February 2017 - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Four Screenshots

February 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was another fairly anxiety fraught night, and I simply didn’t feel capable of tanking a World of Warcraft progression raid. I feel bad about it, but by the time I got home… my mind was spent racing through all of the possible things that could fail today. This is it.. the day we launch the new website and I am terrified. In the grand scheme of things I know that we will deal with everything that comes down the pipe and triage issues as they arise. However on the eve of the event I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that could go catastrophically wrong. I need this to launch and I need it to go successful… because honestly I need a few days to simply fall apart. I have been functionally working sick for over two weeks because I knew things had to get done. Granted I have not been running a fever, so I didn’t think I was likely contagious… but that didn’t necessarily stop me from feeling downright miserable. One thing I did do last night was get my little Random Shots project out on GitHub since Scopique mentioned I should do this thing. Since I don’t really have a whole lot that I feel like talking about this morning, I am going to try one out of these random screenshot posts and see what happens.

I have this weird relationship with Rift. I love it or at least I really want to love it… but I have issues playing it. I talked a little bit about my issues with combat over on Syp’s blog yesterday in the comment section, but another huge issue I have is that I simply cannot bring myself to purge things from my vault. I love their housing system… but I also cannot seem to be bothered to actually spend time building a proper house. However I have this long term desire to do so… and because of that my vault is horrible. With Nightmare Tide they introduced the Minion system and for months I logged in dutifully every day hoping to get housing caches with the thought of putting all of this cool stuff to work in building a really great dimension. However what actually happened is it filled up both my vault and inventory with a bunch of items that I never could quite bring myself to part with. I could bring myself to part with the deluge of crafting materials that my minions kept bringing back, but those housing items were just too rare feeling. Sure most of them go on the auction house for a few silver…. but that doesn’t actually seem to alleviate the problem. What I wish is that Rift had a housing system that worked similar to Wildstar in that you chuck items in a sort of housing inventory that you can then place items from. I would happy wander the world collecting housing items, knowing that one day I might actually sit down and devote the hours to building a proper home.

I had honestly forgotten about the events that happened during this screenshot. Back in 2014 the Halloween event included the ability to transform into one of the various signature characters in the game. There were a bunch of different clones running around in Uldah, and I wound up as Nanamo Ul Namo. It was a lot of fun but largely was just an occasion to take funny photos… like there is one floating around of like nine Minfilia’s on a bench sitting beside one Merlwyb who is looking exasperated. That is one of the really cool and frustrating things about Final Fantasy XIV is that each holiday event is unique and will never be repeated. They sometimes put the rewards you could have earned on the cash shop for a pretty cheap price… but each year and each holiday offers something truly unique. Over the years I have missed several, and there will always be a small bit of me that feels a slightly sense of loss over not getting to see whatever content that was.

This is one of those screenshots where I know what it is and what it is showing… but can’t be terribly certain of the sequence of events. Essentially I know that this is a beta test build of Elder Scrolls Online, during one of the most public test weekends and not one of the Psijic Order/Team Akatosh weekends. The screenshot is somewhere in the middle of Stonefalls, because I spent so much time in Stonefalls. By the time the game launched I was pretty sick of both the Daggerfall Covenant starter area and the Ebonheart Pact starter area. The reason why I know it is a public beta client, is because there is no obnoxious watermark that says my email address over and over across the screen. I still have plenty of alpha screenshots floating around that are watermarked to hell and back and this is obviously not one of them. I also know this is not a live screenshot… in part because of the time stamp on the image and also because I have yet to make it to Ebonheart Pact on my main character. The funny part about this shot is that I had been in alpha/beta testing on the game roughly a full year when we reached this point back in February of 2014. I was an extremely dutiful tester, repeatedly reporting bugs every time I played. To the best of my knowledge I never missed a weekend testing event, even if it simply meant that I popped in for a few hours somewhere during it. It just seems shocking that in April we will be coming up on the third anniversary of the Elder Scrolls Online.

