Journals

Last proper day of School. I have the weekend to study, two exams Monday, and I'm free. (The other two classes from this semester had a sumitive project and two-booklet exam in class, respectively.)
Can't wait until I can spend all day every day mapping.

Remember the TRAXX 160 locomotive i have been working on? I still am! Progress is slow, which is unfortunate since the animation im planning on wont be as good as i hoped it would. Mainly due to time and render constraints. Oh well, here's the current front end of the locomotive, the self-illuminating lights are temporary, im working on making them a bit more fancy with a map from the diffusing shade, and a volumetric light will be placed in front of it with a shadow map so it nicely projects itself on the environment. To many little details? yes, obsessive? yes..Test animation, pan around the loc, 250 frames. Took about 4 Hours to render with 250 rays, 1.5 hours with 25 rays.

update:

youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmK0j4ikCPw

Project Source Development: Week 1

Week one of the Source development is off to a rough start.
As soon as i got news of the new compo i started sketching ideas and outlines and plots and battles etc etc on paper. I was at work when i found out about it so i was powerless to do anything but brainstorm. I did get a lot of ideas down and i have the barebones skeletal-layout of the map completed on paper.
I just forgot how involved source really was.
Aside from actually mapping, i had to re-learn a whole new I/O system. i have been experimenting (lucky) the whole week prior so i have a good foundation with that, but i also need to learn many other things.

Aside from the learning part, i now feel sub-par as a mapper.
Never in my life have i completed a map to my liking. It's always been at around 80% I feel that due to that i won't get this map done either. The scale that i have set for myself is huge.

I tried doing what strider did- apply the map as a texture in hammer. I build walls around the map surrounding the white, and decided that i did not want to do that. I felt that a lot of people were going to do that, and i did not want to follow the crowd. curse my quest for uniqueness
I Then decided i'd flesh out one room at a time.
Build the room out of dev-textures, set all the entities, basic lighting, and move on.
Well the way i have my storyline set out, that's impossible to do, and today i realized i needed to flesh out the whole map and then start with the entities.

Again i was wrong.

How does one start a project this large-with an unfamiliar engine and a deadline?

-Carefully

I basically scrapped my map 4 times in this last week. Wasting 20+ hours of time i could've spent better had i planned this all out. Again, that's where my lack of mapping experience comes in.

So i find myself starting over-again. Mapping the baselines, adding minor terrain detail before i do the entities.
After i have the minor terrain detail i think i'll work on the details (displacements, water, fog, areaportals) lighting, and the more advanced entitiy set-ups.

Plus my personal life took a spin into hell... Almost forcing me to lose motivation. But if i dont work on this at least once a day, it won't get done. This is one map of mine that CANT wait til last minute. Hopefully i'll keep my sanity long enough to see it through to the end.

The Iron Man 2 movie has already been filming for some time now, and even though some film set photos have been released to the public, no direct pictures of any of the villains that Iron Man is supposed to fight have been shown, until now. Behold "Whiplash", one of Iron Man's comic book nemesis from years back:Well, the super villain Whiplash will be played by Mickey Rourke, one of the most bad-ass actors around. Here is the first ever photo of him as Whiplash, without his black mask it seems:I just don't know, I have a bad feeling about Iron Man 2 so far, that Whiplash outfit from the movie does not add up with Marvel's version. But who knows, if there is somebody who might pull off an upset, that will be Mickey Rourke. Now, I just want to know one thing.....what's up with War Machine? Are they going to have that awesome killer armor in the movie? If they do, it better be like the original one in the Iron Man comic:

Moved to a new apartment last month, and I'm still getting used to it. On the plus side the rent is pretty low and i can get 40mbit broadband if I want to (i settled with 10mbit to save money but it's nice to have the option), and it's a nice apartment with nice neighbours too.

The only bad thing is that I get the morning sun so it's impossible to sleep, especially in the summer when the sun rises at 4:30 in the morning

What else is new? Well I bought one of these;

http://www.gcainteractive.com.au/files/2015094/uploaded/p1.jpg

If you have a DS I can recommend getting one

EDIT: I have black curtains I'm just used to having no sunlight in the morning

my father said I got a big pennie collection. Its pretty big I guess.

Next thing I want to show you are the basics of a design for a big competition. This is made in 15 minuts after a quick sketch on paper. So this work is only very basic.

Anyway, the whole thing will be made in chocolate and from buttom to top it will be 1 meter...

Has finally finished 12 months of study for Aged Care Cert 4...thank goodness...hope i pass...have to submit it all tomorrow...

