Not really much to update as far as image gen goes, but I realised I forgot to composite a layer on the eggs (the bottom half did not have the lineart layer) so that's fixed now. The bottom half tends to be completely blotted out if the pattern is largely solid pixels though, so I'm thinking about whether I can tweak the process to work around that.

Redrew the eggs, and I think they look way better! I'm...not sure they are a good representation of the palette because colours are sometimes not quite visible, but hey, they're cute and consistent. I have some ideas for the page I'll be displaying them on!

These birds are ugly but they're growing on me so much...

Pattern gen is fixed (turns out I introduced a bug while I was trying to get rid of antialiasing on the pattern) and it really adds a lot of charm/interest! I was initially going to restrict the amount of patterned pidges generated, but I think I'll let all pidges have patterns. Not all of them are visibly patterned, anyway.

I also tweaked part grouping a little, so that eyes will always be given a colour. This should reduce the occurrence of eyes blending into the base when it's uncoloured, especially if there's heavy dithering on the face. I think it also reduces the odds of void eye...which is a little harder for me to fix (don't think it's worth the effort, so there will always be void eyes).

I made an attempt at generating eggs that showcase the palette, but I'm not satisfied with them yet. While they do look consistent, it doesn't do the showcase bit very well, so I'm workshopping this.

Besides that, I also added a couple of new palette types - rainbow and vaporwave/retro. I think the rainbow palette might need some tweaking, but I went all out on controlling the parameters for the vaporwave ones, so they look fairly good across the board. There's a lot to talk about regarding palette generation here (a lot of it is worrying about the relationship between saturation and lightness + doing bad hacks to deal with chroma), so I think I'll write a page on it at some point.

The main things left (besides working out egg design and adding a watermark/url) are putting up a page for displaying pidges, and writing the cron that will make more pidges automatically. Soon...

I put this down for a while because I REALLY didn't want to do the boring work of pulling my vanilla PHP code into corownet...but that went surprisingly quickly, so I did the other part that I didn't really want to do (creating and assigning theme groups)...which I didn't want to do because it'd be so hard to test incrementally...and surprisingly it all came out in a working state with very minimal problems.

It's definitely not all bug-free - notably, I'm getting way less pattern application than I should be. I also need to actually hook this up to the scheduler, make a page, etc. etc. but! wow! I did NOT expect it to be working so soon.

My main thought is...these are really horrendously ugly LOL. Generating a new palette for each individual pidge looks really bad, even though the palettes themselves aren't that horrible...which is a little depressing given how much thought I put into trying to make these look nice (I will explain theme groups eventually). BUT...I think that's a given for random generation, and I think there are more hits if I repeat the same palette over multiple pidges...so I think I might do that! Sometimes the palette is good, but the generation uses only like, 2 colours in all the wrong places, and it turns out much nicer on another pidge. This is something that I enjoyed while doing the prototype/proof-of-concept, so I suppose it makes sense.

I'll also need to add a watermark or something, like for the firelizards...I really enjoy image generation, but don't want my art to be misused (like for NFTs, or sold as-is as adoptables) and/or untraceable. 

Had fun though! Love my ugly bird(?) children.