Western Europe is east of me

Which means Satisfactory 1.0 will be released at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning. Not a lot of time to make sure I've got footage of my previous game!

On the other hand, I'm finding surprisingly little of that world I really want to show off. As with so many things I do -- really, that most people do -- I run around trying out new ideas rather than sitting down to finish the old ones properly.

That, and I suck at videos. Everybody is doing their "farewell to Update 8" videos this week. As part of stirring up interest in what for some of them is going to be a full-time job doing a marathon Let's Play (or even Live Stream) of their first official 1.0 game.

I also finally got a video flagged. Apparently they won't be allowed to see this one in Russia...

I really wanted to do my own music, but that's another thing I start and never finish. Spending some delightful hours rebuilding my DAW and libraries. So many things turned out to be "That version is no longer supported, but we can sell you the next version..."

And not only are there incompatibilities with VSTs (one of the common plug-in formats for DAWs) -- OS9 stuff doesn't work with OSX, Intel doesn't always work with Silicon, since Catalina OSX has gotten insane with the "Are you sure you want to run this software you downloaded from someone that wasn't us?" Since you can't get a pop-up box from inside a DAW, the only way to press the "Yes, run it anyhow" is to drill down to the UNIX shell. Get on terminal and type in a little "sudo xattr -rm apple.hates.independent.developers the_new_plugin.vst"

I started to throw together a little modern Les Baxter thing...but turns out I am rusty in music theory, too. That, and I really, really need my good keyboard. Which there's no room for until I finish the rest of cleaning I've been trying to get to...

Oh -- did I post the video I finally threw together for the recording I did a while back? By the time I finally had a lighting set-up I liked, it was time to move out of that space. (And to add to the difficulties, my old camera couldn't handle the Barry Lyndon lighting levels and I had to shoot on iPhone instead).

But that's the way it goes.

Learning curves...err...Non-Uniform B-Splines...

Learned enough on Sketchup to start working out the floor plan for our new Tool Room. Plus catching up again on Fusion360, where I finally reconstructed a thing for work I'd been getting printed at Shapeways. 

Tried printing it in ABS for extra strength but my Ender3 isn't handling ABS properly yet. Need an enclosure. Possibly a heated enclosure, and that gets into project creep oh so quickly (like my fancy laser enclosure, which is currently wrapped in plastic on a shipping pallet on a very high shelf).

Also earned a wee bit more about Shotcut so I can animate a basic motion and add some smoke and sparks for a YouTube intro.

Yes, I paid a guy on Fiverr to do an animation for me but as so often on Fiverrrrr he ignored what I'd asked for and did his own thing. Often worth the gamble -- it's cheap, and their ideas could easily be better than mine. Well...not this time.

While I was at it with video and audio, dragged up various free VSTi's and the sample libraries I'd purchased so long ago and started installing them into Reaper on the Mac Mini. Thank Zepherus all this nonsense about passwords is meaningless as long as you have your original email address...

Yes, I'm still trying to cut some game videos.

But my last session in Satisfactory, I got distracted polishing the fruit at the bottom of the bowl...I mean, dressing up the entrance and walkways, adding lighting, and basically making things nice around the front of a Compacted Coal plant deep in the Badlands west of the main desert. Which is not just a place I'll probably never visit again, but is in a playthrough that was entirely to try out some ideas to make my foray into 1.0 a little smoother.

It is really hard not to keep working on that world. That's the game in a beryl nut; addictive.

(Just now I watched a few minutes of the final version 1.0 teaser trailer. Had to stop -- so much exciting stuff, I just want to discover it all as I play. Four days now...)

Robinsonade

The literary genre started by Robinson Crusoe has become a fashionable gaming genre. I think it may have happened through a merging of the streams --

 That is, the elements of crafting in survival games (which are themselves often a kind of Robinsonade) and the various "Dad Games" building and management games, right back to Sid Meir's Civilization. 

The big recent change -- and I'd put it pretty much smack between Factorio  and Satisfactory -- came with a move from top-down or orthographic to First Person perspective. That immersion within the world brings back in full the older elements of the Robinsonade; the isolation and self-reflection just below the struggle for survival. The ideas of loneliness, separation from society, and becoming an island on to oneself as what you bring to the table defines your life, purposed and whatever mimicry of society you end up building.

What changes over games spanning the period from Half-Life (which had the loneliness and isolation but no crafting element) through Tomb Raider 2001 (where you can build and upgrade the tools and weapons you use to survive) to Fallout 4 (where the "base building" mechanic is added to the series, allowing you to construct entire villages from scraps) is the theme of "building stuff."

And this is when SF entered the Robinsonade, beginning with Jules Verne and Mysterious Island, where a group of shipwrecked engineers build an entire bamboo civilization starting with a kitchen match, a seed, and one metal dog collar.

The change is to focus. The loneliness is still there, and even some of the old themes of anthropology and social commentary both in reflection on the society the character came from and in the relationships they make with local life forms. But the bootstrapping element, the "building stuff" element, is the more prominent.

It is said that a frontier blacksmith would start with an anvil. Every other tool could, eventually, be made from there (as long as there was access to iron). Whether marooned in open ocean with just a wet suit and a crashed lifepod, or standing alone on the surface of a hostile world having just melted down your landing pod for scrap, you are presented with a wide-open world.

You don't know what you will find as you explore, you don't know where you will find sustenance and the other tools of survival, and you are filled with both dread and joy at the prospect of trying to find a new purpose for your life. But you do have one thing; your anvil.

(Satisfactory 1.0 is just five days away!)