Tuesday – May 10th, 2022 – Rasputin’s Birthday –

– Tuesday – May 10th, 2022 —> 14˚C / +48˚F —> Sunny, breezy and fairly ‘nice’ on My Uncle. Bruce’s Birthday —> + at least t2o of my 2nd cousin’ Sarah’s childhood friends’ Birthdays’ { Sarah called me “Uncle Jimmy” to avoid confusion when I was her “T”-Ball coach 🙂 } – And, yeah – it’s also Rasputin’s Birthday – when adjusted to our ‘Gregorian’ Calendar. }  –

"Xhyrean with Autumn Trees in the Background"

– “Xhyrean – in the Lowlands – { Example area } With red leafed trees in the background.” –

— Rasputin was not the insane character the Bolsheviks and British Secret Service painted him as to justify his assassination. I have it on good authority that he was finally murdered by a British Agent in order to stop him from influencing the last Tsar to stay out of the first world war. Everything that happened in Russia after that is on the conscience of the British Secret Service.

— But that has nothing to do with the above screen Shot- “Xhyrean” is a time traveler born several centuries in our future in What we call Canada, but in his Parallel world they called it the Métis Province of the Turtle Island Confederation. His mother is, was, will be- half Métis, Half Asian Indian-  His father  tested as having half Métis { Mostly Cree with French blood } and roughly one quarter Scandinavian, and one quarter  ‘Keltic’ dna. I gave him almost black hair after I took this Screen Shot.

"Kaelyn in Ceremonial Dress"

– ” Kaelyn in Ceremonial Dress” –

— Kaelyn’s another mostly Métis Character – Not quite pure blooded enough to satisfy ‘First Nations Purists’ & ‘Not White Enough’ to avoid being bullied most of her young life. So far – we haven’t been able to design and upload really good examples of Métis floral decorated Ceremonial dress. This is as close as we could get her look.

"Junior Gonzakowitz"

– “Gonzakowitz” is the family name of one wild and crazy clan of Ymmps-” –

— Junior Gonzakowitz – { Muhdagus Gonzakowitz’s Grand Son } – Most members of the Gonzakowitz family { both physical family members and ‘adopted’ extended family members } have Bardic talent and ‘Psi’ abilities – most of them can open ‘Wild Portals’ { and don’t always know where they’ll end up if they blindly jump through one of their portals } Those who live in the computer age claim they can communicate with computers using their ‘Psi’ abilities. } Ymmps are known to be ‘hopelessly addicted to practical jokes’. Most Ymmps have thick reptilian tails. “Junior” either wrapped his tail in fake fur or was born with a distinctly feline tail – Ymmps will rarely answer a direct question with any easily understood ‘straight answer’. Most Ymmps have a spell they call “dragon breath” that is useful for lighting cigars and camp fires. If they really work on it, that spell can kill anybody stupid enough to attack them.

"Xhyrean discovered a white tailed deer."

– “Xhyrean discovered a deer.”

— While I was working on Xhyrean – I took time out for dinner and when I came back he was staring at a deer. I think the deer are a very new addition to the example area that comes with the game building software.

"The deer grew antlers-"

– “Okay – after I originally posted this on Tuesday – I took a break and went back to the office and the game building stuff had disappeared from my souped up game building computer- I guessed it was another case of “[%^%$@%%%#!!!]” Microsoft Windows updating itself without my permission. But -When I got the software back up and running – Xhyrean’s pet deer had grown antlers – 🙂 ” –

— Hmmmm- I should probably check in with the people who are developing stuff for the game building software company…

"Shelley"

