Reality is very, very weird. If you didn’t know that, here are some facts to help you better understand that truth:
what if you run at normal speed
maybe start up in the mountains, on the outcropping down and right where I launched the firework, warp down to a tower on the hills, and walk to a tower down by the water.
Hi this is Kyle aka Malkere at Big Kitty Games, it's March 29th 2017, and this video is an update on the world generation in Solace Crafting. I'm currently a ways up these mountains at about 2,200 meters above sea level, and I have the game set to load 32km in all directions giving me about 4,100 square kilometers visible or 2,500 square miles. As a starving indie developer I don't have an amazing computer so I actually have the quality turned down quite a bit, and for people on even lower systems we can turn the settings down even further, or turn them way up for those hardcore gamers out there.
It's very hard to get a feel for just how big the game world is with just a picture or just looking at it from one spot, so we're going to teleport down to this tower, and we're going to run to that tower by the water. These two towers are roughly 4 kilometers apart from one another. Up high like this we can see pretty far, though we could still go quite a bit higher. When we get down to the water it will be a very different view, so remember all the mountain tops we can see from up here.
This crystal here is called a dimension crystal, this is actually the one that we start with here at zero zero. Dimension crystals are a player crafted facility meaning we can construct them wherever we like, and use them to teleport back and forth across mountains, deep underground, or even to other dimensions. So I'm going to teleport down to the dimension crystal I built next to the first tower I named Tower 1. And here we go.
We'll wait a few seconds while the closest four terrains are generated. The rest will be generated in the background. And now we can see, we were up there, and now we're down at the first tower, and we'll start heading to that tower.
I have my running speed pumped way up for this video. Normally we would jog at around 8 kilometers per hour which is about 5 miles per hour, but right now I'm running at around 24 kmph or three times faster. Even at this speed it's going to be a bit of a jog before we get there.
Already you can see the view is very different from a lower vantage. One of my favorite things is to build my own towers so I can look out over the trees and hills and see what i can see. I'm putting in warp pads too for short distance travel that lets you get up and down buildings faster than the massive spiral stairs cases I always end up building in other games.
There is still a lot of work being done here, we don't have a huge variety of encounters that are fully visible from super far away yet. I've been working on a promotional video that very briefly shows all of the major features, after which I'll pump out some more quick videos like this one showing the crafting, building, class, and skill systems in greater detail.
I've got a couple little counters on display here, the one on top is showing our height, and the one beneath that is showing our distance from the center of this world. When we start a new game we start at zero zero. As we move further away from zero zero everything increases in level and difficulty, currently at a rate of 1 level every 3 kilometers. Everything in Solace Crafting uses floats instead of integers which means a monster can actually be level 1.27, and give you 2.3 experience, and so on. So things don't just all the sudden become level 2, as you move around you'll find things that are 1.7, 1.8, and so on. Because distance is always calculated from the center you can travel concentric, like running in a big circle, and everything will stay roughly the same level. The total area of game world between level 0 and level five is over 700 square kilometers. The area between level 5 and level 10 is over 2,100 square kilometers, and it just gets bigger and bigger. Each kilometer generates a lot of lesser encounters, while every four by four sector and every sixteen by sixteen chunk regularly generate larger encounters, so there is plenty plenty plenty to do and see even in just the first five levels.
As you travel further resources like wood and ore start showing up in higher tiers. Resources don't use levels but tiers, because you can use any tier of resources to make an item of any level. Even a level 1 sword can be made using tier 10 metal, and actually the tier of the resources has more affect on the items stats than the level does. So pushing deeper into the wilds has many benefits.
We've been running at triple speed for a couple minutes now and still no tower. I've lost sight of the first tower. There is the mountains we started in.
This massive game world isn't designed to force people to run all over the place, it brings in tons of content for every world that we generate in 360 degrees when you really only need one or two degrees, so you're not just looking for the door to the next level, or waiting for more bad guys to spawn. We're running straight through a couple levels right now though we could choose to level underground, in the plains, in the mountains, in the desert, etc.
10. Negative mass particles accelerate opposite of the force applied to them.
And if that isn’t weird enough for you, just remember, you’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from star dust on a rock hurtling through the universe at 370 kilometers per second.
From Postman
I was taking a walk at lunch near our company around the end of March…
Waiting at a stop light I was caught off guard when a little girl wearing a big backpack greeted me with “Good afternoon!” I guess elementary kids in this area greet people they’ve never seen before.
Apparently that day was graduation and I spotted several other elementary aged kids walking around. This girl that came running past me from behind.
“Good afternoon” came as she passed me, ran off, looked back after a short distance, and then again after getting further away. Being hay fever season I had a mask and glasses on. I got the feeling she was looking back at me like “that guy’s not normal.”
There had recently been a gruesome incident. It wouldn’t be strange to conclude not to approach an older man. If she got back home and said “there was a weird guy,” and I got reported, what would I do?
