Musings of a Mildly Misanthropic Technologist.

Given my enjoyment of Minecraft, Valheim, and Factorio, it should come as little surprise that I play a bit of Satisfactory from time to time. I wanted to run a server but I didn't like the fact that the two containers I found downloaded the game server data at startup. It seems overly obnoxious to re-download between 4 and 8 GB of data each time you startup the container -- which is supposed to be self contained. It also seems entirely unsuitable to running a fleet of servers as you would have to download the game for each and every instance.

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I think it has probably been 10 or 15 years since I sat down and really went head-down on a game for a solid weekend and since I had some extra time around the Labor Day weekend I decided to invest it in a mental health reset by plowing through the Yakuza series. While I still have a working PlayStation 2 I decided to give the remakes a try. The series in general is a mashup of beat 'em up, action-adventure, and rpg games with open-world and strategy elements. The side stories are pretty varied and add a tremendous amount to the story and world building. I started with Yakuza Kiwami and it is alarmingly beautiful given it was also released as a PlayStation 3 game.

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Most video games these days have methods to save screenshots. Thanks to a complete lack of standards they end up all over the place. Adding in storefronts like Steam and GOG add to the mess by providing their own locations (some more hidden than others) you have to go searching for screenshots in. This is irritating if you want to go find your screenshots later. In what has become my tradition I wrote a Python script to fix this particular problem.

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Welcome to the 'verse

Star Citizen has been called a lot of things over the years since its explosion into the scene as an unprecedentedly successful crowd funding campaign that has as of writing raised over $470,000,000 from over 3,800,000 'Star Citizens'. In the ensuing 10 years the game has progressed in the open from little more than a hangar where you could walk around your ships to what today is, arguably a very playable space simulator with several gameplay loops including trading, mining, PvE and PvP combat, search and rescue, salvage, exploration, and of course, piracy.

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I like data. I've been spending some time cleaning up my monitoring and visualization infrastructure, making sure everything is in Grafana and available at a glance and I noticed that the one thing that I'm not doing any collection on is my gaming PC. Now I don't spend as much time as I used to playing video games but I still want information on how the system is performing. Most of the tools to measure the performance of a Windows based gaming system tend to cater towards traditional video gamers, providing overlays or alerts on screen with the information. That is interesting to me so I went looking for a way to send that information into my monitoring platform.

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So I may have fallen a bit into Minecraft, which I'm sure is not really out there in terms of abhorrent behavior given the game's popularity. The more interesting bit is that I decided to take my game world and stuff it into a server so I could play it on any of my computers (I have a MacBook Pro laptop and a Windows 10 PC, amongst others) without having to deal with wacky file sync (there is a HOW-TO on using something like Dropbox to share your world but that looks like an absolutely awful idea to me), locking and potential corruption issues.

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I spent a few hours this week taking a break from Surviving Mars (which is scratching the same itch that Sim City / Sim Tower seems to scratch for me) and finally got around to playing VA-11 HALL-A. I really like this kind of game, a mechanically simplistic story driven world with interesting characters and design.

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I was headed back from the California Nebula last night in Elite: Dangerous to try to sneak in a few runs on the just finished community goal in the Wangal system. It was a little over 1000ly worth of travel... about 71 jumps in the old Type-6 to make it out of California Sector BV-Y c7. I had just found a non-human signal source in Aries Dark Region IM-V c2-15 and poked around a bit at the wreckage.

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I've been playing Elite: Dangerous on and off for a little over a year now and there have been a time or two where I thought that it might be a sweet experience in VR, but honestly not even flying around the black has been enough to really light the lust fire...

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I think this would be the perfect dystopian future.

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