– “Shelley Stephenson” –

— “This was an accurate depiction of what I really looked like – The clothing choices were not mine – My abusive, manipulative older cousin – who convinced me as a twelve year old that he was the only person who understood me and loved me for who and what I was { <—  His words. } – got me drunk, got me naked – took suggestive photos of me – not just then, but several times over three years – When I was fifteen years old my divorced mother sent me to stay with that cousin in the apartment he rented as a Grad Student at a University famous for its advances in Computer Science – for a couple weeks while she went with my sister to a Hospital for further tests – after my younger sister had test results mixed up with another patient and had been given the wrong positive test results and diagnosed with advanced  Leukemia. My cousin told me he was going to have me scanned – using a 3D camera and would send the results to a modelling agency – had me wear a really revealing bikini while Istood on a motorized turntable and the camera did its thing. The next evening he brought me to a ‘house party’ where several of his friends were playing a computer game – I saw a version of the above screen shot and felt sick – My cousin told me that he’d scanned the 3D images of me into a computer game and he thought I would like the above results. I did not like the way his friends looked at me. I did not like the way one guy there grabbed me by the bum and tried to get his hands inside my pants. I stole my cousin’s credit card and took a bus home. I thought I would be alone there for at least another week and made sure all the doors were locked and hoped there was enough food in the pantry so I wouldn’t starve. My mother and sister came home the next day, were happy to see me. I told my mother I felt sick at my cousin’s apartment and came home. I didn’t tell her I stole his credit card. I didn’t tell her what made me feel sick – I didn’t tell her that my cousin had called me just after I got home, called me a string of nasty ‘eff’ words and “c” words, and threatened to send my mother ‘all the naked pictures’ he’d taken, including the ones that looked like I had some guy’s hardened penis in my mouth – if I ever told anybody any part of what he’d done. { One time while I was blind drunk and unconscious my delightful cousin stuck a realistic looking plastic penis in my mouth, took the photograph and carefully cropped it so it looked like the real thing with a real guy just beyond the edge of the photo. } – A couple weeks after I went back home I got what looked like a greeting card in the mail, opened it while I was babysitting for my little sister while my mother was at work and read: “You [effing] [G.D.] slut – You [m.f.-ing c ] I paid your cousin one hundred bucks and he said you would suck my [ male C ] and let me [F] you up your [ bum ] and make you lick the [sh*t] off my rigid [d*ck]” – I actually thought I’d be better off killing myself than living with that kind of b.s. — Then a popular guy who was a football player on the high school’s winning team showed some interest in me and asked me to be his date to a big deal high school dance – I was thrilled – But during the dance, the guy groped me – roughly – I mean it was painful. I asked him to stop and he said, “Oh, you know you want this, honey -” I raised my voice and roared, “Keep your bloody hands where they belong-” And two chaperones swooped in and carted him off – and a woman chaperone – a guidance counsellor – walked me out of the school gymnasium, where the dance was held and told me there’d been a nasty practice in the last few years where a new guy on the football team would have to pass an initiation task by pretending to like a *marginalized young woman – and invite her to be his date for the high school’s pre-Thanksgiving { big game } dance { *read that – ‘not a popular girl – definitely not a cheerleader’ – } and have sex with her – preferably in a car in the parking lot, with the cheerleaders close enough to cheer “Rah rah – he’s our man- if he won’t f*** you nobody will -” when the guy ran out of the car with the young woman’s underwear and even her dress to signal that he’d achieved his goal. – The teachers had also heard rumours that the guys got extra points if they had that sex over her objections. And over the past couple years, none of their victims would admit that anything happened – they’d been threatened with bodily harm and brutal humiliation by the cheerleaders for the rest of their time in high school if they said anything. I was not going to remain silent. That football player was told he could not participate in any school sponsored sports activities for the rest of his time in high school. The team was disallowed from playing against any of their local rival high schools for five years. Some of the coaches were fired. The morning after that announcement was made – I found my locker broken into and all my stuff messed up. My school books had been vandalized, ‘F’ words written in ‘magic marker’ on various pages inside the books, “[ ‘F-ing’ ] Slut” written in lipstick on the books’ covers and on the door to my locker. Police tried to match the lipstick to anything in the cheerleaders’ possession, and later told me that someone in the police department had probably warned the cheerleaders to get rid of their usual lipstick before the officers and detectives got to their homes and inspected their school lockers. The police apologized to me. The school wanted to disband the cheerleading squad, but one of the girls had a lawyer for a father and he threatened to sue the school ‘big time’ if they couldn’t produce convincing evidence that the cheerleaders had been the ones who vandalized my locker. The school assigned a bodyguard to walk me everywhere inside the school that year. That didn’t help much. The guy was pleasant enough – a known gay person with a brown belt in Karate – he’d had to learn to defend himself from football players in junior high school. But other ‘marginalized’ women were afraid to be seen talking to me – and there were rumours that the football players were ‘discouraging’ any guys from having anything to do with me. Somebody killed a neighbour’s kitten, thinking it was mine – hung it’s mutilated body in front of our front door. Again, I couldn’t face going to school – I was literally sick to my stomach every morning. My divorced mother couldn’t afford to send me to a private school anywhere – my father – who my mother had a restraining order against – had changed his name and only had any level of contact through his lawyer – told his lawyer not to bother him with any requests for any kind of help from his ex-wife or ‘her children’. My mother tried to convince me that I would feel a lot better if I managed to convince my tormentors that their tactics weren’t bothering me. She wouldn’t let me stay home from school even after she burst into the bathroom to watch me vomit after accusing me of faking that. I don’t know how I survived for two years – I believed it would be a lot easier to just end it all. But then, a new guy moved to our town and he looked interesting and the one woman classmate who wasn’t afraid to be seen anywhere near me told me that she’d overheard someone tell him that I was a lying b*tch who had ratted on a football player who’d tried to kiss me and got the guy kicked off the team and also told him that somebody hacked my cell phone { I never had one } and broadcast naked photos of me to everybody in the school. The new guy’s response was, “Bull Sh*t – if some idiot got kicked off the football team he probably deserved it – I’ve seen too many morons like you trying to ruin somebody’s life because she said no to the wrong person and I can pretty much tell when somebody’s lying to me – so take your idiotic rumours and stick them where the sun don’t shine.” – I got to know that guy, and I really liked him. I had real issues trusting anybody and the poor guy had to put up with a lot after he let me know he ‘really liked me’, but we’re still together – and I believe there really is hope for the future… even if the rest of the world is going stark raving insane lately.” { — Shelley S. }

"Edited Elf with Deer"

– “Edited Elf with Deer” –

— The elves in the example area come with blue skin – which can be slightly modified – but they still look more than slightly weird. And more than a little bit smug. I was able to edit his body type a bit and managed to shrink the ears a little and left him standing there while I was doing something on another computer and when I glanced back – I got the odd feeling that he looked a bit like me – { maybe in a past life? } – if you dismiss the blond hair and pointed ears.

— I had to give up on trying to upload the last cropped and shrunk screen shot { directly above this } – all I got was a bunch of error messages saying the screen shot was somehow unacceptable – Then I quit the browser and reloaded it and it uploaded – no problem.

