#ctrl alt design

[dustrial-inc]

Playing around with generative movement.

[missmako-chan]

So I’ve started watching Revice:

This has probably been done before but whatever

I’ve only seen 4 episodes but I really like Vice :)

[capric0rn]

dump

[myroomismytardis]

More... more cats please

yeah sure i'll get more of the league designs done for example, here's ashley griffin the invisible man

[pengy-pop]

"Where do you think we are, Antauri?"

"Judging by our clothes and the wooden construction of these buildings, i'd say Shuggaazoom city several hundred years ago!"

passes out right as i place this on the table.

I was supposed to have this done like a month ago.

anyway more monkes for ur entertainment!

Original screenshot and version w/o 'lighting' below cut!

[dazzlesizzle]

Check out the new product Ctrl + Alt + Delete Keyboard Shortcut

[the-jade-palace]

Fin Fin on QEMU (Current Version - v2.2)

Fin Fin on QEMU is a project designed to create an easy to use way for anyone to play Fin Fin without the need for any complicated setup on modern operating systems. It is fully compatible with Windows 10 and 11, but will also work on any version after XP.

The version of the game used is a custom made translation that includes all 6 worlds in English. It has working microphone input, sound recording, and all associated features such as screenshots and the encyclopedia work as well.

Rather than using virtualization, this works through emulating an entire Windows 98 machine. To play it there's no need to install any hypervisors or set up a virtual machine, as everything is already set up, and ready to go.

The download link can be found here! (Hosted on MEGA)

Installation

The whole thing is portable, meaning nothing is actually "installed" and all the data is wherever you place the folder. This also means that if moved to another PC, all user data will still be present.

To run, all you need to do is extract the folder in the .zip to a location of your choosing, and then run one of the launchers.

Included are two launcher versions for the different QEMU display options, one that uses GTK and one that uses SDL. The only difference between the .bat script and the .exe versions is that a command window will be shown when using the .bat script.

Both have pros and cons, so I've included both to let the user decide which one they want to use.

SDL has broken window scaling and no mouse integration, but has a correctly stretched fullscreen. GTK has a stretched fullscreen mode, but has working mouse integration and window scaling. Basically if you want the game in fullscreen use SDL, otherwise use GTK. For a bit more info about these, checkout the 'Files' section under the 'Keep Reading'

Important Info

Before launching the main game, be sure to create a profile using 'New Contact', as the game will not run until doing so. When exiting the game use the shutdown option in Windows 98. Exiting through closing the window forcefully can possibly cause data loss/corruption. When using SDL, mouse and keyboard input will be captured. To release this, press 'Ctrl + Alt + G'. When using GTK, the menubar can be hidden or shown by pressing 'Ctrl + Alt + M'. To make the window fullscreen, press 'Ctrl + Alt + F'.

Sounds

Included are two "sound effect packs" for the in game sounds that play based on the number keys from 1-5.

By default, the game will use the sound effects from the 5 Worlds version, but you can swap out to the 6 worlds one by renaming the "sound (alternate)" folder in the D: drive to just "sound", and renaming the original sound folder to something else.

I hope you all have fun with your new best friend Fin Fin!

Fin Fin is a wonderful little enigma from the past, and my attempt to make it easily accessible even in the present is something I hope you will all enjoy.

If you encounter any issues in Fin Fin on QEMU, please contact me about it.

To view the changelog, credits, and some more info about this project check below the 'Keep reading'.

Changelog

Some information is cut for brevity, the full version can be found inside of Fin Fin on QEMU and the MEGA folder.

v2.2

Added several new Fin Fin screensavers the user may choose from Updated method for calculating Transfer folder size Updated emulated machine to use 128mb of RAM and a Pentium Updated main teoboot.exe executable to fix several issues Updated shortcuts

v2.1

Removed WHPX launching options Removed FinFinWHPX.bat and FinFinWHPX.exe Removed startup crash fix as it was only needed for WHPX Modified folder settings in Windows 98 to open folders in the same window Rearranged Fin Fin on QEMU folder layout for cleaner appearance Added 'OK' button back to Microphone Setup that was mistakenly removed Updated shortcuts for Microphone Setup and Sound Recorder Fixed problem with 'Encyclopedia' launching script that caused screenshots to not show up in the photobook Added 'Transfer' Folder which allows for transferring files between the host and emulated machine Added options for launching with either GTK or SDL display Altered updater to improve ease of use and used NirCmd to improve process as a whole (Updater.bat & updater.iso)

v2.0 (Major Update - 6 Worlds Edition)

