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Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AI. Show all posts

Thursday, March 26, 2026

The downfall of The Sims and Sora

The same Herodian ne'er-do-wells that want you to die for their 1948 satanic military experiment by going ill-equipped to Iran to fight a war-of-choice, are the same ones that are also screwing over the economy - by design!

And the effects of their manipulations are not theoretical. They lust for absolute control, so they manipulate the economy in a specific way: a way that makes democratization of processes unsustainable. To produce engineered dependence in its place!

Nowhere are we seeing this hit faster, than in creative fields. One look at how their economic manipulations forced EA to reshape its entire business model around game design in the span of 2006 to 2026 is a telltale example.

EA could once afford to make The Sims a franchise worth investing in, and a community worth being a part of. Today, the community is slowly dying, and the game is a hollowed-out husk of the spirit that made it so huge once. Game expansions are more in number, but thinner in content and scope. And yet, still cost ever more and more - to make, and to purchase.

When the full game now runs you more money than three years of subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud, for a game that no longer has open world and has outdated graphics, it's only a matter of time before gamers begin the exodus.

Just recently, OpenAI also fell prey to those same economic squeezes. Pinned against a wall, they were forced to face that the democratization of creativity had, in general, just been made all but entirely verboten. With economics weaponized against the spots where the law still can't be.

As such, military contract promises notwithstanding, robotics became the future of OpenAI. Which also meant that video generation was no longer profitable. Sora was first on the chopping block. And the downfall of Sora was, to say the least, a tragedy.

Those fleeing the dying machinima-ready video game era found Sora a refuge for their creative ambitions. Only for that refuge to get shot down faster than a girls' school in Iran! Over the last four months, I have, in the span of about 750 videos, created a vast multiverse of conceptuals to aid my projects moving forward. An archive that covers more ground than my entire Sims era did. And an archive that is a quarter the file size! Four months, versus 20 years.

Creative endeavors will continue onward. But the tools of the trade are changing rapidly. And not every tool survives the long haul. Economy manipulators are seeing to that. Freedom of expression and elitism have been enemies since almost the dawn of time. And that struggle continues even now.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

New projects in, some old ideas discontinued

While the technical founding of Dozerfleet as an operation is October 10th of 1994, the name of "Dozerfleet" for the brand was decided in late April and early May of 2006. Meaning that the current banner the brand operates under is about to turn 20 years old, even if Dozerfleet itself turns 38 in October after the time of writing of this post.

As such, it's become time for re-evaluation of the project pipeline, especially with new stories to tell, and old stories that didn't work out not likely to gain traction. With new tools available, and old tools becoming obsolte to the workflow.

New entries in the works

Along Trolled a Spider

Much of the Dozerfleet formula of today revolves around social and institutional commentary. "Clearing a path" often involves exposing that which is in the way of said path. So the fleet of bulldozers in Ivan's world don't just stand for resistance to those who were destroying Veskinsaya's values. It also refers to plowing down and exposing systemic hypocrisy, and the core problems with human nature. As such, many newer Dozerfleet works are often very satirical in nature.

Set in the Dromedeverse, Along Trolled a Spider is a comedy variation on that theme. It involves a lab experiment, a super-intelligent-yet-restless spider, and corruption at multiple levels of individual, the soul, institutions, and society as a whole. How one spider goes to war with mankind's foolishness, because the awareness of it prevents him from finding peace in his own web. Meme warfare and petty sabotage become Andy's primary tools of the trade, as he sabotages, humiliates, and lampoons every level of civilization that he feels deserves it. And most never even know it's just one tiny spider setting the narrative straight.

This story was inspired by a dream of a talking spider with a Cockeny accent, protecting a young woman from some man that would have harmed her if he caught her crossing a bridge.

Ciem: Carnelian Eve

Set in the Cataclysmic Gerosha universe (Earth-G7.0). Some time after the events in Ciem: Caldera, Tanya Woven is moved to Seattle. Microplast attacks the city, followed by the Kerpher Gang - and a gentrification racket. The most vulnerable in Seattle are threatened. To Tanya, that's unacceptable. However, while she initially tries to handle problems in a way that won't risk the law growing too curious about her, she soon has to escalate her resistance when the Padua Network is crippled - minimizing her support. Seeing just how corrupt the city is forces her to get clever. Not all of Candi's methods of fighting corruption and crime will work this time. Tanya must figure out for herself what being Ciem means in this new environment - and the clock is ticking.

With her father dead, and her mother nervous about the family being recriminalized - especially if they move back to Indiana - Tanya is under a lot of pressure to make her new life work. This tale occurs a year before Cerato arrives, Seattle is nuked, and Tanya is forced to relocate to San Antonio - where she semi-retires from being Ciem, and focuses on raising a family instead during the Sodality timeline. In that latter timeline, she becomes the de-facto babysitter for other Sodality members' children.