– – – – – Okay – everybody, have a slew of great days and nights – I last added and edited this article on Thursday, May 12th @ 7:43 pm,

~~~~~ Jim

I think I got the river stuff figured out and “Snow on the Mountain”

Saturday, July 10th, 2021 – +17˚C / +60˚F —> sunny, clear and pleasant @ 10:29 am after last night’s heavier rain storm —On Cousin Emilie’s Birthday 🙂 —

 

- Aerendel Mountain With Snow -

– Aerendel Mountain With Snow” – Still a work in progress – But lookin’ better all the time … 🙂 –

— Looks like somebody poured vanilla syrup over the mountain in this screen shot – I had to turn off the fog or this would have looked like a silhouette seen through a collection of very white – almost sheer – curtains.

— I think the trick might be – add several layers of the texture ‘Snow’ that came with the latest upgrade to the world building stuff.

 

- Raeynie at the Ruins -

– ” Raeynie at the ruins” – a side path on the ‘road’ from the newest version of the Birkenport – Aerendel Mountain Trail. –

— I had to ‘ramp up’ the exposure on this screen shot – What looks fine on most computer monitors and “Amazing” on a a ‘Gaming Monitor’ with the right settings – shows up almost too dark to bother trying to see in Mac’s ‘Preview’ app. Preview is a lot less bother and easier to use than PhotoShop for half-way decent photos and screen shots – But pushing the exposure up or down is a snap.

— Again – with the fog turned off – she looks like a kid shining a flashlight up at her face to look ghoulish – I could easily fix that – move the ‘Time Of Day” settings back and forth to get the best effect – but we’re trying to remain ‘synced’ so when more than one of us are working in different areas of this virtual 3-D world – we get to see our stuff go through dawn to sunset to dawn in a couple hours – we try to keep them set so everybody’s more or less in the same time zone – and those settings are a pain in the dupah to mess with.

— Oh, The name – “Raeynie” —> Every character – even the builder avatars – the ones with the ‘gear’ ‘axes’ – have to have a unique name. – There was a young woman named ‘Raynie’ who lived across the street from my grandparents’ motel, restaurant and gas station in Vermont when I was in my teens and twenties – She was maybe three or four years younger than me – and one of my young friends had his eye on her as a possible future mate when they were going to high school together. Somebody explained to me that “Raynie” was a misinterpretation and/or ‘cute’ version of “René” – when pronounced with a and old Vermont accent. Role players seem to be gifted with more imagination than most of their contemporaries – & I’ve seen them come up with brilliant variations on their characters’ names. —> And another quirk that came along with the latest upgraded world building software – is – somebody who left the company that developed that software – took all the male characters’ ‘rolling’ routines with him when he left. And instead of half a dozen different possible ‘classes’/’occupations’ and I think there were at least half a dozen races developers that world builders could play around with as they built their games and decided what their subscribers/clients could look like – we now, in the upgrade – can only have human women and could only choose from ‘Ranger’ or ‘Wizard’ wardrobes for the builder-avatars’ looks and or ‘occupations’. Raeynie’s Orange ‘Ranger Shirt’ and the ‘Human Ranger Gauntlet’ on her left arm and hand are a bit more modest than the ‘Wizard Robes’ that look like skimpy/’sexy’ under garments. She’s also wearing all Wizard stuff below her belly button.

 

- I think I figured out how to keep a river from going berserk -

– “I think I figured out how to make a river look right.” –

— With the upgraded world builder stuff – they included a ‘Ribbon Water’ routine, or set of routines for improving the way rivers look even look how they flow – it’s tricky – and you can’t grab a “Ribbon Water 1” from the asset library and expect you can just drop it into place and smile at how clever this innovation makes you look and feel – You have to ‘grab’ a ‘mirror/water’ asset from the ‘Create’/’mirror-water’ menu – move it down into a trench you very carefully designed carved into the two dimensional face of your world – and and then carefully turn the small square you get from the ‘create’ pull down menu – in the direction you want to tell your ‘dynamic ripples’ to flow – and then carefully click and drag the river – one little bit a time – in the direction/directions you want it to flow – BUT! – you can have the river flow down a waterfall, or many waterfalls – on its journey to the sea – and/or bend the river’s course around { – carefully – } so it meanders like a normal real life river, and flows around rocks in a fairly good representation of rapids and then spills down to meet the sea at the end of its journey – or near the end of its journey – the ripples look great – but when the river flows into the sea you have to be careful again because the sea and the river might want to duke it out to prove something to themselves or brag about their genius and testosterone levels – sigh.

 

- River where it flows into the sea. -

– “Almost the same shot from the same angle – but with normal early morning fog and lighting.” –

— To illustrate what happens when you turn the fog back on after turning it off while building/developing your world – I had to ramp up the exposure level again – and that made the fog look a bit more pastel and cyan in colour than it looks on the gaming monitors… and now the rivers and the fog look a lot more realistic since the latest upgrade.

— And – it took me almost four hours of not quite constant concentrated ‘work’ to take the screen shots, mess with the exposure and size { in Pixels } to get these four screen shots visible enough and under 2 MegaBytes so the WordPress Software – { ‘Hosted” on my computer, not their servers – } – would accept the ‘media’ – {when wordpress dot com hosts a blog the size limit on ‘media’ is one MB }.

-Yay?

 – – – – – Shrug….

~~~~~ Jim

Thursday, July 9th, 2020 –

– Thursday, July 9th, 2020 —> +24˚C / + 83˚F – Mostly sunny & hazy with maybe 30-50% of the sky supporting smallish clouds – with Severe Thunderstorm Warnings for later – Where I’m at in Atlantic Canada @ 4:57 pm –

- Nikki + Draelen in Landsdrop just past Sundown -

– “Nikki & Draelen in Landsdrop just past Sundown.” – The area they’ve been working on lately –

— Things have gone a lot more smoothly lately since we got everybody to “Lock” all their heightmaps when they were finished ‘Messing with them’ —> Jim managed to build an impressive cavern in less than an hour. and he didn’t have to drag all the parts out beyond the area and work on them, then drag them back and fuss for several minutes to get them lined up right. — Charging straight ahead with your head down and your eyes closed might not be the most effective strategy in world-building.

- Nikki & Drae in the Landsdrop Cavern -

– “Nikki & Drae in the Landsdrop Cavern” –

— The idea is – crystals in the stone reflect firelight in different colours and intensity – & Jim is correct – on a decent gaming monitor this looks fantastic. –

- The 'Drop' at Landsdrop -

– “The drop at Landsdrop” – the irregular line of rocky cliffs that give the area its name. –

— The cliffs that give the “Landsdrop” area its name – An “escarpment” in geological terms? The term is often used to describe the Niagara region of ‘southern’ Canada. – At first we were not overly thrilled with the look of the texture we’re using here – At a distance it can look funky – but I guess the fog in the ‘atmosphere’ goes a long way to help that when you’re at avatar level on the ground. But some of our avatars will have functional wings. And we’ve been wondering if characters with ‘Night Vision’ would see what we developers see when we turn on the lightbulb — everything? Another quirk with this texture: When you lower the ‘scale’ to something like 0.25 large areas with this texture look great – but when your character gets close – not only is the magic gone, but it looks like the texture failed and left you with reddish purple lines and foggy fields of grey and tan. So – we guessed that we can use that for cliffs seen at a distance – where nothing exciting will ever happen – and maybe gradually bring the scale back up to ‘normal’ closer to the ground – & closer to where anything might happen.

