Community Updates – August 25, 2022

Greets yall! It’s time for some community updates. There’s a lot to mention, so let’s dive in.

Events

To start with, Podcast episode 3 is finally arriving – today! Thursday, August 25th at 8:30pm CDT for the live broadcast. It’ll take place in the community Discord server. The on-demand version will be published the next day. Our guest will be Cody, who has spoken on Legend of Zelda podcasts, and we’ll be taking a trip down LoD memory lane with him. Some Q&A will be welcome through the main segment and toward the end of the show.

Next up, we have a new art event starting today! Our first event was focused on Plos, the first named NPC in Legend of Dragoon. It made sense to start with him, but I also recognize a more relatable subject needs to be chosen this time. With that in mind, the subject of this art contest is Dragoons! You can draw any Dragoon you like, or even a collage of them. It doesn’t have to be canonical either, this is fan-art! Besides, in the Plos event, someone drew him as a Dragoon and it looked great. If anyone out there draws Pelpee I’ll swoon for weeks, if not months. Details including submission info will show up in a separate post on Monday. You’ll have until mid-September to submit.

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Community Projects

Fan Dub

There’s a new fan dub in development! A fan dub is essentially a project where fans of a game give it new voiceover content, to supplement text dialogs and/or replace existing voiceovers. The exact goals and quality will range due to the volunteer nature, but I must attest that there are some mighty quality standards coming out of this group. They are even committed to including other quality of life improvements in the presentation, such as VoidWave’s script mod that improves the English translation. Their latest episode drops today, so head over to their Youtube channel and subscribe / catch up.

LoD Mod for Tekken 7

I can’t say a lot yet, but we have been making some cool progress behind the scenes of this mod! Lavitz now has voiceovers, as well as Meru. It really helps the characters come to life when their audio is a part of the experience. In terms of what to expect, I can’t give a date for the first public release of the mod, but I can say that I’ll doing some livestreams and putting teases/showcases on the LoD Fandom Youtube channel. I recommend subscribing to this channel too – a lot of really cool content is coming up fast, such as…

Reverse Engineering

Another quirky project in the cooker lately is this project led by Monoxide. You may remember that I interviewed him in the last podcast episode about this project. A lot of progress and hard work has taken place since then! We’re now at a point that the game is semi-playable. A reminder that the reason this project is such a big deal, is that we can bypass the usual restrictions of emulation. Yes, they can do a lot, but with reverse engineering we can reduce load times to near-0 when changing screens in a location, for example.

As Monoxide puts it, “we have severed the chains of fate that bound us to outdated hardware and will forge our own destiny with never-before-possible mods.” He’s going for function first, pretty stuff later, but I must stress that this is a big achievement. You can watch this video to see the proof; it’s running natively on PC without emulation. [More on why this isn’t emulation in another post]

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Website Updates

In terms of updates here on the home front, I have a few things to share:

• There was an issue where the website would hang on load, for up to 30 seconds. Monoxide helped me solve this, so the site should load normally once again. Thanks Monoxide!
• The Help Wanted page is now in better shape. I removed the old Project list and am moving them to a Projects page in the very near future. Now Help Wanted shows a simpler summary of the different ways you can help, and you won’t be blasted with details so suddenly.
• I made optimizations to the banner image carousel featured on the header of all pages. I’m proud to say that I have managed to get the entire set of images under 150KB – that’s total, not per-image!! Thank the universe for the glorious WebP format. Keeping our website efficient and lightweight is important, especially for folks who may be browsing with lower internet speeds. Also, thank you to Orichalcon in our Discord community for bringing light to this option!

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Ko-Fi Donations

I’ll expand on this in a separate post, but the short version is that we are now accepting Ko-fi donations for the LoD fandom! You can visit this Ko-fi page to contribute. Earnings go toward things like the monthly cost of the web server LoD runs on, convention savings, and giving me (DrewUniverse) the room to justify more time spent curating the LoD fandom as a whole.

There is a monthly option (DM me on Ko-fi if you want your contribution to only go toward LoD stuff), or you can go to the Services tab and make a one-off contribution instead. I will emphasize that generally speaking access won’t change – community updates will still be free and visible to everyone, and we’ll still do all the same things we always do. Ko-fi just helps with increasing consistency, perks like early access to content, and doing even more for the fandom.

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Okay, that’s plenty of news for one day. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to see what’s going on in the fandom. I’m so excited to show you what else is coming this year!

~Long Live Legend of Dragoon~