Oz: Reckoning

A retelling of a darker, more convoluted version of The Wizard of Oz, borrowing aesthetics from Far Cry 5. The Wizard messed up, when he meant well. Something in Oz broke, threatening all existence there. Elphaba's bitterness drove her to try to fix it, but the scars of her mystical encounter backfire transformed her into the Witch that became feared by many. Glinda also tried, but remained faithful to the Wizard. This led to a bitter falling out between the two. Elphaba's sister also tried to intervene, only to get corrupted even worse. Glinda's powers were damaged, and a key part of her needed to stabilize her - and the spell that could save Oz - went missing. The destabilized Glinda threatened to become a bomb.

To prevent the destruction of Oz, the Witch of the East sacrificed herself to scatter Glinda into multiple fragmented shards, that only a future explorer could one day hope to put back together. Both Glinda and the Witch of the East were gone. But that only slowed the apocalypse coming down. To buy Oz more time, Elphaba began forming a cult that would drain souls over time in self-sacrifice rituals. Her cult to delay the inevitable until a better solution could be found gained traction. Oz broke out in civil war. Most of the Wizard's power was broken. A humbled man, he led a resistance, as the Witch had become excessively violent when trying to proseletyze Oz to her cause.

Meanwhile, Dorothy's family faced risk from multiple institutions in Kansas. The school board was ready to expel Dorothy and declare her a delinquent after she exposed a few too many false narratives in school. Land grabbers came after her family's farm, weaponizing eminent domain to trample all property rights.

Dorothy wasn't expecting rescue. Just a chance to fend for her rights. Especially when the land grabbers threatened to jail her "just to keep her quiet." She was surprised to learn that sometimes, the system jails the victim and protects the criminal. It was backwards! But she knew who was really behind it. Alas, she knew she couldn't say it out loud at school, for fear of what would be done to her familyif she were branded a "racist" for stating the obvious. Typical Marxist tactics, but she knew she'd get in trouble for pointing out the history of Trotsky and dictionary manipulation as well.

The tornado happens. But she doesn't wake up to an Oz of whimsy. She wakes up to a mountainous terrain. An Oz that's...very dangerous. Weird creatures mixing magical weapons with mundane ones. Civil war. Escalation at the drop of a hat. The Tin Man is now a blacksmith. The Scarecrow is just a man who makes straw bales. The Lion...now just a weak man with a lion's mane coat. And a witch who's a cult leader, whose neither entirely right or wrong.

"Out here, you either bow to her, or you burn..."

And returning home is no picnic either. Dorothy knows that if she returns too late, especially post-tornado, she may not have a family to return home to! And if she finds out the land-grabbers stole her home while she was gone? She fears they'll brand her a fugitive somehow, make something up. Anything to keep her from interefering with their ambitions! And her family? Won't be compensated for even one square inch or cent of what is stolen!

Even if she wanted to stay in Oz, she might not be able to. She must now save a dangerous world that will thank her but can't keep her; only to return to a world that no longer wants her.

Wonderland: Amulet Fury

Happening in the same universe as Oz: Reckoning, this tokusatsu romp sees the Queen attempting to conquer both worlds. She tries to frame Alice for arson, and Alice's boyfriend Steve for aiding and abetting. The March Hare and Cheshire Cat, along with some rediscovered powered amulets, enable the teens to escape wrongful incarceration. But to save their hometown, they must first save Wonderland. To do that, they need the amulets' powers, so they can rescue the Mad Hatter, and free his lobster kaiju "Thermidora." When Steve gets captured by the Queen as well, Alice must use her wits and fists to overcome Wonderland's puzzle obstacles and create Team Amulet Fury. Yet, she's aware there will be no clean wins. She will have to return to Earth to explain everything - and she knows the cost will be heavy. But even if she must briefly lose her own freedom, she's determined to stabilize her world - and create a Wonderland where Steve (and the locals) will no longer have to worry about the tyrannical Queen of Hearts.

The (New) Mutt Mackley Show

Plans are underway to add Officer Hornet (no longer played by a Buzz-Off action figure) plus Detective Hooper to the cast on Sora. Also, plans are to eventually have this Sora-based series be featured in syndication on YouTube.

The original Mutt Mackley show lacked a clear direction, and fazzled out quickly. It got a few spin-off projects, such as the photocomic Gored By Them Things (a Beanie Babies Lord of the Rings parody) and the jazzy crime noir films Kings in the Corner and 3-13, the latter of which got a mock-PSA spin-off of its own with Penguin on Drugs.

This new one, however, has a fairly consistent theme: Mackley is down on his luck, and yet is tasked with a weekly pension if he'll help supervise Gambino Penguin - an ex-con trying to learn how to live a productive life without always resorting to petty crime. In this buddy comedy, both of them keep trying to find gainful employment somewhere. However, their universe has a cruel sense of humor, and their efforts to find work are often sabotaged in increasingly bizarre ways - or by their own personality quirks. (Examples: Mackley tries to co-host a gameshow, only to discover the main host has a strange appetite for stunts that put contestants' lives in danger. When one contestant takes the dare and it ends badly, Mackley immediately finds himself back on the unemployment line. Another time, he's late for the interview, because of a train wreck.)

