valued member of the Druid Community in Baldur’s Gate because she’s just a cool gal, but also because she has helped many a druid get lava flowers (a flower that grows inside volcanoes)[i also literally just made that up] 

Combat 

Opal has only ever unwillingly killed once. She was on one of her many quests. She was an ox, lugging a massive stag carcass behind her. Bandits attacked her and she fought them off, maiming a few and kiling one instantly. The others escaped. She went straight home, fleeing the scene. That was the first time she had ever been attacked. She was rarely provoked or approached in human form because of her stature. But as an ox, people didn’t recognize or fear her. She missed a big payday that day. She doesn’t know if they survived or not. She tries not think about it often. 

Fighting and killing are not things she often does. She’s the type of gal to grab a spider and let it outside rather than smush it. But– She CAN do it. She CAN fight (in humanoid form) and she CAN and WILL hurt someone if they hurt or try to hurt her. She will turn into what the situation needs and act accordingly - need to make a quick getaway? HONSE. Need to serve court papers? KITTY. Need to slap a bitch? HUMANOID

She will not attack unless provoked physically. Her moral code is fuck around and find out but reeeally hopes that they don’t have to find out, cus she doesn't know herself tbh.

Childhood:

Opal doesn't know much about her Genie father’s side, though he comes to visit often enough from the elemental plane. She also has a way to contact him whenever she wants.

She has 12 aunts and uncles who are scattered throughout the country, quite a few of them are druids and frequent their local bogs while the others reside in normal villages and have average families and lives. Opal has ALOT of cousins.

She has an aunt and uncle who live in other parts of Baldur's gate. they sometimes take shifts at the shop. All of them contribute to building the shop’s library and maintaining goods. Her aunt is an adventurer while her uncle is a cook at a tavern.

Religion:

She believes in the spirit of nature. Thus she tries to respect it whenever she has the opportunity. Aside from that, she tries to be respectful of everyone else’s gods, except the evil ones (like bal) or the ones that expect an unhealthy blind devotion. She’s not a devout worshiper. Prays on occasion to the universe but other than that, she focuses on her own actions.