Checking it on the internet, you can be targeted as suspicious just for greeting the wrong person. Everyone be careful your actions don’t get you labeled suspicious. And of course don’t ever actually be suspicious.
In Takasaki the Cherry Blossoms will continue to bloom for a few days yet.
From No.258
It might not be the best time for sufferers of hay fever to be traveling outdoors, but the flower viewing season has arrived at last.
Flower viewing most commonly consists of looking up at the Yoshino Cherry Trees or the Sakura Blossoms, but this year, how about looking down at the “Grass Sakura.” Here in Takasaki “Grass Sakura Park” in Misato is famous for just that.
[Address] 370-3113 Gunma-pref., Takasaki-city, Misato-town 12-1
[Hours] 8AM to 5PM (Admittance ends at 4:30PM)
[Season] Early April to Early May
The Misato Grass Sakura Festival Sat. April 8th to Sun. May 7th
[Entrance Fee] Adults 300\, Children 100\
[Parking] 335 free parking spaces
The Grass Sakura last longer than regular Sakura blooming for roughly a month in the beautiful colors of white, red, pink, and violet. “Grass Sakura” are called so because they bloom flowers that are similar to the Cherry Blossom, though outside of Spring their leaves look like a type of grass. The flowers represent a timid yet persevering, fiery love, perfect for the start of April.
Each year the peak season draws a large crowd, so why not visit for yourself?
From Aqua
Isn't food just wonderful.
An update from me who finds happiness in delicious food.
This time I’d like to introduce one of Gunma’s delicious strawberry farms “Strawberry Minami.” This is the farm that in 2017 won the 34th Gunma Prefecture Strawberry Council’s highest award, The Gunma Prefecture Governor’s Award. Located in Shintou-village they operate direct sales, attracting a busy crowd during the peak season.
Their two mains type of strawberries are the Yayoihime(spring princess) and Tochiotome(land maiden). The smooth flavor of the Yayoihime are especially delicious, and are in fact the strawberries used in the sweets made by the famous pastry chef Yoroiduka Toshihiko.
These wonderful strawberries are created using light, temperature, humidity, soil temperature, and carbon dioxide. Proper measurement and control of all important aspects to the strawberries are meticulously checked to create the perfect environment using state of the art technology for the best product possible.
I am reminded that die cast production, like strawberries, require hard work and dedication.
From Creampuff Fingers
It takes time and motivation to visit a sake brewery far from home. I got in the car with my family and headed to Itoyokado when it struck me! I recalled that there was a sake brewery not far from where we were headed. It was fate.
It was a good bit of serendipity, so I dropped my family off at the supermarket, plugged the name into my car navigation, and set out to see where it led. Even on roads you travel a lot, I get the feeling like I’m off on an adventure.
Is this the right road? I started to worry, but made it in the end to a big surprise. Believe or not they were closed for the day. Not willing to give up, I took a picture of the building to remember. To top it off I bought two bottles of sake produced by Takai Incorporated at a store near my house and headed home.
That’s all the sake adventuring I was able to accomplish, but as it turns out, one of the two bottles I bought I had sacrificed to the kitchen when we recently ran out of cooking sake. I nonchalantly recalled losing a bottle the kitchen but opening up the same brand I was surprised to find a quite tasty sake fitting of my tastes.
A thousand apologies to --- I thought repeatedly as I enjoyed my sake. From here on I will only open that brand for drinking.
The mass media has been busy ever since Mr. Trump was elected president of The United States. He claims he’ll make The United States priority number one, by bringing back jobs and money that have long been sent overseas. The way they go about things is an entirely different matter, but the basic concept I personally think is not such a bad idea.
With our own economy hollowing out, local production isn’t just good for The United States, but for Japan and all “first nations”. Unfortunately this all is largely the side effect of capitalist society wanting to buy inexpensive goods, and big brands doing anything to cut costs, so it’s not easy to label one thing good and another bad. Still, if we don’t draw the line somewhere, come up with a way to keep cost from always being the ultimate deciding factor, things will eventually always follow the same path.
Things can get ugly fast with a little bad luck, and I don’t think the current system, which we’ve spent decades building, is going to change overnight or anything. If some foreign product has especially appealing features than I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying it. I have a feeling though that if the products are the same and it’s just a matter of price, helping the local economy by buying the local made, more expensive product might be something we need to encourage little by little.
- My usual Dragon Quest 10 update
After a miserable year and 10 months I have at last brought all my character classes to the maximum level of 96. Of course, with the next update the maximum level with be raised, and my “Specialties” levels still have a long ways to go. It’s an endless adventure to say the least. If I don’t have plans on a weekend I end up spending the whole day inside.
I guess I can’t complain about where we’re spending our money. I need get out and spend my own.
From Naotyn
2014 posts:
Oct-Dec