Taterbug: Charity Under Fire

This spinoff to Ciem: Inferno documents the rise and fall of Meagan Amez, the original "Taterbug" in Earth-G7 lore, from the moment she first gained a love for making prosthetics as a child prodigy all the way up to when she met Candi Flippo inside of Madison Juvenile in 2015. It shows that even in a world where Candi is bio-engineeered to have the powers of a centipede, not all heroes wear orange combat suits with night vision masks. Some of them raid dumpsters to rescue circuits, scrap, and PVC that was about to go to waste - to give meaning back to the lives of veterans betrayed by their own country and abandoned. From inventor to rebel to hero to political martyr, Meagan becomes the first of the Madison Girls in Candi's world outside of Candi herself to earn her own separate origin story.

While Amirah "Flintirah" Rose could possibly also qualify for the treatment, showing how the Marlquaan storm - and her mother's poor choices - trapped her in a life she never asked for, and how the fallout of her attempts to survive it led to the system villifying her when she never wanted to be the villain; Meagan's story serves as a stronger real-world commentary on veterans who were promised big, then denied due to technicalities, corruption, cowardice, and shifts in system ideology that didn't care about the debts it owed.

Through MusicHero, an early template now exists for "Ballad of Taterbug," a song about Meagan's legend. Plans are for the summer of 2026 to edit this into an AMV, just as AnnikaBa's covers of "What Does Abound" and "Die Klage des Luftmaedchens" from Anarteq: Top of the World are edited together around that same time slate.

Projects being phased out / discontinued / canceled

Ciem (2007)

Due to low demand, and the need to move Gerosha mythos forward, all iterations of Gerosha continuity pre-dating the Earth-G7 timeline, with the exception of Earth-G4 as its demise related to Plum x Lemon, are no longer being pursued for development or discussion outside of the wiki. This coincides with a greater push to upgrade graphics to not rely on obsolete tools. This version of Ciem, and its canceled sequels, are part of a version of Gerosha continuity (G5) that predominantly existed inside The Sims 2. The greater project has long since graduated from the Sims community, having gained only marginal support there in the first place.

Making of the Mackleyverse: What Almost Was

This was going to be a book celebrating the preliminaries for the old Mackley continuity. With a reboot underway, and the old works that survived already available for view, the book's initial purpose has already been fulfilled in other ways.

Camelorum Adventures: The Early Artwork

The initial purpose behind this project was going to be to make sure that the Sims 4 concept art for Camelorum from before modern AI tools existed didn't go to waste. However, that purpose was instead fulfilled in part by the official handbook to The Sims 4: Magic of Movies and Memes Stuff.

The Gerosha Chronicles: Art of the Early Earths

This was going to be a book dedicated to all the prior Gerosha continuity that led to Ciem (2007), and to its canceled sequels, as well as the Earth-G6 timeline. However, lack of profit potential due to EA's EULA, plus lack of public demand for outdated continuity in Sims games, led to this book project being abandoned. The wiki contains all necessary information about these stepping stones, even with some of the artwork missing. DeviantArt also holds some of the old timeline content.

Camp Jellybean

Based on a childhood nightmare from 1996, this story went through several revisions over the years. Its world of surreal experiments, unexplained abductions, and a doctor‑sergeant figure who seemed to ruin lives without motive gave it a certain shock‑value appeal—especially for middle‑school readers looking for something strange and edgy. However, the humor and horror often landed in an awkward middle ground: too graphic for younger audiences, yet too juvenile to resonate with older ones. Beyond that initial jolt, the material never developed the thematic depth or narrative direction needed to justify continued work on it.

While it remains an interesting artifact from an earlier creative era, a full revisiting no longer aligns with the current Dozerfleet vision, which prioritizes stronger character arcs, clearer commentary, and more purposeful worldbuilding.

90 Has No Secant

This project began as an atmospheric suspense‑mystery built on early‑2000s J‑horror sensibilities, blending Louisiana hurricane settings with supernatural distortions, family‑curse motifs, and the eerie emotional tone of works like The Ring and Picnic at Hanging Rock. While it produced some memorable imagery, it was constructed from a collage of influences — ClipArt‑style visuals, Grand Isle references, airport scenes, geomagnetic storms, and scattered literary Easter eggs — that reflected an experimental phase rather than a cohesive direction.

The story also relied on continuity elements that no longer exist. Characters such as Meshaluta and the Rintels have been removed from the canon, Sam Wrikon’s origins have been retconned, and the Marlquaan’s physics have been rewritten multiple times since Earth‑G1. As a result, the project is fundamentally incompatible with the unified Earth‑G7 mythos.

Although 90 Has No Secant was once seen as a gem of early storytelling, its tone, structure, and continuity roots diverge sharply from the modern Gerosha vision. It remains an interesting artifact of an earlier creative era, but it will not be revisited.

Stationery Voyagers

The Stationery beings themselves, ironically, proved to be the least interesting and most-legally-problematic (due to their designs) part of their own saga. The more interesting angel characters were later rewritten, and became part of the cast of Cherinob. The saga also struggled to define a specific tone, straying from pop music culture commentary to children's video fantasy to dark drama a-la Heroes-style intrigue and moral ambiguity.

A few projects related to it did survive: "Scalding Inquiries," "The Wages of Cheating Death," and "Ties That Confide." However, there is little reason to revisit those arcs anymore.

