Good Morning Friends! I figured I would talk a bit this morning about Honkai Star Rail. I’ve continued to play it in the background but have not really talked about it in a while. I’m still finding this an extremely fun game even though I am mostly playing for however long it takes to complete the daily activities and spend down my activity currency. I wish there was a bit more meat on the bones here, but we are in somewhat of a holding pattern for the next major story drop to land. I’ve contemplated picking back up Genshin Impact as my friend Ace has done, but I find just the concept of trying to ease back into that game overwhelming. There is so much content that I missed and it feels weird trying to find a place to even start.
I pulled Silver Wolf off the current banner and immediately adapted my default team to include her. The whole mechanic of being able to make encounters weak to abilities that they were not already weak to seems extremely strong. Natasha though is doing the heavy lifting of this team. Right now I only have one healer and really wish I had a second. Right now that would be Bailu… which is a five-star and not on a banner yet. The next banner is for Luocha, which is a character that I have no thematic interest in at all… but might still try and get just to have a second reliable healer. I’ve reached the point where I need to attempt to maintain two teams in order to keep pushing some of the content and whichever team does not have Natasha on it… struggles quite a bit. As far as my lineup of spare 60s goes… I have Bronya, March, Asta, Gepard, and Serval. Essentially I tend to make a super shield team and then give the healer to the other team and it MOSTLY works.
Right now in lieu of story content, we are getting several events happening in the game. The best of these is a sim game where you take over management of the Everwinter City Museum. It took me 71 turns to complete all of the activities which is probably a bit long, but there were several turns where I let my current actions ride just to build up the resource used to fund renovations. Essentially someone looted the museum and you are helping out Pela track down the culprits and replace the items. You also spend some time tracking down volunteers and convincing them to help be docents at the museum. All in all, it was a really fun event and I am sort of sad that I am done with it.
Another game that is cycling off in just a few days is the Starhunt Game which is associated with Silver Wolf. You are essentially tracking down graffiti that she tagged the space station with, and decoding it. This involves going through some mini-dungeons and completing very specific objectives. There is this cool mechanic where the boss of the encounter is too powerful to be defeated, so you have to find a specific tag somewhere in the zone that will reduce its level significantly so you can take it down. The biggest thing gained from this event though is a Light Cone that is themed for Silver Wolf and the ability to power it up significantly. It was fun, but nothing really to write home about.
The event that started this week is a “research” event where you just supply the researcher with some basic materials. So far nothing they have asked for has been a challenge and are items I have hundreds of sitting in my vault. These sorts of events tend to be a way of removing some resources from the economy, and if you have played for any length of time you tend to have plenty of whatever the resources are. The rewards are nice even though the event itself is rather boring. I can always use more blue materials to either synthesize into purple materials or to power up characters.
Honkai Star Rail, while largely in maintenance mode for me… is still something that I enjoy doing each day. It maybe takes thirty minutes to complete everything for the day, and then move on to whatever my gaming main course for the evening. This is just enough time to feel like I accomplished something, without the game really overstaying its welcome. I do however look forward to the next batch of story content dropping, and I am enjoying the little daily interludes that take place over the in-game text system. I should probably spend some time trying to farm the Space-China currency so I can pick up the remaining Eidolons for Fire Traveller. I’ve almost completed the battle pass for the month as well, so it still feels like I am making constant progress. Honkai Star Rail is one of those games where it was really fun to mainline it until I caught up with the content… and then still fun playing it in daily maintenance mode.
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Good Morning Friends and Happy Juneteenth! Yesterday was my Birthday in addition to being Father’s Day, and I am super thankful for all the assorted well wishes. This morning is going to be a bit of a departure from my regularly scheduled ARPG nonsense. Over the weekend I spent some time messing around with Stable Diffusion running locally, and I thought I would talk a bit about it. Let’s get some stuff out of the way first. I do not condone Art Generation models as a method of replacing the work of actual artists. You will see a bunch of images adorning this blog, and they are all for the most part the paid creation of my good friend Ammo. In fact, as we speak she is working on yet another one of my hair-brained ideas and I have no clue what the final bill will even be, but will pay it happily as I always do. For me, the “AI Art” landscape is more a toy than a tool and in the past, I have enjoyed feeding it nonsense and seeing what it comes up with out of that chaos. For example… I have no clue who the fuck this dude is but any time I feed it a prompt with the name “Gideon” in it, I end up with this visage.
