A general thread, because why not?

Nov 26, 2020 at 6:27 AM
War criminal
"Life begins and ends with Nu."
Join Date: Jun 27, 2013
Location: Phoenix
Posts: 2758
Age: 29
So despite everything that is going on in regards to CSE2 and Nicalis, just how is everyone doing right now? Didn't expect several inactive members to pop up again in wake of current events, thought maybe we could have a conversation here, even though the CSMC Discord literally exists for that. Like, what's been going on for y'all rn?

I would like to ask though, to avoid talking about CSE2 in this thread, especially with all the extra rumors spreading on Twitter like "Nicalis is ending all freeware modding". If you're not from the community and you're here to spread that BS in here, please leave. Otherwise, feel free to just talk about whatever!
 
Nov 26, 2020 at 7:28 AM
The TideWalker
Modding Community Discord Founder
"That dog!"
Join Date: Apr 5, 2013
Location: In my mind and of my body.
Posts: 1640
Age: 26
Well I'm still making youtube videos, still working on indie game dev stuff, still trying to draw better, and still working on unix related projects to build the best desktop environment I can.

Indie dev is just tons of man hours, especially with writing, art, music, level design, and of course, building the engine from nothing other than some backends like SDL and lodepng. It's been an experience that's changed me a lot in more ways than one. The amount of sheer hours I've put into this project has been absolutely off the charts compared to what I've done in modding; but I'm glad to be taking this step and growing stronger every day.
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(Yes, I'm working on two games, the not TideWalkers one (Called Val's Venture) was just a physics test thing at first to implement walking code instead of just swimming, but is going to be a full 2 level game)

I'm also digging deeper and deeper into the unix community, I thought people who just dug into libs of core system functions and filed bug reports, and actually *used* those functions to write basic programs to work in your custom bash scripts, was something for completely demented people. Turns out I'm now one of them lol. I've written a wrapper that makes keyboard modularity possible, and allows programs that previously didn't have re-mappable shortcuts, remappable. I'm also re-working how the keyboard is used in part, stuff like mapping TAB to alt, and making it when you press and release alt by itself you get tab. Also making caps lock escape on press/release but Win on hold. (if any of this interests anybody reading this, then you might want to check out my GitHub) This combined with using tiling window managers that completely remove the need for a mouse; has been a super fun project to work on. Technically the only programs I still need a mouse for are art programs like aseprite and krita, and discord since there aren't any ways to access some options. There's also vim, and general twm stuff, and using cli everything but that's a whole 'nother deep dive to say the least. I'm going to work on re-implementing the mouse into my config for more casual usage, with custom things mapped to all 8 buttons on my epic GAMER mouse, but we'll see how that turns out a bit later on.

Moving on

I don't really have much to say about my art, except it still sucks 8 months later; but I mean it just takes a lot of time and effort to get to a level I'm going to be happy with. At least I'm spending most/all my time practicing fundamentals and studying professional work. I'm still missing a lot of understanding of actual weight and depth of the human body in particular, but I'll eventually get there if I keep putting in the work and studying.

I've also managed to pick up gaming again somehow. I did a play-through of Super Mario sunshine after 8 years, and damn it's still a good game. Other than that I've been playing a lot of Slap City (smash like fighting game) and it's been a very charming experience. There are a few complaints I have about it, but overall it's been a very positive experience. Since I recently ripped all my Gamecube and Wii games, I've been playing them on my wii, and even got a cool homebrew loader running
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The virtual library has opened up my access to games and made me more likely to just start playing a random one just by pressing A while hovering over it.

I haven't much to say about my music, as I just have the .orgs I've made last year, plus the stuff in the TideWalkers Demo. I need to spend some serious time learning more about composition later on, once my art is in a better place, and Val's venture gets closer to completion.

So yeah, I've been super busy with things, and that's not even mentioning that I've changed jobs recently (for the better thankfully).

Well this is probably my longest post on this forum.... so I'll stop here.
 
Nov 26, 2020 at 11:05 AM
Senior Member
"Huzzah!"
Join Date: May 31, 2018
Location: under your bed ;)
Posts: 211
i don't really have anything to offer in terms of conversation, but i do have a couple photos of my dogs

edit: i do actually have something interesting to share, i just went for a walk and my headtorch (it's nighttime atm) failed as i was going down a narrow path through the bush, so i got a ton of spiderwebs to the face. deeply unpleasant experience. i do not recommend it (the walk itself was really nice though).
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Nov 26, 2020 at 3:20 PM
Senior Member
"Wahoo! Upgrade!"
Join Date: Oct 30, 2018
Location: O N C E
Posts: 63
Ive mostly just made friends on riscord, and got into spriting for a terraria mod. I kinda should spend more time on the forums other than just browsing, but I feel I usually dont have much clever things to say.
 
