#no rendering. only flats and chunks

[payasita]

covet thy neighbor

[genericpuff]

On today's episode of "Rachel exaggerates things to make herself sound cooler-"

Soooo this is a lie.

No seriously, this has to be a lie. I don't make these kinds of accusations willy-nilly. This has to be a lie.

First of all, if her file sizes are truly 11GB for each episode, that would mean her file resolutions would have to be stupid high, and I just ain't buying that when so much of her art comes out looking like fried chicken.

But again, look at the backgrounds. Crystal clear. Which supports my theory that Rachel has her assistants draw the characters flat and exports them as PNG's so that she (or another one of her assistants) can slap the backgrounds in afterwards which is why when they pinch and zoom, the backgrounds look fine (as they're added in afterwards) and the characters look like they've been drawn with chalk. The shading itself isn't deep fried though, which is, again, because Rachel adds in the shading in post after her assistants have sent her all the flats.

Anyways, moving on from that, if her file sizes are actually 11GB per episode, that would mean her resolution would have to be STUPID high and that would mean there's no excuse for panels to look like this. This is not a Webtoons compression problem, Webtoons does compress images for you if you don't do it yourself but they don't result in specifically deep fried textures like this, that's ALL happening on Rachel's side. If it were a Webtoons' problem, the entire comic would look like that, not just select panels.

This is also what the panels tend to look like in book form. The book art is clearly very compressed and blurred from being too low of a resolution for print, which means either the editor is not being provided the root files, or the root files weren't ever that crisp to begin with. Either one is plausible and either one isn't good.

But of course, I'm not going to make these claims without my own proof. So here's the file sizes for Episode 12 of Rekindled, the longest episode in the series so far by panel count and page length, clocking in at 42 panels and an average of 25 layers per page (and that's including the text layers which adds a good chunk on its own, the actual art layers are like, half of that).

Also, here's what a pinch and zoom panel in Rekindled comes out looking like:

You can still pick up on some fuzziness, but the lineart doesn't look straight up chunky like it does in LO.

Meanwhile, one of my longest episodes of TIME GATE: [AFTERBIRTH] has a file size that honestly shocked me with how small it was.

Guess how many panels that episode had?

Go on, guess. Take a second. Compare it to the file size of Episode 12 of Rekindled, take your best educated guess. Time Gate: [AFTERBIRTH] is also a full color webtoon with full shading and rendering that I used to upload once a week. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Ninety-seven.

Ninety. Seven.

Not only is that more panels than what LO dishes out on a weekly basis, but its overall file size doesn't even come out to be 10% of what Rachel is claiming LO's file sizes to be.

This is what Time Gate: [AFTERBIRTH] looks like, by the way:

(don't mind the blurriness that's working against my point, that's Tumblr, not me LMAO)

But, let's face it, I didn't want to just use my own examples as a comparison, because that seems unfair. I'm not an Originals creator, I just put myself under similar pressures as one because I'm an idiot who tries too hard.

So I asked one of my Originals pals. I will not disclose their name, but they are someone who works for Webtoons Originals and has similar panel requirements and deadlines. They also work with a similar flatting + shade workflow as LO, they have cel-shaded colors and bold flat coloring.

When I asked them how big their file sizes were, they said that at 2500px width - similar to what I draw at, 2400px width - and 200-300k pixel length (again, they're drawing an entire episode on one canvas) their episode file sizes come out to roughly one gigabyte, very rarely much bigger than that.

Rachel is full of shit. This is some Tommy Tallarico level shit, exaggerating stupid things that don't matter to try and make herself seem impressive. It isn't impressive. It makes her look like an unorganized dunderhead at best, and at worst, makes her look like a flat out liar who needs to prop herself up on the dumbest shit to make herself look good. File gigabyte size isn't impressive or indicative of anything, you can achieve high quality art without your file size amounting to 11 GB, and let's face it, Lore Olympus is not high quality art. You're telling me art like this:

amounts to 11 GB?

Now the only way I can see this happening is if maybe, maybe she had like, a bajillion layers full of garbage-

Oh. Oh no. Lore Olympus. Is a sprite comic.*

(*edit for clarification: I've had people confused over what I mean by sprite comic because LO clearly isn't made with 16/8 bit sprites. Sprite comic was a term universally used back in the day for comics that reused the same body parts, heads, expressions, etc. much like how sprites are designed, often keeping an entire file full of different layers made up of these assets to make for easier development. This technique was utilized in comics like CTRL + ALT + DEL. LO is definitely not literally a sprite comic but the way its layers are designed feel very much like something that's being cobbled together like 'sprite' comics were. I'm old.)

Even with these pics for proof, with 600+ layers on one canvas, if there's barely anything on those layers, then it still wouldn't make up that 11GB file size because the amount of layers doesn't necessarily add to file size on its own, at least not by that much, unless they're actually filled with stuff. And again, Rachel's art in LO doesn't scream "highly detailed with many layers". It only had many layers because for some reason she insists on working that way even to its own detriment.

From the looks of it, Rachel's importing all of her assistants' PNG's as separate layers and adding all the shading and the extra details on their own separate layers and basically dividing everything up into tiny bite sized pieces. That's the only clear explanation I can come up with. But if so, that means she's being INCREDIBLY inefficient with her workflow that it's amounting to SIX HUNDRED+ LAYERS AT 11 GB PER EPISODE. THAT IS ABSURD. THIS COMIC IS WAY TOO LOW QUALITY TO JUSTIFY THESE FILE SIZES AND LAYER COUNTS. RACHEL DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK SHE'S DOING-

She's also very clearly using the cloud as a way to backup her work and work with her assistants. God knows how much she's spending on cloud space because of her own incompetency.

Honestly, at this point, as I sit here playing the Photoshop equivalent of Cookie Clicker, clicking the 'new layer' button over and over and over again with my mouse to truly understand what it would feel like to operate at 600+ layers per episode of a webtoon, I'm more inclined to believe she's just lying. Capping. Pulling shit out of her ass. Straight up making shit up. It wouldn't be the first time she's done that. But also because the alternative is a lot more grim - the #1 best selling webtoon on the platform is being operated like the world's worst group project and still coming out on the other side looking like deep fried garbage despite its stupid high file size.

[ceilidho]

tell me something nuclear winter ghoap NOW!! (bo)

BO!!!!! ok you wanna read what i've got so far?? it's not very much but here's what i have for my project that's tentatively titled "permafrost"

At first, it comes as a series of lights in the distance, a gentle rain like a cascade of falling stars. And then, it goes dark.

It happens over the course of several hours. By the time the dust settles—and it never settles, never really settles, always hangs in the air and renders it unbreathable, unlivable—and the sirens quiet and the last few screams die off, there’s hardly anything left. Hardly anything left living. 

The initial blast doesn’t reach up the country and, for that, Johnny lasts the months after the first nuclear bombs are dropped. Somedays, he can barely recollect the hours after the initial impact; they come back in foggy chunks, stumbling out of his house, boots crunching over the glass that had been blown clean out of the windows, covering his eyes against the flash of light and staring out into the distance at the mushrooming cloud of smoke just cresting the horizon. The bottom falling out of him at the sight.

More bombs hit other parts of the continent, several in Russia, throughout Asia and down into Africa, and across the pond as well. The world goes up in flames in an hour. In his cabin up in the Scottish Highlands, crutches jammed under his arms in his haste to limp his way outside, he sees the blast and then hears it a minute or so later. A roar rippling through the air. 

It shatters the world. 

In the present day, the boat sways where it’s roped to the wharf, the waters choppy. Johnny sits on the deck in a foldout chair, fastening a new head onto his ax, fixing the metal wedge over the eye to hold it in place. The blade is cleaner than the one that’d just cracked, sharp from being run over the whetstone. He pulls his scarf back over his nose when it slips down his face.

His cabin in the Highlands hadn’t been a viable choice for longer than a few months, not after the cold had finally begun to set in. Too far up north. He’d made his way down south over the course of weeks, bringing with him only as much as he could carry. A bittersweet goodbye to the summer home of his youth, a hand laid flat against the door before turning on his heel and starting the long trek south.

It’s not any warmer farther down south, particularly around the coast where the wind gets bitterly cold, sinking into the bone. He’d found the boat on a whim, the only structure still relatively intact and, most importantly, isolated.

Making his home on an old boat might not win him any awards for brightest idea, but the downside to traveling further into the country, away from the untenable glacial weather up north, is that it coincides with the areas where the bombs were dropped, leaving limited options for shelter.

Months pass. Years pass. 

His ankle healed funny all those years ago from prolonged bouts of starvation before desperation kicked in and from traveling miles on foot. He’d driven a portion of the way down north until the roads had outlived their usefulness—asphalt cracked, chunks of bedrock spiking up out of the ground. The rest he’d managed with his crutches and a single backpack, leaving the car to rot some three hundred or so miles up the country.

It's some strange occurrence, Johnny thinks at age thirty-something (he’s lost count), that his lot be murky, for death to miscount. He witnesses an apocalypse and comes out the other side. Happenstance. Coincidence, that he’s discharged from the military not a month before the first bomb hits London and leaves a crater that never fills, that never heals. A pockmark in the earth. 

His lips twist bitterly. The price of a long life is a barbed and slick soul. 

​​Immortality sometimes occurs to him, or godship, but neither option rests well with him and Johnny wonders if this is how gods are born: not of sea foam but of inevitability, of miscalculation, of death's err, of smallness, of acorns he carried as a child through pastures behind his summer house.

He sniffs. Cuts that memory off at the quick.

Johnny gives himself a couple more minutes to fiddle around with the ax before looping it into the gear loops on his backpack and buckling it in.

[MISSING STUFF HERE]

Much of the city has returned to nature, rubble encased in snow and ice; the stores have long been looted or reduced to ash from the blast. 

[oddygaul]

Zenless Zone Zero

Well, I’ve been playing the shit out of this game, so fair warning, there will be significant brainrot ahead.

Overall, I really dig it. I’m a huge mark for character action games, and well-done life sims tend to suck me in; Zenless Zone Zero is nailing both those aspects pretty damn well. In fact, it’s nailing them well enough that… how do I put this… it starts to slip into the territory of being A Good Game Generally, rather than just a gacha. And while this is a big accomplishment for ZZZ, this also puts it into direct conversation with other full-price games, resulting in its gacha elements causing more friction than Honkai Star Rail’s ever did*.

*I’ll be comparing this to HSR a lot, because I play way too much of both and they’re made by the same developer. I recognize that it is pretty odd and potentially even problematic to A / B compare them when I could be looking at the game through the lens of, you know, Gaming At Large. But hey, that’s why this is a subjective journal and not a holistic review blog! It is what it is.

