lego - Sleepypete's Pillow

Advent 2020 Day 3 ! This could be pod racing …

December 3, 2020

7:25 pm

Comments Off on Advent 2020 Day 3 ! This could be pod racing …

Hello everyone,

We’ve made it to day 3. Before I go too far with the post, there’s stuff in the news today about an explosion a bit down the road at Avonmouth. I live quite a distance away (didn’t notice a boom even) so I’m not affected.

What’s behind the door ?

I think that’s one of the desert dwellings on Tatooine and yes, I may well be continuing the theme of using something edible to stand the models on to get a decent angle for the camera with them.

The cookie did not survive.

Tatooine made me think of a pod racing link. (The other one would be something to do with wrong droids). I did enjoy the pod racing sequence in Episode 1, that was probably the highlight of the movie.

And one of the best of the Star Wars games was the Pod Racing game. What’s that ?

They’re basically two massive engines, a pilot pod running behind them and lots of luck to hold everything together. I suspect the image in George Lucas’s mind when he thought of this sequence was to try and pull off something like the Ben Hur chariot sequence.

It worked pretty well as a sequence in the movie and the game was incredible when it first came out. I’ve been having another look at it this evening …

I did get it running in the end, although the Steam version needed an extra file added in (for Google – Star Wars Pod Racer crash on start up solved by adding the Dinput.dll into the game folder). I didn’t manage to get it to recognise my two Hotas controllers (I have no idea where my Xbox pattern controller is !) but it was ok running with mouse and keyboard. It even ran at 1440p.

I tried looking back at this one before, with the copy on the cd (yep, cd !) and found issues with it not knowing where the save game was due to Windows changing how it organised files. Looks like that’s been solved this time.

I’d forgotten how fast it was … Let’s see :

The 462 is I believe, speed in km/h. And the pods go faster in an engine boost mode. I think the speed used to reach 1000+ …

I’d forgotten how much of a rush the game was. Lots of varied courses over multiple Star Wars locations. Places like the deserts of Tatooine, with occasional Sand People snipers. Lava planets … An ocean world where you race across platforms connected by undersea tunnels. And a space circuit with zero g sections.

It’s exciting. I was remembering why I was so addicted to it way back … As you see from the screenshots, the graphics are very simple. But you don’t really notice that as you’re zooming through the circuits.

However, if you’re looking to try it out again, DO NOT buy the Steam version. I’m hoping that the fan project to recreate the game comes to fruition. While the Directx suite should in theory allow older games like this to run, there are issues involved. The game itself came out just as Directx was taking off, so it was looking to use 3dfx Glide libraries to run better via proprietary non Directx hardware. I think that was leading to problems this evening …

I couldn’t get my controllers to work, although got round this by using keyboard controls.

And … I called a halt to play due to the game crashing on me, following steadily decreasing texture quality. I think this is why only 3 screenshots were successful out of the 11 attempts.

There is a saying “You can never go back”. It’s kinda true this time round, although while it was running, it was running very nicely. Everything was nicely presented on screen, even in a much higher resolution than the game would have expected. Of course, that means the low resolution textures look really, really bad in the screenies.

It did work as a game now much better than Jagged Alliance 2 did when I tried that again a while ago. (I’ll talk about that in a later post !)

Good game, hopefully something similarly ultra fast and great will come out at some point. I got the memories from it again of it being huge fun the first time … but with the state of the Steam edition, it’s one for the past.

That’s all for today ! Stay safe, be well. May compatibility with the force be with you.

Advent 2020 Day 2 – Tea and Civilisation

by Sleepypete

December 2, 2020

5:16 pm

Comments Off on Advent 2020 Day 2 – Tea and Civilisation

Uncategorized

advent, games, lego

Hello everyone,

Shorter one today I think. Maybe. We shall see ! What’s behind the door ?

I do have a list of games to talk about prepared for this advent period but I will shift it around a bit as appropriate … Like yesterday when I wanted to talk about the author Ben Bova, which gave me a convenient link to Mars and space programmes. Spookily, today linked straight away …

Yep. I reckon that’s a tea cup there in his left hand which can only link to …

Civilisation !

I’ve played most of the Civilisation games over the years, although I’ve gone away from the series lately.

