Journals

DiscoStu8 years ago2016-07-30 01:27:16 UTC 2 comments
Meet the newest member of my family:

User posted image

And the whole family:
User posted image
Cell phone shot because all my lenses are in the picture.
The Mad Carrot8 years ago2016-07-27 22:00:48 UTC 7 comments
33 (number)

33 (thirty-three) is the natural number following 32 and preceding 34.

(Source)
Admer4568 years ago2016-07-22 15:08:53 UTC 8 comments
Hmm, one thing intrigues me.

People from poorer countries sometimes are more successful than people from first-world countries.

E.g. I started mapping when I was 12 and I'm progressing relatively well:
User posted image
That's a 14 year old's work, who lives in a village, with this trash.

Yes, terrible conditions, awful equipment, the country's state (which is 21 years post-war right now) all contribute to my work and make it better than something an average 16 year old (who lives on his own island, surrounded by 3 monitors, powered by 2 GTX 980s) would do.
That, of course, definitely doesn't mean that I am better than an experienced adult mapper. Sorry for the insanely long sentences, but I can't put all my thoughts into separate ones.

And, worst of all, I'm still waiting for the completion of "Teh epik master plan"! It's been around 3 months since I began waiting.
Strider8 years ago2016-07-19 09:30:25 UTC 5 comments
User posted image
This show. Watch it.
Admer4568 years ago2016-07-07 11:34:26 UTC 7 comments
My parents think that buying from Steam (and the whole Internet) is full of scams.

It's very discouraging to know that almost all the games I paid for, are pirated copies burnt onto a DVD.

It didn't take me much time to discover that the games were cracked, thus I learned how to "crack" games, which is actually just replacing the game EXE and DLLs with changed ones.

I realized that by the multiplayer, which by the way, never worked.

It was my parents' fault. But hey, I can't blame them, they just want me to have a secure life, and they want to have secure bank accounts. (they think buying on Steam is a scam, because "prices are higher than the tag says so")

Here are some photos of most of the games my parents and I bought:

User posted image


Except for "The Terminator", it's a movie, the only thing which isn't pirated.

Here's some more:

User posted image


Now you can totally see how much I spent (around 120 BAM in total) on pirated games. But hey, it doesn't mean it's not worth the money, since I enjoyed playing these games, and they did make my latter childhood (from 8 to 11 years of age).

The only things, however, which weren't pirated were a copy of Tactical Ops, and a ton of PC Play magazine DVDs:

User posted image


Just ignore the two on the top, they were there by accident. I still keep these for archiving purposes.
DiscoStu8 years ago2016-07-03 05:23:28 UTC 16 comments
Fuck me, not this agai-- waiiiit a minute...
User posted image
Is that...?

User posted image

YES! YES! I WIN! FUCK YOU!
FriesNburger8 years ago2016-07-02 23:32:02 UTC 6 comments
I've had an itch to get back to mapping and to stick with it recently. I wanted to dissect Half-life maps and see how certain things worked so i could hopefully be a more competent mapper among other things. I decided to use the steam Half-Life SDK with Hammer Editor 3.4 that it comes with for reasons I might get to later in this post. I also went to Botman's site and picked up a couple of tools I found convenient for my purposes.

In the config I set up my directories and build programs directories, wad file paths, and so on. For the build programs I used the valve proprietary compile tools. During the mapping process I used custom 1024x1024 (~1mb) textures made with bsp_slicer.exe to rebuild the basic map geometry (perfect practice for mapping) cause, you know... decompilers don't do a very great job they like to carve the whole map from a single brush block and is a huge mess.

I couldn't use the textures at first cause I could not simply select it from the browser and then press apply in the texture tool. Instead I had to awkwardly replace the gaben trigger texture with the 1024x1024 ones. Then I could use them normally... weird... I also had to have the whole brush selected as well because how the replace feature worked differently when a single face was selected(don't remember the exact details).

