July 2014 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Base Building and Wormholes

July 11, 2014 by Belghast

Zombie Shamble

This morning I am shambling around the house in a zombie like state. For whatever reason I seem to have not slept well last night. I remember waking up at many moments to either kick the covers off or freezing and cover back up. My wife has wondered if she is coming down with something, and I am honestly starting to wonder if this is something more than just allergies. All I know for certain is that I could not seem to regulate my body temperature last night, and the constant pile of cats didn’t really help with the ability to get comfortable. I generally had one pinning my legs down and another stopping me from rolling over, while a third fought for control of my pillow.

I enjoy the hell out of my wife. She can fall asleep without any preparation and tends to sleep all the night through. She can fall asleep at like 8 pm and then transfer to the bed and continue sleeping the rest of the night through. I wish I could do that, but if I take a nap it completely destroys my ability to sleep that night entirely. Additionally I never can seem to functionally get more than four to six hours of sleep in any given night. The result of too much sleep is pretty much the same as not enough sleep for me, resulting in a morning much like this one where I have trouble stringing contiguous thoughts together in my head.

Base Building and Wormholes

Last night I spent most of the evening plugging away on building my base on the Alliance of Awesome server while watching season four of Farscape. I had a simple mission last night, to figure out a way to protect my base from invaders that all too easily could drop down from the cliff above or jump across from the trees nearby. As a result I harvested copious amounts of wood surrounding the cliff to remove the ability for them to perch on top of the trees and drop down from above. The main mission of the night was to find some cactus. The area the spawn is near is a mixture of heavy forestation and to a lesser extent swamp land. While we have an ample supply of cows and horses there was no readily available desert biome.

As a result I started going on these daytrips out as far away from my base as I could before eventually teleporting back using the /home command at the last possible moment before nightfall. While the majority of these were mostly futile it did allow me to stockpile the various things you can get from killing animals and I have a 50 stack of steaks that should hold me for some time as well as a lot of chicken and ham. In fact I brought home so much of it that I had to break down and build several more furnaces so that I could cook each meat at the same time. During my evenings in game I would work on harvesting out the hillside quarry that links up to my fort out on the water.

Cactus Finally

On the four trip out I was getting to the point where I thought maybe just maybe there was not a convenient desert adjoining the biomes in any direction. I had crossed every other imaginable biome, except maybe deep jungle when I started to stumble into what looked like a savannah. Then on the far side of that I started to see some sand dunes. I was starting to get a little edgy however as the sun was extremely low in the sky, which mean I did not have very long at all to harvest any cactus I happened to find. So as night fell I wandered around the desert gathering up whatever I could get. A warning for anyone who heads to that desert… it seems to almost entirely be spawned with endermen.

I gathered up around 30 blocks of cactus and ported out of there with the /home command. I wish I had taken more screenshots but I was in a rush to get the resources I needed and get out of there. In the Savannah region there was what looked like an abandoned safari hut. I would think it was a player creation, but there were absolutely no torches anywhere and it was completely open up on one end. I am wondering if this is a new type of prefab since I last played the game. There were no resources in it other than a crafting table that had been embedded into the floor. That is one of the things that I find most interesting is that since I have not played much minecraft in a long time, there will likely be a ton of things that are new to me.

Defensive Position

2014-07-11_06.19.32

As you can see in the above photo I installed a row of cactus as a defensive barrier to stop things from either being able to scale the sides of my base or drop down from the cliff above. It doesn’t stop the spiders from trying, because every night there is at least one that suicides down on the cactus dying well before they make it into the base. Right now I have a pier or sorts that connects the door into my base to the landmass and I am thinking about putting a line of cactus there as well. It does an amazing job of blocking bad stuff from getting to your base. Right now I am also trying to tunnel towards the spawn so that I can hopefully have a route to get back there if needed.

I’ve started my mine down to try and harvest some diamonds, but that plan fell apart completely when I broke into a rather shallow cave complex. There is still a ton of iron and coal that I need to harvest out of that at some point and sure up the stairs so I can continue to go down past it. Like any Minecraft session I have more projects that I have focus to complete them. At some point I want to expand the main tower structure to go up into a lighthouse of sorts. In order to carry that off I am going to need either some lightstone or some netherrack… which both mean a trip into the nether. Which also means that I need to find plenty of diamond, and use it to harvest obsidian. There is quite a large amount of surface spawn lava nearby so that shouldn’t be a huge ordeal to safely harvest obsidian. In any case… I seem to be obsessing about Minecraft again.