Quick check … yep. I do actually own the latest ones. Never installed Civ VI though and I bounced off Civ V. (I must have got them from Humble Bundle bundles or monthly things.

Like, this month’s Humble Choice games and my opinion of them are :

Will acquire : Crying Suns. Space strategy, looks promising. Rover Mechanic Simulator, gets the oddball choice.

Nope for various reasons : Darksiders III, Yakuza Kiwami 2. They just aren’t games I would want to play.

Something I should grab : Imperator Rome. Paradox can make great games like Stellaris but I saw videos of this when it came out and it looked like the mechanics under it were terrible.

Bundle fillers to ignore : Darksburg, Little Misfortune, Smile For Me, Darkwood, Tsioque, Youropa, Townsmen. I have no idea what these are and the brief blurb made me even less interested in them.

But they usually have something that makes the bundle worth it, the bundle comes with a discount across the site and they’re good for charities.

And it makes Tashnarr jump out of her skin when I buy stuff on Humble Bundle using her code (linky) and the alert goes off. Perhaps a bit mean, definitely comical. (Link to Tash’s Stream page) And she gets a bit of the sale price, which helps her keep streaming, which is always a good thing.

I really need to make the links lists happen as well. I’ve been a bit delinquent there :-D.

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about anything but the subject isn’t it. Those happen occasionally.

Civilisation – you start as cavemen and the object is to nurture and grow your tribe into a civilisation that spans the globe and perhaps, beyond. It was a remarkable entry into gaming with the first one. I played that on the Atari ST.

Simple graphics, well presented for the time. We have a top down presentation on a square grid with ice caps at the top and bottom and a wrap around map. This had all the original concepts of cities, units, buildings and an epoc spanning tech tree.

And spearmen that could occasionally stop tanks.

Civilisation 2 moves this into an isometric pattern. Friends at uni played this but I was still hooked on Master of Magic and Master of Orion. Besides, I knew that it had some blatant AI cheat bugs in it which somewhat put me off the game. (Plus asking price!)

The manual there is for Civilisation III and an expansion. I can’t remember too much about this one. Civilisation IV was the last of the series to allow doomstacks, where you’d have 20+ tanks and artillery on a square that would batter anything around.

Civilisation V re-engineered most of the movement systems and eliminated the doomstack. I should probably know more about Civilisation VI !

Looks pretty. They’ve steadily evolved the gameplay in the series from eliminating doomstacks, including Civic progression, adding a Culture route to victory and expanding how cities work.

I did enjoy playing the original, enjoyed playing MoM and Moo2 more (these will be in a later post)

I think that’s it for this one, the internet spaceship seat is calling. I haven’t done much in the stars lately … it feels due :-).

PS I do like the jumper.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 1 – To Mars via A-Wing ?

by Sleepypete

December 1, 2020

7:02 pm

Comments Off on Advent 2020 Day 1 – To Mars via A-Wing ?

Uncategorized

advent, books, games, lego

Hello everyone,

It begins … And it seems, as always, where there is a plan, there is a plan that’s undoubtedly going to change immediately ! The Advent Plan this year is going to include the Star Wars Lego Stuff (the calendar looked great this year and had an excellent start) and games. But I’m going to deviate slightly from that already. What’s behind day 1 ?

There we go. Usual suspects in there (covering up the wall !), plus one I made earlier and today’s model which was a dinky little A Wing. They do marvellous things with the advent calendar models. I think that’s actually a better looking A Wing than the bigger one. I haven’t acquired the Ultimate Collectors Series A Wing though, it’s a bit expensive at £180 and to be honest, with the X Wing game, it wasn’t my favourite ship to fly. Still, nice concept with a pilot ideally placed at the centre of rotation and two massive engines for speed.

What’s the book there ? I have a memorium as part of this post … One of the authors I grew up with died yesterday of covid complications. His name was Ben Bova. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of his books, although with all authors as prolific as him, the quality does go up and down. It’s a hell of a bibliography and I’m just realising that there are a lot of books to go there that I haven’t read (linky).

