User blog:Foreborn/Another New Background

Yes, another new background image, making this the fourth one used on this site, and the third bearing the name "Project McCall". I'm aware that I made the last background image only seven months ago, and it was a lot of work I might add. Unfortunately, Wikia chose now, after we'd gotten used to it, to undo their mind-bogglingly stupid move of shrinking Wikia sites. What I mean by that, is that there is a lot less space for background images and more for page content, which really is a good thing except for the fact it ruined the background image we had. Even the one before that wouldn't look right at this point.

So began my long hassle with Wikia, as I tried to figure out the new parameters for background images. Over the course of this frustrating adventure, things in my mind included, "Wikia, why do you hate me?" and a recurrence of unhealthy thoughts about killing chickens. You see, it's an entirely new background image because Wikia has a 150 kilobyte size limit on background images. When I made the last two themes, they had to be compressed to oblivion in order to come under Wikia's absurdly small limit. Compressing these images severly downgraded the quality of the final background images. Add to the fact that, in order to construct a background image, the images that you see on the sides have to be placed onto a completely blank image (which results in a slight loss of quality in itself). So in the end, we had some low-quality looking background images.

Now, to save our last theme I would have had to do one of two things. The first and most obvious, would be to cut the images of Ray and Thomas and place them in a new background photo (cropped down to fit, of course). That unfortunately would result in even lower quality than before. The other option would have been to start from scratch, and truth be told, I don't think those images of Ray and Thomas would have worked well cropped down to the new size. So, I have painstakingly crafted an entirely new background. The good thing about Wikia's latest changes, is that the smaller background image results in a file size well under 150 kilobytes. This means there is no compression (and the severe loss of quality that comes with it). I should also address one suggestion of using actual screenshots from the games as background images. While that sounds like a great idea because Call of Juarez has amazing scenery, it's impossible to do now. Before it was tricky enough trying to find screenshots that work well enough in the space we had, but since it has been cut down even further it's impossible. Additionally, screenshots are very high quality and would probably end up needing to be compressed, and no one wants any more of that.

One other thing you might notice is Ray and Thomas will now stalk follow you when scrolling down a page, whereas before they remained stationary. I could go change it back to being stationary if people prefer it. Also, any seemingly low-quality is mostly due to the official artwork itself. All three background images (our very first one is lost), including the new one can be found below (the first two are before they were compressed):



Project McCall



Project McCall 2



Project McCall 3