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.