So, the aesthetic of this game fuckin rules - it’s like, late 90s to early 2000s VHS-core. The main characters run a Blockbuster, for Christ’s sake. Presentation-wise (and systems-wise, and, hell, music-wise), ZZZ is obviously borrowing a lot from the Persona series, but like… great? I’d love it if more things cribbed that style and made it their own, from the confidant hangouts, to the small but comfy explorable areas, to the dynamic menus with edgy character poses. The character design itself is all superb, all the way down to the crowd NPCs - some the shopkeepers here have cooler designs than the main characters of some other games. Even aside from the designs, ZZZ is doing a lot with lighting and color desaturation that really lends it its own unique vibe. They actually have a cohesive artstyle in here! wild.

The presentation of the story is also killer. Sure, a decent chunk of the conversations are just models lip-flapping at each other - although they at least emote and pose a bit here, unlike the Star Rail dialogue scenes with their demure princess waves. In the main story, though, we get not only a heap of fairly lengthy cutscenes, but also this really cool comic panel-style presentation.

I feel like there was a bit of a trend in the PS3/360 era of games to present a game’s story in this comic panel / storyboard style. I understood the motivation: games increasingly demanded a more involved, consistent storytelling approach, rather than the ‘One big rendered cutscene at the beginning and end’ they used to get away with, and the generation’s increased visual fidelity meant that doing even basic, in-engine cutscenes took a lot more resources to make something half-decent. In Spyro the Dragon on PS1 you could get away with a fun little 15-second gag with a barely animated polygonal yeti or whatever; in the PS3 era, you were going up against tryhards like Metal Gear Solid 4. Amidst this landscape, the pitch of having your illustrators pretty up some storyboards and put them in the game sounds like it’d save a lot of work - plus, consoles were finally outputting a high enough resolution that this sort of flat image wouldn’t be compressed to hell.

Thing is, I always kinda hated that approach. In some cases, I think that’s the popular opinion - I fuckin love Bayonetta, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone defend its weird slideshow cutscenes. Even in games where the execution is perfectly fine, though, it rubbed me the wrong way. I think of Infamous - objectively, the art’s solid and fits the tone of the game, and the motion graphics aim to capture some of the dynamism typical cutscenes would provide. Despite all that, it still feels cheap to me - all of the panning, effects, and graphic imagery feel like they’re trying to polish up something that inherently doesn’t fit.

In ZZZ, though, I’m loving every one I come across. It’s obviously still done for efficiency reasons - there’s already a handful of characters that exist only in these panel scenes, saving the team the effort of having to model and rig them. But the freedom this allows for staging and storytelling is huge; the characters are more expressive here than anywhere else in the game, and we’re able to see situations with huge crowds and new locales much more often than would be possible in typical cinematics. And the illustrations are genuinely good, too - full of character, cool poses and creative compositions/angles.

if everything actually had to be modeled, there's no way we would've gotten Legally Blonde Nicole

Plus, the cutscenes are constant, and boy do I love the animation here. It feels so rare nowadays for a high-budget game to do stylized 3D animation of this ilk. Your biggest budget games are all going for the cinematic look, and pushing realism as much as they can - and while I know an immense amount of work and craft goes into animating something like The Last of Us, boy, I just could not care less about something so lacking in flair*. Even bigger properties that use a stylized artstyle these days, like Breath of the Wild, still tend to lean towards fairly naturalistic animation. Zenless Zone Zero’s cutscenes, on the other hand, spin and stretch motherfuckers around like we’re back on the PS2, are filled with forced perspective, and I am absolutely living for it. It’s not even reserved only for bombastic action scenes, either - we get honest to god character acting-focused conversation cutscenes.

*Seriously, take me back to the Naughty Dog that animated Jak & Daxter. Jak’s hero animation is top tier to this day

Of course, the combat animation slaps too; each of the playable agents is absolutely dripping with character. Even characters whose designs initially left me cold won me over once I saw the amount of care put into their movement and combo strings. It’s honestly shocking to me that this is the same studio that made Genshin Impact, a game I dropped after about 2 hours because of how lifeless all the animation felt*. Unique run cycles for every character, actual non-human designs, the flourishes everyone has when stopping mid-combo to snap them back to idle, the absolute synergistic audiovisual bliss of the parry… it’s really impressive stuff from a young team.

*Same studio in name only, totally different team, I know, but still

Mechanically, I have some mixed feelings about the combat as a whole. Zenless Zone Zero is, without a doubt, aiming to present complexity and depth as a team battler - that is to say, it’s more about team synergy, tag combos, and knowing who to use when, rather than soloing as any particular character. Nonetheless, I really would’ve appreciated individual characters having a bit more depth to their movesets; a jump, a launcher, cancels, anything. As outstanding as all the animation work is, there’s some characters that only have a normal attack string on square and one special attack on triangle. Like, sub-Dynasty Warriors level of complexity here. It’s rough.

This is where ZZZ’s gacha nature gets a bit ugly: so far, more complex kits and skill expression are mostly locked behind rarity, which is kind of scummy. In Star Rail, for the most part, 4-star characters are defined as such due to their numbers: they still have mechanics and complexity, they just aren’t tuned as high as the limited characters. Hell, in some cases they have more complexity. Ruan Mei is an almost incomparably stronger unit than Asta, but Ruan Mei’s play pattern is fucking boring: you use skill every three turns when it runs out. Asta, meanwhile, basically has her own risk & reward minigame that demands more thoughtful SP management.

In ZZZ, on the other hand, the lower-rank characters straight up have less going on in their kits. Nicole has like… one tech, sorta. Anby has one single animation cancel to chain her normal into her special quicker. Lucy’s only skill expression is choosing whether to tap special or hold special. Meanwhile, Zhu Yuan, a limited character, has a normal string that bounces between melee and ranged attacks, can be dodge-canceled at any point in the combo to branch into variations of the string, and a hold-normal attack string that’s completely different and has the same branching dodge-cancel tech.

It’s one thing to lock raw damage and meta viability behind a gacha, but locking the characters that are mechanically more interesting to play straight up sucks. If I hadn’t been lucky enough on the standard banner to pull exactly the two characters I find the most mechanically satisfying, I don’t know that I’d still be playing - and this is the point where ZZZ begs comparison to other, non-live service character action games. Sure, it’s probably not fair to compare a random A-rank’s moveset to Devil May Cry V’s iteration of Dante, a feature-creeped nightmare of a kit 3 console generations in the making. But what about Sengoku Basara Sumeragi, my personal character-action GOAT? By all accounts a mid-budget title, yet it offers 40 full characters chock-full of more unique mechanics and animation cancels than you can shake a stick at.

Fuck, can we please get a new Sengoku Basara? Please? I’m desperate out here. I’ll take anything, y’all.

There’s also the inherent issue that plagues every action RPG (usually deftly avoided by the character action genre), which is the delicate balance of player success depending on the numbers vs actual mechanical skill - a balancing act made even more noticeable due to the gacha genre-standard of characters taking weeks of grinding to level up. This is a topic for another day, but suffice to say, a big part of the reason Honkai Star Rail works for me as a very pretty version of Cookie Clicker is because of the Autoplay option. In Zenless Zone Zero, if you’re not willing to grind out the same mob fight for a week or two, you’re gonna hit an endgame roadblock of doing chip damage to a boss you’ve mechanically mastered because you’re underleveled, and boy, that never feels good.

For all those issues stemming from the gacha, I will say, it’s great that the story missions let you use the characters that are actually supposed to be present for those missions, even if you don’t own them. Aside from how nice it is to have an opportunity to put the whole roster through their paces, it goes a long way for actually getting invested in the story. Honkai Star Rail’s storytelling is a hot mess for many reasons, but it’s always particularly jarring rolling up to a sidequest at like, a local theater troupe with a wanted space criminal, the sitting president of a completely different planet, a ten year old child, and a shirtless cyborg cowboy, none of whom have canonically met each other; ZZZ’s approach sidesteps this issue. The proxy angle even provides a pretty valid diegetic explanation for why agents that don’t know each other might be working together.

Now that we’ve sort of meandered back to the story after talking about animation led us on a long detour - the story is surprisingly solid. In particular, I really appreciate how straightforward the writing is. I don’t know if the issue lies with the original text or the localization, but Star Rail’s dialogue, even in simple missions, tends to be incredibly meandering and overstuffed; ZZZ is a lot better about letting all its characters talk like actual humans. It also helps that the plot so far is a lot more grounded, and spends more time focusing on each faction’s group dynamics rather than the overarching plot. These games live and die by their characters, so leaning into those strengths is a smart move.

Zenless Zone Zero is, unfortunately, fully in line with Hoyo’s weird conservative politics - in particular, 1.0 and 1.1 are absolutely stuffed full of copaganda. With how many safety regulation jokes they made at the construction company, I initially hoped they’d lampoon the police faction a bit, or make a commentary on how comically heavily armed New Eridu’s police force are. In a vacuum, Zhu Yuan shouting combat lines like “Stop resisting!” or “Freeze, hands up!” while blasting someone with her gigantic, ‘JUSTICE’-emblazoned rocket launcher shotgun feels like it ought to be satire. Every time we talk to the officers, though, it’s just line after line about their solemn duty to protect the people of the city, how essential and important they are for the community, and so on and so on.

This wholehearted embrace of the world’s current power structure is something Zenless Zone Zero approaches in nearly the exact same way as Star Rail. In both games, your playable character is someone that’s sort of operating outside the law - in Star Rail, as the maverick organization that is the Astral Express, while in ZZZ you work as an illegal proxy. Despite this setup, any time the protagonists come into contact with a governing body, they are no less than thrilled to help them enforce the will of the law.

In Star Rail, you aid the local governments (one of which is an undemocratic monarchy) in committing massive cover-ups to hide their failures from the populace not once but twice. In ZZZ, you aid the police to an obsequious degree - playing along with them to not arouse suspicion is one thing, but helping them organize a fucking community day on Sixth Street? Fuck that. Hell, said community day is even shown to initially be DOA because none of the local residents trust the police - and you best believe we get two full scenes of the MCs changing the resident’s minds, resulting in them spouting shit about “Oh, it was our fault for judging the police too harshly - they really do have our best interests at heart!”

is it tho

There’s an argument to be made that the N.E.P.S. are a little different, given that they exist in a post-apocalyptic world with monsters popping up every day - and ZZZ’s copaganda is certainly a little less flagrant than something like Spider-Man helping the NYPD install civilian surveillance networks in Insomniac’s Spider-Man. And, sure, perhaps this can help excuse why they post fully armored, rifle-wielding soldiers in the Lumina Square DMV, and provides some justification that their existence is more helpful than the real world’s civilian-murdering property guards.

Thing is, though, at every turn you’re hit with dialogue and situations which make it clear that, no, they’re the normal cops. Every other sidequest seems to involve calling the N.E.P.S. in on somebody or helping with an investigation, and for every time we see them handle ethereal activity, there’s two instances of them being called in for petty property theft or something similarly minor - even the playable character has heaps of dialogue choices threatening to call the police on someone*. Much like Star Rail’s reactionary politics were strangely at odds with the ‘blazing a new path’ ideals of the trailblaze, Zenless Zone Zero’s obsession with the police puts a damper on its underground, counterculture aesthetic.

