jordangreywolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jordangreywolf) wrote2019-12-13 09:22 am
jordangreywolf) wrote2019-12-13 09:22 am
Entry tags:
[Minis] Assorted Projects (Mostly Minis)
Minecraft Updates
My favorite mod for Minecraft is called "Ruins," maintained by AtomicStryker. The premise behind it is that you can design your own structures (which may or may not be "ruined" in any particular way) that the mod randomly selects from when generating new Minecraft world terrain, according to various criteria, and then adds to the landscape in the newly created zone. The end effect is that, as you explore a Minecraft world, it may be dotted with various structures beyond the "vanilla" terrain generation. Various "ruins" (the generic term for these templates) are organized by biome, and can be given particular rules for their generation (e.g., sailing ships should only be spawned on water, houses should only be spawned on solid ground, a "ruined" house can be placed such that existing plants/trees may be "growing" through it, a "dungeon" might spawn so many blocks underground, and certain structures might be much rarer than others).
Gwendel has built a number of castles, fountains and pretty cottages that are certainly NOT ruined in the least, and I've transformed them into structures that might be generated via this mod. (To add a matter of challenge, rather than just having cozy little perfect homes ready to move into without any effort, I've populated most of them with hostile armored persistent "highwaymen" who don't despawn upon leaving the area, and must be defeated before the town can be safely explored further.)
I've tweaked many of our structures to fit different needs. My main pack uses a lot of Command Blocks to achieve fancy results, such as spawning a cluster of buildings together as a town, or modules in a dungeon, and to spawn custom "mobs" (villagers with special trades, monsters given special quirks -- such as invisible spiders or a hostile giant) -- and anywhere there's "treasure," there's sure to be some sort of trap or hostile entity to overcome, so there's some element of challenge. (Either that, or else the "treasure" should just be especially hard to find.)
However, some modpacks don't work well with Command Blocks -- so I've put together bundles that leave Command Blocks out. And some people just don't like their worlds to be full of traps and monsters (they prefer to play in "peaceful" mode), so I've made some versions of the pack where Gwendel's villages are completely free of hazards, and I leave out all my dangerous dungeons.
Further complicating things is that each time a new release comes out for Minecraft, there are changes. Not only are new materials added that didn't exist in previous iterations, but some features of Ruins cease to work, or they work differently. For instance, any of my Command Blocks might have to be rewritten, because the names of the mobs changed, or the syntax for how they're summoned -- or else my "custom" monster (which relied on an obscure mob variant that doesn't appear in normal terrain-gen and could only be brought into the game through console commands or command blocks) is no longer possible because the designers decided to remove it from the game entirely. So, I have to update my designs for the new version, but I keep the old ones around, because some folks still like to play using modpacks for previous versions of Minecraft. (The big modpack sets are often several versions behind whatever the current release is.)
Well ... I'm about two versions behind the current iteration of Minecraft, and the Ruins mod itself has had to undergo some pretty drastic changes, to the point where I can't simply edit my old templates, but I'm going to have to rebuild my structures within the program, using the built-in script utilities. So, basically, I've been converting a bunch of my structures into a simplified form -- the raw shell of a building, with placeholder blocks (say, some random color of wool or stained glass) to take the place of dynamic blocks such as water or lava, or to mark areas that are expressly meant to be "air" versus those spaces that can simply be whatever the previous terrain was supposed to be. ("Ruins" templates are mapped out on a 3D grid, in layers, so if I want to add, say, a sphere to the world, to make it quasi-circular, I end up filling in the corners with a bunch of pseudo-blocks that, when the structure is completed, will just leave whatever was there already. So, if this sphere is spawned into water, those spaces will stay "water." If it's halfway in a cliff, those spaces will stay "air" or "rock" or "grass" as appropriate. Otherwise, any time I spawned something, there would be a big cubical chunk cut out of the surroundings, and that would be weird.)
Next, I'll need to spawn these "stripped down" structures into a superflat world, build "baseplates" under them, upgrade the version of Minecraft to the newer version, then use the updated Ruins mod scripts to "capture" them again, generating the new syntax, and then fine-tuning them from there. (E.g., "orange wool" placeholder gets replaced by lava, "blue stained glass" placeholder gets replaced by water, "pink stained glass" gets replaced with a rule for "randomized color of stained glass," "white stained glass" gets replaced with a "preserve-what-was-already-there" rule. Exactly what I use as a placeholder block is arbitrary. If I were building a "church" where I'd actually need to use those particular colors of stained glass or wool, I should use something else as placeholders.)
