Playing Starfield from Bethesda Softworks, LLC

Recent snapshot of my character in game, looking at her starship - Starborn Guardian
Recent snapshot of my character in game, looking at her starship – Starborn Guardian

I’ve been playing Starfield. At this point I have nearly 150 hours in the game. Without spoilers, or at least not many, I want to tell you what I found in this game.

The game starts out (so this isn’t much of a spoiler) with you riding a mineshaft elevator down to the current active portion of the mine. This is the equivalent of the Skyrim, “Hey, You! You’re finally awake” moment. You’re introduced to some of the game mechanics and then taken to the character creation screen, where you chose the starting attributes. This is where the infamous pronouns part is. When you are done creating the character and giving them a name, you’re given an opportunity to change the default pronouns that might be used (though I’ve never noticed a point where they are used, or maybe I missed them because it just worked). I think Bethesda did a decent job with the Character Creation. They aren’t photoreal humans, but they’re better than previous Bethesda games.

Meet Lynness Redstar. My first character in Bethesda's "Starfield" game
Meet Lynness Redstar. My first character in Bethesda’s “Starfield” game

The game quickly takes you into the start of the main questline, which I won’t describe to avoid spoilers. It’s a relatively short main “quest.” Taking maybe 20 hours if you concentrate on it (this is relatively short – compared to all the quests and task the game can offer). The real meat of the game are the side quests though. I recommend doing the side quests first. Perhaps you will join the Vanguard, or the UC System Defense. There are many other choices. There are starship battles, beast hunting, and many other challenges to chose or avoid. Be prepared for adventure, romance, possible heartbreak, and some pretty deep moments if you play it right.

There are also opportunities to improve your weapons, your vehicles, your clothing, and your skills. This is a Bethesda RPG game after all. It’s worth playing. It probably isn’t really “Game of the Year” material, but it is a good game.

Some call the game boring. I have to say they aren’t trying very hard to find excitement. You get out of the game what you put in. It does have flaws, though. It has crashed three or four times in the 150 hours I’ve played. Some game design choices are still rough around the edges. Something particularly standing out – many of the sets, the equivalent of the Skyrim dungeons are reused several times, though the enemy might change. If you aren’t paying attention, you can end up in “Grind” mode and not really getting the most from the game. Some key ideas are not obvious until you’ve been playing it a while, and that can leave you confused about what to do. Ironically, there are times it seems to hold your hand too much (or like the game is on rails, though it isn’t really). You will have plenty of choices.

The end of that main quest is quite epic, and depending on the choices you make during your play through, deep and meaningful. If you have an Xbox and have Game Pass, give it a try. But beware – you’re loose hours, days and maybe even weeks because you’ll be so focused on the game and won’t even notice you missed dinner, maybe several dinners.

My Short Adventure on Ficly (2009-2010)

Long ago I put a few stories up on a site called Ficly

The point of the site, in the words of the Ficly admin:

Ficly is about creativity. When I was originally thinking about this idea, I was looking for something creative I could do for the last fifteen minutes of my lunch break before I jumped back into coding and writing documentation. I’d originally had an idea for a much larger site for serious fiction, but realized that most people don’t have the time to write serious fiction. But, everyone can carve out fifteen minutes to either continue a story someone else has started, or start something of their own – something simple – two, maybe three paragraphs of a character, a plot or even just a place.

From “About” on the Ficly.com site

So these are my submissions.

SandsSpot (Bio blurb)

I’m fighting off middle age the best I can. The hair on my head reveals the vector of the battle. Soon I’ll have to update my icon to a snowy white and concede defeat, accept middle age and get on with life. Not today, however. Today, though I struggle to remember when I find myself standing in a doorway whether I’m entering a room or just leaving, I count myself among the young.

I’m joining Ficly to prove it; to prove I’m still young; that my brain still functions creatively and with ease. Well, it functions creatively, anyway. Sometimes. On Sunday evenings just after the sun sets and I’m getting ready for bed to get up early for work the next day…

I’m kidding, of course.