Tomorrow I am leaving for Kentucky to spend ten days with my grandma on her farm, doin' hard labor 'n shit

Finally a competition.

Using my petite mapping skills I think I can definitely get before the deadline. From past competitions I can tell that the trend is that there is a dearth of entries in most of the competitions.

But on to my mod adventures. (For those of you who pointed it out, yes this is not a professional review, more or less a personal excursion. If you want reviews you can search online for the defunct Hangar 16, just make sure to turn on your pop up blocker once you find it. And yes it exists. At least parts of it.)

Today's mod is: HLDino, a dinosaur themed mod. (maybe)

This is another example of the sort of mods that, as mentioned in my biography, are master pieces that I strive to realize. You start out on a beach with an ak47 from counter-strike. Up ahead you run into dinosaurs from Gunman Chronicles, and they spitting green globs at you WTF. And across the beachhead you see zombies. WTF.

Your ak is surprisingly weak. As you (try to) deal with the oncoming hordes of dinosaurs and blood soaked zombies, you realize that you are dealing not with zombies and rabid reptiles, but infinite monstermakers. So you run and gun, but most run because ammo is a luxury. Eventually you make it to the sewers and that's it.

A mod like this one proves that gameplay is king, and that backstory, reasons for borrowing models from other mods, and making sense are not crucial to great gameplay. I have duly learned this valuable lesson and shall proceed to map based on what I just learned. Maybe you will too, but prolly not.

I am not going to go in to details about the following topic in case it comes close in breaking the Journals rules, but I will say this, I am so getting this thing!: http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/bd6f/

Toward the end of dinner last night, I was feeding my son fruit.

He leaned over, looked at me, and said "I love Dada".

He then put him arm around my shoulder and gave me a hug.

This all came spontaneously.

We often say "I love you" to him and hug him, but it's still great to get such a response from him out of the blue.

I already know that he's going to grow up to be a wonderful man.

Not a spam journal... A day ago i agreed to work on a mod with my friend called "quake: source" (i think that's what it was called), me and my friend play quake 3 arena quite often, and all of a sudden out of nowhere my friend just says "How neat would it be to make a quake 3 mod for source?"

So, we just kinda "dived in" to the thing...

I wonder if it'll last, it damned better, else all the work of making that damn machine gun will go to waste (i know the machine gun is pretty easy, but it took me 3 attempts before i figured out id's "secret" as to how they made the damned thing)

We have also encountered a couple of problems on the way, mapping, blaze says he can't make a remake without a "goood flythrough of the map", he can't simply walk around in singleplayer with no bots and base it off that.

textures, copyright.

sounds, copyright.

and oh what do you know, MOAR FUZZIN COPYRITE.

OMFG! After 3 days (Probably totaling about 15 hours) I finally got the camera-rigging in my map working properly!
So I now have the foundation for my first SP source map layed out.
It will be a Zelda-Like map. The old-skool zeldas Where you can explore a screen only so far, then once you reach the edge of the screen, the camera scrolls to the next screen/room so on and so forth.

I can't beleive how simple it was. Let me tell you guys how i accomplished this:

So the way my test map is layed out, i have 9 rooms each numbered with a room number just like it is on a keypad:

X-direction: 1-2-3
Y-direction: 1-4-7

I have a func_movelinear set on the X-direction with it's origin in line with the middle of room 1. I have the max distance set to 1408, because that's the distance from room 1 to room 3. I have another func_movelinear set up similar for the Y-direction. If you can't see that, here's a visual:So when you move from room 1 to room 2, the camera is parented to "screen_x" and the "SetPosition" of "screen_x" is set to .5. Since room 2 is half the distance to room 3, "screen_x" (and the parented viewcontrol [Camera] ) move to room 2.
Say if you wanted to move to room 5 from room 2, the camea is then parented to the "screen_Y" entity, and then it's setposition is set to .5 as well.

Every time you parent the camera to another object it stays in the same position while being parented.

I was trying to move the parented object the whole time while i only needed to move the camera...

Anyway. Now i can focus on the mind-games within the game instead of the mechanics. Which i have functioning!
Here's a screenshotDon't pester me about the lighting, that'll come later. I wanted to get the mechanics down before i messed with looks.

Member since:November 21, 2007
Steam Rating:10
Playing time:110.5 hrs past 2 weeks
Half-Life 2 43.1 hrs
Source SDK 42.2 hrs
Garry's Mod 22.1 hrs

I think I went insane @_@. I didn't see these till' now.

I was with my dad, in the showroom, picking out a new car.

I know, but I saw Yodalmans shoutbox post and couldn't resist.

It wasn't a shower anyway. We were in a bath.