And I thought HEKTIK was bad!

I've been working on reflux for the past couple hours, and I don't think it can get any worse than this.

There are missing textures, missing shaders, missing EVERYTHING, and most of it is broken even in wolfcam, but it somehow manages to work perfectly in Quake Live. This baffles me. The only explanation I can come up with is that id decided to break all their maps so that they're just barely useable in QL, but won't work at all in any other game (Q3 conversions such as this, for example). It's stupid, and probably untrue, but I honestly have no other idea.

I'm re-repacking all of my QL paks, in hopes that something was missed, but I'm positive that my current resources are all from the latest QL version. This is so stupid, I'm probably going to give up on this map if Muffin doesn't come online in the next couple of hours.

HERE's a list of all the missing textures on reflux, with no fixes. That's almost 200 shaders! And only about 100 of them EXIST in QL! I haven't done the chunky bunch yet: se_industrial, but I expect most of those to not have any shaders either.

Aside from all this stupid shit, something that bugs the hell out of me is the messed-up decals. An example is the weapon marker:

Hektik and shader BS

I finished converting Hektik to Q3, but there was a strange parm in one of the shaders: "novlcollapse" in "textures/sfx/portal_new_nonsolid". It didn't work in Q3, and it looks like the Wolfcam code just brushes it off (doesn't do anything, but was made to not output an error), so I deleted it. This was a relatively smooth conversion, which I'm very happy about, because it means that my technique works perfectly, aside from things like this that can't really be fixed.

This is good, but I want to make sure that the shader parm really is just a compiler setting and doesn't affect the look of the texture, so I might open QL with some HQ config and check it out. Or I could get someone else to do it for me...

Anyway, here's a DL link: hektik.pk3

I wrote a guide for repacking QL maps

I spent the last half-hour writing a short, step-by-step guide on how to convert and repack QL maps so they work in Q3, like I did with Furious Heights, Siberia and Ironworks. It's probably full of flaws and nonsense, so if any of the TWO FUCKING PEOPLE who read this blog care, go check it out and tell me what needs to be added/changed/clarified/etc.

Read it HERE!

Updates on stuff and things

I suppose I should write more stuff here, since that's what blogs are for.

Today (about 10 minutes ago), I talked to Shio, who is a mapping GENIUS, and super über pro defragger, about the problems I'd been having with Quake Live maps. What had happened was, some entities on ironworks and furiousheights were "mis-linked" to their targets, and others were changed. For example, one of the jumppads on ironworks was changed from trigger_push to trigger_teleport, and linked to one of the tele_dest entities. I wasn't sure what the cause of this was, but after talking to Shio for a bit, I had an idea: it was because the entities were linked to other entity numbers (example: entity 45, a trigger_push, was linked to entity 120, a target_location), and I had changed the advertisements from advertisement to func_static, which rearranged the list. This means that entity 45, which was previously linked to entity 120, was now linked to entity 118, which was "pushed up" 2 positions because I had changed 2 advertisements.

This made a whole lot of messes, and the ads didn't even work, which made it almost completely fruitless. But in the end, I was right, and justice prevailed once again.

What this all means is that I now know everything I should need to know to convert maps from QL to Q3, without any flaws (aside from Team Arena maps, which I don't want to keep the entities for because they create errors, and nobody plays TA anyway). Fully-functional advertisements, shaders, entities, and lights. A lot of this is because Shio is such a genius and is awesome. He showed me the -onlyents trigger, and sort-of showed me how to use it (I figured out how to use it literally 10 seconds before he told me how to use it, and we had both come to the same conclusion), and let me brainstorm by spamming him in IRC.

Enough ass-kissing: I'm going to be working on some more maps over the next few days. Toxicity and Reflux will probably be next. I might even make "fps" versions of the ones with intense shaders, like Siberia's snow, that don't have any of those details. The only downside is that they won't work on pure servers, and they might even require different bsps (if I remove the func_static on Sibera, I would have to make a new bsp, but if I only change the shader, it might not work as it should).

Here are some download links, plus some bonus fun stuff:

Furious Heights
Siberia
Ironworks

BONUS:
A broken/buggy version of Furious Heights
A broken/buggy version of Ironworks
Confetti Siberia override shader

Play more promode ;)

Siberia in Quake 3!

I asked the dudes in #tricking.eh what QL map they would like to see in Q3, and we all agreed on Siberia.