In summary, I’m a married male in my fifth decade of life with two kids, no grandkids, and am still working on my bachelors degree (BS in CS). I work in IT (telecom) and have for almost three decades. Also, I like to write and like to think I do it well. At least, well enough.

That, in a nutshell, is my 1024 character bio 😉

The Stories (3)

After World
Author: SandsSpot
Published September 26th, 2010
Average rating: 5 out of 5

We Came in Peace …
Author: SandsSpot
Published July 21st, 2009
Average rating: 5 out of 5

The Return
Author: SandsSpot
Published July 7th, 2009
Average rating: 4 out of 5

The Return

The prophesies of the Christian Bible fulfilled, Jesus recently returned to Earth. There was no fanfare of angels or great shining beams of light, instead His return came quietly one Wednesday afternoon.

Jesus first visited Jerusalem. He surveyed all the promised land. He surveyed all the surrounding lands. Yes, the prophesies were fulfilled, but yet- He brushed away the thought, muttering, “surely not!”

Jesus travelled to Rome, the seat of His church. We mixed up the calendar; observing the wrong day as the Sabbath. “Well, that can’t be right!” He told a passerby. To be sure, following a stray lead, He went to a small museum in Kentucky. “No,” He said, “Humans did not co-exist with dinosaurs! No wonder the rapture failed! They all got it wrong!”

His chosen people badly interpreted His teachings. So, disgusted, he waited no longer; He returned to Heaven. “Father, forgive me, but I cannot rule over these people. Give them all to Satan.”

“Sorry, Son. He already rejected them,” came the reply.

COMMENTS

From M.
I love this! This is a real commentary on, what I believe, the historical Jesus would say about those who proclaim allegiance to Him today!
Rated: 4 out of 5

From S.
Nice story, especially the ending. Personally I’d like a little more emphasis on the fact that people twisted the history for controlling people and to gain power.
Rated: 4 out of 5

From SandsSpot
Hmm… Good thought S.… I may need to work up a “The Return v.2”…

First I want to think about other ideas, though.

jbs

We Came in Peace …

I stared at the plaque for a long time, pondering the words. Some were names and dates, from an age long ago. Our explorers recovered the relic recently and our scientists examined it carefully. An ordinary metal, some simple etching, nothing extraordinary about the plaque.

We looked across the vista before us, up at the orb above us and the larger one below. I wondered about the people that created the plaque, “What were they like?” I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

“Like all the rest, I imagine,” one of the plaque finders said. “Just like all the rest. Dreamers, idealists, ironic.”

“Ironic,” I thought silently. I reread the plaque. I didn’t think they meant to be ironic, but there it was. I bet they didn’t even know. The important words on the plaque were:

“Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.”

We lost their radio signals and came from far away to see why.

Soon after that time religious wars wiped them out. Not peace.

COMMENTS

From R.
Very intruging, but I almost wish you had left the ending more open ended. C’est la vie. I am compelled to add to this though…Hmmmm
Rated: 4 out of 5

SandsSpot
Thanks for the comment and feedback. I actually knew the ending before I wrote the beginning, but still, more open ended would have been good.

After World

Many years ago people made a choice. They chose poorly. We survivors live with that choice. The last of the generation that participated in that choice would pass on in a few years. Many of them still deny their culpability. Still.

Those few of us still engaged in academic studies have recently worked out how that poor choice came to be. Humans denied the possibility that we could cause such a change of climate because they believed the world was created perfect and mere humans could not destroy what the Creator had wrought. We now understand humans could.

Our greatest challenge now, though, isn’t growing sufficient crops on the remaining usable land, and it isn’t finding potable fresh water or any of the other dire conditions we face now on the Earth. No, with our now depleted technological capability and lack of infrastructure, we have no way to deflect an inbound comet. In a few months, an ice and rock behemoth now visible to human eyes will erase our mistake just like another did to the dinosaurs.

