Blue buttholes

I LITERALLY REBLOG OR BLOG ABOUT WHATEVER I WANT. POSSIBLY NSFW! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED <3

[tri-punisher]

big boys 🥰

(enzo, magnus, maximos, cleetus, lyle, cyprin, sadiki, jed)

[midekai]

Commission for Joe G Bear! SFW and all. Just look at his tumby :3

[midekai]

Reference for Pup Tact

[a-taza]

look who brought you snacks for this late-night game session~ ✨ I´m obsessed with this "twink death college asriel" concept 👀

[mottaxio]

Steve from fornite showing hes big guns

[paracosmicka]

i miss the forehead touch perspective meme so much

[jayaxer]

Nine inch tails got a tape for you

[johnmausson]

Just wanted to animate something

[johnmausson]

added colors video version: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BEam7yh1dFk

[jayaxer]

I made a long Gamedev Presentation about entering and navigating studio gamedev called Notice me, Gamedev.

It's up on my Youtube Channel- www.youtube.com/@jayaxer t was streamed to my discord and captured for youtube. There are 18 chapters and it's all free!

There will be 13 more chapters added to this for a total of 31 chapters and about 12 hours of talking.

Each chapter is a little different and some get weird but the goal of my School from Hell channel is to give good information in an interesting way for free.

[jayaxer]

The final chapters are being streamed and recorded this saturday on my server then will be posted onto the gamedev playist on my youtube. Subscibe there if yer interested

[bernieburrart]

[midekai]

Reference for Pup Tact

[wolvesmaw]

Kinda poking at a new OC, Jupiter. He’s a piebald American alligator

[blaquesails]

In her last years, along with her sons, daughters and grandchildren, she added at least 16 tigers to Ranthambore’s population. What would have happened to Ranthambore without her is unimaginable, but she rode out the crisis years, and finally handed the prime range of the lake areas to her daughters to fight it out. She moved several kilometres away to lead the last years of her life. Her teeth were worn out — one was broken, and as the years rolled by, she lost all of them and still managed on occasions to kill and eat deer. Though she was helped by the park management, I still could not believe her ability to survive. By the end of 2015, she was the world’s longest living wild tigress. I saw her in early 2016, scaling a mud wall with such surety — it was just astonishing. Twice in her last year of life, she walked back to her original range of the lakes, spending a week each time at her old haunts. Few other tigers fought with her. They seemed to accept the fact that she was the grand old lady of the lakes.

— Valmik Thapar, “The Machli I Knew: Remembering the grand old dame of Ranthambore National Park”

[ragnarrox]

How to get Nocturne (1999) running on modern systems

Nocturne is a video-game-historically really fascinating survival horror game by Terminal Reality, and it always baffles me why so few people are aware of it. Genuinely an unjustly forgotten horror gem.

It’s not been available to buy on any digital distribution platform (or physically) in a long time, so it’s effectively abandonware. And it’s also a bit of a tricky on to get running on modern systems.

I’m currently working on a video on it, and in it I’ll be referring to this post for anyone who wants to get the game running on modern systems. I’m planning to use this tumblr-blog in the future to provide the “how-to-get-it-running” guides in my videos, and also migrate the old ones I shared via google docs here, piece by piece whenever I find the time.

In this guide, I’ll share my experiences with getting it to run without hassles based on a Windows 11 machine with an NVidia graphics card. 

(And how to do it better and easier than I did)

Siouxsie and The Banshees (1999, colorized)

One of the biggest challenges in getting it to run on modern systems is that, because it was so hardware demanding at the time, it requires a pretty powerful CPU (for the time) to run, I’m talking Pentium III and upwards. Problem with that is that there’s no real good virtual machine emulation for it out there with projects like 86Box. A Virtual Machine, i.e. an encapsulated Emulator is most of the times the most reliable approach because it simulates the entire system for the game to run in, without it ever getting in contact with your actual system. Which ensures that it’s essentially the same system running the game, no matter on which computer.

So we have to make it run within our Windows 8/10/11 or what have you machines.

It doesn’t have to be hard

When I set the game up for replaying and recording it for the video, I went the manual way, used the dgVoodoo wrapper and spent quite some time tweaking and experimenting manually to get it running satisfactorily.

For anyone who wants to go this way (for the fun of it), I’ll list all the hoops I had to jump through to resolve all the issues I encountered, and I’ll try to give a bit of an explanation of why some of the issues happen. I think this stuff is quite interesting from a technical standpoint because it gives a lot of insight into where compatibility issues with this near-25-year-old piece of software arise on modern systems.

