Sometimes You Gotta Dig

Hey Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning so I thought I would do a bit of a recap of my weekend. One of those games that I keep returning to no matter what is going on in my life is Minecraft. I’ve not felt the best over the last few weeks because of mystery-ailment-that-is-likely-not-covid. I can always retreat to Minecraft and my research into the NFTWorld fiasco sparked my desire to play the game. What do I usually do when I play Minecraft? Well, I burrow into the side of a mountain and dig one tunnel going up and one tunnel going down. This screenshot was from the beginning of my process of terraforming a mountain top. I’ve now since built a bit of a reasonable structure up top, and my incessant tunneling has served as material for building projects.
What consumed a truly inordinate amount of time is that in the process of digging down… I encountered an underground ocean. I mean I could, of course, have just blocked it off and continued along with my day but instead, I decided to use the particular properties of gates to hold back water… in order to give me access still to this resource if I happened to need it. Granted again I could have done this in a more simple manner with a door… but I set down this path so I trucked right along with this madness. The most quirky thing about this is that later on, I encountered another section of this cave network with the difference this one being mostly dry. My entire focus however became digging down to bedrock… which I accomplished yesterday and now have a ton of deep slate to build things with.
In other activities, I am still working on my Inquisitor in Path of Exile and have just started the final act. I am still running around with Wintertide Brand and have not transitioned my build over to Righteous Fire. I think I still need to finish cruel lab before I can do this thing, so I should probably set my mind to completing that before I finish Act Ten and take another resistance hit. I believe I am sitting at 70 just about to hit 71 so I have long since started getting lots and lots of map drops. My time with Path of Exile right now is more or less trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. What I mean by that is I am trying to figure out what I want my build to be for my first legit season open. I think a few of us are in this holding pattern of trying to click the gears in place because we know we are just about to do it all over again in mid-August.
Lastly, I am still spending time in Dragonflight alpha, and as such spending time poking around on an Evoker. I believe today is the cut-off for this phase of the alpha test and in theory, when I next play the game I will be able to access one of the expansion zones. I have a Deathknight ready to go and I will probably spend some time speccing out a Warrior and trying to build something I enjoy there as well. I am honestly looking forward to seeing the zones because I have heard good things about them. Evoker and Dracthyr are decidedly not my jam and I feel are right now negatively coloring my impression of the expansion so far. I’ve evolved to be able to play “finger wigglers” a bit more than I could in the past, but the Evoker is maybe a bit too on that spectrum for my tastes. I’ve never reconciled my ability to enjoy a Mage, but I dig the heck out of Demonology Warlock. The post Sometimes You Gotta Dig appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition

Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:
  • To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
  • To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
  • To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
  • Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

To Those Remaining

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS5
I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.
Hades – PC and Switch
This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.
New World – PC
I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4
Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.

To The New and Returning

Destiny 2 – PC
Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.
Minecraft – PC Java Client
Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.
Outriders – PC
Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.
Valheim – PC
Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.

To Those Departing

Genshin Impact – Android/PC
I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.
World of Warcraft – PC
Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.

Ships Passing in the Night

Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.
Dragon Age Inquisition – PC
Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.
Jedi Fallen Order – PC
When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.
Knights of the Old Republic 2 – PC
Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.

Summary

The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly. The post Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Optifine and Nostalgia Shaders

