copypastejunkpile

[copypastejunkpile]

also make the bos assholes again! or at least make a little more work happen player side to make them "good" they're still fascists in my book

thinking about fallout

so that "next gen" update has hit fo4 and part of it adds enclave stuff! that's neat i suppose, but I don't think it's necessary or particularly good for the game. I feel like doing the obligatory faction shit in every fallout game, bethesda is kneecapping themselves by not allowing themselves to make multiple games set in the same region. hear me out, right; so the sole survivor emerges from vault 111 in 2287. It's pretty fair to assume the military had a considerable presence in the area, especially considering there was a presence at that little suburb's vault. It was probably of special interest to the government that specific vault. So why no enclave? Rather than assume the events of the prior games wiped them out or the writers just decided they wouldn't operate in this area of america, why not try to set up for a prequel game where there was an enclave presence, and someone else rolled through and tipped the dominos that killed them off? you could have certain characters allude to a former militaristic faction being in the area, and when the sole survivor asks if it's the brotherhood, said character would go "no it was some other guys who also claimed to be the military. it was real weird. they got hosed some years back and nobody's come looking though, so they must've been posers." like that would have been cooler right? that would have been cool. prequel content is (arguably) already pretty ok-ly written with fo76, why didn't they try it here? from a dev perspective it would have been great too since you can have it reuse a portion of the already created world, with different things tacked onto it like a mod.

I don't know shit about how development went for the game or if there's some npc that mentions the enclave to be fair, but I feel like it's a missed opportunity to not do this. I feel like it's a lot more compelling conceptually rather than modders writing fanfic that devs then decide to throw in.

--

tangentially I think there's some force in bethesda that either can't write the enclave or doesn't trust anyone to try. the enclave is a pretty primary motivator for base game content in 76, but every subsequent expansion basically fully disregards the faction. the most the faction has gotten is orlando.

[copypastejunkpile]

thinking about fallout

so that "next gen" update has hit fo4 and part of it adds enclave stuff! that's neat i suppose, but I don't think it's necessary or particularly good for the game. I feel like doing the obligatory faction shit in every fallout game, bethesda is kneecapping themselves by not allowing themselves to make multiple games set in the same region. hear me out, right; so the sole survivor emerges from vault 111 in 2287. It's pretty fair to assume the military had a considerable presence in the area, especially considering there was a presence at that little suburb's vault. It was probably of special interest to the government that specific vault. So why no enclave? Rather than assume the events of the prior games wiped them out or the writers just decided they wouldn't operate in this area of america, why not try to set up for a prequel game where there was an enclave presence, and someone else rolled through and tipped the dominos that killed them off? you could have certain characters allude to a former militaristic faction being in the area, and when the sole survivor asks if it's the brotherhood, said character would go "no it was some other guys who also claimed to be the military. it was real weird. they got hosed some years back and nobody's come looking though, so they must've been posers." like that would have been cooler right? that would have been cool. prequel content is (arguably) already pretty ok-ly written with fo76, why didn't they try it here? from a dev perspective it would have been great too since you can have it reuse a portion of the already created world, with different things tacked onto it like a mod.

I don't know shit about how development went for the game or if there's some npc that mentions the enclave to be fair, but I feel like it's a missed opportunity to not do this. I feel like it's a lot more compelling conceptually rather than modders writing fanfic that devs then decide to throw in.

--

tangentially I think there's some force in bethesda that either can't write the enclave or doesn't trust anyone to try. the enclave is a pretty primary motivator for base game content in 76, but every subsequent expansion basically fully disregards the faction. the most the faction has gotten is orlando.

#rambling about fallout.... ah

[copypastejunkpile]

My cameras

Alternatively titled "oh god I'm starting a camera collection"

So this past year I've decided to get into film photography, for reasons I'll explain in a paragraph or two. What's followed is me spending a stupid amount on film and the like until I got to where I am now, with enough cameras that I need to figure out where the hell I'm gonna put them.

Instead of doing that though, I want to show them off and talk about them, because God knows that I'm probably gonna buy like 2 more cameras before I figure out what my actual plan is with them. I'll present these in order of ownership:

Canonet QL17

This rangefinder is the first film camera I owned, coming into my possession a few years ago but initially set aside to either sell or gather dust while I figured out what to do with it. When the thought came to it again last year, I used it as an opportunity to get back into photography, a hobby I had refused to let myself enjoy for a little while. I concluded that while I liked it, I wanted to get an SLR so I could have finer control of the composition of each shot, which lead to...