Nov 27, 2020 at 4:59 PM
Neophyte Member
"Fresh from the Bakery"
Join Date: Dec 17, 2018
Location: Somewhere
Posts: 4
Nothing much. Got again into Cave Story, which is how I rediscovered these forums. Now I gotta play the whole game again, because I lost my save files. It still doesn't get old, after all these years since when I first played it to now. Hope it stays that way.
 
Nov 28, 2020 at 6:00 PM
Neophyte Member
"Fresh from the Bakery"
Join Date: Aug 18, 2020
Location:
Posts: 4
I bought Doom Eternal a couple days ago when the Steam Autumn sale came out and I've been playing that a lot. I've also been playing through the Ace Attorney games and I highly recommend you guys check them out. I got into some friend groups recently and it's been really amazing and has changed my life a lot.
 
Nov 29, 2020 at 5:39 AM
Senior Member
"Huzzah!"
Join Date: Aug 21, 2018
Location: United States
Posts: 208
Age: 17
I'm now the composer for a Cave Story fangame called Alex Anomaly and I'm working on a project with my friends irl but other than that, I don't know what else to say.
 
Nov 29, 2020 at 8:47 PM
Based Member
"Life begins and ends with Nu."
Join Date: Dec 31, 2011
Location: United States
Posts: 2307
Age: 27
I guess I'll lead off from August 2015, since that was when I made the last release of Plus Porter, and that was the last major contribution I made to the Cave Story community. Two days after I made that last release of Plus Porter, I went off to college, and stayed pretty busy for a solid 4 years with classes, extracurricular activities, and internships. Not that high school wasn't busy too (in fact, some parts of high school were the busiest I've ever been in my life), but I guess college life put me into a state of mind where I wasn't really getting into anything new Cave Story and gaming-wise. In my first semester of college, I was trying to set aside time here and there to make a program that would try to make a better effort than Carrotlord at converting midi files to org format, as well as converting org files to wav/mp3 files, but I didn't get much farther than making the UI, and I kind of dropped the ball on that project a couple months into college, and even when Christmas break came, I just couldn't force myself to make any more headway on that project. I did actually start watching LPs on Youtube of the Ace Attorney series (watched every game in the main series up through Dual Destinies, and also the two Miles Edgeworth spinoff games). I started watching an LP of Spirit of Justice, but kind of lost interest after the first chapter because I ended up getting extra busy and focused on other things half way through my second year of college. I actually bought Sonic Mania and set aside some time to play through it a couple times over Christmas break my senior year of college (a little over a year after the game came out), although I didn't end up finding the time to play it anywhere near as thoroughly as I played the Sonic and Knuckles Collection as a kid.

I graduated college in May 2019, and soon after moved out of my parents' house and into my own place somewhere else in the country to start my full-time job as a software engineer. I'm really enjoying my job, and thankfully, it has pretty good work-life balance, so I actually have a lot more free time now than I did during most of college and some parts of high school, which is really nice. After getting settled into my new place, I've finally gotten the chance to catch up on video games that I didn't have time to play when I was in college. Those main ones being Halo the Master Chief Collection and Undertale. I've always been a PC gamer, so for many years, Halo 1 and Halo 2 were the only ones I'd played, until the MCC came to PC and they started releasing the titles one-by-one. I just recently finished Halo 4, so now I'm almost all caught up. In between releases of these games, I finally got around to playing Undertale this past February. I had actually been wanting to play it ever since I found out about it when Dinny made that thread in 2014, and believe it or not, I managed to pretty much completely avoid spoilers; I knew very little about it in advance other than that you have the choice of killing or sparing monsters, and that those choices impact the story and ending, and also that the soundtrack is really good. At this point, I've now played through Undertale over 20 times, and I've gotten almost all the variations of the neutral ending, although there were a few that I missed and had to fill in with Youtube. I had pretty high expectations going into it, and yet this game completely blew those expectations out of the water. For someone who lives alone and recently moved out of his parents' house, Undertale ended up being the perfect game to play during the first few months of COVID-19 lockdowns, for a lot of reasons.

Another hobby I've picked up is getting into cryptocurrency. I'm currently invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, XRP, and Pi. There's a pretty good community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in my area, and I've really enjoyed hanging out with them and learning from them.

It would be really cool if Noxid and GIRakaCHEEZER decided to pop their heads into this thread.
 
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