tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90930185926631307782024-03-17T12:12:39.203-07:00The Starving Theater ArtistTricks of the trade, discussion of design principles, and musings and rants about theater from a working theater technician/designer.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.comBlogger1538125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-76952534614072101822024-03-17T11:57:00.000-07:002024-03-17T12:12:08.304-07:00Before the dawn<p>Nasal polyps. Growths that form in the nasal cavities and as they grow, progressively block them. This means stuffy nose, stuffy head, post-nasal drip, sinus headaches. It also basically lowers the threshold of various histamine-type reactions, meaning it frequently leads to asthma and even to what is called NSAIDS Syndrome; a nasty allergic reaction to a whole family of anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin.</p><p>(More technically, one of several similar problems rooted in a disregulation of several metabolic pathways. Named Samter's Triad when first discovered, the specific strong brochiorestriction reaction following intake of non-steroidal (corticosteroid) anti-inflammatory medications is given the lovely acronym NERD -- NSAIDs-exacerbated respiratory disease or aspirin-exacerbated... Anyhow, about .7 percent of population but upwards of 22% of long-term asthma sufferers.)</p><p>And all of <i>this</i> can cause sleep apnea, meaning drowsiness, lack of concentration, and once again, increased susceptibility to infection.</p><p>All of this is my excuse for why I didn't figure it out. Too many different symptoms pointing every which way. And Kaiser, like all HMOs, is very compartmentalized. Having a family doctor who is familiar with your history and trained as a GP doesn't come across as cost-effective in their books. So they have specialists. Very good specialists, but also overworked specialists. Making efficient use of them pushes the system towards targeting a specific complaint and focusing in on that.</p><p>I call it the Kragen's Auto Parts of health care. "Hi; I'd like to order a heart valve replacement for a 2009 male Caucasian..."</p><p>So I was just limping along with increasingly frequent sinus infections, sinus headaches, and poor sleeping. Until December when it suddenly got much, much worse. And I'd picked the wrong item from the Kaiser menu so there was months of following the plan to solve some completely different problem than the one I had before we could finally cross-step.</p><p>So now I'm finally scheduled for CT scan and seeing the surgeon and hopefully getting surgery scheduled as soon as possible. And my allergist, who has been doing "wait and see," will finally see about an aspirin challenge and otherwise doing something other than prescribing more and more medications that treat the growing symptoms of a different problem.</p><p>But.</p><p>I've missed so many hours due to nasty head colds and episodes of severe fatigue HR is getting ready to kick me. And if that happens I lose medical care. I need to keep struggling on and somehow get perfect attendance even as the symptoms get worse and worse -- and somehow schedule all these doctor's visits off the clock -- until I can get what I hope will turn things around and set the clocks back a few years to where I was properly productive.</p><p>Perfect timing, of course. Right <i>now</i> we are repurposing my shop, buying new equipment, and very possibly changing my role in the company. We have a new prototype all over the tables right now and as usual at this company, everything is do-it-now priorities.</p><p>And of course <i>simultaneously</i> we have UL testing on another product that I am de-facto project lead and (oh hell no) lead engineer. I have been poaching real engineers when I can but there's a lot of work and a lot of pressure.</p><p>If only this was happening a few months later. I am looking forward to these changes, but they are happening now just when the strength I need is weeks away.</p><p>But.</p><p>Acute sinusitis. A very nasty bug got into my frontal sinuses and there's little that can be done. Sinuses too blocked for it to properly drain, and by the same coin, rinses and vapor and all that crap can't get up there. Infections of this kind are usually viral so don't respond to antibiotics (I'm on one anyhow). Oh, and I can't even take pain killers.</p><p>Stabbing pain, so bad I am almost unable to sleep. Pain so bad I am squinting both eyes even as I type this. Since Thursday (and there's another two days for HR to complain about). And it just won't end.</p><p>Monday is going to be...delightful.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-7280265013623690722024-03-13T19:44:00.000-07:002024-03-13T19:44:30.499-07:00We are not smart<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgQU-dJ1aWWUZygfKyEXDJLM8uZgHrnyS7t3p5sgDmVz9dr16utAsjggiNOWF3NE-ZArcOgHpASxBGp6AlwKWsbLaso3k2BBOZaCCiMreqaX2CETL47mbEtOXfxKAak9HU0ZgQiyYpHpKYoRt4T-j4IAc6hu48T6NF0DQWIrKMJebf77OJIVQnuSfIJOs" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgQU-dJ1aWWUZygfKyEXDJLM8uZgHrnyS7t3p5sgDmVz9dr16utAsjggiNOWF3NE-ZArcOgHpASxBGp6AlwKWsbLaso3k2BBOZaCCiMreqaX2CETL47mbEtOXfxKAak9HU0ZgQiyYpHpKYoRt4T-j4IAc6hu48T6NF0DQWIrKMJebf77OJIVQnuSfIJOs" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Right after posting, I realized the problem isn't that I am writing too slowly. It is that I spend so much time feeling too stupid to write.</p><p>Well, instead of trying to figure out how to write a smart story when I am dumb, why don't I set out to write a dumb story?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BAHDoCe7U54" width="320" youtube-src-id="BAHDoCe7U54"></iframe></div><br /><p>Like the Asgard approach, this is smarter than it seems at first. What I mean is, give myself permission by doing a story that by genre and style is fine with shoddy world-building, plots full of holes, paper-thin characters.</p><p>And I do have one I've been thinking about. This approach could possibly take care of some of the issues I had with the idea, even.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-51521100396514255522024-03-13T15:09:00.000-07:002024-03-13T15:09:54.185-07:00Par for the Course<p>I should not have been hanging out in the write-o-sphere. Too many nice discussions on Quora, videos on YouTube, stuff like that.</p><p>The scene I am on is a perfect place to step back from all lectures, all the time.</p><p>Already, I was picking this as a place to come down hard with five-senses, but that was for other reasons. Anyhow, this seems like a good scene to try to communicate thematic points without someone sitting down and talking about them -- and this include using the narrative voice of my protagonist.</p><p>How exactly do I get across concepts like dérive in a 2,000 word scene of French people running around an office park?</p><p>Oh, but that's not the worst.</p><p>In the great battle between Pantser and Outliner it is recognized by both that discovering and bringing out the themes of your book, as well as the essential conflicts, core character development, and related deep-structural elements, happens in rewrites. So no surprise; I am changing what is on the table and where I want to focus.</p><p>Originally, the internal conflict that drives Penny for this book was whether to take up the mantle of hero. Amelia came on board first as an ordinary tourist to act as a mirror, reflecting the way that Penny has grown from naive tourist to experienced world traveler (as much as she might protest). She was useful as someone who understood the arts and could turn inner monologue into dialogue. Still talking-heads lectures, but one step more in the direction of being actually interesting. With that in there, it was a natural step to let he be a comic book geek, at least enough to start throwing the hero label in Penny's direction.</p><p>But on reflection this didn't work. She just got done fighting yakuza and nearly dying in the snow to answer that one. And looking into the mirror of a goddess, which should really finish off any questions of appearance versus reality. At least for a while!</p><p>So where her conflict is, has been changing as I write. It was largely behind the several rewrites, of what has become a process so long I may end up with cork-covered walls and an absinthe addiction before it is over.</p><p>And when I hit the parkour scene, I realized my first take (she's physically afraid of the challenge) is defensible but doesn't advance the important themes.</p><p>So I'm trying to define the themes of the book, find ways of bringing them out in this scene, and do it without spelling anything out with talking heads and idiot lectures. Right. This may take a few more weekends!</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-20794316073054835092024-03-03T20:43:00.000-08:002024-03-03T20:43:12.092-08:00Skip to my Louvre<p>The Conversation from Hell in now back in draft. And this weekend I plugged on through (against the trials and tribulations of new medications) to revise 1,300 words of Penny walking from the metro entrance to I.M. Pei's Inverter Pyramid in the Louvre Carousel.</p><p>Speaking of which. I am flipping back and fourth between French and English spelling in my notes, and in the text. Sometimes it is the Eiffel Tower, sometimes le Tour Eiffel.</p><p>(As a tower, it is "le." As "The Iron Lady" -- a frequent nickname -- it is "la." Aren't gendered languages fun?)</p><p>I'd probably use the French terms more often but Speech-to-Text throws fits at French. Or maybe it is just <i>my</i> French. Lately, with my exploding sinuses, it is throwing fits at everything, but it is still a good way to take notes on the fly. The scenes I just finished re-writing were not in speech-to-text. Or on the phone. I needed the real-estate of the mini and the two monitors connected to it for all the stuff I had to shuffle around or consult.</p><p>(Actually, whether I am getting faster at typing or what, I rarely cut-and-paste the material I am re-using. I drag over the bit of scene that has a new home, but then I re-type it, adjusting it to fit in with the flow of the current scene. For today's work, I could <i>not</i> find where I stuck the notes on religious buildings around Montmartre, but it made more sense for the scene to fly past that. But, oddly, I finally turned up something today that explained why there is still a martyrium in the area, after all the revolutions and gypsum mining and so on. It ain't the original.)</p><p>I am hopeful but rather less than sanguine that I might have a draft finished by April. Which would put it five years after the time the story takes place. And I don't know (and have stopped wanting to know) since I started.</p><p>I still need to revise the Egyptian Room scene, significantly. The Charles de Gaulle shouldn't take much editing; a big thing I've been doing is moving some "beats" around to give character and theme development better arcs, and there is some stuff in there that may need to be moved. And then I'll finally be in the parkour scene at La Defense where I left off for this last round of revisions.</p><p>I have dreams that the next Athena Fox story will take a different direction and, possibly, be easier. One problem I've had with this one is there isn't enough plot, and the plot beats unfold far too frequently in a "studying this artwork and knowing a weird detail about an Impressionist painter..." way. The Desert one should be able to have a lot more plot beats that are someone saying something incriminating or someone shooting bullets through a door. Hell, it may be the first story I write that has a proper Body Drop!