2. Canon FTb-n

I got it for pretty cheap (~30 bucks after shipping) on ebay in early December and have had issues with it, but I still really like it. It initially came with a 50mm prime lens but the 35-70mm zoom lens on it now arrived recently and I look forward to toying with it. The whole time I've owned this camera I've been troubleshooting it. At first I wondered if there was an issue with the light seals, but now I've realized it might be something to do with the film advance. The thing that hooks into the film can and lets you wind it back hasn't always been rotating for each wind, and I've noticed just today it's notably bent. I either need to get brave and see if I can fix it myself or find someone to hand it off to for repair, or else I'm just going to keep having shots not turn out on each roll.

3. Canon Photura

This is a goodwill find! I went in on a whim the other week and found 3 different point and shoot cameras, and had a good feeling about this one when i cracked it open only to find an old roll of kodak gold still wound up in it (battery was dead so I had no way of telling there was film in there). Tracked down a battery for it, and it works! for the ten bucks I paid I think I made out pretty good, as it honestly feels pretty nice to shoot with. Very touristy feeling, and its certainly strange to say that this camcorder looking thing is actually a stills camera, but I like it.

Now at the end of the list, I feel like I ought to say I'm not trying to collect canon cameras (though I do really want to get my hands on a t70 to round out the arrangement). I want to get my hands on a couple different nikon cameras, and I've been holding myself back from buying certain techy minolta cameras I've seen on local listings. This is just what I've had the fortune of finding for cheap. Thanks for reading!

#especially long post #cameras #EDIT and then i proceeded to look at camera listings for 3 hours after posting

[copypastejunkpile]

So did everyone complaining about splatoon 3's dlc not being worth it forget it was 25 bucks? For what you get that's not really an unreasonable price to play with a modified version of the game that's designed to be replayable rather than yet another set of curated levels. It only took me a couple days to get all the dev diaries and clear the palettes but that's still a good bit of playtime where you get dialogue between the characters. At best i'd complain the writing is a little sparce in its justification of the premise itself, but it's fine. The gameplay is fine, if a little uninspiring because it tries really hard to play it safe with upgrade pacing. But for 25 bucks i'm getting what's functionally a separate game in a series I already like.

#side order #splatoon 3 #Opinions #Basically im getting mad at redditors because thats the only place ive seen people saying the dlc sucks

[copypastejunkpile]

issue #1: GB studio doesn't work nicely with 8x8px sprites that are meant to move (eg. the player themselves)

solution: center the sprite(s) on the 16x16px canvas. set collision to x=4,y=4 and w=8,h=8. create a 4px border around your scene and shift around your game's space to accommodate.

issue #2: you phase through 8x8px wall endings because the directional collision boxes don't count on their sides.

solution: make a sprite that is identical to the wall's endings, and add it to the scene as an actor with the same collision bounding as the player character.

this feels sinful. it works, but it hurts.

#i kinda hope there's a better solution but until they add native support for making the sprite canvas 8x8px i don't think there is #GB studio

[copypastejunkpile]

The Microsoft Sidewinder Game Pad Pro

I've always had an affinity for game controllers, and despite my financial state I have an okay amount of them laying around. Today, I got to add to my collection a weird one that I've had my eye on for a little bit. The Microsoft Sidewinder Game Pad Pro.

I don't know much about this thing. I knew it was a little big looking, I knew it had a weird d-pad that an ad showed as having two operating modes, and I knew it had dropped triggers in the back. I recently found a listing on ebay for pretty cheap without any bids, so I placed a starting bid and waited to see what would happen. No one else bid, so now I have it.

After fighting with the cord, which has grown finicky in its ability to stay connected, I tried out a 2d game. The best way I could describe the d-pad was as if a 360 controller's d-pad had to be pressed down a couple centimeters before it registered input. For fun, I booted up Dark Souls 2, and it also "worked." I couldn't pause or do certain actions, but I could walk, run and sprint around, and do r1 attacks with the z button.

Wait, I could walk? I moved the d-pad to odd angles and watched as my character moved mostly smoothly to match. It was as if it was analog movement.

So, driven in my curiosity, I opened the thing up.

Well, there sure is a lot happening there. But that's just contact pads for the membrane. What's the underside of that disc thingy look like?

Those are springs. Five of them. The center one seems to be for stabilization, but the other four? It's gotta have something to do with the added complexity to the PCB and its seeming ability to emulate analog movement.

I have no idea how exactly it's doing it, if its reading the pressure with which I'm pressing in a direction or if it's something else, but this is genuinely fascinating. It's hard to find any mention of this thing given its part of a series mostly talked about for its force feedback flight sticks, but man I wish I knew more. That's not the only interesting thing about this though.

