Best Of
Re: Subnautica & Subnautica: Below Zero Coming to Nintendo Switch - Subnautica
Lol why are you people so impatient? Just because they're working on another port doesn't mean they abandoned PS4 and Xbox. First of all, they wouldnt cancel it in the first place, because they would miss out on so many sales. But anyway they're working on it and are planning on releasing it when Below Zero 1.0 comes out on PC or soon after. Do you not remember how late the SN1PS4 port was? Below Zero's console release should be much cleaner. And please, stop complaining to complain. I'm pretty sure the devs know what they're doing.
Re: Subnautica & Subnautica: Below Zero Coming to Nintendo Switch - Subnautica
and my wish came true.
Cyclops docking ... is now a reality.
"No, not another topic about Cyclops docking, please!" you would think ... and you would be right. We have talked enough about the topic here and my last post regarding "Cyclops Docking" is a long time ago: CYCLOPS DOCKING STATION
Much better than just talking about it would of course be able to actually use it. OSubMarin from Nexus actually managed to make that happen.
Features:
Official mod banner:
Official mod banner - zoomed:
Inside a base:
Below docking tube:
QMod menu - Cyclops Docking section:
A short video from BumblebeeTuna demonstrates the mod:
And "Cyclops Docking Mod" from OSubMarin is available here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/subnautica/mods/554
The mod was designed with a lot of love for the details and so the Cyclops Docking Mod fits in perfectly with the game. With this mod we now have the same comfort with the Cyclops as with the Seamoth / Prawn suit and the Moonpool: docking, switching directly to the base / vehicle, charging the batteries. And for all vehicles there is an autopilot that does the docking / undocking. This now results in a harmonious overall concept for the 3 vehicles at Subnautica.
Finally I don't get my feet wet when I come home in the evening and park my Cyclops in the yard. Less time drying clothes, more time for the family. ^^
Much better than just talking about it would of course be able to actually use it. OSubMarin from Nexus actually managed to make that happen.
Features:
- Contains a new component for the base with which a Cyclops can be docked to the base.
- Offers 2 modes:
- Automatic: The autopilot takes over the Cyclops and docks as soon as you are within range (adjustable, default: 13 m).
- Manual: The autopilot can be started manually for docking with a key (adjustable, default: O). It even works from a distance.
- The docking process is absolutely gentle in both modes, i.e. no jerky movements.
- As soon as the docking process is finished, the engine of the Cyclops is automatically switched off.
- The docking clips are animated and the docking tube is also extended a little (when docking) and retracted (when undocking). Corresponding noises can also be heard when the docking process or the undocking process are being carried out.
- When the Cyclops is docked, you can of course go directly from the Cyclops to the base and vice versa.
- When you undock from the base, the autopilot automatically drives the Cyclops back a little.
- The batteries are charged automatically as soon as the Cyclops is docked. The charging rate is adjustable.
- The current charge level of the Cyclops batteries is displayed in the base near the ladder to the docking ring.
- Many things can be set directly in the QMod menu in the game.
Official mod banner:
Official mod banner - zoomed:
Inside a base:
Below docking tube:
QMod menu - Cyclops Docking section:
A short video from BumblebeeTuna demonstrates the mod:
And "Cyclops Docking Mod" from OSubMarin is available here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/subnautica/mods/554
The mod was designed with a lot of love for the details and so the Cyclops Docking Mod fits in perfectly with the game. With this mod we now have the same comfort with the Cyclops as with the Seamoth / Prawn suit and the Moonpool: docking, switching directly to the base / vehicle, charging the batteries. And for all vehicles there is an autopilot that does the docking / undocking. This now results in a harmonious overall concept for the 3 vehicles at Subnautica.