I’ve known for a while that you could run various generation tools locally off your graphics cards, but I always assumed it would be a tedious process. I started down this present rabbit hole when I found out that there was literally a one-click installer that set everything that you needed up for you. There is a distribution of Stable Diffusion called “Easy Diffusion” that offers a quick install for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and within about 15 minutes I was up and running and generating nonsense. I am sure there is probably something inferior about the path that I took to get to this destination, but I honestly don’t really care. I wanted to see if it could be done, and have gotten sufficient enjoyment from this digital version of wooly willy.
The end result is a web server running on your local machine, that you can then access from any other machine on your network. By default, this runs on port 9000 and gives you a fairly detailed interface to control the process. You are going to need some prompts and honestly… the best guide that I have found about this process is this one. More specifically it was helpful in understanding the concept of negative prompts… aka the things that you want to steer the engine away from creating. This is going to be really important if you are working with anything that could be considered the human form because like a pre-teen boy… it seems to be drawn to replicating boobs in the strangest ways. There are negative prompts that you can supply to the process in order to sort of steer it away from that particular uncanny valley.
The other thing you are probably going to want is some more models to play with. You could get really deep in the weeds in trying to explain exactly what a model is… but effectively think of it as encoded data that tells Stable Diffusion how it should produce images. The best place for these seems to be CivitAI.com and on the front page, you will find a number of the more popular options. I’ve played with several of these and after fiddling around a bit, I think I probably like DreamShaper the best because it tends to lean towards more imaginative imagery rather than attempting to replicate reality. Wherever you installed Easy Diffusion, you should find a directory along the lines of “EasyDiffusion\models\stable-diffusion”. When you download a model from CivitAI it will be a “.safetensors” file and you just need to drag it into this directory in order to use it. Something important to note… each model is roughly 2 gigabytes in size so they can rapidly fill your drive if you download too many.
Let’s walk through a multi-hour deep dive that I did yesterday in trying to get something interesting out of the generator. I wanted a Kaiju attacking a city, but I assumed that maybe the model wouldn’t understand the term Kaiju. Essentially when writing a prompt I find it best to sort of use simple language. So for example this is the prompt that I supplied to get the above image.
A giant monster attacking a modern city with the military fighting back against it
This was maybe a little too on the nose and had a distinct Godzilla feel to it. Since I tend to generate five images at a time, you can often see it going in a bunch of directions. Some of these were more akin to something that you would find in a Doom video game, but I mostly liked the general direction it was going. Essentially what I usually do is feed the image that was just generated back into the prompt in order to iterate on that idea. I find that over the course of what ends up being a few hundred generations, it slowly narrows down the focus to get closer to what you were actually wanting.
I wanted to go in a different direction, so I tweaked my prompt a little bit and fed it the previous image.
A giant monster that looks like Cthulhu attacking a modern city with the military fighting back against it
Basically, I supplied that I wanted it to look more like Cthulhu to steer it away from Godzilla… which worked like a charm. However, remember that bit where I said that the models seem to really want to draw boobs? I included this specific image just to show that point.
I took a bit of a pivot because I didn’t want this to end up being a pretty boring drab scene. So for the next prompt, I started adding some style elements to it. I also wanted the city to look a bit more ruinous.
a vaporwave scene featuring A giant monster that looks like Cthulhu attacking a modern city knocking down buildings some of the rubble on fire
I noticed that some of the elements of the monster how were mechanical looking, which made me start shifting in a slightly different direction. Could I get this to make it give me a scene of a Kaiju fighting a Robot over a ruined landscape? Unfortunately at this point going forward… I don’t have exact prompts. The images that generate are named based on your prompt, and my phrase got too long for the file character limit.