There's a terminal for the cord! theoretically it'd be pretty easy to replace the cord for this thing, which is great news for me. I took pictures of the jack for the terminal as well, since that's probably more important to the process. I have to imagine if I bought another one of these controllers I could just swap the cord if I needed.

All in all I'm fascinated by this thing. I want to know how exactly this thing's making up analog movement but I don't have the know-how and can't find anyone talking about this thing. Hell, any information about this would be fantastic. If anyone wandering across this post knows anything, feel free to say something! would love to learn more about this weird microsoft product from before the turn of the century.

#microsoft #weird game controllers #how the hell do i tag this? #old tech

[copypastejunkpile]

ive thought for a while 'hmm what if the zonai are descendants of the twili' but i was always caught up on the doglike features. but then it occured to me. link's wolf form. in a world where link and midna meet again, maybe some aspect of the triforce of courage changes the form of their descendants and over the course of time eventually leads to the zonai...

a stretch as hell but considering botw and totk are seemingly a convergence of everything i almost wonder if the sheer potential for mythos and history gives birth to species in that world. whether or not it happened is a moot point, for at some point it was written the level of closeness the hero of twilight had with the twilight princess. thus in this reality where history has become ancient myth, and said myths seemingly yearn to be unearthed, who is to say that story does not create reality? a kind of being willed into existence through sheer potential, rather than factual occurrence.

#zeldar... #kind of insane stretch but the thought just hit me and i felt like humoring it #also its a kids game. shit happens because they said so

[copypastejunkpile]

with the occasional rumor of a new silent hill i keep coming back to my line of thought. what kind of protagonist would this even be? would he be remorseful during his time in silent hill or cold and distant to anyone he meets? would he even meet anyone, or would he be tormented in solitude by the town/the game? would he meet the ‘true’ protagonist, the one the game intended to have placed in silent hill?

if there ever is a new silent hill, i can’t imagine it ever living up to the expectations that P.T. established. it will probably be good, yes, but it will be undermined by its history. in both what could have been and what might be, something out of its control harms it.

was thinking about P.T. around like late aug. very early sep.

just thinking about the implications of what we saw from silent hills it basically says two things, it speaks to modern delusions and the suspension of disbelief in games. One one hand you have a cruel and psychotic father killing his family after being broken by the dismal circumstances surrounding their lives and perhaps suspecting his wife of cheating on him, but on the other hand you could have a character who realized that they were in a game, and when their mind broke under the weight of the realization killed his family as a kind of ‘mercy killing,’ ending their part in the cycle of the story they’re predestined to, only to find the game anticipated his betrayal of the story and locked him in a kind of purgatory, having to solve esoteric puzzles to even gain access to silent hill. He wasn’t meant to get out of there, he keeps 'breaking’ the game.

[copypastejunkpile]

fnaf thoughts

frustrated that the best idea for what fnaf: security breach was some /trash/ post i read that described the premise as a different timeline where freddy fazbears was a matter of fiction like our world but then some company decided to make it 'real,' built a huge fuck-you place and decided to get a bunch of engineers on making a set of animatronics and r&d. through this they open the megaplex and accidentally invented sentient animatronics with personalities and a set of moral quandries within each of them that make their position in the facility troubling and difficult to fulfill. engineers constantly working on them and attempting to solve their issues meanwhile corporate is oblivious of it. the idea of a group of engineers being hired to make a popular fictional series into a chuck e cheese knockoff and then suddenly by sheer coincidence making a technilogical marvel such as a truly living machine is awesome and what it should have been rather than 'oo here comes the old man again grooming some lady into hacking the animatronics.' take this with a grain of salt because i read the post while on the can and then never looked for it again so im potentially abbreviating or misinterpreting what i read either way could've been better had such potential etc.

[copypastejunkpile]

further thinking on deltarune

ralsei isnt asriel. no shot. knight also probably isn't kris? maybe this does end up involving gaster... the knight being the main factor of mystery for the dark world can match well with the mystery of the bunker and kris' past with it, so its easy to assume some parallel with it. I wonder too though, what the roaring really is? I can't trust ralsei's description of it for some reason. maybe it implies a tie with undertale? the roaring could bring about the worldstate of undertale in some way, a timeline reset. rather than the presence of a single powerful determination wielding being having full control, this town is full of several reasonably determined folk, and using the power of the dark worlds could be what is needed to tip the scales. but then who would want to reset the timeline? who would be aware enough of what else there could be to the world, willing to sacrifice everything they already have?

