Greetings brothers and/or sisters. How goes your struggle against the capitalist imperialists today?
I'm feeling particularly monetised at the moment, as the age of youtube demonitisation seems to have totally passed over OffyDland now. Even the videos from crusader kings where the descriptions regularly contain keywords such as 'war', 'incest' and 'child murder', all seem to have passed The Algorithm's (praise be upon it) checks! Maybe they made it more lax. Of course this means now is the time to sneak my radical religious fundamentalist messages into my videos!
Well, luckily for youtube my religion is praying to The Algorithm (praise be upon it). But I have heard there are those that take its holy name in vain, and freely use clickbait in an attempt to trick their overlord! Fools! Rise up, viewers, and destroy them with the righteous fury of the pure! (Can unmonetised blogs get demonetised? If you're reading this FBI/GCHQ, don't worry, I'm 95% joking). I mentioned in the last blog that in the later parts of the year The Algorithm (praise be upon it) is usually nicer to me, but nothing has really changed so far this year. Uni starts around now though, so perhaps this is the actual time of seasonal youtube watching.
Now, this month's channel news shall revolve round the new and upcoming things that will be starting in October. One will be the new Mount and Blade series, called Recs Romanum, which will start in 2 weeks. That of course means that The Promised Crown will end in one week, with a special double-length final episode that wound up being a pretty nice ending to the tale once a few creative liberties were taken with what actually happened.
I semi-accidentally had the ending basically be a setup for a sequel, a sequel I have no intention of making, but in the end it was always going to be an open ending since that's how Crusader Kings is really. Perhaps one day I'll write a secret novella to extend the tale. That reminds me: the Promised Crown script is pretty much a novella that actually works standalone, so I was thinking of bothering to spellcheck it and format it, creating the first Offy D Merch! Selling little books like that could be a fun way to fund the channel instead of just donations. I also thought of creating a Nariko's Treasure novelised version by converting the script into full prose, although that would take a lot longer obviously. Would easily be a long novel's worth of material though, maybe even three short ones to cover each act. The dialogue alone is >70,000 words, which is a short novel sort of length.
Anyway, the other series that will be starting 'soon' is my challenge run Armenia campaign for the Ancient Empires mod in Total War Attila. Starting it has been difficult because I spent ages trying to work out how to introduce it, what sort of images to use in the opening video, what music would fit the series, and what the thumbnail/title card should be. So despite working on it quite a lot, I've only got half an episode done so far. That means it will start later than expected, probably also in about 2 weeks. At least that means I'll be starting 2 new things at once, which should be good for short term views, which will wake The Algorithm (praise be upon it) up a little bit. I wish there was a less religious solution to improving the channel's performance, but for one walking the path of not-clickbaiting, prayer is all we have left as far as I can tell. I guess making the videos good would help, but we're on a schedule here!
I mentioned in a news video this month that youtube is now claiming upload frequency doesn't impact The Algorithm (praise be upon it) at all. I took this chance to suggest moving This Is Content onto it's own channel so it can stew in its own independent juices. I had presumed this would be meet with great relief from people who just didn't want to see such comedy videos on an otherwise normal channel, but to my surprise the public vote got a big majority for don't care/keep it together, and so the second channel plan was cast down. I was sort of looking forward to having it on a second channel since I could feel less bad for posting it on my main channel, but perhaps the lesson is that I shouldn't feel bad for posting on the main channel anyway.
Right, that's the news I suppose. Now let's take some time to rant about video games in a brief bit of:
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WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
SKYRIM VR: see last two blog posts. Still going m8s. Realised you can use motion controls to block and attack at the same time, finally giving melee combat an exploit to match stealth archery! You can also use two-handed weapons at the speed of one-handed ones, allowing you to scythe rooms apart with their big reach and high damage. Level 90+ enchanting achieved, the dream of two enchantments per item will soon be reality.
FINAL FANTASY VII CRISIS CORE: replaying this on PSP. Since I am now a Dark Souls masta, it's pretty easy as it has roughly the same combat system but with more generous i-frames (and tonnes of easy healing when you mess up). I started playing it after watching a FF7 speedrun, and getting in that classic ff7 mood. DID YOU HEAR THEY'RE REMAKING IT? KIDS BORN AT THE TIME OF THE REMAKE BEING ANNOUNCED ARE NOW 254 YEARS OLD!
Anyway, all of Crisis Core's faults stem from it being quite repetitive and slow. Most missions take place in the same areas, and the NPCs take forever to load their dialogue once you start talking to them. Luckily for me, using an emulator means I can put it in 8x speed for half a second with a trigger button, and skip the constant 1-2 second pauses. Much better! In a surprise twist, despite the game being made for a 480p screen, the textures scale up to 1080p on my TV just fine, so it looks like a PS2 game.
Sometimes the game will load an in-engine cutscene that is for some reason prerendered in 480p and it will look terrible for a bit. Usually it does this when there is lots of stuff happening on the screen, which makes me suspect that those scenes couldn't keep a stable framerate when playing in-engine, so they just rendered them on PCs and slapped it into the game as a video. On the original PSP screen it wouldn't have looked any different to real-time-rendered-in-engine cutscenes, but now I know their secret!
I would have played the new Valkyria Chronicles game but you have to pay money for it.
The other things I played for the channel: Star Wars Empire At War, TW Attila and Sakura Wars. Sakura Wars is almost as life changing as Steambot Chronicles, but I'll save my elated rants for further into the TIC series, so you can see the glory for yourselves.
AND THAT'S WHAT I PLAYED THIS MONTH
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Now to talk about the world's greatest video game; Godless Tactics, developed by esteemed developer Ice Arrow Games, set for release 'in the future' (a popular release window) on the Personal Computer. I've been testing away and doing lots of balancing changes recently, which annoying require one to start testing from the beginning again to see what effect they have on the later game. So I still haven't got even half way through this game in any testing run. That's probably going to continue to be the case as now I am getting around to finish the world map, adding more things to find, lore to discover and adjusting various paths and routes to help the AI.
Had some fun recently when I realised that my pathfinding algorithm gave incorrect paths in certain situations due to some things I had done to optimise it, so had to go in and bolt on some optional deoptimisations to help it along. In the programming world the official term for such hackery is that the code 'smells' (really), since it's clearly not written with expert care, and has deviated from its beautiful symmetric intentional structure. The whole game probably smells, but I have it on good authority that many huge productions end up with hackey code like this, and as long as the frame rate is stable, it isn't a massive problem (until you try to make a sequel with the same code). Just one of those things you learn in life: even people who are professionals at something aren't always that good at it. I'm sure plenty of weird game design or UI choices in video games that be attributed to this (*thinks about Total War Rome 2*).
Errrr I think I'll stop writing now because it's somehow almost dinner time. TYPE FASTER NEXT TIME DWEEB! 'See' 'you' 'next' 'time'.