</p><p>I won't need a Murder Wall to work that plot out, though. I will be doing a world book for <i>Blackdamp</i>, though. I finally realized that when I did a test draft of Alice's first scene (the first scene in the book) and I didn't know how many people there were in her class. So I'm going to ballpark the population figures and economies so I have some general grasp of things like, is there a whole street of goldworkers (or whatever appropriate cottage industry) or is there only enough work for one weird guy that does the stuff in his whatever-the-steampunk city-has equivalent of his garage.</p><p>And learn about Venus. Bought my first book already. I'm hoping I don't have to learn too much chemistry -- time consuming stuff, that -- but I am very afraid it will be far too important...</p><p><i>That</i> book is looking to take a lot longer than April Next to write...</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-84838351272106856172024-02-24T23:45:00.000-08:002024-02-24T23:45:22.596-08:00Put on...the mask!<p>I don't remember what movie that was. 1950's horror movie about a cursed, well, mask. At certain points the audience was instructed to put on their 3D glasses and...</p><p><i>Sometimes a Fox </i>is crawling along. I've been ridiculously sick basically since Christmas (tested positive AGAIN for COVID) and I'm lucky to get an hour or two of clear thinking before my brain goes out again...in a week.</p><p>Made progress on the next book, though. Watched several movies and read a new urban fantasy series cover to cover and messed around with a few games but being sick and feeling stupid isn't exactly the time you finally sit down with <i>War and Peace</i>.</p><p>Whatever I bumped off of, I finally accepted I wasn't actually against having my cast running around in oxygen masks. And there's some fun possibilities if you stick with the CO2 atmosphere.</p><p>The biggest reason not to tinker with Venus is that it becomes too easy. Once you've added "A wizard did it" to explain why the air is breathable now (or any number of other things), it becomes just a little bit too transparent how the world is being constructed to permit the story being told. It may not be a slippery slope but it looks like a slippery slope.</p><p>So, no magical lost Earth technology or remarkable feat of terraformation or anything. Instead I'm going to more-or-less use the real planet. Just bend it a little, like steampunk bends friction and tolerance and energy densities because I'm sorry, a charcoal fire and brass gears does not make you a good helicopter.</p><p>That decision bumped into discoveries I made doing a trial sketch of the opening scene. It is a sort of graduation exercise and...how many people are actually in this class? Um. I think this is going to be old-fashioned world-building, where I sit down and work out some general population numbers and basic economies so the places feel internally consistent.</p><p>Which means I probably won't finish that book this year, either.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-22549173842387536662024-02-05T12:12:00.000-08:002024-02-05T12:12:50.539-08:00Macramé<p>That's my new writing term.</p><p>So when you've got an A plot and a B plot (for a full-length novel, at least that, and probably a C and D as well) they mostly run on parallel tracks. It allows, among other things, for you to provide that action-reaction; when a major turn has happened in the A plot, we switch to the B plot to allow the reader to digest what has just happened before we throw the next A plot event at them.</p><p>Those threads cross, and depending on how on-the-nose you want to plot things, they may end up in a crisis or revelation point at the same time in some bring-together scene.</p><p>And of course you have the other threads; character arcs, world-building tasks, development of theme. All of those are also running, more or less parallel, and when possible with their big developments staggered so the reader can pay attention to the personal crisis or the unveiling of the Big Bad or the new information about a side character in (relative) isolation.</p><p>And then there are the macramé scenes. Those are the scenes when multiple threads converge and connect. Those can be the most satisfying when you finally get them to work. But that "finally" in there? Yeah, that's the problem. These scenes can also be a total pain.</p><p>Yeah, that's where the book is now.</p><p>I'm throwing out all of my old calendar marks. One year since starting, one year since the previous book...all of that is gone now. But...the story is set in April, and maybe, just maybe, I can have it finished by then. </p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-48906233208476627742024-01-31T12:41:00.000-08:002024-01-31T12:41:13.497-08:00I can not read the fiery letters<p>Time to mess around with engraving wood on the new laser. I wanted cedar or something but I had some thin walnut around so used that.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifoyUkqq0BUM_4gry6F2EUPFdpgH-xX-HVogo1Qc9gI2nU7yJaJsX5mMPglITpPTLsDQ1x8_5soFEMJntp2Jcu3KdZ7hSjnHQxLe0cIUNF9szxSGpQY7ogr-zNP2FrUzN0dSu1O6gFDca4UQsj9Kv3Z76eS6aV5asofR2fGzx2tDNMZVldUsVwPFjuVgc/s640/coffee_label.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifoyUkqq0BUM_4gry6F2EUPFdpgH-xX-HVogo1Qc9gI2nU7yJaJsX5mMPglITpPTLsDQ1x8_5soFEMJntp2Jcu3KdZ7hSjnHQxLe0cIUNF9szxSGpQY7ogr-zNP2FrUzN0dSu1O6gFDca4UQsj9Kv3Z76eS6aV5asofR2fGzx2tDNMZVldUsVwPFjuVgc/s320/coffee_label.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p>That is just one of the all singing, all-dancing coffee machines we have at work. Three kinds of beans, three powders (the hot chocolate is good), twenty recipes. And hot water.</p><p>I'm on the psycho-drug now and no side effects yet. Cross all sixteen fingers...</p><p>Well, was sick enough yesterday I called in and spent the day home from the factory...working on another factory. Couldn't concentrate well enough to straighten out the current scene in the book. Took a couple more test videos. May put something up soon. </p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-5297840520923071162024-01-29T12:24:00.000-08:002024-01-29T12:24:48.345-08:00Underground<p>Struggling with what turned out to be a key scene in Part III of <i>Sometimes a Fox</i>. Could be another six months before it is finally edited and ready to publish. At least the cover art looks like it is finally working, or well enough. I've started revisiting my links on the UX community in Paris, <i>cataphiles</i> et al, while I work up plans for what exactly I want to have in there (besides the <i>Petite Ceinture</i> and 145 Rue Lafayette, one of the more famous "fake buildings" in Paris).</p><p>"Cleaning up" my current <i>Satisfactory</i> build is going slowly. Spent my last session starting a dedicated Smart Plating park (mine head, smelters, fab shop and truck station in separate buildings) to complete one more of the last Space Elevator deliverables. But mucked about the previous session because I couldn't figure out a clean way to hook the dedicated Circuit Board factory to the local Hyperloop station.</p><p>That seemed like a good excuse to experiment with taking it underground. Got killed a few times getting the trick working properly; you can clip through the terrain with a carefully placed hypertube, but you will promptly fall to your death below the world if you haven't prepared properly. A bit of excitement being marooned under the map, with a tiny bioconverter chugging away powering my only link back to the surface. Try not to delete the hypertube entrance!</p><p>Some people build all kinds of stuff under the map. I just made a cyberpunk-feel walkway, tube and conveyor belt, completely sealed off to preserve the illusion. I'm late enough in the game that even if all I need is a belt or a tube I can afford to build a whole decorated passageway -- even blueprint it up with railings and lights and signs and architectural details.</p><p>And my latest asthma medication did exactly what the last one did; made me sicker. I'm suffering it out without medication right now to see if I can tolerate it at all. Oddly enough, as unpleasant as mornings and evenings are, I'm sleeping well now...</p><p>That may change when I try the psycho-pills. I think I may try those out tomorrow.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-35284204516344834202024-01-21T11:30:00.000-08:002024-01-21T11:30:32.113-08:00The map, please<p>Tempted again to incorporate a map into my book covers. That or somewhere in the index or something. Geography ended up an important part of the story in so many of this series. In the London book, the relationship of the under-construction Northern Extension with the Kennington Loop, Kennington Park, Nine Elms, and the Battersea Power Station is important to the plot.</p><p>In the Kyoto book, it is a minor plot element but the physical layout of the Transcendence complex has much to do with the theme as well. In the Athens book, her epic flight back from just south of Frankfurt could also benefit from a map. And in the Paris book, several of Huxley's clues are based on the physical relationship of various elements of the Parisian landscape; following the "ribbon of steel" from Sacre-Coeur to the champs-elysees, or taking one particular avenue from the arc de triomphe to Hotel Biron.</p><p>But it seems a bit much to clutter the index and appendix with a map, way too much to have one in the frontispiece like this was a '90s epic fantasy book, and wasted effort to do the back cover as my intent was always to prioritize the ebook side.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-5223766553710172912024-01-21T10:47:00.000-08:002024-01-21T10:47:02.482-08:00Grappling with Cheese<p>I should stop using health as an excuse. Basically I feel so incompetent about writing it is hard to bend down back over that grindstone.</p><p>I realized while doing clean-up on the big parkour training scene at La Defense that I needed a lot more five-senses stuff. I'd been intending to go back with a "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail about the foods, but this bit of a physical activity reminds me of the places where the Kyoto book really worked. And that was the very five-senses experiences of running and exercise.</p><p>And this should help decompress some as well. Part III has been dropping too many story beats without enough breathing space around them. Adding some "you are there" sensuality should give me some space to reflect on each beat, time for the reader to digest, before I move on.</p><p>I went through one scene and it was easy enough. I've still not learned how to write faster, but I have learned how to re-write much more easily. (And faster.)</p><p>A week of COVID. Two insane weeks of work without any recovery time, right up to the last working day of the year and delivering the big project just two days before. A week off for the holidays but I was so wrecked (and had a massive asthma attack Christmas Eve) I took another week sick, then only made it in for a day or two the week after that as well.</p><p>HR hates me now.</p><p>One thing that dragged me back to the shop was finally throwing together a prop for the new cover art. While I was recovering from sick/COVID/exhaustion I opened up PhotoShop, did the repaint for the figure on the fourth cover and sent that off to my cover artist. And came up with a new overall cover concept I'm at the moment pretty happy with. But I wanted a prop for the cover and I thought it would be more fun to build then to try to source in royalty-free images (or trust AI. Shudder.)</p><p>There was a tiny bit of project creep. I really should be using my laser for something, so I finally spent a little time in <i>Fusion360</i> and <i>Lightburn</i> and, yeah, that new 20W head burns through 3/32 basswood like a laser through softwood.</p><p>I also tried to shave time by using glue and paint and plasti-dip as surface preparation rather than the usual round of Bondo spot putty and sandpaper. It didn't work; neither to save time, nor to get good surfaces. But since the final prop will be a few hundred pixels on the actual artwork, it hardly matters.