Building Archives - Page 8 of 24 - 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.

Tunneling Addiction

December 28, 2016 by Belghast

I think we need to talk. I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft. What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night. I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one. I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground… and in truth that is happening again in a big way. The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land. I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night. However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas. Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something. Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean. I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built. As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland… and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot. Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost. One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock. That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction. It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains. So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it. There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor. The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”. This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me. However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.

Christmas Basebuilding

December 26, 2016 by Belghast

My friend Grace calls today Super Xmas… or the day that you get to chill out and rest after the manic running around that happens around attempting to make everyone happy on Christmas and Christmas Eve. This absolutely used to be the case for me, but over the last few years Christmas has become a much more low key affair. I’ve talked a bit about the concept of an anchor household, but for me most of those are now gone. Instead we have to sort of make our own new traditions, and one of those recently has consisted of going out to dinner on Christmas Eve with my folks, and then coming back to our house and doing gifts together. For years there used to be a strict schedule of… my folks and mothers side of the family on Christmas Eve, and my Dads side of the Family early early Christmas morning… then my wife’s family for Christmas lunch and eventually another gathering Christmas evening. Over the years deaths in the family have taken the corner stone of each of those gatherings to where there really isn’t a whole lot going on during the holidays on either of our families.

There were of course a few options… one of which was the household that introduced me to the term “titty milk” a few years back and we opted out of that one. Instead for the most part we just chilled out at home and enjoyed the fact that it was freaking 70 degrees outside for Christmas. In the afternoon between thunderstorms we went out for a walk, which is something I need to start doing every day in an attempt to get myself prepared for all of the walking that is going to happen at Pax South. As far as gaming goes… I spent a lot of time not actually gaming yesterday but more in an extended state of transitioning between games… as I checked twitter and surfed the web. I did play a significant amount of the Sparrow Racing League, but largely playing remotely through the laptop. I am getting surprisingly good at dealing with the input lag that comes from playing PS4 via PC, so much so that it actually takes a bit to get adjusted to using the real console again. I am now in this place where I need two items to hit 400 light… Ghost and Heavy. I’ve since gotten two Exotic Heavy Engrams… but both of them decoded to 399 light instead of bumping on up to 400. This seems like a massive bug because every engram seems to decode at 399 rather than giving me what is usually a level bump. As far as the ghost goes… I tried some more forge only to have it bug out on me with the waves sitting at 100% for 10 mins and then eventually failing out without actually spawning the boss.

Another thing that happened yesterday is that I fell into a giant Minecraft shaped hole as we hung out and watched some shows on demand. It has been several years since I had legitimately played Minecraft and as a result I went back to pure vanilla for the moment at least while I get my bearings. Before long I was back into my standard operating procedure which is digging a big hole and then eventually erecting some large structures. I decided to have my main base out over the open water with a big tunnel leading from what is ultimately turning into my quarry. I used the seed “BelChillingChristmas2016” and wound up with a pretty cool spawn. My original cave opened into a giant chasm underground and I have been building the infrastructure needed to explore it more properly. I wound up digging down into the rock and laying a bunch of ladders as I went which ultimately allowed me to create a shaft straight down to the chasm floor. I have a hut of sorts down at ground level that lets me get down there in relative safety and at least see what monsters happen to be around.

I plan on building a dock of sorts under my base that should allow me to launch boats easily for exploring new areas, and I also plan on building another big land bridge/tunnel to the other nearby coast giving me access to new areas. Right now a lot of my time has been spent simply quarrying cobblestone and hollowing out the mountain side for that purpose. There is a bunch of gold in the chasm, but I don’t really have much need for it yet. I have not seen any of the more useful materials like Diamond or Red Stone so at some point I am probably going to have to do the whole dig down to bedrock thing and start some branch mining. At this very moment however I am trying to expand my base of operations and make more safe space for me to travel in. Minecraft is one of those games that triggers my base building instinct to the extreme, and I am ultimately falling back into the familiar patterns I do when I always play this game. In truth I should be playing Diablo 2 since we plan on recording the game of the month show this coming week… but for now I am indulging myself in a little bit of structured madness.

