Operations Officer
Report
12.8.2002 - FA Howlader
1) Been an exciting week: The Flightsuits are more or less done. We in the Operations Office still have a bit of tweaking to do in terms of placement of a few of the components. But rest assured, this should be done within the week.
2) A note/speech about medals. You are not entitled to a medal (unless its a service medal...but even then..), so don't complain. Don't gripe. If you think you've been "shafted", you probably haven't. This also covers people for requesting awards for doing things, don't. Also, everyone should reexamine the Operations Manual for medal awardingness
3) Squadron patches: Going well, but Commander Tempest posted something on the TC Message Board, which I will repaste here:
So well, most important thing I'd like to repeat:
Submit in a non-compressed file format. Not many have followed that rule until now. JPEG has the great disadvantage that the edges are blurred, and then it's my job to clear the patches' borders up. No great deal, you might say, but still annoying when considering that it might be easily avoided if people would submit in BMP or another uncompressed format in the first place. If you zip it up, the filesize shouldn't be too big for any connection.
Even worse is GIF. Apart from the blurring problem, that format only supports 256 colours and can utterly destroy all the work the graphics designer put into the patch. When released in the version for TTT, the patches will be in BMP format anyway. No reason to let the quality suffer just for the transporting.
Second point: Image size.
Many submissions I got until now came in both a large-size and a small-size (35 * 45) version. Experience tells that this is a very good idea. Especially when I had to edit the patch (which I had to do with about half of the submissions), the larger versions came in mighty handy because it's of course much easier with those.
Another aspect which I didn't think of when I wrote the first note about the patches is the fact that we'll very likely have flightsuits again soon. I had a glimpse on the design of them and assume (not sure yet) that the patches on the FS can be about 70-75 pixels high and about 60 wide. That means it is a good idea to design your patches in a large, high quality version. Having that, downsizing won't be any problem, whereas upsizing from a 35*45 pixel patch would. Also, as I already mentioned, it would simplify editing (if necessary).
Other than that, good week.
Howie