Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.
There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.
More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.
Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage
The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.
Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage
Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.
In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.
I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.
The post Mass Effect Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Mass Effect is an extremely important series for me on a personal level. I am not exactly sure when I came to the realization, but it might be the single best piece of Science Fiction that I have experienced. During my formative years I bonded heavily with Star Wars and Dune so I am already wired to love great Science Fiction storytelling. A little over a decade ago I played my very first Mass Effect game with the release of the second game in the series. Mass Effect 1 was originally an exclusive for the Xbox 360 Console, and as such I completely missed out on playing it as I did not have one at the time. It got a PC release in 2007 but I never actually got around to playing it for one reason or another… more than likely it was due to the fact that I was knee deep in the raid scene during Burning Crusade in World of Warcraft.
There are a lot of games that I play repeatedly, but other than Castlevania Symphony of the Night there is no game that I have “finished” as many times as Mass Effect. While I have only actually done the start with the first game and play all the way through to the third game once, I have played some semblance of other sequences on four other times, having played the first game to the second game sequence probably the most. I did not exactly love the wrap of and conclusion brought by the third game, so I am guessing that more or less halted my fairly regularly revisiting this franchise. Though admittedly my in sequence play through was before the revisions brought on by the later Mass Effect 3 patches which I have never gone back and played.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Even though it did not do as well, I have a deep love for Mass Effect Andromeda as well and I was enterally frustrated when the media backlash effectively destroyed this franchise that I love so much. I still want to see a continuation of this storyline, and I want to know more about the Andromeda expedition. I have a whole slew of theories that are more or less going unrequited other than some occasional conversations via DM with Pixel One. I was extremely happy when the teaser came out during the Video Game awards and hinted that maybe we are going to be getting a new story that blends both Mass Effect timelines/settings.
More exciting than anything however is when I found out that finally we had a firm confirmation of the rumored remaster of the series. Then yesterday we found out that this Mass Effect Legendary Edition would be releasing on May 14th 2021, just over three months from now. One of the biggest questions for me personally is whether or not this would do anything to remedy to awkwardness of that first game. I’ve suffered through it a number of times because an in sequence play through largely requires it being there in order for everything to flow together neatly. However in 2007 they had yet to really land on the sort of interface and feel of the game that was going to win it the masses.
Original Game as Pulled from on Website Footage
The biggest problem that the first game has is the mechanical control and UI elements. The controls just feel wrong as compared to my first entry in the series which was technically the second game. The graphics are fine and the dialog and acting is still fairly solid. However actually navigating and experiencing the world feels off. Playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 recently, I am realizing just how far Bioware has come as far as interfaces go. It wasn’t really until 2009’s Dragon Age Origins that they truly “stuck the landing” and then steadily improved on that feeling ever since with Mass Effect 2 landing a year later in 2010. My biggest hope with this remastered version would be to blend everything together so that ALL of the games use the same user interface and same controls for a seamless experience.
Legendary Edition as Pulled from the Website Footage
Ultimately all I really wanted was for them to take the User Interface from Mass Effect 3 and carry it down to the other games. What instead appears to have happened is that all of the games got reworked with a new UI. On the Mass Effect Legendary edition website, they have one of those split screen videos with a slider allowing you to shift back and forth between original and new versions of some Mass Effect 1 footage. In this you can see wildly different interface elements between the above screenshot and the one before it. This gives me hope that the first game got the significant work that was needed.
In all of my plays through the game, the one thing I have never actually managed to do is complete a fun as “FemShep”. Everything that I have heard is that the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard is the better way of playing the game. However my deeply engrained need to keep trying to “create Belghast” in every game I play… has always steered me down the path of playing the Male Shepard. One of my goals on this replay is to dive down the rabbit hole of the Jennifer Hale experience. I can’t say that I will succeed, because supposed the character creator is significantly better than the previous versions allowing you to create wildly different looking Shepards rather than just awkward versions of the stock character.
I am excited to revisit this old friend. I look forward to it much the same way as I might look forward to some day sitting down and re-watching all of the Marvel movies in sequence or revisiting the Lord of the Rings movies at Christmas time. I would love to see Mass Effect adapted as a high budget series, because the story that is told is so good and I am slightly disappointed that more people have not gotten to experience it. If you yourself have never played through this series, then you really should pick up Legendary edition and give it a fair shot.
The post Mass Effect Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.
The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.
Redstone circuitry has always frightened me more than a little bit in Minecraft. I could get extremely simple automations to work, like opening a door from a switch but always seemed to struggle when it came to anything more complicated. So I now had before me the task of trying to figure out how to trigger six banks of four pistons all from the flip of a single switch. Pistons can move 12 blocks and if you attempt to move anything more than that they just fail completely. My field is laid out with a row of water every 5th block, though in truth I could have gotten by with significantly less water were I planning a bit better. Four blocks at once however is pretty much the upper bound of what I was willing to attempt to fire as a single mechanism.
