Sentinel Armor Progress 6

I've started laying down the base colors for the Sentinel armor. Now, you may notice how both armor models aren't pitch black. That's because I'm using a diffuse texture from a palette swap armor model to make it easier to trace all the filigree.

Like before, nearly everything at this stage is a vector using blending styles The filigree is an exception. The traces are vector lines, but I stroke them onto a layer with the vector mask disabled.

Sentinel Armor Progress 5

UV unwrapping complete. Well, kind of. As you can see, I still need to take all the pieces and shove them inside that black, square outline. I think I'll make it double height and aim for a 1024x2048 texture. That way, I don't have to scale the UVs down so much and can avoid having to make a bigger texture to compensate.

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The MyBookLive is alive again. Swapped harddrives, ran an unbricking script to "install" the new drive, and copied files back over. Now, I wait.

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I was playing around with blog themes and tried Dynamic Views. It looks pretty, but runs slow and is barely customizable. You can't choose one view and remove the menu items for the others; it's all or nothing unless you edit the theme's source.

Extra widgets do not show, color choices seem to be irrelevant, you can't remove existing widgets, FireFox became unresponsive half a dozen times when I looked at customization previews, and it adds extra spaces in posts which then messes with formatting.

MyBookLive dying: Confirmed.

According to the SMART status, the drive is dying. The read error metric is at 1, which is apparently a bad thing. The drive can still work, but it looks to be all downhill from here. I don't expect any support from WD after tearing the thing apart, so I'm adding "another hard drive" to my list of things to buy.

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I'm almost done unwrapping the Sentinel armor. Just one elbow pad left.

I still don't know what kind of delivery mechanism I'm going to use. I think a quest would be appropriate or even a new dungeon. Placing items on NPCs has turned out to be a bad idea. They wander off, get killed and deleted, fall through the ground, don't die, etc.

The messenger system worked well for the Bassrath-Kata weapons. However, players had to use the console to get all the weapons because I set it up so they would only get one item after finishing the Dragonborn quest. Not a great way to do things. Instead of the messenger system, I think I'll create a quest NPC and let him handle giving stuff away.