Modified original Taiwanese 6 Worlds version to add English Translation Added 'Microphone Sensitivity' shortcut to the desktop and start menu Added in 5 Worlds version Encyclopedia (finfinEncyc.exe & encyc30.GIZ) Added sound effects from 5 Worlds version (D:\sound) Added Mouse Integration Added Nircmd to replace launch batch scripts (C:\WINDOWS\nircmd.exe) Added Windowed Mode shortcut to start menu Altered launching scripts (FinFin.bat, FinFin.exe, FinFinWHPX.bat, FinFinWHPX.exe, FinFin Update.bat) Removed large amount of unecessary setup files from finfin.qcw Removed 'Task Scheduler' from taskbar Added Credits and Changelog shortcut to start menu Added dll to fix issue with running on Windows 7

v1.3

Added animated Fin Fin cursor

v1.2

Added guided updater (FinFin Update.bat & updater.IMA) Adjusted wallpaper Renamed startup shortcut ("_setup.bat" to "Crash Fix" at C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu\Programs\Startup) Adjusted Volume Control Settings

v1.1

Added new wallpaper (C:\background.jpg) Added new startup sound (C:\boot.wav)

v1.0 (First Public Release)

Changed from qemu-3dfx to base Removed unnecessary files in Windows Added missing shortcuts on Desktop

v0.5 (Playtester version)

Moved all Fin Fin data to finfin.qcw Created batch scripts for Disc.id Added shortcuts to launch programs Removed unnecessary programs from Windows Removed unnecessary files in Windows

Credits

Resources

The finfin Homepage (finfin.de) - By EMGE The finfin Archive (finfin-archiv.de) - By Xvemon, Nadine S., and EMGE Fin Fin 6 Worlds "Beta" (finfin-archive.de) - By Harald G.

Playtesters

mchi22 that-one-scratch-on-your-arm

Software

QEMU 7.1.0. (qemu.org) - By QEMU team: Peter Maydell, et al. NirCmd (nirsoft.net) - By Nir Sofer Resource Hacker (angusj.com) - By Angus Johnson

Updating Versions

Included is a guided updater that will help you transfer your save, screenshots, and sound recordings to the latest version.

Place the new version in a temporary location without replacing the original. Then, just run "Updater.bat" and follow the instructions.

System Time

Time in the emulated machine is synced to the host PC.

If you would like to time travel in Fin Fin, you can change the time in the emulated PC but it will go back to normal after a restart. Note that if you do this you will not be able to go back to the original time, you can only go forwards using this method If you would like to permanently change the time, you can use the built in date-changer present in the 'New Contact' program, but this will cause the loss of the current profile.

QEMU

Though it should be quite obvious by now, this project works through the use of QEMU, an open source emulator. Specifically, its emulating a full Windows 98 SE machine, and then the game is run on that.

The emulated machine has 128mb of RAM, an AC97 Soundcard, and a Pentium CPU.

Files

The only files this project really has aside from QEMU are FinFin GTK.bat/.exe and FinFin SDL.bat/.exe

The reason I list the .exe and .bat files together is that they do exactly the same thing. The executables aren't really 'true executables', but are instead just batch scripts that have been converted into .exe files. When they run, they essentially create a temporary batch script that deletes itself. The only real benefit of this is that its a bit more straightforward for launching and creating shortcuts, and that there is no distracting command window while playing.

Within the 'Data' folder is where the bulk of the project is. Inside are two virtual hard drives, w98.qcw being the main Windows 98 drive, and finfin.qcw being where all the Fin Fin game data is.

[cheesy-sunny-days]

NEW KINITOPET AU DROPPED

Out Of Reach!AU

Out Of Reach: A KinitoPET AU

*After the events of the Bliss Ending, you think you’ve defeated Kinito once and for all, so you go to bed peacefully for the first time in goodness knows how long. When you wake up the next morning, you notice your computer hasn’t been shut off and you go to do so, but when you do… he’s there.

You don’t know how this happened, and you really, really, really don’t want to know, but you immediately press CTRL+ALT+DELETE… only to find that he wouldn’t go away.