COMMENTS

From T.T.
Wow! Really makes you think about the issues that we’re faced with today… I love the last paragraph, especially the last line!
Rated: 5 out of 5

More Music Tinkering 2022-01-22

I found all the parts to a DIY Music Synthesizer – The ArduTouch Music Synthesizer by Cornfield Electronics. It uses an Arduino UNO type microprocessor. I bought the kit in 2017. I got the decent Soldering Station so I was ready to put it together. I ran to the web page for the ArduTouch and got the assembly instructions. So – Here is the finished results:

ArduTouch Music Synthesizer, batter pack and FTDI cable.

I should emphasize that this is an Arduino UNO type setup, the board is different, but it does use the same Atmel ATmega328P main chip. It makes rather interesting sounds. The default synth program is called Thick. There are several other programs in the github repository.

A Little Music Tinkering 2021-12-30

I keep busy. Sadly, while I do keep busy, I don’t keep busy with a lot of new stuff worth blogging about. But I do have something now.

A short while back I ordered an MT32-PI from LegacyPixel. It is basically a Raspberry Pi 3A+ that has a “hat” added from the MiSTer FPGA project. The MiSTer FPGA is a hardware “recreation” of ancient 70s and 80s era personal computers, game consoles, and even Arcade games. But that isn’t the topic of this post. The MT32-Pi is.

Long ago, in the 80s when Personal Computers were still in their infancy, Sierra Entertainment made a few popular lines of games. One of the key features was their sound tracks. And one of the key features of their sound tracks, and thus their games, was the ability to play via MIDI to the Roland MT32 music synth module.

The games could use a number of audio sources, the PC Speaker, the Adlib and Sound Blaster PC Sound Cards, Tandy / PC jr 3 Voice Sound, and the Roland MT32. It was this last, the MT32, that was the top of the line audio source for games. It was supported in many Sierra games, because it is what the music composers used when composing the sound tracks. And it really sounds excellent.

The MT32-PI can emulate the Roland MT32 using MUNT and work with all those games. It also has a SoundFont engine called FluidSynth. So it can be a Roland SoundCanvas SC-55, too, which many other games support. Any other kind of SoundFont can be used too.

The first thing I needed to do was get more Roland UM-ONE mk2 USB to MIDI cables/adapters. I patched it into my PC and fired up the DAW software and tested the sounds. Now a word of note here, the 3.25mm stereo jack on the Raspberry Pi is noisy (it might have something to do with the video signal in the same jack).

MT32-Pi all cabled up

This worked really well, despite the somewhat rocky sound of The Pi. I ordered a GY PCM5102 DAC board to get clean audio (based on recommendations of the developer of the MT32-Pi hat). I realized I’d need a USB Side connector too, so I ordered that and got it all soldered together. That USB Port isn’t really USB, but it uses the same USB 3.1 Type A connector.

The tiny wires I was using were too small for my auto-wire striper and manually stripping them broke some of the strands in the stranded wires. The solders are weak. I have a quarter size perma-proto perf board coming to finish this up properly.

USER PORT to GY PCM5102 DAC adapter “cable”

This little connector works, but it is delicate. I had to re-solder the wires on it a few times as critical leads (there are only six, they’re all critical) would “break loose.” Below is the MT32 tied to power and the connector. I don’t have it hooked to the PC and audio here, but you should get the idea. Oh and I got some nice labels on the MT32-Pi.

Powered MT32-PI with DAC Attached

The new labels look reasonable good. I made them with my DYNO Label Manager. I got the mt32-pi label image from the project files on the mt32-pi github.

When I have the perf board completed I can update this post with an image of that. It will have “header pins” to connect the board to the DAC and the User Port connector, then some solid core wire to make the connections between the them. Solid Core will be good since they won’t be bending all over like the loose ribbon cable. The solid core wire connections will be cleaner to solder with too.

Here is a diagram to help wire up the proto-board:

Proto-board Wiring

Photos of the finished proto-board project:

Completed Proto-Board USB to Audio DAC
The back of the proto board, just for good measure
mt32-pi sending Audio through proto board.

