I live here now

Drbretto

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The good news is I checked on it this morning and it hadn't crashed yet! It's taking about 8 seconds per frame, lol. It was about 75% done, so I should hopefully have it up when I get home tonight. Assuming my PC doesn't melt down in that time. This video will be the first time I've seen it in actual motion instead of a slide show, so I'm pretty excited, too! It's gonna be pretty.

Mainly, though, I mean the final product. This first video is very early on in the process. You'll see what I mean tonight!
 

Drbretto

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The weather didn't cooperate, but it does eventually clear up. It's also hard to see the progress it is making in this clip, but this is when the server booted me, so that's where we're at. I will activate the platforms individually as I build the initial structure and record faster time lapses, but in the meantime, I still can't believe the only thing that went wrong was one place with consecutive lava buckets leaving that big pillar in the center. Easily fixed.

I have a real good idea of the final product and I'm pretty damn excited about it.
 
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Drbretto

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Might be my last video for a while.

I had a 21 hour continuous shot of the whole mountain being formed (immediately after the end of that video, which was 2 hours, 45 minutes of cleanup and getting it started again before the server crashed) . While attempting to record a video of it, my hard drive appears to have died.

Not the hard drive my stuff is one, thankfully. So this could resume some day. But, it was my solid state drive, and I can't afford a replacement for a while, so, no PC to play it on. I've only spent about 45 minutes trying to fix it, so maybe there's a miracle left there. Fingers crossed I guess.
 
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GamerwithnoGame

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Might be my last video for a while.

I had a 21 hour continuous shot of the whole mountain being formed (immediately after the end of that video, which was 2 hours, 45 minutes of cleanup and getting it started again before the server crashed) . While attempting to record a video of it, my hard drive appears to have died.

Not the hard drive my stuff is one, thankfully. So this could resume some day. But, it was my solid state drive, and I can't afford a replacement for a while, so, no PC to play it on. I've only spent about 45 minutes trying to fix it, so maybe there's a miracle left there. Fingers crossed I guess.
Oh dude, I'm really sorry to hear that! :( I'll keep my fingers crossed too.
 

Drbretto

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It's alive! Though, I have to boot it from a flash drive, but I'll figure that out later. The important thing is, nothing was lost. It was just the boot sector that got corrupted. I have no faith this will last forever, though, so im still on edge that this thing could die at any minute, but for right now, we're still sailing!
 
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Inaeo

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Indeed sad that your system is down. Watching you make a mountain from pure will of engineering was quite impressive.

Edit: Ninja'd by wonderful news!
 
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Drbretto

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Indeed sad that your system is down. Watching you make a mountain from pure will of engineering was quite impressive.

Why TY, sir!

Now that I'm semi running, while it's still too hot in the Dreamatorium (what I call the game room) to play, I am going to try to get this thing recorded one last time. Then I can finally move on to dressing it up! It looks raw now, but when I 'color' it in with ice and packed Ice in the appropriate places, I think it's gonna look pretty cool.

Fingers crossed because I'd really like to get this video to work so I sent move on to less damaging projects, lol.
 

Drbretto

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I think we're good! It's going to take 77 hours to render, but this is the furthest I've gotten and everything appears stable for the first time. This replaymod thing is neat and I can't do this stuff without it, but it is buggy as all hell (and the support is pretty bad). I've gotten to know the telltale signs something is going to crash, and fingers crossed, but it looks good.

Wow, what a turnaround. If I could try to articulate the house of cards this system is on, I'd liken it to a mad inventer flying too high in his home made, untested flying machine, only barely able to stay afloat because he's using all of his strength pulling on ropes that are keeping the whole thing from falling apart, lol. It feels like if I just hold on tight, this pile of rubble will land safely.

Now I have to leave it undisturbed for 3 days, with the case wide open and a box fan directly on it because this room can be a bit of a greenhouse and it's been in the 90's. But I earned this video. And I want to see it.

Edit: oh crap, I can hear thunder, lol. Do not lose power. Do not lose power. Do not lose power.

Edit 2: Totally lost power, lol. But, started it up again. Before, I had never even gotten to the point where you can save the camera path. It literally takes 3 hours to save, IF it saves. You need a tremendous amount of patience to use this stuff, lol. But, now that it's saved, it's easy to get back in and go straight to rendering, so it should just be a matter of time. Currently estimated at 66 hours to go.
 
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Drbretto

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Still rendering! As of this morning, it was at just under 15,000 frames out of 31,000, with an updated estimate of 44 hours to go, lol.

I WANT MY COMPUTER BACK! lol I've been forced into exile with my PS4.

This is taking so long because I think each lava/water bit counts as an entity. So, 500 spouts, then each one is split into 4, then there's 4 waves per round, and up to 3 rounds present at the time, so that's keeping track of an extra 24,000+ entities every frame, at 32 view distance, and everything needs to be calculated fully for each frame. You know how sometimes you get too far away from flowing lava or water and it doesn't look like it's moving until you get close? None of that here, it needs to calculate fully.

UGH, I WANNA PLAAAY!
 