New tools

Sweet Home 3D

A focused effort is now underway to learn and integrate this application as part of the transition away from The Sims as an architectural staging tool. As the Sims franchise is gradually phased out of future Dozerfleet production pipelines, Sweet Home 3D offers a practical way to continue developing floor plans, room layouts, and spatial logic without relying on proprietary game assets.

The tool’s strength lies in its ability to map out interior spaces with precision, giving the Gerosha mythos a platform‑agnostic method for documenting homes, facilities, and other key locations. This supports the broader goal of building environments that can be recreated in any future engine — AI‑assisted, custom‑rendered, or otherwise — while maintaining full creative ownership over the underlying designs.

House Flipper 2

House Flipper 2 has been selectively adopted for adapting certain Gerosha properties, chosen based on how well their layouts and architectural logic translate into the game’s building system. Its toolset offers a practical middle ground: more flexible than The Sims for exporting reference material, yet far less demanding than full 3D modeling suites.

The platform’s EULA is also significantly more permissive than Electronic Arts’, allowing limited tracing and AI‑training workflows that would be legally risky under EA’s terms. While HF2 cannot capture every nuance of Gerosha architecture, it excels at providing calm, distraction‑free walkthroughs that help refine spatial logic without the overhead of maintaining virtual households or navigating life‑simulation mechanics.

Used alongside tools like Sweet Home 3D, it supports the broader transition toward platform‑agnostic, fully owned architectural IP—giving each location in the mythos a clearer, more reproducible blueprint for future engines and render pipelines.

Sora

Sora has become the primary tool for scene marketing, previs, and prototyping how sequences might function in a cinematic environment. Its strengths lie in emotional staging, atmospheric lighting, and the ability to quickly test how a moment feels on screen. The engine can struggle with interpreting certain prompts accurately, and its inconsistent safety heuristics make sensitive topics difficult to navigate. Even with those limitations, it represents a major leap forward for visualizing tone, pacing, and cinematic rhythm during early development.

Grok Imagine

Grok Imagine fills the gaps left by Sora, especially when lore accuracy or risk‑free short clips are needed. Its output is more literal and geometry‑driven, making it useful for quick, watermark‑free inserts in situations where Sora’s safety filters might misinterpret the material. For projects like the "Ballad of Taterbug" music video — where consistency, clarity, and rapid iteration matter—Grok Imagine provides a reliable way to generate focused, structurally clean footage that supports the broader narrative without fighting the tool.

Nano Banana (Krea)

Krea has been part of the Dozerfleet toolkit since late 2023, but the introduction of the Nano Banana engine has transformed its role. Nano Banana excels at rapid, high‑precision scene edits—especially in situations where complex visual corrections are needed quickly and cannot be drawn or composited efficiently through other software. Its ability to repair continuity, refine character details, and stabilize multi‑element compositions makes it indispensable for modern production needs.

The shift is also driven by practical constraints. Adobe’s subscription model has made full‑scale Photoshop increasingly difficult to justify, and Affinity — while powerful — has limitations when handling intricate, multi‑layered edits at speed. Nano Banana, combined with Krea’s Realtime Edit feature, fills that gap by enabling clean, high‑quality adjustments without the overhead of traditional raster workflows. Compared to the older Flux engine, Nano Banana produces sharper, more structurally consistent visuals, even if Flux still holds an edge in emotional warmth and painterly stylization. Together, they form a complementary pair: Flux for mood and atmosphere, Nano Banana for precision and production‑grade clarity.

Obsolete tools

The Sims 2

One of the earliest tools used in Dozerfleet production, The Sims 2 served as a foundational staging ground for characters, early lore experiments, and prototype environments. Its age, technical limitations, and restrictive EULA now make it incompatible with modern workflows. Most projects that depended heavily on it are being overhauled to remove Sims‑based assets entirely, and those that cannot be salvaged are being formally retired.

Spore

Spore was once considered a potential creature‑design engine, especially for visualizing angelic “true forms” and other non‑human entities. However, its stylized biology system, rigid animation constraints, and aging engine ultimately prevented it from producing the fidelity or consistency needed for modern Gerosha canon. As newer tools emerged, Spore became obsolete for creature visualization.

The Sims 3

While more flexible than its predecessor, The Sims 3 is increasingly impractical due to its 32‑bit architecture, heavy resource demands, and instability on modern hardware. Much of the concept art generated with it is now being phased out or reinterpreted through newer tools with higher fidelity and full IP ownership. Apart from the Anarteq: Top of the World Story Pack—which remains as a historical artifact—Sims 3‑based content is approaching full retirement.

The Sims 4

The Sims 4 is proving to be the most difficult legacy tool to retire, largely because of how deeply it shaped the visual language of the Gerosha mythos during its middle era. It remains the last major holdout of the Sims‑based workflow, but its role is now sharply limited. Once the remaining story packs are completed, production with this engine is planned to wind down, marking the formal end of the Sims era in Dozerfleet’s pipeline.

