|UR| Littlefoot More RedBull and doughnuts for the duck!!!!!
|U
choongsta yo whatup fellow map makerzzz
zimm BEER for duck
BugDave lub is in the air
Dierth wily is still pimptastical, w00t!
punkinseed looks very intersting. I look forward to seeing it
Karib I will begin my map :p
zimm you must make GREAT MAPS!! and you do. duck ROCKS
choongsta greetings
zimm where's this new map eh?
Karib I will try a map myself :)
FSK405M imma goin to quak con next year, i promise!
Havoc
[DiE]rth wily makes maps for the people!
FSK405M i will download an 80 Meg version on superman!!!
no-1 nintendo
nintendo the day after2
PowerRAV can i be a superman_beta tester? =P
FSK405M Kick Ass
Nonus I know I rock but I dont know about the others
FSK405 wily duck you all rock!
M yay
Nonus Someone just went for a pee in the pond
BugDave I Lub You
FSK405M brb going for another beer
FSK405M I sell maps for beer money
Hybridesque *squeek!* *BANG*, was that my shotgun?
el kabong ferget koth gimme Giant of the Valley
FSK405M beer = money
FSK405M money = beer
Soft2 Quack!
FSK405 KAG Pirate HAR HAR HAR Lighting-Of-Gonads
FSK405 SPIDER As usual ur maping skills is amazing me
Scotsman Holla
FSK405M ut_temple2...... mmmm
FSK405S Deer season is over, is it duck season yet?
[C-88]GO-GO Dam U...... Dam U all.
Dragonne{TRIAD} Try using EZGen for terrain.
BugDave FUCK YOU JOE BOO!
Tetrahydro awsome fun with 30 bots,head,head,head,head,head,h
FSK405E mushroom 2 pints of beer and half a duck please
Coinbird I want some coins
Marsupilami Do the Kirby dance <( ' ' )> <(' '<) (>' ')>
FSK405M YARRRRRR KAGG MANNN
Elmo The Sniper
Nonus Lord of Doom and Hatred a life lived is a life wasted
Nonus Lord of Chaos A blending we shall go
Nonus stop stealing my bah foof
FSK405N .:nugjar:. doh!
KAG Pirate HarHArHAR YAR Givey me, all be coins there mateee!!!!
FSK405 Earl Can't wait to play it man!
Packrat Ducks of a feather flock together!
foof add some softtrucks on the outside of the buildin!
FSK405|SPIDER Rock on man the map is looking cool!
Apoofoof this map pwns!
FSK405 Dubya oops ...
Apoofoof bah!
FSK405M
FSK405 a wily duck Shoutout to everyone at the pond!
05-21-2003
Finally, some new screenshots for your pleasure! Vacation is over, so it's time to start kicking ass again. I went
through hint brushes a while ago, but I didn't have any visuals to back up my findings. Basically, hint brushes are
there for q3 to optimize drawing what you can and can not see, and guiding bots efficiently. First, take a look
at my map before I changed my objects to detail brushes:
This awesome trippy world is what a bot will compute when figuring out where you are, plus q3 has to figure out
how to draw the world based on this. As colorful and fun as this happy little world could be, it sucks. So, I went
through and cleaned things up by first selecting all brushes in an object, adding func_group to them (just for consistancy), then while
still selected, hit control-m to turn the brushes into detail brushes. Hint brushes care about structural brushes
(which probably should be walls, floors, etc, big places that cause navigation decisions). Again, for the lowdown
on exactly what's going on with hint brushes, I highly recommend reading this page.
Now, what does my map look like after creating detail brushes?
Oh ho ho ho!! So much better! That's it for today's pond, if you have feedback, see me at #fsk405 on ETG!
05-17-2003
Ahh it's been a slow week for game dev. I've been on vacation if that's what you'll call it. I have poked back into
the ever frustrating GtkRadiant to see if I could figure out why or how the shader bug followed my map from work to
home. At this point, applying a shader to a texture results in the texture not being rendered, replaced with the default
grey square texture. Another dumb bug to stand in my path. I've also been thinking up different scenerios for a good
Urban Terror map. I may just put together the bones of the map, and see how it plays.
