geek questions

[juldea]

Will someone please explain to me, with examples hopefully, what cel(l?) shading is?

Also: My only problem so far with gmail is that it automatically groups all LJ comment notifications with the same subject (i.e., "Reply to your post") into one conversation. I'm not used to this and I'm constantly afraid I'm deleting mails without reading and responding to them. Does anyone have a suggestion for another way to do it?

Comments

[karlean7.livejournal.com]

Cel shading is a pretty recent video game trend designed basically to look like a fully animated 3-D cartoon. Following Jet Grind Radio, which was the first game I can think of that had it, a LOT of games used it. The biggest benefit is that it looks really good, while not being terribly hard to do, at least compared to being as realistic as possible. The flaw is that it's so highly stylized that it loses a lot of its appeal after a while, so games have started veering away from it.

Sorry to be confusing. I don't talk about video games a lot these days, and I forgot that some of the cel-shading controversy might have mostly passed over other people's heads. A popular example of this can be found in Penny Arcade's news posts (Scroll down, look for "Celda").