Journals

Don't you just hate it when you're driving down the highway and then your wheel decides it doesn't want to be part of the car anymore?Fine leave wheel, we'll be better off without you!

I generally have the most average dreams. People always describe awesome adventures in their dreams, not me, my dreams are pretty much little tidbits of everyday life. These dreams are also few and far between, I often wish for more exciting/more frequent dreams but they never come.

I thought this was interesting though, a dream from two nights ago that was based on TWHL. Again it wasn't very exciting but odd. Basically I loaded up the site and decided to check out a recent journal posted by Stojke. In his journal he described having frequent dreams about TWHL. He brought it up because in a past journal Striker had written about having frequent dreams about TWHL.

Apparently in my dreams everyone dreams of TWHL.

Random stuff my 4 year old sister says.

On Garbage day: "Nobody throws trash away, even if they're frogs."

On Rhyming: "Glasses rhymes with... asses!"

On the Outdoors: "Did you know there's dirt under the grass?"

On restrooms: "If you didn't have a butt you couldn't go to the bathroom."

Back to school tomorrow, kinda sad that summer's over but kinda happy that I get to see my friends and some classes are actually kinda cool. (Geometry is not one of those) I've always liked history and this year is WWI/WWII era stuff which is cool. It seems that every year I get gym class right before or after a class on the other side of the school, this year I get to run from gym to "Creative Writing" literally on the opposite side of school and up a flight of stairs lol.

At my Grandma's in New York City, not much going on, except an earthquake. Interesting.

Sorry for the journal spam but this is my 1000th login and I want to take the time to thank the TWHL community for helping me get into mapping. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't found TWHL I would have never gotten into mapping in the first place as before I found it I tried and failed at mapping several times.

The clan I co-founded for Half-life with a friend is shutting down today. This probably doesn't affect you in any way but it makes kinda sad. I, along with my friend, had a sort of sentimental attachment to it but we figured it was for the best, after our best 2 members left the clan, leaving only 3 members (myself and my friend included) who actually were actively playing HL.

You know what I hate, links that open over your current page. Maybe I wanted to stay on that page internet?! Now I find my self right-clicking and pressing "open in new tab" for every link I click because I don't want to move off the page I'm already on. I also hate links that open a new window. Why is it so hard to just open the link in a new tab?

I've found more time for mapping recently and have been working pretty hard on an entry for the pool map competition. Is a 5 minute compile time normal, I'm used to my maps compiling in a matter of a minute but the pool map I've created slows down a lot, maybe because of all the brushes I've added for pool stuff. In other news I'm mapping for a mod again and this time one that actually seems to have a future, Hypernova, a Half-Life 1 mod where you play as Eli. http://www.moddb.com/mods/hypernova

Would anyone considering buying an Goldsource or Source game server? Here's the story, A friend of mine and I have been discussing buying one for a little while now. Last week he went onto a new server that came on and saw that it was for sale. After a little discussion with the owner he messaged me. I said I'd think about. I later told the guy that we wouldn't be able to purchase his server, he then told me that my friend had apparently told him that we were 100% sure we'd buy the server even though he wasn't the one who'd end up paying for most of it in the first place, that would be me. The guy had turned down other potential buyers thinking we'd buy it soon. So I told the guy I'd make it up to him by trying to find other buyers. He's offering it for $23 dollars a month, it's being hosted in London and even my ping here in the US was pretty low. 14 GB of RAM, 4 Intel Xeon Core processors, 100 GB connection, up to 32 player slots. You can contact him at agrs700@gmail.com

Okay so get this, I walk over to my wi-fi browser for no particular reason, but I walk over none the less and it's COVERED in tiny little ants. We occasionally get them in the spring but just if we leave food out or dirty dishes in the sink. This was completely different. I pick it up and underneath are more of them, and tons of eggs and larvae too. I quickly run and grab the vacuum and suck them all up, but more keep pouring out from INSIDE the router, turns out the ants decided that my router would be the perfect place to set up a colony. So after shaking this thing out for about 15 minutes they stopped coming out, and I had a while ago sucked up the queen. I proceeded to dump the ants contained in the vacuum out in the forest.

I think they were in there because of all the rain we got, lots of areas here are flooded and many roads and bridges are washed out. Maybe their actually colony got flooded and they decided the wi-fi browser would be the perfect place to set a new one. The funny thing is they didn't seem to damage it at all, it was working fine before and it works fine now and now if they come back they will die a slow painful death of being poisoned.

Yeah imagine this with 10,000 tiny ants covering it.

Thinking about making maps based on my favorite books. The ones I'd like to most right now is one based on Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton and even more than that The Mist by Stephen King. I'd really like to do The Mist but instead of taking areas already in th book add new new ones. One area i think would be cool to do would be the military base that the "Arrowhead Project" had taken place at and is responsible for the disaster. I'd of course being doing in HL1 or maybe Op4 but Goldsource none the less. My current idea for creating the mist itself would be to create large func_illisionary brushes and use a custom texture for the fog and make it slightly transparent but I'm not sure that this would be the best way to go about this. Is there anther better way to create fog in Goldsource?

PS: How do I lock doors without assigning them a button?

I am admin of the Opposing Force Server Anitalink TDM and we're looking for some new maps to put on the server's rotation. Now I don't want to go around and steal people's maps on here so I'll ask. If you want your map on the server just comment which one of your maps you'd like to be put on. (I won't put your map on if it's not very good)

So I have a few things in regards to my mapping.

#1 I have left the HL 1997 and Half-Life e3 98/97 Dev teams, mainly because I don't have time to put out content for a mod right now.

#2 Although I don't have time to put out sufficient content for a mod I am working on two maps right now, the first is another Metroid Prime Hunters remake, this one is bigger and more complex than Combat Hall. The other map is going to be a small Singleplayer adventure for Opposing Force that I started awhile ago but never completed much past the first area.

Is there any way I can port the original Half-Life, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift GUI's into the Steam versions? I personally liked the old ones a lot more than their Steam counterparts.