*Including a case where both options threatened this, leaving me without a non-narc dialogue choice.

illustration by Lv01KOKUEN

And finally… I don’t know where to fit this in, so I guess it just goes in its own little section at the end here. Lots of people, myself included, have touched on the Persona inspirations - and they’re certainly significant. One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention as a huge influence is Yasuhiro Nightow’s Kekkai Sensen / Blood Blockade Battlefront. From its sense of style to its worldbuilding, ZZZ damn near feels like fanfic to me. Hell, it’s right in the name - BBB? ZZZ? And this is on top of the dimensional crossover / big city vibe, the retro fashion, the different factions. Victoria Housekeeping might as well be Libra 2.0 - Von Lycaon is a damn near perfect 50/50 expy of Klaus and Stephen Starphase. And then Belle / Wise, who assist these powerful fighters in a noncombat role just like Leo, also turn out to have some sort of special magical eyes granted to them by untold powers from within the dimensional rift??

I’m here for it, don’t get me wrong - love Nightow. But that can’t be coincidence, right?

[iztea]

Something about my drawing feels off , i only got into digital drawing few weeks ago and I'm stuck at the same point and lost .. any advice?

mmm okay first of all this is really good- first impressions-wise, the proportions and anatomy look very solid so there are no major glaring issues so to speak

if you were to ask me, what i think this artwork needs is that sort of 'volume' or depth that most beginner digital artoworks lack. You can achieve this sort of volume in two ways depending on the style you are going for: either by improving the lineart, or by treating the lines just as part of the sketch and painting over them for a more.. ''painterly/rendered'' look if you want to keep the lineart in, what i suggest is adding some "line weight" so that the artwork doesn't look so flat. What i mean by this is to thicken the lines where body parts would naturally overlap (like the neck and shoulder, the nostrils area, the corners of the mouth as well as the tip of the lips etc) and where shadows would normally be for the illusion of volume. After that, i'd also add more shadows and color variation in the colouring layer so that the skin looks more lively and again, for that volume. You can do it with some dark blue or orange on a multiply or an overlay layer, just experiment a bit with colors and blending modes. If you want a more messy/painterly look (which is more down my alley or in line with my artstyle), what i'd personally do is i'd create a new layer on top of everything and just paint over the lines with broader strokes and a darker color in an attempt to add some volume to the shapes and to make the artwork look more cohesive and less "digital" because at the moment, i can tell that it is made up of a Lineart layer, then a Colouring Layer below, that very religiously follows the lineart layer and then maybe a layer on top of that for the other colors and the hair. This is a very common digital art process and a good one to keep in mind but a little secret i can give out that i've noticed in 80% of the artists who have this sort of drawing process is that they will always, always merge everything in one layer at the end and adjust things as they go. They will not keep the layers separated and just never revisit them in the process, despite what it may look like. There will always be something that needs fixing and they will fix it as they go so i suggest doing the same and being a bit more "freeform" with your layers

Anywayss, besides that, I'd also introduce some color variation like in the previous method. As a general tip, try to move the color slider around and don't just shade with a darker variation of the base color. I like how the hair is painted and the shine and everything, it looks very good and everything is pretty much set in place, i'd just render it even more, make it More voluminous. It's just missing a little pop a color: i'd add some blueish gray hues in the brown hair and for the purple hair i'd make it more rich by adding some deep dark blue hues and some faint yellow highlights (bc purple and yellow are complementary colors blabla) As for the shape, think of the hair as chunks of volume that reflect light and that are also affected by gravity.. or as spaghetti if u like flat hair like me bsjsjd That's all i could think of; Again, it's very good and promising considering you started just a few weeks ago, so keep going at it! I hope it was at least somewhat helpful and that i wasn't being too technical with the wording (and that it made sense)

[desertfangs]

Soul of an Artist Marius/Daniel - 1061 words - Prince Lestat Era Fluff

Marius paints flowers on the walls of an abandon house and he and Daniel discuss art.

My last entry for @vcmicroficmay for the prompt "spellbound." No Wal-Mart in sight. I cut 300 words and still couldn't get it under 1000 but at this point, I figure it's close enough.

This pure fluff with like... a teaspoon of angst. Sorry not sorry.

Whole text beneath the cut or cross-posted to AO3.

Daniel watched as Marius’ paint brush moved in swift, effortless motions and vibrant flowers sprang to life on the decrepit wall. Watching Marius paint was spellbinding, the brush dancing over the makeshift canvas in elegant movements. 

The flowers were beautiful colors: violet, orange, and yellow. It was incredible how quickly the empty wall became a lush garden. 

Marius stepped back to examine his work and then glanced over his shoulder at Daniel, who sat on the grimy floor with his back against the opposite wall. 

“You don’t have to stay,” Marius said. “You must be bored.”

“Never,” Daniel scoffed. “I could watch you paint for centuries.” 

Marius laughed, the sound low and rich. It washed over Daniel like a warm wave. “I doubt you’d tolerate it for even a decade.” 

Daniel smiled. “Is that a dare? Because we’d need to find a much larger house for that.” 

Marius made a sound, a mixture of amusement and exasperation. He continued adding flowers to the vines. 

“Why don’t you paint the walls of our flat?” Daniel asked. 

Marius’ brush stopped mid-stroke. “Would you really have me rendering gardens on the walls while you try to watch your television programs?” 

Daniel snorted. “I’d rather watch this than Star Trek. ” 

Marius’ expression turned dubious before he turned and examined his work. Satisfied the mural was done, he added more paint to his palette before rounding the corner. This next wall had windows, or used to, though the glass had blown out leaving only rusty, metal frames. 

Marius lifted his brush and then stopped.

“Come here, Daniel.” 

Daniel stood, moving to Marius’ side obediently. Marius dipped the brush into the paint, a mixture of red and yellow that made a deep orange, and handed the brush to Daniel.

Daniel stared at it curiously.

He was no stranger to paint brushes, of course. He’d gone through hundreds of them in the creation of his model worlds, small brushes that his deft, long fingers manipulated expertly to paint tiny houses, trees, and buildings. This brush was larger and the canvas before him was blank.

“What should I paint?” Daniel asked. 

“Whatever you wish.” 

He stared at the orange paint and suddenly a memory came to him of poppies weaving in the wind alongside a highway in California. He pressed the brush to the wall slowly, his movements stilted and uncertain. He managed to shape the petals into a convincing outline of a poppy. 

Marius smiled, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “You have an artist’s soul.” 

Daniel laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.” He handed the paint brush back to Marius, who within minutes filled in the fine details, making the poppy burst forth from the wall as if it were growing there. 

“It’s astounding how you bring these things to life,” Daniel said. “It’s a true art.” 

Marius raised an eyebrow. “Like the worlds you built.” 

Daniel thought of his models, long abandoned and rotting in rooms in houses he no longer visited. Little worlds that sometimes looked impossibly real, as if a wizard had shrunk a chunk of the real world down to miniature scale. He’d been so proud of them. He’d spent hours painting and perfecting his methods, figuring out how to make the water look wet and the greenery lush. It had been an obsession that had captured his wounded mind, but it had been a passion, nonetheless.  

“You think my models are art?” Daniel asked. 

Marius tilted his head, taken aback. “Of course. What else would they be?” 

Daniel shrugged. “You just never seemed very impressed by them. Or that I used kits sometimes.” 

Marius was silent for a moment. Then his shoulders sank. “I may have been a little wary of being too indulgent of your fragile mental state.” 

Daniel frowned. Marius had provided him the means and space to build his models. That had certainly been indulgent.

 “Supportive and tolerant, yes,” Marius answered his thoughts, “but I wanted you to come out of your obsession. Those model worlds captivated you so totally.” 

It was true. Daniel remembered hours upon hours focused on only making the worlds as he saw them in his mind, the houses on the hills, the train tracks laid just so, the little roads winding over the landscape. He would pass out at his work table or on the floor of his work room when sunrise overcame him. He remembered nights where Marius spoke to him and he didn’t register more than the sound of his voice. 

“The models were a distraction. Sometimes too much so.” Marius set his brush on the edge of the palette and placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t art. They were created with great passion, that much was obvious.” 

Daniel smiled. He was proud of what he created, and though at times the memory of his single-minded obsession felt strangely alien, he missed having an ongoing project. 

“Perhaps we can come up with a project together,” Marius suggested. “You can build a structure and I’ll use it as a canvas.”

“Yeah, okay,” Daniel says. The thought of building something with his hands again was exciting and frightening all at once. He knew his fixation was a symptom of his madness, not the cause of it, but it was hard not to see them as linked. 

Marius smiled, easing the knot in Daniel’s stomach. He would never encourage him to do anything that might jeopardize his hard-won sanity. He lifted his hand and ruffled Daniel’s short, ashen hair. 

From outside came sound of mortals approaching. They were down the old dirt road a ways, far enough no mortal would hear them yet. Marius growled in annoyance. Daniel helped gather the paint and supplies into a bag, while Marius collected his brushes and tucked them beneath his arm. 

They slipped out of the abandoned house and made it all the way to the main road long before the mortals arrived. Marius frowned as he walked, clearly frustrated at the interruption. 

“Like I was saying, our dining nook could use some color,” Daniel said.  

Marius turned, almost as if startled. “We don’t use the dining nook.” 

“All the more reason to decorate its walls.” Daniel bumped him playfully in the shoulder with his own shoulder as they walked and Marius smiled. 

“As I said, the soul of an artist,” Marius said. 

[thecreaturecodex]

Protean, Yexhul

"Naga" © Igor Klymenko, accessed at his ArtStation here

[This monster is picking up a plot thread I laid down years ago: how to introduce slaadi into the Pathfinder cosmology. It also continues me use of anagrams as the namesakes of proteans. This one is fairly short, so I suspect it's going to be one of the more solvable ones.]

Protean, Yexhul CR 16 CN Outsider (extraplanar) This serpentine creature has four arms, each ending in a clawed hand. Instead of a single head, a riot of dozens of small necks and heads grow from its shoulders like the branches of a great tree. The scales of its chest have eyespots, like the feathers of a peacock.

Yexhuls are the proteans that observe and meddle with animal evolution. Yexhuls push animals in new directions, both by introducing organisms into new habitats and by physically altering organisms, taking what is typically a slow and orderly process and interjecting sometimes bizarre flights of fancy. The touch of a yexhil can alter the abilities of an organism permanently, and the transformations they imbue are heritable. A number of the magical beasts found on Material worlds, especially those that are incongruous hybrids of two animals, are yexhul creations.

No two fights with a yexhul are likely to progress the same way, as these creatures can alter their bodies on the fly. They also have an experimental approach to violence, changing their abilities in different ways for different fights, and summoning different animals to assist them in combat. Although they have many heads, a yexhul can only bite a single target at once, striking with all of their jaws simultaneously (unless it gives itself more bite attacks with its acclimation ability). If their enemies are gaining the upper hand, a yexhul will turn them into something harmless with baleful polymorph, or use primal regression to disable their ability to cast spells.

