I spruced up the main page of the
website. I wanted the visitor to be greeted with random full-screen Youtube Tornado-related video (see below). I hand-picked 37 Tornado videos on Youtube. So I consider this part of the Internet has having the best compilation of Tornado-related videos, for your viewing pleasure.
This is followed by screenshots of the game. I thought how nice it would be if the same screenshot had (1) different effects and (2) a brief caption to liven up the screenshot. I am happy to say that with a free
Cloudinary.com account, I have achieved this. Here are some actual screens from the website that Frankie built.
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The graphics were the rave of the 1990s, but now pale in comparison to today's BIG toys. Personally though, I am a big fan of the flat-shaded polygon graphics of Tornado. The graphics hold a certain charm for me. Something like a poor cousin of Flanker 1.0, yet still very attractive. The main thing for me is the graphics work very well to convery the sense of speed flight at low-levels.
In case anyone is wondering, in all there are 178 (European theater) + 108 (Operation Desert Storm - ODS) screenshots, giving a total of 278 possible images! There are also over 18 random effects which include blurs, dust, negative, contrast, tilt shift, fill light, green, sharpen, colour improvement, oil painting, sepia, vignette, grayscale, dithering, Cinematic, Super Wide, Ultra Panavision and 2.35 Anamorphic. Each frame can either display, as a fully-scalable background, a screenshot from the original game's European theater, or a screenshot from the game's ODS addon.
As for the captions, I wrote 278 different captions - one for each image. That took me about 2.5 hours of thinking and typing the text. The captions are not hard-coded into the graphics. The text that I supply to each image is changed by Cloudinary into a text overlay which fits on top of the background screenshot. I had to write some Javascript to handle this part. But the main role was played by Cloudinary in making available a whole suite of URL/web browser commands to invoke different effects.
And the best part? If I ever decide to do another tribute website, on another flight simulator game, I could use the same code and just change the content.
;-)