A fresh batch of servers is scheduled to be released for WoW Classic on November 21st 2024. I’ve been playing WoW since its release in 2004 though the Cataclysm expansion where things started to die off for me. I’ve touched each expansion here and there since then but havent spent much time with them. I feel like the game lost itself somewhere along the way. But I am excited to restart my journey for the 4th time (vanilla, classic, SOD). To help add a bit of a twist to this reset I am tinkering with the option of running a 5-party multibox setup. I’ve played a couple of hours on the era servers with a paladin, priest, and mage and it seems doable. Blizzard has banned the use of input broadcasting software which made the enitre process much easier. But I have a working concept utilizing a couple tools such as ShiftWindow to automatically position my wow clients. And other addons he first being EMA which provides a lot of in-game utility for managing quests, party, etc.

I spent some time tweaking our tree model where I left of from last time. One of the major issues I had was that there was some strange transparency issues happening when the tree was viewed from above. Almost as if two of the planes had opposite normals the transparency would combine them together and would only display tiny little fragments. The settings that made impacted the quality the most were changing the transparency mode to Alpha Clipping and disabling back face culling. Some other minor improvements I made were to disable both tree textures from receiving shadows and to make the texture backlit to avoid odd parts of it being illuminated from the sun. Overall I think it turned out quite nice

I’ve had the discomfort pleasure of going though a few changes over the past 6 months or so. And no were not talking about seasonal changes, or changing the time, these are professional changes. One common thread I picked up on was the assurance that the status quo would be maintained. However there was a stark contrast in the delivery of the message on both occurances. My thoughts on how to deliver the news of change would be to have a clear plan in place. Its impossible to prepare for every scenario but having a clear message and thought on the future goes a long way and shows that matters are being taken seriously. Delivering conflicting information causes doubt and confusion for parties involved. Remote work has certainly thrown a wrench in the process. People are no longer just a walk down the hallway. Remote workers are no longer privilege to watercooler conversations. Not necessarily gossip but having your ear to the ground so to speak. Theres the official message being delivered but a significant aspect to that message is the leading up to it. Change doesnt happen in a vaccum, there is a series of events that takes place before hand. Topics are discussed, feelings are heard, meetings planned, work gets done, etc. I’m not quite sure what point I am trying to make, if there is one, but I felt it was a small message worth sharing.

I’ve been a fan of World of Warcraft for some time now. I have fond memories of leveling my first character a warrior. I had a small group of friends that also played and we spent countless hours exploring Azeroth. I’ve also enjoyed programming since I was about 14 when my dad handed me a book on Visual Basic 6 I believe. The book was way over my head but I still remember the excitement I had when I clicked a button and a popup window appeared. Recently I have been back on the game development track with Godot. GDquest has published some nice courses on Godot development and building on some of what I have learned there I have started a new project. Not being much of an artist myself I like to use available assets when I can. Using a program I recently found called wow_export I pulled out a model of a tree from Elwynn Forest. It took a couple hours of tinkering but I was able to utilize the image to image feature of automatic1111 to create two new textures for the tree. I hooked them up inside of Blender and then sumbled a bit trying to get the transparency to work on the leaves but after a bit I was able to get it working correctly. With haste I proceeded to place the new model into a Godot scene that I recently created using a plane mesh with noise displacement. I was quite pleased to see the tree working reasonably well.

I was starting to get a warning from TrueNAS about low disk space on my NAS. I recently upgraded to TrueNAS Scale about a month ago from FreeNAS. I have really enjoyed using TrueNAS. I used to roll my own services directly on top of Ubuntu but the overhead of maintaing everything has gotten to me. TrueNAS Core has been simple and easy to work with and a nice upgrade from FreeNAS. I had been running a single vdev mirror of two disks with one spare. Once my drive and an extra sata power cable arrived reassigning the spare and the new drive into a 2x2 mirror took only a matter of minutes. Next step ill have to take on is planning the migration out to larger drives since I’ve hit the max number of drives I can squeeze in my spare PC case.

I’ve been having fun learning more about hugo.

After all of the wordpress drama I decided to take a look for an alternative. Hugo appeared to be a popular solution. I am enjoying the local development evnironment I can run. I also do not have high demands for a website and would like to start using this site as a place to put my thoughts and interests. Having this be a public place give me some sense of responsibility and expectations associated with what I put here.