Most other types of proteans distrust yexhuls, as they were the creators of the Spawning Stone. That continent-sized chunk of reality brought to the Maelstrom was an enormous experiment in the survival of the fittest, and its “fittest”, the slaadi, swiftly escaped the Spawning Stone and eventually the Maelstrom entirely, running amok through the planes. Yexhuls, for their part, consider the slaadi a resounding success, and they are among the proteans more likely to work with slaadi than against them. Annunaki are a species that have a great dislike for yexhuls, and try to exterminate them when their paths cross.

One of the great philosophical debates among yexhuls concerns domestication.  Some yexhuls consider it a natural outgrowth of evolution, and use their abilities to make unusual species more likely to associate with humanoids and start the process of becoming domesticated. Other yexhuls consider artificial selection by any hands other than their own to be a grave insult. Some even “un-domesticate” animals, rendering livestock and pets aggressive and uncontrollable or helping feral populations adapt better to the wild. Other proteans encourage this infighting, as it keeps the yexhuls from conducting any more experiments as far-reaching as the Spawning Stone.

Yexhul    CR 16 XP 76,800 CN Large outsider (chaos, extraplanar, protean) Init +10; Senses all-around vision, blindsense 60 ft., darkvision 60 ft., Perception +26

Defense AC 31, touch 15, flat-footed 25 (-1 size, +6 Dex, +16 natural) hp 241 (21d10+126) Fort +15, Ref +18, Will +17 DR 15/lawful; Immune acid, electricity, sonic; Resist cold 10; SR 27 Defensive Abilities amorphous anatomy, freedom of movement

Offense Speed 40 ft., fly 60 ft. (perfect) Melee bite +27 (3d8+10 plus 1d6 cold), 4 claws +27 (1d6+7 plus 1d6 cold), tail slap +22 (1d12+3 plus 1d6 cold and grab) Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. (15 ft. with tail) Special Attacks constrict (1d12+7),powerful blows (bite), probing bite, rend (2 claws, 1d6+10), specialization, trample (DC 27, 1d8+10) Spell-like Abilities CL 16th, concentration +22 (+26 casting defensively) Constant—speak with animals At will—atavism (DC 20), hold animal (DC 18), magic circle vs. law (DC 19), pup shape (DC 19) 3/day—animal growth, baleful polymorph (DC 21), quickened chaos hammer (DC 20), summon nature’s ally VII (animals only) 1/day—animal shapes, plane shift (DC 23), polymorph any object (DC 24), primeval regression (DC 23)

Statistics Str 25, Dex 23, Con 23, Int 24, Wis20, Cha 22 Base Atk +21; CMB +29 (+33 grappling); CMD 46 Feats Combat Casting,Dodge,Flyby Attack, Great Fortitude,Greater Vital Strike, Improved Initiative,Improved Vital Strike, Mobility, Power Attack, Quicken SLA (chaos hammer), Vital Strike Skills Acrobatics +24, Bluff +27, Climb +25, Fly +18, Handle Animal +27, Intimidate +27, Knowledge (arcana, religion) +25, Knowledge (nature, planes) +28, Perception +26, Spellcraft +25, Stealth +26, Survival +26, Swim +25 Languages Abyssal, Protean, speak with animals SQ acclimation (7 points, energy attacks (cold), reach (tail), rend, trample) change shape (animal or magical beast, beast shape IV), wild empathy +27

Ecology Environment any (Maelstrom) Organization solitary, pair or council (3-6) Treasure standard

Special Abilities Acclimation (Su) A yexhul can alter its physical traits on the fly. It has a number of evolution points equal to 1/3 its Hit Dice, which it can spend on any evolution as if it were a summoner’s eidolon. It may take any evolution legal for a serpentine shape, and treats its Hit Dice as its summoner level for the purpose of qualifying for evolutions. A yexhul can change its acclimations by taking 1 full round, and can carry them over into its alternate forms with change shape if it so desires. Change Shape (Su) A yexhul may change shape at will, but does not heal when it reverts to its normal form. Probing Bite (Ex) The many heads of a yexhul strike simultaneously, but reach around obstacles. A yexhul’s bite ignores any cover short of total cover, as well as ignoring shield bonuses to Armor Class. Specialization (Su) As a standard action, a yexhul may touch a creature to alter its ability scores. An unwilling creature can resist this with a DC 26 Fortitude save. The creature touched gains a +6 bonus to one of its ability scores, but a -2 penalty to two of its other ability scores, as chosen by the yexhul. This is an instantaneous effect, and can only be removed with a break enchantment, limited wish, wish or miracle spell. This bonus is passed on to this creature’s offspring. If a creature’s Intelligence is raised above 3, it gains the ability to speak and understand one language of the yexhul’s choice (typically Protean). These penalties cannot lower a creature’s ability scores below 1. A creature that successfully saves is immune to the specialization of that yexhul for the next 24 hours. No creature can be specialized in this way more than once simultaneously. This is a polymorph effect, and the save DC is Charisma based. Wild Empathy (Ex) A yexhul can use wild empathy as a druid with a level equal to its Hit Dice.

[wildmendergame]

How we created the ideal water system for Wildmender

Over the last 4 years of work, we've created a gardening survival game in a desert world that let people create massive and complex oasis where each plant is alive. At the heart of a system-driven, procedurally generated ecology is a water simulation and terraforming system, and this post is to share a bit of how we built it.



We knew early on that the game would include some level of soil and water simulation, just as an outgrowth of wanting to simulate an ecosystem. The early builds used a simple set of flags for soil, which plants could respond to or modify, and had water present only as static objects. Each tile of soil (a 1x1 “meter” square of the game world) could be rock or sand, and have a certain level of fertility or toxicity. Establishing this early put limits on how much we could scale the world, since we knew we needed to store a certain amount of data for each tile.



Since the terrain was already being procedurally generated, letting players shape it to customize their garden was a pretty natural thing to add. The water simulation was added at first in response to this - flat, static bodies of water could easily create very strange results if we let the player dig terrain out from under them. Another neat benefit of this simulation was that it made water a fixed-sum resource - anything the player took out of the ground for their own use wasn’t available for plants, and vice versa. This really resonated well with the whole concept of desert survival and water as a critical resource.



The water simulation at its core is a grid-based solution. Tiles with a higher water level spread it to adjacent tiles in discrete steps. We broke the world up into “simulation cells” (of 32 by 32 tiles each) which let us break things like the water simulation into smaller chunks that we could compute in the background without interrupting the player. The amount of water in each tile is then combined with the height of the underlying terrain to create a water mesh for each simulation cell. Later on, this same simulation cell concept helped us with various optimizations - we could turn off all the water calculations and extra data on cells that didn’t have any water, which is most of the world.



Early on, we were mostly concerned with just communicating what was happening with simple blocks of color - but once the basic simulation worked, we needed to decide how the water should look for the final game. Given the stylized look we were building for the rest of the game, we decided the water should be similarly stylized - the blue-and-white colors made this critical resource stand out to the player more than a more muted, natural, transparent appearance did. White “foam” was added to create clear edges for any body of water (through a combination of screen depth, height above the terrain, and noise.)

We tweaked the water rendering repeatedly over the rest of the project, adding features to the simulation and a custom water shader that relied on data the simulation provided. Flowing water was indicated with animated textures based on the height difference, using a texturing technique called flowmaps. Different colors would indicate clean or toxic water. Purely aesthetic touches like cleaning up the edges of bodies of water, smooth animation of the water mesh, and GPU tessellation on high-end machines got added over time, as well.

The “simulation cell” concept also came into play as we built up the idea of biome transformations. Under the hood, living plants contribute “biomass” to nearby cells, while other factors like wind erosion remove biomass - but if enough accumulates, the cell changes to a new biome, which typically makes survival easier for both plants and players. This system provided a good, organic feel, and it fulfilled one of our main goals of making the player’s home garden an inherently safe and sheltered place - but the way it worked was pretty opaque to players. Various tricks of terrain texturing helped address this, showing changes around plants that were creating a biome transition before that transition actually happened.



As we fleshed out the rest of the game, we started adding new ways to interact with the system we already had. The spade and its upgrades had existed from fairly early, but playtesting revealed a big demand for tools that would help shape the garden at a larger scale. The Earthwright’s Chisel, which allowed the players to manipulate terrain on a larger scale such as digging an entire trench at once, attempted to do this in a way that was both powerful and imprecise, so it didn’t completely overshadow the spade.

We also extended the original biome system with the concept of Mothers and distinct habitats. Mothers gave players more direct control over how their garden developed, in a way that was visibly transformative and rewarding. Giving the ability to create Mothers as a reward for each temple tied back into our basic exploration and growth loops. And while the “advanced” biomes are still generally all better than the base desert, specializing plants to prefer their specific habitats made choosing which biome to create a more meaningful choice.



Water feeds plants, which produce biomass, which changes the biome to something more habitable that loses less water. Plants create shade and block wind-borne threats, which lets other plants thrive more easily. But if those plants become unhealthy or are killed, biomass drops and the whole biome can regress back to desert - and since desert is less habitable for plants, it tends to stay that way unless the player acts to fix it somehow. The whole simulation is “sticky” in important ways - it reinforces its own state, positive or negative. This both makes the garden a source of safety to the player, and allows us to threaten it - with storms, wraiths, or other disasters - in a way that demands players take action.

[decks-writing-blog]

The Borealis: Chapter Seven: A Lot to Hope For

Chapter One

Previous Chapter

~

Time froze. A sensation Gordon was familiar with by now. Which only made it more disconcerting. He was not in the mood for another interaction with the man with the briefcase.

“We’re not falling anymore?” Alyx said, shifting in his arms. He released her, allowing her to stand up, her feet planted properly on the floor. Whatever had happened had apparently also righted the ship. It had also lit up the hall, though that light was without a source and not right. “What the hell?”

Gordon stood too, flexing his hands to work out some of the tension in his body. Alyx being able to move too perhaps meant that the time freeze was due to the device. … Or that she’d been fully and firmly dragged into whatever the briefcase guy was planning.

Alyx reached up to adjust her headset. “BOA? Dr. Mossman, you there?”

“Busy,” came BOA’s reply, her voice laced with static.

No reply from Mossman.

“I guess the device is doing something at least. Let’s… go out if we can.” Stepping past Gordon, Alyx pushed lightly on the door panel. It pulled back, allowing her to step out onto the deck. After collecting his shotgun, Gordon followed.

Outside was… nothingness. Like when Gordon had stepped through that portal what felt like forever ago, a blank expanse of nothing surrounded him. The only difference – and the only reasons he didn’t immediately turn and run back – was that the whole ship was here too. A sturdy piece of something that clanked under his boots.

Despite its lights being off and no sun, the entirety of it was visible. There wasn’t any light though as there were no shadows or reflections, making everything looke odd and almost flat. Upon striding over to the railing and looking down, large chunks of ice were visible beneath the ship, surrounding the whole of it. No shadows or highlights on it either.

