All posts by Jay Versluis

About Jay Versluis

Jay is a medical miracle known as Super Survivor. He runs two YouTube channels, five websites and several podcast feeds. To see what else he's up to, and to support him on his mission to make the world a better place, check out his Patreon Campaign.

How to get unstuck in Subnautica

Gaming

It happens to the best video games: no matter how much you test your environment, there will be times at which the game character may get stuck behind a rock, or intersects with an inanimate object. That’s super annoying during gameplay, especially when your last save was several hours ago.

Thankfully, there’s a tool we can employ to un-stick ourselves from such sticky situations. In Subnautica (and Below Zero for that matter) it’s the warpforward command. This utility moves your character forward by x amount of meters, no matter where in the game world you are. Here’s how to use it from the Console:

warpforward 1

This will move the player ahead by one meter, in the direction he/she is facing. You can warp yourself forward as far as you like, but keep in mind that this may teleport you outside the visible game world (do don’t get freaked out). A value of 1 should suffice to un-stick your character.

warpforward is somewhat related to the warp command, which will teleport the player to an absolute position in the game world, i.e. a x/y/z coordinate.

Enabling the Command Line Console in Subnautica

Gaming

Video Games are like operating systems: you can issue commands that trigger events and observe internal states that are by default hidden from the player. As such, many games have a command line interface, akin to the Windows Power Shell or the Terminal app on macOS and Linux. Developers use this feature to debug and test the game.

In Subnautica, we can utilise it to get unstuck, switch game modes or do all kinds of other things. It’s not for the faint hearted, and it’s not necessary for general gameplay of course, but if you ever need it, here’s how you bring it up.

  • press F3 to bring up a secret settings box at the to left
  • press F8 to bring up the mouse cursor
  • disable the option “disable console” (thereby enabling it)
  • now press F3 again to close that settings window again
  • hit Enter to bring up a text input box at the bottom left

Now type your command and the game will obey. You can transfer to new locations, trigger or reset game events. and do all kinds of things. Remember: with great power comes great responsibility!

A related tool to the Info Pane on the right. You can press F1 to bring this pane up and examine internal values more closely.

Happy Game Hacking!

How to redeem ACX Promo Codes

Self Publishing,

With the audio release of FLICKER WORLD, Brian and I had the idea to give away a copy during one of the game streams. It was all great fun, and we may even do this again on occasion. Authors and narrators can grab these promo codes from the ACX Sales Dashboard, but neither of us was very clear on where and how users can redeem these codes.

We figured it out, and I thought I’d best make a note of it before I forget.

Promo Codes can be redeemed here:

https://audible.com/acx-promo

Once that 13 digit code has been hacked in, you’re being prompted to login to Audible and moments later the item will show up in your Library, just as if you had bought the book. You can also access it from the (slightly complicated) Amazon account, somewhere along the lines of Your Account – Audible Membership – Library.

Converting aniBlocks into regular keyframes (and back)

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts,

In this quick tip I’ll show you how to convert an aniBlock into regular keyframes to make a change to the animation, then turn it back into an aniBlock for use with aniMate. The process is simple, yet not exactly obvious.

Enjoy!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 4:54 — 4.5MB)

Adjusting multiple values at the same time in Blender

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts,

In this quick tip I’ll show you a neat trick to enter the same value into multiple text fields in Blender. Works for keyboard input as well as using the mouse to adjust multiple sliders.

Enjoy!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:36 — 1.5MB)

E07 Today – Numbers Station Transcript

Broadcast Nuggets

I do crazy things sometimes. Today was such a day. With a ton of stuff to do, my brain was strangely drawn to the Priyom website, a large de-centralised shortwave organisation that have schedules for many Numbers Station. One of which, E7 or The English Man, was about to broadcast and I thought I’d tune in (while eating ice cream with green tea flavour… yeah, I certainly don’t do that very often).

Whether it was the matcha, boredom or just not being able to mentally turn to any of the 147+ items on my list of things to do, I decided to transcribe the transmission. I really don’t know why. But sitting there on that fresh list of 5-digit numbers, I thought I’d post them here – just in case you, Secret Agent among foreign shores, need to decipher them.

Perhaps you had other things to do and didn’t catch today’s super important spy transmission on 10679 kHz. Enjoy!

Continue reading E07 Today – Numbers Station Transcript →

Working with a Full Screen Viewport in Blender

3D, 3D Podcast, Screencasts,

In this quick tip I’ll show you how to go full screen AND immersive with Blenders viewport. I’ll explain how to remove the grey bar at the top and remove all tool shelves temporarily with a single click (or two).

Enjoy!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:07 — 1.9MB)

How to manually rebuild Media Cache Files in Premiere Pro

Video Editing

When you’ve been working with Premiere Pro for a while, importing large amounts of data and creating countless projects, there comes the time when you might want to clean up your Media Cache Database. It’s an exotic combination of various files that Premiere creates to make playback and scrolling during editing as fast as possible.

To access this option, head over to Preferences – Media and hit the big Clean button.

While this will clear out the number of entires in Premiere’s database, it may leave some generated files on the hard drive, or worse, it may lead to some of the temp files no longer accessible. As a result, your project appears to play back without audio or video in the timeline.

I had this recently on a larger (and important) project of mine, and I was wondering how to make Premiere rebuild those files from scratch, if they can’t be found anymore. Turns out the solution is relatively simple: with Premiere closed down, we delete ALL files in two (or three) folders, and when Premiere re-launches it will rebuild everything that’s needed for your current project.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. close Premiere
  2. head over to the Media Cache Folder (path seen in the screenshot above)
  3. delete the Media Cache folder
  4. delete the Media Cache Files folder
  5. delete the Peak Files folder (if you have one)
  6. relaunch Premiere and load your project

At this point you may have to wait a moment or two depending on the size of your project. Watch the progress bar at the bottom right as it goes through every file that needs to be regenerated (or conformed).

Thanks to Screenlight TV for explaining this in more detail.

Discovered in 2019

Discoveries

Where does the time go? It felt like only yesterday that I’ve started my “discoveries” category, and with it the idea that I’d like to paste useful links into a place that would make it easy for me to find them. Turns out I’ve been actioning such findings in different ways, and it also goes to show how little time I spend with important ventures like this.

So perhaps then, as another way of utilising this idea, I’ll have an annual post with important discoveries, or one whenever I feel like I’m running out of tabs in my various browsers. I might even add to this post once it’s published so I won’t clutter up my website with Discoveries alone.

Continue reading Discovered in 2019 →