Preface

Aaaaand there it is. I had originally intended to write one more after this one to form a nice trifecta, but I can't think of much to write there about, aside from talking about Alkaline maps like a dork.

Less boring job talk

It's kind of a weird place, though I believe it highly depends on the exact office building. One thing that immediately stands out is what I like to call the "TLS handshake": upon entering the office building (which is actually pretty small and cozy), and then the room belonging to your department, the first thing that you do is go around employee desks and exchange handshakes or high-fives. If feeling communicative, also perform the ritual on anyone who's shown up later while you were gone on a break or something. Everyone seemed to do it, so I couldn't really not do it without feeling weird.

People don't seem to view the presence (or lack) of an assigned project like a mark of status there, which is major luck. In fact, during one of those times when I felt brave and adventurous enough to take a trip to the kitchen and did some small talk with a colleague, he told me about being assigned to a project, paid appropriately, but not having to do much.

That leaves me with a lot of breathing room regarding what I can do or make during all that time.

Dimension hopping

Having this much leeway at the workplace, I often get a chance to sneak in an hour or two of playing Quake 1, if I'm not busy doing anything else worthwhile. All that on a company-provided laptop, which could probably run S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 if you tried hard enough. But I've chosen to instead give another go to Arcane Dimensions - because it's a classic at this point, and because I absolutely love it.

For me as a mapper, Arcane Dimensions has been, if not a turning point, then at least a huge influence. It is an assortment of extremely high-quality maps, each of them an enormous vignette that could compete with a Dark Souls level (I may be exaggerating). Each map is tight, consistent in design, and a treasure chest of things to both learn from and gaze at obsessively. There are gameplay enhancements and dozens of new enemies on top of that, but they don't feel like an inconsistent mess and work really well with the rest of the mix. Arcane Dimensions' style is probably best described as "amplified vanilla": it relies heavily on textures either taken directly from the base game or the expansions, or created manually while using the vanilla assets as a source of inspiration or a style guide. It adheres to the same levels of pixel density, too. Also, you will often see several textures, - like a window and a brick wall, - combined into one to allow for small neat effects like fake ambient occlusion around the window.

On top of that, Arcane Dimensions goes wild with Quake 1 particle effects. They're sprinkled throughout the entire mod and look delightfully crunchy, especially if you play without texture smoothing. Fog is heavily relied upon too. I don't know if most levels there would ever be the same without the fog - it works really well. However, if I had to extract something truly important that I'd learned from Arcane Dimensions, or at least what it'd highlighted enough for me to notice and add it to my bag of tricks, is... Well, since I don't know and can't think of a prettier term for this, let's call it "material depth(?)".

Material depth is about making a brush face feel less like just a polygon with a picture glued onto it. It means that, if a face has a stone brick texture, then further behind it there must be more of that stone brick. You're not just trying to depict a stone brick from one side - you're trying to do that in all three dimensions.

Failing to maintain material depth throughout your map will result in it looking like a papier-mâché rather than an actual place built of stone and wood and iron and whatever other substances you decide to throw into your mapping cauldron. There are other things that contribute towards reducing the papier-mâché vibe, but I won't go into that here.

Anyway, Arcane Dimensions is a hell of a ride, consisting of around twenty maps, give or take, which are either gigantic epics or smaller and focused pieces. Many of the smaller ones are "covers" of existing maps or even classics like Doom's E1M1: Hangar, but some of the epics fall into that category too, Necromancer's Keep being pretty much a cover of Quake 1's Gloom Keep and barely trying to hide it.

There's actually a way to beat the mod: you have to collect the four runes (yes, again), meticulously hidden as secrets in some of the maps, to open a portal to the ending. I've never actually managed to get them all, but I can't bring myself to cheat around it and changelevel myself into the end map. But hey, how about you give it a chance - maybe at least you will get to see it!

Quakeroach blog

Although I'm not worried much about my job security for the next one-and-a-half years, I was worried a lot more a few months ago. One of the reasons for that has been my lack of knowledge of any web frontend tech, and a lack of experience building a full web app consisting of a frontend and a backend.

On top of that, after leaving TWHL at the time, I still had the urge to post WIPs, as people's reactions are a big part of my motivation to go on with the mappack. I needed a place where I could still post these and link to. Maybe my own personal page, too. I began thinking of building a simple blog website, using something basic and often required in interviews. My choice ended up falling on using React.

The issue of hosting came up soon after. Gladly, Quakeroach agreed to help host it, which sounded like a pretty good idea, considering how we have a good cadre of networkers around. After some pretalk and basic planning, the work on the Quakeroach blog started. Initially the idea was having it bound to a single user, but supporting multiple accounts was decided to be more natural to implement and having long-term benefits.

Now, if you're a fellow code conjurer, you might be thinking: "Isn't React a little bit overkill? A blog could do with serving content statically, and it'd be better for search engine indexing too, which is a thing you'd want for a blog website. Besides, there are solutions around, which were made specifically for creating your own blog websites. Why bother?". All valid points. But overcomplicating things is how I learn, and React seems to be a very frequent requirement.

I've considered rewriting the blog in a more fitting manner at some point in the future, using a simpler approach, maybe learning some PHP or Blazor. However, that was back then. Ironically, I've come full circle now and am pretty much writing blog posts here. I do plan to carry this project through to the end, though, as I'm sick of leaving things unfinished. Maybe we'll do a full-blown website once I'm better at this, who knows?

btw you can check it out here (it's a mess, pls don't hit me)

Uhh

Yeah. That's pretty much it, so far. I could talk more but I'd prolly bore you to death. Anyway, see u when I see u!

