damn it's been a while

But I haven't been doing nothing!

• Summoner's Rift in Quake 3
• Other SR-related stuff (mostly just messing with it in other games)
• I got back into Skyrim, learned a few new tricks and started documenting all my stuff so I don't forget it later, like I did this time. I'm kinda giving up on Skyrim due to animated models not exporting right.
• I haven't really done much Minecraft stuff, as I'm waiting to find something cool to recreate.
• Actually that was a lie, I have been trying to learn some 3DS Max (mainly shaders/materials), for the purposes of lighting Minecraft scenes in Max for utter badassery. Learning the material editor is really difficult though...
• I've been making a few random maps for Q3, but nothing that important. I have no cool ideas sadly.
• I ALMOST FUCKING FORGOT!!!
• THE MOST IMPORTANT FUCKING PIECE OF NEWS FOR ALL MY 0 READERS!!!
• My 3-D Maze that I made a small version of almost two whole years ago is finally "complete"! I finished the maze part mostly (I'm customizing it a bit but 95% of it is done), so I only need to make the starting room and add tokens.
• I made some cool additions to my Skybox test-map, but nothing spectacular. I've been messing with lightmaps some more, mostly in conjunction with Skyrim models/shaders. I can do some pretty cool stuff, but I really wish I had a better CPU to render everything. I usually need to leave the renders going overnight and during the day. MCTest took 2-3 days to finish compiling.
• I was going to make Winterhold College's Mage Quarters the starting room for my maze, for no reason other than it looks cool, but this is the one that made me give up again due to animated models.
• I worked on some Halo 1 map conversions, which is actually rather easy once you find all the programs (that's the hard part). They aren't perfect, and you'd need to really want the maps to do them properly, because you need to manually do all collision. Which means basically re-building the entire map from the ground up. Which means half the work converting the map is wasted anyway. I don't care enough about Halo 1 to do this.
• That's pretty much it. Here's a shitty picture of my Summoner's Rift-to-Quake 3 conversion (the holes in the map aren't a bug - I'm using the trial version of the program, and it deletes 1/5 of the polygons)

Teaching someone how to DeFrag

Today, I tried to teach my friend how to strafe-jump. After about half an hour, we managed to get a basic understanding of all basic functions, and got about halfway through cos1_beta7b's blue lane. Sadly, it will be 3 weeks before we can have another attempt, but when that time comes... I hope to record the whole adventure and use it as a sort-of guideline/tutorial for all new players to get into the game. It will be loads of fun.

In other news, I got 32GB of RAM, and a shitton of games on the Steam Summer Sale. I'll soon be getting back to Q3 mapping, but I'm afraid I might have to start from scratch, at least shader-wise. For some reason, I could compile my mctest map with 7.5GB RAM usage, but now it's taking 31.4GB, and still running into memory limitations (I'm compiling with 2K lightmaps and only 2x super-sampling). When that gets fixed, I'll have a lot more games to play with, and all of them owned legitimately, too! I also have to play through them all at least once. I might turn into a casual gamer, but every time I feel like I'm turning over to the dark side, I'll just go play some Quake to wash it all away.

No problem.

Also, no pics this time.

It's hard to both play games and play with them at the same time

My friends keep coming to me with new games to play, eating up all my free time. Combine that with a full-time job, there aren't many opportunities left to work on all my stupid projects. That, and I haven't really gotten any good ideas lately to start and never finish.

The Minecraft map's progress halted because it ended up being pretty shit, gameplay-wise. It needs to be a hell of a lot bigger, which is difficult to do in such a way that it can be compiled, not to mention that it takes forever to do all by hand. Compiling it also takes over 24 hours, even on lowish settings (lowish meaning still 2K lightmaps with low lightmap scale), with 8GB of RAM. One of my DIMMs died a little while ago, so I can't even compile it any more anyway.

Skyrim is totally a thing of the past, along with all Bethesda stuff. If I ever got a supercomputer, maybe I would revisit all that, but it just takes too long to compile, with too many bugs. Recreating it wouldn't be as big a deal if the textures were split up and used proper powers of 2, but they're weird dimensions like 2048x113, 2048x561 etc. etc. and mapping like that is awful.

Now that summer is closing in, I'll play a lot of CTFS, because that's the most reliable, consistent enjoyment there is. And the demos/recordings are amazing.

Also I apparently got a second-degree sun burn because I've been painting the outside of a house for the past 3 days. It really hurts, and my face is basically leaking. Nasty.

Here are some screenshots of the latest compile of my map.

Click this text for one of 15 raw lightmap pages used on this map.

