This video was supposed to be something quick and easy to put out while I was working on “Axel F”. Turns out, I was wrong on both counts. While it was certainly quicker and easier than “Axel F”, it wasn’t exactly “quick”, or “easy”.

It’s really just a screen recording of me riding on a minecart track which I made in Minetest, right before they switched their name to “Luanti”. (I liked “Minetest” better.) I got this idea from messing around with detector rails in the “boost_cart” mod, which could power mesecons from the “mesecons” mod. Why not make a song with that?

In order to do it well, though, I had to add an extra octave below the standard noteblock range. Which I did through modifying the “mesecons_noteblock” mod. Without it, the song wouldn’t have been as listenable.

Not that it succeeds very well in that regard, either. Despite my laptop running in performance mode, there was a ton of stuttering in the screen recordings.The frame rate was slow, and the notes would randomly lag, so I had to reduce the graphical settings as much as possible while still having an okay quality. I must have done about twenty takes, and this was the only one which didn’t have audio crackling issues. The thing is, it runs perfectly when I’m not screen recording. (What I really should have done was get an HDMI capture card and captured the output from my laptop.)

Why did I choose this song? Because it’s a fun song. I was planning for the environments around the track to get crazier and crazier as the verses got crazier, but that didn’t really happen. It would have taken a ton of work, which I didn’t really feel like doing. And this was supposed to be “easy and quick”, remember?

I’m a fan of the Piano Guys, though. Their compositions are all excellent, and they have a LOT of them! Thanks to Jon Schmidt for writing this song.