Several factors are driving this transition:

  • Continuity independence — modern canons now rely on platform‑agnostic visuals, not game‑engine‑specific renders.
  • Creative ownership — Krea, Sora, Grok Imagine, and other tools allow full control over character design, lighting, and staging without EULA constraints.
  • Pipeline consistency — comics and visual projects that were once slated for Sims 4 rendering have been fully relocated to Krea‑based graphics, ensuring a unified aesthetic going forward.
  • Technical limitations — even with mods and expansions, the Sims 4 engine cannot match the fidelity, emotional nuance, or flexibility of modern AI‑assisted tools.

The Sims 4 now functions primarily as a historical artifact and a temporary staging tool for the final story packs. Once those are complete, its retirement will close the chapter on a long, formative era of Dozerfleet production.

Wonder

Wonder is now effectively deprecated within the Dozerfleet pipeline. As Krea’s evolution—especially the Nano Banana engine and Realtime Edit—has dramatically increased both capability and efficiency, Wonder’s role has diminished to the point of being difficult to justify. Its shift in business model further reduced its practicality, and the performance tax it places on the aging Dozerfleet Mobile phone has made continued use increasingly burdensome.

In practice, Wonder no longer offers advantages that outweigh its costs. With Krea now handling rapid edits, continuity fixes, and high‑fidelity adjustments far more reliably, Wonder has transitioned from a once‑useful auxiliary tool to an outdated remnant of an earlier workflow.

Comics affected

Blood Over Water

This project was originally planned as one of the final Sims‑rendered comics, but with the story packs nearing completion, it is now slated for a Krea‑based release instead. Its priority has been lowered, as it cannot be monetized, but it remains on the long‑term roadmap as a visual adaptation.

Volkonir 2008

A full overhaul may allow this project to qualify for a for‑profit release, but doing so requires abandoning the original Sims 4 format entirely. Its future depends on how well the narrative can be restructured and re‑rendered using modern tools.

Sorbet

The project’s future format is currently undecided. With the retirement of Sims‑based production, its next incarnation—comic, animation, or hybrid—remains under evaluation.

Ciem / Anarteq: Kahoopiliana

Envisioned back in 2019 as a Sims comic, it was decided a few years ago it would be a Krea-made comic instead.

Path of the Ming-Cho

This story may be absorbed into Sodality: Determination as one or two episodes, making its status as a standalone project uncertain. All Sims‑based production for it has been canceled.

Nemara: Ward of the Upper Peninsula

This will become one of the first comics slated for release to have never had a Sims production arc.

Corando's "Don't Lose Hope"

This will be the final time that a Sims-made comic gets release in that format.

Purge-Flare: Stickin' It to Pencil

If demand exists, this could get a Krea remake. For now, is stands out as a historical curiosity, being the only Grand Theft Auto machinomic in The Gerosha Chronicles.

Saturday, February 28, 2026

Nano Banana gets Anarteq back on track

It was in 2025, late in the year, when the story pack adaptation of Anarteq: Top of the World was first released to the blog for Dozerfleet Labs. This release was timed to ensure the four-games-in-one content pack got an IMDB entry that same year. However, compromises had to be made to ensure this end: an incomplete version of the official handbook was released, which left out most of the story insert.

Those missing images have finally been fixed, and will soon be added in, with caption, to allow the full version to be available for download alongside game files. This will ensure that the Anarteq: Top of the World Story Pack project is officially considered finished.

Some images required a lot of repair. Flux, the main engine used through Krea for original generations, wasn't getting the job done. However, Nano Banana was able to repair these issues. Most of the issues dealt with scene lighting, or with the fact that Flux doesn't undestand Inuit weaponry.

In addition, some repairs were made to key shots for the Anarteq: Top of the World Official Coloring Book. Both adaptations of the story will allow for the official novel to proceed with a proper production bible - which may help with future collaborations for adapting the work to a manga, or even a stage play.

With the Top of the World story pack's handbook finished, the handbooks can proceed to be made for the sequels: Guardian of the Soo, Tropic Mercenary, and Envoy to Lough Melvin. Progress on that will also enable the handbooks to be made for the Swappernetters, Horrorday Gang, Sodality, and Ciem story packs, completing the entire Sims adaptation collection. From there, an InZoi concept art book and a House Flipper 2 compilation book will be all that remain, and the game modding portion of Dozerfleet Labs - DzMD - will be retired. It will go into archive mode, with no new game mods being generated. Instead, Dozerfleet Labs' new focus will be on video game pitches.

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Could the upcoming comics be AI?

A Eulogy to Dozerfleet Main

As the until-recent Dozerfleet Main was reaching its end-of-life as a tower, a difficult decision was reached: it was to retire the old dinosaur of a unit. The current Dozerfleet Portable, a Dell Latitude 5490 purchased off of Amazon, is also operating as Dozerfleet Main at the moment. The tower that was until recently Dozerfleet Main was a modified Dell Inspiron 3650 from 2017, with the main hard drive changed over to a 1TB solid state drive, and the original hard drive turned into a backup data drive known as "Ivan's Vault."

The external backup hard drive formerly known as "Dozimax" has inherited the title of "Ivan's Vault." Its sister, "Dozerfleet Backup," has now been re-christened as "Ivan's Vault 2."

