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Ode to Cactuar

February 22, 2017 by Belghast

Cactuar is a strange place and I love it. This is of course the server a bunch of us play on in Final Fantasy XIV and compared to so many other game servers… this one just seems to have a bizarre and friendly spirit to it. There are a whole slew of us that have been practically living in Quarymill as we grind away at Palace of the Dead to level secondary classes and get a shot at tasty replica raid gear. As a result Grace and myself happened to be milling around in town waiting for the festivities proper to begin that evening. Grace pointed out that there were two people bouncing around on Big Chocobo mounts… and we both agreed something to the effect that we should both join in and make this happen. So within moments of us joining the fray and bouncing around wildly on our giant chocos… this happened. Granted a few more guildies came over and joined in the fun but most of us this from just random people talking in /say as we bounced around happily. This sort of thing is honestly an almost nightly occurrence on our server. I cannot count how many times I have been in a major hub like this and a random pony party broke out, where everyone mounted up on their extreme primal mounts and started running around. Sometimes it even evolves into a parade as we all run around throughout the zone.

Cactuar is a weird place and I love it. There are so many times I have had to step afk and typed /mdance before leaving… and come back to a whole bunch of other strangers there with me also dancing the Manderville and somehow almost perfectly synced up with me. I have so many people on my friends list because they had an amazing outfit and we just struck up a conversation, and we /wave madly at each other anytime we pass out in the world. Argent Dawn the server I play on in World of Warcraft has always had its bizarre streaks, but more often than not there was an undertone of malice there. In Final Fantasy XIV folks just seem to be interested in enjoying themselves far more than bringing other people down in the process. I am sure Cactuar also has its dark underbelly, but generally speaking folks are friendly and more than willing to join in the silliness if given a chance. It is funny how a server develops a certain culture, which is honestly the main reason why I question games that are essentially server-less. I know our server “feels” different than a lot of the other larger servers, and I am never quite certain how that sort of thing develops. I mean I guess it could simply be because our server mascot is a half man half cactus… which doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of being hardcore and brutal. Although… anyone who has ever fought a Cactuar knows the score as they fall over after a 10000 Needles attack.

In other news I finally got to see the Sophia primal fight, as there were a bunch of us who had never done it. I realize we are a few patch cycles behind on this one, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was like all of the things happening with Leviathan… but messaged far far better. There are a lot of moving parts on the fight, but we largely winged it without having seen it and only the most vague description of the fight from those who had. We single tanked it, and that role fell onto me… since really I don’t have a well enough geared anything else to do big kid content on. I had an awful lot of fun with the moving back and forth on the platform to avoid this ability or that… or the platform shift as the scales get out of balance. We also did a one tank, one healer Ravana Extreme and that fight is still madness. I would love to do that some more largely because I would really like to get my axe from there… also of as a side note I would love to do some more Bismarck for the same reason. I guess ultimately I really am a Warrior main, given that I didn’t swap at Heavensward and still have no plans to swap for Stormblood. Of all of the gear I own… it is my Warrior gear that I end up enjoying the most.

I’m a Bard

February 21, 2017 by Grace

I had a lovely long weekend and spent most of it doing increasingly silly things in FFXIV, and tying up loose ends in WoW. On the WoW front, I’ve been gradually losing interest since Nighthold released, and only partially sure why other than being distracted by FFXIV. I’ve resolved to let my subscription lapse for a little while, so I spent some time cleaning up my bags, making sure my mail was empty, and other housekeeping things. I realized that the Love is in the Air event was about to end and I had barely even tried to get a rocket this year, and I’m surprisingly ok with that. Even though they changed it so you don’t have to be max level to try, I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough to grind myself into the dirt trying for such a low drop chance mount. I did grind archaeology a little bit, since the bi-weekly quest is currently rewarding a ghost moose mount. Somehow grinding for a set endpoint is much easier to stomach than grinding for a tiny random drop chance. Anyway now I’ve got a sweet new mount and can walk away from the game for a break in style.