— Let me digress for a moment – Jim’s theory is to let every player believe their character has an unfair advantage and counsel them not to do anything stupid while they’re at lower levels – “Don’t jump off a cliff if you don’t have the right magical armor -” … stuff like that. I rolled my eyes at that idea at first, but then, the more I think about it – yeah – that works. A thief should believe he or she has an unfair advantage when it comes to picking pockets of npc’s. – Then learn caution when they go up against the higher leveled & more perceptive npcs and player’s characters. Yeah – that works.

….. — T.R. —

– I Think We’re Taking It Up A Notch – or Seven? –

-Thursday, June 25th, 2020 —> +27˚C / +81˚F @ 6:15 pm —> Sigh — I been Bad and so caught up in trying to undo some Catastrophic messes – I missed telling too many wonderful people that they shouldn’t just have one happy day a year because it’s their birthday – { Hanging my head in shame – feeling like a marionette with cut strings? And an aching neck —> So many wonderful, lovable people out there who deserve to be reminded how wonderful they are … and so little time ? }  Ack!

- After we thought we'd fixed all the irritating little problems ---

– After we thought we’d fixed all the irritating little problems that exploded into our world after one nano-second of clicking on the wrong thing and then pounding control-z hard enough to knock Bill Gates out of his bed wherever he’s hiding out –

— This is what a disaster looks like – W fixed this once already and then when we fixed something else the ‘link’ between two areas unfixed itself. All that black area between the mountain on the left and the hills and green grass on the right? —> That’s not supposed to be there. The tower and other buildings levitated above the blackness? – They’re part of the territory to the right. That bright cube beneath the tower closest to us? That’s a light that should be shining either on  the docks to the left or near the guarded gate that would be part of the land to the right. Several buildings almost dead center? They Belong in line with darkened buildings that stayed with half of the harbor’s docks to the right – when the other half floated, what?-  thirty yards to the left? Something like that.

— I think the above mess happened because we missed one ‘Seamless Link’ That we should have removed before we began moving all our ‘Used-to-be-linked-together-areas’ back together and gluing them in place. Duct tape and wire hangars might have been prettier… and might have lasted better. But anyway —>

-Elise and Vollfe Appreciating a crimson sunset sky -"

– The closest I got to “Read Skies At Night” { which delighted sailors because that meant the storms were chronologically behind them – } Was purple clouds and fog near sunset – But this wasn’t purple – Was it? –

— Elise – The barefoot Hippie builder planted and nurtured some flowers after working all night helping Volffe set up several lamp posts and watching the lamplighter do his thing – I might get around to working on the screen shot of Elise’s garden next time.

— One reason I never tried for a red sunset was the messages in U2’s “Red Skies at Night” and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” – One big reason I’m building this game world is to give people who don’t want to kill everything in sight a place to hang out and hopefully see some amazingly beautiful landscapes. The hackers and slashers will have their own areas to set each other on fire and spill blood all over the place, but a lot of areas will have either ‘Divine Protection’ or Big ugly protectors scaring the living cement out of the bad guys. — But the red skies last night on my wonderful gaming monitor came close to having me wonder, – Gee, maybe red isn’t such a bloody awful colour after all –

— One “Quirk” with this 3D stuff is – you get to see some characters from a slightly different angle and it looks like you took a photograph with a weird wide angle lens that makes people look like they do in fun house mirrors. Not so much in this screen shot as in one that might be next.

- Volffe & Nikki in a Birkenport Morning -

– “Nikki and Volffe in a Birkenport Morning -“

— Okay – This might have been the game day before Volffe and Elise knocked themselves out putting lamp posts in place.

— Remember I said something about weird effects – Nikki’s face is almost twice its normal width in this shot – and her ears are probably – um, 4 inches farther apart than they really are?  And Volffe’s face is thinner here that it really is. — Can’t chalk it up to lens aberrations…

- "Builder's Hallucinations?" -

– As a result of several ‘Earthquakes’ – we brought the sea bed for the ‘Enchanted Sea’ and ‘Enchanted Inlet’ down a bit. Zealandir was part of the working party – ‘Casting Magick Spells’ to mend the broken land? { no- actually using ‘slope smoothing’ tools to bring the Dark Dirt slopes down to meet the sandy slope rising to meet it – }

— Looks like a weird dream of buildings floating or falling in a pink and purple sky while Poor Zealandir looks like he’s trying hard to believe that if he doesn’t turn around and look at it, it might not be real.

- Builders Gawking at the light high up on the 'mont' At Isle San Michel -

– Daerrikk and Volffe staring at the beacon near the top of Mont San Michel on Isle San Michel in the inland sea –

— Some of these darker scenes might not show up all that great – but this one doesn’t look bad – and this is not on the Gaming Monitor… There’s a fairly bright bluish light way up near the top of ‘Mont San Michel’ on Isle San Michel { Locals who want bragging rights to the highest mountain in the inland sea argue which Mountains are mountains and which are mere hills. I don’t take sides. }

- DelVahrian - 'Working on the dry sea bed after the earthquakes.' -

– Ya don’t want to see this guy comin at ya with a bad attitude in a dark alley – “Don’t argue Religion with a DelVahrian – it ain’t healthy -“

— DelVahrians are Hard Workers, Hard Drinkers, and have been known to have some monumental fist fights over finer points of religious dogma…. Here, this guy is looking for leaks in the dry sea bed of the Enchanted Sea – Which is actually a ‘dog legged’ inlet of the Inland Sea. —> And it has a reputation for being haunted as buildings and huge boulders and sometimes screaming people fall from the sky –

- One more view of the Crimson Sunset -

– Here – one more shot of the Crimson sunset in Birkenport – maybe not as impressive as the first shot, but it held Volffe entranced –

— Ack! I’ve been at this all day, fixing worlds and gritting my teeth – And this ‘posting’ or ‘article’ is the wrap up –