#Minecraft

Return to Minecraft

July 10, 2014 by Belghast

When it Rains…

The old euphemism “when it rains it pours” is fitting today because it is absolutely drenched outside… and additionally we have been dealing with all sorts of issues this week. Over the weekend we had to deal with my wife’s vehicle and the tensioner going out in a rather dramatic way. For those that don’t remember we were driving Sunday and the bolt essentially sheared causing pretty much every light on the dash to come on at once and us to barely make it home before the engine overheated to the point of no return. Monday during the day we got that issue fixed and it was a rather simple mistake that lead to it. I thought we were done with our auto troubles for the time being, but reality seemed to have other ideas.

Yesterday over lunch I ran to Target to pick up cat food and while I was out something to eat. When I started up the jeep there was a very loud mechanical whirring noise that I didn’t recognize, but otherwise the vehicle seemed to perform fine so I tried my best not to think about it. As I was heading back from lunch and entering the edge of downtown I noticed that the red battery light had come on. At this point I am not really sure what to do… I’ve had a few alternators go out, and generally speaking that light combined with the whirring noise I heard earlier probably meant mine was dying. I parked in the garage and went into the building calling the shop to see if they could work me in. Sure enough they could, so I thought I would try and make my way there, hoping I did not get stranded along the side of the road. I mean we have AAA so in theory there was never really the chance that I would truly get stranded… but I crossed all my things in hope that I made it through successfully.

When I got out into the jeep I turned everything off that could possibly be drawing power. So by the time I made it to the shop I had a rather sweaty windblown hairdo that I am sure was extremely attractive. Thankfully the shop we use is around the corner from my house so I could drop the vehicle off and walk home. Just about the time I walked in the front door my phone was ringing. They had been able to assess the issues and said it was in fact the Alternator, that the bearings were bad and it would need to be replaced. About three thirty they called back letting me know the vehicle was ready for pickup. It is probably a bad thing that the girl behind the desk addressed me by name when I walked through the door. That means we have been in there entirely too often lately. Good news is that my Jeep appears to be fine now, and since both of our vehicles are paid off… I guess paying a car payment a piece worth of repairs is not too bad in the long run.

Return to Minecraft

A few days ago Zeli mentioned that she would be setting up an Alliance of Awesome Minecraft server so that her child could have a safe place to play the game. It is a whitelist based server, and since my Minecraft name is pretty easy to remember I asked her to go ahead and set me up. Last night I finally got around to logging in and playing. For some time House Stalwart has had a Minecraft server run by a member, and at this point we have conquered pretty much all of the land surrounding the spawn point for a few days worth of travel. While this huge sprawling city is awesome to behold, it doesn’t leave much room for you to go out and tame the wilds. So I opted to start fresh on a brand new server, since really the “taming the wilderness” phase of a new server is the most enjoyable for me.

Zeli started us off with a stack of steaks, a steel pick and steel sword, which is a pretty good toolset to gain a foothold in the wilderness. I however squandered this horribly. Having been so long since I played on a server, I forgot about all of the controls like /sethome and wandered around at night for awhile and down into a cave managing to get myself killed… and as such losing all of the nifty baubles that I started with. I really had no clue where I was in relation to the spawn point, so I pretty much set out to start fresh. We have a village near the spawner, and I managed to find it… which means that we also have the village trackstar zombies at night spawning near us. It took me a lot of deaths to finally get to a place where I had enough tools to defend myself.

I did not get terribly far, but right now I have the start of a mine dug into the side of a hill, with a bridge extending from it out into the water where I am slowly building a tower of sorts. I figure the mine will feed my need for resources and the tower out in the middle of a pond will give me plenty of defense. Just going to have to come up with a clever way to get in and out of said tower. The area I am in for some reason has a couple of golems spawned near me, which do a fair job of keeping the baddies away at night. I am guessing someone spawned the golems at the spawner and they just wandered off. Additionally there are mass amounts of horses and cows where I am set up at, meaning I have eventual transportation and a ready source of meat and leather. This time I did remember to type /sethome. Right now I am very much in the “locking things down” phase, trying to create something that will protect me entirely during the nights.

Farscape

While playing Minecraft last night I opted to hang out downstairs and watch Farscape. This is one of my favorite television shows, but I have not actually made it all the way through the series. I was at the very tail end of season three when Netflix lost the license to the show the first time. For awhile I was having them ship me individual DVDs but that process got rather frustrating. I could have of course gone out and found the episodes otherwise, but I got sidetracked. At some point in the last few years they managed to get the licensing set up again and all of the episodes are now ready for streaming in all their glory.

