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...

Getting a new keyboard, mousepad, small computer upgrades...

I got a job a couple of weeks ago, and so far I've gotten some more RAM for my computer, and my mousepad (Puretrak Talent) is on its way. I need to wait for my check to get verified before I can get my Ducky mechanical keyboard (Cherry MX Red switches), and that's going to be damn fun to use.

After my keyboard, I think I'm going to wait for the Ninox Aurora mouse, and then get that.

As for actual work on things such as Skyrim or Minecraft maps, I'm waiting for cpu to finish his minecraft > map converter. I got some more RAM, which will help a lot with compiling light, though I'm still a bit lacking in CPU horsepower. I might delve back into Skyrim maps, because the real problem I had was light: the maps were all really disappointing and disheartening, because I had to compile in fullbright every time - my computer couldn't handle all the intense light settings I was using. I may still need to dial back the settings somewhat because my processor sucks, but RAM limitations should be more or less gone for now. I might have updates soon.

And as for Minecraft maps, if I get a new GPU before CPU (lol) finishes his mc2map, I will be able to clean them up somewhat in Radiant. The biggest problem, aside from it taking forever (200,000+ brushes in a relatively small map, 90% of which need to be removed), is that I can't render all the tris in Radiant, so I get about .3 fps, which I can't operate with.

Just because nobody but me ever looks over these, I decided to write down a note to save on brush count but increase the amount of textures: if there's a section of flat ground that can be combined into one brush, but there are multiple textures (for example, dirt and grassy dirt), I can make a new texture for that one section, tiling the textures myself. I don't think, considering how well tga compresses, it will be a huge problem. All of the Minecraft textures combined are only about 1mb when zipped up.

As always, here's a picture of what I have been working on: a minecraft-themed jump map. I still haven't been able to beat it. It's really fucking hard. Also, there are a lot of stylistic things I need to fix or change. I want to make the textures tile properly, but I don't think that's possible, at least not with my skills. It's a little annoying how badly the textures tile across edges on cubes...
It's really easy to light, but it looks like ass with my current settings. I recreated the map inside Minecraft to see what it looks like, so I might go from there to make it look alright.

All I do on this blog are, "I've been away for a while" posts...

So, I'm still doing random experiments with Q3. The one I am actively working on is trying to recreate some environments from Skyrim. I found out how to extract all of the models and textures, and they work alright in Q3 with some exporters and whatnot. A lot of the problems are not coming from the models themselves, but more from the limitations of Quake, q3map, and my computer. Q3map2 has a brush limitation of around 32,000, and some of these models hit that cap pretty quick if I use auto-clipping on them. If I ever finished a scene that I wanted to play properly in Quake, I would manually clip it, or at the very least make a low-poly version to use for clipping, but right now I'm just trying to get everything working right.

At the moment, the biggest thing I've done is most of the geometry of Winterhold, as it's one of the more practical environments that can be made into its own map: it's on a big cliff, with only a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The most tedious part of this (not difficult; just time-consuming) will be adding all the details. I will have to add all the stupid benches, plants, trees, rocks, and decals manually, because I can't open large files in Max, which means I can't just rip the entire scene from the game and use that. However, because of this limitation, I might resort to doing a smaller area, such as the inside of Winterhold College's main building. It actually is better for my purposes, since my original idea was to make a, "find the differences" map.

A few weeks ago, while riding the train home, I had an idea to make a scene in Radiant, copy it, and add a bunch of extra details to it. You find the differences, shoot them, and a pretty little ring appears above it. When you find all of them, you finish the map. But instead of looking at a 2-D image, or a small environment through a window, I wanted it to be a large area that you could walk around and look behind walls etc. When I got home, I realized that Skyrim would undoubtedly have some area that perfectly suited my needs. The world is massive, with innumerable details spotted throughout. I tried to walk all over it, looking for any spot that would work for me. I made a list of about 10, and decided to then find out how to actually get these scenes into Quake. This was easier than I expected.

It turns out, there are already a lot of existing plugins for Max to import Skyrim's .nif files, and tools to export all of the resources for the game. All I needed to do was extract all of the models and textures, import them to Max and export them as .ase models for Quake. Compiling a map with them, however, was pretty difficult. If I wanted light, it would have to be very low quality (no high resolution lightmaps or super-low lightmap scale), and more often than not the models would have to be nonsolid. An anomaly I found with this was that my Winterhold scene actually crashes Q3map2 when compiled without auto-clipping enabled, but compiles rather quickly with it on (this seems backwards).

Anyway, I've got a lot of working maps, complete with 2k textures and all that good stuff. Detailing I might save until I can figure out an easy way to copy everything from Skyrim 1:1, but the larger architecture is pretty simple and easy to do.

Before I got into this Skyrim thing (it actually made me pick up Skyrim and try to play through it again, because I was forced to fix all the bugs I ran into when trying to play it last time), I was working on Minecraft maps. I joined up with cpu, some wizard who hangs out on IRC, and got working on mc2map, a tool that does exactly what its name implies: converts Minecraft worlds to Q3 .map format. The early versions kinda sucked, and were heavily limited, but I convinced cpu to add some features and I updated his block id list so that all the blocks were what they should be.

The main problem I faced with working on any Minecraft maps is that brush merging doesn't exist yet. Any world I convert is thousands and thousands of brushes, which my computer just can't handle. I gave up on doing any work with Minecraft, despite having a lot of ideas and good worlds ready to go. There are some incredible texture packs for this game, which make me itch to get everything working right in Quake. The gameplay is also quite good, as Space and cpu have both proven with their previous maps.

This is the end of what is probably my longest blog post. If I used this blog more, I may actually have done a lot more work on these projects, since writing everything down helps a lot with thinking of solutions and finding deeper problems to solve. Now it's time for me to post some screenshots of what I have so far. Here goes...