The former Dozerfleet Main tower had been modified further since its original purchase, to contain an extra 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, thus putting it at 16 GB total. This made it an absolute powerhouse of a machine. However, it was still unable to run a lot of higher-end software, due to its graphics card limitations. Its elaborate Dell design made it nearly impossible to update the graphics for this device, dooming its future of ever being the advanced gaming machine desired.

Enter Bezzyca

The former Dozerfleet Main has since been given a new life as Bezzyca, a children's art and office learning station running on Kubuntu.

It now has all the basics for three children it's being donated to in order to learn their way around open source software, Linux, Gimp, Krita, and LibreOffice. To learn the ins and outs of the software world in a somewhat-safe environment with minimal parental control oversight, but also allowing them to brainstorm ideas any time of the year - away from the prying eyes of school admins, who might otherwise want to scrutinize their every move.

It also encourages them to get their own USB drives and learn their way around private ownership - something difficult to instill as a value in children when they are dependent on clouds and ChromeBooks.

Adapting to software obsolescence

However, the next stage forward in Dozerfleet progress has come at other costs besides simply donating old hardware. In the time it has taken to come this far, key bits of software that Dozerfleet once relied on have now started to become obsolete. Most notably: Microsoft Access and Microsoft Publisher.

Old Microsoft Access content will be the tricky part, as all that table data must now be converted to LibreOffice Calc. This will require a joint effort between Dozerfleet Portable and Dozerfleet Mega Portable (the Surface Go 2 Tablet). The Microsoft account associated with both doesn't recall Office 2019 being installed on Mega Portable. Therefore, there's no option to go back and reinstall Office 2019 for Portable. Likewise, there's no recollection in the online account of the purchase of Office 2016, which was what was running on Old Main.

Worse, Office 2021 was renamed to Offline Microsoft 365 2021, to create even more confusion for those who just want to run a forever license. Turns out, Microsoft wants 2021 to be the last of these offline-runable office apps. Beyond that, they offer only their online subscription model - a perfect reason to want to switch to LibreOffice for most tasks!

But here's the real kicker: Microsoft 365 2021 does not include Access or Publisher!!!

These relics being gone mean that only Office 2019, running on Mega Portable, can still open these files. And that means that several Dozerfleet works now need to be reformatted.

As mentioned above, a slow-moving conversion can happen to transform the Access documents for use in LibreOffice Calc. However, Publisher documents will need to be re-assessed for long-term retention. Those not deemed worth it, will be discarded. Then, there are those which do have long-term retention value. Alas, they now have to be converted.

From Microsoft to Affinity

The following key documents will need reformatting to Affinity Publisher:

Public

  • Every Ape and His Brother lyrics
  • The Horrorday Gang: What's Your Straggele Codename?
  • Volkonir 2008
  • The Official Handbook to The Sims 4: Oughties Big Rapid Living Stuff
  • The Official Handbook to The Sims 4: Into the Future Conversions Stuff
  • Ciem: Inferno: The Inmates of Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility
  • Ciem: Inferno: The Staff of Madison Juvenile Correctional Facility
  • Blood Over Water: Dirty Laundry

Private

  • A Very Anarteq Tour of the Soo Itinerary
  • Arionna Davis' Ciem Info Packet Series (when she initially showed interest in 2019 in portraying Candi Flippo on the wiki, though that arrangement never materialized.)
  • Blood Over Water Relational Chart
  • Blood Over Water Charts
  • Business Card
  • Folder Tabs
  • C.O.W.
  • Old credits for Ciem 2 (2009)
  • Old Stationery Voyagers data
  • Resume files

Out of that list, the Ciem: Inferno tie-in books won't change much. Meagan Amez's timeline will be re-examined per her expanded role. Otherwise, those books should be the same. Purge-Flare: Stickin' It to Pencil will likely also be re-formatted using Affinity Publisher. It was originally made in Microsoft Word 2016, using a mix of text captions and screenshots edited from a playthrough of GTA V on the PS4.

More changes to Blood Over Water lore

The biggest changes will be to Blood Over Water: Dirty Laundry and Volkonir 2008. With the photos provided, it's plausible that Volkonir 2008 could now be mostly made as an AI-enhanced photocomic. Only the bare minimum content from The Sims 4, such as the Golden Lion Knight armor, Selshon, and the Gwirdons would necessarily have to be machinomic-generated. Everything else could either come from photos or from Krea AI.

In spite of all the readiness for Blood Over Water to be done up in The Sims 4, it could become an AI comic instead of a Sims machinomic. The need to completely re-make Dirty Laundry from the ground up justifies this change, as all the Sims photos can now be swapped out with AI to better match its mock-tabloid format. New photos from the 2024 Sorbet / Blood Over Water / Volkonir Big Rapids Farewell Tour also allow for coverage of regions that were impossible to cover when the first edition of Dirty Laundry was released.

AI: The Future of Dozerfleet Comics?

If Dirty Laundry is re-released as AI, and Blood Over Water's remake is also made AI, then Sorbet will likewise take a hybrid Sims / AI approach. Sims only for elements and scenes that can't be made with AI, and the use of AI and photos for everything else.