“Heya there, friend! And what’s your name?… and… do you know where I am..?”

…what?

Main Characters: Player, Kinito, Sam, and Jade

Minor Characters: any OCs I or anyone else has :3

HERE R THE REFS FOR THE SILLY LITTLE GUYS!!! (Sam’s design will change pls be aware of how inconsistent I am with him)

ALSO!!! IF YALL MAKE ANY FANART OF THIS (look at me with high expectations 😭) TAG ME!!!!!!!!!!

[confusedananass]

(instagram)

Tutorial in After Effects under the cut.

ALRIGHT let's get into it. Straight to the point, no nonsense tutorial.

• Create a new composition 1080px x 1080px, let’s call it Design.

• Write some text, turn it into shapes (right-click → Create → Create shapes from text).

• Animate the path so the text stretches like so in a few seconds time. When animated, right-click on a keyframe and select Keyframe velocity and change coming & going velocity influence to 85%:

• Create another new composition and call it FX. Add your Design pre-comp in this composition.

• Add a new Solid layer on top, call it Displacement map. Now we’re gonna add a bunch of effects on that solid layer.

• First add Gradient Ramp. Make it so the white color would be on the right side (End of Ramp) and black would be on the left side (Start of Ramp);

• Next add a Tritone effect and change the Highlights color to black and Midtones color to white.

• Add Fast Box Blur and change Blur Radius to 100.

• Then it’s time to add Fractal Noise effect, and change Fractal Type to Swirly, Noise Type to Spline. Then bring down the Transform panel and uncheck Uniform Scaling, make Scale Width 60, and change Scale Height to a very high number, such as 10000.0.

• Add a keyframe to Evolution at the beginning, and the second keyframe at 2 seconds rotating the slider for one rotation. Add an expression loopOut() on these keyframes so it loops.

• And lastly change the Blending mode to Overlay (at the bottom of the effect).

• The last effect we’re gonna add is Turbulent Displace. Change Displacement to Twist, Amount to 150, Size 130. Add the same keyframes to the Evolution as we did previously on Fractal Noise and loop them with the same expression.

So far your work should look something like this:

• Then it’s time to add colors! Create another new composition, add your FX pre-comp to it, add a background with a new solid layer (CTRL + Y).

• Then add Echo effect to your FX pre-comp, change Echo Time to -0.030, Starting Intensity to 0.03, Decay to 0.94.

• Next add Gaussian Blur effect, make the Blurriness 10.

• Add Colorama effect, change Get Phase From to Alpha. Then go to Output Cycle and change the color presets (Use Preset Palette) to let’s say Solarize Red (it doesn’t really matter, we’re gonna change the colors, we just need it to have two sliders instead of a lot). Then grab a bottom slider and put it on the left side and choose the lighter color you want. I chose pink.

• Now duplicate your FX pre-comp. We’re gonna change some parameters on the effects.

• So the first thing you want to do is change Echo Time to -0.005, Starting Intensity to 1.

• On Colorama go to Modify and uncheck Modify Alpha. Then go to Output Cycle, and add more colors like you see in the screenshot.

• Duplicate your FX pre-comp one more time and delete all the effects on it.

• Last thing to do is add an Adjustment Layer (Ctrl + Alt + Y), add the Noise effect, and make the Amount of Noise 15.0%.

• And you're done!

[catonator]

Funny heading to a blogpost on videogames that’s some sort of reference

Look, I already used the ctrl+alt+delete quote in a blogpost title. It’s February 2024, and it’s already a very wild year for gaming. We’ve had more layoffs than with the entirety of 2023, games shown off at events seem to be stagnating, interest in the art is waning. Youtube is filled with “modern gaming sucks” doomer blackpill videos. It’s a miserable time.

Is gaming just over?

Well, no. Of course not. The Sonic franchise has lingered for decades despite consistent failure. Games are more resilient than that.

Humanity’s relation to computing is still pretty fresh, and I’d say that despite the size and scale of a lot of it, we’re still going through major growing pains. Concepts like video games, the internet and special effects are still pretty new, despite being around for twice or thrice as long as most of the people reading this have been alive. Internal combustion engine -powered cars were invented in 1808, made mass produced in the 1910s, and even then it took until the 1950s for them to be common enough for the US government to bother designing cities around them. In the present day, many have come to resent the car-centric design mentality, even though the driving (no pun intended) factor behind them was mainly the same as with technology today: scientific and technological progression is unquestionably good, and therefore new and successful ideas should be pushed and relied upon as hard as possible. What could possibly go wrong?!

