You’re right about the plastic, but just drop the enlightened snark.
As for pottery, forging, casting etc.: completely different processes, different requirements, “vibe” - may not be possible for OP (ever tried operating a forge in a New York city apartment?), might not be aligned with their skills / interests, financial situation etc.
So, what remains is the question: do you believe 3d printing with plastic should be outlawed or at least strongly regulated as a private hobby?
I suggest you read the Wikipedia article about it, Sierra really went all out on Phantasmagoria. It was budgeted at 800k, but eventually cost $4.5 million, with the custom built studio solely dedicated to filming it weighing in at $1.5 million - thats quite something, considering we’re talking 90s money here. Again, dev costs for AAA titles today are a completely different beast, but as you said, video games have come a long way since then.
I watched a (much longer) complete walkthrough sometime last year when I was down with the flu or whatever and I have to say, re-watching it is a bit more fun than re-playing it, the pacing was quite a bit off.
Roberta Williams is a good enough writer when it comes to early adventure games (I do love King’s Quest), but this was her first horror project, her script was maybe overly long and the project too ambitious in places, and yeah, the complexity of plot lines probably have grown along with the expectations and the maturity of the audience.
It’s still a great project and a major milestone as far as FMV games are concerned, a genre I somewhat miss overall. The mixture of animation and real footage using 90s technology has just the right amount of schlock/cheesiness to be highly entertaining.
Looks great! Forgive me for sleuthing, but I tried to obtain more info about the glue shown in your picture, as I have never heard of that particular brand. From what I understand, it’s a solvent-based glue that melts plastic parts together. They claim it works with ABS, which I can readily believe, but what’s your experience with PLA, ASA or other materials? I’m wondering if the solvent does in fact melt those materials (and PMMA).
Btw. I assume it’s “Ruderer L530”, based on what I could see of it.
Great project, I like that you went all in and installed the solar panels - there is a nonzero chance I would have tested it with only a battery first, therefore creating a suboptimal solution that would have stayed around far too long, endlessly bugging me in the process.
Just one remark: the mailbox is so nice, you should definitely route a channel in the treated pine to hide / protect the blue cable better, that’d make it perfect.