DarkAkuma's
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I know its been a while since I have posted much of substance here. And it's been a while since the public build has been updated. I never intended the Beta to remain private and in development this long, but yet it is.
Why?
Why did I abandon support for v1.4.6? Why is v1.5 STILL in private development?
This will be a bit of a different post for me. But still one that is within the scope for this personal blog/site.
I haven't posted much to indicate it, but I am a huge fan of Dragonball. I would say that... yea. It is my favorite anime. If asked sooner, I may have said Death Note or Re: Zero. But thats just because both are more recent, and when I first learned of DB and watched it... "Anime" meant something different to me. Toriyama's style just made DB feel separate. And as that definition happened early for me, I could never quite shake it despite knowing otherwise.
So with DB being my favorite Anime... moving to talk about my favorite video game of all time... Guess what? It's another Toriyama involved work. Chrono Trigger. Such a over all fantastic game that will never be replicated, despite attempts to do so with underwhelming sequels and fan made "spiritual successors". While I wouldn't rank it among my favorites, even Dragon Warrior is a game I am quite fond of. Though I have only played and beaten 1, 2, and 5 (I think). But overall, I don't have much to say on his gaming work as it was mostly art, while DB saw him work on art and story elements.
This is not my normal type of post. But I guess I do like to post about my MMORPG hobby at times. And specifically to this game... I did post about it almost 10 years ago!
So... How have things gone with this game in the past 10 years? Is it the game I wished for?
Well... I honestly can't say. Despite the typical and expected MMORPG development time before it goes to Release being 5 years, and the fact that I specifically pledged for Alpha access in order to be a part of the development process at the most key stage where everything is being thought of, added and tweaked, thus I should have been able to play the game after 3-4 years... I have not touched a single piece of the game. It's been perpetually in a fabricated phase called "Pre-Alpha". If you have been to my website before... you know that I know about development. CaVE, Unity projects, and all the way back to my start with mIRC scripts. And in all that 25 ish years... I have NEVER heard use of the phase name of "Pre-Alpha" outside of Pantheon. At best, maybe using the term to casually refer to development phases before Alpha as a whole. The only legit common development phases before Alpha are Prototyping, and Proof of Concept.
After diving into the WidescreenEx mod like I did, and liking the result, I found I learned quite a bit. I decided to keep going. The plan was to make some "Fit to Screen" mods for the other system apps. But I quickly got side tracked with something else.
Years ago now, I made some other mods that I never released. Because I never finished them to my satisfaction, and to do so was too involved. That being a mod to allow custom chosen backgrounds to be displayed. This idea was borrowed from the SNES Classic. I even used the background/borders from that device for my work, and it was nice seeing NSO SNES game output perfectly fitting in those borders! But... diving too much into mods always seemed daunting, and improper. That's in large part because, mods were a clunky side thing. Not managed officially. But... of course, that has changed now as with CaVE v1.5, that's a major feature!
Recently I learned just how bad the N64 Widescreen mod was. This is not a mod I developed. It is simply one I felt forced to maintain and update regularly, in order for there to be less issues and bug reports with CaVE stemming from users using out of date mods.
I heard or issues with it cropping out part of the screen, but the context always sounded like the people were talking about 4x3 games with the mod active. That was an unfortunate side-effect of the hack, it causing 4x3 games to not look right. It was a all or nothing hack. You commit to all your games being 16x9, or not. But low and behold... THIS is what 16x9 games looked like.
I got kind of sick of WoW not long after my last post. The token price just started inflating more and more, and while I could probably earn it each month... it just seemed less and less fun. Dragonflight itself kind of very abruptly lost its fun.
After I stopped playing, I ended up getting back to my coding hobby more. Namely, working on CaVE. I have been keeping it up to date with each NSO update, but that's it. After my last post on the topic... well... you see that part at the end? About encouraging people to not just give me silence in return? That... did not happen. Silence is exactly what I got. I really felt that SEGA Saturn support was going to be well received, breath some new life into CaVE, and make it a more broadly valuable tool.
I've been thinking about this off and on for a long time. Posting about my thoughts on WoW, about my characters, etc. But largely have fallen into the mindset of "Why would anyone care?". Lately I have been thinking that doesn't matter. Like or not, this site/blog isn't about the readers. It's about me and my hobbies. I don't post stuff here to appeal to people, I post stuff simply because I enjoy talking about things (and if people enjoy it too, great!). So why not WoW?
I have played WoW off and on since vanilla. At first, just because it's where everybody else was in the MMO space, and because EQ jumped the shark for me with it's then recent expansions. I never really enjoyed WoW itself for many years. I just enjoyed doing stuff with friends. Because of that, my experience was always one of catching up to everyone else, and only then getting to have fun. In vanilla I first leveled a Ally Rogue to 42 on a server where I had family. I stopped... well, I forget why. I think it was probably because I was still adjusting to the game, or because I was too on my own then (my family in the game... sucked. This will come into play again later...). After a break, a IRL friend got me to play again and I started leveling up a character on his server to join his guild. Again, a Rogue but this time Horde. I got to 53 and... suddenly he server transferred... Before I ever got to do anything with him in the game. So I ended up switching back to my first character, as at least that was on a server where I knew people. At this point TBC was out, and I was able to get to level 70. I even joined my families guild and enjoyed raiding Karazhan. That... ended abruptly with a falling out with that family, so I completely quit the game.
I guess I kind of missed a few versions. It's been a while since my last update here too. So this feels like a good time for one.
This is a big update! Ever since I created Slip, discontinued it, and merged it into CaVE... the direction of CaVE has shifted. And that does lead into this update.
I put a lot of effort into refining a template for the Wizard setups used in Sloop/Hiyoko NSP creation. And I'm happy to now announce that the effort has paid off with... Hovercraft and ZebraEngine support!
I just released CaVE v1.3.7, to coincide with the NSO GEN/MD v2.0 app.
Nothing about this NSO app warranted a CaVE update instead of just a database update, but I had a few fixes and additions coded and... it didn't look good for anyone wanting to lift a finger and test it as a Discord only release. Thumbs up emotes are the extent of anything anyone there wants to do now.
Changes:
Fixed an issue with the "Add Stock Games" list.
Added a new Update Database option.
This option simply updates the strings.lng of the current database to the selected version.
Added a .srm 2 cartridge.sram option to the Tools menu for N64.
This converts a Retroarch .srm that contains save data (not save STATE data) to a save file that NSO can use. It tries to automatically detect what type of save data the game uses, and output that as cartridge.sram.
Added a Help option to the Help menu that displays a setup guide and FAQ.
I don't normally do release posts for these minor version, but since its been a little while since I have posted...
v1.3.6 brings an update for officially released Earthbound games, but also a minor fix to handle SP games being addable from the Add Stock Games menu since a SP for Super Metroid and something else on the Famicom were added.
Besides the new Full Unlocks, as usual for SNES/SFC, that's it!
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I may as well bring up other news through. Let's see...
The community preset database project is a complete flop. Few seemed to care about the SNES database I worked hard on, and no one cared to contribute to try and fill out the others. So... That sucks. Since I realized it flopped, there one who has been trying is all. But I suspect that I'm going to have to do these myself. IDK. I may wait for CaVE 2.0 for that, since the preset database feature was originally intended for that. I could try going about it another way maybe.