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgz3OfW-m1ABC1a88k8HxLFOXAazjTk9G6sewAiR2dF2ppsE-5qSDpziZVoeqqtPuSeklf_6NDo0nEwlDDY-PTincEWwM5cGAU1tG9o5AyCRbie9CvQurY3UbJ6X0pEcvhZc4u5mb-4WJGVIQ-hc81XbtXzynxp3_i2UZbHcw2tSUbvsJqPQMh9bWjouDw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="2016" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgz3OfW-m1ABC1a88k8HxLFOXAazjTk9G6sewAiR2dF2ppsE-5qSDpziZVoeqqtPuSeklf_6NDo0nEwlDDY-PTincEWwM5cGAU1tG9o5AyCRbie9CvQurY3UbJ6X0pEcvhZc4u5mb-4WJGVIQ-hc81XbtXzynxp3_i2UZbHcw2tSUbvsJqPQMh9bWjouDw=w320-h240" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /></div>The bracket for the spool is laser-cut wood. Laser-cut EVA foam for the strap (which I had to dial down to 40% power!) Gears off Thingiverse (there's a very nice DXF/EPS gears creator online, but downloads of the models are on a subscription basis.) I did get fancy and the grapple is steel rod, bent with MAPP gas and brazed with my little micro-torch (MAPP/oxygen head). <div><br /></div><div>Some of the parts were found objects so I wasn't really able to come up with a design first and model it properly in CAD and break out the right parts from that. Instead I just had to push ahead building stuff I knew wasn't quite right and hoping it would work when I glued it all up. So; project management mistakes as well as surface prep mistakes. That's why we do these things; to learn how to do better.</div><div><br /></div><div>(There's another thing that's always been part of my design work. I especially noticed it in sound design. And that is trying to find those quintessential cues or clues that the audience will be able to read and thus grasp what it is the design is trying to say. I think the grapple and reel shapes are defined enough here, with telling details like the ring with the knot tied to it, to communicate the "throws a grappling line out and then reels it in." In actual design, some kind of sling or harness is absolutely essential because you don't lift your body weight on a pistol grip. But for visual purposes that isn't on this prop.)<br /><p><br /></p></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-91283204190448735432024-01-20T14:50:00.000-08:002024-01-20T14:50:28.962-08:00My Cabbages!<p>Finished the main campaign of <i>Hogwarts Legacy</i>. It didn't quite deliver. There seems to be a thing, though, with main campaigns being considered the weakest part of a game (<i>Fallout 4</i>, take a bow). I'm not sure this is true. It is true that side quests can take more risks as they can afford to have the player disengage and not follow through. The main campaign has to be a bit blah because it has to appeal to everyone.</p><p>(There also seems to be a thing, for the last decade's AAA games at least, for the last part of the Main Campaign to feel rushed, like the developers ran out of time and money when it came to finishing the game properly. But that might be that, according to Steam data, less than a quarter of all players finish the main campaign in any game.)</p><p>In the case of <i>Hogwarts Legacy</i>, the whole Ancient Magic thing was a bit meh. It was okay for a Macguffin, and Isadore's story was interesting, but giving it to the player character was a little too Chosen One for my taste. That, and the combat and magic systems were robust and complex enough; adding Ancient Magic to the mix was a complexity (and power) that wasn't really needed.</p><p>(There's a basic problem with the shooter paradigm. In a movie or book you can have a realistic -- that is, small -- number of opponents. To give time for the player to fully experience the game, they have to engage with multiple enemies. Multiple enemies begs the question of how the player character is surviving. This pushes towards power-ups; the player character becomes The Batman or the Doom Marine, gets powered armor...or Ancient Magic.)</p><p>This also really isn't a game about meaningful choices, for the most part. You get almost the same ending regardless of what dialogue options you choose. So in M.I.C.E. parlance, this is primarily a Milieu story. You can customize your appearance and pick your house, but that's internal role-play that has almost no functional effect on the game itself. The story is also equally split between the Big Event and the character going through a fairly ordinary Hogwarts school year; so again the I, C, and E aren't really what you came for.</p><p>So anyhow.</p><p>I'd gotten a fair way in with Richard Turpin, my Slytherin. Hadn't intended to pick Slytherin but the game has no pause feature for the long cutscenes and I'd been Sorted before I got back from the bathroom. Well, to be as accessible as possible, your House doesn't really force anything on you. Slytherins in this game are basically the way I'd intended to play Dick in the first place; willing to do what was necessary to save the Wizarding World from the Ancient Magic, but smart about it; study is good because knowledge is power. Being friendly gets you help from people, and in any case it almost never hurts you to be kind. And of course he lies like a rug because why would you give away information if you didn't have to?</p><p>But then I realized just how powerful you could get with Herbology. So I saved that game and started "Henny" the Hufflepuff. Who was shy, helpful, self-effacing, and really into magical plants and creatures.</p><p>It worked out <i>wonderfully</i>. First on the practical; yeah, it is tough to really gather enough mandrakes, venomous tentaculars and chinese chomping cabbages until several hours into the game, where you get the Room of Requirement and your own potting tables. There's a few tricks, like an early errand for Professor Garlick (everyone's favorite witch), or stealing that one from the shop, but also, what really pushes the things up to unstoppable are Traits (which don't unlock until somewhere around the first Ancient Magic Trial), and the ability to weave charms into your own clothes.</p><p>Which doesn't get unlocked until you start keeping your own menagerie and more on that later.</p><p>With the vegetative stats I got up to, my cabbages could take out a troll in six chomps or less. The Rookwood boss fight was a a little annoying until I finally figured out Ashwinders (dark wizards) were going to infinitely apparate in until I knocked Rookwood's HP down. I was operating on the theory of clear the space of minor combatants first.</p><p>Was doing pretty well, but eventually slipped. Back from the last save, I prioritized him and it was over in two minutes.</p><p>Mostly because his second appearance, with even more Dark Wizards of even higher levels supporting him for what was going to be a properly epic fight, he zigged when he should have zagged and apparated right on top of four of my cabbages. The battle was over before he'd had a chance to make his opening speech. I had the same thing in the final dragon fight. Was getting my ass kicked -- I had not brought along nearly enough healing potion and there were too many mandatory/unavoidable damage cases -- until he finally LANDED.</p><p>Cue the cabbages.</p><p>The biggest problem I had with them is that once I cleared a room full of spiders by rolling a few down the ramp that is supposed to dump you into the middle of the combat arena. Something bugged out in the game and it kept insisting I had to defeat the enemies before moving on to the dialogue. Had to restart from a save point. Take out <i>most</i> of the spiders from safely outside the arena, then drop down to do the last few personally so the game would accept that I'd won the battle.</p><p>But combat aside; this was totally the Hogwarts experience I wanted. The Hufflepuff dorm was lovely, and I went straight for the various Beasts quests. Poppy Sweeting is even more fun than Natsai Onai, and I found her side quest more entertaining. The most graceful lovely bit of a game that really goes out of its way to give you those lovely bits (and the Hufflepuff common room is <i>darling</i>) is the vivariums you get. Magical pocket dimensions where your creatures can frolic safe from poachers and everything else. So really this plays very well as a Magical Creatures game, where you pay a lot more attention to petting nifflers and hanging out in a potting shed than you do to whatever the goblins are getting up to.</p><p>(I basically ignored the Sebastian side quests. Henny felt sorry for him and his sister, but he -- like the Weasley kid -- came on too strong with the charm and the bad-boy vibe and she found it off-putting.)</p><p>And my little Hufflepuff ended up with a character arc. She didn't want combat and she didn't trust or like Ancient Magic, but she was loyal and helpful and that put her in situations where she had to shoot fireballs at people (or chomp them with cabbages). And she discovered she was surprisingly good at it, and (due to the Gear system of the game) even started dressing the part as an Adventurer.</p><p>After finally stopping Rangok and sealing up the Ancient Magic, she consciously got back into quiet, un self-assuming student robes, hung out with friends in the Hufflepuff common room, and basically tried to get back to the Hogwarts year she'd been expecting and wanting. Not fighting goblins in underground caverns, but learning herbs.</p><p>So on last analysis, the game was worth the money, and there's some replay potential. There's a base-building mechanic (because of course there is) but the functionality is too limited without a lot of questing after random side errands. So, technically, you can spend time dressing up your Room of requirement and the attached vivariums, or picking your outfit (there is an entire system for <i>wand handles</i>. Which have no effect in play and are basically invisible for most of the game).</p><p>For role playing, you can play a little more towards the unhelpful and mercenary side but the former just closes you off from potentially lucrative side quests, and the latter makes no functional difference in how people treat you.</p><p>(Example; if you are sent to retrieve a diary, come back and chose the lower dialogue option of "I'm gonna keep it unless you fork up more cash" the quest-giver will just say, "But of course! You've earned it!" and be the same thankful person. You can throw classmates across the room, brazenly break into locked chests and steal everything -- RPG standard there -- and even use the Unforgivable Curses without the slightest change in how anyone looks at you.)</p><p>There are a couple of different options at the ends of quests you can explore, and there is specific material for each House in just one spot; how you find the Map Room. For a Hufflepuff, that mission takes you to...Azkaban!</p><p>And as my cabbage play-through showed, you can concentrate your combat skills in one area or another. Since you can't progress through the main quest without learning <i>everything</i> (with the exception of the Unforgivable Curses, which are a Sebastian Sallow side quest or three) this boils down to what you actually do in combat -- and in what Traits you weave into your clothing. Which are also random drops, but since this part of the crafting system is mostly optional, you don't have to follow it.</p><p>(The Cabbage-Wielder build; at least two items with Herbology or Fangs trait, plus Medium potting tables and fertilizer. Spend the rest on Protego and Ederus potion to keep yourself alive while the cabbages get to work. And the double-cabbages Talent is in the Room of Requirement pool -- level 16, if I'm not mistaken, and given how long it is before you get the loom, you are basically at level 16 and through at least the first Ancient Magic Trial before you can really go to town with this build).