BUT... you actually don’t have to do it the manual way, because way too late I realized that there’s a way better, way easier solution:

The game is featured on The Collection Chamber - an amazing one-man-hobby-project blog dedicated to classic game preservation. Their approach is to set the games (and software) up to run flawlessly and package the whole thing in a convenient installer. You just have to download, install, and start the game via the shortcut it creates on your desktop or in your start menu.

It even features the game’s manual in PDF form, the level editor, and its documentation, plus a couple of extras like old trailers. Really. Fricking. Cool.

The game’s lighting effects still look gorgeous, 24 years after it came out

The Collection Chamber package runs the game using the DDrawCompat wrapper, a DLL that you place inside the game’s installation folder that emulates an older, more time-appropriate DirectX environment for the game. It’s similar to the DGVoodoo wrapper (which I used) and it seems to run Nocturne with better compatibility.

When installing the Collection Chamber package, you don’t have to worry about this though because this is already integrated and set-up for you, just like the Windows 98 compatibility mode which ensures the game running with a single core only. (That’s vital, but more on that further down below).

As I said, the game runs fine with this pre-configured package, although I have two notes.

1. Cloth Physics and Framerates

EDIT: In response to this post, Collection Chamber added a patch to their release with a settings-file that automatically limits the framerate through DDrawCompat. So the steps in this bullet point are not necessary anymore! I'll leave them for posterity, but for the CC version, ignore this point.

Nocturne features quite incredible cloth physics at the time, especially visible on The Stranger’s trench coat which would wave around autonomously, simulated in real time.

However, one oversight of the devs was that the physics engine’s calculations are tied to the game’s frame rate, instead of an independent time delta.

That was probably okay when the game was made because it was so demanding that no computer was able to produce ridiculously high frame rates.

However, our modern systems easily push the simulated frame rate into the high triple digits.

The result is that the cloth flaps around like it’s possessed by an evil spirit.

Without fps-restriction, The Stranger’s coat is a comic relief character

While this is only an aesthetic issue that you could ignore, this frame rate problem can also cause some characters in pre-scripted cutscenes to get stuck in certain places and never reach the next trigger-point. Meaning the cutscenes run indefinitely. (Luckily you can skip them, which you’re forced to do if that ever happens)

The Collection Chamber installation does not seem to restrict the game’s frame rate, so in order to fix that problem, the solution I found for myself is to use your Graphics Card’s Control Panel.

In case of NVidia, it’s done via the NVidia Control Panel. You find it in your task bar’s system tray, right click the NVidia Icon and open the NVidia Control Panel.

There, go to “3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings”, then open the “Program Settings” tab.

Here, you click “Add” and find the Nocturne.exe file in the game’s installation folder.

In the “Specify the settings for this program:”-list, you scroll down to “Max Frame Rate” and set it to 30 FPS.

(This works pretty similar for ATI cards – google is your friend for other GPU manufacturers)

Note: Some guides out there say that limiting it to 60FPS does the trick. However, I personally found that the physics simulation looks the smoothest and most natural at 30.

I also personally found that the gameplay does not require frenetic MLG-Pro split-second precision skills that 60FPS is necessary, and the filmic presentation makes 30FPS feel pretty cinematic to me.

Ultimately, it’s your choice.

2. Level Editor (and the changes it brings)

The Collection Chamber package (in the Version 3 release) has even integrated Nocturne’s level and scenario editor, which is really cool!!

However, this causes one slight problem, especially for people playing the game for the first time. In order to test-play the user-scenarios, the map files have to be made accessible from the game’s main menu.

Nocturne’s solution was to add the option to list all available level files (file ending .pod) in an ini file and then you’ll get them for selection when you choose “Start Game”.

The problem with that is that in the original game, you were only given a neat selection of the four major chapters of the game (plus the secret 5th once you unlock it). In the editor-version, you get bludgeoned with a, for the uninitiated, extremely long and cryptic list of map files, and you’ll have no clue what to choose.

What am I even supposed to click here?!

So, if you don’t want to use the editor anyway, and just intend to play the game vanilla, here’s the easy fix:

Simply find the “pod.ini” file in the game’s installation folder and either delete it or (less destructive) rename it to something else the game won’t recognize.

Like ‘sauerkraut.ini’ for instance.

When you choose “Start Game” in the main menu now, it lists the original four chapters neatly, and nothing else.

To quote Duke Nukem: “Ahhh, much better!”

That should be it. Enjoy Nocturne.

Tinker Schminker

Now, for those who are curious about some technical knicknacks, here’s how I got it running before I discovered the wonderful Collection Chamber package. The Patched Version

I do own Nocturne physically, but there have been several patches, both official and by the community to help the game’s compatibility. I used the “Fully Patched” version available on myabandonware.com.

dgVooodoo

After installing this, I downloaded dgVoodoo2, copied the D3D8.dll, D3D9.dll, D3DImm.dll and DDraw.dll into the game’s folder (Nocturne does not properly support 3DFX, so Direct Draw it is) and configured it with these settings:

I’ve uploaded these files with my configuration pre-setup here. Just download them and extract them into your game’s folder. You can use the dgVoodooCpl.exe in case you want to adjust the settings.

