Monthly Archives: June 2020

Monday,  June 1st, 2020 —> +14˚C / +57˚F —> Mostly cloudy with nice diffused light & a little bit breezy @ 5:00 pm in Atlantic Canada —> On our friends’ Drucine’s and Cyndi’s Birthday. 🙂

– Annie & Nikki Fixin’ the border that came unglued on May 12th –

— { I think this is the third time the above screen-shot was uploaded, but It shows a bit of the distortion that comes with looking at other player’s characters/Avatars/’cartoons’ in the 3-D environment of the ‘software, hardware and firmware’ it sometimes feels like I’ve building my game world in since before Atlantis sunk into the sea. }

— { The side walls do look wonky here – after our catastrophic event around Mothers’ Day when several areas ‘came unglued’ while we were trying to fix some weird looking ‘graphix’ anomalies – While we were stitching areas back together – They didn’t match up right – And rather than fuss with ‘slope smoothing’ for hours, we decided to ‘glue’ our areas back together where they appeared to line up okay – and discovered we had something like a fifteen foot high Mesa with vertical sides blocking the road from ‘Keltic Valley’ to ‘Keltic Vale’ —> So we plowed through the Mesa with our levelling tool and knew there would be a whole lot of modifying  later, but it is a lot easier to mess around with landscape anomalies that are not on the border than it is to try to get a border between areas to allow random crossing on uneven slopes – or get a hilly border landscape to mesh properly and not look really strange or even awful. So two of our builder characters / place holders – were standing there, close to the border while we were making mole hills out of mountains and wondering if we should or could do something with a deep gulch that was almost at the border… We could have widened the flat area where the flat stone ‘paved’ road was and then used some of our ‘erosion’ tools to make those weird looking cliffs look a lot more ‘natural’ — so while the cartoon women were looking like they were chatting away – Their human world builders were wondering what to do a kilometer long – fifteen feet high – 20 feet wide { impassable } Mesa that – if it appeared in California – could be explained as a weird looking but almost normal aftermath of an earthquake … —> “Well, heck -” Doug said, “It keeps us off the streets -”

—> I guess this ‘Article’ or ‘Posting’ will feel like a “What I did on my summer vacation’ assignment for a grammar school kid –

– Annie and Nikki posed for this screen shot before they took a break to eat something before resuming their efforts here. –

— So – having cute ‘builder characters’ / Avatars / …Whatever – is more fun that watching guys’ butts run around while while testing ‘play-ability’ and all that. And these two are ‘BFF’s in the latest novel I’m trying to finish writing between building game worlds and telling myself I should avoid watching, listening to, or reading any current ‘news of the real world’ lately – Actually it was my step son who explained that he liked watching a female avatar’s bum a lot more than he liked watching a male character’s back side as he had to guide his in-game avatars through quests and stuff in the computer game we were both playing when he was something like 9 years old (?) And I do believe he had a point there.

– Rachel and Rocky fixed a border crossing. –

— Rachel – { she might be a Human-Ottarian hybrid as we’ve all been messing around with theories on how to design the different races we want to populate our world with } And Rocky –  { An Ymmp – Ymmps are basically a race of decent, intelligent, fun loving creatures with a ‘slightly demented’ sense of humor {{ or ‘humour’ if you’re Canadian … }} } Anyway R&R look like they’re wondering what the bleep I’m doing while they’re fixing a perplexing problem that took us years to solve, when it turns out the solution was rather simple —>

— When ‘seamlessly ‘ stitching areas together – weird things happen if the ‘heightmaps’ of the two areas you are connecting are not both named ‘default’ — I’d named one ‘room’ in the area south of ‘Keltic Valley’ —> “ElvishLands” and tried to have a rain event happen in a room called ‘ElvishLands’ but not in ‘default’ – And the problem that came up was – ElvishLands was the name of the farthest North heightmap that connected with the ‘default’ room and heightmap in ‘Keltic Valley’ —> And it makes absolutely no sense to me,  why this would happen – but ‘Elvish Lands’ kept making itself invisible to the ‘default’ map in the Valley – which is unnerving… I never knew when a character I was using to check the connection between areas – might either not be a able to cross into a ‘land’ that was apparently invisible – and might just stand there, running in place, getting nowhere – or worse, fall through a crack in the world and go sailing downward through eternity –

— The problem went away when I renamed the heightmap from ‘Elvish Lands’ to —>”Default” —> And, almost miraculously – all sorts of invisible buildings and stuff popped into plain view.

