Xerol Oplan

My update may or may not have been delayed by the game's update but also I'm working on a webpage version of the update since 10 images per post is going to mean a dozen posts to post all the screenshots I took. Also I feel it's going to be very important to have the full update posted before I post the save, for reasons that will become obvious once it's posted. Here's a bit of a teaser: e: I'll try to have the writeup posted at least to the point where I can post the save before the weekend. Also We have #df registered on espernet now. Come join us for .34 discussion and cat-based framerate puns.

Two squads of five are assigned. One squad of melee fighters stands guard at the gate while the marksdwarves run out and attack the speargoblins. The remainder of the dwarves are told to take refuge in the dining hall while the remaining goblin threat is dispatched. The fight is on. ---- I was going to do season-by-season posts, but there was so much in the initial situation that I decided to post the first day now. The rest of Spring will probably be posted today at some point.

[Note: Any opinions on previous overseers are purely those of the character being portrayed and not that of myself. But seriously, what the hell is with those stone traps] [also note I'm still uploading the images so you may need to refresh about 15 minutes after this post] Click images for big The diary of Xerol Ducimgidthur, Overseer of Prisonshanks, Year 255 1st Granite I can't remember anything. This isn't entirely true. I know, for a fact, that I've recently had excellent food and drink, and I have my own personal dining room and bedroom of excellent quality, which includes a very fine table. Despite a recently satiated appetite, I still feel cravings for the finest fisher berries and Longland beer, items which seem to be in short supply around here. It has come to my attention that I have been chosen to run this Armok-forskaen place while the mayor is incapacitated. My first order of business would have been to investigate the reasons behind the mayor's injuries, but first I am struck by the need to check over the work assignments. My gut is never wrong about these things. The amount of overlap in assignments which would be best served by single dwarves is astounding. Clearly the previous mayor has mismanged things so badly that the investigation of his near-demise is suddenly of lower priority, and I am now much more eager to take on the job of seeing the fortress through its next year. The first task is to ensure that all managerial duties are run through myself, and that I have no other tasks to distract me from those duties. Focus then turns to reassigning duties to all dwarves to ensure most efficient use of resources. Before this can be done, I require an office. I have commandeered a very well-engraved office on the third floor from which to issue the orders necessary to fix the many problems present here. A stone table, wooden chair, and plenty of space to spread out the large piles of paperwork that will be piling up in the coming months. A single shoe is on my chair, apparently forbidden for any to touch. Once the more pressing issues have been addressed, I will commission silver furniture for all offices. Of top priority is reorganizing the workshop spaces into a more efficient form. Ideally this would have been planned properly from the beginning, but as I only have one year to bring the fortress into order, more immediate solutions are required. This will require some digging, so I request a meeting with anyone who has mining skills. Five dwarves claim to be miners in some fashion, but only two show any real skill at the matter. Their other duties are removed; we have lost a skilled butcher and a skilled gem setter, but our food needs are well-met for the coming years and the export of goods is of low priority at the moment. The digging of new work areas is ordered. I have selected a site in the southeastern corner of our designated territory, a small hill replete with minerals and in close proximity to the river which should afford us a more easily defended location. A plan is laid out, complete with removing excess material on the exterior to make the location more defensible. As a large amount of stone will be extracted by the skilled miners, I have also ordered several mason's shops to be put into place to turn the freshly mined stone into blocks, which should also improve the masons' skills. Which takes us on to the next stage of reassigning work: The masons. The ridiculous number of engravers combined with the complete lack of any masonry skill is just more evidence of prior mismanagement. These masons will have no other jobs until they have become well-skilled in masonry and their hands needed elsewhere. The "fair-handed" division of labor present previously has led to many of our citizens being of low skill in a large number of trades, rather than highly-skilled in a smaller number. More masons may be assigned in the future (for the large construction projects that are only beginning to take shape in my mind) but for now, training these three will be the order of things. Although our food and beverage situation appears to be rather stable, I am looking over those assignments next. The first part of this is assessing the livestock situation. A number of animals had been marked as 'available for adoption', which would make their potential as dinner severely diminished. The exisiting pasture is far too small for this number of animals, so a new one will be assigned outside the new entrance as soon as is practicable. The farming situation seems much more tenable, but we appear to have an overstock of plants, and our current alcohol supplies will not even last one season. Our best brewer has been given the task of doing nothing but processing these excess plants into palatable alcohol, while the other, lesser brewers are removed from that duty. Next up is assigning the specific duties of planting, butchery, tanning, and cooking to the best we have. And overviewing the cooking assignments. The plants are reserved for brewing-only, and the use of drinks in preparing meals is forbidden. The supply of empty barrels for brewing is fairly low, so woodworking skills are examined next. One dwarf already has legendary carpentry skills, so the others are removed from that job. Wood supplies are also fairly low, so the woodcutter situation is also adjusted, and more trees designated for cutting. After some further job reassignments, it is now time to assess the military situation. We appear to have a single squadron of goblins bearing down on the closed front door, and some kind of "anyone who has two hands or even one hand or maybe a leg" situation appears to have been instated with regards to the military. We appear to have ample supplies of weapons and armor, but none were assigned to any of our existing military. The existing squads were removed and new squads with proper uniforms have been created. [continued in next post due to image limit]