Video games are far from the only medium which is seeing similar problems. Movies have suffered greatly from a capeshit infestation, in which the abuse of VFX artists is valued over, you know, basics of good filmmaking, and the general public is clearly sick of it. On the internet, we’ve decided that megastructures like Twitter are better than forms of communication we’re good at, and it’s gone horribly wrong. We’re still learning the “do”s, “don’t”s and “who the fuck thought this was a good idea”s of tech.

Games as an artform are as alive as they ever were, but the sheer scale of the operations has grown to a point where nobody can really understand it. The numbers behind playerbases and the money traffic have so many zeroes that you can’t even fathom the number. Even if I used some metaphorical figure, like 20 000 cars. Shockingly, despite how console sales haven’t really increased in numbers (the top selling console of all time is still the PS2), most of the top-grossing games of all time are relatively recent. This implies that the behaviour of consumers has shifted from purchasing a variety of different kinds of games into purchasing fewer games of fewer different kinds. And I don’t think it’s a case of customers deciding to shift over naturally.

In the past decade or so, the gaming industry has decided sensible experiences are a way of the past, and the future is making games for debt and making back the money with horse armour and other garbage the general public doesn’t really want.

But we’ve seen this shit before. In the 90s, 3D was “the future”, and 2D pixel art or hand-drawn art in general seemed to go the way of the dodo for polygons and ““realism””. About a decade later, 2D art would see a resurgence and in some cases overtake the big lads in lasting impact. In the end, people crave personal stories, varying ideas, and interesting ways to tell them. Not much has changed since ancient Greeks, besides that the medium of storytelling has largely shifted from some guy standing on a stage, trying to explain another world, to electronic devices actually showing us the other worlds.

I think as we play out the Icarus stories in real time, we’ll also learn when boundaries are pushed too far, and the scale of the bullshit simply collapses in on itself. When that happens, the public is forced to step back and reevaluate the ways we thought were the future, and what really is better for all of us.

When a storm flattens a forest of dead, decrepit trees, the sun and rain can now reach the ground and cultivate a new generation of different plant life. Once hidden beneath the dead corpses, now able to grow and bloom in a way the old generation never could. You should just keep doing what you think is right. Now’s the time more than ever to be the backbone of a better industry, for many applications of tech, from games to communication. And it’s better, if the backbone comes from the grassroots, and isn’t defined by the megacorporations. Because those cunts will never learn from their failures.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Decrapify cookie consent dialogs with the Consent-O-Matic

Remember when they sneered at Geocities pages for being unusable eyesores? It's true, those old sites had some, uh, idiosyncratic design choices, but at least they reflected a real person's exuberant ideas about what looked and worked well. Today's web is an unusable eyesore by design.

Start with those fucking “sign up for our newsletter” interruptors. Email is the last federated protocol standing, so everyone who publishes is desperate to get you to sign up to their newsletter, which nominally bypasses Big Tech’s chokepoint on communications between creators and audiences. Worst part: they’re wrong, email’s also been captured:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

Then there’s the designer’s bizarre and sadistic conceit that “black type on a white background” is ugly and “causes eye-strain.” This has led to an epidemic of illegible grey-on-white type that I literally can’t read, thanks to a (very common) low-contrast vision disability:

https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure-black-for-text-or-backgrounds/

Often grey-on-white type sins are compounded with minuscule font sizing. You can correct this by increasing the font size from teeny-weeny-eyestrain-o-rama to something reasonable, but when you do, all the static elements on the page size up with the text, so the useless header and footer bars filled with social media buttons and vanity branding expand to fill the whole screen.

This, in turn, is made a billion times worse by the absurd decision to hide scrollbars (shades of Douglas Adams’ description of airports where they “expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not”).