You can confirm that dgVoodoo is running when you go into the game’s Graphics Settings from the Main Menu when you see “dgVoodoo DirectX Wrapper” listed as your graphics card instead of the one you have in your system. Compatibility Settings

The game doesn’t start without some compatibility adjustments to the .exe file though.

Find the nocturne.exe in the game’s installation folder -> right click -> Properties -> Compatibility Tab.

There check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select “Windows XP (Service Pack 3”

Also make sure to activate the “Run this program as an administrator” checkbox, or you won’t be able to save your game to HDD.

Note: There are some guides that recommend setting compatibility to Windows 98, as it also restricts the game’s usage to a single CPU core. However, with that setting, the game wouldn’t start for me. Only WinXP-SP3 made it run. So I had to find a different solution for the Multi-core CPU issue. Agonizingly slow menus - CPU Cores

The game was programmed for only single core CPUs. When running it with a multi-core CPU, you’ll notice that the game’s menus are painstakingly slow. Each selection takes 5 to 10 seconds, which makes it an absolute pain and especially saving and loading becomes a PITA.

PCGamingWiki writes that you can force the game to run with 1 core only by creating a .bat file in the game’s installation folder with these lines 

I’ve tried this and it didn’t end up working. The menus were still slow. I don’t know why to be honest, but you’re free to try it.

Should it not work for you either, here’s how I solved it.

Once the nocturne.exe is running, alt-tab out and open your Task Manager

(Either CTRL+ALT+DEL -> Task Manager or by searching Task Manager in your Windows Start Menu)

On the left bar, select the “Details” tab, then scroll down until you find the Nocturne.exe, right click it, choose “Set Affinity”.

In the pop-up window, deactivate all CPU cores but one. (Doesn’t matter which one). After this, the game’s menus will run smooth as butter.

Only painful downside is that you have to do this ever single time you start the game. Alas. :( Cloth Physics and Frame Rates

I’ve written about this above in the Collection Chamber package part of this post. Cloth simulation goes wild with unrestricted frame rate. See above how to fix this. Graphics Settings Once all these things are set up, start the game and open the Graphics Settings.

3D API: DirectX 7

3D Hardware: On

Flashlight Halo: Complex

Bits per pixed: 32

Resolution: 1280x1024

Note: You can of course set the resolution lower. I personally find that the game looks nostalgically dashing in the original 640x480 resolution. There’s a reason so many retro-inspired indie games deliberately force their games into lower, more pixelated resolutions.

It’s your choice.

There’s also an HD resolutions for NVidia patch out there, but I personally don’t recommend it because it just stretches the game, making everything look too wide. Just play in classic 4:3 / 5:4, it’s charming. Potential silence

Sometimes, after loading a saved game, the game would suddenly be silent. It has to do with the application switching between various resolutions multiple times between menus and Windows losing focus of the app in the process.

If that happens, just alt tab out and back in and you have sound again.

Plus, this did never happen to me at 640x480 resolutions because at this res, it’s in sync with the menu’s resolution. Intro FMV not visible If the intro movie sequence plays and you only hear sound, but see a black screen – this is an issue that I couldn’t circumvent when using DGVoodoo2.

That’s, I realized later on, why Collection Chamber went with the DDrawCompat wrapper over the DGVoodoo2 one. It just works better overall.

Before I knew about this, I simply ignored this because it’s really only that one flavor cutscene before the main menu that you miss out on, and you can just press ESC to skip it. Just watch it on YouTube or open the “opening.avi” in the game’s “video” folder with VLC. Conclusion

I really recommend going with the Collection Chamber package (and renaming the pod.ini file & limiting the frame rate) for the smoothest experience.

I would go this way myself now (or at least use DDrawCompat) if I were to set it up again.

My steps with DGVoodoo2 I shared mostly ... because I find it technically interesting.

Hope you have fun with Nocturne. It’s a really cool game, definitely worth your time, even if it is a bit janky and unbalanced at times. Gotta respect the jank!

[bigboysdrinkmilk]

Some queer icons and their words for you this Pride Month.

[itsjasperburrdog]

BIG REDD BRUISER makes his way to the arena!! 💪🏾✨

[were--ralph]

so im being horny and wayching porn and i burst out laughing because the top came and he literally sounds like someone chopped off his finger or some shit it's so fucking extra and i wish i could post it but i can't but its so fucking funny

[were--ralph]

Visit Original Link

this was it LMAO

VERY NSFW

[midekai]

BRUH lmao