Finally I don't get my feet wet when I come home in the evening and park my Cyclops in the yard. Less time drying clothes, more time for the family. ^^
The New Writing in Below Zero isn't Very Good
So recently I've been watching the story progress and honestly I have to say it isn't looking good, especially when compared to the old story, and the general quality boost to every other aspect of the game. So I feel like I should at least just get my opinion out there somewhere and list a few reasons as to why I'm not a fan of this new story, so let's get on with it; (note that some of this stuff isn't in the game yet outside of text in the files)
No characters:
Perhaps the biggest issue is that the story has no characters, with every one of them feeling really "safe" and generic, and lacking in personality. All of the large Alterra crew act the same, with the most characterization they get being either "misses their family" or "misses their family and is also horny", with nothing outside of that, made even worse by the fact that there's nine of them to not be able to keep track of in the slightest (the number of them probably being an issue even if they were distinct). I legitimately could not tell you which character is which based on their names. Even characters such as Robin and Al-an are affected by this, being a particularly prevalent example due to how much dialog he has now.
As is Al-an feels like a combination of a small part his old personality, a Star Wars alien with funny alien words, Jar Jar Binks, a Boov, the PDA from the original, and a redditor, wrapped up in a really safe pop culture alien bun. When he does show personality his dialog is less coherent and contradicts itself, such as him being said to be the lead of a science team and then him dismissing fundamental flora as "worthless" and "purely decorative". I'd also like to briefly mention that making him a "somebody" is entirely unnecessary and feels very forced, and it's much more charming if he's just some random dude on the research team. But most of his dialog is just random one-liners with no soul to them, just text for the sake of it. He has basically lost all of his truly alien aspects, just seemingly a regular human except they use George Lucas names for their things that are just copy/pasted human stuff.
I'd also like to briefly mention that Al-an being this huge important figure is so unnecessary and much less charming or interesting than him just being a random person on that expedition. Al-an is basically a different character entirely at this point, and very much a less interesting one.
As for Robin most of her specific issues are that her dialog is pretty standard and/or stilted and obviously speaking towards the player instead of acting natural when talking to herself, and her current voice feeling less consistent and somewhat unfitting which seems more like a direction problem than anything.
Bad Jokes:
The humor in the original SN was generally more subtle when it appeared with at least some nuance to it, not just feeling like the most generic jokes one could think of, and didn't overstay its welcome when it did show up. The jokes in BZ meanwhile are much more frequently thrown in your face and often don't land, being such wonderful comedy as, "guy hates birds for some reason" and "multiple poop and fart jokes" and many other low hanging fruits, which is such an immense downgrade and simply doesn't fit with the feel of Subnautica, at least not with how it's currently presented. Again honestly the best way to describe this is modern Star Wars writing, and not the good modern Star Wars writing.
No Stakes:
One thing I find odd is the decision to make basically every other character in the story dead, which has the consequence of lowering any sense of tension within the story immensely. You no longer have supervisors watching you like a hawk as an active threat to both you and your companions, trying to sneak by or fight them off whenever possible. Now you just kind of meander around until story, never really having a threat to you outside of the relatively easy to harness environment, which was also still a factor in the original story.
Nothing Happens:
Nothing even happens within the story itself, the events of BZ mostly have you wandering around cleaning up corrosive bird feces (because that's a cool and funny joke) for marge so she tells you where to go because that's her only purpose so that nothing else can happen in that place and so on and then the game ends. Even in the events prior to the game nothing happens, with the Alterra people just kind of sitting around hating their job until they die. It even tries to have a plot with marge interfering with the Alterra people's stuff, but they just don't care and go back to playing Fakin' It because apparently that's the only thing that actually happens in this story.
Worldbuilding Has Suffered:
One of the biggest strengths of Tom's writing is the world building, and unfortunately the old detailed and fascinating history of this future world with all these intricate factions and cultures seems to have also been pushed to the side and replaced by the previously mentioned funny Star Wars names like Tworlock and generic future stuff with no real interesting thoughts presented within them. Even the biological information which was pretty hit-or-miss in the original has taken a dive in quality. The most interesting piece of lore is the Sea Monkeys being attracted to you with Al-an in your head, but there doesn't seem to be any interesting details like that elsewhere in the game.