– “Tweaking the fog colours can be fun -” –

— RE-setting the fog colours can be fun – & whatever colours you choose – you can be quite surprised when you see the results. A plain blue might turn out to be an electric ‘Indigo’ or purplish ‘federal blue’. A’ light blue’ choice might end up being more like the colour of pistachio ice cream.

— — — I started trying to build games and game worlds when my nephews were young – Dave was six years old and I think his older brother , Charles, who we used to call ‘Harley’ so as not to confuse him with his father —> Another ‘Charles’ who might have been more ‘Charlie’ than Charles… And I think Dave just had his 35th birthday a coupe days ago – { Yikes? }

— I wanted to design and build a world that would be fun and interesting – where players who didn’t want to just kill everything and everybody in sight could enjoy themselves, have fun, – have their characters thrive in a game world where they might even painlessly learn things that might make their ‘Real Lives’ more fun or less painful – or hopefully both…

— And when I was experimenting with the ‘Atmosphere’ settings in an area I’d named ‘Easlynne’ – I thought the surprising results might be appealing to, especially, women and girls. Clouds, fog, and sky colours weren’t just unusual, they were eye-openers – amazing – My imagine came up with what I thought might be a plausible explanation – dust kicked up by ‘Del-Vahrians’ mining for gems and brilliant coloured minerals got blown into the upper atmosphere and produced some very interesting results – And that kind of made me take another look at the ‘Real World’ around me –  I once ‘made up’ a distant planet for a science fiction exercise and thought the mountains on that distant world might be – purple? – Sure, why not? – And then –  walking my sister’s hound dog on an evening after a storm – well ‘Holy Bleep!’-  the mountains across the river in New Hampshire were purple as the sun was going down.

– “Jassper” at the ruins of an ancient temple. –

— And –  no – I am not totally averse to ‘rolling’ male avatars – “Jassper” has gone through a bunch of changes since 2011, when he was first ‘created’ and given the name of our dog, who, sadly, I am missing dearly these days.

— Way back in 2011 – there were a lot of assets available that disappeared from our selection window – but since one of the first weird areas I tried to build used a lot of those assets that I thought were deleted when the trees we could use back then disappeared – and when I went and looked at the first areas I built – they were still there – the assets, I mean –

— And, although I don’t know if I want any of my weird old experiments to be available for odd hallucinatory events and/or dreams or nightmares – I discovered that if I temporarily connected one of my clunky old areas to one of the areas that are much more likely to be with us if and when I finish building something I think other people might enjoy wandering around in – I could ‘clone’ and move those assets across borders and ‘import’ them into the new area and then dis-connect the wonky old area and keep the cool old assets …

— And see – Jassper, who is currently pretty much a full blooded Ottarian – had fun exploring the ruins of an ancient temple that might have been honoring a fertility goddess or something like that –

— I also had fun describing – I think – nine religions – like, ‘The Church of Conspicuous Consumption’ – and I think every religion I started with had ‘colourful’ nicknames uttered by members of other religions – Like the ‘Church of Peace, Love, and Harmony’ would be called ‘The Orgy Church’ by jerks who wanted to convince their friends and neighbours to tithe into their coffers instead of ‘throwing their gold away’ by donating to any other sect. —> But that’s a subject for another post at another time.

– Maurina – a cross between an Elvish warrior and a healer/botanist –

— Maurina might belong to the aquatic race, The Mer – Many Mer have exotic hair colours – maybe she was shunned for being too ‘ordinary’ – Mer can go crazy if kept from being able to swim and immerse themselves in large bodies of water – They also have re-breathing chambers in their lungs – and subsequently, large chests. Until a couple days ago, Maurina looked like a rather creepy elf. I spent over an hour trying to modify her face into something a lot less creepy – Then spent a little more time trying to make her not look like a baby-faced Barbie.

