The Problem with Color

Playing with color groupings. Also a horse.

I don't normally feel my age. When you've been playing a video game for years, especially if it's one that updates and improves continuously, then it's hard sometimes to feel the age of the game, either.

I'd been saying for years now that stained glass was high on my wishlist for Minecraft. It was something I was sure would take my Masterwork, my cathedral, to the next level.

Random colors hooray!

He wanted Avengers windows.

Now that I finally have it, I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I flew to my cathedral, eager to redo the existing windows and add new ones to the unfinished portions. Too bad I can't make little strips and maybe make a more intricate window on a smaller scale. Maybe that would solve my dilemma. The huge color blocks end up either looking gaudy or childish to me.

A friend and I played around with color groups and patterns, and we could figure out something that would work - or so we thought.  In the end, I wasn't happy with any of it.

Turns out patterning color is much much harder than just patterning windows with clear glass. At least with clear glass all you have to figure out is what shapes you want. Now - it's - I don't know how to put it, other than I feel like some film director during the transition from black and white films to technicolor. What once did not matter much (if at all) now matters a lot. 

I proceeded to Google screenshots of others' Minecraft creations, to get ideas. Well, as it turns out, the good news is that it is perfectly reasonable to be able to produce beautifully patterned windows. The bad news? To get a decent look, your window needs to be about 100 blocks high. Not gonna happen with this one. My large rose window at the entrance of the church doesn't even approach that height, I don't think. Honestly, I never really counted. 

I'm beginning to think I like the cathedral as it is, with just the clear glass, or else with just a smattering of color (which you can barely make out on the rose window at the far end of the room in the bottom screenie). It's funny how long I wanted it, asked for it, and now that I have it, I don't know what to do with it.

It's coming along, at least.

An Update on the Masterwork

I've been working more lately on the cathedral I started ages ago in Minecraft, and I'm finally making some definable progress after months of nothing. Kind of like writer's block, only with, well, pixelated blocks. I tried to take this screenshot from the same location as the original shot in one of my earlier posts when I first came up with the idea for the cathedral, but I've since torn that platform down so it was more of a guesstimate.

You can see I've started to define the roof, and although it's hard to tell, a lot of progress has been made on the walls in the nave and aisles, and I put in a huge rose window at the front entrance. It's actually kind of hard to tell the scale of this thing from this screenshot, but I wish you could see it in person and walk around in it. It's so much more inspiring now that it's so much closer to being finished, I feel more and more motivated to press onward the more I add to it. Hands down it's the most ambitious project in Minecraft I've ever taken on before. The wall defining the border of the kingdom was huge, I'll admit, but it was, well, just a wall. It's not that challenging. This though, this is taking thought and planning and trial and error and a little bit of math even. Not my strongest suit.

The project at sunrise.

The above picture is purely to attempt to give you a sense of scale, but then I suppose if you know anything at all about Minecraft you'll be able to see how huge it is. Granted, it's not the greatest or most impressive thing out there, especially if you do a youtube search with choice phrases such as 'epic minecraft cathedral' but I'm still pretty proud of it. Maybe once I finish it, it won't be such an eyesore and Squid won't have a reason to complain about the half-finished building on the edge of her backyard.

I also lost the link to whatever real-life cathedral I was modeling this after, so it's completely out of my head at this point. +5 to creativity, please? One thing that really pleases me about building this is how I've come up with some new ideas and even stolen some building techniques from watching the videos of others on youtube. Did you know you could place stairs upside down? I do know, and I'm thoroughly exploiting the technique in my flying buttresses. I still wish we could put stained glass in our windows, but as I was talking with a friend the other day, the tech to implement that would be huge, and probably not something Notch would want to add, since Minecraft can be a demanding program to run anyways, at least on my machine.

Hrmmm, after going back and looking at older posts, I was apparently modeling this thing after the Metz. Mine looks nothing like it. Oh well. I'll keep trudging merrily along. /whistleahappytune

Does This Mean I Have No Life?

So I finally did it.

I cancelled my lotro sub.

And yes, I shed a couple tears before I hit that green button. Does that mean I take the game too seriously? Does that mean I have no life? Probably.

Do I care? Yes.

We can't justify paying for three mmo subs right now, and with SW:TOR still pretty fresh on our plates, lotro, being the old, worn out, flataslastweek'snewspaper game, it had to go.

So why was it so hard for me to cancel? I've waited weeks to do this. I've wanted to find a way around it. I considered using Christmas money to pay for another year's sub. I considered all sorts of things to scrounge up the money to pay for another year's sub. In the exit survey, one of the questions asked was "what can we (Turbine) do to bring you back to Lotro?" I put in that they could give me a free lifetime sub if they wanted, because honestly, there is nothing wrong with their game (or wrong enough to drive me away).

I just don't have the time (or, more importantly, the money) to keep paying for it.

I guess it is all the time I have put into the game over the years that is killing me. All the fun memories I have of running things with Squid. The friends I've made - who thankfully, have moved around with me to other games (I'm looking at you, Minecraft and SW:TOR, and yes, even you, stupid Tanks).

I think my biggest fear in hitting that green button was that this felt like a betrayal to Indrabar. She's been with me for so long, and hey, it is an rpg, after a while it does begin to feel like that pixelated thing on the screen is a part of you, and that you really did defeat Mordirith or clear out Sammath Gul or down a dragon or two.