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3205828-it-can-hardly-be-a-coincidence-that-no-language-on

Scrolling a window (without using RSI-inflaming trackpad gestures) is now the world’s shittiest, most widely played video-game, a hand-eye coordination challenge requiring sub-pixel accuracy and split-second timing to catch the scroll-bar handle in the brief, flashing instant where blips into existence:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1516136202235043841

One of the scariest things about the precarity of Firefox is the prospect of losing some of the customizations and stock features I rely on to decrapify the web — stuff I use so often that I sometimes forget that it’s not how everyone uses the web:

https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-mozilla-2022/

[Image ID: Two side-by-side screenshots comparing the default layout of a wired.com article ('The intoxicating pleasure of conspiratorial thinking' by Virginia Heffernan) with the same article in Firefox's Reader Mode.]

For example, there’s Firefox’s Reader Mode: a hotkey that strips out all the layout and renders the text of an article as a narrow, readable column in whatever your default font is. I reach for ctrl-alt-r so instinctively that often the publisher’s default layout doesn’t register for me.

Reader Mode (usually) bypasses interruptors and static elements, but Firefox isn’t capable of deploying Reader Mode on every site. The Activate Reader View plugin can sometimes fix this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-reader-view/

But when it can’t there’s my favorite, indispensable Javascript bookmarklet: Kill Sticky, which hunts through the DOM of the page you’ve got loaded and nukes any element that is tagged as “sticky” — which generally banishes any permanent top/bottom/side-bars with a single click:

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

A recent addition to my arsenal is Cookie Remover. Click it once and it deletes all cookies associated with the page you’ve currently loaded. This resets the counter on every soft paywall, including the ones that block you from using Private Browsing. Click this once, then reload, and you’re back in business:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-remover/

Today, I added another plug-in to my decrapification rotation: Consent-O-Matic, created by researchers at Denmark’s Aarhus University. Consent-O-Matic identifies about 50 of the most commonly deployed GDPR tracking opt-out dialog boxes and automatically opts you out of all tracking, invisibly and instantaneously:

https://consentomatic.au.dk/

We shouldn’t need Consent-O-Matic, but we do. The point of the GDPR was to make tracking users painful for internet companies, by forcing them to break down all the different data they wanted to gather and the uses they wanted to put it to into a series of simple, yes/no consent requests. The idea was to create boardroom discussions where one person said, “OK, let’s collect this invasive piece of data” and someone else could say, “Fine, but that will require us to display eight additional dialog boxes so we’ll lose 95% of users if we do.”

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/26/ico-ico/#market-structuring

What’s more, the GDPR said that if you just bypassed all those dialog boxes (say, by flipping to Reader Mode), the publisher had to assume you didn’t want to be tracked.

But that’s not how it’s worked. A series of structural weaknesses in European federalism and the text of the GDPR itself have served to encrapify the web to a previously unheard-of degree, subjecting users to endless cookie consent forms that are designed to trick you into opting into surveillance.

Part of this is an enforcement problem. The EU Commission we have today isn’t the Commission that created the GDPR, and there’s a pervasive belief that the current Commission decided that enforcing their predecessors’ policies wasn’t a priority. This issue is very hot today, as the Commission considers landmark rules like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), whose enforcement will be at the whim of their successors.

The failures of EU-wide enforcement is compounded by the very nature of European federalism, which gives member states broad latitude to interpret and enforce EU regulations. This is most obviously manifested in EU member states’ tax policies, with rogue nations like Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland vying for supreme onshore-offshore tax haven status.

Not surprisingly, countries whose tax-codes have been hijacked by multinational corporations and their enablers in government are likewise subject to having their other regulations captured by the companies that fly their flags of convenience.

America’s biggest Big Tech giants all pretend to be headquartered in Ireland (which, in turn, allows them to pretend that their profits are hovering in a state of untaxable grace far above the Irish Sea). These same companies ensured that Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner’s Office is starved of cash and resources. Big Tech argues that their Irish domicile means that anyone who wants to complain about their frequent and enthusiastic practice of wiping their asses with the text of the GDPR has to take it up with the starveling regulators of Ireland.

That may change. Max Schrems — whose advocacy gave rise to the GDPR in the first place — has dragged the tech giants in front of German regulators, who are decidedly more energetic than their Irish counterparts:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb

The new EU tech competition laws — the DMA and DSA — aim to fix this, shoring up enforcement in a way that should end these “consent” popups. They also seek to plug the GDPR’s “legitimate purpose” loophole, which lets tech companies spy on you and sell your data without your consent, provided they claim that this is for a “legitimate purpose.”

