Of Large Templates
After piddling a bit in Rift and running Onyxia on the three character that can easily solo her, I settled into Everquest Next Landmark and attempted to recreate my forest temple. I had managed to successfully template the entire structure and suck back up all of the material night before last, so my hope was that it would in fact be as simple as plunking down the template and moving on. The problem is, large templates are extremely hard to work with. After spending an hour placing and undoing the template trying to get it just right, I finally said screw it and started from scratch again. The above shot shows a rare moment when my claim is flooded in sunlight.
The biggest problem I have noticed with templates is that they seem to align to the smallest block size instead of whatever block size you happen to have set as your tool. When you are trying to move a template that takes up your entire claim… it becomes extremely hard to determine when exactly it is in the right spot. I managed to get it pretty damned close at times, but never quite perfect. In the above image I had run out of stone while working on the flooring, but I have since fixed that and finished the first floor for now. Eventually I will build a staircase up to the second floor, but until I have enough stone to make a second floor that point is moot. The temple as it is right now has taken roughly 200,000 stone.
The last thing I was working on last night before logging was building out the front porch area. There is a ramp leading up now that I smoothed out and a stone railing of sorts. My plan is to keep all of my crafting machines out here so that anyone who happens to be moving past my claim can use them. That has been one of the really cool things about Landmark is that all of these player towns have sprung up. It reminds me quite a bit of Horizons, in that a little crafting community is starting to spring up here and there. It would be really cool if they added some large scale public works type projects that they players can work on. I remember guarding crafters as they carried loads of ore and stone to the various bridge projects in Horizons. While there were so many flaws in that game, it really was innovative in its social crafting systems.
Right now my chief mission is to gather enough gold and burled wood to be able to craft the Golden Axe. I have heard you can gather wood much faster using it, and I am really hoping that it will also allow me to fell the largest of trees. I know it is possible to take them down, because I watched someone doing it the other night. Essentially to truly complete the first floor I will need lots and lots of trees. I want to put wood braces to support the second floor and have them jut out slightly from the sides of the building. I have always liked that look but to be able to do them I need a ton of wood. Additionally while searching for the gold ore needed… I hope to gather enough stone to begin construction on the second floor. Finally there are a few machines that I am missing from my porch, so I want to gather up the bits to make the one that can finish marble especially.
Rocky Horror Rejection
For anyone who has ever been to a live performance of the rocky horror picture show, you know that it is a really raucous occasion. Would you believe that I managed to get kicked out of a showing? While I was in High School the local performing arts theater thought they would be edgy and host a showing of the movie. For starters it was a far more sedate version of the Rocky Horror Picture show. There was no live group dressed as the characters and performing all of the scenes, and no virgin sacrifices. Everyone however did show up with a bag of items needed to do the various tributes to the scenes. Even in its lesser form it was still pretty fun, albeit greatly sanitized.
Things went south when we got to “Over at the Frankenstein Place”. This is the point where everyone in the audience raises their lighters into the air swaying back and forth slowly to simulate the “there’s a light” portion. Not being a smoker, I didn’t have a bic lighter on me… so I decided to improvise. Gathering up a bunch of news paper we had to protect ourselves from the water guns… I decided to craft a torch. I bound the newspaper together tightly and lit that bad boy. This was a classic bad move, because I did not expect it to flame up quite so brightly… and quickly. It was only a few seconds before we realize this was not going to be a good idea in any fashion so we stomped it out.
Moments later a security guard showed up and in his remarkable intellect muttered “all right who did that?”. We gave him our best confused look, and then one of my group pointed down to the rows below us and told him that it was someone down there. The thing you need to know is that we are in a huge concert hall style performing arts theater. We sat roughly midway up the main seating, and everyone else in the theater were bunched together down by the stage. There were a good 25 rows of empty space between us and the next person. The security guard proceeded to go row by row, searching the entire space for the hidden arsonist. All of this time we were absolutely rolling, but trying to keep it down just enough to not tip our hand. Fifteen minutes later the winded guard came back to our row and proclaimed “Very Funny… You are all out of here.”
So the bulk of us all got punted from the show unceremoniously. Looking back now, I could have theoretically started a theater fire, but at the time it sounded like a great idea. No one really seemed to mind getting forced out of the proceedings, since it really was a watered down version of the “real thing”. We wound up driving around for awhile and finally ended up milling around in a park for a while before taking our dates home for the evening. We probably had far more fun loitering than we would have had attending the rest of the show, so I guess in the grand scheme of things everything worked out okay. I just find it funny now because I can state that I got kicked out of the Rocky Horror Picture show.
I grew up in a small town of roughly 2500, and with that upbringing came so many little tropes of small town life. The one that did because I wanted to, not because someone expected me to do… was Scouting. In essence it gave my dad and I an excuse to sneak off and do outdoorsy things. Granted these days by the very technology laced lifestyle I live, you could never tell that I was ever a good little boy scout. I even went so far as to be a camp councilor at the local scout camp for a season. The pinnacle of all of it was me getting my Eagle Scout during my sophomore year of high school.