— Have a good Life….

~~~~~ Jim

If It’s Wednesday – This Must Be Isle San Michel -“

Wednesday —> June 24th, 2020 – 1:24 am —> +19˚C / +68˚F – Dark & ‘Clear’ in Atlantic Canada –

- Daerrikk & Volffe + Isle San Michel -

— Daerrikk & Volffe on the Docks at Keltic Vale – Gazing at the Beacon High on the ‘mont’ on Isle San Michel –

— After a frantic week of repairing links between areas inside the Game World – We finally got a chance to work on a couple improvements – Brought down the Space Needle like rock on Isle San Michel – and shaped the mountain or hill more like Mont Saint Michel in France – It isn’t prefect –  but it’s pretty good. Then we put a lamp post and a bright blue light up near the summitt – And here – Daerrikk { Right } and Volffe { With his name showing over his head } were watching clouds roll in and glow blue from the light. There were times, from that vantage – that you could see the whole top of the hill lit up.

- "Isle San Michel -" -

– Isle San Michel and the NorthWest Corner of the Inland Sea. –

— Too many different shades of colour in our mountains? Earlier – { Yesterday? } – We finished shaping the grey stone hill or mountain. Before we conked out in the not-quite-so- ‘wee small hours’ of Sunday Morning we put a lamppost and a bright blue light up near the final chimney-like bit at the top.

— The ‘Mythology’ is, that when a rag-tag fleet of sailing ships carrying refugees from the “Last Wars Of Magick” found “Aerendel” — All they found was an Island in the ‘middle of nowhere’ with a fairly high mountain and fairly lush vegetation. They put ashore and found all kinds of fresh berries and other fruits – good water – and then – as a nasty storm hit – sought refuge in a pretty big cavern halfway up the mountain. The storm lasted three days and the ground shook several times. A lot of the refugees thought the bad guys were winning the Wars – But when the storm was over they discovered that their mountain was much higher above Sea Level than it had been before – and a lot of land had risen from the sea around them – Including a lot of jagged mountains.

— I’m thinkin’ the rocky hills or mountains in the lower left corner of the above Screen Shot are a little too jagged. No matter how sharp and pointed they might have been when the world changed – which might have been 5,000 – 10,000 or more years back – In an area where fresh water freezes and snow is a common sight in winter – I thought it would be more realistic – or at least interesting – to have more rolling ribbons of hills and fewer sharp points. { Shrug }

— So it looks like the world needs a lot more cosmetic surgery – We’re still finding loads of major ‘earthquake damage’ – Areas that used to be connected look like they’re at least a football field apart – And then there’s a lot of areas that are just kind of landscaped with monochrome hills and mountains & without grass or trees or cobblestone roads  or other necessary details – To say nothing about the buildings and caverns and caves and tunnels that are still in the planning stages and – can { or should } we give each race their own style of housing?

— And I better go – I’ve been staring into space and beginning to blink in and out of dreams while I’m trying to type here. And I have a Dentist’s Appointment in the morning —->

— Aaaaaaaa ….

~~~~~ Jim

“Hey – Look What I Found – & This Past Week In Game Building Land -“

Sunday – June 21st, 2020, Fathers’ Day? & it’s +26˚C / +76˚F – off and on cloudy – and muggy? @ 3:34 pm in Atlantic Canada –

I thought I lost this -

– How about a rejection slip from Star Wars – for an unsolicited idea and sample bit of movie script in 1977? –

— I found the above hiding in plain sight here in my office when the ‘clearing away some clutter’ bug hit me. I thought I’d lost it a long time ago –

- Julienne - in slightly foggy reflections in Glaicer Valey -

– “Julienne taking a moment to appreciate the beauty through the coming fog – with reflections in Glacier Valley -“

— Glacier Valley has been around since 2011 – But – while I thought I did a good job of getting the slopes from high mountains right, and learned that white gravel doesn’t just just look like authentic hillside ‘crud’ { – that’s a technical term used by climbers – “Crud” – } —> It also looks like real snow in some places / under the right conditions. … And I was able to pick up a really good ‘Gaming’ monitor during Boxing Day/Week after my 3 month appointment taking photos and working them into a complicated database for the local museum here in the fall of 2018 – and wow – I was actually stunned at how good this looks on a decent gaming monitor.

- A Gremlin - Doug figured out how to morph this guy from a full sized human -

– “Gremlin -” I thought I’d have to try to get my cousin Emelie involved to come up with some decent creature designs – but while this character { one of Doug’s } has some glitches and weird appearance problems – it looks pretty darned good { or Evil – or both } – to me –

— Without the hat – this character has dark eye sockets on the top of his head, and his neck looks like it has a bones sticking out if you look at it too closely – but dang – { I wish the ears were creepier – but heck – } Having a couple of these guys running around burning down whole neighbourhoods could make for some interesting game play…

- Anie - in the shallows of the Enchanted Sea -

– Annie – up to her waist in pretty green water in the Enchanted Sea – Even stout hearted Pirates avoid this area whenever they can –

– Annie looks like she’s really worried that there might be hungry sharks in the shallows of the Enchanted Sea here —> An area that’s just mostly very basic right now – And getting a little bit more finished every day – Even if I work on this game until I pass out and wake up with my neck aching and my head pounding much too often…

- Moe lit some lamps -

– Moe – the slightly Pirate-like Cat-Person – learned that a little bit of some dust from Crystal Mines – when added to whatever they burn in those lamps – both increases the brilliance of the lighting and gives it some colourful tints –

— Moe was my first successful attempt at ‘creating’ a charismatic Cat-Person – With just a little bit of modification we have Fox People who might need bushier tails – But yup, they are different enough –

- Brilliant lighting from a distance -

– This was another view that ‘knocked me out’ – When you see this on s decent sized screen – it looks pretty darned good – & on the Gaming Monitor it looks Magical. –

— As I was ready to wind down – I knew I would pass out soon if I didn’t – Draelen – { My Character } And Nikki – His love interest – met in the dark on “Lovers’ Lookout Hill” and Me, out here in the ‘real world’ was stunned at how good this looked –

- A little more than two hours in real world time passed between the photo above and this one - taken from the same angle -

– Draelen might have been just as stunned as I was – And the morning fog and scenery isn’t bad here either –

— After the magical looking night in the two ‘photos’ – above – A one nano second miss-click messed up several game areas right around this ‘Inland Sea’ harbor – and after three long days of fixing things – we still more to do – But – yeah – seeing that we’re able to have results that look this good – doesn’t keep me from waking up with my forehead on the keyboard – but it does give me hope that we’re actually getting somewhere.