I kept the prompt above but instead added that it was fighting a Giant Robot that was wielding a laser sword. The generator got confused as it often does… and just started making the monster look more robotic. While extremely cool looking… this was not really what I was going for, but it was a key step in the process nonetheless.
I tried a few more rounds of generation, feeding my favorite from the previous round into the next round… but no matter what I tried it seemed to be hung up on a single “monster” figure. I am including this one mostly just because it looked pretty freaking badass. I have no clue what is going on with that building but I am on board with the bio-organic mech with a giant laser sword thing that is going on here.
It was around this point that I decided that I needed to tweak things up a bit further. So I specifically called out that there were two figures, the monster, and the giant robot and this finally began to produce paydirt. It started out a bit ephemeral at first, with this pseudo-robot-building thing in the background. However, that gave me a thread to expand on, again feeding one generation into the next round of five generations.
After a few more rounds of generation, the idea was starting to finally take root. I say idea because in fiddling with this nonsense, it does seem like the generator gets something stuck in its head and you have to sort of forcibly dislodge it at times. I was getting somewhere though, but knew it would take many more instances of taking an image that was the closest to what I wanted, and then feeding it into the next loop… and doing this over and over until the results started to turn in the direction I wanted it to.
Then after legitimately two or three hundred rounds of this nonsense and the course of an entire afternoon wasted… we have this glorious piece of nonsense. I think what I find so interesting about Stable Diffusion so far, is that it can serve as this rapid ideation platform. If you want to quickly iterate on some ideas you had in your head, you can come up with something that is still… very visually wrong at times but contains the flavor of what you wanted. I could see this being honestly an amazing tool for an “actual artist” to test out some ideas and have the machine keep iterating on something until they get a layout and subject matter that they wanted… that could then serve as the scaffolding to build something interesting. Even for wordsmiths, this could be super interesting because I can already wrap a story in my head around what is going on in this picture.
It is also sometimes just super interesting to feed it a prompt and see where it goes. This is a hundred or so generations off of the prompt “Belghast”. No clue why but it seemed to really latch onto a military and zombies theme when I used my chosen moniker as the prompt.
This delightfully ominous scene was generated with this prompt:
a skinwalker stalking a group of hunters in the woods
So while I would not at all consider that to be a successful prompt as far as subject matter goes… it still looks freaking cool nonetheless. Again this image has a story to it that is just begging to be told. I feel like trying to make one of these image generators create exactly the image that you were wanting… is a path to madness. However, if you sort of go with the flow and iterate on the patterns that you are seeing emerging… it can produce some really interesting things. While I don’t exactly consider this art on the same level as the things being produced for me by Ammo… there is definitely an art form that is emerging from guiding the machine. It somewhat reminds me of carving a woodcut block, and allowing yourself to lean into the imperfections of the material… rather than trying to fight against them.
Anyways I thought this was interesting. No clue if anyone else cares about it, and I have no clue if I will ever walk through one of my generative steps again in the future. The cool thing about this blog is it is a “me” blog more than it is a blog devoted to any one particular topic. I’m enjoying creating nonsense with Stable Diffusion and thought I would share that with you all.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off with a carryover topic from last week and talk a bit about Star Wars Shatterpoint. From there Ash tells us about the Furry Child Soldier game… better known as Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2. Bel talks a bit about the Overwatch 2 PVE content that is being sold for $15 after the original PVE expansion was canceled. He also talks a bit about the concerns brewing about a proper cash shop opening in World of Warcraft. Tam tells us about this delightful-sounding game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist before Bel brings down the show with talk of the current Corporate Internet Apocalypse. We talk a bit about the Reddit Blackout and Streamers abandoning Twitch. Finally, Bel and Ash talk a bit about how nonsensically good the Spriggan that Grace told us about is in Last Epoch.
Friends… I am starting to get so overwhelmingly pumped about Path of Exile II. With Not-E3 going on right now, we’ve got two new teaser trailers kicking around after a few years of relative silence. I talked about the first one last week(Ngamakanui), and then we got another one during the PC gaming show (Aggorat). I’m expecting ExileCon on the 28th of July to be a massive deal and essentially outline not only the full feature set of this mega-expansion as well as a general release schedule. It would be truly wild if they just shadow-dropped the game at the show… but I sort of doubt that will be the case. We do know that the Crucible league that is wrapping up was a bit smaller than normal because we are expected to get a really massive league launching with ExileCon, and I wonder if it will be directly tied to Path of Exile II.
