Work continues on my long-overdue website upgrade. I now estimate that the project has reached the milestone halfway point of completion. And I’m feeling pretty good about the changes; not only is the site looking slick but also includes some major improvements. At every step, I’m testing to make sure it’s functional and readable on a variety of resolutions from mobile to 4K, and that it smoothly scales for everything in between. CSS sure has come a long way in the last decade towards making element scaling more possible.
I was also impressed by the CSS grid layouts. They made it pretty simple to realize my bento box-style homepage with different-sized blocks that automatically arrange themselves to fill in any gaps and any number of columns. And almost no JavaScript was required for this, save for a bit to make all the columns end on the same row, which warrant either hiding or resizing some blocks. I think this new look for the homepage is a lot more compelling. And since it’s an automatically generated mix of posts and pages, it won’t require any additional publishing work like the old homepage “slider” (which has been randomly breaking a bunch lately despite me not touching it for a decade).
I’ve also been designing the look from the start with a dark theme, as I think that’s generally the preference these days—to not have your eyes blown out by bright screens all day. But I do plan on tacking on a light theme as well once it’s all done. I also have a slick new background mask that’s better compressed. It was a whole saga figuring out that WEBP alpha channels are not compressed the same way as RGB channels, and then discovering that there’s now actually masking native to CSS so I could just make the mask be grayscale with no need for an alpha.
And I’ve finally made a snake spinner/throbber animation for loading events (seen at left). I wanted to do this in the past when I was making the current version of the site. I tried using Flash animation, but it didn’t look quite right. This time I rotoscoped footage of a sidewinder snake moving across sand. It’s only 8 frames, but I think it works pretty well. It gives kind of a lo-fi effect and scales quite well. *wink wink* I originally intended to use animated PNG for the final format, but ended up finding the dependable old GIF format worked best, so why not—it’s not like it’s deprecated or anything.
And lastly, I made several improvements to how media is used in posts/pages. I’ve been trying to make all the media usage consistent and standards compliant. So, all audio clips use native audio elements, and all (YouTube) videos use WP oEmbeds. I actually found old videos on here that were still trying to use Flash players for fuck’s sake. Downloads will also be improved by listing previous versions and downloading directly from the server instead of through a WordPress plugin (I think that was the cause of a lot of corrupted downloads in the past😬). And I’m making better use of syntax highlighting for code blocks and markdown-formatted changelogs.
Back to Diablo 2
Now it’s time for the (what’s become) regular section on game modding. I’ve been replaying Diablo 2 lately. Of course, I love the game, but the more I play it, the more I become aware of its flaws. I think they mostly stem from the game being just so dated. Or maybe the game is a bit bad, but we just overlook it because of the nostalgia…? I would love to give Resurrected a try, of course, but I’m not sure I can justify the price quite yet, especially since mods only seem to work in singleplayer. Bleh.
This is the first time I’ve tried playing the sorceress class. I’m usually more inclined to play melee or archer since the controls for magic can be so fiddly. Unlike Diablo 3, you can’t use skills on a single button press. You have to first switch to the skill, and then use it. And because you want to move with your left click, you really don’t want that to also use a skill, especially for a ranged character, it would be a constant dance of switching between move and hold still (to cast a skill without accidentally walking over to enemies). So that leaves you using all your skills with right-click and then either scrolling the mouse wheel to cycle through them (fine for a few skills) or selecting skills with keys first. Ugh… I dunno… you get used to it, I guess.
The sorceress is certainly a powerful class (well, until you start running into elemental resistance monsters), but the way the skills are setup really forces you to focus your points on only one skill. If you start spreading your skills out over several elements or spells, you undoubtedly fall behind on DPS. And the loot is less fun than melee, too, since the weapon damage and any added damage from items isn’t relevant for spell damage. I used the same staff (Bane Ash) for most of Normal, and just recently switched to a Leaf runeword staff in Hell, so there’s not much in the way of options for magic-user weapons. You just get whatever pumps up your skills the most.
The last time I was playing D2, I mentioned wanting to try removing magic find from the game. As a recap, my issue is that magic find is antithetical to the function of gear. Gear is there to help you survive and kill monsters, and it shouldn’t be there to find more gear. Better gear should just come naturally. Plus the way the game was originally balanced, you basically had to pump up your magic find to get good gear in the first place. It felt too forced.
Well, removing magic find is what I’ve been testing during this most recent playthrough. I’m still tweaking the drop rates, but I’ve eliminated magic find as a property from all items, replacing it instead with a mix of other properties: sometimes gold find, sometimes sockets, stamina regen and movement speed for topaz gems, added skills for Ist rune, etc. It’s been working fine so far. I’ve attempted to balance the drop rates so that you’ll get about one or two legendaries and set items during a session, and many rares. I’ve also cut back on the chances for legendary and set items with gambling as I found I was relying on that too much. But I only reduced the chances by about 25%—I don’t want it to be too tedious to gamble if you’re hunting for a specific item.
No idea when I’ll release any update to my Balanced Better Drops mod. I might want to do another playthrough first, maybe another Demon Hunter or Barb. Or maybe I’ll finally give Necromancer or Druid another try—if I have the fortitude to endure another spell-caster. I’ve also been thinking about making my mods easier to install and more modular and customizable by making a mod manager program. I know something like this exists for D2R, so I dunno…maybe it’s a waste of time since few people are still playing classic. But I’m finding it more and more difficult to keep my mods separated; they keep needing changes to the same files. We’ll see.
Also during this playthrough I’ve been trying out the high-res and high-fps mod called D2DX. It’s been a blessing for keeping me from getting migraines due to the low framerate of the base game. It does have a few bugs like a logo showing up on tooltips; sprites stretching weirdly, wiggling, or swapping out when moving; and occasional black screen flashes. But it’s still better that nothing.