TLDR: It's a lot of work! I feel like I need to devote a weekend or something just to getting through it, so I can get a few representative structures put together, and update the collection on my site. It may be rather stripped down, as a lot of features in the Ruins mod "broke" and haven't been replaced yet. (Most of my Command Block tricks won't work in the new version, so all my modular dungeons and custom monster generators are out. That's kind of sad.) But I've actually had some folks asking about it, so I suppose I ought to get to it.
Mansions of Madness:
Digital_Rampage has a LOT of board games, and quite a few of them he gets excited about, and declares, "We've got to play this sometime!" but he never sets a date, and nothing happens, and eventually it gets forgotten about, while the next new, shiny thing takes over. I try to help out by painting minis and such, but it can be frustrating when such a project is time-consuming, and by the time I make much progress on it, the interest seems to have waned, and it's unlikely the minis will ever get used in a game.
"Mansions of Madness" is a game that Digital_Rampage has actually had people over to play on occasion. It's a board game with adventure elements, very much like a stripped-down version of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, with a series of "adventures," and the Investigators try to solve the mystery, complete objectives, etc., before they run out of time. There are baddies to fight, and so forth, and there's an area to be explored (represented by colorful room/location tiles), and adversaries to fight (represented by monster miniatures). An iPad app helps in moderating a lot of the game, taking on the role of the "GM," so to speak -- though necessarily the options of the party are rather limited.
There are a lot of innovations about the whole setup I rather like, and could see myself adapting to more conventional RPGs ... but the adventures themselves can be a bit frustrating. It's certainly the case that whenever we play a new scenario, we can count on the Investigators dying, going mad, or simply running out of time to save the world for sure, the first time through, and quite possibly the second as well, before we have any hope of guessing the proper order of things to have any hope of succeeding. (And even then, it's by no means a sure thing.)
Anyway, the minis are rather nice, and would be wonderful for playing a more conventional campaign of Call of Cthulhu. There are just so MANY of them, so I've had to resort to a bit of "speed-painting" to get them "good enough for the table top," without going into any great detail.
One problem with the monsters, is that they plug into large plastic bases, but they don't necessarily stay there, even if I glue them in. Digital_Rampage has had a lot of problems with them popping off their bases in the box. To try to address that, with his latest expansion set, I tried putting some putty on the bases to build a little more to "anchor" them to. I also did that to the investigators as well (who are normally ATTACHED to their bases, so this would be a moot point -- but I cut them off, and then drilled pinning holes and reattached them with wire, so they should still be secure).
I used some "plastic clay" to make temporary texture stamps to make an "arcane"-looking design on the bases, then applied some basic wash-and-dry-brush techniques to make the detail "pop" more, without getting too far into detailing them (since I needed to do this all QUICKLY).
Starfinder Miniatures
As I've noted earlier, Digital_Rampage is starting his Starfinder RPG campaign (this Saturday, in fact), and he's got a bunch of miniatures he got from the Starfinder Kickstarter. They were originally put out in resin by "Ninja Division," but that particular company has had PROBLEMS with fulfilling Kickstarter pledges and actually getting anything to market (and then starting up another Kickstarter for another project or two before the LAST one has been taken care of). Anyway, it seems that Paizo had enough of it, and changed their relationship with Ninja Division over to a Polish company called Archon Studio -- and now the minis are being put out in high-impact polystyrene plastic instead of resin. Assembly is far more challenging (LOTS of tiny pieces), but the detail quality is much better (and I don't have to worry about rifle barrels and swords going all warped and "bendy" as with the resin versions).
Here's "Zo!" -- an alien undead celebrity. (It's a sci-fantasy world, and one of those worlds is essentially a "world of the dead," where the inhabitants "survived" a cataclysm by resorting to necromancy.)
And here's an "Elf Operative."
