Terry's Site

Fire Emblem Frustrations

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 14:52:19 -0500

I have been playing Fire Emblem: Blazing Blade recently. It isn’t my first Fire Emblem game. Many years ago I played Fire Emblem: Awakening on my 3DS. Unfortunately, it seems that this run of FE has run into the same fate as that one. I got to a chapter I just couldn’t beat.

I am thinking that maybe it’s not for me. I really like Fire Emblem, the characters, story, and the strategy, but I think there is a higher meta-level thing I am not getting. I know I am supposed to level up my characters early on, which means throwing my units into the heat of battle against enemies they can beat, but I tried and I am still at a point where all but a few of my units die in a couple hits.

I got stuck on the chapter with the pirates. The enemies on the right, I seem to be able to handle, but the damn wizards on the left are a nuiscance. Not only do they have really good range, but there are a lot of them, and they do a lot of damage. It also doesn’t help that their attack animation feels like it takes way longer than any of the others. I don’t know if it does, but it feels like it.

If I send a strong character up front, they swarm and wear him down to death. If I send smaller units, dead. If I send ranged units, well the wizards can reach them too; dead. Not to mention that if I get a healer anywhere even close to my units the wizards immediately target them like a heat seeking missile.

I am not trying to claim that the game is bad, just that there is something I am not getting with it. The tutorial all made sense, but it feels like there is a meta to the game that is vitally important but never explained (or I guess maybe I didn’t catch or understand it).

If anybody has a suggestion for what I might be doing wrong, feel free to reach out. Until then, I am done with FE: BB.

Project Forage

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:19:05 -0500

Prototype mushroom visual

I have finally come up with a new idea for a game I’d like to make. I have been making very basic prototypes for a few weeks now, and my passion for the idea continues to grow. For the first time I’d really like to share the process publicly. Both because the more people share their experiences, the more we can learn from eachother, and because I think this game has potential, and so I’d like the world to know about it as early as possible.

The inspiration

The idea came to me when I become interested in foraging. The idea of wandering in nature collecting delicious herbs, mushrooms, roots, etc, is very appealing to me. However this isn’t easy to do safely, and is basically impossible to start on your own. It is very dangerous to go into the woods and start eating plants and mushrooms that you aren’t 100% sure you can identify.

So I did some looking around to see if there was some kind of group in my local area that could teach me how to identify properly, and keep me safe. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find a group, which is a bummer because it seems like so much fun.

The more I thought about this unfortunate scenario, the more I realized that there don’t seem to be a lot of foraging games, and games with foraging mechanics are not very deep or engaging. I started to think about how the fun of carefully inspecting flora to identify tasty treats could lead to a fun and satisfying gameplay experience.

And that lead to the idea I am currently working on.

The idea

As mentioned before the idea is to translate the foraging experience (or at least how I imagine it) into gameplay.

The main gameplay loop will consist of the player setting out each day to explore the surrounding environment and find plants and mushrooms to harvest. The player will be able to inspect each thing they come across in a 3D view and will have resources to reference, compare, and identify. At the end of the day the player returns home and decides what to do with the spoils.

Obviously that is a very high level overview, and I have many more ideas for the nitty gritty details, but that is what the game will be at its core.

There is always a risk of overscoping here, but I really like to challenge myself, and am not content to stick with smaller ideas that don’t push me enough.

The goals

My main goals will be to improve my 3D texturing and character animation. I will only really need to animate a player character, so I should be able to focus on that and refine my skills. The detailed flora will also give me many chances to improve my texturing.

There are many technical things I will learn along the way, but the goal is to improve my artistic skills. Technical skills tend to come easier to me.

Interseted?

Here is a video of my current prototype!

If you want to follow the progress then please bookmark my blog and or follow me on the links at the bottom of this page.

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts!

Jbox Download Tutorial (cheap Korean dubbed anime)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 08:49:34 -0500

If you are trying to learn Korean (as I am) then you are possibly on the hunt for new Korean media to immerse yourself in. Kdrama’s are fun, but can get repetitive. If you are a fan of anime, then you may desire to watch anime dubbed in Korean. However, this isn’t the easiest thing to come by, especially without paying a high price and/or fighting with DRM, which prevents us from using useful language learning tools like Kimchi Reader on it.

I am not actually a huge fan of anime. I have watched a few, which have been entertaining, but I am not into anime as so many others are. I do find it is easy and fun to watch, even when I don’t fully understand the language, making it perfect for immersion. So I spoke to a Korean friend about it. He pointed me to a site called jbox where I discovered on my own that you could simply right click any video on the site and save it through your browser. Since the monthly fee to access all the Korean dubbed anime totalled to about 5 USD, I used paypal to send my friend the money and he set me up an account with a one month subscription. From there I was able to easily save DRM-free copies of whatever series were available and of interest to me.

However, since that time the site has added a measure against this. Now if you try to right click it brings up an alert stating “보안상 오른쪽 클릭은 작동이 중지되었습니다.” Right clicking was blocked. I did some digging around and believe I have found a way to still download video on this site. I am not good at making payments on Korean sites, so I can’t give any suggestions on how to get an account with a subscription outside of asking a Korean person you trust, and who trusts you, but assuming you can figure out a way, here is what you can do to download DRM-free Korean dubbed anime such as My Hero Academia, One Piece, Fairy Tail, and more.

