I am a pretty princess! (Patreon)

Good day everyone, I really wanted to have this update out earlier, but I figured you'd like something more than text and how-to pics. That something became a simple Ty Lee pic. You'll find some different versions of the pic below in the attachment. 

But first, a link to the hub-post with older projects etc.

I've done a lot the last couple of weeks which kept pushing the update to "tomorrow", but don't let that fool you into thinking a new FET build is a sure thing this month.

Once you start lagging behind (like I did last month) it's difficult to catch up. That means there's a good chance a new FET build will be ready in June instead of May. I'll try and keep it in Mai (badumm tshhhh), but I have almost no confidence I'll succeed at that.

If I don't make it, I'll give out a link and password like I did last month for the early access version so anyone who can't stick around for June will still be able to get the build once it's done.

So what have I done? I've broken things! A lot of things! But I'll keep that for last.

First off, I started working on redrawing the last new scene with Raven in 18Titans. I simply couldn't help myself. It was a pebble in the boot of my mind and had to get it out first before working on FET again.  I wasn't happy with the scene at the time, but was already late so just went with what I had.

It was irking me a lot and when I got a few (subtle and some less subtle) messages about it which mirrored my mindset, I just had to start working on it. It has the same point of few (this is how I spelled "view" at first...)  but I slimmed her down a lot. I have a tendency to draw girls with "heavy bones" when I'm not careful.

With that 18Titans bit out of my mind and out of the way I started on a solution for the pregnancies during the love route's epilogue. Meaning they will end in a more meaningful way than just undoing it through a menu like can be done now.  

Once the basis for that was ready I went on to create a scene which I've already mentioned in one of the art asset updates. It turned out pretty funny from a visual perspective. At least in my opinion. I got a few good chuckles out of it once I put that together. the next scene was and is giving me trouble. I got it finished, but I don't like it. It's... okay, but not super exciting and I've been really struggling with that to make it better.  Then there was a mystery bug(s) which I've been trying to solve and had me at a loss. 

There also still are a bunch of pregnancy related bugs(thanks for sending those in youknowwhoyouare!) which also still need my attention.

All of this was going on when I started breaking things. Slightly less on topic stuff from here on out! Consider this your warning!

Mouse

Ever heard the story of the "princess and the pea"? I must come across as the princess by now, because I'm going to talk about mice again. Yeeeeeep, it's that time once more.

I finally had a good solution for my mouse situation. A nice wide, soft silicone mouse wheel.  Without friction because I went in and took out it's limiter. 

...I broke  it. Snapped its axle in two. One long bit and the other small and stuck.

I really liked it. It wasn't a 10 out of 10, but a solid 8 nonetheless. Once I discovered I really liked this one I went looking for a spare just in case anything would happen to it, which it did! The mouse was gifted/dumped because friends/family know I like to have their old decrepit pc hardware to toy around with. It turns out the mouse was really old and isn't made anymore. The brand makes security cameras now. So I went looking for alternatives, but finding mousewheels that soft and almost half an inch(!) thick is difficult.

I haven't found a replacement as good as the one I had, but found something which seemed to somewhat resemble the one I broke. After a lot of squinting at low res pics, I thought this had a soft silicone and wider than normal mousewheel. Luckily enough its rotary encoder wasn't a solid block which meant i could remove its "speed limiter" again. I'm getting good at that! but my  plan to swap out the silicone part of my old mouse with this one was a no-go, because the switches are so close together even the original mousewheel barely fits. 

This one will have to do the job, until I can find a better one(you're it).

If you know of any (ambidextrous!) mice with unusually wide and soft silicone mousewheels, let me know!

So what else?

I started slooowly migrating to Linux. Linux mint to be precise. Windows is getting bigger/bloatier and acting a bit more like spyware with each iteration, so I wanted to make a serious effort to (slowly) switch over. I took an older pc with win10 and made it a dualboot. I didn't want to risk botching the pc I'm doing all of my stuff on just yet after all. The dualboot is for when wanting to play windows only games.

Linux has come pretty far when it comes to user friendliness. But I still broke and had to reinstall it a bunch of times. Which was entirely my own fault for wanting to do things off the beaten path. I'll spare you the details.

Anyway the biggest hurdle is the drawing software I use. It doesn't have a linux flavor, meaning I've done a lot of research into alternatives. For those in the know, I didn't even consider wine(to emulate windows software) assuming it probably wouldn't work. 

I tried Krita first which also comes in Linux flavor and was already slightly familiar with. I use keyboard shortcuts extensively and a lot of it was different from what I'm used to. You can do a lot with Krita, but so far the line-flow doesn't really do it for me. Most likely a matter of dialing it in, but haven't been able to find the right combination yet. 

Then I stumbled upon AZpainter. It's reminiscent of what I use now (sai), the first time I drew something using AZpainter the lineflow was just perfect, exactly the way I'm used to, but the user interface a lot less so. 

Then there's the fact there aren't a lot of tutorials out there for it. I've gotten a better handle on it and generally I like it. I might write a tutorial for it myself if I ever start to really use it intensively. It does have it's downsides though and I don't know whether those will become too much of a bother to deal with over time (for example, it won't zoom in at the cursor's position, only at the center of the pic.) 

After all of that I tried to emulate my windows drawing software using wine... and it actually worked pretty well! I still prefer using a native program but it's nice to have that option at least.

On with the blabbering! Next up, notepad++. I assumed it would be available on Linux, but no. That was quite the surprise.  I started using "Geany" now which has a windows and linux version and is very nice too.

Almost over!

So since I'm having this new setup I also needed something to elevate my monitor at eye level and enough room for the keyboard straight below it. That's how I like it best. Couldn't find anything which suited me so using four nuts, two threaded rods and a rusty storage rack, I made one myself. 

It's gloriously ugly, but can take my weight(not that I'm that heavy!) without flinching, so a pc monitor will be no problem. I'm going to sand it down, spray paint it black and maybe find some plastic caps for it so as not to be too much of an obvious DIY project.

And THAT is all for this update. Good job getting this far :)

Talk to you later!