Trike

What program and prompt are you using here?

What is this?

GAH! This is incredible. I love it. Excuse me while I run around in a circle flailing my arms in the air like a Muppet.

Apparently this is releasing May 29th (2024, for those reading this in the future), on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I loved the XCOM reboot, the follow-up not so much, and obviously I’m into superheroes, so I’m intrigued. I also really enjoyed the Gears of War turn-based game, so I’m down for this. Be advised, they use adult language. The dialogue so far isn’t great but the gameplay looks decent. Capes preview:

Best value: Mass Effect 2. Played it through 4 times to get different endings and make different choices. Just an amazingly immersive and cool universe with fun gameplay. Worst value: Mass Effect 3. Turns out none of your choices mattered and the story was hot garbage, even before you got to the stupid ending. “Hey, the galaxy is on fire! Earth is being destroyed! Go get some ointment for this one guy.” WTF. I also bought the so-called Collector’s Edition based on the promises lies of BioWare, which was a bunch of digital crap. Best value: WarCraft II and WarCraft III. Super-cool games that sucked me in for multiple hours and many play-throughs with different factions and characters. Plus, making your own maps for PvP was always a cool addition. Worst value: World of Warcraft. So terribly disappointing after the fun of the RTS games. One gaming acquaintance maintained it was easier to roleplay in WoW than CoH. I was like, “I just killed a giant chicken and looted a ‘glass of ice cold milk’ from it. How does that make any sense?” Best value: Star Wars: Dark Forces. Unique gameplay for the day, adding to the Doom aesthetic with amazing abilities like “jump over a 6-inch barrier” and “look up”. 😁 But with Star Wars sound FX and music. I played the heck out of that. Worst value: Star Wars: The Old Republic. Another BioWare garbage title that was, in a word, boring. Best value: Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2. The original WWII versions were so good. They felt like real passion projects by people who were really into that era. I have never tried the modern-era versions of the game, although I did enjoy watching the game movie of the one that seems very much like Halo. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare -

Namor was in the original line-up of the Invaders from the 1970s because it collected some of the WWII-era Marvel heroes from the 1940s comics like The All-Winners Squad, back when Marvel Comics was called Timely Comics. The 1970s reboot couldn’t use Miss America due to trademark by the beauty pageant, and X-Men had introduced a new version of Angel so they didn’t want to confuse people by also having the 1940s version on the team. I think The Blonde Phantom was there but not as a heroine (memory is hazy), but I don’t know why they didn’t use The Whizzer, other than he has a name that was rendered ridiculous over time. Claremont & Byrne later brought Whizzer back in X-Men as an old man who was the father of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, but this later got retconned when Marvel made Magneto their father.

This is an interesting interview with Lawrence Schick, the guy who came up with the term “XP” while working with Gary Gygax on D&D. https://www.eurogamer.net/from-creating-dd-to-making-baldurs-gate-3-meet-the-man-who-coined-the-term-xp

Keeping with the theme, Canada Rocky.

Canadian Lynx Couldn't get Krea to make a cat face, and it kept giving her (and her brother) cat ears, which i had to erase, but close enough. (Also had to erase very obvious camel toe. 😆 Why Krea, why?) Canada Lynx

My newest Tank, Moonlightning (Elec/Dark).

That's the breast version I've seen, like 58008 times better than others.

I have a personal SG called Pulp Heroes on Indomitable but I also belong to a public SG there called Golden Age Group. I log in to Indomitable and suddenly it’s the 1930s again. 😁

She kinda looks like actress Devon Aoki in a couple of those.

I popped her into Krea to upscale her. Her face is off for some reason but otherwise it came out all right.