It was really easy, seeing as how I'm now an experienced repacker. There were a couple shader complications but it was all done in under half an hour (remember that I do everything by hand, plus every time I get onto a map to test it, I end up running around for quite a while sometimes).

I also decided to take this opportunity to play with a couple shader ideas I had a while ago, and they worked... somewhat. Here's a screenshot:



CONFETTI SIBERIA!

Today is an historic day!

Today is the day that I first converted a demo from defrag to Quake Live properly. No middle-ground demos recorded from wolfcam, no buggy sounds or events that crash the demo, no wolfcam-only playback. This works as a normal Quake Live demo should!

This is also part two of my three-part project, but I'm not going to tell what part three is ;)

If you want to watch the demo, you can download it HERE!

For some reason, the demo doesn't play in QLDT (I have some suspicions as to what could be causing it), but it works fine in QL and wolfcam. There are also a bunch of imperfections, such as the time being wrong, and the configstrings being Q3's and not QL's (that's what might be causing QLDT to not play the demo). I'll play with the configstrings and try to make the demo playable in QLDT, but it's fine as-is, IMO.

nebuLa needs to learn to not add spaces to his filenames, because they really do mess with autocomplete, and all those %20's in the URL are just plain ugly.

Furious Heights in Quake 3!

I decided to play around with some map conversion, because I wanted to do yet another experiment. My pick was Furious Heights.

After an hour or two of on-and-off work, I got it 95% working. All the shaders and textures are there, but the advertisements don't work. This map isn't that big a deal; there's just a big empty frame on the wall. But some maps, like Campgrounds, have the advertisements being part of the actual map structure, so if the ad doesn't show up, there's a big hole in the wall, plus some massive HOM effects.

I tried a few things to get the advertisements working: I tried changing the classname from "advertisement" to "func_static", deleting them altogether, and changing a few other parameters in a few different ways. I couldn't get them working, so I'll have to consult my experts as soon as I can.

They're available for download, but I'm not sure if I should actually publish them (lol nobody reads this fucking blog anyway)...

----

In other news, DREAMHACK!!! Along with the duel finals, mccormic's latest movie, "Kleftogiannis", will be shown. He's taking a very unique approach to this, and I love talking about it. He's making a CPMA/OSP/QL movie, which in itself is very weird, but he's also essentially showing a "beta" version at Dreamhack. What I mean by that, is that because he was strapped for time, his vision isn't quite complete. He will be fixing a lot of transitions and minor bugs after the showing at Dreamhack, as well as adding a whole second track (the first track is just brilliant. It's amazing, and I can't stress that enough. It's a DnB remix of some song that I'm not allowed to name).

It's gonna be the tits!

Editing, other things.

I fixed Aerowalk (there were three missing textures, plus a broken shader), and finally captured my video, only to realize that I didn't add enough time to the end of it for proper transitioning, so I had to redo everything. And because I'm stupid, I deleted all the .ct3d files, so I have to restart from scratch. At least I figured out how to do everything (mostly), and won't have as many hindrances along the way.

This is an opportunity to fix everything that was wrong with the first instance, and make it all better in general. I know a few techniques I can use to make the whole process a lot smoother. Remaking the Aerowalk cam is really annoying, though, for many reasons, and so I stopped for today (or yesterday, by real logic), but will hopefully finish this whole thing tomorrow (or today, by real logic).

I'm also in the process of fixing all the texture bugs I can find. There are problems, of course, but I will have a fully-functional map pack soon, with absolutely no texture bugs, and possibly some improvements.

Looking a little bit at the way bsps work, I realized some cool things that are actually good to know: there is always a specific amount of room before/after a shader name when it's called in a bsp, which means that you can safely add/remove characters from the shader inside the hex editor. What it also means is that the character limit for shaders is easy to find. I haven't counted, but it's only about 30 characters or so.

I went through all the maps and fixed one bug in particular on every map that it appeared: telex. Instead of using the shader, which had proper blendfuncs, QL decided to use the raw texture, which looked like crap. So I overwrote the texture name with the shader name, and now it's all good. I had to also fix the shader, though, because it was stupidly done, and didn't work at all.

After I've fixed all the maps, and after Maverick gets off his lazy, vacationing ass and gives me an FTP, I might upload my fix.pk3 for other people to use, because I know I'm not the only one with this problem.

