Terraria
Digging into the pixels in my text editor to make a cosy home for notes about pixel art-powered game Terraria along with links to Terraria videos from the HyperTextHero Twitch livestream: 1
2024-12-20
For a more comfortable user interface, when in-game click on Settings on the bottom-right and increase Zoom and UI Scale.
Hold Left Ctrl to see a preview of placement. Cut with axe, dig with pick, etc.
Press Esc to open inventory and build a workbench by right-clicking on its icon in the crafting menu on the left of the screen. When near the workbench other items appear in the crafting menu. For example, build many arrows by right-clicking on their icons continuously, then left-click on the inventory slots on the top of the screen to place them in your inventory.
Cut some trees and build a house (walls, roof, door) as soon as you can for protection from enemies, especially zombies and other abominations that come in the night. Build by dragging the wood to the top inventory bar, then press the number corresponding to the wood and left-click on the screen to build. Don’t worry, you can plant more trees.
Build background walls to complete a house (they look like a brown 4-block square).
If you add a table and chairs an NPC will move in who you can give you tips (right-click on the NPC, select Crafting, drag an item from your inventory to the Place a material here slot to see what you can build with it.)
Thanks UK_Oxide for many of these tips, and to Mike P for joining me in my first coop Terraria game!
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Thursday, 19 December 2024
Cooperative Video Games
Cooperation is a human superpower, especially in video games. Here’s a list of good ones I’ve played, with the number of players supported, in alphabetical order. =todo Make tables sortable
And here are some cooperative video games I hear are good, with how many players each support, that I haven’t tried yet:
| Coop Game Name | Number of Players |
|---|---|
| Baldur’s Gate 3 | 4, 8 with mod |
| Bellwright | 4 |
| Enshrouded | 16 |
| Fury Unleashed | 2 |
| Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light | 2 |
| No More Room In Hell 2 | 8 |
| Nuclear Option | 16 |
| Path of Exile 2 | 6 |
| Portal 2 | 2 |
| Remnant: From the Ashes 1, 2 | 3 |
| Rimworld | 8 with mod |
| Risk of Rain 1, 2 | 4 |
| River City Ransom | 2 |
| Satisfactory | 4 |
| Streets of Rogue 1, 2 | 4 |
| Wartales | 4 |
| Windblown | 3 |
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Drone Dream
Strange noise and wind. London? Hyde Park? Small, quick moving forms darting in the sky. Missiles from The Culture or Dune? Mini F-14 Tomcats. Zipping past me, one, two of them. They’re causing the noise and the wind? Rumbling, crumbling walls. Curled up earth. Maybe playing War Thunder test flights versus fast Mig-15s and reading about the intersection of AI and robotics brought these flying things to this dream? Phone tracking. RF (radio frequencies). Faraday cage around phone to hide it. Person-shaped small killer drone comes in through window, towards Last Known Location of phone. It approaches someone else. I sneak up on the drone to destroy it.
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Wednesday, 18 December 2024
Manual Automatic Transmission Rage
Having experience with both manual and automatic transmission, I’d argue manual is more difficult but gives you more control, especially for slowing down safely using low gears, and makes you focus on driving rather than the beverage placed in a drink holder or your friends’ messages in the screen of your phone as you careen past a red light into a busy intersection or pedestrians waiting for a bus.
7 years in heavy traffic in São Paulo to and from school with my dad cursing, and driving an hour and a half each way to a job in Rome for a year made me familiar with the rage on the road.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas helped transfer mine to video games then, and I have since kept the promise I made to myself that I’d never drive in traffic regularly to go to work again.
Living in a rural area now, I reluctantly co-own a car, but still think the things are best in video games like Grand Theft Auto, and that spending hours at a time in them, separated from others inside their own machines feet away from you in heavy traffic, driving in a city, is a form of insanity.
Just rambling on a Wednesday here, putting this post up as a place to write down more automobile stories from real life and virtual worlds, and to expand on a comment made over at Rock Paper Shotgun.
Further information on the effects of cars or the lack of them:
- Not Just Bikes YouTube channel.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
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Tuesday, 17 December 2024
- Moon ✶
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Always exciting to see articles by Bartosz Ciechanowski, masterful interactive physics demonstrations, joining my news feed orbit.
The Moon may be just an unassuming neighbor in the sky, but its presence affects our lives in many subtle ways. When it reflects sunlight off its scarred surface to guide the way in the darkness of night, or as it breathes life into oceans by rhythmically raising tides, or when it cloaks the Sun in a rare and awe-inspiring total solar eclipse, the Moon reminds us of the celestial world right outside of the safe confines of our planet.