Alyx joined him. “Is this supposed to happen?”

Gordon lifted a hand to sign a, “Probably,” at her even though he had absolutely no idea. If it wasn’t supposed to happen though then this was very bad. They weren’t going to discuss that right now. The only thing worse than being stuck in stasis inside the void for twenty years would be if he’d been aware during it.

Not wanting to risk staying anywhere even close to the edge where matter met nothing, he left the railing. He made his way back to the doorway, still open, and continued in until he reached the command room.

Nothing was powered on, not even the lights. Despite that, like everything outside, it was all visible anyway, just without shadows. Not too dissimilar to looking at an incomplete 3D render unaffected by simulated lighting.

BOA’s orb hung limp over the command console. Upon walking closer for a better look, her eye was on. Waving a hand in front of it got no response though.

Alyx walked up behind him, the thud of her boots on the metal floor falling flat in the dead silence surrounding them, no echo. “I don’t like this. But I guess there’s not really anything we can do, huh? Just gotta wait and hope this is supposed to happen.”

A chance to rest wasn’t something Gordon was going to pass up. As much as he didn’t like this either, the fighting had been going on so long, this was almost preferable. Despite that, he was a bit too keyed up to just sit down. Instead he headed back out into the hall. Not outside though, instead turning for doors and hallways he hadn’t gone down before. Like the door leading outside, any door they came across opened after pushing on it for a couple seconds and then stayed open.

The first place of note they found was the crew quarters – a few more frozen corpses curled up in a couple of the beds. Gordon was no expert but it didn’t seem to be enough room to house a proper ship’s crew, especially given the size of the Borealis. It might be one of several rooms but more likely, its primary purpose being to conceal the device and was overseen by an advance AI, a proper crew wasn’t necessary for its running.

Speaking of the device though, it would likely be in the ship’s hold, right? Gordon had picked up bits and pieces about ships from various media, assuming what he remembered was correct, that’s where stuff the ship was supposed to carry was held. And the Borealis’ only purpose was to carry the device so upon exiting the crew quarters, he set to looking for the hold. It would be down, right?

Whether that was the case or not, it wasn’t too much longer before they found a steep flight of stairs leading deeper into the ship. At the bottom of which… “What’s that sound?” Alyx said as she drew her pistol, keeping it pointed down for now.

Gordon shrugged. It was distant enough that the only reason they heard it was the otherwise dead silence. Lowering his helmet to hear it better, it sounded… mechanical. Like the whir of a giant overworked computer. He started towards it, trusting her to follow.

It led them to a ladder this time. At the bottom was a small room and a pair of large double doors. In front of which was a keypad. Despite that, Gordon tried pushing on it anyway. No effect. Damn. Whatever was making the sound was for sure on the other side though, whirring away.

Stepping up to the key pad, Alyx pulled out her multi-tool and began fiddling with it. “I made this thing to hack Combine stuff but with a little tweaking it should be able to hack Earth stuff too. I mean human-made stuff should a lot less high-tech so… you know. So let’s uh… give it a try.” Apparently done adjusting it, she lifted it to point at the keypad.

Turning it in her wrist, it sparked. The keypad made a sound that wasn’t very promising but a moment later the doors made a sound that was as they started to open. “Who thinks the Black Mesa team’s inferior now, huh? … Not that I’m actually part of Black Mesa but my dad and Kleiner were and they taught me basically everything I know so that counts… I think.”

“It counts.” In a way she was more part of the ‘Black Mesa team’ than Gordon was given how long he’d been away from it while she’d grown up in it.

“Thanks. Let’s go investigate.” Pocketing her multi-tool she led the way through the doors as they opened wide enough to allow them to pass through.

Inside was the largest room they’d seen so far. Not that it felt particularly big with how much of that space was taken up by what could only be the device.

‘Device’ seemed like such a paltry word for what it actually was though. The ship was long and thus so was the hold and the machine within it. Sitting in the center, leaving only a small walkway on this side, perhaps on the other too, it ran the entire length of the ship, going almost up to the ceiling. Which wasn’t particularly tall, this was a ship after all, but it was still enough to be well out of reach.

The machine was lit up and active, humming away. Every handful of meters there were screens, some with keypads or buttons next to them, others just the screen. Presumably all related to monitoring and functioning of the various parts of it. The heat coming off it was intense enough that after only a about a minute of walking along the short hallway between the device and wall, Alyx was pulling down her hood and scarf.

Eventually they stopped at one of the screens, stepping towards it to get a better look. It showed what looked like oscillating wave lengths. What it was measuring or showing was impossible to tell as nothing was marked. A classic case of a top secret project that only people who knew what it was and exactly how it functioned would be able to understand the output of. Every such person was likely dead except BOA and she wasn’t likely to share her knowledge.

Alyx stared at it in silence for several seconds, her shoulders noticeably tense before letting out an annoyed sigh and turning back to face Gordon. “We probably shouldn’t touch any part of this thing until after its done, huh? Plus if we can get it back to White Forest then we can…” She cut off as her eyes caught on something behind him.

He turned to look. … The man – if such a word could even describe him when he obviously wasn’t human – in the suit. He stood way at the end of the walkway, towards what seemed to be the bow of the ship. Upon catching Gordon’s gaze, he bowed his head slightly as if in respect or farewell – or perhaps to convey something else entirely, impossible to know for sure – before turning and walking to the right, putting him out of sight as the device cut off view of him.

Alyx pushed past Gordon to sprint after him. “Hey you! Get back here!”

Too tired for even a light jog, Gordon followed at a only slightly faster than normal walking pace. He’d run after the man many times before, he was never there upon what should’ve been catching up to him. Perhaps where they were would make it different but probably not.

Upon reaching the turn, Alyx ran down it. She was only out of sight a handful of seconds before leaning back around the corner. “He’s gone. There’s nowhere he could’ve gone except down the other side but there’s no one there, nowhere to hide either.”

Reaching her, Gordon lifted his hands to reply. “He’s like that.” Him being here wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t strange either and thus… maybe it was fine.

“I know I’ve seen him before though. I still don’t know where but I’ve seen him for sure. But… there’s nothing we can do about him, huh? Just like there’s nothing we can do about this.” She gestured to the device. “Damn it.”

“Let’s look around more.” Maybe they could glean something from it even if it wasn’t much.

“Yeah, okay.”

~

The device was designed to be as obtuse to those not familiar with it as possible. It was on and functioning at a high capacity, seemingly not out of its what was safe for it but that was a bit harder to tell for sure. That’s all Gordon could discern without opening it up to get a look at its insides. A move that likely would’ve been suicide. If his reset power worked in the void or not, he had no desire to risk checking. Hopefully they’d be able to take it apart later.

Upon reconvening and settling on there being nothing they could do here right now, they left to explore the rest of the ship. Not that there was much more of it to see. And most of what was there was empty. The defective turret was still kicking though and started firing on them as soon as they came into the room even though it was lying on the floor. Despite its failed attempts to harm them, Alyx righted it, putting it back on its feet and in the center of the room.

Ultimately they ended up back into the command room to sit under BOA’s orb and wait for this to hopefully end soon. They could’ve gone to the crew quarters for a nap in the beds but… if Alyx thought of it she didn’t suggest it and it seemed wrong to Gordon. Now was a good time to relax but not all the way like that.

With how complete the silence was now that they were still, it wasn’t long before Alyx broke it. “So uh… how many times did you die and come back during that fight earlier?”

Gordon shrugged.

“More times than you can count?”

He almost just shrugged again but well… “I don’t like to count. That fight, I probably could’ve if I’d wanted to. Not the most times I’ve died in a single battle.” Close though but that was largely to do with how long it had lasted. He was a lot less clumsy than he’d once been when it came to killing.

“Okay. I guess, not wanting to count makes sense. Sorry I asked. It’s just…”

“It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else?” It might not hurt to unpack it more later given the unexpected comfort her knowing brought. But right now, wasn’t a good time.

“Oh, uh… of course.”

~

“… The rest of the houndeye guard dogs didn’t last long after that but they were cool while they lasted. I’ve thought about trying to…” Alyx cut of as time resumed.

The world around them lurched back into motion and darkness consumed the room. Gravity took hold as the ship seemingly fell. Blessedly only a short distance, hitting the ground with a clank that was more felt through the floor than heard. The deck shifted to the left before settling once more. Still on solid ground then but flat as they weren’t sliding downwards as they’d been before.

Above them BOA’s orb jerked back into motion too, her eye the only light visible in the darkness. “I’m back! And uh… the device isn’t. It’s gone, actually. That’s not supposed to happen. I’d blame you but… I don’t believe either of you are capable of that.”

Gordon turned his flashlight on as Alyx stood. “What do you mean it’s gone?”

“I mean it’s gone. My connection to it is severed in an entirely different way than before. And I don’t have much power to spare but I turned on the security camera in its room and uh, it’s gone.”

The command console’s central screen lit up. Gordon stood to look at it, Alyx at his shoulder. On it was a night vision security camera’s perspective of the hold they’d been in earlier but… the massive machine in the middle was indeed missing, leaving behind a darkened patch of metal but that’s it.

Alyx looked up at BOA. “Is this some kind of trick to get us to… I don’t know, not try to take it or something?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that you might take it away. That is a fair point though, huh? This wouldn’t be a good plan to accomplish that goal though because you have clearly suspected it right off the bat. I am just as mystified as you, if not more so. I am also quite angry because it’s mine. I hacked complete control of it fair and square.”

“Gordon, you think it might’ve been your suit guy?”

“Maybe.” It was the only thing that made sense. They had seen him down there after all. Though it was hard to know for absolute certain as they had no idea what that guy’s deal was.

“What’d he say? And who’s the suit guy? If he stole my device, I want to know who he is so I can take it back. I don’t know how I’m going to do that but I’ll figure it out.”

Alyx stepped back from the screen as it flickered off. “He said ‘maybe’ and the suit guy is some alien extra-dimensional weirdo that’s been harassing Gordon for a while now. But let’s return to that later. First, it completed doing whatever it was doing before vanishing, right? So… did it work? Are we safe from the Combine?”

“Answer to your first question is: correct. The second: correct. Despite having less power than I would’ve liked, I believe I succeeded in the task you set me; active the device on a global scale, leaving as much of the Combine behind as I can. It has left me extremely low on power though, hence the lack of light. I request that you repair my solar panels or I will run out completly in about an hour. The third: maybe. As I said, I singled out as much of the Combine as I could, leaving them behind in the move. I likely missed some though because I didn’t exclude all alien life as you said the ‘vortigaunt’ whatever they are, are your allies. As for their main empire being able to find Earth again, that depends on if they can track us through to a parallel universe. I don’t know enough about their technology to say how likely that is.”

“A parallel universe, huh? That’s… interesting. I suppose it’s one way to run away from a multi-galactic empire, just leave the whole dang universe.”