</p><p>I will duck in long enough to watch the final cut scenes, and maybe take my graphorn out for a run, but I'm pretty much satisfied with my buck. I don't care to listen through un-skippable dialogue a third time and it is probably back to <i>Satisfactory</i> for me.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-44266609766877701132024-01-15T20:12:00.000-08:002024-01-15T20:12:00.026-08:00Fantastic Beasts and Where to Store Them<p> It was a tossup between <i>Cyberpunk 2077</i> and <i>Hogwarts Legacy</i> and as much as I admired the character work and story and immersion of the former, it wasn't a world I particularly wanted to hang out in.</p><p>Hogwarts, on the other hand. This is a media property, but Warner really put some love into the IP. I think it went beyond just trying to keep the customer happy -- they are sure to know and respect that a whole bunch of people want to hang out in Harry Potter land, even if Warner would just as soon they pay at the gate for the live Wizarding World experience. And there is just a little bit in the game of making sure that they are playing nice with the movie-watching, wand-buying, full tour to Burbank crowd.</p><p>But past that, this is a game that works.</p><p>Which is funny. Really, this is generations in on game design. There are quite elaborate chains of mechanics; you collect robes and other clothing items that are functionally armor, increasing your combat stats, and you can trade those in for money when you upgrade. Which means you run out of inventory slots. So there are the Merlin Challenges to increase the inventory slots. Which in turn require new Spells to complete, and those spells are taught for a price that may include things like raising (totally unrelated) botanicals...</p><p>Which means functionally there's a lot of the same grind as in <i>Starfield</i>. The difference, the weird difference, is that this time it is fun.</p><p>The stuff is fun to do, that's a big one. More fun than anything in <i>Starfield</i> (the space combat is okay, but the basic combat is a boring slog through endless bullet-sponge AI without enough intelligence to use a pencil). But more than that, it looks great, and the sound and music are great, and there's lore that's interesting. So you don't feel like you are sitting there spamming the "fire bullets" button.</p><p>Fights by the middle game of <i>Hogwarts</i> are complicated and fast-moving, with ever-changing and quickly evolving situations. A very good rock-paper-scissor mix, even if there are a few killer aps.</p><p>Chinese Chomping Cabbages. Besides being absurdly strong if you spend all your available upgrades on improving them -- plus dedicate all of your greenhouse to raising the things -- there are situations where you can manipulate the enemy AI. If they see you, they converge in full combat mode. If they are getting nibbled to death by vegetables they flail about, sometimes getting killed without even getting a shot in.</p><p>That is, if you stand just out of range and roll a few cabbages that way.</p><p>The game puts a lot of emphasis on raising "beasts." I think. There's links between main story progression and side stories, and I'm not sure -- even aside from gear upgrades -- you can get through the main story without progressing some of the "beasts" storylines. Which are sort of two not always related ones; fighting poachers with Poppy Sweeting and Natsai Onai (the latter, like Sebastian Sallow, appears to have mandatory main-campaign missions). And raising your own.</p><p>See, you can do it ethically -- because you aren't trying to support a family, you just need a few feathers and hairs to weave into your own school clothes for the mojo they give, so waiting until the frolicking creature drops a few naturally is enough for you.</p><p>And you have up to three magical vivariums, pocket dimensions in which your pets can frolick without predators or other threats. Which are the loveliest level designs in the game, and that is saying a lot. This game really, really spends those pixels well.</p><p>It is what I am doing now while I wait for paint to dry on my new prop and my brain cells to recover after fighting my way through another scene in the never-ending Paris novel.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-451420452106759152024-01-04T14:59:00.000-08:002024-01-04T14:59:23.748-08:00The Quick Brown Fox<p>It was more than interesting. I came out of COVID to hit 12 hour days straight through the weekend. I made the truck just barely in time, and when HR fell short (again!) I ended up making my flight and hotel reservations at the very last minute and out of my own pocket, too.</p><p>Not exactly a proper recovery period.</p><p>Got to LA and got the install finished that I've been sweating about since, oh, February. All my gambles and improvisations seem to have paid off, and the client was happy. And I collapsed. Barely dragged in to the last work day of the year to turn in my receipts.</p><p>I had to take an extra week off work to recover. I might even want another one; as I've finally started feeling human again I've dug into long put-off projects. Talked to my long-suffering cover artist and made up a new scheme I really like. Working my way through all the covers to see if that idea works, then on to do the repaint to make the stock image model look properly on-model to my cover girl.</p><p>(Who isn't exactly Penny, any more than the incidents or settings are literal. I'm smarter than that. Covers are to sell an idea, not to be a document of what is inside.)</p><p>Which means I've been coming to grips with the latest iteration of PhotoShop, which has made some large changes to the workspace and has also added some crazy new tools. I find it annoying how much they are overselling their new Generative Fill, for instance -- rather like those annoying Grammerly ads -- but, sheesh, the Firefly AI is insane!</p><p>Thing that it misses, though, is what I can do in my Stable Diffusion workflow (which I only do for personal use...so far. There's some gray areas, well, more like turgid smelly gray-green areas, in the use of AI tools within the workflow of producing commercial art.) What I can do in Stable Diffusion is drop a few blobs of paint -- seriously, the most low-rent comes-with-Windows pixel-pusher program -- and tell Stable Diffusion what it is supposed to be seeing.</p><p>It is an interesting insight into the mind of the machine as you try to predict how it is going to read the blobs. There's that balance between having the artistic eye to know how things actually look, especially in the gross scale; not like a child's drawing of a bicycle that has cranks and handlebars and spokes but they are sort of all over the place in different places and scales. More like a Picasso bull, where the essence of the animal, attitude and all, is captured in a couple of triangle.</p><p>And against knowing what the training material contains (remembering things like celebrities and fashion are going to be over-represented in the training data), and the psychology of the people who did the training and what words they chose for the prompts.</p><p>In any case, PhotoShop and Firefly haven't yet given that aspect; where you can tell it to look at the underlying material, select how much to keep what is there and how much to pay attention to the prompts instead. <i>Plus</i> the variety of Control Nets, which provide another layer of dial-in selectivity as to detecting poses or contours or whatever. PhotoShop is drifting too much in the Apple Computer mode, which sadly with the increasing power (and the almost inevitable lack of transparency that comes with tools that are too esoteric in their mathematics but rather more importantly, grown via genetic algorithms and similar) is presented in a black-box manner where what it will do is what the designers presume most people want it to do. Which is right enough of the time to make the software spectacular, but when you happen to want something that lies outside those limits...</p><p>So anyhow. I stopped off to make this post as I was finally visiting Adobe's font library, which comes with the whole Creative Commons pay-every-month license that is the only way to have PhotoShop these days.</p><p>***</p><p>Oh, yeah. And while I was very sick, I couldn't even think straight enough to follow the plot of a movie. But I <i>could</i> hang out in the Zen-like experience of <i>Satisfactory. </i>My current world is starting to look half-way nice and I may make a quick tour video some day.</p><p>One more thing on the list of "god, I need a couple months off work to handle all this!"</p><p>Well, that and not being so sick I can't even sleep...</p><p><br /></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-50986567984446191842023-12-10T12:28:00.000-08:002023-12-10T12:28:21.894-08:00I am a jelly donut<p>For a moment I thought I had made a break-through. For two days I struggled with the (fortunately mild) symptoms of COVID. Then I started to get some use out of my enforced isolation. Cranked through clean-up on the first two scenes of Part III of the Paris book and put over a thousand words down on the next.</p><p>And oops. It wasn't quite working. This is the process, though. Revision is usually necessary. Many writers begin by getting the whole thing down in an extremely rough draft, and once the whole shape is there on the page they can start whittling and adjusting and finding the real story that's in that rough mass.</p><p>Others try to hurry the process by working out as much basic structure as they can in outline. But they still end up with revisions. And then, occupying both spaces, the revise-as-you-go crowd has confidence in their grasp of what the overall shape <i>will</i> be (like the outliners) but is willing to cut <i>now, </i>tightening up the draft now rather than writing more chapters that will just end up on the floor.</p><p>A couple of days of struggling and something like thirty attempts to write just one simple conversation. Which I finally got this morning. And the final version was too short to be a full scene but with my understanding of the total structure I moved some stuff that needed to happen soon enough already and I put down almost a thousand words of brand-new scene.</p><p>In one morning.</p><p>The people who are actually writing for a living claim to crank out 2,000 words a day. Which is how they can get up to four books a year. That's leaving about a month for revisions, which doesn't strike me as plausible when those same people are claiming fifteen revisions and three rounds of beta readers. Basically, the number of words falling off the keyboard in any span of time isn't a good guide to how much <i>book</i> has gotten done.</p><p>I'm happy enough with scenes as a metric. I have cut scenes in the past. Moved them, created new ones, heavily revised them. But my draft, when finished, is the third or fourth draft and that's basically the book there. It isn't going to get a lot bigger or smaller and it isn't going to change radically.</p><p>Oh, yeah. And I needed a bit of "business" in the scene I just finished so I had Penny eat a <i>millefeulle</i>. That's my genius bonus for that scene. All along, she's been complaining about just how much this adventure keeps coming back to Napoleon. Guess what that particular pastry is called in America?</p><p>I also, sadly, could afford no more than a sentence on Loie Fuller. There are just so many amazing people, with such deep stories, in Paris in that period! Innovative dancer, inventor, lesbian -- her list of friends and admirers alone could fill a paragraph (start with Toulouse-Lautrec and end with Marie Curie!)</p><p>I knew Part III was going to be a bit unfocused but that's the struggle I am having. It was that damned <i>chevaliers de sangreal</i> scene that got me, once again. I rescued chunks of material from two different scenes in previous drafts, heavily revised and rewrote...and then decided this was the wrong place in the narrative to go on about the role of the Church in the history of Paris.