MUSHclient GUI: 29-Aug-2010

I've just been having a play with an online photo to cartoon convertor, and in my opinion the results are actually pretty good:

This could prove to be the solution to my avatar problem - because while I suck at drawing and painting, I'm not bad at photography, and most of my family are pretty keen photographers as well.  It also seems to be much easier to find public domain photographs than hand-drawn artwork.

But back to the plugin...

Finally got the sunrise working (using the actual time - previously it was just using a dummy counter for drawing purposes).  The original plan was that there would be a sun going from left to right during the day, and a moon at night - but this proved very fiddly, because days vary in length throughout the year.  So in the end I decided just to have a full cycle (from left to right) represent a 24 hour period, from midnight to midnight, with the moon turning into a sun during the day and back to a moon at night.  I also added the current time as a text label.

I've been creating more avatars from photos as well.  Some work better than others, but I definitely think the cartoons fit the GUI better than photos.  If other people decide to create their own GUIs, this would be a great way to built up a shared repository of images.

(click image to enlarge)