Thursday, 8 May 2014

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.