I fired up a super flat demo world for the purpose of allowing me to sort out the mechanics in creative mode before attempting to apply the same logic in my single player world. I’ve not reached a point where I have unlimited supplies so I needed to be fairly judicious in the application of my resources. Even then I still built it wrong, but we will get into that later. Essentially my idea was to use sticky pistons and push the blocks to one side and in theory retract everything when I turned off the switch. The above image shows the final circuit design that I landed upon. Essentially a matrix of blocks connected by redstone with a single repeater to help boost the signal strength since redstone will only conduct for 15 spaces.
From there I decided to go ahead and create a larger scale mock up of the final machine, this time doing four iterations of the same modular design instead of the final six. It was around this point that I realized things were not going to work as I had originally envisioned them. This came from a simple misunderstanding of how sticky pistons actually work. In my mind they pushed a column of blocks and then retracted that same column of blocks as I had seen this behavior over and over in builds that relied on them in a vertical stack. When used horizontally they exhibit a completely different behavior of just pushing all 12 blocks and then retracting only the block directly making contact with the piston.
This lead me down the rabbit hole of not only needing six banks of four pistons all firing at once… but at the same time requiring a second series of six banks of four pistons firing in reaction to the first bank firing. Essentially I needed to shift all the blocks to one side and then trigger a counter event that pushed all of the blocks back to the other side. It is through the process of building something that you often learn how you SHOULD have built it. Where I thinking more clearly I would have simply set the circuit up so one side is always on and the other side is always off and the switch just toggles between those two states. However that is not the path I actually went down.
Meet the fearless observer block. The side with the cute little face sets towards a block of some sort that has the ability to change states. When this state changes the observer sends out a pulse of Redstone energy triggered out the backside of the block that can be connected up to some mechanism of your choice. The pulse is similar to that of a button push and I decided I was going to try and harness this mechanism to create my back process of triggering the opposite banks of pistons to fire resetting the playfield back to its normal position.
This ended up being significantly more challenging than I would have expected. In my mind how this should have worked was that I set the observer facing the empty block that I had on one side and as soon as a block was pushed into that spot it would trigger the back loop of the process and push everything back. This did not work in practice I believe because I was using a lever to trigger the entire process. This is the sort of revelation that happens long after you have built the damned thing and not necessarily in the heat of problem solving. So instead I switched to watching the state of the piston on the first bank. In practice what happens is each time I extend a piston or retract a piston it sends a pulse. You can slow this process down a bit by adding an additional observer which I ended up doing to fine tune the order of operations a bit.
The above image is the end result built in my single player world. Now is where I talk about how I did this wrong. Firstly I should have used a button to fire the event, and I think had I done so my original idea of monitoring the empty block state would have made things work perfectly. The second critical flaw that I did was use sticky pistons. This is all due to my earlier fallacy that using a sticky piston would pull the entire column back into place, but instead only pulls a single block. What ends up happening in practice is that on the back leg of the journey… a single block stays attached to the piston when it retracts creating a less than optimal situation.
However since I crafted 48 sticky pistons and lack the materials to craft another 48 regular pistons… I am pretty much stuck with this design decision for the moment. What I did in order to counteract this is dive even further down the rabbit hole and farm up copious amounts of clay and dye and create a rows worth of glazed terracotta. This block has the unique property of not being able to adhere to a sticky piston and as a result gets pushed neatly back into the original position by the second set of pistons. The unfortunate part however is that I have now lost a full row worth of plant-able space due to this design flaw.
At some point I want to replace the pistons at least on the backhaul side in so I can reclaim that row of planting space. I ended up building a way down into the mechanism of the machine that way I could debug any problems that might come up. Additionally there is the off chance that some of the produce will pop off and then get pushed down into the lower machine cavity and this gives me a way to drop down and double check that this did not happen. There are a lot of things that I would change if I ever did this again, namely I would just stick to normal pistons on both sides given that the “sticky” nature only serves to complicate the process. If I find another cache of Iron I will potentially swap them out and then switch the entire mechanism to work off a button.
The problem with redstone is the same problem with most of my development projects. You have to sort of force yourself to walk away from them otherwise you will continue fiddling and “optimizing” them for eternity. I set out to build a machine that would harvest my field of crops in with the single push of a button and I accomplished that. If it weren’t for the water… I would consider building a Minecart hopper system that cycled around the field collecting anything that dropped but that really is a path of madness. As it stands now… I just need to go find some more Iron before I do much of anything else.
The post Adventures in Redstone appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.
The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.