Week In Gaming 9/27/2015

September 27, 2015 by Belghast

Week of Playstation

This week was very much a week of me waiting on something to happen on my PC while pivoted to the side and playing the PlayStation 4 instead. The strangest thing has happened and I am not sure exactly when it did. For years I was a diehard Keyboard and Mouse gamer… and if you suggested that I play a shooter with a controller I would give you a dirty look at best… and at worst give you a thirty minute rant about why that is a sloppy control mechanism. The thing is… shooters now have a significant amount of aim assist regardless of what platform you happen to be playing them on. Sure you can get closer to pixel perfect aiming with a keyboard and mouse… but I am finding for extended gaming sessions a controller just feels more comfortable. Destiny was essentially the game that forced me to learn how to play with a controller, and now… I am finding myself replaying some games that I played exclusively on the PC on my PS4. Over the week I picked up the Borderlands “Handsome Collection” because it was silly cheap on PSN, and I have to say… I am finding the game more enjoyable over there. While I won’t necessarily say I have abandoned the keyboard and mouse… I am finding myself equally comfortable with a controller and it seems so strange to be typing those words.

Destiny

This week the game that I spent the most hours playing was without a doubt Destiny. I am not sure why but the game feels fresh and new, and all of the frustrations I had over gearing for light are just gone. Instead light has become this number based on the average attack power and or defense of your items, and seeing it climb is awesome… but at the same time not something oppressively holding me back from doing interesting things. I now think of light much more like a traditional gear score system in MMOs. There is some content gated on that number, but it doesn’t feel like something that is extremely grindy to get. I happened to luck out this week and Hawkmoon this seasons exotic hand cannon was available on Xur. I had enough coins to buy it and bam I am now rocking a really awesome weapon, which only serves to improve my experience. I’ve heard that you can send blue engrams to low level characters as a more efficient way of farming Strange Coins, and I might end up doing that as I pretty much depleted my entire stash on this one item.

Other than that I am slowly working my way through all of the story content that I have not played since launch. It feels strange to be progressing in three different storylines at essentially the same time, doing whichever happens to suit me at the moment. The big thing I am trying to work towards right now is I really need the dreadnought patrol zone opened up because I keep getting those as daily quests. I am not sure how far into the story that happens but I keep working on creeping that storyline forward in the hopes that the next one will unlock the patrol zone. Other than that I unlocked Sunbreaker and am completing most of my content as that, in the hopes of leveling it quickly. There is something satisfying Fist of Havoc, but I have to say super fire hammer brothers is also pretty awesome as well. You can whittle down objectives super quickly while throwing those hammers. I’ve taken Taken bosses down to half health during my “hammer time” but the only problem is it essentially leaves you out in the open and vulnerable. So I end up having to run for cover as soon as I’ve spent all of my energy. Needless to say I am having a lot of fun with Destiny and probably going to continue playing it over the coming weeks.

Creativerse

I’ve blogged about this game already at length this week, but I have to say I am still really liking it. I am also digging that the company is from McKinney Texas which isn’t terribly far from me. Not sure if I can rig this but it would be kinda awesome to go down and meet that team at some point. I am hoping that they end up doing Pax South this year, because the game has so much potential. I called it “Pretty Minecraft” but really that is selling the game short by a large amount. I will say that it has pretty much killed my desire to play Minecraft at all from this point out. I get what people say about the mods, but in reality I never modded Minecraft that much other than adding in quality of life things like a mini-map. Regardless of how I modified the game it just felt like I was playing the same thing over and over with varrying differences. This game however feels fresh and interesting because the world itself is something that I don’t know the formula behind. I talked about this a bit the other day, but I think part of it is the fact that I have no real resources to rely on yet. I can’t go on a wiki and find out that obsidian spawns between these two coordinates or if I need an item for a recipe I have to find it the old fashioned brute force way of exploration. If you are in the mood for a building and exploration fix I highly suggest you check it out.

Star Wars the Old Republic

swtor 2015-09-13 19-44-00-02 — Oh Captain My Captain

Last night during and after the podcast I finished up Alderaan on my Smuggler. In the time it has taken me to get this far on my Smuggler, I found out that Tam has leveled like three characters from 1 to 50. How is he doing it? Well he is doing ONLY the class storyline, and I think maybe he has made a convert out of me. I shot through Alderaan last night only working on my class storyline and gained three levels in the process. Mostly at this point I just want to see the class storyline on several new classes before Fallen Empire comes along and changes a good deal of it. I think the rest of the day I am going to likely work on my Smuggler and see just how close to the end I can manage to get. My hope is that even after Fallen Empire they come up with a way to speed characters to the post 50 content. I need to circle back around and do the Shadows of Revan content on my Jedi Knight, but honestly I am having so much fun with my Sawbones. This is still such a great game, if you just treat it like a subscription. The free to play options are complete and total bullshit, and feel like the most punitive way to play a game I have seen period. If you can stomach the fact that you have to pay a subscription to really enjoy this game… then it seems like a really enjoyable experience still.