This will produce the following results:

Comics by pending format
Title Visual style Media format
Anarteq: Top of the World Cartoon AI comic
Anarteq: Top of the World Story Pack Cartoon + Game Abridged AI comic + Sims 3 mods + Sims 4 mods + InZoi recipes + a House Flipper 2 tour
Blood Over Water: Dirty Laundry, 2nd Edition Live Action AI mock tabloid
Blood Over Water Cartoon AI machinomic (with Sims and photograph references)
Sorbet Cartoon AI machinomic (with Sims and photograph references)
Volkonir 2008 Live Action AI machinomic (with Sims and photograph references)
Corando's "Don't Lose Hope" Machinomic Sims 4 machinomic
Path of the Ming-Cho Cartoon AI comic
Ciem / Anarteq: Kahoopiliana Cartoon AI comic
Sniperbadger: Fall of the Critter Resistance Cartoon AI comic
Nemara: Ward of the Upper Peninsula Cartoon AI comic

Handbooks to finish

Work on these comics will resume after the handbooks are finished for Anarteq: Top of the World Story Pack. As well as for the following packs at Dozerfleet Labs still awaiting handbooks:

DzMD Handbooks to be Made
Title Game Inception Year
A Tour of The Gerosha Chronicles House Flipper 2 2025
The Blood Over Water Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Ciem: Inferno Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Ciem: Ash Cloud Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Ciem: Caldera Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Anarteq: Guardian of the Soo Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Anarteq: Tropic Mercenary Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Anarteq: Envoy to Lough Melvin Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Corando Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Extirpon Trilogy Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Navyrope Duology Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Horrorday Gang Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Path of the Ming-Cho Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Phaemer Village Peacekeepers Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Pilltar Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Sodality Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Swappernetters Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Gray Champion: Modern Legends Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Horrorday Gang Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
The Volkonir Character Recipe Book InZoi 2024
Anarteq: Guardian of the Soo Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Anarteq: Tropic Mercenary Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Anarteq: Envoy to Lough Melvin Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Ciem: Inferno Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Ciem: Ash Cloud Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Ciem: Caldera Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
Swappernetters: Frontliner Story Pack The Sims 4 2020
Swappernetters: Chrome Kite Story Pack The Sims 4 2020
Swappernetters: Supporting Cast Story Pack The Sims 4 2020
Swappernetters: Screwworms and Other Villains Story Pack The Sims 4 2020
Sodality: Instigation Story Pack The Sims 4 2020
Sodality: Adaptation and Determination Story Pack The Sims 4 2024
The Horrorday Gang Story Pack The Sims 4 2020

Completion of these handbooks, and of the comics aforementioned, will beget work opening up for the for-profit novels across the Megaverse.

Percolation Encyclopedia's uncertain future

Another work, this one with an uncertain future, is Percolation: The Complete Encyclopedia of Crossover Gerosha and Dozerfleet Crossovers. It was drafted at a time when Miraheze underwent a change of leadership, and was in danger of being shut down. That threat has passed. The artwork contained inside the encyclopedia has since become obsolete. To make matters worse, the work itself was all made in Microsoft Publisher, and then never finished. So it would need a massive overhaul to be added to Affinity Publisher, and be scaled down of unnecessary features.

Progress has started coming. But alas, some things needed to be sacrificed in the process.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

New Ciem: Inferno tie-in books available for download

Click on the above images to visit the download page for each book.

The compendia for Ciem: Inferno tie-in books about the inmates and staff of the Madison Juvenile Center in 2015 in Earth-G7 have now been remade. These guide books aid in understanding more about Candi's world to those who didn't ever live in Indiana in that time period. Many aesthetics and even some characters are loosely inspired by the Netflix series Girls Incarcerated.

While originally made with The Sims 4, these guide books have been completely remade in 2023, using Wonder AI by Codeway Dijital.

Friday, December 2, 2022

What's next for the videos?

There aren't yet quite enough images to piece together a proper Eccentriaverse walkthrough; though most of the essentials are already in place. A Dromedeverse walkthrough is just about ready, though the Trapezoid Kids have yet to be remade with AI.

As the Database still waits for news that it can be rebuilt on Miraheze, priorities have shifted to completion of Corando's Don't Lose Hope. After this, production can begin on Blood Over Water. Ideally, the latter can reach completion by some time in February. An Eccentriaverse AI video can then be pursued in March, when Volkonir 2008 production is set to resume.

Completion of all such Volkonir-related comics and videos will then allow for proper for-profit Volkonir literature to be written at any time. However, research on the Bozeman area may have to wait until at least the following year. There are plans tentative in May of 2023 for a trip to Lewes, Delaware, to study the area for The Trapezoid Kids, Grillitan Diner, and Camelorum Adventures. Such a tour would ideally be followed up by one of Bozeman, and one of Captain Cook, Hawaii.

A tour of the Philippines is doubtful, as is a tour of North Bay and Yellek for Anarteq: Guardian of the Soo and Experiments and Offspring. It would depend on how crazy the regime is feeling as to whether or not it would even be worthwhile to enter.

Travel to Shanghai and Hong Kong for Extirpon 2, The Call Him...Black Rat, and Little Shanghai Hornet seems very unlikely, as does travel to Tokyo or to Baton Rouge for Mukade: Reinvention and The Bison Reborn.