Good Morning Friends! I spent most of my evening playing Destiny, but for a little bit in the early evening I resolved to get something working that I had thought about for awhile. I do not have an RTX series graphics card and as a result I cannot play Minecraft RTX. That said my preference is the Java Client and I don’t believe the RTX shaders work for that anyway. However there are a number of community supported shader packs that provide a very similar experience. I’ve installed this sort of thing before in the past and form what I understood it was a much simpler process these days. As a result I sat down and sorted it out, and the results are phenomenally cool. I thought this morning I would share the process.
This entire adventure begins with a little utility known as Optifine. I’ve been using this for years because it greatly expands the graphical options available to Minecraft and tweaks the way that textures are applied to the blocks. For example instead of rendering glass as a bunch of individual panes, it will instead render an entire wall of glass blocks as a single seamless mass of glass. Essentially this is a JAR file that once double clicked acts as a guided installer much like that of a standard Windows wizard installer. It is going to attempt to find your Minecraft folder, which in theory should be auto populated but if not type %AppData% in the windows run prompt and double click the .Minecraft folder and then copy that entire path and paste it into the Optifine installer.
Once this has been installed successfully you should see a new profile show up in your Minecraft Launcher. For example I have three in my drop down, Optifine for 1.16.5, the latest release which will always update to the most current client, and then an older legacy edition of Forge 1.14.4 which is a similar mod manager. If you want to use Optifine or any of the shader options, then you will need to launch Minecraft under this profile. In theory it shouldn’t negatively impact any of your existing saved games but there will always be the little caution icon indicating you are playing a modified version of Minecraft from that point forward.
Next we will need to grab the Nostalgia shader, which for sake of this discussion is the RTX replacement we are going to go with. Thing is there are a bunch of different Optifine compatible shaders and if you are curious about other options check out this Rock Paper Shotgun article. I personally went with Nostalgia because it is reported to have a minimal hit to performance. Some of the shader packs will cause a dip in performance and given that the Java client already performs worse than Bedrock aka the C# client… I didn’t want to take a lot of chances. Ultimately this time you are going to download the shader zip file and hold onto it for a few minutes because you are going to drag it into a specific folder shortly.
Now you are going to launch Minecraft and make sure you have selected the Optifine profile. From there you need get into game, hit escape, choose options, choose video settings and now finally choose shaders. You should be staring at a screen that looks very similar to the one in the above screenshot. From here click the Shaders Folder button, and this is going to pop open the folder where Optifine is expecting shaders to be stored. Copy the zip you downloaded from the Nostalgia website into this folder and within a few moments it should show up in the list of selectable shaders. Select it, click done and you should now have Nostalgia shaders installed and impacting your game visuals.
The difference in how the game looks is not subtle. The world becomes significantly darker, but the lighting effects become more meaningful. You can see that were are getting realistic looking water reflections on this screenshot taken from the dock on the back of my multiplayer realms base. Additionally as I have placed torches around the perimeter, you see them all casting their own halo of light.
Similarly look around the torches in this screenshot, you can see the rain that was pouring down being illuminated in a somewhat natural manner. The game still feels like Minecraft since I have not done anything to tweak the block skins, but it feels like a more naturalistic view of the same game.
Things got really trippy when I went down into Grace’s undersea base area because we were getting block a reflection from the surface of the glass as well as a ghosting reflection from the water.
The transition between water and land represented by her waterfall entrance to the ocean from the sea base ends up looking like a portal to another world. This was taken from me standing on the sea floor staring back into the base.
This however is looking the other direction out into the ocean floor… as some of the underwater plants are now apparently flagged for bioluminescence. The ocean in general because a much more dark and foreboding place.
Finally we have the Nether which also becomes significantly more dangerous because everything is much darker. It would be SUPER easy to walk off the edge of a cliff and fall into a morass of lava in this version. I do really like the way that the lava has a glow to it however.
This mornings post is largely just show and tell and explanation of how to get to the same point yourself if you are so inclined. I’ve used these sorts of shaders before, but the install process was considerably more tedious. I already had optifine installed, so for me personally it was just a case of clicking on the folder and dragging the zip file into place. I am probably going to experiment some with other shader packs to decide which one I like the best. I do really like the warm glow that Nostalgia has.
Most of the screenshots I have included were of night time, because that is when the difference is the most dramatic. Daytime however looks very solid as well and gives you a sort of depth of field experience fuzzing out the far distance and giving you more naturalistic shadows. The one thing of note is with these sorts of shaders it becomes a bit harder to tell if something is sufficiently lit. When I am running this sort of shader I often times pop open the debug menu with F3 so I can check the actual lighting levels for the purposes of spawning monsters. I honestly think the part that I enjoy the most are the more smooth clouds, because Minecraft clouds have always bothered me. Whelp folks that is it. I just wanted to explain how one gets shaders in Minecraft these days and that it is much easier than it used to be. On that note going to close the post and get on with my morning. The post Optifine and Nostalgia Shaders appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Northern Expansion and NDA

The northern expansion of the Realms server began last night, and most of the evening was spent building a sky road in an attempt to link up with the Taiga Village that I found earlier. I have no clue WHY I have this desire to keep pushing forward into new areas and opening up new possibilities but it is apparently a thing. The skyroads serve a few purposes, not the least of which is safe passage to wherever I am wanting to go. The second is it serves as a nice landmark for me to use while exploring because I have a mighty tendency for getting completely lost. Like in games I struggle until I am able to build a sort of 3D map of where things are and how they relate to others and building these roads helps me do this thing. I know there are a few deserts that I would like to link up with as well but I think the next big thing that I am going to do is venture forth into the Nether. I think I am mentally prepared for that nonsense and can hopefully get some new resources. I think that might be the side benefit of all of the expansion on the surface, is that it might be useful for linking up portals through the nether given that many of these little outposts are far enough away that they might link to new biomes inside the Nether.
Another thing that I am wanting to return to soon is Valheim. I was really enjoying the flow of this game and I am super happy that it seems to be blowing up right now. More attention means that likely we will see improvements to the game as a result. I’ve still yet to take down the second boss and I should do that thing. While not as fulfilling as Minecraft in the building gameplay, I am enjoying the adventuring quite a bit. I think more than anything I want to get back in and harvest enough metal resources to start building into those weapons.
Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I realized that I had several game test invites sitting in my spam folder. So even though I had been watching and searching for one of these… the key words I was searching on did not apparently resurrect it from my spam folder. The problem with both of these games is that they are also bound by an NDA. So as a result we break out a generic Game Under NDA image and not say much detail. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time playing one of these and I am super happy that the world still feels extremely good to be exploring it. It is something I have tested in the past but I don’t want to go into much more detail than that. Suffice to say some improvements have been made and I am super down with what has evolved while I have been gone from it. Unfortunately this talking around in circles about something doesn’t exactly make for compelling content.
Another thing that I think bears some discussion is that I am not certain how much longer I am going to be able to keep up the YouTube thing AND the blog thing. I am starting to experience some deep conflicts about these competing activities. I am finding myself NOT wanting to talk about certain things on the blog because maybe there is a video queued up that has yet to be released where that thing happens. Even worse however I am finding myself not wanting to do something in Game, because I am not necessarily in the mood to record it and I think that maybe just maybe it is something that should be recorded. Essentially I am not designed for the YouTube style content and I think maybe after this week I might officially let it drop. I proved to myself that I could do something like this, but it has also taught me that I can’t do that and this blog and you know work and life and those sort of things. It isn’t like I am trying to do any of this for a living, so there are no serious ramifications of any of these decisions. I just personally find I enjoy sharing content more in the pattern of blogging… where I do a bunch of stuff and then talk about it, rather than staging a bunch of video content and then letting it come out slowly. Conceptually I enjoy YouTube videos… but really I am learning that there is not enough creativity in me to make that work in addition to the blogging and podcasting that I don’t want to give up in the process. It was a fun experiment nonetheless. The post Northern Expansion and NDA appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.