The last thing I'm doing is some more of my stupid demo modding/stitching. I have a basic plan, and nothing more. It will be more of a hobby that I can do whenever. It's stealing all of Mazu's cpm3a jumps from HERE. Basically, I'll be doing all his jumps, and stitching them together into one big demo full of awesome, with some clever chat thrown in wherever it fits. The way I see me doing it is, I land a jump in CPMA (and record a demo obviously), then get the pos from the end of that demo and load it in defrag, then just run to wherever the next trick starts, and transition from there. I'll have to figure some clever way to go from defrag to CPMA, because there is no savepos in CPMA (otherwise I wouldn't need to make "interim" demos in defrag). Someone with real knowledge and skill could finish this in a couple days, but I'll be doing it over the course of X days/weeks/months. I'll figure something out, or this will just be another worthwhile project sent to the scrapyard.

Movies have been slow lately. Not many new releases, and not many old movies to download. I've downloaded pretty much every worthwhile movie that's already out, plus/minus around 5. There is one in particular that I would like to get my hands on, but have no way of downloading: anti-conformist, a staged fragvideo by the same guy who made deception. Wussie has it, but he hasn't uploaded it anywhere, and own-age.com is dead so I can't get it there. It's been bugging me ever since I learnt of its existence.

That's pretty much it, aside from oranje having his own $10 VPS with massive lag spikes but an average ping of about 15ms (for both of us since it's practically right beside us both).

Maverick|FTP

The other FTP I got was kinda suck, but Maverick might get me one, which would be awesome. Hopefully it won't be all weird and buggy and with a super long URL, in which case I'll use the shit out of it.

In other news, my family sucks. And I hit 50gb of Quake movies.

100 get!

I reached 100 movies, and it's still climbing! My hundredth movie was "Get Quaked" by JoKa, but by far the highlight of this little package was Cristal's movie, "Castor Fiber". Cristal is one of the most unique editors I've ever seen, and his editing is always over-the-top, but still amazing. Out of the couple movies of his I've seen, they tend to focus more on third person than first person sequences, and heavy editing, color corrections, filters, and effects.

I hope it's a he, anyway...

Check out my awesome movie list HERE!

90 get!

I just reached 90 movies on my list/harddrive. The 90th movie was ZhoreZ by LovEmE. Not too bad; not my style, but still pretty good quality. I don't like that a lot of people just throw massive amounts of framerate and bitrate at their movies without thinking. One of my friends actually rendered a movie at 100fps! He didn't even know what he was doing; he just wanted the best quality he could get. His bitrate wasn't high enough to handle that sort of framerate, and his input wasn't even 100fps, so it didn't look like 100, but still ran at that rate.

When I hit 100, I might do something, like... watch more movies. I need my mentor to log onto IRC so he can teach me how to do the things I want to do, like make a legend, and fix a few things, and other miscellaneous what-have-you that I want added to my page.

The fact that my project is a list of movies isn't really significant; I just wanted a "sandbox" to play around with, and this was the result. I learn as much from making a list of movies as I would from almost anything else, since it's all the same thing at the core.

HTML coding is the only thing that's kept my attention for this long, which is really good. I might end up doing web coding for a living: who knows?

Partway done

I finished capturing the "first" (second) part of this video, after figuring out how I'm going to do everything. The cameras are quite nicely done, and I think everything is pretty smooth.

The only problem I'm facing right now is the broken textures on aerowalk. The second clip was on bloodrun, which is perfectly fine, but aerowalk has missing shaders. Just like when I repacked sidrialdm1, it seems as if there are shaders that just don't exist ANYWHERE in use here. I can't find the images or the shaders, and it just makes no sense to me at all.

I'll probably be finished this tomorrow (or today, whatever). I fell asleep, but I forget if it was an accident or not. I slept for a few hours, so hopefully I'll be able to stay up all day instead of sleeping again, so I can go to bed at night, like a normal person.

I'm capping at a ridiculously high resolution, because I have no anti-aliasing or other filters on my GPU. It'll have to be down-scaled from 3840x2160 to 1280x720, which is quite a large difference (3x!), but there will be virtually no aliasing or anything of that sort.

Timing the normal aerowalk and the mask layer will be tough because I'm using 120fps (120fps at such a high resolution is crazy. The bloodrun sequence was 17gb, which is higher than anything I've ever done in Quake!). I'll have to line both tracks up perfectly, and if they're off by even one frame, it'll look weird.

Lastly, the demo I'm using is really good. The quality of the frag is really good. It's not a super nice shot or anything, but more of an amazing technique/strategy.

