My three Miceketeers (Patreon)

Hey all, time for an update! Actually I'm way later than I'd normally be with one, but I'm behind schedule with other things so I kept pushing this back.

A lot of time went into checking some error/bug feedback for FET. I don't regret doing stuff all over the place for FET last time but it DID mess up some things. It's mostly simple typos which cause problems and I needed to fix, but a few were more serious and the kind which affects a smaller amount of people and/or things which I can't  recreate on my end. Those are always the worst ones to figure out. 

During that bughunt I also found one which was already there before, but which I didn't notice earlier because it doesn't always occur.  When you go back in time to *spoiler* yrram aratak*spoiler* during the love route epilogue, there's a possibility to return to the present too soon which could soft-lock you from starting the bonfire part. I'm removing the bug and trying to retroactively fix it, but that's always a matter of treading very softly so you won't break more than you fix.

I'm still not done with that, but this is supposed to be an 18Titans build month so of course  I need to spend plenty time on that too if I want to have something ready at the end of this month.  Which of course I want to!

It's February(luckily the 29 days version instead of 28) but that still means I have less time than normal.   ...and then there was the day I didn't have power because... well I don't know why, but it took them the whole day to restore it.  I was constantly waiting and hoping the power would come back on because they kept moving back the time frame in which they thought it would be fixed. Well, at least it didn't go down while I was working on anything and lose a bunch of progress!

Btw. you can expect some very ugly temp art in the Titans build because it's the sort of thing I'm bad at and takes forever to draw(city background).  I prefer leaving in something bad looking, fix it later and being able to finish the build on time instead of moving the build towards March. That might happen anyway, but you know I hate doing that. 

For one of the backgrounds I've also been using 3d modelling again to speed up and help me with perspective etc. Here's a preview.

I've you've seen the cartoon and have a good memory you might recognize the place.

Anyway, I like working on this build(as with all builds) a lot, but wish I was faster/more efficient!  Which reminds me of AI. It can be demotivating to see how fast something like that can create detailed looking stuff... though personally I still much prefer human made things. I'm not certain whether that's just a mental thing(me knowing there's no person behind its creation) or me not liking the results enough.  

Btw. have you guys seen the OpenAi sora thing? Text prompt created movies which are actually consistent with their output? The character in the last frame is still looking how he/she looks in the first frame.  It feels like everyone was talking about it yesterday/today and I think everyone expected this to happen sooner or later, but sooner came a lot sooner than I expected and the results are damn impressive.  I haven't seen it do traditional 2d animation yet, but I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be just as good looking as the examples I've already seen.

The first AI text/image/voice stuff was already impressive enough all by itself and it's easy to become used to the wonders of current tech, but this is another big jaw dropping moment as far as I'm concerned.  I wonder how long it will take for real full length animation series being created using this. It seems inevitable.

Oh and about the title of this post. I thought i had finally found a mouse which was good enough for me to use for long periods of time without problems and the recent one did well for a while buuuuut my hand started to ache yet again... 

So I got myself an expensive contour Unimouse. Which is a mouse which you can adapt to your hand. 

It rotates,extends and flips parts so you can really mold it to your hand. It felt weird at first, but I kept using it for a day. The next day the muscles in my lower arm weren't happy...

It's because it has one big disadvantage compared to most other mice and that's the fact your fingers can't curve around the buttons. That part, which you can't rotate/flip/extend, is very flat compared to other mice. I had to send it back which was a big disappointment since I figured if this wouldn't work, nothing would.

Soooo... then what? Well I got myself an "Anker Ergonomic Optical USB Wired Vertical Mouse".  It's dirt cheap, but pretty damn nice to my surprise! I also got a Hama ergonomic mouse and took out their "limiters".  The thing which introduces a slight feeling of resistance when using the scroll wheel. I also used some foam clay for the Hama to make it fit my hand slightly better. There's plenty to say about the foam clay, but I'll skip it.

And finally I took a normal mouse and...

I stuck all three of them in a usb hub. 

And Now I just switch mice throughout the day.  It's working out well so far. My hand is never in the same position for very long because I keep flipping between mice. 

Honestly this whole mice thing has almost become a fetish to me. And I already have my eyes on another mouse which I'd like to try sometime in the future. A Cherry MW 4500 and/or a Minicute EZmouse 2, but with my swap setup I think I can go for a long time without any problems and needing a different mouse so I'm going to shelve this into the "done" part of my mind.

Aaanyway, that's it for this update again. I'll be burning some midnight oil again this month and I can't guarantee I'll have the titans build ready this month, but I'll try.

Have a good weekend!