I had a very productive weekend! My remaining Christmas presents that I ordered back in November/December FINALLY arrived! I pretty much have everything ready to go, but I’ll need to get a couple new shipping boxes. One is too small and the other one was claimed by our kitties. I also had some time to play a little TF2 yesterday!
It had been so long since I’ve played TF2 that I forgot what button it was to change classes (sad… I know) and I accidentally summoned Monoculus! At least I know that Admin plugin still works… It was a fun romp, we’ll have to do it again sometime. 🙂
I also wrapped up some more animation today! I’m going to work on animating one more scene tomorrow, and then I’ll finally get to progress into tweaking and smoothing all the animations I’ve done for all of these cutscenes. I might actually be able to do some SFM rendering later on in the week! Maybe I’ll finally be able to release something in a month or two. 😛
Today was one of my busier day’s off. I had to take care of a few things around the house, and I made a different breakfast to counter the last couple of bacontastic ones. I made a Chinese style Frittata with a spicy gingery oyster sauce, brown rice and some yogurt and mandarins to counter the sick burns that awesomesauce leaves.
Almost vegan… almost.
The Frittata is packed with all kinds of vegetables; like an entire shredded carrot, bean sprouts, green onion, mushrooms, chopped spinach, and some chicken broth for extra flavour. I didn’t use a single bit of cheese on this breakfast, which is a rarity when it comes to omelettes and frittatas (at least for me). I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would. It isn’t everyday that I think about putting carrots into eggs, and I’m actually not a big fan of carrot, but I’ve found if I shred it I can tolerate it more than whole. The best part is that I’ll have leftovers for the next few days. 😛 I’ll be able to bring questionable homemade food to work for the old unimaginative old biddies to awkwardly glare upon.
Hawt
There’s an optional sauce you can make that consists of oyster sauce, chili garlic sauce, sambal oelek, or sriraccha sauce. I added some ginger to mine for a little more zing, and almost everything I put ginger into seems to amplify the flavour factor. But if you’re lazy any sauce will do.
Look it’s food!
I tried another food lifehack; slow cooking Mongolian beef! I made a Mongolian beef sauce and added some sliced sirloin into the crock-pot along with some bell peppers and mushrooms and let it all mingle for about 6 hours. I stir fried some snowpeas and carrots with more of the bean sprouts from this morning; everyone seemed to love it. The meat was melt in your mouth delicious, and the best part was that little effort had to go into it, get some meat, veggies, sauce and just let it do its flavour-thang. I’ll have to consider more crock-pot related ideas down the road, especially for those busy work nights. I’m finding that I’m having to cook more, and on some nights I feel like I barely get to sit down.
I wanted to get back into Dark Souls, didn’t get very far the last time I played… and tonight it wasn’t that much different, definitely not from a lack of trying tho. My previous character was a little fuckey, so I ended up having to begin with a fresh character.
I kept getting my ass handed to me by these Karen ghosts. Every time I tried running this path I did make it further each time, but I’ll probably have to watch a video on how to get past these ghostly bitches.
Right, this happened.
I did discover another path this time, and I actually made it to another bonfire! Next time I return to the game it’ll be nice to explore some newer terrirory, and hopefully I’ll actually be able to progress further… and possibly avoid all of the Karens.
Curried Rice with Moroccan seasoned chicken sounded good tonight. It warmed up the house and made for a pleasant aroma. I bought some chicken tenders and pretty much just used different seasonings, there was no recipe followed here it just tasted really good. I’ve also been looking up recipes for the weekend, planning to do some more Asian shenanigans to fuel that nerd energy. I’m thinking either Japanese or Chinese.
Portable Yogurt seems to be my prime goto during the week when I grow bored of breakfast in bar form. You can use pretty much anything for a container, but I prefer these yogurt cups. They come with a dome for storing cereal, or other kinds of toppings.
I’ve reached a point with my workday parfaits that I don’t need to even look at recipes, unless I’m looking for flavour inspiration. I almost always use oats with these things. One scoop per cup does the job.
Equal parts milk and yogurt come into play; sometimes I’ll also do straight yogurt, but I prefer it to be kinda like a smoothie bowl. In this case I’m using regular milk and honey sweetened greek yogurt, as greek style yogurt is DUMMY THICC on protein. Then of course comes flavouring my canvas. For the two parfaits I made I decided the base would be my matcha/monkfruit powder.
I like to use chia seeds whenever possible. They’re a great thickener if you want your breakfast to have a pudding like consistency, and have plenty of nutritional value. Plus they add a nice crunch.
Mixed in a different fruit into each one. The one on the left got the blueberry treatment, and for the other one I tried dragonfruit. I ate that one today, and I’m thinking if I go to use it again to add a second fruit like strawberry to it for added flavour. Dragonfruit is good for you, really high in fiber, but at least in frozen form it’s quite lacking in taste. I’ll be looking forward to some blueberries and matcha tomorrow, that particular set has become a regular staple and a good combo with matcha. Both green tea and blueberries are rich in antioxidants.
To top it off I added fruity granola for additional crunch. Eating one of these gives me enough energy to power me up until I go home for the day, and I like them because they’re easy to make ahead. This is probably my favourite breakfast lifehack.