</p><p>When I finally got straight what I was going to try to do, I'd realized I had to change half the previous scene and come up with a new conversation -- the one that took thirty drafts -- and now I've got to come up with something to fill the Carrousel du Louvre scene now that Catholic Conspiracies are (mostly) off the table again.</p><p>Oh, and the whole scene in the Paris Metro is getting booted downstream to the introduction to the parkour scene at La Defense. So at least I may get some use out of that material. </p><p>I did, during this time of basically outline-as-you-go (or revising the outline, since I am not entirely without one) look at everything I could about the Sully Wing at the Louvre and put together a rough idea of how that scene is going to unfold. Oh, and I read the entire thing from top to bottom to see how it flowed.</p><p>Monday, I arrive back at work where six massive panels are waiting for a high-priority, high-profile rush job we only barely have time to finish on deadline. And my engineers phoned (emailed) wanting three more of <i>their </i>units built as well. I totally predicted this. I knew both these projects were going to arrive together and at the last minute.</p><p>I hadn't predicted that I'd be climbing out of five days wrestling with a bug. Next week is going to be...interesting.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-85561869159781843862023-12-05T09:38:00.000-08:002023-12-05T09:38:52.048-08:00NaNoCovWri<p>After all these years, finally had a positive antigen test. So off work for a couple of days. Maybe I can get some writing done?</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-17977519455124155862023-12-02T17:19:00.000-08:002023-12-05T10:02:51.609-08:00Bring back those lazy crazy hazy days of Sumer<p>It might have worked better if Penny knew nothing about history.</p><p>I was trying to create a character who could believably pull off a lot of the Archaeologist Adventurer stunts; climb, jump, identify artifacts, read ancient manuscripts, navigate in Tokyo or Paris, Texas). So it made sense to have her know something about history, because that is the big intellectual one (the physical stuff...one can often hand-wave).</p><p>And I did the series in first person so she could explain what it was she was seeing without having to have a Boswell follow her around (I ended up creating a character for almost every book that she can talk to, anyhow). And it may have been a mistake. It means I set things up perfectly for the narrative to constantly geek out about history, filling every page with stuff that the reader might struggle with, or even decide is getting in the way of the story.</p><p>It might have worked better in third person. Intellectual characters sometimes work better that way. Instead of getting first-hand all this very detailed science, you are just getting the magic at the end, when the hero confidently declares the inscription is in Sumerian, or the light is from a pulsar, or the cabbie is actually a left-handed draftsman who bets on the horses.</p><p>Or I could have taken the history from her. Made her an outsider to the world she was walking into, learning the history and archaeology or whatever along with the reader. </p><p>(Which I tried to do; I made a point of having the plot-important history delivered to her so the reader can get it, and can also see her learning it. And yes, I made it a running gag that whatever her knowledge of history, she'd inevitably focused on the wrong things and the plot-important stuff was as unknown to her as it was to the reader.)</p><p>It is tempting to think I could have just gone with her as an actor. As pretending the Indiana Jones thing without having any of the skills. But when I started writing, I hadn't realized how much I was going to lean on her acting background. Hell, when I started, she was a film student. The idea that she had spent a while not just in classes but on the stage, much less that she might identify as a theater bum...</p><p>The other drawback of the actor thing is she already is inclined to quote plays and sing songs from musicals at any excuse. Perhaps fortunately, copyright doesn't allow that to happen!</p><p>But, alas, I had set out to write stories specifically set in places I'd been, and involving history I was interested in, so no matter where I had gone with my protagonist or my narrator, I was going to end up with what some of my critics have been calling "too much stuff" in it.</p><p>***</p><p>Started another "Archaeological Thriller" on Kindle. Atlantis again (sigh). But it opened with Solon in Thais meeting an Egyptian priest who is (just barely!) believable as being there at the time.</p><p>But this was of course the Diego Salvatore the reluctant conquistador chapter; the guy who is in the story just to show the MacGuffin to the reader then get killed. When the story proper opens...they are doing a pretty convincing job of underwater archaeology, with amphorae, Minoan trade ware, and ox-hide ingots right there!</p><p>Worth noting that I pay a lot of attention to background building and info dumps and stuff like that in every book I read for pleasure. I am always trying to calibrate, making sure that when I write I know if I am doing less (as if!) or more (likely!) than published books. But it is quite difficult to actually judge this stuff and I am still not sure.</p><p>I ended up sort of simultaneously reading that, watching the not-very-good <i>The Hunters</i>, and playing part of <i>Uncharted</i>. And sure a lot of stuff is made that doesn't worry about getting history right. And it seems many of the audience don't care. But the book was on the NYT best-seller list (and <i>Uncharted</i> seemed to be doing decently on Hindu mythology and Indian history) so once again I'm led to believe that even something as out there as Atlantis is an easier sell if the author first gains the reader's confidence that they know their history.</p><p>Plus there's an element of fun in it. I've mentioned that more than one author of a neolithic story has had what is clearly the Amesbury Archer show up. In the Atlantis book I've been talking about, Fayum portraits and the Phaistos Disk show up and I'm not going to complain that the former are out-of-period. Because this is a shared in-joke, the author showing that they know the material that they are taking liberties with, and the reader sharing in knowing the thing, too.</p><p>***</p><p>I'm in low-confidence mode right now. Just finishing up the big "girl talk" bit I planned (Penny and the side character confidante of this book, Amelia, letting down their hair.) Which since Amelia is the Carolina Girl is me trotting out stereotypes of the South to go with the stereotypes of the French. And, yes, the only critique I've gotten so far on the book has been a comment that one of Huxley's lines sounded like the worst mock-period twee English garbage.</p><p>Yeah. I can't say I've ever gotten useful critiques. The only critical comments have been "That's shite," not a specific on what was wrong or a suggestion of what to do differently. Well, okay. There was one suggestion that I should provide a list of all the historical characters at the back of the book. That just struck me as a pointless exercise. If you didn't know who Miyamoto Mushashi is, how does it help to have his name listed a second time in an index you have to flip the pages to get to?</p><p>***</p><p>And I've given up on <i>Starfield</i>. It was mildly amusing in a Zen sort of way at times. There are days when grinding is all your mind can handle. I slowly came to appreciate the world they are trying to build. It just isn't carried out very well. They didn't hit the beats hard enough, and they didn't follow through.</p><p>Compare <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i>. There isn't a story-game segregation, or a world-game segregation. Everything from the UI and menu design to the quest design to the combat design works within the world presented. Contrast with say my favorite whipping-girl, <i>Tomb Raider 2013</i>, in which your scared college student avatar flails away useless with a crappy bow during the cut scene, then you take over and proceed to murderize everyone with and ice axe then desecrate a few W.W.II corpses for the loot while you are at it.</p><p><i>Starfield</i> takes those gaps and fills the experience with them. Todd Howard has been going on (and now he has apparently ChatGPT replying to Steam reviews for him) about how space is supposed to be lonely and some planets are bare.</p><p>As if. Pick a remote moon in the far reaches of the map. Land on a completely random location; this is in fact a procedurally generated unique bit of landscape. Three hundred feet away from your landing site is a struggling mining outpost, an abandoned mine, and a pirate base swarming with two hundred well-equipped pirates, and more ships flying in as you watch.</p><p>Every single time. (Oh, and it is the <i>same</i> base at that, copy-pasted right down to that one dead body with a flailing leg thanks to a terrain intersection).</p><p>Sixteen times the detail? Sixteen times the clutter. I will admit that the terrain out in those "empty" worlds can be very realistic. About <i>Mass Effect: Andromeda</i> realistic, though. Not Unreal Engine realistic. By comparison, <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i> is a little more obviously computer generated.</p><p>But...HZD looks <i>gorgeous</i>. Those pixels are well-spent. And let us not even talk about the <i>Starfield</i> NPCs -- their graphical realism is about <i>Fallout 4 </i>level, but with some exceptions, their design is worse. There is the usual crop of idiots going around saying the problem is <i>Starfield</i> is "woke" so all their people are ethnic and ugly.</p><p>Um...the first people you meet in HZD are elderly, and Aloy the ginger is about the whitest person in the game. But oh my god those are some gorgeous people. In all their variety.</p><p>That, and they are fully animated. One assumes that Bethesda's excuse is that full RPG means too many lines for hand-animation (which is what <i>Andromeda</i> claimed for why so many people had tired faces). But over there, we've got <i>Baldur's Gate 3</i> saying "Oh yeah? Hold my beer!"</p><p>The best I can figure is that they went like <i>Andromeda</i> did and wasted all their years of development trying to get full proceedural generation working. Then over the last six months of crunch tossed together a few hand-built locations and quests. And it feels like it. There's not even a full DLC of designed material in the game, and all of it looks rushed.</p><p>And I went back and replayed both main story and DLC for <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i>.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-43223958164145424072023-11-19T17:36:00.000-08:002023-11-27T13:07:24.831-08:00He's here, the Phantom of the Opera<p>Finally, Part II of the Paris book is finished. Well, draft is finished. But I am a revise-as-you-go type and that puts me a lot closer to final draft than one might otherwise think.</p><p>A long tailing scene through the Palais Garnier, with musings on history, architecture, theater, and a whole bunch of stuff about <i>Phantom</i>.</p><p>Were I a better writer I might have been able to engage with the building more fully. Using the physical spaces and the various stories told in and of it as integral elements of the cat-and-mouse pursuit. I did sort of manage that when I did the big after-publication revision of the Japan book, making some semblance of one of those martial arts period piece chase scenes, jumping through windows and throwing straw baskets or whatever, out of what had been a stroll through the reproduction Edo-era town on the outskirts of Kyoto.