So the math is a 1024x1024 texture applied to 6 sides of a brush is 6 megabytes, which is 3 times over the texture memory limit (~2mb). This is the best I can figure as to why I was getting the compile error MAX_MAP_MIPTEX. Looked up this error and it said that I was using to many textures which exceeded the alotted memory limit. Well that didn't make any sense because I had the minimal amout of brushes to create a working map and not that many textures.
That's when I realized, of course, it had to be the massive texture size I was using.

I didn't want to break them down because I thought it would take to much time (later on I found you can do it really
quickly with photoshop cs3). So I had also read you can pass the command option -texdata 4020 to qcsg.exe to increase the memory limit to ~4mb. When I tried to compile again I got a diferrent error which was: Windows gave the error "Access Denied". Orignally I thought windows didn't like me modifying a tool set to read only or didn't have
Administrative rights, or UAC was causing this, or my configuration paths were somehow wrong.

Come to find out when running an elevated console and compiling my .rmf file directly with qcsg.exe plus the command
option -texdata that qcsg.exe doesnt recognize that command and I later find out that command was for Zoner's version of the compile tools. So naturally decided to use Zoner's tools, but to make a already long story short, the tools made bsp files that GoldSrc Steam Half-Life didn't like because it would crash with a fatal read error.

So I've decided to stick with the tools that came with Hammer Editor. I see it as a challenge and dicipline to make
these maps with the quake compile tools(I'm a bit of purist anyway). The whole point of this post really is to talk about the Access Deinied error because there isn't much information on it at all. So I hope that this gives a little
more light on this error.
Mr. Cowboy Zombie8 years ago2016-06-30 17:45:43 UTC 6 comments
How hell his glasses can stay in his face?
http://i.imgur.com/iByNs0j.jpg
Archie8 years ago2016-06-24 06:48:04 UTC 19 comments
There are no words.
Scotland must seize this opportunity to get the fuck out of the UK, rejoin the EU and try not to wince as Farage's England tumbles further and further into a Dystopian wasteland.
This is a victory for xenophobia, short-sightedness and lies. Trump winning is the next milestone on this journey. This is the darkest timeline.
Notewell8 years ago2016-06-24 02:12:12 UTC 7 comments
So, I played the HL: Day One demo, and I found a few interesting things.
First off, some animation differences.
User posted image
The famous airlock guard had a trio of animations that differed from what shipped. At first I thought this was just an alternate standing_idle, but it also has 2 other sequences - halting_player and standing_looking. (His gun isn't quite on his holster, which may be why they changed it. Though I dunno why they didn't just use a higher quality version of the same pose.) There are 8 or 10 animations present in the barney model that just plain weren't used in the final version, not counting the unused ones that actually shipped. I kind of wish that Valve had kept them in - I can definitely see some of these having been used in mods if they were.

The hgrunt model, which has been presumably pared down to save on filesize, does not contain a shotgun submodel, balaclava, or cigar guy. There are a few unused unshipped animations, one of which is curiously reminiscent of the Sten gun.
User posted image
(due to the odd rotation and the arm movement I assume this was a prototype shotgun fire animation)

The bullsquid death animation is different - instead of collapsing and spreading out, it does a backflip and lands on its back.
User posted image
User posted image
player.mdl has a gender submodel slot, featuring Gordon and Gina, and a weapon submodel slot, featuring a shotgun and backwards Mp5.

Scientists were apparently originally slated to feature in an aquatic area, with a tread, frontcrawlling, and 2 floating corpse animations. I guess this is from a cut section of the Icky area in Apprehension? Other notable things include a trio of animations for the scientist who built the gluon gun crawling out of a hidey hole and showing off his work.

The dead_osprey model, which if I recall correctly, was used in Opposing Force, actually originated in the HL1 beta. Looks like it was probably meant to be switched out when you killed the osprey, then play the crash animation when it hit the ground.

Headcrabs have two movement speeds, run, which is the one we're all familiar with, and walk, which I don't recall existing. (When I first saw it ingame I thought it was limping.)