This is a screenshot from one of the early alpha builds of Skysaga, a minecraftian sort of voxel building game. The game had a really awesome style to it, in everything other than the character models… and their weird floating arms and legs that were detached from the torso bothered me. I realize that was part style decision and part that they simply didn’t want to have to properly animate arms and legs. I mean if it worked for Rayman… why not for a construction/exploration game? I cannot really tell you why I checked out of this game, but I did… I think in part because it was the sort of experience that handheld you through the process of building by continually throwing new crafting achievements in front of you. Then each time a new build was released… we would get wiped back to square one. I am sure the game has changed massively given that this is a screenshot from February of 2015 and I am still actively getting emails talking about alpha builds of the game. When I just checked the website they list that they are in Alpha 9… and this screenshot is from what I can only term as a 0 alpha build given the version number. If you are still in alpha after two years… something tells me you are using the nomenclature completely wrong. If you are selling a product… you aren’t in alpha. You are just in a buggy release mode.

Random Screenshots

February 15, 2017 by Belghast

Last night didn’t go exactly as expected, largely because I did essentially zero gaming. What happened instead is that I wound up installing Visual Studio community edition and tinking away all night at an idea I have had for awhile. In order for it to make sense you are going to have to know a few things. Firstly I take my game screenshots probably way more seriously than most people. The theory is that since I have to summon a blog post every morning, and use screenshots to break up my blocks of text… I need access to them quickly and at a moments notice. Functionally I have thirty minutes to an hour to write every morning, so speed is of the essence. As a result I have directory system out on 4 terabyte network attached storage drive, that first breaks games up into larger categories like MMORPG or FPS and eventually down into individual game directories. Functionally feeding this beast would be madness were it not for the fact that I circumvent the screenshot routines of individual games, and dump every single screenshot I take into a “gameshots” directory. I’ve tried a lot of different solutions and through them all.. the most reliable option has always been Fraps so I continue to use it… in spite of how clunky it can be sometimes. About once a month I clean these individual gameshot directories on my desktop and laptop and dump the images laying around into the directory structure on the network attached storage. I still wish there was a direct way for me to connect into my PS4 screenshots over the network, but for the time being I have been using a second twitter account to export them without spamming my main twitter feed.

The second piece of information that is going to be key… is that some time ago I had an idea for a post prompt for those days I am struggling to find any purpose. The idea being to take a random screenshot or two and then write about whatever happened to be going on when I was taking them. The challenge then becomes how does one grab a random screenshot when you have a multi-tier directory structure that includes over 13,000 files. This seed was planted around Blaugust time last year but I never actually got around to building it. For whatever reason last night I sat down while eating dinner… and knocked it out over the course of the evening. It is still rather crude and doesn’t look amazing, but as the night went on I kept adding different features to it. The functionality is pretty simple… you use the file picker to choose the directory you want to crawl for screenshots. If you wanted sheer madness you could of course start at the root of C and crawl downwards, because I believe that would work given that I am using recursion to make the crawl. When you click search it is going to go out and find any JPG or PNG files and dump them into a list, then after completion dump links to those files out below the progress bar. You can of course click the links to preview what it brought back. I tried to make it work with picture boxes but given the 1080p file sizes kept blowing up the memory allocation. I might rewrite at some point in the future and dump the links into an in app web browser for display. Sidenote… the progress bar starts out as complete bullshit but as you run the app remembers how many files it found last time and bases it off of that. One of the things you will know as a programmer is that progress bars in general… are bullshit.

At the moment when you hit search it brings back eight files and displays them as links. At some point in the future I want to rework this process and use some sort of an object that is easier to add elements to on the fly, rather than a bunch of linklabels as I did last night… because I was lazy. I would like to have a drop down that lets you choose from some values on how many files to return each search. Right now I am caching the two directories and the number of files it found on its last run to the app.config, largely because I got tired of having to keep entering the same values each time I ran the application. I am using app.config because I really don’t want to have to write things to the registry… and I am sure you don’t really want me to do that either. The final feature to talk about is the save button, that attempts to copy any files found in the search to the directory you have chosen. I say try because there are of course things that could go wrong along the process. This morning when I ran it on a new machine for whatever reason it saved the files one directory up from my intended target. I will have to sort that out and figure out why the behavior isn’t quite functioning as intended. Whatever the case I’ve zipped up the current build and dropped it on my web host if anyone has a real burning desire to play with it. It is a 7z file so you will need 7zip to deflate it… largely because I have an obsessive love for that utility. If there is any demand I will probably throw it up on GitHub and start working off of that, since I don’t really have a great version control option at home.

