A pleasant surprise, a minor course-correction, and a sneak-peek!

So just as proper work resumed on the next Demon's Souls Compare-Through (I recorded vocal audio for the first half of the episode), a free-cam tool for Dark Souls 1 was ingeniously fixed up by Meowmaritus and it was and patched back into the debug menu by Horkrux.

That's something I didn't actually have previously. Every time you see me show something in Dark Souls 1 where I'm panning over an environment or whatever, the player-character is usually standing in the middle of the screen. They just have gravity disabled and their rendering is toggled off to make them invisible, and so the camera never actually has a greater freedom of movement than it normally does.

This is an awesome thing to have now. I can't stress enough how much this will help with making future Dark Souls 1 videos more slick, but of more immediate interest to me; It allows me to take a closer look as something I thought about researching previously.

What happens during cutscenes?

In Dark Souls 3's debug there's a proper free cam, but it wasn't working for older Souls games, where much more of the code was apparently missing.

For my Dark Souls 2 Out of Bounds videos, I was able to use cheat engine to lock the camera at certain stationary positions during cutscenes to see what happens off-camera. It was tedious and took a lot of experimentation with coordinates.

I thought about doing the same for Dark Souls 1 and it was an idea I had sitting on the backburner for a while. Though my Dark Souls 1 Out of Bounds video covered a bunch of stuff about objects *relating* to cutscenes, I was never actually flying the camera around DURING a cutscene, and I wondered what kind of silly stuff I was missing there.

And as it turns out, there's some stuff in here that I find surprising and interesting. So I'm going to pump out another Dark Souls 1 video before anything else. The good news is that this will be a shorter episode and easier to produce than most, so despite adding a touch more delay to the next Demon's Souls video, I think I can make something that's interesting and of decent quality pretty quickly. So I'm getting to work on this right away and the script is almost finished.

Here's a quick look at what really happens when Manus pulls you into the DLC.