The thing I love the most about this show is that it actually has some pretty diverse aliens that are both a member of the crew and ones that you encounter along the way. The claim to fame of the show that it was done by the Jim Henson creature shop, and because of this the aliens that are brought to life by master puppeteers just have a realness to them that you cannot get with CGI. Dominaar Rigel feels like a real character and not a small puppet, and because of this the show has held its production value, whereas most science fiction feels cheesy a few years after it is made as our graphical standards keep increasing.

At this point I have just finished season three and am ready to start the fourth and final season. If minecraft continues to hold my interests, I will probably spend a few more nights watching Farscape and building away in the Alliance of Awesome server. In fact I think that is what I did last time I watched Farscape… build away on the House Stalwart server. Minecraft and watching television seem to go hand in hand for me. If you’ve never seen Farscape I highly suggest you check it out, as it has this whole Buck Rogers meets Star Wars feel to it. I pretty much like all of the characters except for a late addition to the crew … Jool. It is not that I mind her character, it is that I mind the sonic assault that is having her in any sort of action situation. When she gets freaked out she emits this high pitched scream that drives me up a wall.

The Pause Button

July 9, 2014 by Belghast

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Right now I find myself struggling to get excited about anything in the MMO genre. I think I part I am feeling this overwhelming feeling that there are so many games that are not MMOs that I want to be playing. For years I have just defaulted to playing an MMO for so many different reasons. For starters it was more or less my social lifeline and the primary way that I kept in touch with all of my friends. The guild House Stalwart that I lead and still do lead more often than not in absentia of late… was a vessel in which I collected all of my friends in one place. During the heyday of World of Warcraft this was a glorious thing, and kept me tied to the game because it was the place I could hang out with everyone at once.

When I entered the twitter and blog community this shifted considerably, and I started wanting to hang out with new and different people and had pure hell trying to incorporate all these new friends with my old friends as well. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the end result has been a series of games played with a small subset of friends each time something new came out. I guess over the last few weeks I have realized that I no longer need the crutch that is MMOs as a way of capturing my friends and hanging out with them. At this point I pretty much have contact with everyone I have ever gamed with seriously outside of said MMO. Just because I am not playing the same game doesn’t mean I no longer have access to those people.

The Pause Button

At this point I really want to indulge my absolutely insane steam backlog, and start playing my way through it. In part this is because a single player game has something that an MMO will never have… a pause button. Over the last few months my wife and I have gotten more serious about exercise, especially since getting our fitbits back in March. Neither of us necessarily like doing it, but we know we need to and the payoff in the long run will be a much improved life. So much of my gaming life has been about getting home and getting everything done that needs to be done before gaming “primetime”. The problem is our exercise routine doesn’t fit into this plan, since in general we need to wait for things to cool off before going out and about. Sunday I made a walk in a heat index of 110 degrees, and that is not something I want to do again anytime soon.

What this means in reality is that I really cannot get involved in anything at all until I get back from my walk. This also means that for sake of sanity sake… this only gives me an hour or two to do anything structured and still be able to get up and around in the morning in a non-zombie state. So right now my exercise routine has pretty much destroyed my ability to do group MMO content, which is the primary reason why I plan MMOs in the first place. I don’t mean grouping to quest or grouping to PVP… but grouping to run Dungeons. Without the drive to do the next dungeon, the MMO experience I am finding is rather bland. At the very least that thing that used to drive me higher and higher in level just isn’t there right now.

The Treasure Trove

I am not saying anything dramatic like I am done with Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft or MMOs in general. Instead I am giving myself the leverage to not care about them if I so choose. I am sitting on what feels like a gold mine of narrative games that because of the feeling of having to log in nightly to whatever my current MMO was… I did not play. So you are likely going to see a lot more single player game coverage… and significantly less multiplayer coverage. I guess this is the good thing about having a blog format that revolves around my whims and not necessarily a specific game in it. I might end up losing some readers in the process, and I guess I am okay with that. I have become known for being an “MMO Gamer” and while I won’t stop being that, I will probably focus on more of the content that I would normally talk about during Steampowered Sunday.

Right now I want to actually finish some games. I have this horrible habit of getting near the end of a game, generally within an hour or two of beating it and losing the drive to push across the finish line. It is like I had so much fun playing the game that I don’t want the experience to end, and if I never go back and finish it up… it never has to. Right now I am within two hours of being the new Wolfenstein game for example, but I have been reluctant to do so… because I really enjoyed the experience on the way to the end. I am honestly the same way with novels and my bedside table is strewn with a ton of half finished books. In games the journey has always been so much more important than the destination… so I guess I avoid finishing the journey. All of that said it is something I would very much like to change. Back in the era of Nintendo, I had challenges with friends to see who could beat a specific game the fastest… so I know that me is somewhere deep inside waiting to get out.