It feels like a betrayal because there was no Indrabar in SW:TOR yet, and there probably won't be, because, as my husband once said when I was creating my character for that short stint in SWG,  - "It's not a very Star Warsy name. It just sounds, well, elvish." So, for SWG, I went with Tsuka, and Tsuka is now in SW:TOR.


Tsuka was also in Skyrim, instead of Indrabar. A psychologist might say that two personalities are fighting for control.

Yes, I know it is just a game.

Yes, I am a sane, mature adult. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have cancelled.

Just because I am an adult though doesn't mean I have to be happy about the choices we are sometimes forced to make.

 Well, here's to the 20th, and whatever changes that will bring to Indrabar and the rest of my lotro characters. Hopefully they won't all just poof into thin air. Hopefully I won't cry like an idiot again.

Maybe now I can have a real life, you know, in the real world.


If I was able, I would give Indrabar permission to punch me in the face for just metaphorically indefinitely locking her in a dark cell with no chance of sunlight or ever seeing her forty-nine horses and three goats again..

Elfstone at Sunrise

My Elfstone castle, glowing in the misty dawn.

The minecraft multiplayer server was finally updated, so I logged in today just in time to see this. Sometimes I love this game :)

Glasswork and Hired Help

 Today I made a good deal of progress on the Masterwork, mostly in those four-way arches that will eventually line both sides of the cathedral interior. Notice that some of my dirt scaffolding is still in place. I removed as much of the redundant/unnecessary scaffolding as I could, but some of it I forsee myself needing again in the future, so I left it there.

I also finished up a bunch of framework for the windows, and with Squid's help, got them all even ("three singles and a double!") Then I gave her a bunch of glass and she filled in all the windows I had framed up for me.

I am excited to see what it looks like when the details on the outside - the flying buttresses and such - are finished as well. I hope they will dress up the outside, because right now those walls are a bit too smooth. I will have to post pictures of those archways on the interior once I get them all finished. Also notice that doorway smack in the middle of the wall. That, in all likelihood, will not be in the final version, but with the walls up, I needed something to let me in and out between my storage chests and the construction easily. Why I couldn't just put the chests in the middle of the cathedral I don't know.

In honor of all my talk of flying buttresses, I give you the only movie reference I know of related to classical architecture.

Discrepancies

Only after I started raising the walls a bit in my cathedral did I notice something when going back and forth between my reference photos and what I was actually building - my building was not tall enough. To truly capture the grand majesty of a cathedral, I need this thing to touch the sky, literally, as I will probably go all the way to the top of the map. So, after some more tedious math and some re-working, I managed to get at least one side to the correct height, so far anyways.

I don't know if you can really tell from this screenie, but notice that the right side has openings that sit significantly higher than the openings on the left side. The right side is correct, height wise anyways. I still need to work on the windows a bit. But it's coming along, and I have height now, yay! Oh, and that other side needs fixing. Maybe Notch will have invented colored glass by the time I get ready to put the windows in.

More work tomorrow, maybe, if the ice-storm doesn't kill me.

The Masterwork

I love Minecraft. I've been playing for a few months now on a friend's multiplayer server, and I've enjoyed building my little creations. And I mean little seriously. Even my greatest work so far, my Elfstone Castle, is nothing compared to what I have just undertaken. I have taken a very basic floorplan of the Metz Cathedral and am working on building it in Minecraft. It will be rough. It will probably be ugly. Especially as I have no capabilities for stained glass and the Metz is known for its windows :(

I'm not sure if you can see the sheer size of this undertaking from this screenshot or not, but this is the basic groundwork for the structure. I will continue to post updates as I add bits and pieces, and maybe I will get it finished and make it beautiful.

The hardest part so far has been that I've had trouble counting out the grid appropriately and my measurements have been off. I finally think I got them right. You'd think, after almost 26 years, that I could learn to count in multiples of ten.

And she fell down into the big Underground....

Lately, I've been playing Minecraft. A lot. When my husband first showed me the game, I thought it was meh, but once I tried it myself, I found it very addicting. The graphics and gameplay are simple, and there is literally no story, dialogue, or (if you in multiplayer mode) combat. All you do is dig. And build your ultimate _________ (<--- Insert whatever you've always wanted to build here).

If you are in single player mode, the concept is simple. You start out somewhere on a randomly generated landmass, with nothing in your inventory. You must find shelter and a light source before nightfall, because soon the monsters will be out. This comic from Penny Arcade best describes the early stages of the game to me.

After a while, I kept deleting and restarting my single players saves because I wanted a landscape that was inspiring and really would challenge me to build something fantastic. When I loaded this world in, I was wowed from the start and have been in love with it ever since. However, being in the shade from the cliffs and grotto means that I have to deal with more monsters than usual, and I have died several times.

Last night, a friend of mine from lotro and I received an invite to play on another lotro friend's multiplayer Minecraft server. We checked it out, and have decided that multiplayer is much more fun than single player. Sure, the game is still in alpha, so the multiplayer mode doesn't at this point have all the functions that single player does, but the general concept is still there. I found it much more fun building things when other people could see what I was building and not only admire them, but offer advice, make their own modifications, and such.

Theories and I are in the process of building a gigantic fortress - which, due to a lack of knowledge about where the rest of the players had started building, is VERY far away from everything else, but we are okay with that. The friend who invited us built a massively long bridge/highway from their village to our fortress, so now we at least know how to get to them if they need us, or we need them. Multiplayer currently has no monsters though, so unless we are suffocating under a pile of sand and need to be dug out, that won't really be an issue....