re-tuning (Patreon)

honestly like looking back at that last post is a little embarrassing because i was clearly not in a very good place when i was writing it. i can't really blame myself because i wrote that literally right after resigning to the fact that the problem was out of my ability to fix. but hhh. so morose. yikes. but maybe im not over it yet anyway so eh. 

so status update: called a repair shop, the dude came out to my house i was like 'yo' he was like 'sup' and he took a look at the computer for like fifteen minutes and then decided he needed to take it back to the shop to do a full diagnostic. he told me he'd call me the next afternoon at latest and let me know what the dealioso is. 

well "the next afternoon" was today and i didn't hear from him. so. that sucks. i'll have to call there when they open again on monday. even then if they have to order replacement parts it could be a few weeks before i get it back. and it's almost sure that it's a hardware failure given the circumstances, so that's likely. currently the most likely issue seems to be the motherboard dropping out-- but that's far from certain until i hear back from them.

so anyway god bless having this breaking laptop (hasn't been as bad as usual in the way of overheating/crashes!! it's working hard for me!! screen still shorts out regularly though loll) otherwise i would actually have gone insane-- even more than i have been anyway

and the last few days have been one heck of a slump for me. my daily rhythm is completely thrown off-- and by that i mean my motivation to do much of anything. 

those who have followed me for a long time know that i have a tendency to be hard on myself for not doing much. not a good habit-- one i'm ever still challenging. you might think that one's computer dying is a good reason to accept a break-- but the truth is i could have been doing more than i have. just. motivation. and mental scatter. not good excuses, but maybe i've needed the time

because the thing that i forget-- and i know this, at all times, i can say it quite confidently, but it's hard for me to really remember it in my heart-- is that no matter what i'm doing it is beneficial for me. if i am watching anime i'm usually learning japanese words from it and analyzing the story for what i would do differently. if i'm just talking in reborn's lobby it's time spent in the community i feel i often neglect all too much, and connecting with people is never a waste. if i'm playing a game, i'm learning about my market whether i'm trying to or not-- and i often am trying to anyway, paying attention to how various effects are animated, what their mechanics are, and how they're presented to the player. 

case in point i downloaded a game a friend sent to me for the express purpose of just having something to pull me through my lethargy (labyrinth of touhou 2, for the curious) and i've ended up getting ideas for several exciting mechanics for starlight from it-- of course that ends in a brick wall because starlight isn't cloud-hosted like reborn. but point being. those ideas are saved for later.
and maybe i wouldn't have had them if this mess hadn't happened.

so like yeah whatever this sucks and my lack of energy sucks and losing out on being able to do various things sucks
but
whatever, it'll be fine. 

it's also not like nothing is getting done. this evening marcello and i solved the bug of music not playing when loading the game in houses in reborn city (or after egg hatches, etc). 

in truth this bug was something i knew would happen and i had chosen to accept it as a workaround. the old city and new city share many of the same interior maps for buildings, and music is assigned per map-- and only one song. so it would have been really .. concerning, for lack of a better word, if the player was outside in E16 city and enjoying the brand new atmosphere and then stepped into a house and it suddenly shifted down to that old minor morose key. yikes. so, how to get the houses to play nice with the music change?

what i did was i removed the song setting from the houses at all. rpg maker plays nicely with this-- if a song is playing as set by one map, and you move into a map with no set song, it'll keep playing the song from the previous map. this allowed the player to carry the current cities music into buildings with them. further, i added parallel events inside the houses whos only job was to play the right music and then kill themselves. we honor their sacrifice. for most cases this did the trick, but it did leave a few silent exceptions.

last night we were exploring a fix to a bug wherein the player-defined volume would totally overwrite the volume specified by a map (such as how the Big Top Data Office should be quieter than the rest of the circus). Such a bug exists in E16. we found the reason why in a part of the code we didn't even know existed. Apparently Essentials supports different music per day and night. It asks if there is a night time version of a song and then if it is night, it plays that instead. The volume bug was caused because we only appended the volume-handler to the night-time version of songs, instead of the normal ones. And Reborn does not use night time music. 

...But what if Reborn did use night time music, I said. Well, that's not really possible anymore. it's impossible in part because of how much of Glitch's music we use, and it's impossible because among the data that was lost in this recent computer death was the project files for the city songs-- meaning I can no longer edit them. so firstly god bless that this didn't happen before E16. secondly, i couldn't make night versions if i wanted to-- at least not without rebuilding them from the ground up which, haha. 

...however.
if that section of the code was going to be unused anyway, let's just repurpose it. instead of asking for night versions, it can ask for white versions!
(^ this must be read in the spirit of the drying pan joke)

so we did. meaning the music was restored as normal to all the houses and it should update to the white version automatically. the self-terminating events have been removed for cleanliness, and all is right with the world*

*ha. 

--

as of right now the only things that I know have been lost from my computer are the aforementioned project files, and two graphics that I had made and was rather proud of, but did not post due to spoilers. I can redo those graphics without too much trouble, although it is tedious. and the project files... are unfortunate, but ultimately, have already served their usefulness. this could be much worse.

i mentioned last time i was also losing data from the old league. well, while my tower was already taken off to the store where for all i know it could be being held hostage right now, i decided to hook up my old computer (the one i was using for like, six years before my current desktop) and see if i could find anything on that.
and i did.

i'm sure that there are still plenty of things missing, and i have not fully explored what all it was i found, but if it is interesting and not a spoiler then i think i will post some of it here during this downtime. streams are still off and updates will still be sporadic, but hopefully that can tide you guys through. 

thanks for bearing with me. <3