I've also gone back and painted up a bunch of minis I've had on hold for a long time, since they might actually be of use in this setting. For instance, some Reaper "Blackstar Corsairs/Privateers" for possible use as heavy-armor "space pirates" or "mercenaries":
And because it IS a sci-fantasy setting, and all sorts of this weird stuff can happen, I also painted up some very piratey-looking space pirates (from Relic Knights):
Another motivation for my painting up of a bunch of these oddball minis, however, has just been that I've been trying to make some headway on all the junk in the garage -- and part of that has been to address some of the stuff I've been accumulating in order to paint up "some day." So in some cases, I either need to actually do it and use the stuff (or at least properly get it out of the box, discard the needless packaging, and organize the minis properly into foam-lined organizers for later use), or else finally get rid of it one way or another. Toward that end, I've been tackling a bunch of old Relic Knights, Sedition Wars, and other minis, with the hope of either finding a use for it, or finding a HOME for it (selling it, giving it to friends, etc.).
Secret Weapon Miniatures Bag o' Crud
One thing I bought for myself on Black Friday was a "Bag o' (Crud)" from Secret Weapon Miniatures. SWM makes a bunch of resin bases and terrain bits and such, and occasionally accumulates a bunch of cast-offs -- bases that are a little warped, or with bubbles in them, or partial casts, or whatnot. These are sold on occasion in grab bags called a "Bag o' Crud." Well, a different word than "Crud," but I prefer to use that one, since I was raised to think that the other word was a mild expletive.
Anyway, I find the randomness of the selection to actually be fun, and I end up being able to use just about everything in the bag anyway, given all the different genres I deal with in RPGs. It might seem pointless to get new minis (since I have enough already), but when I'm prepping bases, I need BASES for them.
One of the base themes is called "Shattered Ritual." It's a pretty fun design to work with -- I made a texture-stamp of the surface in order to do the putty work for the Mansions of Madness minis (though the quality of course is greatly degraded from the original). I found that it's a nice design to use with "spellcaster" types, such as the Doctrine faction for Relic Knights -- special character "Fiametta" used as an example above. (In Relic Knights, "Doctrine" is basically a "magical academy," with lots of "magical high school" tropes in the minis, such as boring guys in uniforms, and magical school girls in ridiculously short skirts.)
Fallout
I still hold out for the possibility of doing something Fallout-related, though of course it's up to me to get the ball rolling. In the meantime, I've just been painting up assorted things that might be useful. I've had some vague ideas of things I might do, but it's probably impractical to think that I'd actually pack it ALL into a single campaign. (Just as well, though: The nature of "sandboxy" GMing is that I should be prepared for more than what I'll actually run -- inevitably, something is going to get skipped. Anything I don't use might be fodder for a "one-shot" scenario at Necronomicon, at least.)
Ghostbusters
A new Ghostbusters movie? Okay, I saw the trailer, and that looked pretty awesome. :) I'm definitely fired up to see this in the theater. I've also had some folks poking me about updating my Savage Ghostbusters fan material to the new edition ... so I suppose I ought to do something about that. I've also got a bunch of Ghostbusters minis that Digital_Rampage got me a while ago that I've never painted. (Shame on me!) Maybe I'll run some "Savage Ghostbusters" at Necronomicon next year.
World of Warcraft
Gwendel has been strongly hinting for a while that she'd like me to play World of Warcraft again, so I can play with her. There are a couple of obstacles to that:
1) I no longer have a PC capable of running it. When I've been playing Fallout, it was on Gwendel's PC -- and now that she's back into WoW, she's using that PC. Related: I no longer have a place to set up said PC. The computer room is pretty much taken over by Gwendel's stuff. My personal space is occupied by my treadmill. I'd need to do some work to clear up a space to set up a PC.
2) My schedule is a bit problematic. But that applies to everything I want to do.
3) The time sync and the "grind" is a concern. (I'm not even sure if I can access my old characters -- and even if I could, they're likely on the wrong server.)
4) Not sure that I want to mess with the "drama" that seems to infect Gwendel's guild.
I guess first I need to get back to more house-cleaning and junk-clearing and get a space that I could potentially set up a PC ... and then look into how much it costs for a PC that could run WoW (and, hey, maybe other useful stuff like Photoshop).
no subject
Yeah, I don't think it's worthwhile getting back into WoW, especially if Gwendel's guild is raiding or something, that is a pretty big timesink in itself, not including the 'get to max level' and such.
no subject
* It turns out that Wendy's laptop (which she hardly uses anymore, except on the rare occasion we travel) is actually powerful enough to meet WoW's minimum requirements, and most of the recommended requirements.
* Right now, that laptop mostly resides on the treadmill. Basically, there's a console area on it that the laptop fits neatly onto, and I often have it playing videos while I walk. Once upon a time, I tried using a treadmill while "walking across Warcraft," but I ended up hurting my wrists, because I tried to use the keyboard at an awkward angle while doing that. Maybe I can learn from previous mistakes and just NOT do it that way. I've been using the laptop with Fantasy Grounds for Digital_Rampage's online Starfinder campaign, but what I do there is that I stand and run the treadmill during periods where I'm not really required to *do* anything (waiting my turn in combat, listening to the others argue about what to do next, etc.), and then when I actually need to do something that requires my hands (other than poke the hot-key for speaking), I stop the treadmill, and at that point it's pretty much like a "standing desk" -- not the most comfortable thing in the world, but doable.
Perhaps I can do that with WoW: go on the treadmill while my character is on a flight path, etc., and stop the treadmill when I'm actually fighting, typing, etc.
Anyway, Gwendel's primary interest is her desire to "do stuff with (me)," and it's just that she's unwilling to actually do anything that *I* am doing (such as, say, joining us at the table for RPG sessions happening over at our house), so that leaves WoW. I tried seeing if I could recover my old WoW account, but Blizzard claims to be unable to find my email address (or any of my older email addresses), so it would seem that they must have done some housekeeping in the intervening years and wiped my inactive account. (I find forum posts claiming that Blizzard "never" deletes inactive accounts, but it would seem that mine is an exception.)
If I *were* able to sign back in, I suppose I could try the free version (unable to mail stuff, unable to join guilds or groups, level-capped at level 20, I think, and so forth), so if Gwendel's interested in running around with a low-level character, I could at least do that until the novelty wears off (and if nothing else, see if it's even possible with my current setup).
No way I'm doing guild raid-groups or anything intensive like that, for sure. :/
no subject
WoW changed the quests across original Azeroth during the Cataclysm, so the quests flow somewhat better, and some zones have had their storylines changed.
Good luck with it! Let me know if I can help.
no subject
That's a good idea. I'll have to see if I can get a couple.
no subject
I feel like you put more work into your hobbies than I have ever done on things that I get paid for, although this is probably a matter of perception rather than reality. :D The miniatures look great!
How is the World of Warcraft plan going?
no subject
Re: World of Warcraft:
Well, Gwendel got her Christmas gift a little early. (She was fine with that.) Technically, her old laptop could run World of Warcraft, but only with the barest, stripped-down options. I shelled out the money to get her a new PC, and now her hand-me-down PC (5 years old, yet the new PC cost less than her previous one did) is now occupying a spot in the corner of the family room.
I've signed up for a 6-month period of WoW, and I've committed to being available to play with her on "anime night" for that period (instead of, y'know, watching anime for a while, unless that's what Gwendel would rather do that evening). If all goes well, I'll renew it again so it'll be a full year. I haven't committed to anything beyond that, though. There's a certain amount of nostalgia of getting to see places in the game again (other than just watching Gwendel play), and lots of "ooo-and-ahh" moments of getting to see new stuff for the first time, but I'm just not that terribly interested in the grind, or motivated by whatever it is I'm working toward.
If Fallout 4 had a multiplayer option, and we could somehow play co-op as "Nate and Nora" to explore the wasteland, waste time building custom outposts with pieces of scrap (and then spend a lot of time furnishing the interior to make it "pretty" in a post-apocalyptic way), that'd be cool, but even then, I couldn't see myself sticking to it for 6 months, let alone a year. Even when I've shelled out the costs to host a Minecraft server to try out a new modpack, we got maybe 3 months of active use out of it before people reached their goals, finished their home bases, lost interest, and wandered off.
So ... well, we'll see how it goes! I might try playing on the laptop while on the treadmill, but only for doing light, goof-around stuff (like running around Ironforge, gathering ingredients to make gingerbread cookies, versus trying to take down a monster boss). Maybe it'll motivate me to update my old WoW RPG map, so it'll work for "post-Cataclysm" details (though I might retroactively try to squeeze in map details for Gilneas, Pandara, etc., since those are locations that should have still existed "pre-Cataclysm," but we just never got to explore them before that point, so they weren't on the maps).
Gwendel's on Wyrmrest Accord server. My mnemonic for remembering that is "Dragon Sleepytime Agreement" (to which Gwendel only said, "Ugh!"). I suppose I'll post some screenshots, once I figure out the best way of doing so. Right now it's mostly just of silly Christmas -- er, I mean, Winter's Veil -- stuff.