The abyss of the darkness

Little work on the next update of Beyond the Beyond has gotten done over the last week. I have completed Robin's run through Dark Wizard though so, uh, hurray? All the videos have been uploaded but I haven't written captions for the last video so it is still private at this time. I'm planning on finishing up the solo Rune run next so Beyond the Beyond is on semi-haitus while I work on that.

So I have a Surface 3 that I've been using as a portable workstation because when I leave for the day the things that need to get done don't suddenly stop needing to get done. I also have a Surface stylus pen and it's been pretty handy. It is way more convenient than having to pack a mouse for my tablet. The work I do is mostly text. (And if you couldn't guess that then uh I guess you're new around here?)

So Microsoft in it's infinite wisdom decided to roll out an update to Office 365 a week or so ago that changed the default behavior of the pen to ink mode.

Without any way to turn ink mode OFF. It used to be a toggle. This makes the stylus pen totally useless in Office if you're not drawing and given that most of the applications in the Office suite are built for large amounts of typing and text formatting there isn't a whole lot drawing going on. I'm sure somebody out there does do drawing in Office. I just don't happen to be part of that group. I personally used it as a mouse and a pointer because the stylus pen is way more accurate than the trackpad. In fact I still use it that way in other applications like Dreamweaver. Some buttons and drop-down menus are simply too small for finger taps and I have rather small fingers!

Now when Office 365 auto-updates it has never notified me of that fact. It just updates in the background and goes on its merry little way. You can imagine my surprise and anger when I settled down with Word and found the pen wasn't working as it had been. Cue two hours of trying to figure out what setting I accidentally changed. I had to go to Microsoft's support forums to find out what was wrong. (Good thing I already knew how to do that!)

I'm not the only person upset at this change. There are plenty more right here at UserVoice expressing just how foolish this change was. At least it's already being walked back. We'll see how long it takes to fix this mess.

Updates have been rather slow lately haven't they? Yes they have. I've been working on episode 67 of Beyond the Beyond but work has been slow because it's another of those episodes where I do some plot filling and dialogue between smaller parts of the group so that the characters can relax, resolve plot threads, and just generally allow aspects of their personalities shine through that don't come up when they're dungeon crawling. Right at the moment that I'm typing this update I'm waiting for sundown, working on other stuff, because I have a night set to populate and there's too much glare while the sun is up. The finished update is probably going to be posted in two parts. It's already sitting at over 17k characters and Livejournal has a character limit that I think is about 20k.

As for Beyond the Beyond overall we're past the half-way point. Depending on how I pace the rest of the game we could actually be well past the halfway point. There are only 5 dungeons left in the game and one of those is optional (which means I'm definitely going to do it but we can't get there for some time). Of course one of those dungeons is the most hated in the game. If you've played Beyond the Beyond you probably know what I'm talking about.

I have given some preliminary thoughts about what the next project should be. I of course still have a mountain of tedious work left on Dark Wizard. I'll get that done one of these years. I don't have any plans for another video project. If I do another screenshot LP I'll use a shorter game. I'm not sure what that will be.

Okay so two quick updates about Beyond the Beyond.

First off I played for a good while yesterday. The team's up to 7 members now so if you want to see a particular character in action squawk now or forever hold your clucks. I am already trying to give each character screen time but the actual party configuration for the next set of dungeons is still undecided.

The second order of business is that I need to do some work on the back end. That means there might be some wonkiness and broken images. Just holler if something seems broken for too long 'cause it's easy to overlook stuff.

Oh yeah and I did finish my archive bing of Bob and George. About 3/4ths of the way through I was reminded of why time traveling didn't make me bat an eye when I was watching the first season of King Arthur & the Knights of Justice. Quite the contrary. I got a few episodes in and suddenly it dawned on me how everything could make sense. I really should get around to watching the second season one of these days. I have the show on DVD now so it's not like I have a real excuse.

EDIT

Behold the fruit of my labors (much of it probably pointless in terms of the LP but wevs)! Here are some before and afters from days of copy-pasting and organizing.


Click any of the images for the full size files.


There was one frame of Yeon I couldn't get. I'm still hoping to get more frames from the ork set and Dagoot hasn't shown up yet. Also that soldier sprite in the top right of the set has been a major pain in the butt because I've found all of one NPC with that sprite and they are of course standing partially in shadow. The nitpicky part of me would much prefer a way to get these with correct palettes directly from the game files or VRAM but going from screenshots ensures I won't have any problems using these sprites in any customized sets for the LP.

Every emulator has its quirks and ePSXe is no different. I have no intention of changing emulators or graphical plugins. For better and for worse I'll be sticking with the settings I decided on at the outset.


The third sheet started out as mostly empty space but has seen a lot of filling in. Just from casually playing the game it is easy to not notice how many frames of various sprites don't show up on screen without outright cheating.

Well it's December 1st and that means that National Novel Writing Month for 2015 has concluded. I ended up with a little over 87,000 words for the month and did get that 30 day badge. Yay! Now though comes the decompression part of the event where I'm tired and achy and drained and just want to do things that don't involve any brain power.

That's why I'm doubtfall there will be a new update for Beyond the Beyond this coming Sunday the 6th. I'll be working on it bit by bit but I'm not going to force myself to slap together something half-assed. Just figuring out things like where we are in the game and "Who are all you people?" will take a bit.

So today is day 20. At midnight the site's validator went live and progress bars at 50,000 words or more can turn purple. I validated a word count of 52,003 words this morning and am enjoying that lovely purple glow but the work is far from over. There are still more days in November. My goal now is to keep adding words to the pile until there's no more month. The novel sitll isn't remotely close to done even though it's gone through two NaNoWriMos now.

But at least something resembling an actual antagonist has shown up. Then ran off after a character who's not being followed in the interchanging narratives. I wanted to focus on what's going on throughout the city though and draw the narrative characters in gradually. Right now they've got other concerns.

So here we are on day 10 of this year's National Novel Writing Month. That's one third of the way through the month. To reach PAR for the day one must end with at least 18,333 words. I'm feeling pretty confident about meeting that goal seeing as how I crossed that number back on the 7th. Today I'm going for the next badge which sits at 25,000 words. My daily average thus far is 2,353 words but since I haven't clocked any in yet for the day my average is slightly skewed downwards.

Right now I'm sitting at 23,539 words. Since I'm doing a continuation of last year's novel when added to that the total reaches some 92,000 words (I don't have an exact count thus far because that includes things like a table of contents, section headers, and notation tags for comments). For the curious Beyond the Beyond's currently sitting at 244,516 words although again that number is a bit skewed because it's a total count that only exludes the end of update footers and so it does include the game's transcript. I have to admit that the end of act stuff piles on the words. Just doing the act summaries gets wordy!

In my last update I joked that nothing in the novel has exploded yet. Have no fear for I penciled in a car bomb into the narrative schedule. I'm highly doubtful the continuation will get that far though. It's sort of one of those things happening as a result of general unrest so I chucked it ahead in the timeline. It's place could easily change.