Ideally, Blood Over Water and Volkonir 2008 can both be completed before journey to Lewes becomes an issue. Release dates for the Eccentriaverse and Dromedeverse AI showcases will also be contingent upon how well the video does for the Gerosha showcases.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

The Gerosha Chronicles, According to an AI, now available on YouTube

You can also watch it here.

Dozerfleet Studios and Dozerfleet Comics spent the months of October and November of 2022 compiling attempts to rebuild much of The Gerosha Chronicles using the AI art generator app Wonder, by Codeway Dijital.

The 2-hour video that resulted compares the results of the AI's efforts to re-create various Earth-G7 characters with their pre-existing renders in Spore, MakeHuman, The Sims 3, The Sims 4, GTA 5, Far Cry 5, Adobe Fuse / Mixamo, and other rendering software.

The results were actually pretty impressive, as the AI was able to get some characters pretty close to how they were supposed to look. The text-to-speech app Narrator's Voice TTS was also employed, to give voices to some characters.

For all the characters and story works in progress that feature, there were a few that didn't make the cut, due to lack of renders / time, or due to difficulty getting the AI to comprehend the characters. While Stephanie Barrin was easy, Seth Lambrelli wasn't. Pilltar only features his Sims art, given how difficult he was for the AI to grasp. Likewise, Strawberry only features as Sims art in the video.

No one from The Tragedy of Lord Zeras nor Feud of Three Worlds features in the Origins-related sections of the video. Only Inukpak features from Experiments and Offspring. Only John Domeck himself features from Of Angels and Icicles. Kicked Deer renders came out too late in production, to say nothing of Shrouded Entity or any others. Likewise, only Stan and Shalia made it into The Battle for Gerosha's section. Fantisk, Luddin, and any other supporting characters were absent. Apart from Pam Marcones herself, no one else relevant and new to Extirpon 2 features. Spoliat didn't get featured. Similarly, for the first Extirpon, only the man himself got renders. Nematode didn't get one in time. While it would have been nice to include them, Greg Travin and Detective Hallower from Cherinob 2 didn't make it to the final cut of the showcase.

In the Legends portion, no renders were exported for anything from the following works:

  • The Gray Champion: Chillingworth's Revenge (even though Chillingworth and Mapacha are mentioned later in the video.)
  • The Gray Champion: Shaken Dust (even though its events, as well as Brackett and Hibbins, are later referenced.)
  • Extirpon 3
  • Pilltar 3
  • Navyrope
  • Navyrope 2 (even though the Navyropes are mentioned later on.)

The Orient section skipped Mukade: Reinvention entirely, even though Charlotte is referenced later on in the Legacy and Sodality sections.

Likewise, the Legacy section merged parts of Ciem / Anarteq: Kahoopiliana with Ciem: Ash Cloud and Anarteq: Tropic Mercenary. It skipped Path of the Ming-Cho entirely.

Sodality was long and ambitious, so a great many characters never got their renders. Meerkat, for example, never got a proper AI render. Swappernetters ran into similar issues, though a lot of major characters still found a way in.

The following characters also got voice work from the Narrator's Voice app:

  • Maurice the Ferryman
  • Cherinob
  • Krampus
  • Luftmaedchen
  • Black Rat
  • Stung Hornet
  • Plum Bixie
  • Darshan Chawla
  • Mahima Zecharia
  • Jerry Emberton
  • Jen Emberton
  • Spike Monide
  • Candi Flippo

Some characters, it struggled to make them unique, and not resemble others. Li'Ban, for example, in spite being Irish, wound up looking very similar to Cherinob, whose HMC is supposed to look Australian. Jerry Emberton and Belay also began to look very similar, in spite one being a Christian post-grunge rock band singer and the other being a literal demon once worshiped as a Canaanite god.

Krampus involved cheating the prompts to give him his proper Dozerfleet form, prompts along the lines of "scary vampire Santa with goat horns." Simply entering Krampus by name into the prompts led to the AI getting confused, and defaulting to depicting him with more traditional takes on his appearance, as it couldn't separate the original Austrian folklore from the idea of Adolphus Kraus.

Similarly, it cropped off Luftmaedchen's masked photo's top, refusing to show her head with her mask on, as it couldn't comprehend the plague mask that she typically wears.

The AI did do a few characters surprisingly well. Cropping the top of her head off notwithstanding, Wonder got the look of Plum Bixie right on the very first try. Her Inner Fox outfit was more of a struggle though.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

AI has arrived at Dozerfleet

Courtesy of the apps Wonder and Narrator's Voice, both available for Android, several characters in the Dozerfleet Megaverse can now be depicted visually in ways they haven't been seen before. And in some limited instances, approximations of their voices are now also available on the wiki!

While not all characters have AI-rendered versions of themselves yet, a large number of them do, and may see that art uploaded to their articles at some point. The audio samples are more limited. However, samples have been recorded to approximate what Cherinob, Black Rat, Stung Hornet, and Plum Bixie sound like. Voice narration files for the Dromedeverse and Eccentriaverse are pending.