But in the meantime, GDPR consent dialogs remain a hot mess, which is where Consent-O-Matic comes in. Consent-O-Matic automates away the tedious work of locating all the different switches you have to click before you truly opt out of consent-based tracking. This practice of requiring you to seek out multiple UI elements is often termed a “Dark Pattern”:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3313831.3376321

But while “Dark Pattern” has some utility as a term-of-art, I think that it’s best reserved for truly sneaky tactics. Most of what we call “Dark Patterns” fits comfortably in under the term “fraud.” For example, if “Opt Out of All” doesn’t opt out of all, unless you find and toggle another “I Really Mean It” box, that’s not a fiendish trick, it’s just a scam.

Whether you call this “fraud” or a “Dark Pattern,” Consent-O-Matic has historic precedent that suggests that it could really make a difference. I’m thinking here of the original browser wars, where Netscape and Internet Explorer (and others like Opera) fought for dominance on the early web.

That early web had its own crapification: the ubiquitous pop-up ad. Merely opening a page could spawn dozens of pop-ups, some of them invisible 1px-by-1px dots, others that would run away from your cursor across the screen if you tried to close them, and they’d all be tracking you and auto-playing 8-bit music.

The pop-up ad was killed by the pop-up blocker. When browsers like Mozilla and Opera started blocking pop-ups by default, users switched to them in droves. That meant that an ever-smaller proportion of web users could even see a pop-up, which meant that advertisers stopped demanding pop-ups. Publishers — who knew their readers hated pop-ups but were beholden to advertisers to keep the lights on — were finally able to convince advertisers that pop-ups were a bad idea. Why pay for ads that no one will see?

Pop-up blockers are an early example of Adversarial Interoperability, AKA Competitive Compatibility (comcom for short). That’s the practice of improving an existing product or service by making an add-on or plug in that changes how it behaves to make it more responsive to its users’ interests, without permission from the original manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

It’s been more than 20 years since the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) tried to get tech companies to voluntarily recognize and honor their users’ privacy choices. It failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Do Not Track, another attempt to do the same, did not fare much better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

But you know what actually worked? Tracker-blockers and ad-blockers, “the largest consumer boycott in history”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Making it impossible to track users is of great assistance to efforts to make it illegal to track users. Tools like Consent-O-Matic change the “security economics” of crapification, by turning the consent theater of illegal cookie popups into actual, GDPR-enforceable demands by users not to be tracked:

https://doctorow.medium.com/automation-is-magic-f4c1401d1f0d

Decrapifying the web is a long, slow process. It’s not just using interoperability to restore pluralism to the web, ending the era of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

It’s also using a mix of technology and regulation to fight back against deliberate crapification. Between Consent-O-Rama, Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Cookie Remover, it’s possible to decrapify much of your daily browsing and substantially improve your life.

[Image ID: A GDPR consent dialog with a rubber stamp in the center depicting a snarling man flipping the bird.]

[dustrial-inc]

#alchemy #jacquardloom #daltonelements #xvlt #oxxvlt

[ dustrial.net ]

[wolfnanaki]

Did you watch Patricia Taxxon's latest video esay? I don't know much about being a furry but that video changed a lot of assumptions I had regarding GVH. I assumed GVH wasn't "furry enough" because it didn't go all the way with the characters being humanoid dinosaurs, being pretty much humans that look weird, but it lines up with what she says about the other visual novel Echo in her video.

Yeah, I've seen it! I've been following Patricia's work - music and videos - ever since she provided tracks for Hbomberguy's video on Ctrl-Alt-Del.

And yup, I think Goodbye Volcano High does kinda tumble into accidentally being furry in the way she describes. The game's not concerned with the big worldbuilding of making it a dinosaur world in the same way Zootopia tries to justify it being a world of talking animals, so it ends up being more in line with Echo. Yet all the characters being dinosaurs is also extremely important to how they're portrayed. For example, if you know dinosaur lore, Naomi's crush makes so much sense.

It's kinda funny, I don't think GVH wasn't trying to be seminal furry work, but it kind of is anyway. The designs used are so distinct from how furries have been drawing dinosaurs for years, so for some long-time furry dino fans, they're a little off-putting. But I can totally see furry OCs of future furry generations being inspired by the GVH designs.

And I hope Patricia plays GVH someday. I wonder what she'd think of it.