For those curious… the images I have been interweaving throughout this post were pulled using the random tool this morning. Just like with any randomizer there are going to be sequences of things closely tied together. This morning it returned: Diablo 3, Everquest 2, Fallout 4, Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy V, and three shots from World of Warcraft. So if you are looking for shots from a bunch of different games you might need to spin the wheel more than once to see what shakes out. I’ve run it before and everything that was chosen save for a couple files are from my Final Fantasy XIV directory. Granted in my case… I have way more screenshots of WoW and FFXIV than pretty much anything else in the directory structure with FFXIV containing 3,071 files and WoW containing 1,462 files. Though in theory the WoW Directory is not a true representation given that I have a bunch of files on Google Photos that predate the NAS idea. I also have literally every hard drive I have ever used sitting in a stack, and I have as a weekend project at some point to crawl through them looking for old game screenshots to add to the collection. Generally speaking I donate all of my computers to Goodwill, but before doing so I pull the hard drive… and you end up with a stack of 20-30 drives over the course of a couple decades. Here is hoping that they still spin after all of this time. Let me know if you end up playing with this and what your results are.

Provoking Stupidity

February 14, 2017 by Belghast

I sat here this morning for a good thirty minutes contemplating not making a post today. After the flurry of activity coming back from PAX, and still struggling with what whatever respiratory hell that continues to drag on after getting home… I just feel completely drained of interesting things to talk about. Right now I tend to play at least a little bit of three different games each night. I’ve moved on from the Sahagin and am now focused on the Kobolds while doing dailies in Final Fantasy XIV. In World of Warcraft, I am attempting to do my emissary cache chests, thought I saw the one from Nightfallen and “noped” the hell out of it last night. I am not sure why but I am just done with Suramar as a whole, and nothing seems less exciting than venturing forth into that zone to track down four dots on the map and completing them. I am not a huge fan of elves in general, and the fact that there is this giant pseudo stealth city in the middle of the zone… kinda combines a bunch of things that I find miserable in one place. After dealing with dailies in WoW and FFXIV I tend to log into The Elder Scrolls Online to push that story a little further, however right now it feels like I am mired in Malabal Tor and dead in the water. The beginning of that zone was awesome, but I have reached this middle section largely focused on Elvish politics… and man am I struggling to care. However I am making progress, because I keep turning black symbols on my map into white symbols.

Last night I did a little more than normal in Final Fantasy XIV as six of us all queued for Dun Scaith together. This was my first time in the zone, and in fact I slowed down the party from queuing because I had to actually finish turning in my quests and watching the cut scenes post Weeping City. It was a lot of fun, and reminded me quite a bit of the way the fights felt during Syrcus Tower. There were a lot of “wipe the raid” mechanics but they all largely seemed messaged well, apart from the whole “stop doing anything” section of one of the fights. Granted as a tank I could be dumb and stand in a certain amount of crap while learning the lay of the land. I reluctantly ended up main tanking several of the bosses, because I kept pulling threat on the Dark Knight that was super serious about main tanking. Generally speaking if I am tanking I go with the flow and if someone pulls a mob off me then “Gratz you get to tank now”. However this Dark Knight did not subscribe to that philosophy because he kept provoking the boss back to him… and then through simply doing my primary combo I would end up pulling the boss off of him again, which would in turn cause him to provoke the moment his cool down was up. After a few rounds of this… I went deterrence and focused on trying to do as much damage as I could. At which point… the Dark Knight died and I once again had the boss. His party rezzed him… and you know the very first thing he did? Yup… he provoked the boss back onto him at which point I sort of wanted him to keep dying out of his sheer stupidity.