Real progress on my Minecraft map

Due to my lack of internet access these past few weeks, I've been able to get a lot of work done on quite a few projects, and the most fun one has definitely been my Minecraft map. Many moons ago, some friends and I created a relatively small Minecraft setup, intended for Hide and Seek/CTFS. Our intention was to make it something akin to Pillcity, which is a great map for both CTFS and Hide and Seek. It sat around for probably over a year, until I recently started working on it again. And I have made some great progress! I'm already almost half done, though less than half of the map is actually completed. The shaders caused a lot of issues, along with fixing some bugs in the map itself, and figuring out the scale of it all.

Compiling it takes a long time, and on my system I cannot do a whole lot in terms of extra settings. I don't know what the final map will look like, but I expect it will look amazing. My test compiles take several hours, and they are not as detailed as they could be.

Well, enough of that crap. This is the only real thing I've gotten much progress on, though I did finally find a god damn golden God's Hand in Disgaea 2. Even with 270+ hours poured into that game, my progress is shameful. It took me over 200 hours just to figure out what my goal was!
Here are some screenshots.

I've been doing a lot of not fruitless work recently!

Over the past weeks and months, I've been working on a lot of different projects. Some of them end up working out, while others just outright fail, but I've started taking things in differently. I'm doing my best to learn from everything I do, rather than simply forgetting about a project if it doesn't go exactly as I imagined it. A good example of this is video editing: I've made a lot of short clips, for different purposes, and though none of them have seen the light of day (one of them will soon enough), I've learned something useful from each of them. Now multiply that by about 4, and apply it to all sorts of fields - level design, art, etc. etc., and that's what I've been doing.

Obviously, I'm still messing with Skyrim and Minecraft, though I added Mirror's Edge to that pool of games to steal from, because its level design honestly has higher potential in Defrag than it does in Mirror's Edge, and all the tools are readily available to bring it all over. I made a few maps to learn what's what, and collision is going to be a breeze, because most of what you interact with is flat, unlike 90% of games these days. This means that I don't need Q3MAP2 to do its shitty collision hacks, and I can instead use caulk/clip brushes for collision, which also improves framerates substantially. That said, Mirror's Edge doesn't really destroy framerates the way Skyrim does, so it isn't a huge deal anyway. I might finish a map soon enough, and I have the potential to re-texture it and actually release it. Wouldn't that be fun?

Aside from Mirror's Edge, I've had a lot of ideas for Minecraft stuff, but because CPU still hasn't said a word regarding mc2map, I still can't do anything. The same goes for Skyrim, though obviously for different reasons: a lot of the models don't work, sadly, but also to re-create an area takes a lot of effort, and with the values I get from the Creation Kit differing from what they should be in Radiant, it's a lot of trouble, and I don't want to get too into it. It is still fun to play around with every once in a while though.

Now, on to the really juicy stuff.

My current project is to do with one of the most fun CTFS maps I've ever played: ojfc-12. I'm re-creating it with a bunch of weird shit. First off, I'm trying to figure out a good way to do fake fog, since real fog looks like crap. I basically have a texture running up the side of each column, and an alphamod function to create a gradient, from 100% to 0%. This makes it look like there's fog, because the texture is the same color as the bottom of the skybox. It looks really neat, but is also very inefficient, because it basically means two brushes for every pillar on the map, and the map is built from pillars. I also have some tentacles writhing around down there, but that's just me messing around a bit.

The real problem with this map is lighting it: with a good skybox, it took me literally 30+ hours to do a single light pass, not including radiosity. Hopefully I'll be able to use Maverick's super 16-core servers for that, but if not, I'm pretty screwed, as I also don't have enough memory to do some of the effects I want.

Speaking of effects I want, one idea I had was to make it somewhat cartoony, with all the textures picmip-y and cel shading and all that. It won't look super unique unless I do something super unique with that, but I don't know what yet. Same goes for the lighting - I want it to look special, but as it is, it just looks like a crappy space map. That is essentially what it is, but it's an amazingly fun crappy space map, and I want it to look great as well as play great. Hopefully I can figure all of this out, and if not, oh well: I only wasted a week on it, no big deal.

While I do all this (mostly while I'm waiting for a stupid light compile), I've been watching a lot of Quake movies, and movies in general. I've learned a lot, and I am hopefully going to be able to make some sweet movies soon. With the help of people like Entik, hopefully I'll be able to solve my biggest problem, which is that I don't know how to properly utilize the tools I have: namely Q3MME. Aside from maybe KOS, there isn't anyone to better learn from, and as soon as I can, I hope to start doing some badass learning. It's gonna be so much fun!