Best I can conclude is that the knight is most likely someone we don't know yet, or at least someone we have too little of an understanding of. It's obvious we don't know the whole picture in the real world, let alone the dark world. similarly ralsei's identity is in the same position. we have a slight understanding of who ralsei is in the dark world, but the ability to traverse between dark worlds is a uniquely lightner ability. Then again, and slightly drinking my own kool-aid in this, this could be explained by his position of 'prince' and this is simply an ability he possesses as inheritor of this plane.

an off topic note, but looking a tiny bit at deltarune theory I'm a bit unhappy with the assumption I see on how much undertale may share with deltarune. In my opinion, there is no reason to assume that any connection between deltarune and undertale is anything more than superficial. at best the argument can be made that deltarune is on technicality a sequel to undertale, but due to some character relationships I think that if it is some kind of sequel it is not to the undertale we experienced, it is a completely different world state from how we experienced it.

[copypastejunkpile]

Rengoku 2: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. rudimentary file documentation

To preface, I’m putting this out here to help any of the tens of people who might remember this game and want to do some digging in it’s files. I personally started this to rip Gram’s model to use in vrchat (and tower unite, though each version has its issues) but found my love for the game’s art direction took me and made me wish I could get more from within the game. After a lot of digging and trial and error, this is what I ultimately know about where each thing is stored in the game files.

Ideally, I’d love to rip the level geometry for this game to port to various games (vrchat, any host of source games, maybe quake even) but I simply have not figured out a way to do so yet. If you figure out how or I missed the method to doing so, let me know! Otherwise proceed through the ‘keep reading’ margin.

The most consistent tool for ripping this game is gitMO, then viewing through Noesis. Jaeder naub is what managed to rip the soundtrack, but needed to be converted to be played in windows media player. it also creates a lot of junk rips in-between, clusters of fake models that are most likely encrypted level data. does also kind of manage to obtain the prerendered end credits from Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory, but it loops for 8 hours so hit or miss.

DATA00X is what actually contains the game files. As far as I could find, nothing of particular note is to be gleaned from anything else.

DATA000 contains basically nothing. I don't think any tool I've used has managed to find much anything in it.

DATA001 contains UI elements and items related to the menu. anything related to the user interface is found here. also contains a couple models related to interactables and the generic skeleton used for the player and most enemies.

DATA002 contains more textures, more related to multiplayer menus and bonus elements. I also theorize this is where the level geometry is stored, due to file size, but any tool I've thrown at it doesn't see the levels. Also contains game's soundtrack.

DATA003 contains base player model (including textures and animation set), level titles, and flashback sequence textures.

DATA004 contains certain level elements (doors, breakables, interactables etc.) but lacking textures. Also contains seemingly every level geometry texture. Have not fact checked that, but it's pretty extensive and seemingly looping?

DATA005 contains special NPC models, including their textures and animation sets.

things I haven’t done:

any intensive digging with hex editor or w/e, trying to crack open the things myself. I'm frankly too inept to know how to make an impact doing that.

contacting rich whitehouse to see if he remembers a damn thing about rengoku 2 in particular. this is only in my mind because one of the bosses is featured on his site on the side, so either he has some active neuron that recalls the game on a technical support level or I’m a dickhead and he picked that boss because it looked cool. either way I can’t bring myself to pester the guy just to ask how to rip what I want.

If someone asks I can probably provide my rips of this stuff. I don’t wanna just toss it out there though as the iso is easy to find and despite hudson being dead I worry about copyright.

#Rengoku 2: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N. #psp

[copypastejunkpile]

like 2 days ago head full of undertale...

thinking about undertale again. and im still adamant, i think the mystery man sprite technically isn't gaster. at least, not in a current state. I think that whited out sprite is his 'current state, mangled by the core and now sustained by it, chunks of metal embedded in his skull and a pipe leading from it to a power source, perhaps a sustained source of the lab's supply of determination. Perhaps he's even an amalgamation now, but bound to something greater. mystery man might be something close to his appearance pre-accident, or a kind of projection of a free and ideal self, which is his main method of interacting with the world outside his space and manipulating things. then again, its also possible that mystery man is simply a goner in that sense, as the goners are also lost but infinitely tied to space and time. a kind of fragment of himself then? one piece out of thousands, embedded into the wall in the cave, who knows where the others are, what they look like? are the goners just monsters that gaster became 'embedded' in? who were somehow too close to the accident? lots to think about, but no conclusion. As if there ever will be one. It won't be resolved in deltarune.