Oh, they were distorted all right. I just showed you the few where they weren’t as bad. 😆 Check out how many fingers are on the right hand of the guy in the first pic up there. 🖐️ ✌️ Also:

Speaking of Norman Rockwell style, here’s a sampling of some I had Bing make using that prompt:

On the topic of “Japanese brush painting, in the style of Yoji Shinkawa”, for some of them I asked for a specific item in a particular color, and the results were gorgeous. They weren’t CoH-related, so I didn’t post them, but here are a few: The above prompt with “medieval knight with a purple cape” + “squire wearing orange cloak carrying a bunch of swords like a golf caddy” + “goblin wearing a red cap welding large knife” + “gryphon with golden feathers and a human for scale” + “wizard wearing a pointy blue hat” …you get the idea. But I mean, check it out: I did hundreds of these! That’s why I haven’t been writing down my prompts. XD

I’ve just become lazy. 😛 I’ve been doing so many iterations that I haven’t been writing them down. These are easy, though. The top two are “Japanese brush painting, in the style of Yoji Shinkawa, (fill in character description here)”. The bottom one is “oil painting, Norman Rockwell style, (character description)”. Unlike Krea or DeviantArt’s Dream Up, Bing AI still works after you’ve used up your 15 credits. But I’ve never had to wait more than a minute when out of credits, so I just keep iterating while doing other things. Tuesday I did them in between Penelope Yin TF missions for Tanker Tuesday, last night it was while we watched TV, tonight it was between Halo matches. Tonight I kept trying to get it to make me a picture of a wingless Chinese dragon fighting a flying European type of dragon, but no matter what prompts I gave it the dang thing kept responding with the same incorrect image. So I burned through my 15 credits and then just keep trying prompt variations.

I've found that with all of these AI programs sometimes the order in which you phrase things has an effect, but I'm not entirely sure what the difference is. It's very much a black box. For instance, I did a bunch of anthropomorphic characters and I wanted them all to have a variation of the game's paw print inside a circle as their common feature. If I put that first, I got paw prints all over the picture, but if I put it last then 9 out of 10 times it added them where I wanted. Sometimes it surprised me, like when it put the paw print on a dog's collar and on a polar bear's belt. After many iterations and squeezing my brain for thesaurus words, I found that "emblem" was the best word to describe what I was looking for. "They have a chest emblem that is a stylized paw print inside a circle." But it took me dozens of attempts to get to that solution. I didn't keep the ones that were far misses, but I kept a few examples. I asked for an anthropomorphic wolf wearing green tights with the paw print. This was the result. Why it rendered a female with long hair I have no idea, probably because the furry community does this, but it was getting close to what I wanted. Same with the caracal, except this time I used the word "emblem". So close! So then I tried moving that specific ask -- "a chest emblem that is a stylized paw print inside a circle" -- to different places in the prompt. Once I put it in last place I got consistent placement with my "wolf wearing green". Except it kept giving me lady wolves with hair. (I also removed the "wearing brown boots" ask because it looked dumb.) So I specifically asked for a male wolf, and that did the trick. After that I simply swapped out different animals and colors. Instead of "wolf" and "green" I did "chimpanzee" and "yellow", or "lion" and "maroon", etc. This was dozens of attempts over a couple weeks, and it was frustrating... until I broke through with the right word placement. Then it was just a matter of plugging in different animals to see what I could get. The program absolutely refuses to make a bull, again probably because of swingers, but substituting buffalo and bison worked. Then I started messing around with camera angles and I decided to try to do a version of the classic Justice League cover where they're all looking up at the viewer. And that's how I ended up with a massive desktop wallpaper-sized version of a bunch of animal characters. I rendered them individually, then took them into a free program called paint.net and pasted them together. It was a lot of work, and i actually forgot to include a couple. Again, check out the bear, panda and Akita on the left side. The program can sometimes surprise you. (Click the pic to see the full size.)

That second one is terrific. A unique blend of items.

It is a bit strange how it sees things. In the Back Alley Brawler one it said he had his arms crossed. No idea how it came to that conclusion.

As Player2 says, you can specify things in the prompt box under Settings. I added “Korean woman in her 20s wearing a traditional Korean outfit” to the prompt for the enhanced version of Mirror Spirit:

Major Mighty and Mighty Lad, 1950 Phantom Fox

Mighty Man Bright Tiger and Bamboom