Conclusion:
Despite what problems I did have with Tom on a few occasions with plot holes or biology his writing was still consistently interesting and compelling for most of it, and being totally honest here I feel none of this writing is better than the original BZ writing in even one aspect, and I would rather it have just been completed based on what was already there since it was basically done anyway. Writing is the one aspect I feel has actively gotten worse since
even between the start of the year and now while every other part has been even better than I could've imagined, even with the issues I do have, so I'm sorry for the really negative post but I'm just disappointed more than anything.
No characters:
Perhaps the biggest issue is that the story has no characters, with every one of them feeling really "safe" and generic, and lacking in personality. All of the large Alterra crew act the same, with the most characterization they get being either "misses their family" or "misses their family and is also horny", with nothing outside of that, made even worse by the fact that there's nine of them to not be able to keep track of in the slightest (the number of them probably being an issue even if they were distinct). I legitimately could not tell you which character is which based on their names. Even characters such as Robin and Al-an are affected by this, being a particularly prevalent example due to how much dialog he has now.
As is Al-an feels like a combination of a small part his old personality, a Star Wars alien with funny alien words, Jar Jar Binks, a Boov, the PDA from the original, and a redditor, wrapped up in a really safe pop culture alien bun. When he does show personality his dialog is less coherent and contradicts itself, such as him being said to be the lead of a science team and then him dismissing fundamental flora as "worthless" and "purely decorative". I'd also like to briefly mention that making him a "somebody" is entirely unnecessary and feels very forced, and it's much more charming if he's just some random dude on the research team. But most of his dialog is just random one-liners with no soul to them, just text for the sake of it. He has basically lost all of his truly alien aspects, just seemingly a regular human except they use George Lucas names for their things that are just copy/pasted human stuff.
I'd also like to briefly mention that Al-an being this huge important figure is so unnecessary and much less charming or interesting than him just being a random person on that expedition. Al-an is basically a different character entirely at this point, and very much a less interesting one.
As for Robin most of her specific issues are that her dialog is pretty standard and/or stilted and obviously speaking towards the player instead of acting natural when talking to herself, and her current voice feeling less consistent and somewhat unfitting which seems more like a direction problem than anything.
Bad Jokes:
The humor in the original SN was generally more subtle when it appeared with at least some nuance to it, not just feeling like the most generic jokes one could think of, and didn't overstay its welcome when it did show up. The jokes in BZ meanwhile are much more frequently thrown in your face and often don't land, being such wonderful comedy as, "guy hates birds for some reason" and "multiple poop and fart jokes" and many other low hanging fruits, which is such an immense downgrade and simply doesn't fit with the feel of Subnautica, at least not with how it's currently presented. Again honestly the best way to describe this is modern Star Wars writing, and not the good modern Star Wars writing.
No Stakes:
One thing I find odd is the decision to make basically every other character in the story dead, which has the consequence of lowering any sense of tension within the story immensely. You no longer have supervisors watching you like a hawk as an active threat to both you and your companions, trying to sneak by or fight them off whenever possible. Now you just kind of meander around until story, never really having a threat to you outside of the relatively easy to harness environment, which was also still a factor in the original story.
Nothing Happens:
Nothing even happens within the story itself, the events of BZ mostly have you wandering around cleaning up corrosive bird feces (because that's a cool and funny joke) for marge so she tells you where to go because that's her only purpose so that nothing else can happen in that place and so on and then the game ends. Even in the events prior to the game nothing happens, with the Alterra people just kind of sitting around hating their job until they die. It even tries to have a plot with marge interfering with the Alterra people's stuff, but they just don't care and go back to playing Fakin' It because apparently that's the only thing that actually happens in this story.
