A steaming deckful of systemic shocking

Steam Deck 256 GB

This Spring's Steam Sale had the Steam Deck's different versions slightly discounted. I asked my old friend, who had bought a Deck sometime earlier, what he thought of it and how had it worked for him. It was pretty clear at this point that I was going to order one, maybe I was just confirming my decision somehow.

Device

The postal services delivered my order pretty quickly (or I was so busy I didn't even notice the time between ordering and receiving) right in the early April. I was delighted with the transport case that relieved me of the awful "where the hell could this be stored safely?" process.

As a physical device it was a bit larger and heavier than a Nintendo Switch. The photos here didn't show that there were two pairs of formula 1 gearshift -triggers in addition to the normal double R/L corner triggers, just like in Steam Controller (I liked it as a controller, I just haven't played many games that were nicer with SC instead of keyboard+mouse combo).

Testing

During these couple of months I haven't used that much time with the new toy, but I've played a bit. I think I completed episodes 2-4 of Secret Agent HD on the deck while I only completed the first one on the desktop. In Noita aiming the magic wand with the thumb controller was a bit odd but despite that I did get halfway reliably to the Snowy Depths. Or as reliably as with the desktop...

My aforementioned desktop was at least 8 years old at this point, and only recently I had ended up in this situation where it didn't run the newer games that I was actually interested in playing. I guess there were a million things that it wasn't good enough for anymore, hadn't been in years, but none of that had crossed my table. Now I could ogle at the modern games if they behaved well with this sort of a console controller or not. The touchscreen, what little I tinkered with it, worked just nicely. I also hadn't yet taken the time to reboot to the GNU/Linux side of things and start fooling around. No rush.

System Shock remake

The early June email flow woke me up to the fact that the Kickstarter project I just backed in summer 2016, System Shock remake, had its final product released to the wild. Interestingly the project team's original and mildly optimistic release goal was 2017, which has obviously caused some keyboard-smashing rages in the well-known type of internauts. I was just content with the thing being done and that I could try out the game I paid 30 USD for. As anyone reading my nonsense here may have noticed, I hadn't been able to run out of things to do over the years.

I almost forgot that this KS project also included System Shock: Enhanced Edition that I found in my Steam library some years ago and that I hobbled through to compensate for the fact that I didn't get a grasp of the game in 1994, 1995 despite spending my allowance on the SVGA cd-rom version and all. Maybe it was too different from Doom for my liking at that point in life? I couldn't remember such details anymore. Another pretty likely explanation was that the family computer, a 486/SX66/4 (later /8 and even /16) just didn't run the shocker well enough.

No matter, I practically didn't play the original System Shock at all and the Enhanced Edition on the slightly more modern hardware mostly gave me a headache. The places I could somehow remember and recognize and the story was known, but I didn't think that was going to be a problem for my experience. Most likely my old colleague Matti – who I suspected having memorized each of the pixels – might have been even more excited than myself.

 

So far I've been adventuring in the bottommost levels of the Citadel Station over the evenings of a couple of weeks. I've gotten beaten up or otherwise seriously injured often enough to make me limp back to the Medical Suite to cheese the autodoc and the recharging station. Despite my cautious approach I've managed to murder everyone from almost two and half floors now, having proceeded from the Medical level to the Research and Reactor levels. Some of the irradiated corridors I've avoided like the plague because just opening the door has made the hacker gag his guts out and the radiation damage has taken ages to fade away. Maybe I didn't need to be that paranoid, as getting the Isotope from the pretty hot room in Research wasn't that hurtful (I went in with full health and ran back to the autodoc straight after, of course).

The poor folks turned into cyborgs have been awful and they've lost heads and/or limbs in fights, just like in the good old Soldier of Fortune. Whenever I have managed to take it easy, the normal and few elite cyborgs have been pretty chatty so they've rarely been able to take me by surprise.

A few of the commenters I've seen have said that "this is how it looked in your memories" which wasn't quite correct as my memories came pretty freshly from SS:EE instead of polished by almost 30 years. It was very descriptive, I just found places much more recognizeable now, it was easier to get lost in the original.

Finished: Project VIII/22

Vogtlandische Maschinenfabrik AG (Vomag) SdKfz 162 - Jagdpanzer IV L/48

The Tank Destroyer project that I started barely in the year 2022 was now finally completed, in June. Not that I had rushed around with this, nor had I dragged my feet on purpose. This project, just like every other one, lived on inspiration: sometimes I got a sick amount of stuff done in a handful of consecutive days, then I tinkered with other things for a good while as the Jagdpanzer IV was simmering in the background.

Timeline

My timekeeping was pretty unstructured, I mostly used the timestamps of the photos I had used to follow up the different modeling sessions. If the whole show lasted 28 about 45min sessions, then we got a 28 * 0,75h = 21h, spread nicely over six months. While spinning these numbers up I took a look at how the Königstiger went, and it had only eaten something like three more months from the calendar despite being a lot more complex a model and the build-paint process was quite a lot more intensive.

New method invocations

In an earlier related post I was ruminating that being practically a random gift, this was a great model for testing all sorts of weird new things. As documented, I got carried away painting the metallic parts with a non-metallic paints (excluding the final highlights on the tracks), and that seemed to be a neat approach, at least with the engineering tools.

