Journal 2:

On ModDB, 2 maps are included in the early build v1004. There are 2 seperate builds:

Early Build v1004 (including Custom Models)
Early Build v1004 NO Custom Models (excluding custom models)

Apart from that, Flame also includes custom voice lines/lore which tie into the general story of the previous mod I worked on (Half-Life: Xen's Horror). It talks about how a guy named Walt feels paranoid about the recent importation of the enhanced displays and how they are deemed "unnecessary" because of the two week break they were forced to be on while the core was unwatched. More will be shown soon

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!

So since I feel like I've more or less wrapped up all the features I had planned for Pathos, I thought of posting this just so people are aware of what the standing is with the Pathos Engine. I know there aren't many users of it, but well, this is for those who are using it, or are considering using it. Recently I've been re-evaluating how I'm spending my free time, as well as the fact that Pathos has been in development since 2019. I feel like five years is a very long time already, and too much to spend working on an engine, when I have a full game to finish making levels and other content for. I also have obligations towards some other projects I help out with, and because of this, my efforts are kinda split in multiple directions recently. Eventually it all becomes too much to deal with, and ends up becoming rather overwhelming at times.

This is why I've decided to freeze any new Pathos features altogether, and from now on my focus will be on maintaining what I have released. I had ideas for some other features, like a detail prop/sprite system similar to what Source had for grass, and some other things which I feel can easily be applied by a talented mapper if needed. They're not essential features. That's what I've done since I can remember. I consider Pathos to be more or less done, featuring a wide variety of features the original GoldSrc Engine had, plus some Source-like ones as well. I think that maybe some documentation might still be needed, but that'll come along as I dedicate free time to it. For the most part, the engine is pretty stable and doesn't have major performance problems, and I want to free up spare time to actually do some more meaningful work.

Another source of grievance for me, has been the cycle of changing anything in the engine, or adding some new feature, and having to deal with bugs caused, or revealed by said changes even weeks after. One aspect of working on GoldSrc I liked - That is until Valve started doing their updates that broke mods - was that it was a stable base to work on. Even with the custom renderers I didn't have to deal with issues as low-level as I do now when I change something. It's not that I hate the work, because I enjoy programming, but the time poured into it, for me, is less and less worthwhile. I could spend that time literally doing anything else, including activities that don't leave me exhausted by the end of the day.

Consider this a bit of a rant too, I'm just compiling my thoughts at the "end of the day" as I wrap things up. If I had to do it all over again, I would still do it, honestly, but goddamn am I glad I don't have to. I had fun designing the UI, I enjoyed working on the networking code, even if it is basic at best, and I could go on about this endlessly. I enjoyed working on this engine. I was less thrilled when I had to reference code either because I had no idea how to do something, couldn't do the math, or I needed to maintain compatibility. That's one thing that's kind of a miss for me, but then again, trying to do this all from the ground up would've taken me five years more, at least, and math that is way above my head.

Overall, I am happy with what I have created. It allowed my game to truly take off, without the frustrations and limitations of GoldSrc, and in the end I was able to make a few folks happy by open-sourcing it. That for me was worth it. Thank you for reading my ramblings.

The YouTube algorithm pushed me Half-Life stuff because of the anniversaries, and that brought me back here.
I'm downloading a bunch of the latest competition maps. Congratulations, everyone!

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!

Suppose that you need something, but don't have the time to do it. Maybe it's just too good to leave it archived, maybe it took considerable effort, and you even made a labor of love on it. Maybe you simply want to get rid of it, publish it, let the world know it, etc.
I'm pretty sure everyone (or most of us, at least) have recycled content in some form. It can range from a simple idea to an entire map, a whole model, pehaps even the mod itself!
But, is it ethical? Is it correct? Are you not commiting any "modding sins" by reusing content? Why am i even bothering to question such banalities?
I guess it's not a bad thing, but from my experience, it could be frowned uppon by some modders. Maybe because it shows a lack of effort, or it can break the vision of the whole thing.