Worldbuilding Has Suffered:
One of the biggest strengths of Tom's writing is the world building, and unfortunately the old detailed and fascinating history of this future world with all these intricate factions and cultures seems to have also been pushed to the side and replaced by the previously mentioned funny Star Wars names like Tworlock and generic future stuff with no real interesting thoughts presented within them. Even the biological information which was pretty hit-or-miss in the original has taken a dive in quality. The most interesting piece of lore is the Sea Monkeys being attracted to you with Al-an in your head, but there doesn't seem to be any interesting details like that elsewhere in the game.
Conclusion:
Despite what problems I did have with Tom on a few occasions with plot holes or biology his writing was still consistently interesting and compelling for most of it, and being totally honest here I feel none of this writing is better than the original BZ writing in even one aspect, and I would rather it have just been completed based on what was already there since it was basically done anyway. Writing is the one aspect I feel has actively gotten worse since
even between the start of the year and now while every other part has been even better than I could've imagined, even with the issues I do have, so I'm sorry for the really negative post but I'm just disappointed more than anything.
Re: Discovered reason for game crashing when launching. access violation
Just to note that as at 27-Nov-19 after the Big Little Update, Subnautica still fails to start with no output_log.txt file generated if a standard install of Citrix exists on the same machine.
Disabling the "Citrix Virtual Bus Enumerator" in the Device Manager fixes the issue and does not appear to impact Citrix in any way that I have been able to tell. Since the fix is so simple, it would be nice to see it included on the pinned Steam troubleshooting post, rather than hidden away here.
Disabling the "Citrix Virtual Bus Enumerator" in the Device Manager fixes the issue and does not appear to impact Citrix in any way that I have been able to tell. Since the fix is so simple, it would be nice to see it included on the pinned Steam troubleshooting post, rather than hidden away here.
Re: The Small Suggestions Megathread (add yours and I'll credit you!)
It's great to SEA that we're now marooned and alone out there on 4546B 
Really appreciate that we're now not on some sort of comm... seems more true to the first Subnautica style, imo.
Just thought about this small plot twist, shortly after you've landed and looked around, the space station is obliterated by some meteorite, to amp up the feel? (or dormant planetary defense system?) Like, in the original Subnautica there was nobody anywhere remotely reachable, except for the poor Sunbeam which had been still quite a distance away before it responded to the SOS.
Just generally keep true to the feeling of the original game, it was grim, dangerous, enveloping you with feeling of scale of the surrounding space which became smaller only to the end of the game, and the unknown, ... the whole atmosphere of riddle.
I actually got the first game as underwater survival, and then it was dropping its awesome plot on me as tiny little depth charges that detonated like a-bombs.
Venturing into the unknown and having a hard time finding the means to, was and continues to be really rewarding..which is nice...
So back then at first I thought hmm, probably there might be a means to seal the radiation leaks from the Aurora?... And then,...
That "Who are you" thing... And I suddenly want to look under every stone out there to get to the BOTTOM of it... The amount of engagement was UNFATHOMABLE.
I even remembered those times of playing X:BTF in 2001 where nothing was clear but you had the drive to go somewhere and find the next plot part which you had zero idea what it was, only remembering that you maybe should find the means to fix your hyperdrive and get back to Earth. That was pretty cool,..
Apologies, this was supposed to be a one-paragraph post. :] Italicized the main part.
Really appreciate that we're now not on some sort of comm... seems more true to the first Subnautica style, imo.Just thought about this small plot twist, shortly after you've landed and looked around, the space station is obliterated by some meteorite, to amp up the feel? (or dormant planetary defense system?) Like, in the original Subnautica there was nobody anywhere remotely reachable, except for the poor Sunbeam which had been still quite a distance away before it responded to the SOS.
Just generally keep true to the feeling of the original game, it was grim, dangerous, enveloping you with feeling of scale of the surrounding space which became smaller only to the end of the game, and the unknown, ... the whole atmosphere of riddle.
