Binjovi

Yep. I'm using a combination of various texture and GUI replacements. What I use is my own custom mix grabbed from various different packs. The GUI and block textures come from Dokus's RPG texture pack while many of the icons come from the Painterly set. You can't see them in these shots, but I created my own bucket sprite as well since it seems very few people know how to sprite a decently-shaped bucket. If it's alright to do, I can zip up and post the stuff that I use in case anyone is interested. It's actually only 18 blocks tall. The floor on the inside is a block lower than the surrounding area, so it's 19 from in there.

Pictures: Looking up from the inside. From outside the entrance. A good vantage point from a hill.

Yeah, I'm a pretty good distance from the main area. You can't even see it with far draw distance on, so I shouldn't be running into anyone anytime soon. I would like to get the highway (or at least a path/road of some kind) to my place though. It'll probably take a lot of cobblestone.

Yeah, there's plenty of room. No worries. I've been slowly building a complex off on one of the main continent's peninsulas. The idea is to make a huge tree in a glass dome. It's looking good so far, but I need a whole lot more glass.

There is no secret underwater base. In other news, I hopped onto the server yesterday, but the game keeps crashing every five minutes or so, so I didn't really do anything. I'm not sure that I'll be able to build there if the server doesn't want me. Single player still works just fine. It's just multiplayer that's having trouble.

I lol'd at the dialogue in the final screenshot. At any rate, if they want to interpret Minecraft in that way, let them. Minecraft can be many different things for many different people, and this just proves that the game really is what you make of it. It's pretty awesome.

I just like having my own artwork in my avatar/signature. I like having something original even if they aren't all that amazingly well-done.

It may have much more flexible tools, and many more resources/materials for you to build with, but there is more to Minecraft than just building things with cubes. The graphics being the way they are makes Minecraft charming to many, myself included. Cube2 and Minecraft are wholly different things even if they share that in-game building aspect. Why more people don't play Cube2, I can't tell you. I can tell you that I prefer Minecraft over Cube2 because typically, the things that I make have a function. I don't just build a castle because I want to, I build one because I need to. There's also the satisfaction of building something with resources that you worked to gather. It just makes your structures more impressive when you created the tools, spent the time to find the blocks you needed, and built the thing brick by brick. Maybe Cube2 is like that also, and I just never found that aspect of the game....

You're not doing anything incorrectly. SE's updater takes forever on the first couple of patches. The rest should be a bit smaller. I was going to link you to some torrents of the updates to help speed you up, but SE finally told everyone to stop doing that, so you're just going to have to do it their way. Sorry. Also, I REALLY want to start another character on Figaro to play with all of you, but not only does it cost more money, I hardly have the time to play my main on Lindblum, much less a secondary. D=

A water source block is a block from which water constantly flows out. Any large, natural body of water in minecraft should be filled with such blocks. You can also find them stuck in holes throughout caves. A source water block simply looks like a full block of water, and unless it's contained, will "spill out" from that block. A water source block can be carried in a bucket. You can create an endless spring of water by digging a 2x2x1 (length x width x height) hole in the ground, and filling two opposite corners with a water source block (typically from the ocean). Creating such wells is great if you plan on farming, as you can expand if you need; without heading back to the ocean to grab more water. That's about as in-depth as I can be. It's really just as the name implies.

Until it's out of the alpha stage. I'm pretty sure not even Notch knows when that'll be just yet. He seems to have hit a few bumps with trying to officially start up his business. Still, it might be a good idea to buy sooner rather than later. Once he gets back into the swing of things—and with a team to boot—the progress will probably start to really pick up. Also, do we have an awesome OCR server yet? We really need one of those.

Lindblum is where my linkshell ended up, so that's where I'm going to be.

Yeah, I'm really digging this game so far. What I find most interesting is that I actually enjoy the crafting system. It seems like they're really trying to make crafting and gathering on-par with a war or magic class, and—aside from the obvious necessities they provide other classes—the announcement that you'll need crafters for certain quests, that they can form parties themselves to create large things, and the fact that attribute points are supposedly just as important for those classes as well, really shows how integral and interesting SE wants them to be.

We're also, like, 8 days away from release. While I'd like to think that they have some super-secret build behind closed doors, the likelihood of that being the case is very slim. I'm sure things will be improved upon when the game is released, but a lot of the complaints will go unanswered for a while still, methinks. By the release of the PS3 version, the game should be looking a little healthier.

Yeah, there are mods that do that. I'm sorry that I can't name any off the top of my head, as I've never really minded the level synching.

According to the manga (which is supposed to be canon), Samus was there watching as Ridley killed her parents. She was... 8 at the time, I think. If there's an 8-year-old that isn't traumatized by a giant dragon-dactyl murdering their family before their eyes, there's probably something seriously wrong with the kid anyway. This explains why she's shown as a child for a moment when confronted by Ridley too. I really don't see how that's trying to rationalize, as it's already established information. At any rate, I liked her being frightened by Ridley. It's like the Worf Effect, except that it worked. Ridley actually freaked me out a bit in this game, which hasn't happened in a while. I consider that a good thing.