For example, my submission for Make Black Mesa Come Alive was no exception.
For starters, this miniwarehouse section was recycled from another mod that i never finished (and will never bother to do so). It was heavily modified, so only its essence remains. The grenade models were recycled from a cancelled deathmatch mod i was working on too (Can't remember it's name, but it had a Mod DB page somewhere). A character that you only get to see once is this guy (during the short vent sequence). He was supposed to take a more prominent role in the maps, being required to unlock doors and disable security systems. Another character that was also supposed to appear at the very beginning was this unnamed security guard, who was not in a very good shape. Similarly to other games, he would have served as a companion that taught you how to work in teams (like at the start of Black Mesa). You were the brains, he was the brawn. His model (and concept) was recycled from my cancelled entry for The Buddy System.
Gordon was to take this role too at some point, tho you would have followed him instead, and helped him to open doors and such. Gordon's model comes from an unfinished mod of an alternate universe. Both the security guard and the scientist had scripted arguments and dialog that made them feel more alive, making the player forget just for a small second that one is a bullet-spitting machine and the other one is a living keycard. They also had animations for jumping over ledges and railings, climbing rooms and ladders, a concept that came from this awesome mod.
Finally, there was also supposed to be this small sequence where you entered some random lab and freed a vortigaunt. The model was reused from yet another cancelled mod. The purpose was to show that vortigaunts are slaves, and constantly being forced to participate in an invasion they probably don't want to take part in. Most of these stuff were cut, but it just amazes me how much content i have been trying to reuse lately (i also wanted to display these models because i consider them too good to be archived).
It also makes me think, how much unused or never-seen-before content has been made by the community, and how cool it would be if people posted every single thing they made. Something like TCRF but for Half-Life mods.
Sure, it would probably lead to a massive flood of mediocre/unfinished content. But it could also give us some uncut gems. It could serve as inspiration. Imagine, a map you never finished serves as an inspiration for the next "They Hunger"! That would definitely be cool to see.
Just a tought.

I have been a "mapper" since the earlier days of Half-Life. I was never one of the greats. I had always wanted to create a map that would propel my name to Half-Life celebredom and see my bsp smeared all over the server lists. That was not in the cards for me. My maps were either proof-of-concepts awkwardly trying to push the boundaries or overly artistic with no substance.

My five year old son has been playing Gary's Mod recently. Since he took an interest in it, I loaded one of my old (2007ish) HL2 maps into it for him to play. I didn't expect him to like it. It was more of a, "Hey look, your old man used to do this stuff!" But days later, I was walking past the computer and he was playing my map. I asked him, "You actually like this map?" and he replied, "Yeah daddy, its fun!"

It was a very heartwarming moment for me. I never made the map knowing that over a decade later my son would be the one enjoying it. I felt like I had finally got validation in the best way.

I am a man of few proclivities and fewer hobbies
thus I shall take it upon myself to dedicate time on educating myself on the goldsrc engine
until I give up

Yesterday, some lore has been implemented into the already polished map for the starting point of Half-Life: Flame.

There are three scientists which discuss about a recent change in the facility. New technology has been implemented, but one scientists feels that this is going to cause a cascade of issues.

Find our more soon

Just wanted to let everyone know that a new update for Pathos has dropped, which includes some code fixes and optimiztions, as well as new features, such as lightmap upscaling and lightmap data compression.

Changelog:
- Updated tools_readme.md with information about bspconvert and pbspv2update.
- Updated shaders.md to provide better information about invalid states.
- Recompiled the levels to use 4x lightmap upscaling.
- Added a new room to feature the new post-process effects added by valina354.
- Added new voice recordings to help explain new features.
- Added new constant to CString class to denote null result from find.
- Added lightmap data compression support to Pathos BSP V2 and the ALD file formats.
- Added string caching to CString class to help decrease memory usage.
- Modified lightmap data storage to store the default lightmap data on-disk if ALD files are present, instead of storing it in memory all the time.
- Modified CMD5 class to use a constant for the size of the hash result.
- Modify texture manager to use maps instead of linked lists for faster texture lookup.
- Modify various engine structures and classes to use std::map and std::unordered_map instead of the arrays and linked lists.
- Added CSysPrintInterface to allow for tokens that set how many times a message should be printed to the console per game or application instance.
- Added experimental lightmap data compression feature.
- Fix memory leak in dynamic light manager.
- Fix memory leak in menu particle system.
- Fix memory leak in portal renderer.
- Fix GL texture not being deleted in portal class.
- Fix two memory leaks in texture renderer.
- Got rid of hash arrays previously used to limit the number of repeating messages printed to the console.
- Modified ambient_generic entity to support playback of sentences.
- Improved VBM loading code by getting rid resizings/memory reallocations during level load.
- Extended math_counter entity to provide different increment values and operations per trigger mode.
- Fix trigger_relay_binary, where it would always trigger it's On target regardless of it's actual state.
- Fixes various problems in pathos_jack.fgd with the new entries.
- Added "Initially dark" spawnflags to light and light_spot entities.
- Added pbspv2update tool to help update V2 bsp files to V2.1.
- Updated DMC forest skybox to latest version.
- Updated compile scripts to use the lightmap scaling feature.
- Modified vhlt compile tools to now support lightmap upscaling up to 8x(still needs work).
- Modified vhlt compile tools to support miniz compression of lightmap data.
- Improved parameter design for new features in the compile tools.

