Holidays Begin (and the nightmares of Kharak) (Patreon)

Good morning!

So the Deserts of Kharak video was absolutely a cursed affair and I didn't want to get into details until it was out and done to not curse myself further. I also don't like talking about any technical problems going on in detail unless it's bringing a video to a full stop, and this one was clearly salvaged now that it's done with.

It was supposed to be out monstrously long ago, as I first back and forthed with Extellus about the animation in mid-2020 long before the first Homeworld videos were out. He got all the visuals completed in 2021, but since the video was delayed after a Warhammer 3 sized iceberg and other IRL explosions. I was thrown off enough that I didn't want to go right into a series I had a lot of history with again, and for weeks on end my life had become Warhammer 3 and I was dying to get away from more RTS games for a while.

I decided to throw myself into something completely different by burying myself into Marathon again and melting my brain.

Luckily, in that time David got all the audio mixed for the animation so that had a lot more attention on it over trying to get it done in the early year. So it had been a long time coming, and I wasn't really able to sprinkle any other Extellus work around outside of the Anonymous Agony video for dumb continuity reasons. I've attached the render of it to this post without any YouTube compression if you're interested in that!

DoK has always had strange issues. It's a miracle Unity 4 game so had some jankiness there already, but it had another mild quirk that didn't bite me in the ass until recently. My PC setup has both online backups through Google Drive, a backup drive that clones folders, and ANOTHER external backup drive. When I'm working on a project I have it selected so that all the captures of a game will be backed up so if something goes haywire all the work will be saved. Since my old main drive was starting to go and the motherboard itself was beginning to act up, I got some new parts together and began the process of swapping some of the old stuff over to the new like the GPU and other drives. In a tragedy ENTIRELY MY OWN fault, it turned out one of my external drives for transferring files over was the exact same brand, filesize, and everything else as one of the internals, and I formatted the wrong drive while setting up the new PC.

It was a "that sucks" enough to even try a data recovery center's hand at it since it was a quick simple format, but luck would have it WD had my security in mind and the external was a TRIM so everything on it was gone forever. A lot of the stuff in the transfer drive was a variety of personal files, movie edits, and shitpost images so nothing mission critical for making the video, but I'm always plagued enough by the "what if it did have something I need" enough to try and get it checked out. So upon loading the backups I did have, I discovered DoK footage was almost completely gone. It turned out instead of saving to the game folder named after it for footage, it was instead uploading to the folder that captures desktop footage which I don't backup since anything I'm recording on desktop is either brief or sensitive. In one of the settings switches to either fullscreen or fullscreen borderless that changed the directory for some reason, and all I had was mostly in the void now except for looking in the settings that would kill it. WHOOPS.

I still had most of the project outlined and good to go! But no footage.

EDIT: While trying to post this Patreon lost connection and wiped out half the post and the draft only saved a way earlier version. It was wiped to this point exactly. The curse is real. Or maybe it's just more Ring.

So most of the past week was spent replaying the game for maybe the fourth time or so in the past year period. When I was talking about the "challenge" of the game, I didn't really have a lot of getting my ass kicked which I really should've let happen but it completely slipped my mind. When I told this story to one of my friends he went "oh that's why you're completely obliterating everything in the video", which wasn't my intention since I actually like keeping fuck-ups and more human stuff in there, but I was just pressed like hell for time and forgot to get better context. There aren't many missions in the game (and it's all a desert) so it can already look a bit samey, but if the situations on screen seemed a bit repetitive at points now you know it's because I got really good at the campaign from playing it so many times recently.

Anyhow, Callisto Protocol isn't running fantastically either, which is still doable, but now that I'm about 9 days behind from where I wanted to be I realize there's no way any video on it I'd make before the year's end will be very good with everything going on. It's supposedly getting an update in February to add New Game+ and some other additions, and based on the patches it's still getting it seems that it needs a lot more time in the oven as a game. I was really hoping to cover it and the Dead Space remake back to back, but at this point I'm shelving Callisto until it's gotten some more patches. I haven't seen any other videos on it since I didn't want to spoil myself, but from what bits I've seen around I don't think I'd be too far off from what a lot of other people are saying anyways except some disagreements about the writing since there are some fascinating parts of it.

So I'm really sorry about the delay. I was hoping to have two videos out this month, since this year alone has felt pretty bad to me when it comes to output since the videos were generally longer, and most aggravating the Sins video got pushed enough that Sins 2 came into existence. The long term RPG stuff is still backed up thankfully, so all of that wasn't own zoned by the wipe and I'm hoping to have a wrath video out in either February or March.

Have a wonderful holiday season! I'm going to pass out again now.