I just finished the game, finally. I have to say the game was very enjoyable. The dialogue, and even the story didn't really bother me too much. There are certainly far worse out there, after all. It was actually nice to see a softer, more human side to Samus, too. Similarly to Batman, the fact that she's a mere mortal, with emotional baggage, and even some mental issues makes her all the more badass when she manages to overcome those obstacles to complete the impossible missions she takes on. The gameplay was great. Even though there was melee combat, and dodging and rolling, it still felt like a Metroid game, oddly enough. Was it a new Super Metroid? No. Nothing but Super Metroid will ever be Super Metroid, and fans need to realize that, I think.

I started playing this a bit today. Pretty entertaining so far. I'm really liking a lot of the improvements over FFXI that have been made. As far as it being confusing, I haven't really had much of a problem figuring out what's going on. The little intro bits and my first few minutes playing were really the only confusing parts. Once you figure out what's what in the UI, the game's pretty easy to navigate. I don't know how it is for the other nations, but at the Aetheryte Crystal in Gridania, there's an in-game manual that you can read to get you up to speed on the mechanics of the game.

I actually saw these a couple days ago. I'm really not too keen on any of them. I like the grass's final form the most of the three (Which is good, 'cause I always pick the grass starter), and I am digging the water final's double mustache thing. The pig does look like it could easily be a fighting type, but they may go against expectations and make it fire/dark, or even just fire. I'm sure they'll grow on me a bit, but for now, I'm a little disappointed.

Neck, hand and foot seams are not easy to get rid of so there are, sadly, very few options out there for completely dissolving the problem. Not even Beautiful People—which mostly just adds a lot of hair and eye options to character creation—can get rid of the seams; they're just reduced a bit by the new textures. The real problem stems from the fact that the meshes for hands, feet, and faces are separate from the body. Because of this, a ridiculous amount of care has to be taken to even reduce this effect. Even if you manage to make a texture for the body that happens to perfectly line up with the hands, feet and head, the simple fact that they're separate meshes means that certain lighting conditions are going to make that seam quite obvious still. I have seen a couple female body mods that have been built in such a way that the seams have been nearly entirely disposed of. There's a seamless version of the HGEC body—a very popular one with many new clothing and armor options—floating about on TES Nexus somewhere, and I believe the TGND body mod has virtually no seams as well. As for male bodies, Robert's is pretty much the only one (there are a couple variants, though) and it seems to be seamless from what I can tell. As for fixing up the faces a bit, I tend to prefer Improved Facial Textures, though some swear by Facial Textures by Enayla, which are also pretty darn good. Another mod that, surprisingly, helps out a lot is the Vanilla Races With Eyelashes mod. You can probably guess what it does by it's name: it adds eyelash meshes to all the default races in the game, including all the NPCs. I'm pretty sure Natural Faces can be stacked on top of the two texture mods listed above. While the face textures themselves improve the resolution of the textures, Natural Faces fixes a bit of the odd discolorations you get from weird tweaks of the color sliders. I probably shouldn't be making this post any longer, but since I'm on the subject, the Tamriel's NPCs Revamped (TNR) mod may be to your liking. The goal of the project was to redesign every NPC face in the game, making each races' features stand out from the others. The result for a lot of them is quite good, and like the Unique Landscapes mod, each race is an individual package, so you can pick exactly which races you want to see given a makeover. Using all of these things in conjunction has the slight potential of getting some things screwed up because they all deal with modifying similar aspects of the game. Even though it's tedious, I recommend applying each of them one at a time, and inspecting the game after each one to make sure you're not getting any problems, and if you are, which mod is the culprit. Some of these—the face texture-related ones in particular—are pretty old and have never had any updates, so they use older methods of applying them: namely, drag-and-drop archive invalidation. Make sure you're applying them in correct orders so as not to overwrite an important change you made earlier.

I'd like to know what NPC mod that was. The purple-armed Khajiit thing sounds a bit like a problem I had when I tried out some body model replacement mods. Argonian tails turned bright purple for me in addition to the Khajiit problem. I'm surprised to hear you say the texture pack looked bad. Qarl's Texture Pack makes the game absolutely beautiful in comparison. I believe this is the one I use. OMODs make things a breeze, and unless the author screwed something up—which usually results in them fixing the problem rather quickly—you shouldn't have any problems with incompatible/missing textures. Oh, man. I totally forgot about the Clocks of Cyrodiil mod. Very cool stuff right there.

Happy birthday!

I've been playing with modded Oblivion for quite some time now. I've yet to try Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. It's one of those big ones—along with FCOM and Martigen's Monster Mod— that change so much about the game that I'm still somewhat hesitant to use it. Lost Spires is a very well done quest mod. I highly recommend it. Ruined Tail's Tale is another one that's pretty much a must-play at least once. If I'm not mistaken, Dune isn't much more than a new worldspace. I'm not sure it's been updated in a while. You might want to try out Deserts of Anequina instead as it seems to be getting a good deal of support, and is actually a lore-friendly part of The Elder Scrolls series (a plus for me). Of course, there's no reason you can't try out both. Though they have a few compatibility issues here and there, the Unique Landscapes series of mods is excellent for breathing some new life into Oblivion. It basically redesigns the various regions of Cyrodiil creating a larger variety of (and usually much nicer to look at) geographical locations. Probably the best part of the UL series is the fact that it's modular—you can pick which areas to install, and which to leave as the default areas. I think these have some problems with both Lost Spires and Ruined Tail's Tale, so you may want to try those out first.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday!