In which I notice that the NPCs in chapels don’t ever pray, and good athiest that I am, I decided to fix the problem. Mod #2 is now available at Nexus.
Uravesa Othrelas: Devoutly praying.
Varon Vamori: Pervily checking out Uravesa.
Olava the Fair: Not entirely impressed with Varon.
Ursanne Loche: Totally in the good part of her book.
In which I’m going to describe a process to create roadsigns for Oblivion using GIMP and Nifskope, because at least one of you cares about this.
0. Take either one of the 512×128 city sign textures from textures/clutter/signs/ and use the clone tool with a relatively small brush size (circle 5 or 7) to blot out the existing names, being careful to preserve the color of the wood if not the grain. Blotchiness isn’t critical, as most of it will be overwritten anyway.
0a. Or you can use your own base texture, which should be some multiple of 512×128.
0b. Whatever texture you use, make sure you load it WITHOUT mipmaps.
1. Using the text tool, change the options to Kingthings Petrock, size 50, color f7f3de or some shade of yellowish white. Type your text in and align it. You may wish to use an existing road sign texture as a guide.
1a. Repeat this on the other half of the sign, using the flip tool to flip it horizontally.
1b. In the layers thing on the side, use merge down to merge both text layers BUT NOT the main surface layer.
2. In the layers thing on the side, change the mode of the text layer to Difference.
3. In the layers thing on the side, right click, and create a new transparent layer between your new text layer and main surface.
4. On this new layer, using a circle 07 or 05 brush and the black color, carefully outline the text with a slight border, making sure to cover all the area under the text as well. You’ll see it change colors, so it’s obvious.
5. In the layers thing to the side, change the mode of your new layer to Overlay.
6. Right click in the layers thing, and choose Merge Visible Layers.
7. Save as DDS with DXT1 compression and generate mipmaps on.
8. Before closing the window, go to Filters/Maps/Normalmap, and create a normalmap. I used 4 samples and 2.0 scale, you might want something different.
9. Save as DDS, DXT5 compression, generate mipmaps.
Putting it together in Nifskope is left as an exercise to the reader.
Meet the new Count and Countess. Not the same as the old Count and Countess.
Since Samson prodded me for a new post, and it has in fact been a while since I’ve said anything, let us fix that. As I have been mostly boring lately this may be fairly random and unexciting, but.
As to my extended absences, it would seem that my body is now in the habit of waking up at 7:40 AM each day, essentially no matter what. 8 hours of sleep? Great. 3 hours of sleep? Still going there. This is less fun than previously imagined, and means that by 6 or 7 each day, I’m pretty much done with life. Sleep schedule, I don’t know that we can go on like this. I just can’t keep living a lie to be with you.
As far as that whole eSATA thing goes, works like it’s supposed to, with the exception that my external HD STILL hates my goddamn BIOS and I can’t reboot gracefully at all. I have a suspicion that this is largely the fault of my Seagate Free Agent Pro having some whack conflict with my BIOS – I have an enclosure that I use sometimes that works just fine. The backup thing works well, however.
While I’m on the subject of technology, it turns out that Microsoft went ahead and put out a free downloadable anti-virus/spyware/malware program called Microsoft Security Essentials. I’d heard pretty reasonable things about it, so I decided to give it a shot after my upgrade to the latest AVG went fairly far south. So far, I couldn’t be happier. Unlike AVG, it actually does what it’s supposed to, namely detect and delete viruses, which I was surprised to learn AVG hadn’t actually been doing particularly well, as in they missed some. MSSE not so much. Unlike AVG (and the 2k version of Norton AV I used before it), MSSE sits quiet in my systray, doesn’t bother me, doesn’t slow down my computer, doesn’t randomly conflict with stuff, and pretty much Just Works. Astonishing for an MS product, I know, but if it improves my AV experience I’m all for it.
Also on that praising MS note, part of my Office 2007 purchase of a while back was a thing called OneNote, which is pretty much a notebook/organizer program for notes. I was initially sort of skeptical, since Real Men use Notepad to create text documents with names like Projlist.txt, but I’ve been turning to OneNote more and more lately for various projects, because it turns out that having the equivilent of several different text documents available from the systray is pretty handy. So far, it’s been instrumental in my Dark Brotherhood sanctuary mod for Samson, as well as AFK_Weye patch organizing and D&D note jotting. Welcome to the 21st century, I guess.
Switching gears entirely, this is another one of those didn’t-really-grasp-it-at-the-time-but-oh-hey-useful-skills things, but having picked up a fair bit of carpentry knowledge in my youth, it’s nice to be able to say “You know, dammit, I really need a coat rack, because it’s winter and they’re eating up my closet and ohmigodbears,” and then inside of an hour build one from scratch after a trip to Home Depot for $5 worth of brass plated hangers and hooks. Did you know that Home Depot opens at 6am? I didn’t either. Unfortunately for me, as is so often the case I’ve realized that I have need of more tools. Some kind of jig to help me drill straight holes would be nice. Hell, an actual power drill would be nice, too, not to mention a good radial arm saw or at least a jigsaw, but you know.
Yes, as it turns out, I am slowly morphing into the leporidic version of that suburban male who does a bunch of home improvements, talks about tools, and goes across the street to BS with his neighbor while said neighbor puts in some paving stones. Later that same day, I took a trip to the dump, and combined I suppose the whole experience tells you that I’m slowly turning into my father, which I assure you is vastly amusing.
I have another fair bit to say about Google Analytics, which I went ahead and stuck back on the blog, but I think we’ll do that later. This has gone on long enough.