The Praedian Records

J.G. Phoenix

Current Projects

Riaz Royals

Yamato 90%
Yorktown 80%
Essex 50%
Cleveland 90%
Blücher 95%
Prinz Eugen 50%
Seydlitz (Redux) 40%
Lützow 80%
Type 34 Destroyer 99%
Type 36 Destroyer (Redux) 50%

M.A.S.S. Builder: Overall Combat Adjustments

Melee build lovers, rejoice!

I think. 0.9.0 is still quite a ways off, but like usual it’s good news for the game. Vermillion’s addressing some of the issues melee builds have when dealing with bosses.

  • Bosses will have a longer wind-up time before some attacks, such as the first boss’ ground stomp, the multi-headed runner boss jump attack.
  • Bosses will now “fall” for a longer period of time to create a window for combo attacks to chain until the end. These windows of attack should also benefit slow firing weapons such as detonator and single shot weapons more.
  • Bosses will recover their stamina from melee attacks less.
  • *There’s something else planned as a big update coming to boss fights that both close combat and ranged players can utilize, which these changes will compliment. We cannot reveal them yet until its ready.

Bosses in particular are one of the main reasons I’m a shooter main and don’t really even delve into hybrid setups. Most bosses can knock you out in just a few hits so it’s usually not worth trying to muscle your way through all the AOEs and mobs to reach them and get in a few hits before inevitably having to run away again. The trade off with shooter builds is that doing this, you trade ammunition woes for HP woes.

The Dash attack is also getting looked at, but it was said this was just to make it slightly less spammable. It will have slightly less damage, and a longer transition from one dash attack to the next.

Some other good ideas coming include:

  • As mentioned before, increase melee attacks’ animation speed in their combo attacks. The deeper the combo is, the faster the attack is.
  • Certain defense nodes now have a passive increment to armor in addition to triggered defense increase.
  • There are now nodes that allow faster shield recharges and quantum break activation. We just had some time to code them in so now there’s more choice of nodes to help with your playstyle. Glass cannons ranged players can now regen their shields much faster with a single shield regen investment node while others can have a much lower downtime.
  • Quantum Break can now utilize “trigger at end combo attacks” tech nodes on every of their ‘nth’ hit. We’re still unsure what ‘nth’ will be.

I especially like the idea quantum break triggering from combos. I never use this mechanic because I can’t remember it exists for more than two minutes. I play this game on very hard difficulty when I’m not testing a completely new build, too, and that leaves a few more holes in gameplay aside from just not using melee on anything but lone mobs.

‘Overall’ these are great changes coming in the next update, and hopefully by the time it comes out I’ll have a few things to showcase. I’m not just covering this game’s weekly updates; I want to get some content of my own going as soon as possible. (See my Space Engineers material as an example)

April: Begin

A couple of quick updates.

Space Engineers

I knew I would be too out of it to get much else done this afternoon, so before I went to sleep I spent a good chunk of the morning doing some series testing on that carousel style hangar on the Admiral Hipper. I also tried to enclose the entire thing in an airtight room.

I really really needed a modless solution to having an opening wide enough for the Cosmo Messer’s wingspan but I couldn’t get an airtight seal with hinged doors, rotor doors, or hinged fill ins + normal hangar doors like some of the ones I spied on the workshop. Some people like to use pistons for this kind of thing, but I won’t even consider using pistons on my ships anymore unless they’re part of a Clang drive, or a small grid fighter catapult.

They’re still too finicky for my taste.

I tried an extended hangar door mode for a quick and easy–and temporary solution, but as I was slipping into dreamland, something told me the only solution that will work for a combination of ship sizes like this are side entrances. This way, the Cosmo Messers can leverage their short height to get through the doors same way the do on the Prinz Heinrich. So I’ll be putting in side doors and making some tweaks to the hangar to accommodate, because with sloped LCDs being the one exception, I refuse to use any more mods on this ship than necessary.

Fleeing Victory

Part 2 is coming along, but I’m still putting together certain scenes relating to the one I’m on–the usual. It should be done Sunday, but that largely depends on when and how I wake up. Right now a couple of other things are higher priorities for me, including deciding between a Remnants story or an Artorius story.

Since Fleeing Victory is more of a long term experiment, the pace could pick up dramatically or the whole thing could go quiet depending on what else is going on. Either way trust in these words when you see them:

“To be continued”

Phoenix

As for me, it’s tougher now. I haven’t had much in the way of good and consistent sleep for pretty much the entirety of March. Too many things were lined up to push and pull me in every direction at once. Not to mention I was making a bunch of little changes in the way I do things, especially on P.R.

So I’m still adjusting, and while I don’t expect April to be much better than March was, it’s a phase I’ve got to get through.

Gathering Material

This Arpeggio of Blue Steel event idea is evolving into more of a fun project now, so I’m going to need more than that initial few days I said to make it. It should be worth the effort though; I’m going to make this look as ‘official’ as I can get away with for posterity. For that I’ll need a lot more reference pics and the original ARP articles from Wargaming’s website.

I just wanted to mention that since this could take one or two more weeks on top of the other things I’m working on.

Next Up: Halo The Fall of Reach

I’m having trouble finding whole series that are available and at a lower price, so I may just have to snipe a few here and there. I decided on Halo for this month because The Fall of Reach was another one I started online but never finished. I’m still shopping around for a hardcover version of Dark Force Rising.

For now I chip away at other things and wait for the new book to arrive. One of these days I’m just going to drop a few hundred dollars grabbing a little of everything I like or entire series I’m trying to get around to.

Hard Fought Clan Battles

Tonight’s matches were pretty rough but we had a few really good games mixed in there, too. The second and final matches in particular were worth recording so recording the replays for video footage later on.

Someday … someday, I’ll have premier working properly again and will be able to make better quality videos, and faster to boot.

For now, I’m just carefully managing the footage on one of my external hard drives.

Ships used tonight:

  • Shikishima
  • Shimakaze
  • Preussen

That’s all for now. This week is mainly going to be focusing on the Cosmo Messer, Fleeing Victory Chapter Three, and that hypothetical ARP event for WoWs I mentioned. Priority is kind of in that order.

Well That Was Interesting

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.

Wrapping Up March

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.

More on this once I make a decision.

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