Raspberry Pi Tinkering 2021-04-22

Raspberry Pi 4 boot from NVME parts.

For about a year I’ve seen notes and notices about an experimental feature on the Raspberry Pi 4 to boot from external NVME SSD drives using a USB 3.0 SSD adapter. I recently ran across a story that mentioned that the feature is now officially in the Raspberry PI OS.

One reason to do this is that the boot from micro SD is pretty slow. Another reason is the micro SD life span is not great. An SSD is fast and is meant to be used to boot and run an operating system, so it makes sense to me to go that route if I can. So I bought a few parts to update my Raspberry Pi 4 model B.

I got the following:

I already had the Raspberry Pi 4, in a Cooler Master Pi Case 40 and using a Logitech K400 Plus wireless keyboard with touchpad. The Pi 4 shares the monitor with my DAW workstation computer by using the unused HDMI port of the monitor (Acer 27 inch 2560×1440).

At first I didn’t get the Power USB Hub. But the NVME drive couldn’t write with the power supplied by the Raspberry Pi 4 USB 3.0 port. I could read from the drive all day long, but the boot didn’t work until it could write. I got the powered Hub and now the NVME drive is happy.

Here’s a look at the parts:

Raspberry Pi 4 boot from NVME parts.

This will be a fun setup to work with.

Sunday Night – 2021-02-14 A Snowy Start

A pretty start to a scary 3 days.

Sunday, February 14, 2021 is the start of a truly massive event.

Monday, bright, Clear, and covered in Snow

By midday Monday we were in the three day long power black out. We had snippets of power during those three days. We had a short outage early in the day, then by noon we were really out of power. We had brief spurts of power getting shorter and shorter until by evening no more. From noon to evening when the spurts stopped we had maybe 30 minutes of “on” time – each new burst of power shorter than the previous, from 15, to 10, to 6 minutes, shorter until the last burst was maybe 40 or 50 seconds. Then we were dark (this was evening, after sunset). The house cooled off quickly because the short bursts were not enough for the heat to even kick in by the end of the day, and because the multiple hour stretches of no power let the temperature drop. By sunset, the temperature was in continuous decline.

Tuesday offered just a few of the shorts bursts, all under five minutes, and none activating the heating cycle of our heating / cooling system. The refrigerator did get warmer, trying to meet the room temperature halfway. We had a visit with Diana’s sister at her home, but they had lost power too and their house was getting colder, too. We left during daylight because the really cold temperatures after sundown would turn the melting snow and ice of the daylight into dark ice.

Wednesday we unbundled from our pile of blankets, but the power was solid out. So much for the Rolling Blackouts the politicians said we’d experience. We went well over 24 hours straight of no power. Our battery banks for keeping the phones alive were effectively empty. Finally, late Wednesday we had a few minutes of power. We even got some heat, but not much before the power was off again. We piled several layers of blankets over ourselves for sleep once again.

Thursday very early, power came back on, probably shortly after midnight. It ran for a good bit then stopped. But before morning the power returned, perhaps by 2:00 or 3:00 AM. We actually got heat and warmed up to the target 68 Degrees Fahrenheit – the temperature that CPS asked us to use to conserve power. Of course we’d been conserving power completely for nearly three days by that point, well two and a half at least. I was ready to not be completely cold while wearing outdoor heavy coats inside my house.

68 does seem cold still somehow, though. And we are still likely to experience Rolling Restarts through Sunday. But we’ll have much warmer days than we’ve been having. No more single digit Fahrenheit temperatures. I do worry about the still 500,000+ people that are without power yet.

Playground Sessions Global Piano Recital

Playground Sessions, the Piano Learning software company, recently provided a nearly month long “course” on the song “You Raise Me Up” that we students learned at the three different levels (Rookie, Intermediate, and Advanced) and submitted our sections via video to Playground Sessions to form a global piano recital. I participated at the Rookie Level.

To see the results visit YouTube at this LINK.

It really turned out amazing.