Monday, 16 December 2024
HTML Playing Card Suit Symbols
♠ Spades
♠
♠
♥ Hearts
♥
♥
♣ Clubs
♣
♣
♦ Diamonds
♦
♦
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- ESAK ✶
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These types of labels can only be rough approximations at best due to the 2-dimensional nature of x-axis and y-axis graphs, but they’re still useful, so here’s my Bartle taxonomy questionnaire result:
You are 87% Explorer
What Bartle says:
♠ Explorers delight in having the game expose its internal machinations to them. They try progressively esoteric actions in wild, out-of-the-way places, looking for interesting features (ie. bugs) and figuring out how things work. Scoring points may be necessary to enter some next phase of exploration, but it’s tedious, and anyone with half a brain can do it. Killing is quicker, and might be a constructive exercise in its own right, but it causes too much hassle in the long run if the deceased return to seek retribution. Socialising can be informative as a source of new ideas to try out, but most of what people say is irrelevant or old hat. The real fun comes only from discovery, and making the most complete set of maps in existence.
You are also:
♥ 60% Socialiser
♦ 47% Achiever
♣ 7% Killer
This result may be abbreviated as ESAK.
Richard Bartle on text:
If there was some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination…Well, there is. It’s called text, and it’s been around several thousand years.
One example of the value of a sprinkle of text added on top of an existing video game: A text message about seeing footsteps headed in a rough direction with estimated number of people in the group popping up in the user-made Arma 3 mission Pilgrimage added so much drama and interesting decisions to the game.
Sunday, 15 December 2024
Fight Flight!
A series of videos of flying machines dueling in video game flight simulation situations. It’s HyperTextHero’s Fight Flight!
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Saturday, 14 December 2024
- Waveform visualizer ✶
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Nice OBS plugin to show waveforms of the audio source of your choice on your livestream.
And by the way, closed captions now work again twitch.tv/hypertexthero. I had, uh, treated this plugin with unattention or disregard since building Interwebs Communotron 2023, but I now have rectified the situation by making sure it is installed.
Friday, 13 December 2024
Deep Rock Galactic
Control, this is Hyper.
I’ll be playing this tense 1st person coop action game called Deep Rock Galactic about digging for treasures hidden in bug-filled asteroids with my friend Artwo and others over time, and keeping links to DRG livestream vods on YouTube right here for accessing via the tendrils of interspacial communications:
I’d started playing on the Xbox Gamepass thing as we were given a free couple of months of service, but it was too difficult to take screenshots, so when the free trial was up we both bought the game on sale on Steam and started again from scratch.
The game’s main idea and gameplay loop is similar to Helldivers 2. You select a difficulty and a mission, are shot down to an asteroid, complete the mission and secondary objects, and then need to extract, while fighting off bugs.
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Tuesday, 10 December 2024
- Satellite Tracker 3D ✶
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There’s a lot of satellites in orbit around Earth.
Sunday, 8 December 2024
- New emotes ✶
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Plus links on most emote images to the inspiration for each one.
Saturday, 7 December 2024
Crop video with Photoshop
Here’s how to crop or cut the width and height of a video to make it smaller using Photoshop.
- Open the video with Photoshop.
- Click Window → Timeline if the Timeline window does not appear on the bottom of the screen.
- Press c to activate the crop tool and click and drag on the video to select the area to crop.
- Click on the swooshy ➦ arrow on the bottom left of the Timeline window, select preferred render settings and click the Render button to save it in a format of your choice.
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Wednesday, 4 December 2024
- Genie 2 ✶
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Artificial intelligence model for making playable game worlds with controllable characters to train AI further.
Today we introduce Genie 2, a foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied agents. Based on a single prompt image, it can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs.
Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Their engaging nature, unique blend of challenges, and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.
Sounds good for prototyping, but like most things, editing, or choosing, is key.
Who knows where we’ll be in 5–10 years. There’ll be good video games, but hopefully not in a world like Ready Player One’s.
Tuesday, 3 December 2024
- Ko-fi tips ✶
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Things have been getting more expensive as I now need to pay for caretakers for my mom, so I’ve set up a digital mug for tips, after researching several options.
Ko-fi is a nice company, I receive 95% of the amount given, and appreciate anything received very much.
Monday, 2 December 2024
- Dying is a form of education ✶
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Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing about Elden Ring at Harper’s Magazine:
One of the insights underpinning FromSoftware’s games is a recognition of the opportunity that the medium presents—an opportunity not for narrative simplicity, as it has been seen in the past, but for a new kind of complexity, a centerless, centrifugal form of storytelling, defined by discontinuity and uncertainty and yet, at the same time, propulsion and accessibility.
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