</p><p>I didn't quite finish watching the 2011 Royal Albert Hall staged production of <i>Phantom</i>, or the 1925-1927 Lon Chany version, or for that matter reading the book. Much less <i>Phantom of the Paradise</i>, or any one of a hundred other adaptations of the story. Truth be told, I was doing long hours on another "unexpected emergency" project for the engineers at work. And what was playing through my earbuds to keep me awake was not Sir Andrew, but the MTV production of <i>Legally Blonde</i>.</p><p>***</p><p>Turns out I know someone who <i>worked</i> in that theater. At least he answered my ghost light question and whether the drops would be in or out. But still too many questions about the physical layout and none of the stuff I've found online is helping enough. Pretty much, every "behind the scenes at Palais Garnier" thing you find on a shallow search is either selling you, or telling you that someone sells, tickets for the guided tour.</p><p>Which I really should have taken while I was there. But no, I'm not going back to Paris to do research on a book only three people will ever read. So instead on to the Louvre, especially the Concourse mini-mall on the way to the lower entrance, parkour, La Defense, and the old belt railway (and some cataphiles...still on the fence about whether I will let Penny go into the catacombs on this trip.)</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-57862274323981554702023-11-13T19:56:00.000-08:002023-11-13T19:56:32.922-08:00Tour de Paris<p>Had to work this weekend but actually felt pretty good Monday...over lunch at work, opened the file and wrote. A good hundred words. Whee! Do that for a year and I'd finish the novel.</p><p>I jest a little. The Palais Garnier chapter is at 1,700 words and no huge problems yet. Well, aside from the outline planning on this being an epic 4,000 word sequence. </p><p>For no particular reason, though, I started thinking about what the book does as a tour of Paris. What hotspots does it hit and does it do anything interesting in them?</p><p>So here goes the current sequences (I use the term "sequences" as being a common idea or thread or location that may span several scenes or even chapters, or be concluded in just one or even part of one.)</p><p>A cafe at the place du tertre, and Penny meets a fellow tourist on her first day in Paris.</p><p>Penny looks for clues around Sacre-Coeur, atop the butte of Montmartre.</p><p>A stroll down Rue de Abesses, travel tips and beginning French, one of the Hector Guimard metro stations.</p><p>Back to place du tertre to meet a caricature artist, first of the "bohemians" who run a steampunk cabaret in modern Montmartre.</p><p>Musee d' Orsay, art and gossip about the Impressionists, and discussion of the Paris Exposition of 1900.</p><p>A (brief) stroll down the Champs Elysees and visit to the Arc de Triomphe, with Marianne (in the Phrygian cap), pointing the way to the next clue.</p><p>Morning workout running up the Rue Rivoli and past the old vineyards of Montmartre.</p><p>A visit to Shakespeare and Company, and the bouquinistes along the Seine.</p><p>A parkour chase across the Ile de le cite, followed by Parisian street food and a brief discussion of the Jewish community of Paris.</p><p>The Steampunk cabaret, with various popular songs being done in French...and German. Plus a "dual time" visit to the bateau-lavoir in the company of a young Picasso.</p><p>The Pompidou Center, Tintin (Herge was Belgian, though), and a long discussion on Rodin.</p><p>Another chase, starting in Gallery Vivienne.</p><p>A tailing scene through the projected landscapes of a Van Gogh multimedia show.</p><p>A talk with a "love picker" on Pont des Arts, about the love locks of Paris.</p><p>Another tailing scene through Palais Garnier, with a whole lot of stuff about the Phantom of the Opera.</p><p>***</p><p>And that's where I am. Projected, a steampunk photoshoot at the Arts et Metiers metro station, a parkour workout at La Defense, a description of the foyer at the ballet, a meeting with cataphiles along the route of the old Petite Ceinture and a run-in with some punks, details of what happened to Picasso's friend and why his Blue Period, a steampunk garden party and mock duel at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a midnight climb of Notre-Dame des Paris, a daytime visit to Notre-Dame du Travail, and a dinner at the Jules Verne cafe atop the Eiffel Tower.</p><p>So there's a few more hundred-word days left there.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-54814544073552520702023-11-04T22:55:00.001-07:002023-11-04T22:55:41.835-07:00Capital idea<p>I'm a good ways into the love locks scene, with one last big chapter to go to the end of Part II. Boy, has this one been a slog!</p><p>I also decided that I will send this to an editor after all. I'm not going to sell enough copies to pay for that, and I haven't the patience (see above!) to do developmental edits, but I want a line editor to go through the thing because I just can't deal with capitalization and, even more, italics.</p><p>Within the context of what I am doing some of these are arbitrary choices. As a for-instance, I am in this book italicizing sentences in French. As per the trend, if the entire sentence is in French the quotes are also italicized, otherwise, not.</p><p>But should I italicize names? Everyone knows the Louvre, so that probably shouldn't be. Something like the <i>Ile de la Cité</i> is actually a descriptive phrase as well as a name. As is anything that is a Rue or a Pont; should it be the <i>Pont des Arts, </i>because "pont" is the French word for bridge? It seems to make sense; that it would be the Eiffel Tower or <i>le Tour Eiffel</i> depending. But then is it properly <i>Notre Dame</i>, since that just means "Sacred Heart?" Or is it better that the familiar English Notre Dame isn't in italics, but <i>Notre Dame de Paris</i> when it is given in full form?</p><p>There's a bit early on when the character Bastien is speaking franglish; he is mixing actual French with English <i>and</i> English roots given French grammar (apparently that's a thing). So...which parts of <i>that</i> mess should be in italics?</p><p>Oh, and French capitalization rules are different, too. Of course.</p><p>I can at least get the French words correct by hiring a French reader. As painful an experience as <i>that</i> is likely to be. But the thought of trying to figure out consistency in such cases as whether I should italicize or quote or both something like, "You say 'bonjour' when you enter a place of business..."</p><p>In the Japan novel, my rather odd rule of thumb was that only proper Japanese got italics. If someone mentioned "sushi," that was just treated as an English word imported from Japanese. Even much of Aki's weaboo speak didn't get graced with italics, along with Penny's mixed attempts at it. Only a complete grammatical/idiomatic sentence from her got the full italics.</p><p>But all the little details of even if it should be the Eiffel Tower or the Eiffel tower are just too much for me to mess with. Sure I can look them up. But there's something on almost every page, and I'd just as soon to pay someone to worry about that. And fix the places where the italics or the intricacies of punctuation around quotations escape me.</p><p>I would very much love to somehow push through this one, and find some way to kick a few more out the door on a much shorter schedule.</p><p>(And, yes, the Love Locks scene is on the Pont des Arts. Largely because that's the bridge people think of if they've heard of love locks at all. And even though it is clear of them now, finding an excuse to stick some up anyhow is easier than going into the history of which bridges still have them...)</p><p>***</p><p>I've been reading a series about a very Mary-Sue character -- it is intentional on the writer's part, but only partially works -- and that's been giving me thoughts about larger-than-life characters. The Greeks didn't have the hangups we do, in that their heroes were larger, stronger, and probably related to a god, and that was just fine.</p><p>The first superheroes were also very much of a "faster better stronger" mold -- one of the innovations of Marvel was heroes that had problems and hang-ups and weaknesses, with perpetually broke hang-dog Peter Parker being the poster boy. And now we have come to where we often dislike the really skilled characters -- and when we get them, we demand that those skills have some logical reason for being.</p><p>One of the things critics express about the "Sue" characters is the opinion that they haven't earned their powers. But I can't help thinking that there is a hidden gender bias in there. The same swipe of a pen gives a character a black belt, a physics degree, six years in the Marines...but the readers question it more often when that character is female (doesn't help, of course, that the standard is usually hot, young female -- that is, not of the age and size and battered appearance that really should go with those years of getting those skills shown on the paperwork. Yet, this qualification is often waived for the men as well...)</p><p>A lot of what went into Penny was reaction on my part. I didn't want the standard female protagonist package, with or without the "strong" appended. So no handy martial arts background or surprisingly young doctorate degree, but she also isn't a shy loner, she gets along fine with cheerleaders, and her hair isn't perfect after a week in a cave.</p><p>Yet she is becoming a hero. Sure, an "ordinary man" hero, but in a semi-realistic universe (and trope-aware enough herself) to recognize that you stop being ordinary by the third Holy Grail you manage to dig up. So far, I've held back in that her superhuman ability is her almost autistic focus on whatever history the plot requires her to be knowledgable about.</p><p>(She's also able to pull of physical stunts that a self-described "ex dancer and climber of plastic rocks" shouldn't be able to pull off. And has stubborn endurance which is also way off the bell curve. But those are part of the standard "ordinary man" exception where one ticking atom bomb is enough to let thirty-something computer salesman who sometimes plays a bit of pick-up basketball somehow come up with the strength, determination, and sheer luck to beat up a renegade Green Beret.)</p><p>The main magic skill I've given her is language. She has an instinct that she isn't in control of. Which basically, at least up to this book, is given her the seasoned-world-traveller characteristic of being able to speak a little of whatever the local language is, without me having to defend her actually learning the damned thing. She's just a very finely tuned parrot; speaking the correct idiomatic phrase to get her through an interaction (with nearly flawless pronunciation), even as she has no idea what it is she said.</p><p>And none of that makes my job of how to treat language any easier.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-38298473076991398162023-10-31T21:34:00.000-07:002023-10-31T21:34:05.318-07:00Do Gogh On<p>Various projects -- and some work politics -- all hit at the same time. Precisely as predicted, of course. Had to fly to Burbank to take some measurements and got a chance to step inside the gates at Sony, at least. But head colds and flying are not good companions.</p><p>In any case, I'm finishing of the scene at the Van Gogh Experience. This is the scene that gives the lie to the idea that I just cram everything I know into each chapter (although I will admit that this book is less filtered than the others). My choice for this one is that my protagonist doesn't know much about the painter and doesn't get a chance to learn, either.</p><p>So there are a lot of Van Gogh paintings being projected on to the walls, and I am spending time staring at haystacks and cafes and lots and lots of sunflowers. But the narrator is unable to name any of them, much less place them in proper historical context.