- Gaeren - The Ursan on the right - and his Delvahrian captain of the guard -

– Somebody had to make armor in the DelVahrian style for Gaeren – an Ursan { Bear Person – } –

— These two are in the same unit – guarding the city of ‘Emeliea’ with spooky clouds coming down from mountains in the west –

- "Tall Spruce with roots -" -

– We’ve also been seriously learning how to ‘make trees’ with Speed Tree software – from the same company that designed software that made some really impressive virtual plants for movies. –

— I have to ask Cousin Debi if this is what a real spruce tree looks like, and not a Colorado Blue Spruce –

— Sigh – And I better sign off and get some rest before I blink and wake up a couple weeks from now with a splitting headache…

— 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

– It Used To Be Friday –

– Saturday – June 13th, 2020 – +15˚C / +59˚F – dark & partly cloudy @ 1:42 am on my friend, Bob Balough’s Birthday –

Draelen & Nikki in the guard house in the "Norff Land" area

– Draelen & Nikki on guard duty together in the guard house in “Norff Land” – The chosen and highly defensible ‘New Homeland” of quite a few Ymmps –

— Not long after I took this screen shot the world we’ve been working in went ‘Down’ – { Schnarr! } It went down at about 6:31 Friday morning and it’s still down as of the last time I checked, maybe half an hour ago –
— I spent hours last evening thinking I could copy and paste the page of “The sentient Races of Aerendel” that I laboured over and put together painfully in HTML sometime between 1995 and 1997? – Before I could get my hands on a working copy of Dream Weaver. Long story – You don’t want to hear it. It’s all about me joining the vast hordes of unpaid US home health care providers trying to keep my father alive and then being so burned out I couldn’t work for a couple years.

"Norff-Land" The Ymmps adopted homeland.

We were building this new area and adding the sea to its south – This is about as far aw we got –

— The rocky coast of “Norff Land” { Ymmps, wiff dere demented senses of humor love making fun of language and talk funny for the plus perfect hell of it. } – They’re also hunted by the goblin-like race in this world who, if they can capture an Ymmp, and cut off its tail, and locate the correct glands and process the oily juice they can squeeze out of those glands just right – and survive the hallucinations and near-death experience they go through when the drink the stuff – become almost demonically powerful after having been born sickly, weak, stupid and generally useless – Ymmps are fun characters, ‘old souls’ who just want to laugh their way through this life and have as good a time as they can – And they all develop a ‘spell’ they call fire breath – which can kill bad guys, maybe ten at a time, but then they’re exhausted and need to rest and hope there are enough other Ymmps around to protect them and kill off the crazed attackers who want their tails – literally. I was raising steep hills along the jagged coastline while Nikki’s player was sleeping and had left her there as a place holder in case I tried to do too much at once and crashed out, if it took me a while to get back on I wouldn’t have to twiddle my thumbs for a minute or so while the world ‘spun back up’ and allowed me back in to get back to the business of building the landscape of this world – which is coming together and looking a lot better than I thought it could when I started this.

Julienne in Glacier Valley

– Julienne in Glacier Valley – with the early spring melted snow reflecting the absolutely gorgeous terrain behind her. –

— Looks like a ‘Visit Aerendel and Stay as long as you like’ Post card above, doesn’t it?

Juvenile Palm Trees.

– “Juvenile Palm Trees” – Besides checking a lot of minor problems with ‘Seamless Links’ and making some cosmetic changes, putting finishing touches on several areas – I’ve been working my way through ‘Speed Tree” tutorials and here’s some of the results –

— Palm Tree Saplings? 19 + feet tall? – The pink sphere is a collision thing – no characters can run between the young trees – I was thinking I could ‘sink them into the ground’ and have myself a jungle like look –

Tall twisted Palm Tree.

– Here’s a slightly twisted palm tree guaranteed to react to breezes – I wasn’t a big fan of palm trees, but I know where I can put this –

— A “66.21” foot tall palm tree that’s been buffeted by Trade winds? I randomized this from another palm tree that was 50 feet tall and couldn’t resit. I’ve got some more reading to do before I make sure it has all its intended features and close my eyes and push the button to send it through the pipe line with a couple whole forests waiting to join it. I liked the trees that disappeared with a server upgrade – I forget how many years ago – but these are a lot more interesting.

Tosha - without her axe

– Now this was an interesting occurrence – Tosha did a lot of work landscaping the other day and somewhere along the line might have actually lost her ‘Gear-Axe’ .

— I want to know if her axe magically reappears next time she pops in to help me here, but I guess I’ll have to wait –

— Have I done enough damage for one day? If I don’t get some quality rest I’ll be in trouble, deep.

— “Have a good life -“

————— Jim

Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> “Planting Trees”

Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> +23°C  / +72°F —> Mostly cloudy & Muggy here in Atlantic Canada @ 7:30-ish pm. –

"Broadleaf Speed Tree" 001

– “My first Speed Tree” With this Version. –

— Windows 10 still hates me. I downloaded the latest version of ‘Speed Trees” that I need for ‘creating’ trees to replace the place-holding leafless monstrosities I snitched from an example area. I downloaded this new version three times and it kept telling me that I was an idiot and it didn’t want to work for me. I almost gave up. But I stumbled into the start/stop menu and noticed that the ‘alias’ for speed trees said it was for (32) bit machines – so I waded through the “All Programs” files and opened up the “Speed Trees” folder and clicked on the (64) bit folder and clicked on the “modeler” app and it blinked at me and said, “Oh, that’s what you want- Okay!” and opened right up.

— And in the ‘manual’ it says ‘click here’ to see what I’m talking about – and when I did that I got more confused than usual – until I realized the link shot me to YouTube video tutorials for the wrong Version. A woman who knew how to set the volume levels while she recorded the wrong version’s tutorials didn’t quite blow me out of the room. But when I found the right version’s tutorials the guy was speaking so softly I thought the woman had blown my speakers. In his second tutorial video, that guy got it right and by the time I got through a couple tutorials – I felt confident and stupid enough to jump in and try to generate myself a tree. The tree above is the first tree I ‘created’ from scratch.