I know that some of the model content, such as the spazhard animations for the zombies, were included in the HL SDK, but I really wish that all the animations made for HL1 were left in the files. But anyway, moving on. Let's get some map screenshots up in this bitch.
User posted image
The second opening in this room in Office Complex is gone, and the hallway to the shotgun room is much more straighforward and not full of random crates. The submap does not exist, rather being nearly the exact same thing in the main map with the exception of the texture used on the fence.
User posted image
(My shotgun is transparent due to an OpenGL error. Decals flickered a lot too. I guess my GPU doesn't support the older versions?)
User posted image
The hgrunt in the first map of WHG is replaced with a barney, and there are vents in the walls. Not sure why those were removed, as the final version of the map doesn't have any significantly larger or more complex bits to it to warrant having to remove geometry like that.

Okay, now for stuff I can't show in screenshots - mechanics!

Auto-aim is always on, with no menu option to disable it unless you turn off the crosshair altogether. A neat feature with this, however, is that your viewmodel shifts with the auto-aim crosshair position, similar to non-ADS aiming in console games such as Goldeneye and Timesplitters.

The glock has no alternate fire - seems that was added late in development. There's also a modern-style tactical reload on it - if you have ammo, reloading will give you 18 rounds to represent the one in the chamber, but otherwise you'll get the standard 17. This also explains the reason why mods built with the HL SDK code often "give" the pistol the ability to reload at any time - seems in the version of the code we got, the tactical reload was removed as in gold HL, but the check for it wasn't - so if there's less than 18 rounds, and there will always be without the tac reload, the pistol can be reloaded. This feature, though cut, is long ahead of its time, so the only reason I can think of to remove it is that playtesters were getting confused.

Frag grenades are a lot lighter and more bouncy, closer to HL2's grenades in the distances and angles you can pull off with them. Not sure why this was changed, as the heavy grenades we got were a lot less useful.

The Mp5 has the same higher rate of fire as the Uplink demo, and on picking it up you have the full 50 rounds, rather than 25.

env_beverage does not restore health. The benefits of hydration were apparently lost on Valve until near the end of development.

A mechanic that was not present was the beta implementation of the long-jump module - but Gina's different line in the Day One Hazard Course gives us some insights as to what it was. Apparently the long jump module, like the beta flashlight, was going to use suit power, and a great deal of it per jump. The LJM, instead of a backpack, was a special kind of battery for "short duration long jumping" - either some kind of limited time powerup, or a second counter that you'd need to have points in in addition to suit power. They probably changed this to the final version because it was too complex for players and programmers alike.

Finally, something a bit cumbersome was that, like Quake, there was a limit to how high you can look in any direction. Presumably this was just a hold-off from the engine code they got from ID that they didn't get around to changing, but having it there makes barnacles a lot harder to fight.

All in all, the Day One demo had a lot more insights to HL1's development than I thought it would, having always been given to understanding that it was just literally the first few chapters of the game. I wish a lot of the cut animation content was left in for modders to play with, and I don't understand why a couple of the mechanics and map features were changed between the demo and release, (I'm looking at you, tactical reload and bouncy grenades! Also the damn extra Office Complex map we apparently didn't even need!) but there were still some dregs of the "bad" HL1 beta that Valve cut for good reason left in there too.
Tetsu08 years ago2016-06-21 03:51:54 UTC 20 comments
To my friends and acquaintances; the good people of TWHL.
Life is certainly strange... A fact I have been constantly reminded of over the course of these last few weeks.
I have been going through a rather drastic series of changes in my life recently, and it hasn't given me much time to create the worlds that I once used to love creating.
The simple truth that I have been realizing is that I no longer feel any desire to map. It was something I did to distract myself. Something I did in my moments of weakness to build myself up and give me confidence in something because I thought i was halfway decent at it.
I would get absorbed and consumed but my motivation always faded and it all eventually became tedious work towards an end result that never seemed worth it once I invested so much time into it.

Truth is i don't like mapping anymore. It seems.... Like a nostalgic idea now. Something I used to love doing and have such a fond memory hammering away at these crazy ideas... And the worst part about nostalgia is that it's never the same once you try to go back in time. You get the taste but it's never as sweet as you know it once was.