Put me down for an overseer role. What kind of time limit will there be for playing your year? More often than not I've had SGs die on me when someone doesn't show up for their turn and no one's sure how much time to give them before passing it off to someone else. I guess it's about time I updated to .25 and the latest version of Therapist; I've been running .23 and the version of Therapist that was out at that release. Does Therapist still crash if you try to turn off beekeeping? Also you may need to prod me in IRC about this since I rarely come to these forums anymore.

I'm working on a custom map, can anyone help me out with finding a place to test it?

BTW, if anyone has any good quality video/audio/photos of just about anything, PM me so I can give you the FTP info.

Ok, I'll clear things up here. (1) We cannot possibly 'make' any more badges. This is due to the Fire Code and the overall capacity of the hotel. (2) To TRANSFER a badge (I believe the badge must have already been paid for), you need to contact Eli. I'm not sure if he wants his email given out so either PM me or get on the MAGFest IRC: http://magfest.org/irc (3) To transfer a hotel room, you should call the hotel. We can't do anything about that.

The overflow hotel block was extended again; this always happens, without fail, every year. The hotel allots a certain number of rooms, we fill it, they add more rooms, repeat. Above all else, check the website and even after that call the hotel. (Except for the Hilton, that's actually overbooked right now.)

Last year everything was shifted forward a day; things kick in on Thursday (I think around noon but don't quote me on that) and end on Sunday, like M6-7 were. I'm arriving Wednesday and leaving Monday but I'm also setting up/tearing down tons of stuff.

I picked this up on my own let's get some multiplayer going.

I'm heading down with the MAGFest crew again.

Bands & guests announced!

I'm working on editing M8 video: Also since the old thread got axed here it is again: We don't have any good cameras this year, and I would like to borrow a few if anyone has any they don't mind lending out for a few hours. We especially need panel coverage so if you just want to operate your own camera in a panel room all day that's fine too, just drop by and give us a copy. Any equipment we borrow I'll take personal responsibility for and probably buy you a pizza or something too.

I know nothing about most players outside of the AFC North, there's just too many people to keep track of. It takes like 30 seconds a week to make pickem picks.

Fantasy's just too complicated for me, I wish there was some kind of game between the complexity of pickem and fantasy. So what's up with the turnout this year?

New track from last night's JHCompo: http://xerol.org/h/file/921 This is going to be part 3 of the final battle. I really had fun with this, especially with the time signature change (5/4 section that runs from about 1:08 to 2:06). Might transpose it depending on where the surrounding tracks fall and I'm not 100% happy with the tempo (even changed it four times during the compo). This brings the total up to 37/67 tracks, so 30 to go. I'd say at least 10 and maybe as many as 15 of those are variations on other tracks or short pieces (think game over, etc.), so another month or two of compo cycles and I'll be nearly done with the first runthrough. Edit: Might as well respond to some comments while I'm at it. Most of what I've done to the soundfonts is simple layering. I have a base FL project that I'll make slight variations on, a final track will have between 60 and 80 soundfont instances (but only 7-10 actual note tracks). Using this base project is something I need to go back and re-do several older tracks with. Even if the tracks themselves are in somewhat different styles they mesh a lot better when they're all done with the same setup of tracks/effects. As far as humanizing goes, I just kind of go with whatever. It's almost all been velocity editing (and velocity slides) and in several cases there's copied/pasted patterns that I should go over again and modify a bit in the variations. This is especially glaring in the percussion where most projects only have 3-4 drum patterns that just repeat, but generally I only put in just enough percussion to enhance whatever else is there so it's not as noticeable as it could be. As I said above I did have a bit of fun with the time signature change in the latest track so I might try to do that a bit more. One of the biggest challenges is making things loop properly, I haven't found a sound library yet that'll read cues out of an ogg file so I can't set a loopback point inside the track so it has to loop end-to-end. In most cases this means cutting out a proper intro and having the opening sections as more of a bridge, especially where the pattern ends on a diminished chord instead of a I (or i, in most cases). It's the latter in the first two battle themes, the former in The Aeroduct (that initial flute is also the closure of the final pattern). Edit 2: Finished up the Final Battle (Part 3) for now: http://xerol.org/h/file/923