– “Tosha” on a clear, sunny afternoon. –

— One complaint I have with the faces and clothing available here at the beginning of things, while we’re building pretty much from scratch – Well, two complaints – One – women pretty much have a choice of either being scantily dressed bimbos and walking around in clunky armor – with maybe one blouse for the more modest types and one skirt that looks like it was designed by fiends who wanted to make sure that women couldn’t get away if they were attacked. —> & Two – Faces seem much too difficult and time consuming to modify without looking ridiculous –

— In the Reference  Game – That I think can’t be played at all any more – Every time I tried to roll up a woman, she looked terminally depressed.

— But then again = Enter Tosha – Tosha used to be completely Ottarian – and the first time I saw what happened to her face when I slid the racial sliders all the way to their version of my Ottarians – I thought she looked like she was probably related to Betty Boop – with a really wide face – but with a little bit of modification – playing with the dozens of sliders for over an hour – each slider having strange results that do not appear to have anything to do with the qualities they’re ‘advertised’ to represent – I mean the ‘happy – sad’ slider doesn’t seem to make anybody look happier or sadder – more like makes them look weird or clueless –

— But when I finished messing with Tosha’s facial morphing sliders I thought she looked like a bit like a close family friend’s daughter – who was growing up to be beautiful, brilliant, creative and and full of ‘heart’.

— And then recently, The first time I brought her out after several years – I thought she looked a lot more like Betty Boop than Mary Ellen.

— So I thought it was time for her to grow up – or evolve into somebody or something else – maybe become a cat-person or a friendly or not so friendly elf.

— And, when I made her look more ‘human’ her face wasn’t so Boop-ish – and she almost reminds me of an actress I’m trying hard to place – and/or remember who she played in what series or mini series I liked enough to watch all the way through.

– Tosha – close up – looking thoughtful just after sundown. –

— Some of these characters take on shades of expressions in one screen-shot that I never noticed before – Here – Tosha might be checking out somebody she’s thinking of flirting with, or she might be a bit apprehensive about some scary character who might be sneaking up behind her.

– I get to see those big red letters too often –

— I started writing and importing the screen shots here almost two and a half hours ago – I think I mentioned “Windows 10 Sux” when I named this post.

— I’m more used to Macs. My first computer was an Apple IIe. I managed not to upgrade to Windows 10 for quite a while. For one thing, every time I checked – the world building site did not say their stuff was compatible with Windows 10 –

— But then – they made sure I couldn’t do anything with Windows 7 – My gut feeling was – if felt like they tossed a routine into their mix that took your world ‘Down’ if they recognized that you were still using Windows 7. Not that Windows 7 couldn’t handle their latest upgrades – just that there was something ignoble in their character that made them sell their souls to Microsoft.

— And Windows 10 tosses out a lot of simple, useful apps like ‘Paint’ – and replaced them with asinine ‘Paint 3-D’.

— They take choices that used to be there away with no warning or explanation.

— They replaced halfway user friendly apps with simple commands – with insidious ‘You can’t get there from here, you have to wade through a bunch of new ‘bull-chips’ choices to save what you just worked on. — Instead of ‘one click and you’re done-‘ they throw in something like ‘Wouldn’t you really rather do it my way?’ detours. Which leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, and  – “Okay, I understood how your previous app worked, why the bleep have you decided to ‘fix’ what wasn’t broken?”

— I get the feeling that Microsoft has a lot of ice-holes pretending to be creative – who get weird ideas into their insanely cross-wired minds – about how they’d like things to be – and implement them — especially if they complicate their customers’ lives beyond the point where we all expect micro-shit to be much too frustrating for words – like the earliest computer salesmen who were convinced by con artists – that the words ‘powerful’ and ‘elegant’ would make them millionaires, all they had to do was repeat them incessantly like some hideous mantra to anyone they believed looked like a clueless moron – who’d probably wandered into their kill zone by mistake – and that would convince all kinds of idiots to overpay for overpriced-useless junk and believe they were getting a bargain.

— Everything they market should come with the warning “Designed to fail and become obsolete before you can possibly figure out how to use it.”

— sigh — Yeah, but I will slog through this and learn new tricks and — dammit — They can’t keep raising the bar to make sure I never can finish building this danged thing – can they????

————— Argh!

~~~~~ Jim