Gordon tapped Alyx on the shoulder, getting her to look at him as he shined his light on his hands so she could read them. “If activating the device results in moving to a parallel universe does that mean this Borealis is not the same one that was being worked on by the Aperture we know?”

“Correct,” BOA said upon Alyx repeating the question to her. “That one would’ve gone somewhere else, perhaps to my universe of origin. Or perhaps it did something else and vanished for entirely different reasons. Regardless, you ended up with me. Congrats!”

This would’ve been a nice discussion to have had before activating the device but whatever. It hadn’t killed them and had maybe done as they’d hoped. Of course if Aperture were capable of creating such a device then surely so were the Combine. The question was could they track Earth to where they were now and open another portal to it? Hopefully not. Only time would tell.

And then there was still the question of what the suited man wanted and where the device had vanished. But right now, maybe, just maybe, Gordon could rest for more than a few hours. His ordeal might be over for a time at least. Maybe… hopefully. Breaking down in relief over a ‘maybe’ would be pathetic though so instead he turned and marched out.

Out in the hall, warm sunlight streamed in through the open door panel. He marched out into the warm summer air. They were in the forest somewhere, miles and miles away from the wretched arctic. He’d never been a cold weather guy. The trees were a familiar white too so perhaps not just any forest.

A murmur of voices came from off the ship’s port side. He went over to investigate. … A small group of people, mostly humans but a couple vortiguants hovered around, looking at the ship that had landed randomly in their vicinity.

“Yo, that you Gordon?” One of them said, pulling back a helmet to reveal it was Barney. Good ol’ Barney, always showing up when Gordon least expected him to. “Man is it good to see even if you did dock your ship in the middle of the damn resistance camp. Like seriously, you couldn’t put it off to the side instead, man? It’s huge.”

“Sorry about that,” Alyx said as she ran up to catch up with Gordon. “That’s my fault. I gave the coordinates for the White Forest camp, not thinking she might plop us in the middle of it. But Barney, we did it! We succeeded… maybe. Sort of. Go get Dad and Dr. Kleiner and I guess probably Dr. Magnuson too. We got things to report.”

“No need, they’ve already been sent for.”

~

Naturally the meeting point ended up being the Borealis’ command room even if that did mean they had to bring flashlights. BOA was officially considered important to the resistance so her orb was included. As always, Alyx did all the talking. Gordon sat in the corner, barely listening as she and BOA filled Eli, Kleiner and Magnuson in on everything that had happened since their earlier call’s end.

Halfway though, Gordon got up and walked out, slipping out seemingly unnoticed. He made his way outside and sat on the deck, leaning back against the wall next to the doorway.

At Alyx’s request on BOA’s behalf, members of the resistance were already set on repairing the Borealis’ solar panels. The murmur of their conversation and work washed over him as he looked up at the sky. It was just as blue as it had been before. The constellations would be different though, right? Maybe not hugely; this universe clearly had to be close enough to their old one allow for a spot for Earth to safely exist after all.

Gordon wasn’t an astronomer but he’d had a star-gazing telescope he used to bring out into the desert to look at the stars through. Perhaps he’d be given enough of a break that he’d be allowed to do that again? … Maybe not right away. If there were indeed Combine forces still on Earth, even if only a few, he’d be expected to help take them out.

Would his reset power even work here though? Probably but it was a big change so… maybe not. He wouldn’t know for sure until he died again. … Perhaps just a little bit, he hoped it wouldn’t work. Not that he had any desire to test it, life wasn’t quite that miserable, but he was tired.

So instead he’d hope that they’d escaped Combine and that the suited man was content with having stolen the device – if that is even what happened to it – and would leave him and Alyx alone now. He’d hope that things would get better, that he’d be allowed to rest and look at the stars, maybe even do science again. That the rest of his friends, like Alyx, would still love him even once they realized he wasn’t okay because he couldn’t keep the act up if allowed the chance to just exist alongside other people instead of constantly moving onto the next thing. It was a lot to hope for but surely he’d earned some reprieve from the universe… or more like multi-verse, right?

~

The End

[A/N] I considered doing an epilogue, solidifying this as a happy ending (and to make it clear that Mossman and the rest of the resistance crew up in the arctic are fine, if anyone cares) but figured it wasn't really needed. Especially since I might end up wanting to do post-Combine fics with the HL crew that would serve as the same even if I probably wouldn't connect them directly to this fic unless any of them feature BOA. Which, I suppose is possible. Even though I don't know how well I managed to capture the Portal vibe that I was going for with her (the Borealis, being a touch point between the two game series, I wanted - and would want out of actual HL 3 - it to have a Portal vibe to it) I had fun writing her. So I might decide to do more with her in the future.

[dogtoling]

Would the culinary culture in Splatoon be different if they can only eat chunks of food? (I keep thinking of all the sensations/experiences that come from chewing food)

yes. well, clearly in splatoon it's not, but we already know the inklings are canonically just Human Lite despite not having teeth to chew food like we do, which would render a lot of foods TERRIBLE to eat even if you believe they do not have a radula. even if they JUST had their beak and a soft, flat tongue, they don't have anything in their mouth to grind food into paste... which, if you recall, is how we process like all food (unless you're REALLY excited about the meal, or lack teeth, or have a toothache. in the case of the latter, im sorry man)

Generally cephalopods are carnivorous, so stuff like rice and pasta or even bread aren't things that they would've come to eat naturally. The same goes for vegetables, which even the first game implies are a new thing in Inkopolis or squid culture (although it's unclear if this is even true or if it's a joke or exaggeration, this has never been expanded on). My headcanon is that these vegetable-based foods only recently became popular among Inklings due to influence from other cultures, namely species that are herbivorous. So as more mixed-species societies popped up, different foods that were fairly alien to other species also did, and eventually may have snaked their way into those species' diets if they were well-enough liked.

Generally I think Inklings' own culinary cultures would pretty much exclusively include meat (seafood), with the exception of fruit, which Inklings enjoy for their flavor, color and water content. But I think Inklings would be pretty simple with their cooking, meaning there's probably rarely much seasoning or even a side of any kind given those are mostly vegetable-based things - save for recent decades of course. Traditional inkfish food is probably finger food, grilled, deep-fried, or even raw. Small fried fish and fried shrimp are ever-popular, and utensils are really a fancier, newer thing. I like drawing inklings with suckers on their fingers, which also means that finger food would be the most natural way to eat something for them given that they can taste what they're about to eat before it's even in their mouth (which, among other things, is a very easy way to check if something is edible at all before it's in your body. Or if it's spicy).

Generally I think Inklings enjoy crunchy or crispy and fried food, which is typically meat or at least includes meat (usually that of crustaceans), and finger food is preferred for its simplicity and natural feel. The Crusty Seanwiches and Schwaffles are a very good example of the kind of food that is popular with Inklings, which also seek out the high calorie content because MY GOD, the energy consumption of even just one turf war has to be ridiculous. So as a whole i'd say they prefer food that is easy to eat by hand, rather than stuff that is so mushy you can't bite it at all or grab it... sauces are on thin fucking ice unless they are for dipping in.

When it comes to Octarians, I like to think their culinary culture is different from that of the surface, largely because of their wasteland surroundings unfit for farming much of anything even if they wanted to, and isolation from the rest of the world. Instead of the squids who like to fry and grill things, Octarians probably have more raw, pickled, dried and salted foods - these are foods that are easy to make and very easy to store for long periods of time, which is crucial when your society doesn't have all the food in the world to pass around as a given. They might have kelp as a side dish or an addition in soup every now and then, but most of their food is definitely some form of meat. Vegetables are mostly absent from Octarian cuisine due to not really being nutritionally helpful to octarians, like almost at all. Surprisingly, in spite of this, wasabi is a really big thing and is used as a spice similar to how we use like, salt and pepper. They'd have salt and uh... wasabi powder.

[tagapagsalaysay]

Whered you learn to paint? I dig your style sm. Also how many layers do you use when you draw digitally?

I'm self-taught but a huge chunk of my foundation comes from van Gogh studies. Eventually I evolved over that + DE's art and formed my own style.

I started with using a lot of short (!) prominent strokes over details.

My first few attempts back in 2019 were bright colors on dark. Many focused on highlights but not values in depth yet.

DE came around this time too, so I got to study the style of the game to use even larger strokes to optimize for time. Many of these are great combinations of colors but still lacking in acknowledging value (except for some pieces)

These are the pieces that have GREAT colors but poor values

I consider these pretty good in terms of value. My style is getting closer to what it is today on the right one.

When I got into studying value, I started to experiment with smaller strokes again, so you'd have pieces combined with large patches of shading and small details when necessary.

Ehh... y'know what I mean. Late 2020 and early 2021 had me using the oil brush A LOT and i used it to my advantage. Then came mid 2021 and I switched over to another brush that had less blending than the default CSP oil brush. This gave me slightly more workload when I render, but also more freedom in determining values and mixing colors by myself. The piece I started with this style is this one, where you could see the large strokes again, matched with small detail strokes when necessary. This is also the point where my art started having that textured but soft dreamy feel that people point out a lot. Shapes are a lot more solid, but also more fleeting in the background.

Now from here, I don't really know where to go, because my evolution from 2021 to now is mostly in anatomy rather than the method of rendering. But you can see that I started using a flat new brush but... I feel like the style is not there yet. So we'll see. I also use underpainting way more now.

I try to use only 3 layers at once but some big pieces really need to separate components for the time being so my maximum tends to be 20. Anything past that and I start deleting.

[enrax]

TASK 001 - HOME

The apartment in Osaka needed to be maintained. Although no one had bestowed the obligation upon the seven-year-old Junji Okada, it fell on his child’s shoulders nonetheless. Maintain, maintain, maintain, or it would crumble. His childhood home was the place he remembered most vividly. Most terribly. As an adult, he could close his eyes and visualize the layout in painstaking detail; the father-shaped viscousness, the mother-shaped loneliness. His familiarity was a byproduct of his meticulous nature, his need, the oppressive barometric pressure of his compulsion. He checked every nook and cranny, the hidden and not so hidden, for the disaster he was certain would come. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he remained steadfast that whatever was going to get him would come from the outside. It would, like a spider, a shadow, a bad dream, creep under a crack in the door if he wasn’t watchful; if he wasn’t careful. Junji had been careful. But it didn't matter how many times he swept the floor or rearranged the cutlery, cleared the cobwebs or made the beds. This house was coming down. The disaster was inside. The cracks were structural. Inherited.

The Australia home was bright and spacious. He recalls feeling as if he’d suddenly fallen heir to a large family when he previously had none, even though they were tan and blonde and looked nothing like him. (They made a point of bringing this up at every opportunity.) Everyone was impressed by his English, despite the fact that he'd been speaking it since he was a baby, and his accent was identical to theirs. He began to have doubts about himself, about who he was, about the foundation of his identity. He looked for cracks and found them.

The Swedish dorm was often freezing and cramped and grey. He shared the room with a boy with whom he would share a myriad of teenaged firsts: kiss, bed, body. While the academy sculpted his moldable frame into the shape of a refined young man with manners, etiquette, and class, the small dorm taught him that, despite the continual challenge it presented, personal freedom was possible. 