Highlights include the Orion series, which started with a lovely concept of a Protagonist and Antagonist who were at opposite ends of their stories. One was stepping forwards in time, the other was stepping backwards. They would meet at certain nexus points in history, where mankind could have died out if not for an intervention. Central to the series were a race of hyperadvanced Creators, who would be our long distant followers (what’s the opposite to Ancestor ?) Ah ha ! Descendants. To ensure their survival, they had to protect their ancestors … and they made Orion their agent. As he goes backwards in time, he learns more about the origins of the conflict and how his feeling about it develop is exceptionally well written. I think the strongest of these was Orion 3, Orion in the Dying Time, which put Orion in the period where the dinosaurs died out and homo sapiens took over. There are events here on a cosmic scale.

And then there’s Orion 2, which saw our character moving through the stories of the sieges of Troy and Jericho with a little bit of Egypt too. He inherits a mercenary band of Hittite Engineers from an Empire that had crumbled to dust as the story begins.

They’re usually great stories of epic adventure and his specialty was near future Earth, such as the story of the first Moon colony and an incredibly tense race to independence in Millennium. There’s also Messianic Nanotechnology in Voyager and … the two Mars books. (I should read the other Grand Tour books at some point).

There have been plenty of Mars books and they tell their tales in their own ways. This time, we have a multinational, multirace crew inhabiting a temporary base on Mars. Bit like The Martian, perhaps double the size. They have Hydrogen fuel cell rovers and power armour. And a precautionary tale for what can happen if your vitamin supply gets neutralised by pure oxygen … One notable thing is that for the second book, Return To Mars, they convert the rovers to Methane because the Hydrogen leaks out (the molecules are too small) which might be a precautionary tale for the moves to fuel cell technology today …

Anyway. Great author, I enjoyed most of the books he wrote (variance in quality is ok !). I’m tempted to read Mars again and I was chuckling away at a Remember story written by R.A. Salvatore that was posted on Farcebook yesterday. Need to read more of his books.

To the game … I’m still addicted to Mars Horizon. Yep.

I left the last Mars Horizon post with the people getting to the Moon …

I managed to get back there again last night in record time. I’m hunting achievements again … It’s going to be tricky to get all of the achievements but I’m enjoying having them as targets along the way while I play this lovely new game that they’ve given us. It’s a little marvel.

The graphics are a little simplified and cartoony but they look great and don’t get in the way. You could probably successfully play this game on pretty old hardware and it would still look good. It doesn’t need great graphics to do its thing. The gameplay is very simple as well. You choose the research and the missions and there is a resource token puzzle minigame that determines how well the missions go.

It gives you these little cutscenes along the way too. I’ve only played Japan and half of NASA so far, so I’m looking forward to seeing the other rockets and devices from ESA, USSR/Russia and China.

Yes. I will always make that joke given chance.

This made me chuckle as well. It was a tiny little sampling rocket fired off from a Mars lander, designed to bring Martian surface material back to Earth. Could this happen with our science ? Probably not. I did enjoy seeing it in game though.

A curious base. Bit small for my liking. I think the best starter base I know of for Mars has to be the one in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, where engineer Nadia carves out an underground (for radiation protection) base at the landing spot. Of all the stories in the Mars books, that’s the one I enjoyed the most.

The Mars mission in Mars Horizon feels very much one way … but that’s ok for game things. I think the Transit Spacecraft plus Lander Vehicle and Ascent Vehicle model is more like the way to go.

I think that’s it for me for today !

Lovely little A-Wing model;

Sad at the loss of Ben Bova, possibly the author I read most (after Anne McCaffrey) in my teenage/young adult years;

Vastly enjoying Mars Horizon.

Hopefully this will be a good December’s worth of posts and I won’t start burning out on them like I have in previous years …

Stay safe, be well.

(PS I should say a couple of words for the drama in the Vendee Globe over the last couple of days … maybe tomorrow ! Good to see one definitely safe and the other travelling to safety)

Quiet week with spaceships and Lego

by Sleepypete

August 1, 2020

11:10 pm

Comments Off on Quiet week with spaceships and Lego

Uncategorized

games, geeky, internet spaceship, lego, stayathome

Hello everyone,

I’ve been having a quiet week … a bit of time away from the work stuff and to see about catching up on sleep and other non stressy things.

