#between this and the 4.7 patch featuring him

[reginrokkr]

someone please hold me, after nearly 4 years Dain is finally getting an official artwork

[berniesrevolution]

THE NEW REPUBLIC

When it was still standing, 1906 Boone Street was a classic example of a Baltimore row house: three stories tall and only 15 feet wide, with a curved bay window in front and a narrow garden out back. Built in 1920, it featured a red brick facade, five bedrooms, and a claw-foot tub in the second-floor bathroom. Karen Saunders, who now lives two doors down, remembers living in the house as a child in the 1960s. Lewis Mitchell, a Coast Guard welder, purchased the house next door 21 years ago. Together with his brother, who lives one house over, Mitchell spent more than a year cleaning, painting, and repairing his new home. “I build ships,” Mitchell says. “I figured I could do a house.”

But even as Mitchell and his brother spackled walls and patched leaks, 1906 Boone sat vacant—a moldering eyesore that dragged the entire neighborhood down with it. Whenever it rained, water would collect in the abandoned row house and seep into Mitchell’s basement. To discourage break-ins, he hung his mother’s curtains in the upstairs windows at 1906. But with no one tending to it, the house eventually collapsed in on itself. When I visited the property, it looked like a stage set for an apocalypse film, its walls and floors partially demolished, its roof open to the sky. Bird droppings covered the stairwell. The bathtub was still there. Exposed, squatting precariously on a jagged scrap of what used to be the second floor, the tub felt somehow obscene: a ruin-porn image of a city in crisis.

In cities from Baltimore to Phoenix, vacant houses attract crime, serve as breeding grounds for rats and dumping grounds for trash, strain fire and police services, and gut local property values. “There’s a general reduction in quality of life around these properties,” says Kim Graziani of the Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit organization that studies run-down houses across the country and works to turn blighted properties into neighborhood assets. “You find increased rates of fear, anxiety, and depression among people who live adjacent to vacant and abandoned properties. There’s a loss of neighborhood fabric.”

One day, around eight years ago, Mitchell came home from the shipyard to find a piece of yellow plastic nailed to the front door of 1906 Boone, one of those FOR SALE—NO CREDIT CHECK! signs that have become ubiquitous in poor neighborhoods. Mitchell figured maybe he’d buy the house and fix it up, the same way he’d renovated his own home. But when he called the number on the sign, he didn’t reach a Baltimore resident who had inherited the place from his elderly parents, or even a local bank that had repossessed the house. Instead, he wound up talking to a woman from a company in Texas that offered to sell him the property for $30,000—nearly ten times what he thought it was worth. Whoever the real owner was remained a mystery.

Real estate speculators can impulse-buy a house for less than the price of a used car—but local communities are fighting back.

The Community Law Center, a local legal services group, launched an investigation into 1906 Boone and hundreds of other vacant properties around Baltimore. The hunt took more than a year. In many cases, the identity of a property owner was hidden behind a maze of shell companies; an operation called Baltimore Return Fund LLC, for example, had purchased 1906 Boone at a city tax sale for $5,452. Eventually, the investigation revealed a Texas-based web of nearly a dozen LLCs—limited liability companies, a form of legal tax shelter—that controlled more than 300 properties in Baltimore. Nearly all had been purchased at tax sales, often online, between 2001 and 2010. Most sold for less than $5,000. Many were vacant and in bad shape.

As it turned out, all the properties—and the various LLCs that owned them— were the responsibility of one man: a Houston millionaire named Scott Wizig, who had made his fortune as a real estate speculator. Few people in Baltimore had ever heard of Wizig; it’s unclear, in fact, whether he ever visited his properties in the city. But over the course of a decade, Wizig appeared to have become the biggest private owner of derelict houses in Baltimore. How he did it, and why no one was able to stop him, explains much about the current state of America’s cities.

The housing crash of 2008, combined with the relative ease of buying property online, has ushered in a new era of real estate speculation. With millions of homeowners unable to pay their mortgages and taxes, abandoned properties are increasingly put up for auction in online tax sales, enabling out-of-state investors to snap up houses, sight unseen, in vacancy-plagued cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. The market is huge. Nationwide, according to the Center for Community Progress, more than 4.7 million properties currently stand empty—a number that surged by almost half between 2000 and 2010.

(Continue Reading)

[nyxatnight]

Dev Insights: Ganesha

Ganesha is the God of Success, remover of obstacles and barrier to evil. He’s currently the highest ranking God in our Hindu pantheon, and the newest Guardian to join the Battleground of the Gods.

Lore

Ganesha is one of the most worshiped Hindu Gods today, so we wanted to pay homage to this amazing Deity, while being respectful to his lore and background. Every team that worked on Ganesha completed their own research to fully understand his lore and how to best bring him into SMITE.

“I wanted to be as accurate and respectful as possible. To me that was a fun part of the challenge.” 

– Andy Timm, Concept Artist

Ganesha is a part of a number of stories and lore, but the Design team wanted to focus on his role as a placer and remover of objects. He protects his teammates from evil (with his Ohm Ability), is able to pass through barriers and obstacles (with his Remove Obstacles Ability), and finally, places his own obstacles in the way of his enemies (with his Ultimate, Dharmic Pillars). We wanted Ganesha to feel peaceful and almost pacifistic, so his abilities focus heavily on protecting and helping his team.

The FX of each of his Abilities brings in other elements of his Lore and inspiration from the Hindu Pantheon. Notably, his Ultimate, Dharmic Pillars, features FX borders that read “Know the risk, the cross” in Hindi. These borders give a mystic feel, but also are impactful and can be read as a warning to assist in making the Ability more readable.

The Challenge of Four Arms (And a Trunk)

One of the biggest challenges with Ganesha was his model and animations. There are numerous difficulties that can present themselves when dealing with a character with four arms and an elephant head.

First, the Modelling team had to figure out how to position four shoulders. This can be a tricky task with just two shoulders, but with four, we had to go through many iterations with the Rigging team to make sure that the model made sense and still represented four individual shoulders throughout his poses.

The second challenge was Ganesha’s trunk. The Animation team wanted to bring the trunk to life and use it as a way to make Ganesha more expressive, however, animating a trunk came with its own challenges. Elephants switch between actively controlling their trunks and letting them hang, so the Animation team had to test out the best balance for Ganesha.

“This was the first time most of our team had to animate the trunk of an elephant. Which is a strange thing to animate because of the way real elephants tend to switch between actively controlling it and letting it flop around all willy-nilly. In the end it became another tool we used to make Ganesha more expressive. The team did a great job using it to add some extra charm.”

– Isaac Sansom, Senior Animator

The third challenge was animating Ganesha’s four arms. We wanted to make sure that players could see all of his arms in his base animations, which limited the amount of poses available. We also had to make sure that his attacks could be clearly read and not just a bunch of limbs waving around. In order to achieve this, the Animation team decided to hide his bowl and rose while in combat to allow him to fire abilities with those two arms.

The God of Success

Ganesha is a unique Guardian who brings a lot of support to a team. His Remove Obstacles Ability is great for setting up other Abilities and can be used to keep someone within the pillars of his Ultimate. Another great combo is to use his Turn of Fate Ability into his Ohm Ability before a teamfight, which grants both an offensive and defensive edge.

“More than anything else, Ganesha brings some serious lockdown. His Remove Obstacles into Ohm combo provides some devastating peel or setup, depending on the situation.”

– Daniel Fishman, Designer

Ganesha is available in SMITE with the 4.7 patch.