I’ve been bouncing back and forth between different mini scenes depending on how much time I have to spare. I worked on this bit last Monday, while tonight I worked more on the bar scene, and I still have to refine the main scene and get to animating more of a dummy thicc ice scene, and I also have to do a little something for a bonus ending. I swear, it seems like with each one of these videos the ideas just get even more ridiculous.
I spent the later part of my evening working on animating a couple goofy evil men sharing a couple drinks at The Inventory. I like to wonder what it would be like if all these game universes intermingled, like if each game universe was from another state or country, would they go on outings like this? Cortex and Eggman have shared interests; they both have a thing for certain types of bling, and their good counterparts are both furry platformers.
Ever since its release I’ve been checking into news and videos about the newly leaked/released Tomb Raider Anniversary, and it seems to be getting all kinds of love from the fans; Patches are being released every other day to make the game more playable, they got the netcode fixed for multiplayer, actual multiplayer! YouTubers have been making all kinds of videos showcasing this relic, and today I was happy to hear that the Midas Level is actually loadable now in the latest patch!
In its current state the game is a giant puzzle piece in need of being solved, and thanks to the Tomb Raider fan community they have accomplished so much and we’re barely into the new year! Imagine if they finally get this game running in full from start to finish, and it’s own splash screen instead of National Treasure. It would certainly be interesting to finally experience Core’s original vision for their anniversary, with help from those devoted to making the proper efforts!
Now if I could just run it on a keyboard, or get it to see my damn controllers…
I decided to play something a little more modern tonight. Trudged through another map and even took a tour of my own digs.
It’s always cool finding additional details added into the game world to not only make it feel more realistic and lived in, but also maintaining a sense of humour. Doomguy has quite the collection of reading material at his disposal.
Doomguy also seems to enjoy breaking the 4th wall once in awhile, as well as rock out by the looks of it:
It’s as though these guitars were crafted from the finest demon parts imaginable! I wonder what they sound like when strummed? 😛
Never Forget
I’ve just started into the third level, and have decided to leave off until next time. Really enjoying the game so far, much harder than the 2016 reboot even on the same difficulty setting.
I downloaded Core Design’s recently leaked Tomb Raider Anniversary, and I’m not disappointed at all in what I see. Not all of the levels are accessible, and being this is an alpha release this is nowhere near a perfect state, but diehard fans are patching the game what seems like every other day over at archive.org to make the game all the more playable. Right now the only way to play it is on your C: Drive, and the game folder has to be on the root drive (can’t be placed in a Programs Folder for organization), and as a result I can’t get the Alpha to run under Linux properly via Proton or Wine. I’m not well versed enough in Wine to figure out how to get a game to run properly, not sure how to keep the proper directory structure. I did learn that if you don’t patch the game properly you’ll be visited by 3D Nicholas Cage.
The Incredible Nicolas Cage
Once Core Design discovered they were not going to be able to publish their version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, they decided to recycle the assets and make a game based on the 2004 Movie National Treasure starring Nicholas Cage. This leak even includes a splash screen even after you fix it to load Tomb Raider content:
Oh no not the bees of cancellation!!!
I’m not sure how much of this was converted from their original Tomb Raider idea, but trying to start the game only results in crashing.
This level shows up when I try to load The Great Abyss. From what I can tell this is part of The Lost Valley but in its own enclosed map.
I knew Natla was evil but holy shit.
Apparently in this build of the game Natla is a Nazi? There are a few nazi flags hanging about, along with the nazi eagle as you wander deeper into the mine. I’m not sure if this was in transitioning from Tomb Raider to National Treasure (did National Treasure even have nazis? I never watched the movie), or because it had something else to do with the Indiana Jones project name. Still I was taken aback by it while turning around in the level just to happen upon… that. Kind of a jarring coincidence in these jarring times.
In this build of the game Lara is fucking invincible. She can walk on lava, manages to avoid drowning, and survive boulders and spikes completely going through her.
I didn’t want to sleep tonight anyway…I thought they were cows at first.
In this stage of the game all enemies are currently incomplete. They have no loading animations and little to no texture details.
Peru is probably one of the more finished looking maps out what I’ve seen thus far. There’s this really cool effect that happens when you enter this corridor, where these stone faces roll around and begin to spit darts. It only made me wonder what the rest of this game would have looked like had Core Design been able to finish it?
To no surprise a lot of the levels use the original textures from the first Tomb Raider, and in some cases even models. It makes sense as that would save time on making any more textures than necessary. This makes it easier to focus on other aspects of the game, like level design, game mechanics, etc.
This game requires a controller for it to work properly, with the best one being a Dualshock 4. I do own a DS4, but no matter what I did the game couldn’t read any one of my controllers. The game doesn’t really have a keyboard and mouse setup since this was originally designed for a PSP, and the release is new enough that I don’t know of a solution. I’ll be keeping an eye out for patches or any more information I can get my hands on, I really wanted to livestream this, but at the moment my controls are quite limited. Still, what I’ve been able to see so far has been an adventure in itself! I might try installing this on my laptop to see if I can get different results.