Preface

Now, I'm not exactly comfortable with infodumping personal stuff onto people. We all got our problems, and offloading mine has always felt like an impolite thing to do. However, I would occasionally see other people do it, so maybe it's not so bad after all? Hey, maybe that's even a healthy thing to do? I don't know, and I've never really had a chance to ask anyone.

To further try and justify the following mess of codepoints: for quite a long time I've been finding myself talking to a mirror, or a wall, about a curiously recurring set of topics. It would always kind of occur on its own, take a lot of time, and give no sense of resolution whatsoever. At some point, it became clear that feedback was needed.

I kinda departed from this place not that long ago, but soon I ended up coming back over and over, and I'm still not sure what the reason is. I don't know if I'm still welcome here at all, but whenever I thought about screaming into the void in text form like that, the journals section always seemed like the best kind of void that came to mind.

I apologize for being a long-time annoyance.

Boring Job Talk

I seem to be doing fine. Probably better off than many, which makes me feel all the more guilty while writing. I'm currently employed in a software outsourcing company, which I've gone through an internship in, in parallel to completing my last 1.5 years of university. Soon after graduation, they agreed to sign a distribution document, which meant that I'm guaranteed and forced to be employed there for at least the next 2 years.

It's a pretty weird place to be employed at, however. Shortly before the final exams hit (and waaaaay before I was officially employed or even getting any kind of payment at all), they'd put me on a project as a proxy developer - that meant I'm doing the actual programming while someone makes appearances on calls and meetings. It was quite a mess, but eventually I got used to it and even got some industry experience getting messy legacy backend code to work.

As autumn military drafts were getting close, I got a pair of notices that required me to show up at my assigned voenkomat, to determine my suitability for army service. Spoiler: I was deemed unsuitable and rescheduled to show up 3 years later. However, as soon as I received the notices, I notified my management and they decided to move me off the project.

The normal scenario of getting a project here involves going through an interview with a client and lying a lot. Ever since losing my shadow project, I've been consistently (and unintentionally) failing these, so all my obligations really involve just visiting the office twice a week, appeasing their homebrew working hours tracker, and telling their status check bot that I'm still alive.

Now, with the boring stuff out of the way...

Personal Projects: Mappack

The progress on the mappack can be described in two words: slow and steady. Well, that was three words, but anyway: I'm working on it, on and off.

I've thought a lot about its overall structure, and decided that it's set somewhere during Surface Tension, probably right after the section with the helicopter and the minefield. Except Gordon doesn't immediately end up at the cliffside soon after descending into that tunnel. Instead, possibly after crawling for a little while longer through a small tunnel network and letting some time pass, he ends up near what appears to be a Weather Monitoring Station (the one with the dome, if you remember).

After finding out that the thing's just a cover for what appears to be a long way down into the guts of Black Mesa, Gordon descends into the hazy Maintenance Tunnels (the shots of which I've been shamelessly spamming the WIP thread with (sorry!)). There, the player gets introduced to an actual character - yeah! - a scientist, which, without spoiling too much, will accompany Gordon indirectly throughout most of the mappack.

The next chapter is the Optics Department. That one will be all about colorful crystals, gigantic laser machines, and all sorts of cool lighting effects. You'll even get to burn a giant hole in the Mesa itself (after the obligatory Half-Life-esque powering-up process!)

The final one is Administration Offices - yup, the place where Dr. Breen is! ...Or, well, was supposed to be. You won't actually see him (no way I can find a VA for that one :v), but you'll have to grab a certain something from there.

One idea I keep thinking of is related to that one scientist character. I'm thinking of trying to record the lines for him myself - although there's, like, an astronomical number of things that can go wrong - or I'll just ask someone. Don't know who yet, though. The more fun thing, however, is you'll be able to shoot him dead and the game won't end. Quite the opposite - the rest of the mappack will subtly adjust to it. After all, Half-Life really has always been an RPG .

The toolchain for the mappack is something I've never really thought I'd end up using, and is actually fun to experiment with. It's your classic favorite VHLT v34 for doing the heavy lifting, but on top of that, there's MESS by Captain P and Half-Life Featureful SDK by FreeSlave.

I've used MESS before, and made two grave mistakes back then: make all my mapping revolve around it (bad idea!), and - albeit somewhat unrelated - implement very detailed entity setups during the grayboxing stage (very bad idea too!). Now, however, I only use it on very specific occasions: duplicating small lights across very long surfaces, saving very sophisticated setups to reuse them and easily tweak them if need be, etc etc. It's a very big help this way.

Featureful is to thank for enabling the usage of fog in Maintenance Tunnels. But it also adds "upgraded" versions of multi_manager, which I've grown quite fond of using. It also gave me the idea to incorporate some of the Op4 enemies into the mappack, like the Black Ops.

I'm going to have to touch up what I have of the tunnels, and also the weather monitoring station. After that, I'll finally be able to move onto the optics department, and trust me, it's gonna be epic! I'll make sure to share some shots as well .

Wrapping Up

Not too much, but enough for tonight, I think. I had kind of cut myself off from the people here for a while, for better or worse, but I'll talk about it more in the future. Right now, I kinda just wanna establish contact, that's all. A new beginning, in a way. See u later!