Not much to report. Did a little animating, gaming, reading, cleaning, plotting, etc. Had a blast in Q3A with Yutram earlier, and played DMC5 for the rest of the night. Might touch up on some animation while finishing off some wine (the drinkable kind) and hydrating with a bit of tea.
Open Thread!
Got out of town earlier in what I can now call yesterday. It felt nice to get out of town, admiring the trees and wildlife as we drove along. Other than that the temperature was cool enough today that I focused a little on some SFM stuff, and ran into a small problem.
Years ago I made this picture of Geralt in SFM for a friend of mine, and ever since then we all (along with her) decided this was one of her “personas” so to speak in our small circle jerk of friends. Naturally I like to include whatever characters a person wants to be if their voice happens to end up in one of my videos, the only exceptions are asshats, and Bong (and Bong is not an asshat, we just choose for him). I was looking to add her favorite Geralt model into my project today only to have SFM crash instantly. I tried loading other models that were associated (it was a model pack) and they all crashed. I tested this on both Windows and Linux and the results were evenly matched. I’ve tried other Geralt models but each one I’ve run across seems better for posing rather than animating. I’ve tried the SFM Workshop, SFM Lab, and even looking on the Gmod workshop for something to extract but… nope. Unless we find some workaround to get the model(s) to load properly again, I’ll have to animate one of her other alter egos. I’m still puzzled as to why these models would crash the entire program, given that SFM hasn’t had any updates in years I can’t see what the general cause would be.
99% of the day was enjoyed outdoors… with a gaming laptop… for science. I tested a few more games under Proton, and 99% of what I tested actually worked! Mortal Kombat 9 ran as if it were native, Hard Reset Redux worked just as well as on my main desktop, and I even tried a freebie! I played Particula for the first time, and it ran perfectly from what I can tell. I might have to run it under Windows though just to compare grapical details. Framerate was excellent, but I’m not familiar with the game’s graphics, and I couldn’t tell if the enemy emotions on the map (I’ll explain later) were rendering correctly or not… that nerd stuff.
I did play the native port of Valley, which strangely ran better on the laptop than it did the desktop. On my desktop install of Linux it seems to run sluggish, though I might have to double check my settings to make sure it wasn’t something like Motion Blur causing issues. A GTX 1070m should not be outperforming a Vega 64… especially when I know the game runs flawlessly under Windows.
So far Operation Not Detailing With Asshats has been a big success. I woke up early this morning and did brunch at the local Irish pub, then I came home and slept the breakfast and mimosa off (and I have plenty of leftovers for tomorrow). It was nice hot summery weather today, made iced tea and played around on my gaming laptop. Managed to get Spyro to work under the Linux. Maaaaan this vacation is going nicely.
I spent the day doing a little “house” shopping as it were, for another video project. Finally settling on this map as our digital home headquarters. I’m not quite finished decorating yet, and I need to see if I can find a better door to fit that gap, but I’m digging the house and the hood it resides in. My imagination is already running wild at the idea of who might occupy this digital neighborhood. I’m thinking of getting started on the channel trailer tomorrow. I’m wanting to release that before doing the last two Skyrim videos for the saga.
Had to do my first ever factory reset on my Fire HD8 today. I’m not sure how I managed it, but once in awhile when I plugged in headphones Alexa would try to activate, and since I don’t have the tablet registered with Amazon it begs me to register. I usually just hit the Not Now button and get back to the apps I’ve installed outside Amazon’s eco system; but there must have been a FireOS update that took it out. I tried to close out the app, but to no avail. I managed to get back to the homescreen, went into Waterfox and found that the only button I had at the bottom of the screen was the Back button. I had no choice but to restart, and found that I couldn’t continue any further until I registered the device.
Of course… I’m too much of an asshole to give up that easily. 😛 Factory resetting it did the trick, at least for now. I’ve been trying to replicate the problem again but haven’t had any luck. I’m planning to do a little science experiment with a little help hopefully not too far long down the road that could help prevent this from happening again.
I also had to fix a couple things in Windows tonight too, went under there tonight to play and privately livestream DMC2 (don’t ask). I wanted to run OBS in the background but found that my drivers were out of date, as the AMD codec was missing. Updating the drivers fixed the problem but… when installing the driver I had to hit reset on my computer because all of a sudden all of my USB ports fucking died. Windows went into Recovery Mode… and failed. I booted in anyway and sure enough, everything was fine.
So yeah, vacation is off to a great start. 😛 Better to have it now than during a busy bork week. Think I’ll end the night with a game that doesn’t end in DMC2…
It turns out one Broforce session is enough for me to make a decent sized video footage wise. I’ll have to sleep on how I want to piece this one together, and talk over a good way to end the video, while at the same time I’m also thinking most of the video will be gameplay footage… these games pretty much do all the entertaining.
New monitor arrived! All pixels are good. Just in time too, since I start my vacation after work tomorrow! I played a little Portal 2 tonight, and also started chopping up Broforce footage. It’s a shame that I have to start from scratch again, but there are several improvements that have been made to Shotcut since I last chopped up footage for a fresh project. Different audio tracks now show each waveform if being separated from an mp4 or mkv multitrack recording, more filters and fine tuning, and the overall performance boost from adding more RAM, the 3900x and having Manjaro installed on NVMe makes all the difference. I actually feel like I’m moving through it much faster. I also have Source Filmmaker installed to my old Samsung 870 Pros (one SFM install for each operating system) to improve long load times in due part to all of the fucking assets I’ve accumulated over the years.
Well, that’s enough self indulgence for this eve…
I kicked back today with a good breakfast, a little photo work, and lots of Linux gaming. Took a bit of a break from using Proton to play some native Linux TF2 and Dusk. Apparently in Discord it reads that I’m playing hl2_linux instead of TF2, that made me chuckle a bit. The last time I played TF2 under Linux it kept giving me stack errors, nice to see they’ve fixed it.
I prepped my laptop on the Linux side for some fun lunch time shenanigans tomorrow. Since DMC5 runs so well on my Manjaro desktop setup with pure AMD hardware I want to see how well it runs on my laptop with Intel/NVidia. I did a quick test launch and it automatically detected the best settings, always a good sign! It even sees the proper refresh rate (144hz). Should make for a fun, scientific lunch break. I also installed a few Portal 2 mods in case I wanted to do somewhat actual not actual science.