On the Final Fantasy front I am fully engaged in what feels like a series of weird side projects with no main overarching goal. My scholar is now geared enough that I feel comfortable that I’ll be able to get into whatever the next set of dungeons is without issue. That means that I’m still slowly working on her gear but it is no longer any sort of priority. I also managed to get my summoner’s gear over the threshold needed for expert roulette. This not only means that I get showered in upgrades, but also that I can actually run dungeons with my healer buddy again finally. Hooray! Mostly the end-game stuff feels like keeping time until the next new thing arrives, and I’m ok with that. I have a lot of other silly things vying for my attention.

One of the silliest things actually got completed this weekend. I finally finished my scholar’s zeta weapon. It took way too long, and probably wouldn’t have happened if most of the steps hadn’t been nerfed into the ground by the time I got to them, but I still feel weirdly proud and happy to have completed it. I will be starting the Heavensward weapon quest soon, but it will be nice to take a breather for a little bit before I start.

Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of is running Palace of the Dead. In my last update about my bard, she was trapped deep in the hell of the subligar levels. As of Monday she’s now level 50 and looking much better. I didn’t have any ironworks gear laying around for bard, but I did have some ilevel 100 gear that looks just lovely with her garuda bow thank you very much. Aside from the bard I’ve also gotten my lancer and marauder up to 30 this way, which means I have a freshly minted dragoon and warrior. I doubt I will be playing either of them very often but it has been fun to try them out and to see their class stories. Now I am only missing monk, paladin, and dark knight and I’ll have all the combat jobs unlocked.

The last week or so have seen a renewed flurry of activity in my free company, with lots of new faces and old friends returning to the game in preparation for Stormblood. It has been really fun introducing some people to the game, or helping folks gear up and run new-to-them content. Playing with friends definitely helps make a game more fun and more “sticky”, I’m constantly bouncing around doing all kinds of things I probably wouldn’t be doing on my own. My only real concern is that I’m going to get burned out before Stormblood gets here, so I’m planning in advance to take a mini break before that happens. Other than that I’m settling in and enjoying all the company and the silly things to do!

Four Screenshots

February 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was another fairly anxiety fraught night, and I simply didn’t feel capable of tanking a World of Warcraft progression raid. I feel bad about it, but by the time I got home… my mind was spent racing through all of the possible things that could fail today. This is it.. the day we launch the new website and I am terrified. In the grand scheme of things I know that we will deal with everything that comes down the pipe and triage issues as they arise. However on the eve of the event I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that could go catastrophically wrong. I need this to launch and I need it to go successful… because honestly I need a few days to simply fall apart. I have been functionally working sick for over two weeks because I knew things had to get done. Granted I have not been running a fever, so I didn’t think I was likely contagious… but that didn’t necessarily stop me from feeling downright miserable. One thing I did do last night was get my little Random Shots project out on GitHub since Scopique mentioned I should do this thing. Since I don’t really have a whole lot that I feel like talking about this morning, I am going to try one out of these random screenshot posts and see what happens.

I have this weird relationship with Rift. I love it or at least I really want to love it… but I have issues playing it. I talked a little bit about my issues with combat over on Syp’s blog yesterday in the comment section, but another huge issue I have is that I simply cannot bring myself to purge things from my vault. I love their housing system… but I also cannot seem to be bothered to actually spend time building a proper house. However I have this long term desire to do so… and because of that my vault is horrible. With Nightmare Tide they introduced the Minion system and for months I logged in dutifully every day hoping to get housing caches with the thought of putting all of this cool stuff to work in building a really great dimension. However what actually happened is it filled up both my vault and inventory with a bunch of items that I never could quite bring myself to part with. I could bring myself to part with the deluge of crafting materials that my minions kept bringing back, but those housing items were just too rare feeling. Sure most of them go on the auction house for a few silver…. but that doesn’t actually seem to alleviate the problem. What I wish is that Rift had a housing system that worked similar to Wildstar in that you chuck items in a sort of housing inventory that you can then place items from. I would happy wander the world collecting housing items, knowing that one day I might actually sit down and devote the hours to building a proper home.

I had honestly forgotten about the events that happened during this screenshot. Back in 2014 the Halloween event included the ability to transform into one of the various signature characters in the game. There were a bunch of different clones running around in Uldah, and I wound up as Nanamo Ul Namo. It was a lot of fun but largely was just an occasion to take funny photos… like there is one floating around of like nine Minfilia’s on a bench sitting beside one Merlwyb who is looking exasperated. That is one of the really cool and frustrating things about Final Fantasy XIV is that each holiday event is unique and will never be repeated. They sometimes put the rewards you could have earned on the cash shop for a pretty cheap price… but each year and each holiday offers something truly unique. Over the years I have missed several, and there will always be a small bit of me that feels a slightly sense of loss over not getting to see whatever content that was.

This is one of those screenshots where I know what it is and what it is showing… but can’t be terribly certain of the sequence of events. Essentially I know that this is a beta test build of Elder Scrolls Online, during one of the most public test weekends and not one of the Psijic Order/Team Akatosh weekends. The screenshot is somewhere in the middle of Stonefalls, because I spent so much time in Stonefalls. By the time the game launched I was pretty sick of both the Daggerfall Covenant starter area and the Ebonheart Pact starter area. The reason why I know it is a public beta client, is because there is no obnoxious watermark that says my email address over and over across the screen. I still have plenty of alpha screenshots floating around that are watermarked to hell and back and this is obviously not one of them. I also know this is not a live screenshot… in part because of the time stamp on the image and also because I have yet to make it to Ebonheart Pact on my main character. The funny part about this shot is that I had been in alpha/beta testing on the game roughly a full year when we reached this point back in February of 2014. I was an extremely dutiful tester, repeatedly reporting bugs every time I played. To the best of my knowledge I never missed a weekend testing event, even if it simply meant that I popped in for a few hours somewhere during it. It just seems shocking that in April we will be coming up on the third anniversary of the Elder Scrolls Online.

This is a screenshot from one of the early alpha builds of Skysaga, a minecraftian sort of voxel building game. The game had a really awesome style to it, in everything other than the character models… and their weird floating arms and legs that were detached from the torso bothered me. I realize that was part style decision and part that they simply didn’t want to have to properly animate arms and legs. I mean if it worked for Rayman… why not for a construction/exploration game? I cannot really tell you why I checked out of this game, but I did… I think in part because it was the sort of experience that handheld you through the process of building by continually throwing new crafting achievements in front of you. Then each time a new build was released… we would get wiped back to square one. I am sure the game has changed massively given that this is a screenshot from February of 2015 and I am still actively getting emails talking about alpha builds of the game. When I just checked the website they list that they are in Alpha 9… and this screenshot is from what I can only term as a 0 alpha build given the version number. If you are still in alpha after two years… something tells me you are using the nomenclature completely wrong. If you are selling a product… you aren’t in alpha. You are just in a buggy release mode.

Random Screenshots

February 15, 2017 by Belghast

Last night didn’t go exactly as expected, largely because I did essentially zero gaming. What happened instead is that I wound up installing Visual Studio community edition and tinking away all night at an idea I have had for awhile. In order for it to make sense you are going to have to know a few things. Firstly I take my game screenshots probably way more seriously than most people. The theory is that since I have to summon a blog post every morning, and use screenshots to break up my blocks of text… I need access to them quickly and at a moments notice. Functionally I have thirty minutes to an hour to write every morning, so speed is of the essence. As a result I have directory system out on 4 terabyte network attached storage drive, that first breaks games up into larger categories like MMORPG or FPS and eventually down into individual game directories. Functionally feeding this beast would be madness were it not for the fact that I circumvent the screenshot routines of individual games, and dump every single screenshot I take into a “gameshots” directory. I’ve tried a lot of different solutions and through them all.. the most reliable option has always been Fraps so I continue to use it… in spite of how clunky it can be sometimes. About once a month I clean these individual gameshot directories on my desktop and laptop and dump the images laying around into the directory structure on the network attached storage. I still wish there was a direct way for me to connect into my PS4 screenshots over the network, but for the time being I have been using a second twitter account to export them without spamming my main twitter feed.

The second piece of information that is going to be key… is that some time ago I had an idea for a post prompt for those days I am struggling to find any purpose. The idea being to take a random screenshot or two and then write about whatever happened to be going on when I was taking them. The challenge then becomes how does one grab a random screenshot when you have a multi-tier directory structure that includes over 13,000 files. This seed was planted around Blaugust time last year but I never actually got around to building it. For whatever reason last night I sat down while eating dinner… and knocked it out over the course of the evening. It is still rather crude and doesn’t look amazing, but as the night went on I kept adding different features to it. The functionality is pretty simple… you use the file picker to choose the directory you want to crawl for screenshots. If you wanted sheer madness you could of course start at the root of C and crawl downwards, because I believe that would work given that I am using recursion to make the crawl. When you click search it is going to go out and find any JPG or PNG files and dump them into a list, then after completion dump links to those files out below the progress bar. You can of course click the links to preview what it brought back. I tried to make it work with picture boxes but given the 1080p file sizes kept blowing up the memory allocation. I might rewrite at some point in the future and dump the links into an in app web browser for display. Sidenote… the progress bar starts out as complete bullshit but as you run the app remembers how many files it found last time and bases it off of that. One of the things you will know as a programmer is that progress bars in general… are bullshit.

At the moment when you hit search it brings back eight files and displays them as links. At some point in the future I want to rework this process and use some sort of an object that is easier to add elements to on the fly, rather than a bunch of linklabels as I did last night… because I was lazy. I would like to have a drop down that lets you choose from some values on how many files to return each search. Right now I am caching the two directories and the number of files it found on its last run to the app.config, largely because I got tired of having to keep entering the same values each time I ran the application. I am using app.config because I really don’t want to have to write things to the registry… and I am sure you don’t really want me to do that either. The final feature to talk about is the save button, that attempts to copy any files found in the search to the directory you have chosen. I say try because there are of course things that could go wrong along the process. This morning when I ran it on a new machine for whatever reason it saved the files one directory up from my intended target. I will have to sort that out and figure out why the behavior isn’t quite functioning as intended. Whatever the case I’ve zipped up the current build and dropped it on my web host if anyone has a real burning desire to play with it. It is a 7z file so you will need 7zip to deflate it… largely because I have an obsessive love for that utility. If there is any demand I will probably throw it up on GitHub and start working off of that, since I don’t really have a great version control option at home.

For those curious… the images I have been interweaving throughout this post were pulled using the random tool this morning. Just like with any randomizer there are going to be sequences of things closely tied together. This morning it returned: Diablo 3, Everquest 2, Fallout 4, Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy V, and three shots from World of Warcraft. So if you are looking for shots from a bunch of different games you might need to spin the wheel more than once to see what shakes out. I’ve run it before and everything that was chosen save for a couple files are from my Final Fantasy XIV directory. Granted in my case… I have way more screenshots of WoW and FFXIV than pretty much anything else in the directory structure with FFXIV containing 3,071 files and WoW containing 1,462 files. Though in theory the WoW Directory is not a true representation given that I have a bunch of files on Google Photos that predate the NAS idea. I also have literally every hard drive I have ever used sitting in a stack, and I have as a weekend project at some point to crawl through them looking for old game screenshots to add to the collection. Generally speaking I donate all of my computers to Goodwill, but before doing so I pull the hard drive… and you end up with a stack of 20-30 drives over the course of a couple decades. Here is hoping that they still spin after all of this time. Let me know if you end up playing with this and what your results are.