After tanking Dun Scaith I just sort of faded into the background and played a bunch of other things. The problem is right now… nothing is really completely clicking with me. I seem to enjoy everything well enough, but just in very small bursts. By 9 pm I was already starting to yawn, and by 10 pm I was in full zombie mode as I stumbled through the house trying to shut it down for the night. Functionally I am probably just restless and sick, and been unable to really give myself the time needed to convalesce. I’ve functionally had to work sick, because things have been too crazy not to. I am looking forward to when the worst of this is past me, and I can take a few days off… or at least allow myself to completely fall apart rather than trying to keep myself going just well enough to remain functional. The legitimate Flu has been going around at work, and I am hoping that I remain in this realm of respiratory hell… and don’t actually catch that one. I took my shot, and it was the three way protection variety… so here is hoping that we don’t end up with strain four.

Chateau Belghast

February 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bizarre one. We are still very much under the gun of a release date, and I attempted to do whatever I could to further that goal. However for all of Saturday our building was without power, and I was instead on call just in case something went wrong. The building power went down at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time we started recording AggroChat we had not yet gotten the all clear. I was just hoping that things would cycle off of the generators as successfully as they did cycling onto them, and that I would not end up getting interrupted during the podcast. Sunday was a mixed bag of work and doing all of the other things that we ultimately put off until Sunday like laundry and various errands. The weekend as a whole wound up being a very random mix of games as I played whatever I could during the brief moments of downtime. As you can see by the Chateau Belghast image above, I started fiddling around with Fallout 4 once again, and scrapped my old house and built this one instead. The inside is largely unfurnished but I am digging the outside quite a bit. It took me far longer than it should have to sort out how best to attempt centering the neon text, but in the grand scheme it seems to look okay. The frustrating bit with their neon font is that is is in no way monospaced with the characters all varying pretty wildly in width.

In Final Fantasy XIV I am still very much getting back in the swing of things, and have fallen into the pattern of doing Beast Tribe dailies. In theory I started down this path because I wanted a reliable source of ventures for my retainers, so that I could keep sending out my gatherers on field exploration. However I also really like mounts, and over the course of the last week or so I have been pushing up the Sahagin, not necessarily because I love the mount, but more because it was the next closest faction. For a long period of time, it was the faction I was spending the rest of my daily allowance on while working on the Sylph. Yesterday however I managed to push Sahagin across the finish line and now have my truly bizarre Sapsa mount to ride around on. I figured what better place to take a picture of it than in the waters of The Mists, where the Free Company house is located. Next up should be the Kobolds as once again… they are the next closest given that I had been spending my extra ventures on them while working on the Sahagin. I mean I know there are lots of other things I SHOULD be doing… but I just can’t bring myself to pug dungeons yet. After a string of bad experiences with Palace of the Dead… I don’t much feel like pugging that one either. The problem there is as we talked about on the podcast, is that if you fail… you lose all progress gained which seems deeply punitive for a random group activity.

Finally I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing Elder Scrolls online. I failed to take any screenshots so instead you get an interior shot of my home. I pushed forward the story line in Malabal Tor a bit, but the big problem with ESO is that I tend to wander wildly. I find it extremely hard to stay focused and instead I wind up going after the next object on the horizon that looks interesting, and as a result never seem to end up getting my objectives accomplished. There is always a fallen log to harvest, or an outcropping of ore to mine. Whatever the case I find myself continuing to move steadily towards 160 champion levels, which is the current item cap. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is probably going to change with Morrowind, but for the time being getting there.. and being able to craft a set of gear that will last me for a bit tends to be my focus. The other thing that I am realizing is that 160 champion levels is just a drop in the bucket given that quite literally every build I find expects you to have at least four or five times that amount. There is a part of me that wishes I had never actually faded away from this game, because at this very moment I am so impossibly behind the curve. Then again I think that overwhelming amount of content is what has been drawing me there much in the same way as it did for A Realm Reborn until we caught up. I know there is more to do than I have time to do it… and in some way that is insurance from ever really getting bored.