EHM The Blue Line

I think most of you know I don't "talk up" my projects much, and the TBL Admin Crew definitely knows that; I just love creating stuff for the game and for the EHM Community.

Arch and I have been talking about it though and I'll allow myself to talk this one up a bit. I have to say... that I just completed and posted a project that is best described as jaw dropping.

To balance things out I'll also do something unlike me: explain what is actually three projects in one... and do it all under 150 characters like my short description of the file does

Large high quality NHL Trophy images with name and explanation for year end news items. Titlebar versions and new trophy based league news logos too!

Here is a full size in-game screenshot (as seen in my Etched Steel skin) of the presenting of the Selke Trophy, if you'll all allow me a bit of boasting by posting it inline instead of linked (click on the image for the full size due to our spiffy new autoscaling forum setup):



As a set they look so good that the collective screenshot I realized it couldn't be posted as it was. That is why for the first time I had to overlay/alter and brand the screenshot heavily so it couldn't be claimed by someone else as theirs and the elements of it chopped up and used who knows where... sorry that's so obnoxious by keep in mind the altered shot is even only 75% of it's original size. I gladly share my work but I don't give it away or make it easy for other people to steal/co-opt it

I usually don't mention this either but I will here since Arch has been insisting I should... this set between searching for sources on the net, planning and creating the design elements, removing the backgrounds of the source images, testing and writing up the install instructions took me around 40 hours or so. Here's some of what I was sharing with Arch as I worked on them, just for fun if anyone cares to see a bit more of what goes into my putting together a project like this.

The main problem doing a sources-base project is that some are more of a challenge than others. Here's three examples of the toughest ones in this set:

There just aren't many sources for the darn plus/minus award since honestly nobody cares The trophy itelf is tough because it's a hockey player sculpture with his stick up over his head, not exactly a dream source in photos.

Also tough is the All-Star trophy which is never seen off ice I don't think... and the pictures should you find them are usually from the on-ice presentation after the All-Star game itself. That means someone is always holding it often at a bad angle. Oh yeah... and it's freakin clear!! So I had to get extra creative on that one.

So when you look at those two awards Arch said I should let people know that these are the two sources the Plus/Minus and All-Star MVP trophies came from.

Some more of what I was rambling to Arch about before:

Pop quiz... who can tell me who Roger Crozier is? Then how about why he would have an NHL award named after him called the 'Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award'? And what does the award mean? Anyone? No? Yeah me either.

Quick history lesson: he was in goal for the Sabres inaugural game which was also the team's first home game and Crozier brought home their first win that night. He went on to be a succesful hockey front-office guy as well as GM.

So, that's the name and here's the what and why: The award is given to the goalie (or goalies depending on # of games played as Turco/Belfour co-won before) who post the best save percentage for their team. How did he become associated beside being a goalie? He was a good candidate for a save precentage award as he was known for seeing more rubber than a mile's worth of city roadway during a night's work. During the 1971-1972 season, he turned away 2,190 shots, which is still the team's record for shots faced by a goalie in a single season.

I'm super excited about making this project available for people and I hope it makes it feel like you've actually won an award now instead of "You're the league MVP here's ten words of text to celebrate that fact" which is just a bummer when we work as hard as we do on our games to bring how that silverware ya know?!?!

Thanks for endulging me in my rambling on about this project There are some other surprises not on the screenshot that I think people will appreciate as well so let me know what you think and of course enjoy playing!!

What a cool project! I look forward to installing everything tomorrow, you are pretty amazing Minty!

AWESOME Minty!

Very Good Project

Keep up the great work

Thanks for writing all that out, Minty I'd been pestering him to explain to everyone how the heck he does these things (I think he's usually too modest ). It's darn mind-blowing! My favourite is the plus/minus award. If you compare his finished product with the source picture, you'll see how much work went into removing the player's hand and restoring the trophy underneath it.

As always....AWESOME!!!

The screenshot looks cool....cant wait to put it in my PC

Iam so glad I have joined this forum

That's awesome work, Minstrel!

This is Roger Crozier...

Absolutely beautiful work! I am so happy to be able to add this to my game! TBL keeps making my EHM better and better. Thanks so much!

Awesome Minty. They are very beatiful.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks amigos As a lot of you know part of why I dig hockey so much is tradition and the NHL trophies are the greatest example of that tradition. Also, the trophies themselves... at least the long-established ones are so darn cool and I'm not sure how many people have been able to experience them. That's probably why I worked so hard and got such good results out of this one.

As far as projects go I've always taken to the "radio show" analogy in regard to making projects. That is that you can have the world's best radio show and work like hell on it but if nobody can recieve to signal it adds up to nothing really. So without being able to actually get these out to people to use and enjoy my stuff they're just dead ends. That's how I ended up joinin the crew here and its also why we work as hard on TBL as we do cause without you all we're just radio waves bouncin off the walls.

Minstrel

I've found a glitch in your pack: the award for the rookie of the month says "race for the calder CUP". Seeing that the calder cup is awarded to the winner of the American Hockey League, couldn't it better to redo it saying Calder Trophy?

kidhander wrote:I've found a glitch in your pack: the award for the rookie of the month says "race for the calder CUP". Seeing that the calder cup is awarded to the winner of the American Hockey League, couldn't it better to redo it saying Calder Trophy?

Umm... just put your thumb over the last part of it when it gets displayed

Heh... that's what can happen when you're juggling all those trophy names, also that's not one I had a news item ready to test out. Thanks for spotting it for me. Here's the new version, you'll have to rename the file so as a reminder I'm linking my gallery page instead of posting the image in-thread. I've updated the file for subsequent downloaders so if your file was 'NHLTrophyV2' yours is already updated and you don't need to follow the below rink to attain a corrected version:

NHL Rookie of the Month.png

It looks better now

I usually don't visit the graphics forum, but I saw this on the SI games site and figured I'd better stop in.


These look awesome Minty, really good work here.