Redstone circuitry has always frightened me more than a little bit in Minecraft. I could get extremely simple automations to work, like opening a door from a switch but always seemed to struggle when it came to anything more complicated. So I now had before me the task of trying to figure out how to trigger six banks of four pistons all from the flip of a single switch. Pistons can move 12 blocks and if you attempt to move anything more than that they just fail completely. My field is laid out with a row of water every 5th block, though in truth I could have gotten by with significantly less water were I planning a bit better. Four blocks at once however is pretty much the upper bound of what I was willing to attempt to fire as a single mechanism.
I fired up a super flat demo world for the purpose of allowing me to sort out the mechanics in creative mode before attempting to apply the same logic in my single player world. I’ve not reached a point where I have unlimited supplies so I needed to be fairly judicious in the application of my resources. Even then I still built it wrong, but we will get into that later. Essentially my idea was to use sticky pistons and push the blocks to one side and in theory retract everything when I turned off the switch. The above image shows the final circuit design that I landed upon. Essentially a matrix of blocks connected by redstone with a single repeater to help boost the signal strength since redstone will only conduct for 15 spaces.
From there I decided to go ahead and create a larger scale mock up of the final machine, this time doing four iterations of the same modular design instead of the final six. It was around this point that I realized things were not going to work as I had originally envisioned them. This came from a simple misunderstanding of how sticky pistons actually work. In my mind they pushed a column of blocks and then retracted that same column of blocks as I had seen this behavior over and over in builds that relied on them in a vertical stack. When used horizontally they exhibit a completely different behavior of just pushing all 12 blocks and then retracting only the block directly making contact with the piston.
This lead me down the rabbit hole of not only needing six banks of four pistons all firing at once… but at the same time requiring a second series of six banks of four pistons firing in reaction to the first bank firing. Essentially I needed to shift all the blocks to one side and then trigger a counter event that pushed all of the blocks back to the other side. It is through the process of building something that you often learn how you SHOULD have built it. Where I thinking more clearly I would have simply set the circuit up so one side is always on and the other side is always off and the switch just toggles between those two states. However that is not the path I actually went down.
Meet the fearless observer block. The side with the cute little face sets towards a block of some sort that has the ability to change states. When this state changes the observer sends out a pulse of Redstone energy triggered out the backside of the block that can be connected up to some mechanism of your choice. The pulse is similar to that of a button push and I decided I was going to try and harness this mechanism to create my back process of triggering the opposite banks of pistons to fire resetting the playfield back to its normal position.
This ended up being significantly more challenging than I would have expected. In my mind how this should have worked was that I set the observer facing the empty block that I had on one side and as soon as a block was pushed into that spot it would trigger the back loop of the process and push everything back. This did not work in practice I believe because I was using a lever to trigger the entire process. This is the sort of revelation that happens long after you have built the damned thing and not necessarily in the heat of problem solving. So instead I switched to watching the state of the piston on the first bank. In practice what happens is each time I extend a piston or retract a piston it sends a pulse. You can slow this process down a bit by adding an additional observer which I ended up doing to fine tune the order of operations a bit.
The above image is the end result built in my single player world. Now is where I talk about how I did this wrong. Firstly I should have used a button to fire the event, and I think had I done so my original idea of monitoring the empty block state would have made things work perfectly. The second critical flaw that I did was use sticky pistons. This is all due to my earlier fallacy that using a sticky piston would pull the entire column back into place, but instead only pulls a single block. What ends up happening in practice is that on the back leg of the journey… a single block stays attached to the piston when it retracts creating a less than optimal situation.
However since I crafted 48 sticky pistons and lack the materials to craft another 48 regular pistons… I am pretty much stuck with this design decision for the moment. What I did in order to counteract this is dive even further down the rabbit hole and farm up copious amounts of clay and dye and create a rows worth of glazed terracotta. This block has the unique property of not being able to adhere to a sticky piston and as a result gets pushed neatly back into the original position by the second set of pistons. The unfortunate part however is that I have now lost a full row worth of plant-able space due to this design flaw.
At some point I want to replace the pistons at least on the backhaul side in so I can reclaim that row of planting space. I ended up building a way down into the mechanism of the machine that way I could debug any problems that might come up. Additionally there is the off chance that some of the produce will pop off and then get pushed down into the lower machine cavity and this gives me a way to drop down and double check that this did not happen. There are a lot of things that I would change if I ever did this again, namely I would just stick to normal pistons on both sides given that the “sticky” nature only serves to complicate the process. If I find another cache of Iron I will potentially swap them out and then switch the entire mechanism to work off a button.
The problem with redstone is the same problem with most of my development projects. You have to sort of force yourself to walk away from them otherwise you will continue fiddling and “optimizing” them for eternity. I set out to build a machine that would harvest my field of crops in with the single push of a button and I accomplished that. If it weren’t for the water… I would consider building a Minecart hopper system that cycled around the field collecting anything that dropped but that really is a path of madness. As it stands now… I just need to go find some more Iron before I do much of anything else.
The post Adventures in Redstone appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