P.S. On an unrelated note, I'm playing with these .fs files. I have no idea what they do, but I'm going to break them and change some values and see what happens. Could be fun!

Back editing/making crappy videos!

Yesterday and today, I've been getting ready for a short little video I'm making. This is probably as close to real editing as I'm going to get, at least for now.

Basically, it's inspired by dorftrottel. I have a camera path that goes in a circle around the platform, and a custom .bsp with a green clip at one point, and everything else red. The idea is that I'll capture the same camera path on each map, then turn the green into a mask for transitioning to another map. I'll be cutting out the last 2-3 camera points and adding them to the beginning of a cam on another map, so I can transition smoothly from map to map, without the need for tracking or any kind of editing.

So far, I have the camera path for aerowalk, and that's about it. I somehow let myself capture it on the map while it was full of missing and broken textures, but I'm not sure how to fix them, so I'll have to wait for someone else to fix them for me :P Until then, however, the second map's camera will be in production. I have actually captured the path on each aerowalk, so I can test those in Vegas and figure out how to do this, then work on the second camera, then maybe fix the textures and capture this.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to play around with some video compression and make this even more fruitful.

Quake 3 Entity Plus

I played some dude's E+ map, and it was quite fun, albeit buggy. This mod has huge potential, and some impressive entities (to be expected, since it's a mod based around entities). Basically, it's a single-player map where you fight a bunch of dudes, get some keycards, and beat a boss. It's simple, Q2-style, fun. There are balancing issues, along with general bugs, but overall it's surprisingly NOT buggy, considering what's being worked with.

Get it here!

League of Legends

I'm going to be playing some LoL, along with Terraria, Quake 3, and hopefully Baldur's Gate/2 over the next little while. Should be fun, since I'll be playing most of them with friends, and if not, there's always pubs/pugs!

The Pando Media Booster thing for LoL was a bitch to get working, but after I did, the download was pretty smooth I guess. I'm horrible at this game, so I'll be raged at and carried for a while, but hopefully I'll become competent after a few games. Only time will tell.

I feel like I'm using this blog like it were Twitter, but without character limitations. I should stop doing that.

Baldur's Gate TuTu

I was bored today, with nothing to do, so I decided to fire up TuTu (it's basically Baldur's Gate 1 inside the Baldur's Gate 2 engine, which is funny because I have a mod that returns a lot of the BG1 functionality to it), and start a new game.

I read through some of the class descriptions, and almost considered playing a Lathander Cleric, but instead read up on a few more classes. This was a great choice in the end, because I found out about the fucking amazing Monk class. They're pretty shit early-game, but my god are their bonuses amazing when they get to level 10+.

Anyway, I rolled some badass stats, made my character, and started playing. Monks move much faster than any other class, so I breezed through Candlekeep with ease. I met up with Imoen to start kicking some ass, but on the very first group of monsters, I got two-shotted. Four times. I figured something must be wrong, so I checked my settings, and sure enough, the difficulty was set to "Insane". I moved the slider down to "Normal", and tried again. This time, I died in only one hit, so I just closed the game and read some forums.

I've since read a tiny bit more about monks and how their full potential as badasses can be achieved, so I'll try again later. Monks are awesome, though I still think spellcasters trump them.

I just keep adding!

This has been probably the only project that I've stuck with for this long: a measly 3 days. I keep downloading movies and updating this page, changing things, making it look slightly better.

It's so fun!

My list of movies, updated!

I wanted to do something with this page, so I asked my good friend TaTooKa, who has helped me out with HTML coding a few times in the past, to walk me through this one as well.

Sure enough, he agree, and we embarked on an epic quest to make my page not suck balls. Basically, all I did was add mouse-over dropdown menus for each of the items, so you can see more detailed info on the movie. It took about half an hour to fix a bug in our code, and then a bunch more time for it all to actually be written. The page is only about 1/4 done right now, because I'm writing everything by hand, and it's not very fast this way.

The only thing to be wary of is that these filesizes are the sizes of the movie files ONLY, so if the download is a .rar or .zip, it's probably bigger than what's written on my page, because there are other files inside. Or, it could be up to a few megabytes smaller, because there's only one file, and it's been compressed (although most of these use incredible compression, so there isn't much more space to be saved).