Autopilot Gaming

All of that said… what did I end up doing last night? Playing World of Warcraft while watching movies. I was in the mood to hang out downstairs and watch stuff off Netflix, and after making a couple of attempts to play various games I settled to playing WoW. I have lost the ability to ONLY watch Television, after having done it as an activity while I was doing something else for so long now. That said games like Divinity: Original Sin require too much of me to be able to play them and keep track of a movie at the same time. WoW on the other hand is almost pure muscle memory at this point… I don’t have to think about the game to play it. So I decided to fire up one of my army of new hordies over on Scyers and at least get one of them into my guild of horde friends Bloodmoon Chosen. For years I have made an attempt to play Horde, because I have a large number of friends over there as well as Alliance. However because of my desire to have all of my slots available for Alliance, I kept relegating the horde to an alternate account. With the merger of Argent Dawn and The Scryers server, this gives me the ability to have 11 Alliance characters and 11 Horde characters.

The first movie of the night was Odd Thomas… which was familiar sounding but I did not have a clue why. It was staring Anton Yelchin… aka Chekov from the new Star Trek series, and more or less I have liked him in everything I have seen him in so far. Turns out that maybe somewhere deep in the bowels of my mind I realized this was a book series by Dean Koontz, but when folks on twitter informed me of such last night I was surprised. I really enjoyed the movie in a more action hero Donnie Darko kind of way, which likely makes zero sense anywhere other than my own head. It was good enough that it makes me want to track down a copy of the novels and read through them. I’ve never been a huge Koontz fan, and generally I tend to consider his novels a bit on the cheesy side… but I dig this protagonist. I like the whole unlikely crusader for good aspect of the story, and it tends to be a trope I enjoy in most movies.

The second movie of the night however was not nearly as enjoyable. One of my guilty pleasures is that I like John Cusack. I am a huge fan of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, but the unfortunate truth is that Cusack tends to play exactly the same character in every movie he is in. Edgar Allen Poe likely was a neurotic mess… but Cusack’ particular brand of neurosis doesn’t quite work here. Additionally while I can get behind the transformation of the cerebral Sherlock Holmes into the Robert Downey Jr. badass action hero… this doesn’t work at all for Cusack and Poe. I am honestly not sure what I was expecting, but after the high that was Odd Thomas I was just looking for something else and this movie showed up in one of my Netflix streams and I figured what the hell. Unless you are supremely bored and have literally watched everything else of substance in your movie feed… I would highly suggest skipping it.

Impressive but Still Beta

July 8, 2014 by Belghast

Auto Update

“Wow, I’ve never seen that happen before” is generally something you never want to hear uttered from an auto mechanic. That said at this point my wife’s vehicle is fixed and ready to go and seems to have no negative impact. Apparently on the Pontiac Torrent there are two different sizes of bolts that can be used to attach the tensioner. Quite simply when they replaced that part they used the wrong one, and as we were driving Sunday the vibration and force sheared the bolt off completely causing the serpentine belt to shread, and at the same time stopping the flow of motion to both the water pump and the alternator.

The good folks at Hibdon were more than willing to fix the problem, and after getting the vehicle towed there yesterday morning they had already fixed everything by mid day. It is one one of those “honest mistake” type situations, and I don’t fault them for it… especially since they are also the ones responsible for making it right. It was a grand inconvenience but thankfully my wife really had nowhere that she needed to go yesterday. I cringe when I think how much worse this could have gone had the bolt sheared and she lost power to major systems while out on the highway with no place to really pull to the side of the road. We were likely saved by the fact that it happened so close to our home and we did not drive it long enough to cause a radiator boil over.

Steam In Home Streaming

One of the problems with having multiple machines is that ultimately the game you happen to want to play is not installed on the machine you are sitting at. Yes I realize this is a first world problem, as I am extremely lucky to be able to have both a nice gaming laptop and gaming desktop, but this is something I have tried to deal with for some time. I’ve tried gaming over various versions of remote desktop, and none of them work well enough to offer a passable experience. I am not sure who mentioned it first, but the other day I said something about steam logging you out when you tried to log in a second machine. Apparently this has not been the case for some time. What happens now is that you see all of the games available installed from all of the machines you happen to be logged into on your network. The cool thing about this is instead of the play button you now see a Stream button as shown above.