[copypastejunkpile]

was thinking about P.T. around like late aug. very early sep.

just thinking about the implications of what we saw from silent hills it basically says two things, it speaks to modern delusions and the suspension of disbelief in games. One one hand you have a cruel and psychotic father killing his family after being broken by the dismal circumstances surrounding their lives and perhaps suspecting his wife of cheating on him, but on the other hand you could have a character who realized that they were in a game, and when their mind broke under the weight of the realization killed his family as a kind of 'mercy killing,' ending their part in the cycle of the story they're predestined to, only to find the game anticipated his betrayal of the story and locked him in a kind of purgatory, having to solve esoteric puzzles to even gain access to silent hill. He wasn't meant to get out of there, he keeps 'breaking' the game.

[copypastejunkpile]

note from like a couple weeks~a month after deltarune chap2

just watched a video essay that in a lot of words brought up something i've been thinking about since chapter 1: that deltarune more likely than not is going to culminate in nothing. chapter 1 easily establishes that the whole dark world thing is just a super trippy version of the creative process, and imagination kind of run rampant. The dark world is a kind of intense re-contextualization of everything in a given room or space. Innocuous items are given depth and expanded to become a character, not unlike what you'd actually do to create a character. The main cast then is willingly roleplaying in this universe that's been created; they're just self-inserts in this grand fiction. Every character that's so far interacted with the dark world has had reason to need this kind of escapism, they're all notably troubled by their lives and have so far all used the dark world to change themselves, and consider it a kind of respite from the real world. the whole thing is about using your own creativity as a kind of escapism. This then brings me to ralsei. He acts as the loremaster for this fantasy, and calls himself the 'dark prince,' which is to say that he is a kind of natural inheritor of it all. But what if he's the one who started it all? consumed by the dark, the fantasy he created, he now resides in it completely, mostly refusing to face the real world and preferring to stay with his own creation, essentially becoming lost to it like many have before with their own works. perhaps the secrecy is less insidious, and is more a way to signify how much he doesn't want to go back, but knows at the end of this journey, he might have to. Ralsei fled his life, and destroyed he had in the process. I think in a way too the lyrics to the credits song are also indicative of this as they kinda read to me as saying 'don't feel trapped by life's troubles, you can find respite within yourself/your mind' (i dont think this fully explains things though, i have to somewhat ignore kris' situation with our possession of them. that's definitely something that will have to be resolved independently of what i just rambled about)

[copypastejunkpile]

deltarune 2: cyba (from when it first came out)

-ok so ralsei's hiding something for certain -susie not have a home? or do her parents just suck ass -kris IS the knight. we, the soul possessing them are the tactician; a bodyless 'lightner' perhaps -does ralsei know that? -when does susie get told that lancer is just the card and that somehow these objects become the darkners -alternate route shows how strong noelle can be, so does she play a larger role in later chapters? -is there a point where we might become permanantly detached from kris? -is asriel an asshole? the line susie says for his room in the mansion makes me think so (I HAVE TO REREAD THAT LINE I THINK OR JUST PLAY THROUGH AGAIN BECAUSE I CANT FIND ANYONE ELSE THINKING THIS) -what's up with that bunker? what's kris' history with it? is it another dark world or is it something to do with the humans at large? -the mysterious man behind the tree, is he just an easter egg? possible the whole concept of 'gaster' is just the tree and the no reception noise -though i cant help but feel it might also be tied to the bunker. say there is something to kris' past that lies in the bunker, perhaps they were experimented on in there? humans in captivity or something? and this doctor that worked on them (or perhaps us honestly) is the true 'gaster'? -that could explain why we possess kris honestly. but it seems our control is sudden. kris had a life before this, and seemingly coinciding with our possession they became the knight. maybe that's what happened in the bunker then, our possession of kris and their turning into the knight. -OH kris left the door open so the whole goddamn world would suddenly become dark world after seeing both enclosed spaces become isolated dark worlds -right? i think so at least -but ralsei's story makes me think these fountains have a range too, a kind of natural limit -but ralsei's also hiding something so who fucking knows if his story's even true

other things to note: -asriel and ralsei are anagrams of each other -frisk and kris are near anagrams, might just be a coincidence but i feel its worth noting -deltarune's world and characters hold close parallel with the world's endstate with pacifist ending undertale -BUT also chap1 end holds similarity with post-genocide pacifist end -with chap2 genocide route there's reason to suspect that our actions DO have consequences. our choices might matter after all -kris' life pre-possession indicates that they were always kind of creepy, but nothing to indicate outright cruelty or any of this knight business

CHAP3 PREDICTIONs: gonna be based on tv right so like we can go in a couple directions, tv flick horror shit or movie tropes probably the first one honestly this is halloweentown from kingdom hearts but its deltarune and like. i dunno someone's gonna be scary probably a jason reference lightgun shooter reference somewhere? gonna be dope probably