I'm thinking of adding the MD5 and editor's names to the info sections, but I don't know if that's the best idea. Editor's name, sure, but MD5 seems pointless for most of these because you won't know if your file is broken or anything unless you extract the archive, but if you extract it without errors, then your file isn't broken. Even if they weren't pointless in that respect, it just seems like an unnecessary waste of space. Nobody really cares, anyway. If the video doesn't play, or gives an error, then try fixing it, or re-download it.

Also, all of these files are hosted by Maverick, and they will continue to be. Every update I make to the list will be hosted only by Maverick himself, that means no megaupload, no youtube, no fileshare, nothing. This is best for everyone, though, because his site is "ad-free", he doesn't encrypt the URLs, and he has incredible speeds.

Any movie I download and consider high enough quality to add to this list, I will add. If any of the TWO or THREE people reading this even CARE, then suggest what sorts of things I should add to the info sections, or what I should add to the page itself. I might not replace the download buttons, just because they're so $$. I might add a stream one, though, and if the file isn't on youtube, I could upload it, or get Maverick to upload it (it would be nice to have both a stream and download available for all movies).

Since I now have limited access to Maverick's file tree, I might take a look at what movies he has there, and download any that look interesting.

This seems almost like a substitute for own-age.com! HA! AS IF! Still, it's pretty nice if I do say so myself.

HERE YOU GO!

I made a list of all my Quake videos :D

I just spent about half an hour organizing all my Quake videos in a nice list, which I'm hosting on my dropbox (because dropbox is amazing, and I'm too poor to rent a site). It's a very crude list, with only the basics, and no nice styling.

Here it is!

All of them are alphabetical, although they use their filenames, rather than "actual" names. I might address that.

I've added download links where I can, most of which are from Maverick Servers and Gaming. There are a couple from megaupload, one from hotfile, and only one youtube link. I also only added the max quality versions of the videos, so if you download anything from that list, be aware.

Maverick has hosted a lot of movies on his servers, and his speeds are incredible. He also doesn't believe in "hiding" the URL, so all his downloads are download manager-friendly. By far the best file hosting I've yet to come across, and a great site as well. That's enough ass kissing for now, though.

UPDATE: Maverick has been completely and utterly badass enough to host ALL of these movies, immediately after I gave him a link to this list. The man is truly a wizard.

maverickservers file hosting

A new project!

This one is similar to the cross-map cams that I've been trying to do over the past week or so, with an added twist: I'm going to be using 3ds Max as well. It might be easier, it might be harder, but I don't really know what I'll be doing.

I'm going to be using Camtrace 3D for my cameras, as usual, but I'm going to be using the camera script importer for 3ds Max 7/8, as well. The only problem is that I have 3ds Max 2012, so I need to get the earlier version, or find some way to make it compatible with the current version. The latter will definitely not happen, sadly.

What my plan right now is, is something like this: I make a camera on a number of maps (the camera is going to be about 30-40 seconds long, which is probably almost 5 times as long as any one I've made before), export/import it to 3ds Max, add the rocket .md3, then try and animate it (all I have to do is a slow rotation so it shouldn't be too hard), all the while keeping it in line with the camera in such a way that it doesn't turn or do anything strange.

Because I'm very inexperienced with anything to do with 3d modeling and animation, I'm going to need a lot of help, especially with the effects I'll be using. I know a lot of people who are very experienced in this, but their willingness to help might not be too high. That would mean lots of tutorials and imperfect work.

The other part of this project is the filters/effects I'll be using. I don't quite know what they will be yet, but it will be something like cel shading, or outlines/shapes only (sort-of like shadow art?). I might use some weird colors as well, who knows?

I really hope this project finishes, because it's the most inclusive one I've started (3d modeling, scripting, configging, and a couple other things), and it also doesn't seem like it will have many complications, at least not in-game, which is really nice.

To be honest, the only main problem I can see right now is lining up the rocket with the dude who shoots it, if it will even start like that. I only have a vague image of it in my head that needs refinement. I don't even know if I will need to animate the rocket in Max, if that's possible, or if I will even want to. I don't know what sort of demos I'll be using, if it will be through some action (that would be really nice), or just empty maps (pretty lame, but this whole thing is pretty lame), or what. With a bunch of players running around, making the effects properly will be a huge challenge, but without any action, it would be a boring video to watch.

The more I think about it, the more ideas pop into my head. For instance, I might try and incorporate my map-to-map airrocket thing, and have the video end with the rocket hitting a Keel. If I pull this off properly, it would be a really, really sweet video. I can't wait!

I also know what song I'm going to be using.