I actually got the first game as underwater survival, and then it was dropping its awesome plot on me as tiny little depth charges that detonated like a-bombs.
Venturing into the unknown and having a hard time finding the means to, was and continues to be really rewarding..which is nice...
So back then at first I thought hmm, probably there might be a means to seal the radiation leaks from the Aurora?... And then,...
That "Who are you" thing... And I suddenly want to look under every stone out there to get to the BOTTOM of it... The amount of engagement was UNFATHOMABLE.
I even remembered those times of playing X:BTF in 2001 where nothing was clear but you had the drive to go somewhere and find the next plot part which you had zero idea what it was, only remembering that you maybe should find the means to fix your hyperdrive and get back to Earth. That was pretty cool,..
Apologies, this was supposed to be a one-paragraph post. :] Italicized the main part.
Re: Splash Down (A Subnautica Story)
It doesn't really matter about anyones opinion l, if you love what you do then do it no DEW it
Re: 'BOREALIS RISING' - A Subnautica Story V2.0.
@derf213 Fortunately, things are basically not too bad in my part of the world (Victoria, Australia). There's a large number of COVID-19 cases in Australia (24,812) and 18,231 of these are in Victoria. The Melbourne metro area currently has curfews in force after 8.00 p.m until 5.00 a.m and there's police checkpoints at all major roads leading out of Melbourne. Face masks and/or face shields are mandatory until further notice. This probably sounds horrible to some overseas readers, but most Australians have realized that strict control measures are necessary to contain the spread of this virus. Aussies aren't really happy about it, though. Me included.
I sincerely hope this bloody pandemic GTFO ASAP. The world has had quite enough of this shit.
To be honest, I'm doing reasonably well under the circumstances. I live in Warragul, a fairly large town about 100 km southeast of Melbourne. My only real problem at the moment is boredom, coupled with a severe lack of motivation and a lost sense of purpose. I had to quit my job (reluctantly) about six months ago, because the company I worked for moved to the other side of Melbourne. This required a three hour commute to and from work, five days a week. Roughly a third of my salary was being spent on fuel. Not an ideal situation.
I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't really felt like writing much since my last post in May 2020. Boredom, writer's block and general de-motivation have worked their evil magic on me. However, I have made a reasonable start on getting the last couple of pages into shape, and I'm feeling just guilty enough to finally buckle down and take Borealis Rising to its conclusion. I apologize to my readers for the lengthy delays between page updates.
I'm particularly grateful for having such a dedicated audience. Naturally, I want to finish this story with a satisfying (I hope!) conclusion. Thanks for sticking with me.
P.S: No matter which part of the world you're in, bear in mind... We're all in this together.
Stay strong, and do whatever it takes to beat this bug.
I sincerely hope this bloody pandemic GTFO ASAP. The world has had quite enough of this shit.
To be honest, I'm doing reasonably well under the circumstances. I live in Warragul, a fairly large town about 100 km southeast of Melbourne. My only real problem at the moment is boredom, coupled with a severe lack of motivation and a lost sense of purpose. I had to quit my job (reluctantly) about six months ago, because the company I worked for moved to the other side of Melbourne. This required a three hour commute to and from work, five days a week. Roughly a third of my salary was being spent on fuel. Not an ideal situation.
I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't really felt like writing much since my last post in May 2020. Boredom, writer's block and general de-motivation have worked their evil magic on me. However, I have made a reasonable start on getting the last couple of pages into shape, and I'm feeling just guilty enough to finally buckle down and take Borealis Rising to its conclusion. I apologize to my readers for the lengthy delays between page updates.
I'm particularly grateful for having such a dedicated audience. Naturally, I want to finish this story with a satisfying (I hope!) conclusion. Thanks for sticking with me.
P.S: No matter which part of the world you're in, bear in mind... We're all in this together.
Stay strong, and do whatever it takes to beat this bug.
