Here is my compilation of last year’s Freedom Planet Livestream. :melon:
Sunday Open Thread
It seemed I had an accidental nap and woke up on the first day of my week off from work. My brain is currently being flooded with what to do first… probably put a video up later. :v:
No stream tonight… Have some food and SFM porn instead
Today was a rainy day. A perfect time to do some laundry, a little animation, and make soup and sandwich to keep heat in them thar bones. I made my first attempt of Manhattan style Clam Chowder with a grilled cheese with buffalo chicken, pepper jack and a couple steakhouse tomatoes inside of sourdough wheat bread. I was missing the fresh parsley, but managed to make due by using a little bit of dried parsley with a shredded carrot at an attempt at something similar. I regret nothing. :meseeks:
I also managed to edit a few scenes today and clean my bedding at the same time, that I may lay my clean head of hair on a clean pillow for what may or may not be clean dreams. I just need to make it through one more day, and I’ll be free for a little over a week. I’ll have time to be productive on things I enjoy, and I’ll have to promise to do something nice for myself if the weather permits… like maybe take myself out for a latte or sushi or something, and perhaps a small shopping adventure either local or over teh interwebz. :zorak:
I anticipate there will be more streaming as well. :melon:
Two outta three ain’t bad
I was going to do another stream tonight, but feeling pretty tired… I might do one tomorrow if I have time. Tonight I played a little Crash Bandicoot (to warm up for a stream) and did some more video prep in SFM. My original plan to have my NIGHTS Into Dreams video as a two parter won’t be happening after all. It will be a slightly larger video from what I can tell, and unlike Freedom Planet I appear to have a lot of animating ahead of me… or so it seems. I’ve surprised myself before when working with audio/video and coming back to it at a later date and re-evaluating if you should use a particular scene in a different method or not.
Sometimes time can make you your own critic.
St Patty’s Day Open Thread
Happy St Patty’s Day! Or if you don’t celebrate it I hope you had a good day! I started mine out waking to the smell of battery acid in the air that I didn’t remember from the night before. My APC unit had a dying battery in it (clearly) and it finally gave up the ghost… We had them out recently and they showed no signs of bulging, that was at least until this morning… I knew there was a good reason why my throat felt like it was corroding.
I had originally wanted to do a livestream tonight, but felt too sick too. Instead I enjoyed music on my new sound card, did a little SFM and watched another person’s livestream. I’m thinking I’ll pick back up on it tomorrow after doing a little digital shopping. There are a couple things I’d like to treat myself to, and I haven’t really spent much on myself lately apart from some bargains on Nike’s and Levi’s. I might do a little tidying too. I’m sure I’ll get a better night’s sleep without the sulfuric aroma permeating out of my APC backup…
My kingdom for a skeleton
I spent a good chunk of the evening trying to animate a final scene for my upcoming Freedom Planet video, but ran into a problem with a particular model I downloaded from the Gmod workshop. I found a nice 3D model of Lilac I wanted to use for a scene to end the video, and I extracted it for SFM use. Upon playing with the model I found out after posing it for various keyframes that I couldn’t do it properly. The model doesn’t have a skeleton, but you can move around the limbs. Unfortunately, the next video won’t have as much animation as I had originally anticipated.
The gameplay will have to do most of the talking. I’ll probably release it next Sunday, (not the upcoming one).
Microsoft is doing things that I can’t complain about
I really need to stop sleeping when weird shit happens. I awoke yesterday to find Microsoft actually making somewhat of an attempt to make themselves look good on PC for once… where to start? The first thing I read yesterday was the announcement for the Halo Master Chief Collection coming to PC, and you can purchase it on Steam!
For the first time ever, The Master Chief’s story comes to PC. Featuring Halo: Reach along with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, the Halo 3: ODST Campaign and Halo 4, this is the definitive Halo experience.
Shorter Microsoft: Here’s the deal, we don’t talk about the first Halo release for Vista, and you can get our game collection outside of our shitty store. :zorak:
This came as a bit of a shocker considering Microsoft wanting to push their store onto people, and placing it on Steam also gives people like me a chance to see if it will handle under Proton. :trollface:
Of course that was shocking enough on it’s own, but Microsoft cranks it to 11 when news of DirectX12 coming to Windows 7 via World of Warcraft.
Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.
On the surface this seems like really extraordinary news, however if you take the time to think about it DirectX12 never really took off quite like how Microsoft wanted it to. When AMD open sourced their Mantle API (now Vulkan) that left Microsoft a little dead in the water as that looked much more attractive to developers. especially when developing on more than one platform. Plus with more people having little reasoning to switch to Windows 10 to take advantage of DX12 apart from maybe a handful of titles that properly utilize it. It is interesting they would do this so close to Windows 7’s end of life cycle… or is this a sign of them continuing to support it? I might have to turn my dualboot system into a triple. :trollface: My only hope is that if they do go back to Windows 7 they don’t do to it what they did with their newer OS’s/
Then to top it all off Microsoft actually did something to make Windows 10… somewhat better?
Occasionally, startup failures can occur due to hardware issues, file corruption, or incompatible 3rd party software.If Windows detects that your machine cannot start up successfully, it will try to diagnose and resolve failures due to disk issues, system file corruption, invalid registry keys, or other such causes. If all these steps are unsuccessful and your machine is still unable to start up properly, Windows will determine if the startup issue was introduced after recent driver or quality updates were installed. If so, these updates may be uninstalled automatically to get the device back to a workable state. This is only done as a last resort.
This is only available via the Windows Insider updates, but it’s about friggin time they got to work on a update safeguard. In fact all of the items I discussed above should have been rolled out a long time ago. Anyone that is at least half tech savvy could look at all of this and see this was all possible. We have been on pretty much the same kernel since Windows Vista, porting DX12 to Windows 7 should have been just as fine as adding it to Windows 10, and making Halo games console exclusive was always a boneheaded move on Microsoft’s behalf. You already have people using your OS, why not give them a game to play on it that YOUR own company made if they have the hardware to back it up? Not all of us want to buy a console to play exclusives… unless it’s a $10 PS3 or something. :trollface: