Ah what a whole lot of nothing today was. To be fair, my sleep schedule is still imploding and trying to stay off of caffeine isn’t really. A fast might be a good idea, but whatever day I do that is going to be even less productive than usual. I think I’m going to pick just one thing to focus on tomorrow and try to make as much progress as I can. Since I said I’d be posting Hipper’s crew information by Wednesday, it’ll probably be that. If I finish early, onto the next thing.
I almost can’t believe I got some writing done while working on a build in Space Engineers. It makes sense in hindsight; working on digital art always helped me with my writing, so it’s not a stretch for something mostly visual like Space Engineers to help with any related writing. That’s definitely something to take advantage of.
I’ve got some crew members for the Admiral Hipper coming along that I’ll probably start introducing tomorrow or Wednesday after another session. For now I’m just mentioning it because I need time to flesh them out a bit more. I’ve also got some pilots I need to figure out, and at least one character not affiliated with the Hipper or the Kaiser faction.
It’s been getting dangerous in my neck of the woods, but I do appreciate the increased rainfall we’ve been getting. It’s not quite a shot in the arm when I’m too busy to sit back and enjoy it, but I really do appreciate it.
July’s done, so I’m going to quickly touch on a few plans for August.
Art Practice
I’m still at it and I’ll be posting whatever I can soon, possibly next week. The stylus and photoshop still aren’t meshing together as well as I’d like, but I’ve had worse problems, and if all else fails, I can just use the mouse for most things. It’s nothing new to me.
Lydia’s Golden Treasury
The plot for this one is outlined, so now I just need to find a few good days to sit down and focus on it. I’ll have it done this month one way or another. In fact, I’m going to be starting fairly early on this one. If I can I want to start writing and editing multiple chapters at a time so I can finish the story up before winter.
Artorius and Remnants
While I’m not sure I’m ready to have another go at either of these, I’m willing to give it a shot. The issue with Artorius is that it would work better as a visual novel, which is a much bigger project than the light novel I had in mind. Remnants is just dense with little details I need to sort out before I start so the plot doesn’t get ruined by something obvious.
Space Engineers
I’m not putting in as much time as I normally do, so the Hipper’s interior is going to take a while. Once that’s done, though, the sister ships won’t take nearly as long. Other designs I think I can iron out in August are the Cosmo Messer F, the Edinburgh, the Badger, and maybe, maybe the Hurricane.
Books
I’m still chipping away at Dune. As for the new book, I’m going to finish Spice & Wolf Volume 2. I’m not that far in so I’m fine going this route. Not to mention I’m still barely a third of the way through Dune.
Videos
I need more video editing practice, so I’ll post at least one new one this month. I’m aiming for two, but we’ll see how things go. It’s probably going to be a Space Engineers video, a showcase for either the Hipper (if it’s finished soon enough), or the Cosmo Messers.
Closing
That should be everything related to content. The new site’s still in the conceptual phases, so I won’t have anything to add there for a while, and I’ve got more important things to focus on besides. August–and let’s be real here, every month going forward–is going to be busy as hell.
M.A.S.S. Builder – WIP: Multiplayer Party Features Preview – Steam News
Hello everyone, today’s WIP will be something different as we’re still working to polish and optimize Multiplayer modes to be presentable. Today, we’ll be talking about a complimentary function of Multiplayer works, namely the party feature.
I hesitate to call a party feature ‘complimentary’ these days. It’s closer to a QoL master stroke than just a neat little feature. One really inconvenient thing in a lot of multiplayer games is not being able to group up before heading into a pre-game lobby. A lot of games nowadays just ignore this and they’re a lot worse off for it. Just knowing that M.A.S.S. Builder is going to have something like this makes me want to buy it for some of my friends.
The Admiral Hipper’s exterior is almost done. Normally when I get this far I get a strong urge to start chipping away at a sister ship. That’s when my understanding of the external layout is at its strongest so I make smaller messes changing things around. Unfortunately I can’t do that because the Hipper’s internals aren’t even close to finished. If I just copied the ship as is and tried to make any of the sister ships on the side, I’d wind up having to make an interior twice.
On a ship this size?
(The current main gun turrets are just place holders)
No thank you. Whether they turn out the same or one winds up being better, that’s way too inefficient. I’m just going to have to finish the Hipper first or get fairly close.
As a side note, there are some specific ships I want to build before any of the others, including the Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst, and Belfast. I’ve got some SE lore coming together that might help me scratch that writing itch while I sort out LGT, Artorius, and Remnants.
One other thing to mention is that I did try to build some rotor turrets for the ship yesterday. It didn’t go well. While the SBY weapons mod is fantastic, the fixed versions of the shock cannons are extremely heavy, way too much for unmodded rotors to handle. Just placing them nearly destroyed the turret frame. This is a problem I’m going to have to put off a bit longer, maybe until late August when the next phase of weapons comes out. I wanted the Kaiser faction to be using red colored energy weapons wherever possible anyway, so maybe that will help. Otherwise I’ll have to ask the mod creator if they’d be willing to look into the problem.