</p><p>About the only one I think I can get away with is to have a cross-fade that suggests that the sunflower was Vincent himself. But the tidbit that he painted scads of these things to decorate the room that Gaugin was more-or-less blackmailed into taking in shared digs at Arles -- an odd couple that would soon enough erupt in violence and the loss of an ear -- well, I can't share any of that.</p><p>I have enough name-drops and references and weird jokes anyhow. At some point Penny is across the cornfield (with crows) from the people she is tailing, in a spy-movie version of that one segment from Kurosawa's <i>Dreams</i>, and she remarks there's too much light and they are going to see her "coming through the rye."</p><p>That's the problem with spending so long writing. Not that I add new stuff at every pass. The process is different. It is that I take so long between writing sessions, when I write a couple of new paragraphs I've had days to think about the scene and the random ideas and associations and jokes and turns of phrase are just waiting in the wings. All of my re-write passes are about taking as much of that stuff as I can...back out. </p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-39363768309447468072023-10-21T23:41:00.000-07:002023-10-21T23:41:00.231-07:00Twenty Hours<p>There are some books in which the sample chapters are just so engaging you immediately buy the book...then find out the rest of the book does something different and not as interesting.</p><p>I've never encountered this in a game. Generally, you know in less than five minutes. (Of course, you rarely get a sample chapter, so you've bought the game already...)</p><p>Mostly. It can take a while to get into the core gameplay loop. In <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i> you are introduced to most of the core concepts within twenty minutes of the (long!) opening cutscene. An important element is the "focus," however, and if you are really, enjoying exploration and listening to <i>all</i> the audio diaries it might take you forty minutes get to Aloy actually using the thing in-game.</p><p>Similarly, you don't get the bow and you certainly don't get the trick arrows until an hour into <i>Tomb Raider 2013. </i>But the thing is; whether it is the mostly-passive opening sequence of <i>Bioshock</i> or the extremely long cutscene that begins <i>Horizon Zero Dawn</i> or the big build-up -- you do character creation before you even start playing -- before you actually stride the corridors of the <i>Normandy</i> as Commander Shepard, you still know what kind of ride you are in for.</p><p>These games all have a style. There's a strong artistic vision that infuses all the design elements, from as big as skyboxes to as intimate as inventory screens. The music, the sound effects -- and when any element of play begins, the fluidity and intuitiveness of the controls.</p><p>I had trouble right out of the gate with <i>Dragon Age</i>, as I did not like the control system. It almost reminded me of the "tank" controls of original <i>Tomb Raider</i>. <i>Far Cry 3</i> also felt awkward. I just did not really feel in control of Jason Brody. But that's a me thing; that's a reaction some players will have, and some will not.</p><p>Just as the very strong design choices in some games just don't mesh with all players. When you give a whole game a distinct stamp, color, flavor, then some will like it and some will not.</p><p>What doesn't work is being bland. I can't think of any game I have really liked that had a bland approach. My favorite games have all had, over and above the game play, puzzles, dialogue, choices, voice acting, and of course graphics, an extremely distinctive style. You can't confuse <i>Portal</i> with anything else out there.</p><p>***</p><p>So every now and then a game comes along that the advise is not to judge it immediately but play for twenty hours. As I mentioned in my previous "review" (short take?) <i>Starfield</i> takes obscenely long to open up the rest of the game to you. </p><p>Well, okay, the crafting, base building, and ship building are a bit of an appendage. They are to some one of the more attractive parts of the game, though, and they are behind a grindwall that's a good 10-20 hours thick.</p><p>Same goes for the main campaign. Considered skippable -- but one of the side quests that is well spoken of (Crucible) requires multiple hours of play just to clear the first barrier. You have to have a specific package of upgraded ship and upgraded skills (and some toughness, too) in order to even get the quest. </p><p>It took me well over twenty hours to get to where I could start building my first outpost. I could have done ship building earlier, but really, not that much earlier. Plus, it took that long to get both the main campaign into an interesting place, and to be able to start pursuing the big side quests (like Mantis).</p><p>So, yes. As far as the play opportunities, as far as exploring that "core gameplay loop," I really did need to put twenty hours in.</p><p>Which pains me. It means there are some upper-level managers who are congratulating themselves on making a game good enough that most players do a good twenty hours, and none of them quality for a refund. The reality is that they've done such a bad job of staging this game, it really does require that kind of time.</p><p>The crafting system is ridiculously grindy, and it is linked in various ways to outpost building (and less so to ship construction but there are similar things going on there). The player just can't experience the game as written without exceeding the refund time.</p><p>But...and here's the big but...the five minute rule was still true.</p><p>It looks <i>awful. </i>It looks like shit and it runs like shit. The two are connected only in the dreams of the marketers; turn down the graphics and it still bugs out all over the place. Turn up the graphics to full settings -- and it still looks like a game from fifteen years ago.</p><p>Almost every part of this game is a regression. The NPCs are less alive, less animated, less realistic. The scenery is less interesting. There's less interactivity overall, really. This still has the Creation Engine stupid of playing long, long animations of your character sitting down, then awkwardly cutting to a different POV of them seated. Same for crafting. This still has the stuck-in-place, dead-eyed NPCs chanting the same stock lines at you without any sense that your input even matters. It is like being trapped in the animatronic Hall of Presidents for twenty hours.</p><p>And all the usual stuck on scenery, vanishing heads, and people mysteriously floating into the sky...that's all still there.</p><p>But even that doesn't matter. Because when all is said and done, it doesn't have the "it." The design is merely adequate. There's no strong flavor to it. No strong choices. Just...stuff. Generic music, generic assets, generic UI..</p><p>I take that back. The UI is regrettably ugly and dysfunctional. It looks and feels and works like the low bid for a mega-chain POS register. Endless unfriendly menus with poor text, poor tactile response, no clear and consistent UI system...</p><p>It feels absolutely random, for instance, whether you can click on a quest location and make the jump from there, or if you have to go to your ship, or if your ship pops into space over the planet and you have to navigate down to the surface with another click-and-loading screen. After dodging bigger enemies for hours by having one finger on the hyperdrive controls -- as the game itself, and the NPCs in the cockpit with me, all recommend -- I got killed while staring at a screen labeled "You can not fast travel in combat!"</p><p>There's no strong spirit to it. People don't love <i>Portal</i> because of the cutting-edge ambient lighting engine (although <i>Portal 2</i> does look very, very nice). Or <i>Bioshock</i> because the environments are filled with intricately modeled clutter. They love that these games have a distinctive look and feel that draws you emotionally and aesthetically into their world.</p><p>And you can figure this out in five minutes. Seriously -- don't do the twenty hours. It doesn't really get any better. The same poor gameplay loop, the same broken balance, the same crashes, the same ugly graphics and lack of a great style; what you see in a tutorial in a mineshaft really is the game you are going to get.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-79554158421737418242023-10-19T16:18:00.001-07:002023-10-19T16:18:24.521-07:00Monkey!<p>I decided my <i>Starfield </i> character would be an incarnation of Sun Wukong. I'd already decided this during character creation -- and it turned out to work quite well.</p><p>Bethesda games. You go around solving problems that have been there for decades. Going one-man army on the enemy that <i>somehow</i> has experienced Marine units pinned down. Doing errands and helping people and everyone is amazed at your exploits.</p><p>In <i>Fallout 4</i> you get the reputation as the Vault Survivor (or you can even go around in costume as the Silver Shroud, but only a few people recognize it). In <i>Skyrim</i> you are the literal Dragonborn. So at least there's an in-game reason for you to be so heroically capable in <i>that</i> game. I was starting to have a sort of standard backstory for my <i>Fallout 4 </i>characters that basically the world had gone to shit and one competent person from the past could kick ass. Helped that I tended towards engineers; people who could make their own advanced weapons and elaborate settlements, which I hand-waved as me having had a pre-war education.</p><p>And in <i>Starfield</i> you pretty soon get alien powers. But it doesn't matter. You are already both scary competent and also the savior to pretty much every obsequiously thankful colonist out there.</p><p>So it worked being the Monkey King. Being a demi-god already, a legendary trickster and warrior, even if I did have to work my way to my first ship as a street rat in the cyberpunk city of Neon.</p><p>Incidentally, that's the most fun I've had in the game so far; going around playing with the gangs and corruption in Neon as an ex street rat. So basically a cut-rate <i>Cyberpunk 77</i>. Only with worse graphics, worse stories, worse missions, and much, much, much worse NPCs.</p><p>It helped a lot with suspension of disbelief. Why this penniless street kid and one-time Argos Consortium miner is suddenly beating up twenty-year veteran pirate captains. And why all those worshipful colonists are getting stars in their eyes whenever I offer to help out. Because I'm already a legendary hero. Reincarnated, maybe, but after the <i>Journey to the West</i> this shit is easy.</p><p>Did make for some weird moments around the alien artifact, though. The Constellation Group kept asking how I suddenly felt so different now that I had alien powers, and I'd shrug because, hey, I was already a supernatural being. Bethesda had not planned for <i>those</i> dialog options.</p><p>***</p><p>It is a basic problem with games. Somehow the entire Third Army can't move unless Private Jones can chuck a grenade through a window successfully. Sometimes it is acceptable in context. Commander Shepard is a highly. highly, highly trained soldier, top of her class, survivor of legendary battles. And hasn't figured out how to use a rifle, but never you mind. The Doom Marine, on the other hand, just is. It's his thing.</p><p>Aloy has her Focus and spent a lot of time learning its tricks -- so even when she runs into other Focus users, she is able to do things they can't. 2013's Lara Croft, on the other hand, is just a student. Even the movie gave her an athletic background. The game does handwave that Roth taught you how to shoot, but still, you should <i>not</i> be doing so well against experienced survivors. "She's just one girl!" ("This one girl is kicking our ass!")