Silence

I haven't had a lot to say over the past bit.  My employer shifted into games, so I've had to stop working on a lot of games stuff.  Still trying to find the next focus for this blog.

Stay tuned.

Budget Planning

I was recently approached about a position which had a mixed bag for compensation.  Take-home pay would be one-third lower, but total compensation would end up 50% over my current total comp.  I used the opportunity to try to sketch out a rough budget to see what would have to go if I did have my take-home drop by a third each check.

It was a bit of an eye-opening experience.  Realistically, I'm one of the fortunate ones who would be able to withstand a hit that large per check.  There are some elements I'd have to modify about my lifestyle, but most of those involve "mad money" or disposable income.  Those elements wouldn't vanish from my lifestyle, but would be drastically curtailed.

I've got a couple of things that would help mitigate that reduction.  My Kia is scheduled to be done being paid off by May 2022.  My HVAC loan is a large chunk of cash each month, but will be done by end of January 2023.  I've got three large expenses coming up in March, April, and June, but nothing major planned for the rest of the year.

Realistically, I'm considering trying to live with this budget for the next two months out of curiosity.  The money that I'm not going to be spending will be split in two: half going to my emergency savings account, and the other half going towards my largest bills.

RTResolution v0.4.0 Troubleshooting

RTResolution will be released to the general public on Friday after being released to patrons early today.  This post will collect the troubleshooting information from early adopters.

The game crashes on launch.
The RTResolution patcher now drops two files in your save game folder: Terraria.exe and RTRHooks.dll.  Make sure you copy both files over to your save game folder.
Update 6/10 7:24pm: Fixed in RTResolution 0.4.2.


The game won't go over 4096 in any one direction.
There are memory constraints within the Terraria process when you start going larger than this.  If you want to risk it, try the 8K experimental build.  I'm aware of at least one crash at higher resolutions due to an issue inside of Terraria with ultra-high resolutions, though.
Update 6/10 7:24pm: Fixed in RTResolution 0.4.1.

RTResolution v0.4 Released Tomorrow For Patrons, Friday For Everyone Else

I'll be releasing RTResolution v0.4 tomorrow for patrons.  This has the verified biome fix, works for Terraria v1.4.0.5, and is tested in multimonitor scenarios as well.  This also unlocks me being able to do more mods in the future the way I used to do them in RomTerraria.

The build will be released for everyone sometime on Friday.

For those of you who have been popping on to my Patreon, grabbing builds, then dropping off...I'm tracking that.

RTResolution v0.3 Released

Update 5/20/2020 8:42pm: v0.3.4 was released to patrons early to help ensure it works fine.
Update 5/18/2020 5:24pm: Added v0.3.3 to help with out-of-memory crashes on multimonitor configurations.
Update 5/18/2020 1:02pm: Added v0.3.2 to help with multimonitor configurations.
Update 5/17/2020 2:21pm: Added v0.3.1 as well for those who are experiencing game balance issues.

This version of RTResolution is designed to work with the new Terraria v1.4 "Journey's End" patch and does the following things.

1) It increases the maximum size of a display before a forced zoom to 8192x8192.
2) It increases the maximum size of render targets to help with multimonitor scenarios.

Terraria "Journey's End" running at 4K with a zoom level of 100%.

Download v0.3.3 here.

Download v0.3.2 here.

Source is on my Patreon and will be released for everyone at the end of May.

Note regarding biomes: I'm still tracing through all the biome logic in "Journey's End" and it's going to take a little time for me to figure out how it works.  If you use this mod to enable 1:1 zoom, you might get some biome wonkiness until I figure out all the internal logic and how to patch it.  I'm hoping to have something by end-of-month.