Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Be The Battery

February 10, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was a little more bleak than they usually are, and the bizarro thing is… I think writing it helped a lot. It helped putting the frustrations and dread into a single post and sending it out into the world. Its almost as if typing the words lessened the hold the malaise had on me. Then again the activities of last night helped quite a bit as well. However I will get to that shortly. First off I want to show off my home in Elder Scrolls Online. I went back and forth on a few different homes before finally settling on Mournoth Keep in the Halcyon Lake area of Bangkorai. I remember being extremely fond of the main campaign in Bangkorai so that fit for me as well as the fact that since I chose Daggerfall Covenant as my original faction… I wanted something to call home in the same area. In truth I have not done much with it since getting it, largely because I have not had much luck in getting pattern or furniture drops. I am being told that looting furniture seems to be the best way to do that. In theory I could resort to stealing, or instead just fine one of the many towns controlled by enemies and run amok looting there. I have a feeling through with the focus on housing there is going to be a lot of competition for lootables.

Now on to the events of last night and how they seem to have turned around my spirit. For awhile now Squirrel, Jex and myself have had an informal Thursday night thing where we go off and do small group content in Destiny together. Originally this was the night when we took on the Challenge of Elders, but more recently we have been running all three of our characters through the weekly nightfall. I have yet to get an icebreaker, so I largely think they are humoring me until I actually get one. Whatever the case it is a lot of fun, but due to the bizarre schedule since coming back from PAX it had been a few weeks since we last did one of these nights. In truth I had not actually played Destiny since probably January 19th now that I am thinking about it. I was extremely rusty, and by the sheer number of times that they had to rez me it showed… but regardless I think we all had a lot of fun. This week the Nightfall is Dust Palace which is something that has been in the rotation since year one… and that everyone has memorized at this point. As a result we were able to run through three characters worth of Nightfalls in way less than an hours time. During the Nightfall runs they asked me where I was on progress on the quest line to unlock the Outbreak Prime weapon, which requires you to group together in a fire team with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter to make forward momentum.

The truth is I had not really made it terribly far other than picking up the occasional progress from our Thursday night runs when the stars happened to be aligned and we wound up choosing to play different classes on a given run. Like they often do… they set out to change that and we ran a sequence of Archon’s Forge to finish out the step I happened to be on since those apparently count as “public events”. It was around this point that we realized that we did not have three characters with the devices needed to do the decoding step of the quest chain. There is a phase that needs to be completed in a social area where a titan, warlock and hunter input a sequence on this item that drops from the quest chain. If all three sequences are correct you can click through and get to the next step. After a little shuffling we realized that Jex’s warlock had already completed the quest, and Squirrel’s hunter was on the step I had just completed. So we continued on to catch Squirrel up in the process and ran a sequence of three heroic strikes, and then three public events to get us all on the same stage of the quest. After that back to the social area to complete the matrix and move on to the next step.

It felt like the night was still relatively young, so instead of hanging it up for the evening we pushed on into the next quest which involved collecting a bunch of SIVA tech by killing splicers. This also required us to run the Sepiks Perfected strike, which we knocked out in short order by simply doing the 320 light version. From there it was back into Archon’s Forge to complete three events, and farm up the rest of our SIVA Tech fragments. All of which went extremely quickly and before we had finished the three events, we had gotten 100% of our fragments. Watching those things scroll by 2 at a time on the right side of the screen was madness as we tore apart the forge event. Finally it was another trip back to a social space, this time to solve a four by five matrix. It took a half dozen attempts but we finally got the right numbers on all three of us, allowing us to move to the final step. Now both Squirrel on his hunter and myself on my Titan are on the step that requires us to simply kill any three bosses in the Wrath of the Machine raid. Then I will have my very own Outbreak Prime pulse rifle, and can do silly damage to SIVA targets with my nanites. All it all it was exactly the sort of concentrated fun that I needed to pull me out of my funk, and even though I am staring down the barrel of what will almost certainly be an extremely stressful day… I suddenly found a new packet of spoons with which to confront it.