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Drbretto

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WELL.

I have mixed feelings on how it came out, but I have to remind myself that me going in and fixing things up is part of the idea. There's a bunch of space I need to fill in, and there's a good deal of trimming and shaping I need to do. And then, going back over it all with the ice will make a huge difference. It's salvageable. I am confident. But didn't shape up *exactly* as I had hoped.

I also wish I could have been on the whole time to watch it live and adjust accordingly. That was a 21 hour time lapse, left to run all on its own.

I could do better with the shape of the frames, too. Again, retrospect. This was it's in kind if test run anyway. I will eventually improve the design, and I learned a LOT from this experience, so nothing is wasted.

The platforms kind if gave me an idea. It looks almost like a man made structure on the shorter perch of the mountain already, and given the way the clouds get in the way at that height, I think I'm going to look off that too section and build what I had planned for higher up there instead. Then, I can actually fix up that one uneven part that spilled off to the side and make it look like a snowy ramp to the entrance of the tower I'm going to encase in the ice. It will lead up to a spire with the RF storage multiblock and celestial manipulators. It will look pretty neat I'm the end, I think.

Edit: every camera angel was a total guess, btw. And at least I nailed that part. I got some good long shots right where the 'action' is. They were educated guesses, but still just guesses. I had to make the camera angles from the same timestamp as the first transaction and hope it worked out right because the file is way too big to preview.
 
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Drbretto

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OK, I'm happy, I think, with the middle section. The squared ring. I think I might have to just blow up the whole top part and just use the middle section to build something on. It will no longer be the tallest mountain, but that's fine. It'll look pretty cool, I think. And it'll be a lot less work than trying to shape something out of the top of it.

And I definitely need to raise the cloud level. That video is about to give someone a seizure.
 
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Drbretto

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You're going to need to put on your imagination caps.


Every time I build something, I sort of find a vantage point and sit there for a few hours, visualizing what I want to do. This video is that vantage point for this project. Until now, I had such a vague idea of what I was going to do. Now, after looping that video a bunch of times, I can see it.

You might need to be literally me to see it, but it's all in the video. First, it's a test of the ice effect. I don't like it up close at all, but it's meant to be viewed at a distance. I have a plan that involves getting up close and personal with the final product though, so I will be seeing if I can do anything.

But, as you can see, at just the right distance, it could look like a big frozen platform mountain thing. It actually works really well and you can see it at the tail end of the clip.

That was the first exercise of the imagination. Imagine that basic setup all the way around that whole section and each of the side mounds as well. With little rivers in between. I think, again, from the right angle, will look pretty cool.

Second bit, you need to imagine away some of the random things I'm experimenting with all around it. For one, I haven't quite nailed down their role 100% yet. But also because they're bugged! Some of the blocks are permanently stuck as light sources. Every time I place and ice block there, it melts. I'll work on that later.

But lastly, there's the top part. Which I hated at first, but I see it. Watch the beginning part where it swoops in from a distance, into the first quick night. And imagine some kind of huge Buddha-like-shaped temple entrance. Like something out of a Final Fantasy game.

I'm no artist, so I don't know if I can pull off what I'm visualizing. But if I can, this thus going to be pretty rad
 
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Drbretto

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Thanks!

I'll be getting back to all this stuff in a couple of weeks. Whenever inspiration strikes again. There's been a bit of progress since this (half of the base and outer edges have been converted to ice and I've carved out a cave inside it with TNT), but I got a bit burnt out while some other games became available to me (Nier Automata and FFXII-HD, both of which are consuming my soul).

But, as it goes, one weekend down the line, I'm going to get the itch and get right back in there and finish this bad boy up.
 

Drbretto

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You guys are making me wanna play, lol. I feel like tinkerbell and y'all are clappin'. :p

I will try to at least upload the other video I made tonight. I'm pretty busy for the next week and a half, but I can probably get in and continue icing it up through the week.
 

Drbretto

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Here's that other video. This was a few weeks back and it's more something I recorded to see it at different angles to get a feel for what it's going to look like. That was a solid 5 hours of replacing blocks with ice.

Some angles, it looks right, some angles, it doesn't. And the shaders add a bit too much contrast between the ice and the trim, but overall, it looks like an ice formation, so it's achieving it's goal. It's just, damn is this part tedious.
 
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Drbretto

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Ok, so, after all that, that world may be done. It's hard to go back to something so tedious when there's so much new and awesome to explore. I may go back at some point, but I'm not sure. Fir right now, it's time to move on fir a bit.

But, we have set up shop in a new world. Sprout is the modpack, and it's pretty awesome so far. Here is the new seed, running for the first and last time at a whopping 64 view distance! But, I'll lose that when I put it up on the server....

 
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Inaeo

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I'm very excited to see where this goes. My play through Sprout is going low tech for a while, while I explore a few magic mods and build a self sustaining town. Not having tried and true methods available is exciting and fresh, if occasionally frustrating when mod interactions prevent expected behavior. I'll be looking forward to seeing how you address some of the areas I struggled with, although your, likely different, choice of mod progression will likely play a key role.