</p><p>The bigger problem is RPGs. And this is a game design problem. You need situations for the protagonist to solve. In the real world, there would still be problems occurring. There's always business for the long-runner detective show or whatever. But games are cast in bronze before you start playing. When you fix the current issues...there are no more.</p><p>And they have to be fixed, too. There has to be that moment when the thing is concluded and you collect XP. So that leaves late-game in a weird place where none of the NPCs have much to say to you (because you already did their quest), but the world hasn't really changed despite all of that (because quests can happen out of order and they can't design for every single option. In <i>Just Cause 3</i>, you can liberate the entire nation but the dictatorship still has cars full of soldiers patrolling around.)</p><p>Character AI, as exciting as it is, won't solve all of this. As already implemented (and only in third-party mods, oddly enough, not in any current release) it allows conversations to continue and the NPC to remember and refer back. And, eventually, to have their personality shaped (because that's already happening, but the trigger is actions, not unscripted dialogue). But this stays at a <i>Sims</i> sort of level, as AI is not the tool to create new scenarios, new quests.</p><p>Oh, sure, they've been trying. Bethesda has had ongoing open quests using their Radiant system for a while now...and it sucks. A good quest is sculpted, with unique options, locations, dialogue. Not "Another settlement needs your help."</p><p>At some point activity ceases. The world becomes static. Might as well go invest in the base building at that point...</p><p><br /></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-57486927171356820412023-10-17T16:32:00.002-07:002023-10-17T16:32:47.900-07:00Dragon or Draggin'<p>Bethesda is still searching for the right balance.</p><p><i>Skyrim</i> starts with a slow five minutes, but there is this thing in Elder Scrolls games; you need to spend to first five minutes in a dungeon. Or in <i>Skyrim'</i>s case, in a cart to your execution. The thing is, it doesn't put half the game behind a grind wall. You can go anywhere, and you can dip your toes in anything. At level one, you can use a sword or a bow or even magic, you can craft a potion or some new boots or even cook some stew.</p><p><i>Fallout 4</i> was, I believe, intended to give you a taste of future glory. Unlike <i>Fallout 3</i> where there is a complete faction quest before you can get to powered armor, you can get your first suit at level 1. And a mini-gun. Which is in a place with several triggers to tempt you into wasting all of your ammunition on raiders so the spring-loaded deathclaw can twist your brand-new armor into wreckage in one epic hand-to-hand.</p><p><i>Starfield</i> is generous in giving you your own ship barely ten minutes in. But, really, the game doesn't start getting fun until about twenty hours of play. It takes that much, well, grinding -- boring stupid grinding -- before you have any skills that make a difference. You aren't really doing an RPG, and you don't have a lot of options. The interesting quests are meat-gated away (you need to level up in order to tackle them), the random planet hopping turns up nothing of particular value or interest...plus of course this is late Bethesda RPG in which your responses to a quest-giver are either agree to do it, or agree but be sarcastic about it.</p><p>It simply isn't worth crafting, or collecting most of the materials you can collect, or exploring, because you don't have the skills to do anything with any of that. And those skills only come with a whole bunch of exceptionally grindy combat.</p><p>And you can't personalize your experience, because it doesn't matter if you want to be an assassin or a diplomat or a gadgeteer, you don't have any skills and won't be getting any for hours and every single enemy is dropping a leveled spray-and-pray gun for you to use instead.</p><p>About twenty hours of play. Less if you don't struggle against the railroading (always a decent recommendation for recent Bethesda games) and just follow the quest markers they throw in front of you. At that point you can start making some choices that feel worth making, and start having some skills other than "picking up gun off ground and holding down the trigger."</p><p>It isn't...good...yet. The quests are often frustratingly unfinished, stopping just when you've actually started to get involved. But you can finally survive getting out of the easy plains and into the wild where half-way interesting things to do are. It is still shallow, but I liked the Cydonia mining colony and sort-of-liked Neon and the Mantis quest is actually sort of fun.</p><p>Plus, at the end of it I expect to get a ship that might -- like the finally unlocked basic crafting skills -- make it worth doing some of the other activities the universe offers.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-24740629591602942982023-10-15T23:21:00.003-07:002023-10-15T23:21:43.922-07:00Sixteen Times the Elevators : StarfieldFor some strange reason of poor optimization or stringent system limits, the original <i>Mass Effect</i> was "blessed" with ludicrously long elevator sequences in all the Citadel scenes. They were ostensibly hiding loading screens, as was the laborious "Scanning for pathogens" sequence whenever you entered the <i>Normandy</i> from dock-side.<div><br /></div><div>Always one to make good bugs out of bad bugs, the team added some dialogue to <i>Mass Effect 2</i> in which returning squadmates comment about all the lovely conversations they used to have while waiting for the elevators to get there. They also added an elevator <i>to the Normandy itself</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, <i>Starfield</i> manages to get the worst of both worlds. It has extremely long door-opening animations, and ship-launch animations, and all sorts of other fill-the-time animations...but still has to stop on a blank screen to actually load the cell. No, worse than that; it stops on the still picture and spinning disk <i>to load the transition scene</i>. Then once the transition is done, <i>it goes to a loading screen again</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>This pretty much sums up the game, technically-wise. It obviously has a more hungry engine in it. The first advice in all the materials for lags and crashes is to turn down graphics quality. The requirements for storage, RAM, VRAM and GPU are huge.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it looks like crap. I mean, it looks vastly worse than <i>Andromeda</i>, and that was an earlier game with less intensive graphical needs. It is barely better than <i>Fallout 4</i> aside from some fancier lighting. But what really kills it is that all this horsepower is being used badly. All those CPU cycles are going to waste. <i>Skyrim</i> provides landscapes that feel more real and NPCs that are easier on the eye even though they are clearly a few generations back.</div><div><br /></div><div>It has reached a sort of Uncanny Valley of graphics; the graphics are so "real" that they make the computer cry, but the result is less pleasing to the eye than what other teams achieved with, well, much less.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the most poorly optimized piece of garbage I have ever watched spin, and lag, and bug out, and even lock up. And, no; turning down graphics doesn't fix the bugginess or the lag (it does, oddly, make the game look a bit better!)</div><div><br /></div><div>Not just graphics. The cells load agonizingly slow and have all sort of problems. But as bad as the optimization for running on a computer is, the optimization for the human experience is just as bad or worse.</div><div><br /></div><div>The menu system is a nightmare. The space combat control schema is a cludge. Nothing is properly tutorialized. They've even managed to screw up maps. I am playing a couple of very large patches down the road, and I have to suspect that they patched around some of the loading-screen nightmare by giving you the option to launch into space without going through your cockpit at all. I suspect this largely because the design of when you can skip the various planet screens feels like a mish-mosh.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then, so do the other menus. There's no feeling of a single design vision, as there was with the Mass Effect games (not that <i>Mass Effect 1</i> was a winner for inventory screens, either).</div><div><br /></div><div>And, ouch, the planets. For procedurally-generated planetscapes, they don't look bad. But there's little variation, little fractal scale. It is just rocks and trees, rocks and trees, out to the horizon. You don't get a sense of having gone anywhere, or having been anywhere, because no part of the map sticks out. There's no "follow the river into the ravine, then climb the hillside and on the other side of the glade..." There's just...more rocks and trees.</div><div><br /></div><div>Which wouldn't be so bad...again, that's what <i>Mass Effect 1</i> had to offer. But it also had the Mako (and smaller maps anyhow). The preset landing locations and quest locations are twenty minutes apart on the damned <i>Starfield</i> maps. Twenty minutes of walking. Through rocks and trees.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am still playing. It is mildly diverting. But oh, boy, what a botch job of a game.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9093018592663130778.post-75012339896126893962023-10-09T09:00:00.000-07:002023-10-09T09:00:13.219-07:00Time to Gogh<p>I went to the "Van Gogh Experience" when one of them (apparently there's at least three) was in my city. The sign for the restrooms said "If you need to Gogh..."</p><p>I did manage to make it through the revised Galerie Vivienne chase, and the brand-new aftermath scene I ended up adding. So now I'm in the middle of the Van Gogh scene...and I'm not ready.</p><p>I'm intentionally not having a lot about the artist and his life this time. There's some beats I want to hit, because they play to other themes. But I don't really need to talk about his time as an apprentice preacher, or the way he stayed in South London for a while. </p><p>What I do need is for the exhibit to seem like it makes sense. For the paintings that are playing on the projection loop to at least pretend to tell a story about his life and career. So I need to understand a bit more than I do. I don't need factoids. I need a feeling for the flow of it. And also, a feeling for what parts of his life there are images from him that are memorable enough to people more used to "Starry Night" to at least sort of recall.</p><p>The trick about these exhibits is that they really are a lot of favorite hits. And they present a curated and perhaps sanitized vision. The one I saw, I don't remember a single one of his sketches of the miners of the Borinage, for instance. </p><p>And I'm just now realizing I really have only three more of these "chunks" of art history to finish off the novel. There's a bit of the petite ceinture, and some more stuff about Picasso, but really there's three biggies left and this is one of them. The other two are both novelists, and buildings. The Paris Opera House through the lens of the long and strange history of dramatizations of Leroux's book, and Notre Dame de Paris through the (original) preservationist intent of Victor Hugo.</p><p>Just as well. The hot weather is over for the moment but I'm not feeling up for much more than watching movies about Van Gogh. And contemplating purchasing Cypberpunk 2077 or (a very, very distant second) Starfield.</p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13795012676809363730noreply@blogger.com0