I needed to get OBS Studio and Davinci Resolve installed on the new computer anyway, and what better way to incentivize myself than the wild hair of an idea which led to…
Oh, the hours I sunk into this game, a decade or so ago.
Someone on a friend’s Discord brought up “Nolvus,” one of the mod pack manager bundle thingies (technical terms? what’s the fun in using those?) for Skyrim and how it made them want to revisit the game again and I thought… why not? Surely, after the better part of a dozen years, the Skyrim experience has been perfected and polished.
I’ve reached endgame for my “ChooChooingScenery” game of Satisfactory, the point where I gear up to send off the final Space Elevator shipment consisting of four products: Assembly Director Systems, Magnetic Field Generators, Nuclear Pasta (which, despite its name, contains zero radioactive source material), and Thermal Propulsion Rockets.
The math is all sorted out, source materials (almost) entirely in production, and I have a vague notion that I’m going to build a gigantic factory in the “dune desert” to house this last great project. But I want to make it nice and neat for a change. I want to build a set of machines that not only fit together well but looks good doing it.
And I can’t do that if I’m not absolutely clear on the exact order of what things I need to go into which other things to make the next things.
It was the jankiest of builds, it was the jankiest of builds.
Sorry, Charles Dickens, but in this case repeating myself is the most accurate way to start.
This past Tuesday evening, the kids and I finished up the “Tier 8 Products” factory build. Which is to say, we’ve now automated the final three requirements for the final milestone unlock: Turbomotors, Fused Modular Frames, and Cooling Systems. (Electromagnetic Control Rods are built elsewhere for various reasons.) I noted in voice chat at the end of the session that our co-op build was vastly more efficient and elegant than my personal version of this same (basic) factory had turned out. Spud found this amusing, as he sees our version as being quite “full of the jank.” Which isn’t wrong, but there’s janky and there’s janky.
Please allow me to illustrate.
Yes, it “needs” supports underneath. We’ll get there some day. There’s beautification to be done all over this co-op map.(more…)
If you’re going to play around with nuclear fission, it’s probably best to do so on a distant planet where (almost) zero humans are endangered by your efforts.
I put this together last weekend and eventually remembered that I should post it here:
Please enjoy 18 minutes of a train moving along train tracks through video game scenery.
Note that the rail network shown in this video is far from complete. There’s the planned nuclear power site along the north coast of the Rocky Desert region yet to build, never mind the expansion into the Dune Desert and south from the Oilands. But if I waited until I was “done” building new rail segments in this game, I’d never get a video made at all. So, here we are.
As a learning experience, making this video also taught me a simpler way to “slide” text on the screen in Davinci Resolve than I’d used previously, cutting the production time on this one down considerably from what I originally expected. I’m not 100% happy with the look of the text itself, however. I think it needed more contrast on the edges to avoid readability issues on complex backgrounds.