[notquiteapex]

what's the plan for the jukeboxes? curious about how v2 is coming along 👀

also i love mine to bits, wanna wire it up for a soundboard at some point hehe

OH BOY I GET TO TALK ABOUT MY OTHER WEIRD PROJECTS!

Jukebox development has been on hold for a while now! Between the work on the next version (which would've been v4, btw, not v2. (I've been working on this for fuckin ever dude good god) Fun fact, you and some others got a v3!) and life just kind of happening to me, I haven't made much progress. Part of that life bit was also because I'm actually going to be doing an independent study with a prof at my university to develop the (hopefully last) version of the Jukebox.

The plan is to use a cheaper microcontroller (v4 had one that cost $2.50 to $4 per chip, v5 will be using one that's only $1 with a $0.25 memory chip) but keep pretty much everything else the same from the previous version. That means USB-C, Cherry MX and Kailh Choc key switch support, and open source everything. It would also have another 4 keys for the "modifier" (ctrl, alt, shift, super) keys for even more hotkey-ability.

I actually have a bunch of v4's built, and have been meaning to give them away to local friends or swap them with existing Jukeboxes I have given/sold to people. I also use a v4 with some "relegendable" key caps.

Ideally, the final version of the Jukebox would be sold with these (or similar) key caps, with a fun sticker sheet or something. The current "stickers" are made of printer paper, held in by the top and bottom halves of the keycap. I regularly use this while streaming and when I'm in Discord calls. It's great!

A big part of the reason the Jukebox still isn't finished, even with the whole independent study thing, is that I want it to be basically "finished" when I release it. Nothing new should need to be done with it once its out in the world. No firmware revisions, no bloated desktop applications. I want it to be something you can buy once and be happy with for the rest of your computing days, because lord knows we already have enough e-waste in the world. Designing products that last and that people want to use can be hard, especially when you're self funded and solo!

But I still have more plans for this thing, like this screen add-on for monitoring PC performance for weird PC building nerds like myself (or just anything, because it's a screen), and hopefully by next May it'll be ready for order proper. (Also ideally any old jukeboxes out there would just get a simple swap with the new ones. I'm already super in-the-red in terms of profit off these things, going in further wouldn't be so bad if it meant I got some of my old equipment and stuff back so I can use it for other things :D)

[fantasticpeaceart24]

The t-shirts have a unique design with a retro feel and funny motivational slogan “Ctrl+Alt+Del negativity, reboot with positivity.” they feature a simple, yet beautifully bold to celebrate any special occasion and day.

[mortia]

Custom Regions in SC4 for TS2: Part 3

Now that we’ve got our 2 basic Height Map images, let’s open them up in SC4 and see what we are working with. 

Load up SC4 and go to the Test region that we made last time. 

PART 1

PART 2

On this screen, simultaneously press the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R keys to bring up this window.  

Once there, navigate to wherever you saved your .bmp from the last tutorial and hit “OK”. I’ll start with the 3D generated Height Map. 

If it has been saved out correctly, you will see a slight lag and then you should be presented with your new region and something resembling your 3D map that you drew at the start of all of this. 

You can see here what I meant when I said in the last post that those darker areas were going to be problematic. See the deep ravines around the bases of the hills? That shouldn’t be there at all. So while the map has the basic shape of what we designed originally, it’s really not accurate at all.

Let’s try out the other image that we drew as a Topographical Map. Close down SC4, doesn’t matter if you save, and then Delete the existing “City - New City.sc4″ file that has appeared in your Documents\SimCity 4\Regions\Test directory. This will allow your Region to open as empty the next time you start SC4; as once you have terraformed using a grayscale image, you can’t redo it with another until the region is back to its original state. 

So, open up SC4 again, Load your test region and go through the process above again, but this time use the topographical map that you saved earlier at 65x65 pixels. Wait for it to load and then see what you have. 

Well, I have an asston of water! This is because (according to what I’ve read online) I did something to my files when I was messing with mods and made it so that my game doesn’t read depth properly. You may or may not see an island at this point BUT if you do, don’t panic! There is a fix which I will talk about a bit later. 

If your SC4 is behaving properly, then you should see something like this:

Much more accurate to our drawing than the 3D generated height map was! Of course, it’s not a perfectly smooth slope, but that can easily be fixed by adding additional rings to your topo map: the more segments, the smoother the result. 