No pictures this time, because I had one, but it's lost in the interwebs now, never to be seen again. Maybe in a later post I'll add one.

Mazes and blocks and stuff

I recently went back to an old idea I had, which is to make a space-style Minecraft CTF map. The only difference between now and then is that I actually finished the map this time. The map is playable, and I will hopefully be playing it a lot now. It's really fun, with okay scaling and shape and all that.

Soon, I intend to figure out how to bake the lightmaps in 3DS Max, so right now there are no lights on the map. It's really bright.

In other news, I made a really cool 3D maze. It's built using 64^3u grid "blocks", and it has 7*8*7 blocks. It's built entirely using patches, so all the walls are 0u thick, which makes it a really strange and cool feeling running around, though there are some points where the movement is a little awkward.

There is also a larger (16^3) maze in the works, but I ran into some problems - mainly, that having eight thousand patches, half of which are on the same plane as another, really slows down the game. I got less than 50fps without collision in the worst areas, and literally 1fps with collision on. It's not really the best performance, no doubt. That is why I'm going to try and either convert it to a model and compile it from there, or recreate it with brushes. I would prefer the former over the latter, as brushes almost entirely defeat the purpose of this map. It won't necessarily break the gameplay though.
This is one of sixteen "layers" of the maze. Creating it manually is a very slow and painful process.

New monitor - ASUS VG248QE

I ordered my monitor on Friday, and it arrived around midday Wednesday. Newegg's shipping really is spectacular.

I decided to get this monitor because I really wanted something that felt a lot like my oldschool CRT monitor, with the high refresh rate and all that. It still can't compare to a CRT in other aspects, and all LCD monitors lack one of my favourite features: proper support for multiple resolutions. I can have my desktop at 1600x1200, and play games at 1920x1080 fullscreen if I really wanted to. There's no crappy blurring or dithering, which is so nice.

That said, this monitor feels pretty good. 144Hz is nothing to laugh at; my CRT did only pull 100Hz at full resolution, though I think it got up to 180Hz at 800x600, which is cool. The colours look like shit, there's no doubt about that. They're worse than my CRT, they're bright, they're washed out, and the contrast sucks. It's a lot bigger though; 24 inches felt really amazing when I first got on it. The only complaints about it, aside from the color, is that it's glossy. Glossy sucks. The screen isn't, but the stand and frame are glossy as hell. It makes it feel cheap and ugly.

Eventually, I might find a good IPS panel and try that on for size. Then I can get a good contrast of good performance vs. good looks, to judge things properly. Right now I'm comparing it all to the ever-superior CRT monitors, which will never be beat.

One major reason I decided to get a new monitor, aside from the fact that I had money I needed badly to waste, was that I'm going to be building a desk soon, and it won't really have as much room or be in the same spot as this one, so I won't be able to have a big, fat monitor on it like I do now.

Anyway, here's a picture of my desk now:



It looks pretty sexy, not gonna lie ;)

I'm going to start making some claymations!

I got my hands on a whole lot of leftover clay from an animator friend of mine, and soon he's going to let me hang out at his studio and learn how to animate (and how to make stuff out of clay... my god is it hard). Today, I got some good plastic gloves so I don't have to wash my hands all the time, and I decided to get down and dirty, and try to make something. My goal was Sarge. It didn't turn out too well.



It's really hard to make things out of clay, but sooner or later I'll be able to make it not look like Sarge is a zombie mutant alien with a dick-tongue and is 75 years old. I think it's worth a good laugh though, so I took a picture anyway.

In other news, my keyboard arrived a couple weeks ago, and it's damn nice. I even ordered some o-rings to make it a bit quieter, and they make a huge difference. It now feels and sounds amazing. While installing the o-rings, I damaged the clear plastic LED window on the caps lock key, so now it just has a big hole in it. I wanted to get a new key set from wasdkeyboards.com anyway, but it turns out they: A. Don't have windows for LED lights, and B. Don't have PBT keycaps, which I'm using. I thought I could get a set from Ducky's own site, but of course it's impossible to buy anything from them, directly anyway. It's really sad.

This weekend, I'm probably going to Anime North with some friends. That should be fun. It's also burger week next week, which means all sorts of fancy burger joints are selling their top-of-the-line stuff for $5, and on June 3, there's going to be a huge event, where, for $35, you can order all you can eat sliders from all of them.

Other than these couple shitty advancements, I'm not really doing anything; just working to save up money and buy some nice things. I want to get a nice motherboard and CPU, but that would be at least two weeks of saving. That's a lot of time without nice things...