Another small dorm, this time in Oxford, but it would not be occupied for long. He and Charlie would split their time in England between an ancient brownstone near their university and a lush flat in London. Nine years later, Junji is rendered incapable of recalling details, his memory of these homes disengaged from his mind like an amputated limb. Though he couldn’t see, he could still feel: the weight of Charlie's fist against his cheek, the agony of seeing someone he loved spiral into a drug-induced rage. He'd lived in that London flat for a considerable chunk of his existence, but he could no longer remember something as simple as whether it had two bedrooms or one. He, however, recalled with perfect clarity that his second and final flat in London had only one bedroom. And when he recalls that bedroom, it is swashed in blood.

South Korea. His first flat a hollow shell. Junji was a minimalist at heart, but this place was ascetic. Austere. Self-denying. Self-effacing. He'd built himself a grave, and it wasn't until the appearance of a certain orange feline that he'd been able to dig himself out of it. When he moved to his present apartment, he consciously tried making it a home, although it never would be. He knew this all too well. He'd never had a place to call home. 

All these places and not one to call his own. 

And then along came Soa and, as espoused by the romantic poets of yore and twenty-first century rom-coms alike, he fell in love and everything changed. He began to realize, with no small shock to the system, that his flat felt like a home when she was in it. Comfort — compounded with the looseness of being, the delight of being seen and understood, to be met on one’s own level — existed within her. 

But then comes that niggling fear of childhood, a creature in hibernation stirring in a dark den, rubbing the sleep from its nocturnal eyes. A whisper on the wind: Junji and Soa need to be maintained. Maintain, maintain, maintain, or it will crumble. 

[feliciadraws]

*SPOILERS FOR FINAL FANTASY XIV*

Ahhhh shoot, my recap of the Another Turn In The Coil is looooooong overdue (I've been busy with art projects and stuff, plus it was my birthday on the 13th hehe, also Another Turn in the Coil was an emotional rollercoaster for me and I was frickin REELING afterwards so...yeah), but since I'm a big chunk into Through the Maelstrom I might as well since I don't want anyone to miss a huge chunk of one of my favourite parts of the story so far so here we go! Patch 2.2 - Another Turn in the Coil (recap) So, having found where big boi Bahamut was entombed beneath Carteneau Flats and regenerating, the Warrior of Light headed back to the Waking Sands to report to Urianger, bringing with us news of not just big boi Bahamut being alive but also, seemingly, the legendary grandfather of Alphinaud and Alisaie, Louisoix, who until now was thought to have perished in the Calamity while sealing Bahamut away. Urianger passed along his findings to the Sons of Saint Coinach, who put forward a theory regarding Bahamut and how the big boi is connected to not just Dalamud but the Allagan Crystal Tower too; it turns out Dalamud was designed to gather the sun's energy like a giant solar battery, which would then be channeled into the Crystal Tower, using Bahamut as a living conduit within the moon itself, serving as its 'living core' as Urianger put it. Alisaie also put forward some unsettling findings of her own, stating that the things keeping Bahamut bound were known as "interment hulks," each one designated "Ragnarok-class," which thus renders my initial thought that it was some kind of giant Allagan spacecraft moot. And here's where it gets creepy; these interment hulks, which Alisaie mention act as binding coils, are not only meant to hold Bahamut but to FEED him AND keep him in some state between alive and dead, AND that somehow, since Bahamut is technically a primal but isn't worshipped by anyone like the other primals we've seen in the game, the Allagans who designed the coils have managed to simulate the power of PRAYER to keep the big boi from losing his solid form and turning back into aether mush. All of which is actually pretty terrifying. So, it came down to deactivating the coils and destroying whatever is keeping Bahamut bound, but amid the main objective, poor Alisaie found herself fighting an internal battle of her own, grappling with the notion that her beloved grandfather Louisoix might still be alive after all this time.

Not gonna lie, this was already getting off to a heartbreaking start, and it only gets worse from here.

So, on the trail of the binding coils, the WoL was sent to the Twelveswood, following word from Gridania that a fragment of the moon Dalamud had been discovered. But before long, we were joined unexpectedly by Alphinaud, who mentioned Urianger had informed him of the upcoming expedition into the fragment, but also spoke of Alisaie's admiration of their grandfather and of her own personal struggle in making Eorzea's salvation 'her own personal crusade' , voicing his concerns that her emotional involvement would turn the quest to save Eorzea into what would effectively be a wild goose chase. Interestingly enough, before departing, Alphinaud requested that we don't tell Alisaie that he was there or make a big thing of it.

MAN horsestandingonbeachmeme.jpg

Journeying into the Black Shroud, with Alisaie in tow this time, it was found to be full of corrupted aether crystals, which became visible when they previously weren't due to aetheric disturbances, which made for a very funky exploration experience.

A funky exploration experience, and more heartache for Alisaie...

Further exploration of the area and finally making our way in to the fragment itself took us into an Allagan structure, and a meetup with a figure who Alisaie recognised from the past, another figure who was thought to have perished around the time of the Calamity;

According to Alisaie, this figure was none other than the Garlean Imperial Legatus who spearheaded the Meteor project, Nael van Darnus, but yet there was some confusion; this Nael claimed to be a different one who had perished in the prelude to the Calamity, speaking like a fricked up religious zealot who worshipped and served Bahamut, saying that he was given the name Nael by Bahamut, before t-posing and diving backwards into oblivion in the most gratuitously extra way possible.

And things got crazier from there; after a few intense battles with some freaky-deeky chimera creatures which may or may not have been created by the Allagans, another trip further down into the depths of the fragment opened out into this whole other space that shouldn't have even been down there, as if we passed through some kind of portal.

A portal that seemingly led to the past, to the prelude to the Calamity itself, as Dalamud was crashing down to the earth, where we were once again met by Nael van Darnus, who chided Alisaie and the WoL, claiming that we had 'violated Bahamut's sanctuary' and that he was going to make this our grave. But just as Nael was about to charge up some kind of energy attack, Alisaie stopped him just in time and, using her own magic (GO ALISAIE!) knocked the mask right off of Nael's face and...

It turns out this Nael van Darnus is actually a woman, and not only that, but Bahamut used his own power to channel the last of the essence of the previous Nael and use it to possess this woman, making her a vessel for Nael so he/she could continue serving Bahamut...or something (from here I'm gonna be using she/her to describe the current Nael for clarity).

After channelling the essence of Bahamut himself, Nael transformed into a huge woman/Bahamut hybrid demon lady thing, and a battle ensued, with the Calamity seemingly raging in the background. With Nael herself defeated, a series of increasingly odd occurrences happened;

For starters, it turns out the whole battle took place in a huge augmented reality simulation type room, with the Calamity being a mere simulation that dissipated after Nael's defeat.

After that, Nael, or rather, the woman Bahamut was using as a vessel for Nael's aetheric essence, appeared to be still alive, albeit greatly weakened.

What's more is that Nael appeared to express remorse for her actions, speaking as though she were free from Bahamut's control, which very much confounded Alisaie, who I guess had only her prior knowledge of how the tempering of primals works and how there's no cure for being tempered, but then she reasoned that big boi Bahamut had merely 'relinquished his claim.' Hmmm... Nael continued, this time warning Alisaie of the despair that lies ahead on the path she currently walks, but before Alisaie could get any answers, mainly concerning liberating her grandfather Louisoix...

THIS HAPPENED. I gotta admit this broke my heart because I actually felt sorry for her in this moment, and she seemed genuinely guilty for what she had done and what became of her.

A mysterious, ominous voice called out from the shadows, maybe the voice of the one who just impaled poor Nael with that magical energy spear thing...at first I thought it may have been an Ascian, but then Alisaie said she recognised the voice, but didn't think he would say such cruel words...Louisoix? And things just got crazier and crazier from here, and infinitely more tragic.

On to the deactivation of the coils, which seemed to go relatively well, although big boi Bahamut seemed to regenerate much quicker than Alisaie had initially hoped. But just as she had successfully shut down one of the coils, thus slowing Bahamut's regeneration and bringing us one step closer to turning him back into aether mush, out from the darkness stepped none other than Louisoix himself.

But what should have been joy for poor Alisaie turned into nothing but anguish and heartbreak, as he seemed to have turned EVIL and was actively working to RESTORE Bahamut, hitting her with a magic blast and knocking her prone. Just as he was about to blast her again, the WoL stepped in front of her, shielding her from Louisoix's magic, but Alisaie noticed something particularly harrowing...

The light glowing in Louisoix's eyes...Alisaie saw the same light with Nael, saying to her that Louisoix himself had been possessed and was now under Bahamut's control, which just dug that old knife further and further into Alisaie's ever increasingly broken heart, but far from wallowing in her grief, Alisaie swore she would take down Bahamut for doing this...

My heart breaks for her... In the aftermath, back at the Waking Sands, while it did become clearer, the whole truth, as divulged by Urianger, was somehow just as harrowing; he described the true nature of this fake Louisoix we had encountered, in that it was nothing more than what he called an 'aetherial shadow', basically an aether clone created by Bahamut to serve him, using the image of Louisoix, who really had died when he attempted to call on the power of the Twelve to seal away Bahamut during the battle of Cartenau, which to be quite freaking honest is even more heartbreaking. Following on from that, Urianger then went further into the case of Nael van Darnus; it turns out the original Nael van Darnus, who was in fact a guy after all (the Nael we saw was merely a vessel for his essence), sought to bring about Eorzea's destruction, using the lesser moon Dalamud as a weapon. The noble house the OG Nael belonged to were also 'safeguarding' knowledge regarding ancient Allag, and turned to alternate means of communicating with Dalamud, which resulted in both Bahamut inside being awoken AND Nael's soul being enslaved by the elder primal. And after the original Nael's death, Bahamut transferred his essence into the woman we knew as the current Nael van Darnus we met when exploring the fragment. But little did anyone know, that Alphinaud, perhaps concerned for Alisaie's welfare, was eavesdropping on the whole conversation before skulking away. -

Man...that was...intense. And I'll admit I was an emotional wreck after finishing Another Turn in The Coil. Like as if it wasn't bad enough that big boi Bahamut had killed Louisoix, but was then using his image as an aether puppet to serve him, tormenting poor Alisaie. Poor, poor Alisaie...man my heart was breaking for her the whole time, and even Urianger was greatly affected by the whole thing, even suggesting that Alisaie take some time out from exploring the coils. Gosh, I hope Alisaie and even Alphinaud get at least some closure in later parts, or some resolution, especially Alisaie, like my heart was breaking for her this whole time, and even now as I'm typing this I'm feeling heartbroken for her all over again. She just wanted to see her grampa again, only to be met with that...it just makes my heart hurt and I want to give her a hug...😭

Well, following on from this, I should be posting a recap of my progress so far of Through the Maelstrom!