Cardiff happened on Wednesday, more about that in a bit (but the thumbnail will give some away!). Shopping has happened today, although it included what’s probably best described as a milk mishap. Not quite a disaster, although I was mopping up milk from the boot of the car and my kitchen floor. Looks like only a little bit escaped, which was good. (It got squeezed in the shopping bag enough to pop the seal).

There we go. More of that box in the background in a bit. (More Lego may have escaped as well …)

Been watching the cricket too, there’s been a fair bit of that this week … rain permitting.

Cardiff was ok on Wednesday. I feel it’s probably inevitable that we’re about to see a second wave of Covid cases coming in now in the UK. We never properly got close to eliminating it (getting a below 100 case in a day level), it’s trending slightly upwards again and mask discipline was shocking on Wednesday. Perhaps 1 in 3, maybe 1 in 4 people were in masks. I didn’t stick around for munchies like I would normally have done, although that was partly due to wanting to get back for more of the Kim & Becky crafting stream. It’s a good chilled out stream to listen in to as Kim facilitates and Becky produces magic.

Lots of games have been occurring this week, although I’ve been a little limited by my shoulder … I think I may have actually popped it out slightly this week, although it has improved again today. There’s been a load of music listening too :-).

I played a little Final Fantasy XIV last weekend, although that’s suffered a bit with the shoulder. I can’t show to latest screenshot because the gear system has given my poor punchy catgirl something nearly indecent.

I’ve skipped ahead a little with the Internet Spaceships and I may come back to those but this was Tea-89 on her way back to the bubble, this one is a slightly processed image by the way with “Auto White Balance” picked to make everything more visible. Looks great.

I did want to be doing something different to exploration though and this is Tea-89 returning to the hangars at Jameson Memorial.

I had a chance to give the Admiral Luperza an updated paint scheme, although the shoulder meant I didn’t want to indulge in combat just yet …

So the Towel of Space made her debut. The name and colour scheme are in honour of the wonderful Katherine of Sky (youtube link), another lady of the videos who has a lovely voice with great intelligence and style behind it. When she does streaming, she has a strict no face camera policy but did start up a Cat Cam, with a towel bed for her kitties to lie on while the camera pointed at them.

The kitties appeared to know when the camera was on …

So chat started up the cult of the Towel Of Sky and a new meme was born. The callsign for this ship is CAT404, or Cat Not Found. I’ll name one in honour of the other Lord Of Sky, Caledorn (youtube link) at some point. He hasn’t been making many videos lately but I’ve been enjoying listening to him as I catch up on other series.

There’s Towel of Space hard at work amongst the asteroids, collecting Painite which can fetch prices of around 630,000-700,000 credits per tonne. That’s not as much as it used to be but it’s still probably the most profitable activity in the game at the moment. Plus I think it’s ok for my hands too as there is less interaction with the controls.

The other high value methods are either broken (Low Temperature Diamonds are extremely rare at the moment due to a bug) or very fussy in their mechanics. I mine by finding good asteroids and blasting at them with lasers (very simple), the game now includes methods for drilling into asteroids and blowing them apart for shinies hidden inside. That seems very fussy and I haven’t tried it yet.

I’ve actually enjoyed the mining, it’s been a different activity than the exploring and is definitely easier than the combat.

I mentioned pictures of Lego though … That’s what was in the box.

It was fun to see a picture frame take shape, including having a prop at the back.

A shape steadily takes …. shape.

More detail appears …

And I suspect you know what this soon became …

There we go. This was one of the new Brick Sketches that have just been released. I enjoyed putting this one together last night when I was a bit too warm to do much else.

And 2d vs 3d !

I’ve been eyeing up the LED light up kits as well. One or more of those may appear at some point.

I’ve also still got my eye on a Hotas upgrade, I’ve enjoyed taking an early look at Automation :

Nice little Triumph Spitfire analogue there. It doesn’t have quite the body customisation options that I was looking for but the engine and mechanicals customisation is incredible even if it isn’t going to go as far as doing Hybrids, Diesels or Rotary/Wankel engines. I may well acquire the BeanNG.Drive application that lets you drive your creations around.

Anyway, back to a bit more chillout for me this evening.

Nite all, stay safe, be well.