— Let me step back a bit —>

"Randomized Conifer"

– “Randomized Conifer” There are several example trees already made that came with the software. I clicked ‘randomize’ and it said, “You’re stupid, but if you really want to do this-…” and removed a lot of lower branches. –

— Before I went wading through instructions and tutorials I clicked on “Example trees” and blinked and it gave me a really tall conifer, and I clicked on “Randomize” { Just in case the graphic screen shot didn’t load for you } and it warned me that I would lose a bunch of detail – but what the heck – I told it to go ahead, and the above is what it gave me. 🙂  I thought, okay, that’s weird. – But what the heck? – And I saved it. It might look okay sunk into the ground to maybe halfway up the trunk … and then the software got nervous and told me, ‘You can’t save that here, how about we save it somewhere on your computer?’ – I said, “Sure – why the bleep not?” – and had to convince it that I wanted to plop it on my desktop for now – where it would be a lot easier to pull it back up later and mess with it, or whatever… Almost every program/app these days thinks everybody should love to have to search through half a million ‘documents’ anytime they want to open a file or look at something they worked on and saved yesterday before some random weather event shut down the local electrical grid or maybe a snowplow took out a utility pole or something – and achieved the same end, “Boom, crackle crackle – Fzzzzt!” – And our UPS guardian thingamajig beeped like crazy for an hour or so when nobody was in the building to hear it and then … “OMG – where’s all the work I hope I saved????”

"Not quite the Colorado Blue Spruce I expected, but hey, that's cool -"

– An Experimental second tree, I told it to be a “Spruce” and this is what I got. –

— Nature doesn’t subscribe to human sensibilities and I was really glad this tree isn’t perfectly symmetrical.  I’ll have to ask my cuter than heck cousin, the botanist – if this looks like an actual ‘other than Colorado Blue-” spruce tree – or do the ‘normal’ needles belong to some other species. But wait a minute- If I’m building a world for a computer game that doesn’t necessarily look exactly like this one – That might be a ‘Plejarin’ Spruce or something…

"A slightly inebriated palm tree."

– This was one of their example – pre-finished trees. I altered it a bit –

— In their tutorial, they use this palm tree as an example of how you can bend and twist your trunk around – I ‘played with it’ and lengthened the trunk a bit and tried to get it to stand up a bit straighter after its bend. And this looks okay to me.

- My Original Pine Tree -

– This Palm Tree – I ‘built’ from scratch – I actually lengthened the fronds a bit and I wasn’t happy that most of them stood pretty much straight up and none of the ‘magnet’ tools I clicked on bent the fronds down… But I don’t think I ever saw a real Palm Tree in real life – so maybe they look like this? –

— Interesting? Next time I’ll give a palm tree longer fronds.

"Ash Saplings"

– “Ash Saplings” – I wasn’t sure what I’d get when I clicked on the template that generated several Saplings. here – but yeah – I like the results. –

— & Hey! I don’t have to ‘plant’ a forest with only huge mature trees. – Maybe next time I can ‘create’ a bunch of baby Christmas trees?

- One of their examples. A broadleaf with roots around a bunch of rocks. -

– I thought this was cool, but maybe I’m a sucker? – This is one of their example broad leaf trees with roots hanging on to some rocks. I like the rocks…. –

— Yum? A broad-leaf tree with roots wrapped around some unusually rounded rocks. And it looks like somebody cut off a couple lower branches.
“Speed Trees” – in their tutorials, want to make sure you put ‘caps’ on broken or sawed off stumps of branches. It took me a little bit of trial and error to realize that when you put the ‘cap’ on the broken top of a tree – that puts caps on all broken/sawed off branches.

- Another broad-leaf tree- I defined this one. -

– “Another broad-leaf tree.” I defined this one.-

— The first time I tried to add roots to a tree trunk – before I added branches – all the branches wanted to hang out down at the roots – Which I found quite ‘irksome’. – And until I deleted the roots and the branches, I couldn’t find the editing stuff to pick the branches up and tell them to bond with the tree trunk – not the roots. –

— I wasn’t going to show you all my experiments and goofs here – but I did.

— I’m pretty happy with what I did here today – most results were surprising and most of them were positive surprises.

