Illusorywall

Fan of the Souls series. Testing obscure or debated mechanics, and posting about cut content or other oddities. Also on twitter @illusorywall.

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Patreon Launched!

Hey everyone, I’ve launched a Patreon! If you like the work that I do please consider supporting me here. Any amount would mean the world to me. <3

https://www.patreon.com/illusorywall

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Dark Souls 2 Dissected #1 - How Soul Memory Was Solved

Here it is! The first episode about Dark Souls 2!

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Dark Souls Dissected #10 - Out of Bounds Exploration

Here’s a close look at a whole bunch out of bounds content in Dark Souls 1. It’s my longest video yet, hope you enjoy!

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Demon’s Souls Dissected #2 - Sixaxis Motion Gestures

My most recent Demon’s Souls Dissected from earlier this month. I take a closer look at the awkward sixaxis motion inputs and why some of them were more difficult to perform than others.

And now that there’s finally a couple episodes in this series, here’s a link to the playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH-cMCF0_NrZ7nVu0fYcJ5R-xzbnd8yjY

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Dark Souls Dissected #9 - Lordran’s Layout

I’ve gotten a bit slow at posting here on tumblr, so if you aren’t already following me on twitter or youtube, be sure to head on over since most of my Souls content gets posted there first.

Here is last month’s Dark Souls Dissected, a deep dive into the layout of Dark Souls and the spatial relationship between different areas:

It is largely a recreation of my older tumblr post here, but there’s a lot more stuff added and some things just come across more nicely in video. 

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Demon’s Souls Dissected #1 - Loot in the Leechmonger’s Lair

It’s been my intention for a while to branch off from Dark Souls 1. Though I still have a lot more to cover about that game, I’m happy to finally break the ice with Demon’s Souls now. This is one that is a bit out of left field; It explains how knocking enemies off of cliffs in 5-1 results in more treasure in the Leechmonger’s arena. It’s a unique, under-recognized mechanic.

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Dark Souls Dissected #8 - Humanity Drop

My longest Dark Souls Dissected yet does a deep dive into the “Humanity Drop” mechanic. Better known as ‘the thing that lets you get soft humanity for killing a bunch of enemies in an area with an undefeated boss’. I worked to uncover how this worked a bunch of years back, but in preparation for this video I learned some new things and also got some answers to mysteries that have been without explanation this whole time.

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Dark Souls Dissected #7 - More than Meets the Eye: Hidden Designs

Instead of my usual analysis of a mechanic, I made a video that explores a peculiar design aspect found in Dark Souls and other Soulslikes from FromSoftware. 

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Dark Souls Dissected #6 - Q&A: Dead Snakes in Sen’s Fortress

Here’s a video response to a viewer question about the 2 Serpent Soldiers that sometimes spawn in as dead near Siegmeyer. This also doubles as a sort of behind the scenes look at some of my testing methods.

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Dark Souls Dissected #5 - Spawning Quelana

I’m back with another Dark Souls Dissected video. This one does some reflecting on how Quelana’s spawning conditions were figured out, as well as a lesson on how Dark Souls is “thinking” about her presence behind the scenes. 

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Dark Souls Dissected #4 - Fall Damage

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Dark Souls Dissected #3 - Vagrants

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Dark Souls Dissected #2 - Covenant Betrayals & Absolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqK9N3HSZ0Y

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Dark Souls Dissected #1 - Sin

I’m launching a brand new video series about the obtuse and arcane mechanics of Dark Souls 1. Hope you enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNysXeQrNzo

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Dark Souls Remastered: Online Bell Ringing Added to Second Bell

One of the cool passive online features in Dark Souls 1 was that the bell atop the Undead Parish Church would ring for other players online, when someone else rings it in their own game.

For whatever reason, this was never included for the 2nd bell in Quelaag’s Domain until now. 

(a screenshot from PtDE, where this does not work)

I was excited to see this in a live stream by Miltrivd, which can be seen here. I was confident this was new because I’ve done testing specifically on this 2nd bell before in debug, to confirm it didn’t have the effect. But we have additional confirmation from HotPocketRemix, who had this to say:

I will also confirm this based on what I'm seeing in the event scripts. There's a new event which is essentially an exact copy of the Undead Parish Bell multiplayer event. They even copied the name of the event (it's still in Japanese, while new events have English names, generally).

Interestingly enough, it appears to send the same multiplayer event ID as the Parish one, so if I'm reading this correctly, the game can't tell the difference between the two bells being rung in terms of multiplayer propagation. However, since you'd never be connected to people in the Parish and Blighttown at the same time, you'll only ever receive bell ringing events from the correct bell. (I.e. if the areas weren't separated like this, someone might ring the Parish bell and in your world, the Blighttown bell would ring.)

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Return to Yharnam 2018

It’s that time of year again!

Return to Yharnam is a massive, annual community event that begins this year on March 10th, with a suggested end date of March 24th. It’s meant to be a coordinated time for fans to return to the game at the same time, to surge it with simultaneous online activity. This year, Bloodborne also happens to be March’s free download on PS+, meaning there will be lots of newcomers to interact with!

Suggestions for what to do and how to play in Return to Yharnam:

Create a new character and play through the game

Engage in as much co-op along the way as possible

Optional: Try to defeat at least two players in each area in PvP before defeating the boss and moving on. This will help spawn Bell Maidens in areas they're not usually in, bringing PvP to less-common locations.

Leave a message that says "you're in the know, right?" by as many lamps as possible (but especially by the Central Yharnam lamp). Keep an eye out for any that you find and give them all a fine rating!

This event is not specific to any online community and is meant to reach as many Bloodborne fans as possible. Help spread the word anywhere you can think of!

I tweeted about it here:

https://twitter.com/illusorywall/status/970001164807876608

Reddit topic here:

https://np.reddit.com/r/bloodborne/comments/81s066/return_to_yharnam_is_happening_again_it_begins/

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NES Audio: The reason the triangle wave doesn’t have volume control.

Something pretty well-known about the triangle channel on the NES is that it doesn’t offer proper volume control (it can be messed with, slightly, but that’s another story). But I never really considered why this was the case.

Thankfully, this was recently explained to me by hunretrogeek, and the answer is surprisingly simple: It’s already using up the allotted volume space to make the waveform itself.

Consider the square/pulse waveforms on the NES. There’s not really any verticality to them. They’re either in the up position, or the down position, never anywhere inbetween. They were also given a 4-bit space for volume control, resulting in 16 possible volumes (0 = silent, 1 = softest, 15 = loudest).

The triangle wave? It was also given a 4-bit space to work with. But it’s already eaten it up in the process of making the triangle shape:

So there you have it! The triangle doesn’t lack volume control out of some intentional shortcut to give it less features than the pulse waves. Instead, the issue is that it wasn’t given more resources/ special treatment.