A Weekend of Games and Fabricating

I spent this weekend playing two games and fiddling with my makerbot trying to get reliable prints out of it.

I had quite a lot of trouble with the MK4 plastruder which was continually stalling mid print and stopping outputing polymer. This was mainly due to the incredible difficulty of tension adjustment in that design. Along comes the new MK5 extruder with a nice thumb wheel to adjust the tension and things are dandy. The extruder keeps squirting out plastic and larger builds become doable.

Now that I can try larger builds I find a problem with layer offsets. Smaller parts are fine like the various test cubes and my favorite the dodecahedron but when it comes to larger prints I get these shifts in the XY. Everything goes fine for the first 5-10 layers then a little shift then a bigger shift and eventually the part is a random mess of plastic.

I read various theories on why this was happening, loose belts, overheating steppers, lack of oil on the runners, electrical interference from the new relay, and an international conspiracy of homeopathy chiropractic and acupuncture practitioners out to ruin things for everyone so they can sell their pseudo scientific crap openly.

So I adjusted the belt tension, aimed fans at the steppers and adjusted their drive voltages, oiled the runners, got a new powersupply to isolate the relay from the rest of the circuit, disproved all their laughable claims with simple application of science and dismissed their junk theories as the ravings of pre scientific fools pointing out that in this day and age people really should know better than to believe in what is essentially repackaged dark ages witchcraft.

But despite that my prints were still showing random offsets. I wondered if it was just the object I was using, so tried to print a MK5 circuit board mount (on the mk4 the extruder circuit board mounted to it but there is nowhere for this on the MK5) this came out a little better but still slipped at the end. I did notice that towards the end of the print the print head seemed to be inside the print piece ie it was low enough that it was deforming the plastic as it printed. I wondered if the settings were off somehow and the layer traversal was too small.

I did some more searching and found some new Skeinforge settings that were supposed to improve the print quality. Also some of their before and after shots had artefacts in the before prints that looked like things I was seeing in my prints. I loaded the new settings recomputed the GCode and ran off another print and this time got a good result. A brand spanking new board mount with no slip and only slight heat warping was finished. I fitted it and then tried to print the previous object (a printable 3x2x1 rubiks cube alike) and that worked too (with a few issues down to it delaminating when I used a bit too much force to get it off the build platform).

I still want to try tweaking some more stuff the new settings reduce the infill ratio quite a bit so I want to check that the reason the thing is working is just it's extruding much less plastic (a sort of run time issue) but since even the most problematic object came out fine I suspect this has done the trick.

And once again pretty much the first real print is a replacement or upgrade part for the printer :D. Next I want to print some cable guides to tidy up some of the wire routing that currently touches one of the belts.

So these prints even the failed ones take a lot of time and while I was waiting on them I was playing a couple of games.

The first is Lara Croft and the Guardians of Light. The latest in the long running tomb raider series is something of a departure from the traditional 3rd person over the shoulder camera system, this is a top down isometric game with co-op play. It still is a platform adventure shooter like its predecessors and it has some neat little additions to the jump climb run package. You have three little helper gadgets the grapple that can attach to special rings and allows you to swing or climb certain areas, the spear which acts both as a weapon and a platform element in that it embeds into walls then can be used as a plaform to stand on, the other element is the remote explosives that you can place the remotely trigger moving objects or destroying the environment. All three are used together with the normal running and pushing things to great effect with some really enjoyable puzzles.

You move with the WASD and your weapon is aimed by the mouse pointer allowing you to manuever around and fire at the various enemies. Its and effective system though the movement on the WASD can be a bit of a pain in the isometric environment when it requires fast movement and accurate direction for platform jumping where combinations of direction keys are required for the 8 possible directions. It leads to a lot of inadvertant plumting to your death with lara leaping in the wrong direction down a mine shaft rather than to the next platform due to it being not quite on the obvious direction. It might be better on a joy pad since it was designed for consoles I suspect this is an element of that.

You get a variety of weapons better ones are found and earned through higher scores. These weapons use a ammo bar with certain ones the basic pistol and the spear and remote bombs being infinite the game auto switches to the infinite weapons should you run out of ammo in the middle of a fight. The weapons are fun and varied and often can be used in the games puzzles, so there are flame throwers and grenade launchers and alsorts.

Along with weapons there are also relics and artifacts that can be found or won by completing challenges, artifacts add bonuses (and for the weaker ones often a negative as well) to lara speed weapons defense bombs and so on. Relics add various abilities like power shot, scatter shot, power bomb, health regen and ammo regen. The relics use a rechargeable bar that fills up as you kill and collect gems the special abilities activating once the bar is full and you losing it when you get hurt.

The graphics are good with nice environments and colourful locations, it's all augmented with some physics and destructable environments.

All in all a very fun game to play with plenty of replay value to complete the various challenges and unlock the special weapons, artifacts, and relics.

The second game is Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a game by Ninja theory the team responsible for the dreadfully disappointing god of war clone Heavenly Sword. This time they hired not only Andy Serkis (who directed this game as well as providing the main characters voice and presumable mocap) but also a proper writer in the form of Alex Garland of the beach/28 days later fame.

As a result the dialog in the game is much tighter it doesn't stray too far into the usual cliches and it keeps some tension playing it's cards very close to it's chest with the reveal of what has been going on only coming about at the very end. The story is supposedly inspired by the Chinese "Journey to the west" but I would guess only loosely.

You play as monkey at the start of the game trapped in a slaver ship in some post apocalyptic future then a young girl named Trip shows up and nearly kills you by escaping and destroying the ship in the process. She then manages to attach this slaver headband to you which will kill you if her heart stops beating. She promises to remove it if you help her get home. Monkey is not very happy about this but can't do anything about it so gruffly sets off to get Trip home as quickly as possible and get rid of this annoying headband.

The game has a mix of platform acrobatics, melee combat, ranged shooting, the odd hoverboard section, and puzzle solving. You have to travers the environments while also keeping an eye on the relatively defenseless trip who serves as a sort of tech girl hacking locks and doors and so on as well as allowing you to upgrade Monkey's skills. Melee combat is using Monkey's staff which he can swing about with light and heavy attacks as well as a wide attack that does no damage but serves to knock enemies back (sort of crowd control) and a stun attack that stuns mechs and also breaks through shields. Some enemies have specific weak spots that can be used to your advantage by performing a take down, some with then act as an explosive you can shove into other enemies, or stun all the enemies nearby, or give you a gun you can use temporarily. You can also fire blasts from your staff of either plasma or stun/shield breaker.

A lot of the game revolves around moving trip from one place to the next in safety. You can carry her and also throw her across gaps she can't jump herself. She can also distract enemies allowing you to sneak up on them unseen. It's an interesting mechanic and it works quite well, they also allow you to instruct trip do execute certain actions some of the best puzzles involve you out doing something while you instruct trip to flip a switch or some such at the right time.

There is also the odd hoverboard level but they are few and far between.

The graphics are colourful and varied which is something of refreshing change from the usual post apocalyptic pallet of browns a la fallout 3.

Cutscenes are well executed and epic in scale some of the set piece fights are wonderful and very well executed.

It's a fun game and much better than their previous effort well worth having a go on.