— Yeah, I can live with this…

————— Have a good life….

~~~~~ Jim

 

Today’s Round of Catastrophes & Fixes —>

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020 – 9:50 pm outside of Ithaca, New York

- Notice the gap between the two areas-

– As she began to Re-Join the areas – This is what Annnie saw – Notice the gap between the Vale to the left and the Valley to the right –

— { The above is the first of three screen shots Annie missed after she worked all day Tuesday to re-join the Vale and the Valley – The green outlines tell us that the two areas are now touching where they need to be joined – And you will probably notice the gully or gulch or canyon between the two areas. — Depends on how large a screen you are viewing this on. }

= = = = = —djo — { Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 – 4:08 pm— Jim’s birthday reminders that his calendar sends all of us – tells us it’s Connie G’s Birthday }

—> Reports from Xhyrean & Rachel :

— First, from Xhyrean :

  • Annie discovered that Keltic Valley had sailed away from The Vale – and set about fixing that – Nikki helped – Nikki reached the point where none of her commands to alter the landscape or basically do anything helpful got results, so she ran south as far as she could go while Annie twiddled her thumbs and waited for ‘reality’ to catch up with her queued commands.
  • Nikki did fix a glitch between the border of the Valley and ‘001’ and ran up east of center through 001, through the cave and back out and managed to get to the border of Stone Lake, but couldn’t cross into Stone Lake. Then she turned around and thought she could race back to Annie’s side, but got stuck at the northern border of 001.
  • We will probably have to fix that when we’re through with all our other little fiascoes.

{ & he included Annie’s Screen-Shots }

—–> Shantivarta

= = = = =

—– Then Rachel :

– Yeah, Nikki got stuck, we probably have to re-do the borders to ‘001’ – plus, i think we did a decent job- the girls did good work. 🙂 – now let’s see if I have the presence of mind to actually attach my screen shots —-

—– Raitch —

{ & she included Nikki’s Screen Shots }

= = = = =

— Let me get the screen shots in order:

Julienne in the North-East Shield Mountains

– Julienne explored the North-Eastern Shield Mountains late last night / early this morning – She was impressed with the clouds as evening fell –

— The North-Estern Shield Mountains are beyond the North-Eastern Plains. Julienne had a break between her bard-like engagements and thought she’d get away from it all – Like the caption says, she was really impressed with the purple evening clouds in the mountains.

- Yup, The valley district came unglued from the Vale district.

– Annie’s first Screen-Shot of the day – Everybody was so busy yesterday getting the inland sea back in place, that we missed the fact that, indeed, The Valley had divorced itself from the Vale. –

— That is a mess –

- "Border Gaps"

– Apparently,The Vale and the Valley used to overlap considerably –

— After they brought the two areas into alignment, they saw that there was a gap of several yards or meters between the landmasses that used to be connected. They made an executive decision to link the areas together with that gap – and bring up that impassable gully, & do some heavy duty landscaping / earth moving to match the real estate on both sides of that ‘canyon’?

- What it looked like as Annie began Repairing the Eastern Edges

– This what Annie saw as she began to match the edges between the Vale { on the right } and the Valley { left } –

- After Annie matched the Eastern Edges -

– And this is what the Eastern Edges looked like after Annie used the leveling tool to bring the edge of the Valley Area down to match the Vale’s –

- A bit of a plateau formed when they brought the edges of the bordering districts togethe. -

– When they ‘glued’ the edges of the two areas together – They had to ‘fly’ up and see what they were doing from a distance – Then back on the ground, they had this bit of a wall blocking the road. –

— If you’re seeing this on a big enough screen – Annie is trying to look over the top of a wall that suddenly grew between her and the gateway into the Valley District. If they left that there almost no players that couldn’t fly would ever be able to ‘Get there from here-‘ – but – that is really easy to fix with the right bulldozer / Leveling tool – { Ya just gotta be careful with that tool or you may find a line of weird pillars across the land you probably spent a lot of time and effort to ‘landscape’ just right. Luckily, we taught them well and they were careful – } – And, they made another executive decision, to bring the very steep hill up from the Vale to the Valley — down a bit.

- :The View From The Valley Side Of The Border -

– After Smoothing out the road from the Vale to the Valley – they began to use the leveling tool to Bring the hills on one side of the border up to the same height as their counterparts on the other side. –

— I think they told me that Nikki bulldozed the road down to level from the Valley side, and then did a lot of slope smoothing on the Vale side to grade the road into something more passable, and less steep. But – from this screen-shot, you can probably see that first efforts to match the hills on both sides of the gully that wasn’t there before — together… gave them some weird, and not very pleasing – results.

- "Getting There"

– This is a long shot of the road work Nikki completed – making the slope up the hill from the Vale to the Valley a lot more pleasant, and traversable. –

— Nikki labeled this screen shot “Getting There -” It shows her handiwork in smoothing out the road’s climb.

- Steep sides on both sides of the road -

– Nikki’s bulldozing handiwork. The road into the Valley, through the gateway – used to be that much higher than it is now. –

— Where else could you bring a whole neighbourhood down several meters in altitude in less than an hour and make it work? Our two young women then had a lot of hill-sculpting and other landscaping to do before they were satisfied with the way this area looked. –

- The view from way beyond the western edge of these two areas.

– The young women stopped their efforts to ‘pretty up’ or make the entire west side of both areas match and/or look the same from out here in the ozone. –

—  When they saw that bit of a lake on the edge of the valley – on our right there – Annie and Nikki couldn’t be sure there wasn’t another area linked to the valley up there, and so stopped trying to make the western edges here look like one heck of a thick chocolate bar. –

— Annie told me there were at least two screen shots of her work on the eastern edges of both areas – that she missed when she sent us her screen shots of the day – She’ll get them to us tomorrow – and one of us will have to edit them into this article { and/or ‘posting’ } –

- Annie & Nikki on their lunch break -

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

— Yeah, ‘Real Life Adventures’ sometimes get in the way of game world building – But these two made sure they documented their presence before they had to go eat something before one or both of them dropped dead from acute low blood sugar -ness. – { I have a poetic license and I’m not afraid to use it – }

- Almost Midnight in the game world -

– Most of the rest of these Screen shots deal with ‘selfies’ of the two young women. –

— The more they did, the longer their computers hung up with serious lag. They moved mountains and carved hidden valleys but couldn’t take the time to capture that work in screen shots without taking the chance that  just a little more effort might crash their software and they could lose a lot of what they’d already done today. And that would be a tragedy and a half.

— But I think there may be one more shot out of the fourteen they sent us today that should go here:

- "Midnight Blue Clouds"

– Annie took this last screen shot as electric blue clouds swooped in low over Keltic Vale. –

— I think it’s a wonderful thing, that these two young women – up to their ears in dirty work, still noticed things that gave them a lift, like the strange atmosphere in this game world producing some odd and wonderful coloured clouds….

— And now it’s time for me to get ready for my night shift –

— Take care, Be safe – wear your CoVid-19 masks and try not to scare little kids to death —

————— Douglas Jay Otterson  { — djo — }  —>  Finished Editing-in the last 3 photos/Screen-Shots @ on Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 – 3:20 pm Ithaca Time –

New Page Added – “Stuff From Yahoo Group”

Sunday, October 27th, 2019 – Dark and chilly @ 6:39 pm  in Atlantic Canada

DreamCat as a Dryad

– DreamCat as a Dryad – Screen Shot from eons ago when we were playing Simms online in its first incarnation. –

{ DreamCat is the character with the butterfly wings. }

Yahoo Groups will be nuking its group’ content soon. they will not allow any new content after tomorrow, the 28th. I copied everything worth copying and pasted that into 60 pages of word processing { Open Office } @ a font size of 12 pixels ( I think it’s measured in pixels ).

So- at any rate – there’s a new page and some of its content is personal memorablia and some might be worth reading.

— Grumble grumble

——— TaleRocker