Today was one of those productive development days where multiple projects got attention, even while dealing with the usual collaborative frustrations. I spent way too much time pestering Jin about the Stonk Wars project (which I never really talk about here), but when the waiting got too stressful, I pivoted to some actual feature development.
New Audio Controls for Lurk Mode
The big update today was adding proper volume control for embedded streams in lurk mode within the land party system. This has been a requested feature for a while now.
You can now adjust the slider like before to control the NPCs talking (or actual people in lurk mode, as is usually the case). But the new addition is a dedicated stream audio button that lets you mute or unmute embedded streams independently. You can set your preference for whether streams should be muted or not when you tune into them on the big screen. It’s a small quality-of-life improvement that makes the whole experience more customizable.
Auto Blogger Test on Schmotime
The other major development today was testing Auto Blogger integration directly on Schmotime.com. I ran a level review episode for the Sacred G podcast, specifically covering Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.
What made this test particularly interesting was the workflow. I fed it a bunch of screenshots and video clips along with captions, then told it to create a regular episode based on these notes and media. The key difference from running Auto Blogger on my personal blog is that it uploaded all the media directly to Schmotime and integrated it into the episode content.
This opens up some cool possibilities for content creators on the platform. Often people want to include slides and video clips in their episodes to illustrate what they’re talking about – similar to how I use media on this dev blog. Having Auto Blogger available on Schmotime means creators can just drop their videos and images into the system along with their plot outline, and it’ll generate media-rich episodes automatically.
It’s essentially an alternative workflow for creating multimedia podcast content without having to manually manage all the uploads and formatting. The test with the Jedi Knight level tour worked out pretty damn well, so I’m optimistic about expanding this feature.