So let’s say you look at this and decide you want to have a river running straight through your hill, no problem! 

head back into your photoshop file (I hope you remembered to undo after changing that size to 65x65!) and add another Solid Color layer. Mask it out and draw your river on there at whatever depth you’d prefer. I made mine 70. 

Resize and resave your bmp image, delete the City in your Regions folder and open up SC4 again. use this new image to generate your region terrain and take a look at what’s changed! 

Yay! A River Runs through It! 

Now, before we move on, what to do when your map is being flooded by water?! the answer is the SC4 Terraformer tool. This is a third-party program that allows editing of SC4 maps outside of SC4. It’s still pretty jank as far as controls go BUT it is still a lot better than trying to work entirely in SC4. The most important thing we’re going to use it for, however, is Raising or Lowering the terrain. 

*You will need to register for the site in order to download the program and, keep in mind that this is old software. It can be installed on Win 10 (not sure about 11) but you will need to read the comments on the download page to find the workarounds to make it work. I promise, it’s not difficult. 

Once you’ve downloaded SC4Terraformer, go ahead and launch it. I should open up to your SC4 Directory but if not, locate that and scroll down to find your “Test” folder that you made in Regions. 

You will see your Region pop up with your lone little dot up top. Don’t change anything and just click “OK”

And this is what you should see! Get yourself familiarized with the controls and center your water-flooded map so that you can see everything. 

Under the Dropdown on the left labeled “Global Tools” you will find buttons for several things, but what we want to focus on right now is “Raise Terrain”.

Click that and you will be asked how much you would like to raise the terrain by. I usually start with 20 and then lower the number as I get closer to revealing the land beneath the water. 

Repeat the “Raise Terrain” action until you are happy with the result. 

There we go! Now our map looks correct and is not an island. Click “Save” when you are happy with the result.

*You may have noticed, but you can do all of the same terraforming that you can in SC4 with this tool. You can also move freely which is a huge step up form SC4′s static isometric views. If you want to do any smoothing, or edits, this is a good place to try things out. You CAN Undo, but only directly after you perform an action. There is no infinite undo. So work slowly and carefully. 

Once you’ve saved and opened up SC4 again, you may notice that your region thumbnail looks a little bit different from usual. This is normal and it’s just because we used Terraformer to make edits. Once you enter the Region it will look totally normal. 

So if your map looks good to you, start adding roads and finishing up your planning in SC4! You can make further tweaks to the terrain now or wait until you get the map into TS2 to do some terrain editing. Once you are happy, save your City/Region and transfer it over to TS2 the way you normally would. 

And that is it for making Custom Regions in SC4 for TS2! It’s...a process, but it’s a process that you can control and tweak to your liking as long as you have patience and the willingness to experiment. 

If anyone can figure out how to make 3D height maps work flawlessly without needing to go a 2D route, I would be so grateful if you’d share, but this is what has worked great for me so far with this round of experimentation. 

Here are some links that were immensely helpful to me when making maps. 

LAND AND WATER RGB VALUES

C.O.R.I.M.A.P.S. FOR SIMCITY4

GRAYSCALE VALUES VS SC4 REGION HEIGHT

This should be the end (my fingers hurt) but I’ll just show you one more thing: How to use that 2D map you drew in 3D for further fun! 

Remember that segmented Plane that we made at the very beginning of the tutorial? 

Even if you didn’t use 3D to plan your map initially, you can definitely use it now!

Go back into Photoshop and Save a larger version of that Topo Map that you used to make your SC4 .bmp. 

Then, back in 3D, use that map as a basis for Displacement on your segmented plane. Displacement tools are going to be different from program to program so I can’t tell you how it works in yours, but a bit of Google-fu should tell you what you need to know. Adjust your heights till they look correct to eye and then...

You’ll have a scale-accurate(ish) 3D map of your TS2 terrain! “How is this useful, mortia?” you ask? It’s super useful! With this you can build ‘hood deco that is accurate to your ‘hood! Existing deco doesn’t fit right? Bring it into 3D and adjust it to fit perfectly! Wanna make rocky cliffs to cover your mountainsides that you can see from lot view? Make them in here and adjust till you’re happy!

Again, it’s NOT perfect BUT it is a solid place to start. You will need to tweak heights and things once you see your custom pieces in the game, but I hope that all of this will ultimately be helpful to some of you out there!