How to download Korean dubbed anime:

This tutorial assumes you have access to an account with at least one month subscription, however, if you just wanna test this out, the site allows you to watch as many previews of episodes as you want for free, but you will need to log into a free account (you can do so with email, Google, Naver, or KakaoTalk) so you can use that. I don’t have a subscription myself right now, so this tutorial will be written using the previews, but the player is the same so this method should work on the actual full length episodes.

This tutorial also assumes you are proficient enough in Korean to navigate jbox’s website. If you aren’t you may need to use a translation tool or a friend to help you.

Finally, the only prerequisite software to be used is VLC Media Player

This tutorial has been tested on Linux with both the Firefox and Brave browsers (Brave is essentially a reskin of Google Chrome, so it should work on all chrome based browsers).

Step 1:

On the home page of jbox, press F12 to open your browser’s developer tools. If you have never done this before, it might seem a bit overwhelming, but don’t worry. You can ignore most of the buttons and whatnot in the developer tools.

Step 2:

In the developer tools panel, click on the tab labeled as network. Once in the network tab, find the input box labeled as filter (it should be in the top left). In that box type “m3u8”.

Step 3:

Now that our network panel is now checking for m3u8 files, load a video on jbox and play it. Once the video loads and/or starts playing, you should see some things pop up in the network tab.

Step 4:

Examine the data that has been loaded in the network panel and find the entry where the data in the “file” column ends in “.m3u8” with the largest size in the “Transferred” and “Size” columns (generally called chunklist.m3u8).

Step 5:

Right click the file in the network panel and move to the context menu option labeled “copy” or “copy value.” From there, you want to click something that says either “copy url” or “copy link address.” The names of these menus vary slightly across browsers, but if you paste what you have copied and it is a link that ends with the file name you selected, then you should be good to go.

Step 6:

Open VLC player.

Step 7:

In the top left click on the menu labeled as “Media” and then click “open network stream.”

Step 8:

Paste the link you copied earlier into the box labeled as “Please enter a network URL.”

Step 9:

Locate the button in the bototm right labeled “play,” but don’t click on it yet. Instead, click the small arrow button next to it which will open some options. Click the option labeled as “stream.”

Step 10:

Hit the “next” button until you enocounter a screen titled “Destination Setup.” You will see a drop down menu that says “File” and an “add” button. Click the add button and it should take you to a screen where you can choose where you want the file to be saved. Make sure the file name you give it has the proper extension for the media format you want (e.g. .mp4).

Step 11:

Continue hitting the “next” button until you come across a menu with a “stream” button and click that.

Step 12:

Wait for the progress bar at the bottom of vlc-player to finish.*

Step 13:

Once the stream is complete, navigate to your chosen file destination, and play the file in your media player of choice (You can use VLC if you’d like). If the video plays correctly, you are done!

Congratulations! You just unlocked a wealth of new Korean immersion material! It should have only costed you about 5 USD and some time. You will only have a month to download what you want, but a lot can be downloaded in a month.

If you encounter any issues with this method, or discover a better way, feel free to reach out to me through my fediverse account linked at the bottom of the page (or any other means you know to contact me).

* I believe what VLC is doing here is literally streaming the video as if you were watching it. That means that the process of streaming the whole file could and probably will take as long as the video itself. This isn’t ideal, but you can go ahead and add another stream for another video while this one streams, and vlc will start streaming that one immedieately after. It should be easy enough to queue up a lot of videos and let them stream in the background while you do whatever else you’d like to do.

P.S.

This site also hosts Korean subtitled anime. These are hard subs. If you want dubbed anime, make sure either that the title has the word 더빙 in it, or watch some of what you are about to download to ensure that you selected a Korean dubbed version, and not a subbed version.

What I Use

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:48:59 -0400

Hardware:

I use a custom built PC built at the end of 2023. It runs an AMD Ryzen 0 7900X, and AMD ATI Radeon RX 7700 XT, with 64GB of RAM and several hard drives/SSDs.
I also use a Thinkpad T420 as a laptop.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S22 as a phone and a Galaxy Tab S6 Lite for a tablet. At some point in the future I would like to buy a phone I can load a custom ROM onto, but I haven’t had the time to figure that out. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these devices.
I also use a 2016 Macbook Pro for work because that is what my employer has provided.

Software:

PC and laptop:

My pc and laptop run Arch Linux. I just find that it works and makes most sense for me. I have been using it for years now.
My desktop environment is a custom build of dwm
My main web browser is Librewolf, but I also occaionally use a vanilla Firefox installation
I use a custom build of st terminal
I generally like to use suckless tools :)
I use Anki for flashcards

Phone and tablet:

When there is a sufficient app on f-droid I will use that. I try to minimize proprietary apps, but have not gone completely free and open source… yet
I replace almost all my basic apps with the simple basic tools suite

Other:

I use Nextcloud to sync my calendar, rss, and contacts

This is not an exhaustive list. I use many small apps and programs for various purposes. I will continue to update this blog post to add more apps, and update if I change any of these, so stop here every so often if you are interested.

About

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 09:59:50 -0400

My name is Terry.

I am a twenty-something software developer from the United States. I have a variety of interests, but my passion is for game development.

This site is currently rather small and modest. I don’t need much at the moment. I just need a place to write some blog posts. I am sure I will tweak, improve, and add onto the website as time goes on.