Today was a little different. I was hoping to put the final touches on the Cosmo Messer.
So here’s how everything started going in circles.
The Carousel Hangar
If you’re familiar with Space Battleship Yamato, you’ve probably seen that pair of carousel storage platforms it uses inside its hangar. It maximizes internal capacity by shifting and slotting fighters onto their launch points instead of relying on a lane or an elevator.
I wound up making a simplified prototype on my Admiral Hipper rebuild, and frankly, I can’t believe this is actually working!
It only took a few hours, but roughly two of them were spent figuring out how to get everything working with Coren’s Easy Automation script.
It’s bigger than I wanted it to be initially, but the Cosmo Messers’ wings were a bit too long for the original build. This version is only one block wider, but that makes a difference; the hangar space I have to build around this thing is going to have to be significantly larger to avoid collisions.
On the bottom of each platform you can probably spot the hydrogen tanks. They don’t need to be there but they fit, and the idea here is to store the fuel with the fighters rather than needing to draw it from deeper in the ship. I’d put some welders on these too if I thought it was a good idea, but an actual maintenance area sounds better.
Maybe I can finish the Cosmo Messer tomorrow.
Or maybe I’ll get distracted and churn out another weird contraption. Personally, I’m fine with either outcome.
PSO2: NGS
I don’t play this one much anymore, partly because I’m trying to make the switch from using a ps4 controller to just my mouse and keyboard for most games and it’s especially painful in PSO2. FFXIV also hits everything except the ‘feel’ of combat better, so more of my free time goes there.
I decided to log on earlier just to see if I could slap together a certain look that’s been floating around in my head. I got stuck in the salon for around two hours trying to get it working only to hit the maintenance wall right as I was putting the finishing touches on it.
“That is true pain.”
~Lord Ozunu
Anyway, I’m trying to remember the important things I did because sometime after maintenance I need to go back, do it again, and save it this time.
What a day this was: An incredible success followed by a classic failure.
I’ve got some specific goals for this week to round out the month.
Cosmo Messer Release
I need to do one or two more sweeps of the design to clean things up, get the controls mapped out the way they’re supposed to be, and run a couple more tests. After that, it’s screenshots, descriptions, and maybe–MAYBE a brief video to make this workshop entry more appealing.
On the same day I release the mod I’ll also be making an article about it on the blog and linking to it from the workshop. So that also needs writing.
Next Novel
I’m tempted to just pick up Dark Force Rising since I finished Heir to the Empire on the 25th; I did give myself some leeway for going through whole series if I felt like it, but I also wouldn’t mind hopping around. I haven’t decided yet, so I’m looking around for reads I would personally be interested in.
The Praedian Records (Main Page)
The blog is located on the subdomain, but there’s a main site I haven’t finished building. This isn’t going to be finished in April, or at least I don’t think it will be. I do intend to get the ball rolling on that, though. I’m mentioning this here because I’ll be documenting my progress on that.
Fleeing Victory Chapter 3
Parts 2 and 3 are coming, but I think only part 2 is going to be posted this week. Part 3 will probably be out in the first couple of weeks of April.
Lydia’s Golden Treasury
The original plan was to have the 1st draft of Eisenwolf up by April, but I hit that wall where I have to restructure parts of the story first and that’s really slowing me down. Having said that, I think it’s for the best. I’ve got a chance to massively improve the story and establish a better through line for all seven chapters.
Remnants vs Artorius
Lydia’s Golden Treasury was supposed to have the majority of its content written by April specifically so I could branch out into other projects more cleanly, but I don’t want to put off the next ZAP project just because I’m a few chapters behind. Part of the reason I fell behind in the first place is because my inspiration was split.
That pressure valve needs a release, and it’s either going to be one of the Remnants stories or one of the Artorius stories.
Clan Battles is still going on but I’m chipping away at this post in the meantime.
Arpeggio of Blue Steel Event (Hypothetical)
So I’ve got an idea for an Arpeggio of Blue Steel event in World of Warships. I’ll have to save the details for another post since this is just meant to be a quick blurb, but the basic idea is bumping all the ARP ships to roughly tier 10 and arm them with weapons and equipment that fits the lore of the show. It’s a pretty code heavy idea, but rather than the previous ARP events, this one was more of a special mode like the current Savage Battles or Dirigible Derby.
I’ll post ship and mission specifics in a few days.
Shikishima: Still Got It
4 kills, 2 at almost the exact same time. I’ll always treasure this upgunned Yamato. I’ve got just about enough material for a short Shikishima video, or a slightly bigger kill compilation, but I still need to figure out the issue with Premier running on my PC, first. So it could still be a while.
With just a little digging and the right amount of curiosity to push me forward, I finally managed to solve that pesky little border problem on the main Blog page.
Now for the record, it wasn’t the bit of CSS itself that was the issue. I knew exactly what I needed, or at least one version of it.
padding-bottom: 3%;
What I didn’t know until doing some hunting was where to put that piece of code. Divi’s really useful for people with no HTML or CSS experience whatsoever, but its UI can really get in the way if you’re used to working in external documents, directly calling classes yourself, or you’re just not familiar with the advanced section.
I have all of those problems.
Anyway, figuring this out took about ten minutes and made the blog’s main feed go from looking like this (Hover):
Kind of subtle, but it makes all the difference. Having the border so close to the final line of text always made it tougher on the eyes, but I was willing to put up with it because having borders between the posts was the fix to a much worse problem I was having.
So I’m glad that’s fixed, and I’m glad this line right here is much easier to look at.
As we’re progressing in 0.9.0 development, we’d like to showcase the newest tile set we’ve created for upcoming missions, the urban tile set. We’ve imagined these cities to still hold modern aesthetics, with a futuristic blend here and there, and filled with high and low rises to house the world and…
Incredible work! I didn’t realize until today that Vermillion could crank out things like this.
What is the platform for? A special place just for M.A.S.S. units to pit their strength against each other, of course. The cityscape shown here is what you’ll see in the upcoming PvP multiplayer modes and will be used first as a testing grounds for multiplayer lobby.
This tileset clearly has way more potential than just a multiplayer lobby, but you have to start somewhere, and an MP lobby makes sense. Hopefully it will also get used in the Photo Mode because that will make for an incredible backdrop.
You know what would also be nice here? A scenario editor. That’s more of an RTS thing, and just the older, mid-2000s games at that, but it would be nice with a map like this one.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about this tile set in the future.