Oops, the right number is 22150. Fixed.

Pretty sure this is the fifth year, at least. http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/pickem Group ID: 22150 Password: entropy9 Picks are set to be locked 5 minutes before each game, so if you miss a Thursday game you're not screwed for the week. We're playing against the spread, and yahoo pick'em has now added PLAYOFFS, so I've enabled that as well. Good luck and happy pickins! edit: Is anyone interested in a money league? $5 a person, winner takes all unless there's more than 10 people then we can split it 70/30 for 1st/2nd.

Most of these started out as compo tunes. I've been working on and off on this OST for nearly 8 years but most of it's been done in the last year and I'm seriously considering going back and re-doing everything prior to last summer as it just doesn't fit in with the style of the newer tracks I've been doing. A few other notes before I get to the tracks: I've made a stylistic choice to keep the sound quality lower than it could be. I'm still doing the best quality renders I can and a bit of mastering across the board (at least once it's done). But the sounds themselves are primarily Squidfont and other free soundfonts, so not the highest quality sounds available. This is (partially) intentional. The style of graphics and gameplay in the game are more akin to the PSX than newer systems, even though the game will be for PC. (I say partially intentional because I don't really have much better sounds available to me at the moment, being unemployed and all.) The game itself is a TRPG much like Final Fantasy Tactics (and a bit like other TRPGs, but more like FFT than others). Turns are doled out character-by-character rather than team-by-team, and the main thing that's going to set this apart from other TRPGs is the seamless nature of the world. Rather than moving icons around a map and then zooming to battlefields you'll move around the map in a formation, dispatching enemies continually rather than having individual battles. I made a very quick-and-dirty engine demo a couple years ago, and more recently started working on a new engine of slightly better quality. Here's some terrain shots from the new engine: And the old engine with temporary character models: As I said above, I'm not going for current-gen graphics because I know I can't pull it off in a reasonable amount of time (or budget) so it's intentionally styled as an older console RPG would be. The music has been molded to fit this style as well. So it's about time I posted some: Start off with a battle theme. And then more battle music. And of course you're going to win the battle, so there has to be victory music. (This one's still wip-ish). An example of where I've already gone back and redone a piece once, and am going to need to again: Overworld theme (2004-2006) Overworld theme (2008) Overworld theme (current version) And I know I still need to do more work on it to fit it in with the other recent tracks. Anyway, moving on: Villain's theme. The 'lighter' section isn't finished here and this isn't actually his main theme in the game, just something to loop behind a cutscene. Boss battle, also a variation on the title screen theme. Now nearing the end of the game, you enter The Floating Fortress and then cross The Aeroduct. First is just a general area theme while the second is for fighting a succession of minibosses as you approach the final area. And then there's one part of the final battle half-done. I tried to mash the main theme in there a bit and it didn't quite work out, so I'm going to give that another go soon. I also need to make it a bit longer before it loops since a 1:04 loop is a bit lame for a final battle. These mp3s are just the ones I've made mp3 versions of. In the main game everything's a looping ogg file, so when I make a track I primarily just make the ogg and don't worry about mp3s unless it's for a compo. Here's the tracklist as of a couple weeks ago (add "64 - Meeting the Mastermind" to this and it's basically where I stand today): About half of these need to be re-done to the current "sound" standard, but I've got 35/68 done and I know what I need to make to fill in the gaps as well (the whole story and soundtrack have been planned out basically forever, and I've even got concept sketches of most of the maps/areas too). The only thing I'm really missing (besides free time and/or a stash of cash so I can spend my time coding instead of earning money) is a visual artist for doing 3D models and animating them. I've picked up so much doing this project, however, that I might even start doing that myself at some near future point. Most of the mp3s (and oggs) are tagged with "2010" as the date, but I doubt I'll even get the soundtrack completely done this year, although if I add one track a week I'll come close to at least filling it out. So, yeah, feedback appreciated. I'll update this thread as I add new stuff.

Well it's probably best that no one made it out to my party, I was working until 5am the night before and again from 8-2 in the morning, then took a nap, so I didn't get started until 4, and by then my brother's friends showed up, and by 5am the cops had shown up at least once. I was still fishing beer pong cups out of the pool today, among other things, so I couldn't make it over to Stevo's either. Oh well, see you at magfest, right?

I might be able to come but the main reason mine's not on Sunday is because I'm probably busy most of that day.

Ok I'm having a party/cookout on the FRIDAY of Otakon this year (that's July 30). I can't have it on Sunday as my parents are getting back from vacation that day, and I've already got plans for Saturday. To accommodate as many people as possible, and because I don't want too too many people over at the same time, I'm having it from Noon to 2am. If you've been to my place before, you're explicitly invited, if not, please send me a PM. I'm completely broke so please bring something. A 6-pack (or equivalant), some kind of meat/side dish, or $5 is what I'm asking for. Try to coordinate if you're not going to bring cash so I don't end up with enough beer to last me into September (seriously this happened last year, I had to empty the keg into the street before it exploded from gas expansion). Wine is also nice to bring. I might not have enough cash to buy the right things in advance so if you know you'll be attending and won't have a chance to pick up something, consider sending 5 bucks via my paypal: xerol at xerol.org. I'm personally providing a certain amount of meat (determined by cash-on-hand on the 29th), including hamburger and hot dogs; condiments; buns/bread; and some vegetables (both for grilling and fixins). If you're going to pick something up, I recommend going to the Mars supermarket here. Prices there are generally better and they support local food producers. (Do NOT go to Superfresh or Giant.) This is also about a mile south of my house to get a general idea of where you'll be going. I can ferry people to/from light rail which is accessible directly outside the BCC, but may not run after 11pm or midnight, so if you're coming late make sure you have a way to get back to whereever you're staying. If you are coming, regardless of whether you've come before, please PM me your phone number. I'll respond with mine and the address. I've recently lost a lot of numbers due to dropping my phone and having to reset it. My number's changed a few times over the last 2 years as well so this just makes sure everyone has up-to-date contact information. I probably won't be online during the BBQ so you MUST be able to reach me by phone if you have questions.

We're back tomorrow night at 8:30pm EDT. Still trying to find a co-host as everyone keeps BAILING on me.

Yeah I need a much better mic. I might be able to borrow one for tomorrow. The beer is yuengling. I don't know if I'll have beer tomorrow, depends on whether or not my paycheck has cleared the bank yet, or if a co-host can bring some. Thunderstorms were rolling through my area tonight and there's a forecast for more tomorrow. If there's basically any rain going on within 40 miles of where I am my internet connection becomes completely useless. I may have to postpone or record/upload the show tomorrow. I didn't really spend that much time pre-playing the game, only about 15 minutes on the first couple of levels to get an idea for the controls and gameplay. It's a little bit of preparation that lets me get more game-time in the show's slot rather than spending 15 minutes figuring out what button does what. Also I found the MAGICAL HOLY DVD OF ALL ROMS that had been missing before and therefore limiting me to the US-released NES games I had on my hard drive. After Air Fortress, I'm going to do a run through of Toy Story for Genesis. It's not a particularly obscure or rare game, but something I haven't played since I was playing games on cartridges and a bit of nostalgia I want to go back to. Tomorrow's show is at 8:30pm EDT. I think people are turning off at break because it's usually after 10pm by then and people have work/etc. the next day, so hopefully I can play an hour, take 5 minutes off, and come back with people still watching. Can a mod please edit the title to say "Tuesdays @ 8:30pm"? Thanks

In which I get pretty drunk...