Eulogy for Barbara Jean Sandlin

[Eulogy for Barbara Sandlin 1941-08-08 – 2020-05-19]

Irving Berlin said about death that “the song is ended, but the melody lingers on…”

My mother, Barbara Sandlin, born Barbara Belk during World War II, grew up in a musical and loving family, including aunts, uncles and cousins. Her father played several musical instruments, and her mother played the organ.

She was the oldest of two children. Her parents, Bill and Juanita, provided a loving and blessed home life for her and her brother, Ken. Barbara adored her brother his entire life. She was his cheerleader and support as they grew. Later she extended this to Ken’s family.

Barbara enjoyed participating in her High School Drama department as crew, support or cast, and also the pep club, and service club. After graduating she continued on to college where she planned to study nutrition. While at college she met her life partner, Gerald, whom she married in 1960. Gerald was another connection to music as he was deeply involved with performing music, playing instruments and performing with a Gospel quartet.

Barbara had their first child while Gerald was in the Navy. During his time in the Navy Barbara moved from Detroit to Norfolk, Virginia to Gerald’s home port. She made lifelong friendships in Norfolk, participating with and helping other sailor’s wives in their community.

Barbara had their second child as Gerald was finishing his enlistment. In total, they had four children; John, Marica, Jeff, and Curt. As the children grew, she enjoyed providing the family a blend of “Southern Comfort” food with a balanced and nutritious diet, along with keeping them active and making friends, all in a positive environment, filled with brightness, love and hope.

After the Navy they moved back to Detroit and began a civilian life. She had a busy life and only found time to practice piano as the children were heading to sleep. This heavily influenced the children to pursue music in various aspects as they grew up. She liked to play from the Great American Standards, songs such as “Jeepers Creepers, Where’d You Get Them Eyes,” “Alley Cat,” “The Entertainer” and others.

Barbara continued to be deeply involved in community service. She earned “Master Gardener” from Michigan State University Extension Service, becoming the president of the service in her county. She also later earned “Master Gardener” in her Tennessee community, learned and then led Tai Chi sessions, while encouraging others to join the Tai Chi group. She held many jobs and volunteer positions throughout life, including Cub Scout Den Mother, Girl Scouts Troop leader, Newspaper Columnist, an assistant at a hospital, active in the Unity Church of the Cumberlands, the local Tai Chi group, and Quilting.

Music and sharing her bright and loving vision of life were important to Barbara at every stage in life. In addition to piano, she played Hammer Dulcimer, sang in the church choir, and encouraged her children to pursue their musical passions.

She expressed that she had a blessed life and always knew she was loved.

Barbara was a truly bright light in this world, bringing love, happiness and hope to everyone she met. Her light has gone out but the echo of her light will continue to spread, bringing more light, love and hope to the world.

Tonight we celebrate her life.

2020-04-21 A Different Topic – “Game Of Life”

John Horton Conway passed away recently. He created the original “Game Of LifeCellular Automation system. In response to his passing I’ve created a version in DOSBOX, using Microsoft QuickC 2.5 With Assembler (not that I used the assembler portion here).

It is a simple program that randomly fills 20% (roughly) of the cells with the ON bit. The rest are set to OFF. A set of rules are applied in successive generations that control which cells turn on, which turn off, and which stay the way they are. This creates an interesting evolving pattern on the screen. In this case I used the standard 25 line by 80 columns of the old style monitors (generally called 80 column displays), including MS-DOS PCs of the late 1980s.

I used QuickC because it included library functions to control the cursor position and screen clearing. It is entirely text mode, with the ON cells represented by an asterisk character. The OFF cells are space characters. I added a display at the bottom of the screen to indicate which generation is showing. They tick off at the amazing speed of a 1980s PC. DOSBOX emulates a 4.77 MHz clock rate generally, though you can make adjustments. Mostly it uses the slow clock speed so that games of that era will run properly rather than insanely fast.

Video of the program running. Running time 2.52 minutes, rendered to 1280x720p.