One of the things that have been a bit hard to wrap our heads around has been the fact that we keep referring to it as a new game… but in reality, it is just a continuance of the original game. The idea is that everything about Path of Exile 1 continues trucking along, and all of the expansion league content applies to both games going forward. This solves one of the problems that I had when Destiny 2 was released because it felt like we gave up too much of the good stuff that was in Year 3 of Destiny 1… to end up getting a crude shell of a game that wasn’t fully fleshed out and lacked a lot of the quality of life features we had gotten used to. So I will not only get a brand new campaign, and a whole slew of new abilities to play with… but also get to keep access to the leagues that I love like Delve and Heist.
One of the things that I find interesting is that in the two latest trailers that we have seen so far… I feel like we are seeing brand-new classes on display. For example in the Ngamakanui trailer, I just assumed I was seeing the Witch on display because it was a female caster… but Aggorat pictured above has made me reassess those assumptions. The “Monk” class that we see on display in that trailer does not really match the visual signature of any of the starter characters that we currently have in the game. This makes me think one of two things is happening. The first idea is that we are getting several new starter classes and both of these trailers have showcased a different one.
The other more intriguing idea is that maybe we are getting a detailed character creation system similar to the one that we just go with Diablo IV. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it would be so freaking amazing to be able to craft my starter character to look however I want it to look. Not that I mind playing a feeble old man, a girl in rags, or a beefcake in a diaper… but the entire ARPG experience is so much richer if you get to pick your own appearance. This would also solve the problem of not being able to play the gender you would prefer to play. That doesn’t necessarily impact me directly given that I pretty regularly flip back and forth between gendered options just to mix things up when a game gives me that ability. However, I know this is a big deal to a lot of players and it would be amazing to see these character models trickle out into the rest of the game.
<img data-attachment-id="24191" data-permalink="https://aggronaut.com/2023/06/16/path-of-exile-ii-hype-intensifies/path-of-exile-2-aggorat-teaser-pc-gaming-show-youtube-0-59/#main" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1280,720" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Path of Exile 2 Aggorat Teaser [PC Gaming Show] – YouTube – 0-59" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?fit=880%2C495&ssl=1" decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="880" height="495" src="https://i0.wp.com/aggronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Path-of-Exile-2-Aggorat-Teaser-PC-Gaming-Show-YouTube-0-59.jpg?resize=880%2C495&ssl=1" alt="Screenshot from recent Path of Exile II Teaser trailers showing the text
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July 28
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Suffice it to say I am pumped for July 28th… but am trying really hard to reign in my expectations. I have considered taking the day off from work just so I can watch the presentation uninterrupted. A lot of the reason why I have been so engaged with Diablo IV right now… is that I am in somewhat of a holding pattern until the next Path of Exile league. The only negative I can see about the “two campaigns one game” thing, is that for players who were maybe hoping POE2 would be a fresh start and wildly different. I expect a lot of new toys to play with, and a lot of changes to the game engine to make it feel a bit more responsive and have much better visuals, but I also sort of expect POE2 will feel a lot like the original release in the way that the end-game works. It took me over a thousand hours in this game to really come to a place of loving it wholeheartedly, but that is sort of a big ask for most players.
I do think the relatively shallow nature of Diablo IV, is ultimately going to make a lot of players feed into Path of Exile. There were a lot of folks holding out hope that D4 would be the next best ARPG and I am not sure that is the case. It has a lot of great moments, and yesterday I released a video talking about some of my favorite things. However even in a video where I tried my best to stay positive… a number of complaints still made it into the recording. I am almost vibrating with hype for what I am seeing for Path of Exile II though, so the future still seems exceptionally bright. I’m also extremely pumped about the release of Last Epoch 1.0 later this year. We are truly living in the golden age of the ARPG, and the loot will flow!
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