Commit:
https://github.com/TheOverfloater/pathos-public/commit/1e7fe9f6f80659b272dad0d55fed8d8fefc98206

It has been more than twenty years since I joined TWHL.

It was the start of my mapping journey, and now my son has included his level design experience as a part of his college application.

I will check back in ten years. I sure hope TWHL will still be a thriving community.

I turn 52 in ten days.

I just wanted to create this journal to let everyone know that a new Pathos update has dropped. I've added a ton of new features, but mainly what a lot of people have been wanting to have, and that is support for the type of animated and switchable lights you had in Quake 1 and Half-Life! Yes, you no longer need to use env_dlight and env_spotlight to achieve this, but instead this is natively supported by Pathos now.

A list of the changes made:
- Merged custom normalmap feature from PR #43.
- Reformat PR #43 changes to be in line with Pathos coding standards.
- Fixed issue in PR #43 where the last set current water pointer would override any custom water normalmap textures.
- Merged "pos" and "maps" command from PR #38.
- Reformat PR #38 to be in line with Pathos coding standards.
- Fixed PR #38 to report player position in world, instead of the last view origin used for rendering.
- Implementation of Pathos BSP Version 2 format.
- Custom storage for ambient, diffuse light data, and light vectors.
- Add data variable in face data for potential lightmap scaling feature in the future.
- Add data variable in face data for potential smoothing groups feature in the future.
- Support added for Half-Life 1-type animated lights.
- Extend light and light_spot entities to support the animated/switchable lighting feature.
- Add FGD entries for styles to light and light_ entities.
- Optimize CBasicDraw class by adding support for rendering quads using indexes.
- Added func_particleblocker entity to specify select brush entities that particles can collide with.
- Modify ALD format to support animated lights along with bump mapping data generation.
- Modify renderer to support bump map data generation together with animated lights.
- Added function header comments in some files.
- Extension of file interface by adding a function to query the game folder name.
- Cleanup of model cache code that identifies and loads BSP files.
- Optimized beam rendering and vapor trail beam code to be more performant by rendering them as quads with indexes.
- Optimize vapor trail beam lighting retrieval code by only doing it once per a given distance.
- Optimized lightmap generation code by extending the AllocBlock code to extend both height and width from now on.
- Added debug cvar to enable dumping of lightmaps generated by BSP renderer.
- Added game_staminamodifier entity.
- Modify worldspawn entity to now send lightstyles to client.
- Fix worldspawn not calling base class's spawn function in derived function.
- Fix CGLSLShader not creating logs file folder when an error occurs, causing logs not to be created.
- Add bspconvert tool, which can convert Pathos V1 BSP files to Pathos V2 version.
- Extend entitytest2 map to showcase switchable lights.
- Move some BSP processing code to shared file.
- Move lightstyle code in renderer out of dynamic light class and into it's own.
- Optimize on lightstyle array code.
- Add compatibility code for V30 BSP and Pathos V1 BSP to support legacy bump map data storage solution.
- Clean up struct usage in BSP loading code to specifically use named structures for V30 and Pathos V1 BSP.
- Move lightstyle array code out of CEnvDLight and into server-side lightstyle class.

You can find the latest commits here:
- For Pathos: https://github.com/TheOverfloater/pathos-public/commit/5ea8844617eb125175550edbe34cb59898fc7acf
- For Pathos's version of VHLT: https://github.com/TheOverfloater/pathos-vhlt/commit/b59bac0943923d919059353bb725ee51b3f36b2f

On October 4, 1985, the Free Software Foundation was founded by Richard Stallman! We have a lot of free software thanks to promotion from the FSF over the years and I think that's pretty darn cool.

...There's also the fact that 10 years later to the day, I was born. It's my birthday!!!

Finally a nice, round number of years old again.
Last time my age was a power-of-two, I was just a little shitkid being up to no good. Next time, I'll be yelling at such shitkids to get off my lawn. Heh.

Anyways, back to work.

How have you all been?