Oil paints had been tickling my curiosity for a longer while now, but until this early year I had managed to squash my interest in the subject. Luckily, however, my colleagues were even better with their sales pitches than the random internauts, because those things were damn comfortable to use! Their drying/flashing/curing times were incredible, but especially considering my weird schedules that was most often a good thing. Curses, I couldn't fix my overapplication of mud over a weekend? No worries, the thinner reactivated my paint and I could salvage the situation. There was nothing like this with the acrylics, but I was going to keep using those as my main painting tool in the future.

Applying pigments with the thinner was also a new thing for me, that I encountered accidentally, and good that I did. I was most definitely going to play even more with the pigments in the upcoming projects.

Photography

With all this newness, I got inspired and played with my final photos much more than before. The backgrounds of my light tent photos had been bothering me because they (the backgrounds) weren't smooth and clean fresh out of the camera. For reference, any of the recent "Finished: Project n/yyyy" can be checked for examples. For these final photos I spent some more time, checked for some useful processes, and ended up taking my photos three times until I got what I more or less wanted, thanks to someone missetting the DSLR's aperture parameter to the opposite end of what it needed to be.

[0] – Photos in the light tent

Simplest thing first, I set the background roll so that its folds (packed away it was folded twice) would jump out as little as possible. I took my photos with the camera's (Canon EOS 60D; kit lense with specs I never have bothered to memorize) manual mode; ISO 200; aperture f25; exposure time 0"6 aka 600ms if I read these correclty. So far I have not shot these photos of mine raw but still jpeg, despite the seriously committed people swearing by the wonders of the raw format.

[1] – First edits

When finally done with the photography I dropped my shots into my work laptop's Photos, where I bumped the colour temperature a notch upwards, then adjusted the Levels. Being a total amateur I just looked at the spectrum and dragged the dark handle to where the graph practically started and the light handle to where it pretty much ended.

Unlike in this pic here that showed the Levels of a WIP photo taken from the tabletop, my final photos had a pretty much gaussian curve in them with a noticeable amount of emptiness. With the unnecessaries trimmed off, the colours in the photos started looking much more than what my own foul eyes told me of the model in the real world.

[2] – Artifact cleanup etc

Cropping the Levels didn't remove all of the nonsense, even if it helped quite a bit. As the second editing stage I threw my photos into Gimp, where I picked a white and simply started painting over artifacts with it. The result was a pretty uniform white background (or blue in the few photos I took with the blue background).

Being my lazy self I got most of the junk just along the edges of the model with Gimp's magic wand tool's "select by color" mode. The last fine-tuning I did by hand, sometimes poking individual pixels. Whenever needed I also rotated the photo to get it to an angle I felt I needed to get, then cropped it nicely, and finally resized each photo down to n*1024.

As you could see from these photos below, you didn't even need to squint for it, the results didn't end up being nearly perfect. They were much, much better than the ones that I didn't play with this much, that was for sure.

[3] – Photo gallery

Jagdpanzering 28

Twenty-eighth session

This was a finishing round. I went through each of the spots that bothered me, and added what I felt was missing. After a long back-and-forth pondering about the wooden bits I ended up applying a brown wash (Citadel Shade - Agrax Earthshade) on them after all.

An undo-round

I cleaned up some of the larger dark mud oil paint splotches with the thinner. At this point these oil paints had been on the tank's surface for many days already, but less than a week so I wasn't worried. I dipped my /-shaped blending brush into the thinner, wiped most of it off and started working the dark brown paint towards the front edge.

Yup. The dirt layer decreased as if I had pressed ctrl+z. Or not quite, as I didn't want to remove all of it, just fix the heaviness. While I was doing this, I also reduced the overlarge light rust pigments. Those moved along nicely as well.

Mostly I felt I needed to clean up the front and the rear parts of the tank. In general I felt the track armour in the rear of the tank looked half-assed, but I wasn't bothered enough to redo it all.

The muddy dirt on top of the tank I edited so that I removed most of it from the tops of the hatches. My idea was, of course, to model the crew moving around the hatches with their dirty boots but didn't really dance on top of them.

Afterwards I realized that I may have committed an error: I made the mess on the hinge-side, instead of where they would be actually moving on. Better results next time.

Metal

One sure sign of being almost done was that I now painted the barrel cleaning rod's connectors with brass (VGA 72758 Brassy Brass). It wasn't too clear where these were supposed to be just looking at the monolithic piece, but that's what I painted. I had never had the delusions of doing those as nmm, even though the engineering tools ended up looking pretty nicely metallic, with an simple intended non-metallic-metal trick.

Running gear's metallic bits

Next I drybrushed, where I physically could,  some Gunmetal (VMA 71072) onto the contact points of the tracks. I also went through all of the guiding horns, drive sprocket's teeth, and idler wheel outer rims that I could.

From a pilot's viewpoint:

Of course I had managed to misplace the graphite pen I bought in the early year, so I had to usea normal (and hard) pencil to highlight the metal-painted bits. It didn't really work too well to replicate the effect of a track worn clean by the wheels. But it has to be mentioned that I was ridiculously careful with my awful tracks at this point, because they were foul, and had broken off from multiple places, and I didn't want to break them again.