[emcscared-whumps]

we gettin on the sweat tonight lads

i'm sick without really feeling sick (test results pending lol), so tonight, we're gonna see just how fast i can bust out a finished piece >:)

there will be no consequences! because i wont be infecting my client at work tomorrow!! :D

im talking a bust portrait of a character with a simple face angle, simple expression, simple lighting, that otherwise fully rendered and polished

and im going to log-- (OH GOD I SPELT LOG WRONG WHAT THE FUCK)-- the *actual* time i spend on the piece because i found out that clip studio can tell me how long ive had the canvas open, but i'm sure that i leave canvases open for entire days without touching them, so... that is not accurate enough for me

anyways; the reason? a friend and i were talking about art commission pricing and the habits we've noticed in the art community, and i got curious: what would *i* price my stuff if i were to hypothetically sell it?

through some basic maths and reasoning between us, i have discovered that the key to making a good rate is skill at speed

(it's not as bad as it looks, my american friends, i am using aud :) currently, 1usd = 1.50aud, 50aud = 33.28usd)

we talked about how much is a fair price for the product vs how long it takes to make, and i discovered that if you're quick at making a character bust lineart of moderate quality for $15, and can do one in 30 minutes, accounting for *only* time spent drawing, you'd be making $30 an hour, which is pretty cool considering it'd only be bust lineart. ($20 for bust lineart would yield $40/hr, but i'd only charge that of my skills and precision were reliable and en pointe. it could even be pushed to $25, but i wouldnt go more than $30 unless some super complex shit was happening and i happened to be very very good. at which point you still want to be as fast as physically possible)

there was a plot twist though: rendering times.

hypothetically, if i charged $20 for bust lineart, extra $10 for flats, extra $10 for shadibg, and extra ($5 to) $10 for extra finishing details (little backgrounds etc), that would be $50 total for a fully rendered bust. if i took 4 hours to do it (which i think is reasonable time (for me) to do most things by hand), all of a sudden, that's made my $30-40/hr into $12.50/hr.... which is kinda (very) shit lmao

with this in mind, i have one question: just how fast can i make stuff, and what quality will it be? what would i theoretically be paid for my fully rendered bust pieces?

i usually an very VERY slow partly coz i cannot stay focused on a piece for long enough chunks at a time, or, if i can, i will stop halfway through and leave it for several weeks or months, leading to a turnaround that is at such a leisurely pace even *snails* would be envious

ALTHOUGH. last year, my friend (same as above) alerted me to a built-in time-lapse feature in clip studio. i was intensely curious. for whumptober that year, i had a very clear vision of a piece i wanted to do for one of the prompts, so i used that to test the feature. i sat down at about 1700, stopped only for dinner, and had the whole thing exported and posted to tumblr at around 0100, about 7 hours. i have a sneaking suspicion that was the fabled beast called hyperfocus lmao. the [piece] was a roughly rendered full-body shot with a dynamic pose, both hands exposed, and a more complex expression, not bad considering that my pride piece took 10 months :)

bust portraits are my most comfortable style of piece, so i will experiment with those, especially since my character profiles need them, and also i want them all to look cohesive, which means i will re-draw all of my current ones (rip pete, timmy, and kate lol)

(hm, if i took 3 hours instead of 4, that'd be $16.70, if i took 2, it'd be $25... still not even close to that tasty tasty $30-$40/hr... so the solution would be to up the price of rendering since flats are easy. extra $20 (instead of $10) for rendering, since it's as complex as anatomy with lineart, bumping the total price to $60 (which is starting to *really* push the envelope of what i think people would pay for my art). so if i took 4 hours at that price, that'd be $15/hr, 3 hours would be $20/hr, which is better but still kinda shit for all that extra work, and any faster might reduce the quality to a point where it isnt worth that extra $10...)

......... i'll let u guys know the results lol

[eccentric-nucleus]

started picking at the whole stereographic projection thing, and part #1 is "generate some points on a sphere", and uhhh i wasn't working on this for any huge chunk of time but i still feel embarrassed at how long it's taking me to get back to having a sphere point generator

also i'm already seeing at least one issue, which is that if i do this as a raw vertex transformation then the 'far hemisphere' ends up being comically distorted in a weird way. i mean, obviously, it's a map projection, but you have this thing where the 'north pole' ends up being projected to an an infinite ring surrounding all other points, an infinite distance away (it's the good old 'the south pole becomes a giant ice wall that encircles the globe' thing you see in flat earth thought). but if it's a vertex shader and you only have the one north pole vertex, it's still just one vertex. and instead of being an infinite distance away it's at the limit of the projection. so for rendering purposes i will decide "an infinite distance away" means at projection coordinate 2,0. close enough!!

(i mean also if the goal here is to roughly simulate walking around on the surface of a planet we don't ever need to worry about anything past the local equator, since at that point everything is invisible due to being under the horizon regardless. so, w/e.)

[crystalelemental]

Apparently I lied. I needed to test out Lana here, because I had some Big Opinions about her that...have been challenged. For anyone wondering, she's 2/5.

General Overview Lana, as a sync pair, has a great supportive effect in her Terrain, but her only supportive function is DPS. This is my least favorite thing in the world, because this kind of approach generally overshadows allies, and renders them irrelevant. Lana's lower stats, however, makes it so allies compete. Her DPS isn't too exceptional on single-target, and her sync is downright terrible. It's basically the Archie effect, only without the issue of only having one application of your field effect. I may or may not be saying the Tapu are better than Master Fairs.

But all of this leads to me considering her pretty shit in Gauntlet. Poor single-target DPS and horrible sync is a recipe for disaster in this mode, especially when you have a flat 0 defensive tools. So I needed to know, can she really contribute?

The positives of Lana are the amount of DPS provided. Terrain is a huge boost, allowing even weaker hits to deal serious damage. Her Buddy move in particular can shred opponents when facilitated. Lana works best with partners that can sync nuke effectively, or are similarly high DPS to pair with strong support EX. To her credit, she also never ran out of Terrain for me.

Lana's weakness is that she is a designated third slot. Lana's power is not so great that she steals any show except maybe Latios. As a result, your usual thirds do not exist, and gauntlet gimmicks require the support or the main offensive partner to check. Meaning if you don't deal with paralysis, or with debuffs, or with flinch, your run is in serious trouble. Paralysis is the big issue. Yes, I know, Calem exists. But also come on man. Sincerely. Come on. Base Calem is so bad. Lana also really struggles to take hits. I have her with Vigilance, and even then some hits are chunking her for over half. Most notably, without disruptive effects, fights like Azelf become a nightmare with her on the team. Moonblast does not even deal pretend amounts of damage, so the notion of using her mixed offense spread to accomplish anything is a joke. Lana, as a result, can accomplish things, but often less effectively than a simple alternative that can reliably flinch or sleep. And that's significant for the teams I built.

Vs. Latios This is Lana's best showing, being able to deal good damage when it's spread, and Latios is low-threat enough. Will is a solid secondary damage dealer, thanks to a few traits. Stored Power is good DPS. Air Slash can flinch for a lockdown on fights where it matters. Confuse Ray helps check Uxie. MU Torchic was the selected partner, since it can cap special attack and crit for Will. Gradual Healing and Synchro Healing are helpful for survival, but also it's Latios so this is not as impressive here as with other fights.

Vs. Tapu Bulu Same general structure, but Lele has the benefit of setting Psychic Terrain over the Grassy Terrain, which is relatively handy for minimizing Bulu's damage. Once again, MU Torchic and Will are the combo, thanks to Will's potential for disruption.

Vs. Tornadus BP Surge has inherent paralysis, which answers the Tornadus fight well. Tate has some decent sync power with Cakewalk, and can flinch with Zen Headbutt. The specific issue is that Surge is squishy as shit, and Tornadus can easily overwhelm him. Also Tate is weak to Dark. Brutal Swing. It's a massive mess. I feel like the only reason we won this was that Tate hit flinch right at the end of the second bar, then again before Heat Wave, or he'd be dead. Which is just too specific.

Vs. Terrakion On-type, this ought to be good! And it kinda is. Lana can deal crazy damage on-type. I opted for Phoebe as a low-tier support to help Tate, who can flinch but isn't reliable about it. The fun is that with infinite terrain, even Tate's dealing good damage on Zen Headbutt. It's respectable.

Vs. Cobalion This fight is a brutal time. Tate needs to be on his flinch game for it to work out. If you thought Tornadus was dangerous for Surge, Cobalion is downright terrifying. But, the paralysis does check it, so that's a big help.

Vs. Azelf This fight sucks. MU Torchic and Will again. The flinch rate is the only thing salvaging it, but Will has to be really on his game. Azelf basically cannot get sync off ever. Even one is devastating. It takes forever for Will to reach a point where he can handle Azelf's first phase and get to Lana, but if you get hit with sync near that phase, you likely just reset Terrain, and guess who else is Psychic-type! It's a clean wipe. This is such an annoying fight.

Vs. Uxie Initially, the intent was MU Torchic. Uxie doesn't hit too hard, you'd think we'd be able to handle it. But nope! This is the problem with Uxie. It's not too immediately powerful, but it's impossible to stop its damage, so relying just on gradual healing tanks does not work at all. So I had to crack. Variety Agatha's back on the menu, throwing out support for Will. I slightly regret not pushing for a defensive support and letting Lana take point on DPS, but...I dunno, having seen her damage numbers, it's not good.

Vs. Latias At this point, I gave up on MU Torchic being worth anything, and kept up Agatha. I brought Oak along for no reason in particular, and also because he has randomized debuffs to keep Latias in check. Lele does well enough at the outset, but unfortunately cannot stop Mud Slap. And if Oak ever syncs, he loses Swift. So this is very reliant on DPS. The good news? Swift and Lana's Buddy move are both sure hits, so the accuracy drop doesn't matter. So that's kinda nice.

Vs. Regirock I was so done at this point. So Agatha again, and Will for the better flinch rate. The thing is, even with Vigilance, Rock Slide still chunked Lele, so Agatha's passive healing needed to be on point to get anywhere. Which it thankfully was. But still, not great.

Vs. Entei Generally easier thanks to the vulnerability to flinch. This is also when I got to learn how good Buddy Psycho Cut can be with defense drops. Lana can deal respectable damage under Terrain with -6 defense, it's just getting there. Acquiring the defense debuffs requires a lot of compressed support for other gimmick checks. So it works here, but it's not exactly my favorite outcome.

Final Thoughts Sygna Suit Lana is better than I thought here, but you'll note I didn't clear Moltres. There is no situation in which bringing SS Kris or Ingo to a fight while also using Psychic Terrain on Lana makes sense. Their buffs are wasted on her, and there's no ally in the world that needs both terrain any another weather effect.

Lana's big problem is just the lack of anything but DPS. I'm sure she's great for CS, but Gauntlet's a huge problem. She can get the job done, and for some stages on a relatively small budget. But it's rough. It's a lot of RNG and investment and frankly more stressful than it's worth. So on this, I do think Lana's pretty...not that great.