Melinath's Scenery: signposts.

[melinath]

I'd like to work with you on developing a set of monumental signs for Wesnothian. You supply the art, I'll supply the linguistic/orthographic knowledge.

That would be great! How would you like to communicate?

[kitty]

as is said, i started combining blackletter and ugaritic forms....

[melinath]

... and Kitty takes the cake for written script. That's beautiful. gorgeous.

And here's a proposed monumental version...

This may be too simplified...? Each letter has between one and three 'strokes'. I've left out word dividers and sentence dividers to save space on the monument(s).

@esr: Right now, these letters are arranged according to the Ugaritic alphabet that they're derived from. Of course this doesn't mean that Wesnothians speak Ugaritic. We can assign whatever sounds we want to the letters, I imagine. When you say that you want a "transcription table of phonemes occuring in Wesnothian names to signs", what exactly do you mean? Do you want to make a number of different "place names" that can be layered over a sign image?

[thespaceinvader]

Trying to design a language is probably over-ambitious, though it would be cool. My suggestion would be, as for the dwarvish and human magical language, that we simply assign each letter to a latin language equivalent, and write easter-egg messages for people who are willing to translate them themselves.

[melinath]

Trying to design a language is probably over-ambitious, though it would be cool. My suggestion would be, as for the dwarvish and human magical language, that we simply assign each letter to a latin language equivalent, and write easter-egg messages for people who are willing to translate them themselves.

If Tolkien can do it, so can a group of random people who met on the Internet! I'm... not sure what esr is planning/wants... but for now, these letters are exactly the same as the human magical language (Ugaritic), just script/monumental forms of it. Or do you mean assigning letters different than the default letters, so that there's an e and an o?

[esr]

Melinath: Kitty and I have been through two iterations now. You want to look at this:

http://wesnoth.pastebin.com/m56700679

[Jetrel]

Just for the "portrait":
The coulourscheme you use is nice and has a good weathered feel to it!
But your lines need a lot of work - they feel thin and shakey and the ones marking the structure of the wood are too random.

My spider-sense tells me you're using a mouse to draw those lines. It has a certain characteristic look of that. You'll probably have a very hard time doing decent lines with a mouse.

Try doing it on paper and scanning it in, or if you're serious about computer art, consider getting a cheap ($100) graphics tablet (one of the cheapest bamboo tablets here should do great). To do it on paper, I'd suggest printing it out, laying a second page over it, and tracing over that second page (you might need tracing paper).

This is a major issue we must get fixed before this can be committed.

[melinath]

I actually did draw them by hand, then scanned it in and inked it with my mouse. So your spider sense is half to three-quarters right.... Or maybe that's what you meant. I have the original lying around and can probably easily ink it IRL and adjust the pic accordingly. Though then I'll have to redo the sign perspective again... ugh. Work. Oh, well. The price of art.
I didn't realize a graphics pad could be so cheap... maybe I'll get one eventually, but for now that would take too long. I'll give printing it out a shot.

[thespaceinvader]

Mouse inking isn't goign to cut it for mainline, unfortunately - Inking by hand is workable, getting a tablet may well be your best solution if you're serious about digital artwork, particularly Wesnoth - our mainline style is basically reliant on tablet techniques.

[vonHalenbach]

I didn't realize a graphics pad could be so cheap... maybe I'll get one eventually, but for now that would take too long. I'll give printing it out a shot.

I have got mine for one euro from the e... and it was used, only six inches and with a serial cable instead of usb.

[kitty]

Next updates to the scripts: we have got two now - the monumental steel hand and a cursive brush hand. Esr and me collaborated on them since yesterday (if you are interested in the details simply check the irc logs). Details on the pronounciation and use of the glyphs are here.

Trivia: The casual Wesnothian term for the monumentals is "steel-hand", distinguishing it from the old writing which is called "brush-hand". The new writing was promulgated in YW 51 by the reigning King with the cooperation of the mages of the recently founded Academy on Alduin.

[JLS]

That steel–hand is just plain awesome!

[Aethaeryn]

No special Æ character? It sure does show up a lot in random names.

[thespaceinvader]

If we're going for special characters, one for dd would be good, given that that's a distinct letter sound (soft th, as in the) in Welsh, from which so many of our names are derived. Similarly, ff would be nice too, but that shows up far less.

[melinath]

And now to take a slight detour from kitty's awesome scripts...
I've redone the lines with the print/trace method. Made the signpost actually square, since that is something many signpost-making societies are capable of, and moved all inner linework to the coloring for now. A couple things I know need to be fixed (unless someone says otherwise:

• the lines at the lit bottom part of the post - either continue them or remove them.
• remove or improve the brown splotch on the unlit part of the post (was a knot)