Last night I decided to try this out, and I had some mixed results. This all started because I decided that I wanted to play catch up on True Blood which meant needing to hang out downstairs with my laptop. True Blood is one of those shows where about halfway through the third season it went off the rails and I stopped caring about it. That said at the same time I felt like after spending that much time watching it… I felt committed to seeing it through to the end. Like if I stopped my choice to watch it in the first place would have somehow been invalidated. Sadly this is how I end up feeling about most television, and why I am still watching Bleach after all these episodes… when essentially every season is EXACTLY THE SAME. All that aside the game I wanted to play last night was not installed on my laptop, so it was either steam streaming or a 10 gig download over wifi.

Impressive but Still Beta

I have to say that the actual game play was rather impressive. The game I was streaming was not exactly fast paced and action oriented… in that I was playing Divinity: Original Sin. There was a minor input lag, but I seriously might be the only one who actually would have noticed it. For example I refuse to use a wireless mouse because I can feel the slight hesitation of the wireless lag… whereas none of the rest of the world seems to be able to. The biggest thing I noticed is that it felt like I was watching YouTube video. Since you are in essense streaming video across your network, there was a certain measure of blurring and artifacting of the screen. This was most noticeable when confronted with large areas of a dark color, but it was not bad enough to be anything more than an annoyance.

The deal breaker for me however was that every time I tried to alt+tab out of the game to check something… the stream would crash out, and in a game where saving your progress is important this meant that a couple of times last night I lost a bunch of progress. Alt+tabbing is something that is just habitual at this point, and I have done it before I even realize I did it. So all of the problems I had with Skyrim apply here, in that either I have to force myself to NEVER alt tab… or I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. As a result I decided to just simply deal with installing yet another game in two places. Unfortunately since Divinity: Original Sin does not use the steamworks cloud save functionality… this also means I will be manually copying saved games between the two machines each time I decide to switch systems.

Steam in home streaming is of course still very much a beta product, and hopefully they will fix the alt+tab thing. When they do I can see myself using it quite a bit more often, especially as my laptop ages. What this really gives you is the ability to play games using the full horse power of your gaming machine, while on another machine that simply acts as a viewer and input device. I’ve even seen video of someone playing games at full frame rate using a chromebook with linux side loaded onto it. If they ever get internet streaming working, and manageable lag wise… this means there might be a time when you could play all the games on your home machine from your tablet while travelling. What I would love to see is for this to work in a more universal fashion, so I could play the games from my PS4 while sitting at my PC or versa vicea. I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet, but it gives me hope that maybe at some point we will be.

Old Addictions

Over the weekend there was a point where my wife needed to get out of the house and do anything. She had been sitting in the house for over 72 hours at that point, and just needed to see something other than the walls around her. While we didn’t really have much in the way of errands to run, I decided to co-opt the trip and run around and visit a few pawn shops. I’ve always loved going to pawn shops, because you really never know what you might find there. Since I hate paying full price for anything, they are a smorgasbord of potentially awesome things for cheap. One of the various ones we went to had a bunch of their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 games for as low as $5 a piece. I picked up used copies of Tekken 6, The Simpsons Game, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavy Rain and a copy of Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition.

One of the things I have always been curious about is playing Fallout or Elder Scrolls on a console, so for $5 I could not pass the the chance to see “how the other half lived”. When we got home I had this grand idea of testing out all of the games… but never actually made it past Fallout 3. I booted up the game and spent the next three hours playing it before I realized how much time had passed. This is one of those games that I can play over and over and never quite get bored of it, and I always thought it was the ability to modify it that made it so intriguing to me. Playing on a console I have no modding at all available, so I realize it really was the game itself. I am completely happy to wander around with wastes with nothing but a pistol, dispensing justice.

Last night after we finished our walk I went back upstairs to cool down, and made the mistake of turning on the television and continuing the journey into the wastes. Next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am scrambling to get back to Megaton extremely encumbered, but at the same time completely unwilling to drop any of my plunder. This will be interesting to say the least. One of the “mods” I always install when playing the PC game is something that removes encumbrance, because I absolutely hate playing the inventory management simulation that is a Bethesda game. That said at this point I feel committed to seeing just how well the Fallout 3 experience translates to a console. Additionally it has been a really long time since I have played Fallout 3, as more recently I tend to play New Vegas when I get the fallout itch. It is amazing just how much more I like Three Dog, than Mister New Vegas.

#SteamStreaming #Fallout3 #PS3