My life and hobbies surrounding it have turned away from gaming as a whole. I no longer strive to make it in the gaming industry or develop a one hit wonder mobile game or a gripping multiplayer game that's refreshing and new...

I've undergone a transformation this year. Broken out of my chrysalis if you will... Really matured into who I should have been about 5 years ago.

Which brings me to my point... I'm sure some of you have noticed my absence. My apologies for going MIA when I started an ambitious project. I wanted a taste of glory and success that Urby had with TWHL Tower (cheers btw, epic work)
But I myself didn't want to put in the work; and I still don't. I'm forfeiting ownership of the mod and I'm removing my name from it.
So sorry for that. I shouldn't have committed to that project but i was in denial about a lot of things in my life.. It was a poor distraction for some things that desperately needed my attention.
Such as my health and well being as well as the health and well being of those around me.

So this is my note to all you regulars.. I'll skulk the forums and drop by from time to time because really... Nobody ever truly says goodbye to this website... There's the occasional question that I'll immediately know the answer to... There's the journal post I'll drop a comment into.. But maps or mods... Don't count on it..

This isnt a goodbye; more like a "see you around".
Thanks for listening, thanks for being such a large part of my life.
-Brett (Tetsu0)
Rimrook8 years ago2016-06-19 11:38:57 UTC 13 comments
Haven't seen this website in a while.

Gonna update you all super quick.
My wife's Grandfather, Grandmother, and Father all passed away within the last year. We've been having a hell of a time settling the estates but it's almost done. We're getting a house, put in a bid yesterday on a nice European style condo. So things are going pretty well on the living side of things. Other than that, Lyssa, Nahmbo, and I are each in good health.

Game dev stuff has been going well. I've been doing commissions for various game features and tech for other people using the same engine. Stuff anywhere from simple scoring systems to full navigation map dynamic cartographer systems. It pays ok and I can live on it.

Super Matt Jordan is still in development, though its super slow, I've been focused on story and base systems. It will be completed eventually, it moves forward a little each day now. There will never be a kickstarter since I'm funding the project myself and releasing it as a Free-to-play.

Sometimes I miss mapping. I don't have the drive to do it anymore as other things are more worth the time. It definitely has been one of my more favorite hobbies. Maybe someday in the distant future.
Admer4568 years ago2016-06-11 07:26:53 UTC 24 comments
Impressive, by just looking at it:
User posted image
At first, I thought that my laptop had a...... something. But then, if it's what I think it is now, I will be able to plug in an external GPU!
Right now I'm thinking that it's an ExpressCard slot, because the manual of the laptop says that it has that slot.

Basically, using the slot, I could connect a good graphics card via a dock made for those. And, therefore, gaming would be a lot easier for me.

See, people dislike low-end laptops, like my Fujitsu S7210, which has:
-2 GB of RAM
-120 GB of HDD space
-an Intel T7500 CPU (with 2 cores at 2.4GHz)
-and worst of all, an integrated Intel X3100 GPU!

...thusly, the reasons to dislike are pretty obvious. But it can be upgraded :D

So yes, I hope that I'll someday plug an eGPU to my S7210, and enjoy playing Crysis (1) at 30 fps, also mentioning Far Cry (1), Half-Life 2, and Doom III, all three running at 60 fps. Those days are yet to come.

P.S. "Teh epik master plan Part 3: Moment of Truth" coming soon in 4k and 3D. 150 Limited-edition Blu-Ray copies, available at $59.99 on June 20th 2016.
zeeba-G8 years ago2016-06-07 23:02:12 UTC 14 comments
cs meme...
User posted image
monster_urby8 years ago2016-06-01 11:50:48 UTC 10 comments
Sooo... streaming. Let's talk about that. I'm going to be doing it.

You can check my Twitch channel HERE

My net connection isn't amazing at the moment which limits the quality somewhat, but I think it should be watchable.

I'll be playing maps and mods from time to time, as well as mapping every now and then.

Mainly I'm putting this out there in case any of you feel like dropping in for a chat. You can see my past broadcasts to get an idea of the feed quality, mainly the latest one. I will also be on mic next time. :)