Lone Echo II

You may remember me gushing about the amazing Lone Echo VR game at the end of last year. Well I immediately bought Lone Echo II and have been playing it ever since.

Lone Echo II was released in 2021 to high praise and oh my God does it deserve it!

Better graphics, more detail, more character, more depth, more puzzles, more variety!

I will avoid spoilers and just say you are the same character and the story starts shortly after the end of the last game. But there are upgrades and a number of twists that expand the original game play.

Once again the visuals are so gorgeous that you will want to spend time just investigating nooks and crannies and taking in the views.

You can speed run the story mode, but the real fun is exploring the quite expansive side missions that allow you to upgrade your equipment and then reach even harder areas.

The one thing that was infuriating about the first game was the difficulties with the save game system. I am glad to say this is fixed.

Here I have my helmet spotlight on and you can see the texture detail on the canister floating in front of me.

Oh dear! I have stopped to stare at my hands again. The detail on the fingers and tools is above and beyond.

So much to take in! Bottom right is the transport link which is designed for multi person cars. This gives you a little glimpse into the scale of the environment.

Detail, detail detail! Although not quite flawless, the character animations are very expressive and textures high quality. Even the hair moves around in zero-G!

Really!? I am looking at my hands again . Oh, and there are the planet's rings. You can send ages flying over and through them if you want.

Me desperately trying to capture the scale, depth and beauty in the visuals and ... failing.

Taking screen shots was not easy. I had tried to take screen shots during the 17.5 hours of game play, but found I had to come back after completing the story mode to capture some more.

The yellow diamonds are distance markers to objectives, you can turn the off but ... well I didn't.

There used to be a shortcut for taking in-game screen shots but it no longer works. Instead I have to pause the Virtual Desktop app, choose to take a screenshot and then rush to unpause, only to find the game has paused, resume that and then position my view. All this before the countdown completes.

This itself sometime resulted in some tearing and motion blur, luckily only in the screenshot, the game was fine.

And then, after all that, I just do not get the same Wow! factor as seeing these vistas within VR.

The biggest problem with this and the previous game is simply its reach. As an oculus Rift only game your options include a reasonably powerful PC plus a Rift, Quest 2/3/etc or Vive (using ReVive).

In a few years when the next generations of VR headsets are a reasonable price, along with powerful CPU/GPUs and loads of memory and space I really hope someone remakes this with even better graphics! (and they can fix the random texture pops).

Final note: This is better than Half Life Alyx !!

Slightly delayed update

I may have posted the stats for 2024 a little late ... and now I have finally reviewed the posts from last year and updated the archive and the Year 2024 summary

As per usual, I had forgotten most of anything I had actually done. Not to mention there were some empty posts that may have been affected by the fix I noted a few days ago. fix I noted a few days ago.

Next on by flog list is Lone Echo II, I have completed it! and some up-down news about 3D printer-ing

What the font!

This is the second time Gentoo has fiddled my fonts, so I needed to blog about it.

The text in terminal and GUI was all of a sudden a bit small and I hadn't asked for anything to be changed.

Found in my root history a lot of enabling and disabling.

history | grep -i font

...
2023-10-30 10:18:19 eselect fontconfig list
2023-10-30 10:18:58 eselect fontconfig enable 35
2023-10-30 10:19:54 eselect fontconfig disable {47..49}
2023-10-30 10:21:06 eselect fontconfig enable 36

and when I ran eselect fontconfig list

I could see new fonts enabled in the last slots

[1]   05-reset-dirs-sample.conf
[2]   09-autohint-if-no-hinting.conf
[3]   10-autohint.conf
...
[59]  70-yes-bitmaps.conf
[60]  80-delicious.conf *
[61]  90-synthetic.conf *

then a quick eselect fontconfig disable {60..61}

instantly brought back my easy to read fonts :D

What went wrong?

So I dutifully ran my yearly summary script that I wrote last year and it generated all the stats and all the graphs.

I created the flog blog post but failed to export the resulting file, not to mention completely forgetting to include the graphs.

I have now added a trap that cancels the upload process if the file is empty.

if ! find . -name "daily.html" -size +1c | grep -q .; then
  echo "The daily.html file has not been updated so I quit"
  exit
fi

So I cannot accidentally post empty posts, again :)

As part of the process I create "daily.html" with a single space character. This is to remind me to update this file and it shows as the latest file in the file explorer.

The if ! is checking for a negative outcome (non 0 exit code). The find is looking for files with more than 1 character and grep -q checks the output and returns only an exit code -q is quiet.

find returns the files it finds and uses exit codes only for error conditions.

Graphs!

Here are the graphs for 2024

March had no posts while June and July had the long posts.

The same information but logarithmic showing there were a lot of months with images.

Number of images vs post count shows images out number posts.

A different view of the count of posts verses the length of those posts.

and the raw data

"Month","Count","Length","Images"
"Jan",3,47,9
"Feb",2,28,0
"Mar",0,0,0
"Apr",1,15,0
"May",5,66,10
"Jun",9,104,9
"Jul",8,115,12
"Aug",2,27,8
"Sep",1,20,1
"Oct",1,10,0
"Nov",2,20,0
"Dec",3,45,8

Next post I will describe the issue that left all these lovely stats stuck in Feb after flubbing January.

It's 2025!

but in 2024 the blog flogged

Number of posts: 37

Total tags (recorded in the system): 2216

Of which were used in 2024: 305

and of which were new in 2024: 93

Top tags
6 json.xml
6 jq.xml
6 gentoo.xml
5 flog.xml
5 fail.xml

See the whole year in Year 2024 summary

See 22 years of posts in The archive

Lots going on. Currently playing Lone Echo II and there has been some rumblings in the 3D printing area :D