Over in GBA dev'ille, I have done little this week, except for talking to my guys about getting together to learn
some of the dev tools out there. While things are quiet now, it's time for a breather. I'm looking at my upcoming
unemployment, now thinking that even though I'll be getting a sizable severance, I've got to get back into making
dough asap, be it a gaming position or not. That's fine though, I'll still have my free time to do my dev work.
If you haven't noticed, the left side of the page has a little app that you can sign your name in. You should do that.
Why? It's like peeing on a bush. The other bears will stay away then. :)
05-12-2003
Sup everyone! I picked up a book called Game Design Perspectives
by Francois Dominc Laramee (and about two dozen other major contributers) from the bookstore the other night. The strength of
the material in this book amazes me. I aspire to be a game developer/producer, but I'm lacking many fundamental ideas. Where
this book amazes me is all those necessary fundamental ideas are hit upon and explained. Never did I think I would come across
such a gold mine of critical information!!! Of the few chapters I've read so far, I would recommend this book upon a silver
platter to anyone who wants to understand real game design.
I received my GBA development kit! It consists of a USB to GBA cable, 128MB flash cartridge, and software. I got it up and
running in no time flat. Big props to the hackers who have spent their time building a quality product. I've tested various
third party demo games or just demos to see how they work on the GBA. The emulator is dead on, so there was no difference between
running a GBA program on either the pc or GBA itself. Currently, for my amusement, I've got a simple image slideshow program
on the flashcard now until I put something more useful there. Can you guess how long it took to taint my innocent GBA? :)
Also, I've been asking around about whom may want to join my quest to create GBA games. I have a few friends who are very interested.
What appears to be happening is I'm loosely pulling together a team! Optimally, and this is most certainly subject to change, is
having 3 coders, 1 art person, 1 sound person, 1 storyboard person+, and 1 game designer/producer. I'd like to add a marketer of
some sort in there too, but no money is exchanging hands over this whole project. Maybe substitute marketer with internal/external
motivator? =D
I'll be filling the role of the designer/producer, as well as being a coder for now. Depending on what happens, there may be
a need for some kind of level designer. I'd like to end up seeing each person's involvement turning into a simple focus on their
part, rather than everyone having to dip their hands in the other roles needed. Either way, it's my job to figure out everything
first!
05-07-2003
I've spent a good deal of time now looking at GBA programming. The examples I've been working with have been strictly C, so it's
been fairly easy to follow along. I used one of the sample programs that displayed a background image and a blinking box, to make
a program that can scroll the background in all directions, with wrap-around, plus I added screen-flipping (for smoother screen
updates). Then, with some tenaciousness, I built a warping
effect kind of like heat bends, still correctly using the wrap-around and scrolling. I ran out of time last night, but I was
going to take it a step farther by creating a warp window that I move rather than scroll the whole background.
I'm trying to figure out how to optimize using the hardware because when warping the whole screen, I get like a frame every 2
seconds. On top of that, I couldn't get cos() to work for some reason, so I built a cosine table in perl and referenced it as
an array. Lots of things I don't know about programming the GBA yet, but so far so good.
05-05-2003
Whew. Much has happened over the past couple days. First, I've gotten into hint brushes. Here's your tip of the day right off the bat.
If you're using gtk 1.2.13, go to plug-ins, and load portal file (.prt). But to do this, you'll have to compile your map first with
just BSP, no options (like -vis or -light). Now, if you're like me, you'll either puke or feel like you're on some kind of acid
rush when you discover what the bsp did to your map! Hint brushes are there for q3 to optimize drawing what you can and can not see.
Otherwise even though you can only see up to a wall, q3 draws EVERYTHING in the map in front of you. Hints also tell bots where to go.
For a good tutorial on hint brushes, check this page out, it helped
me a lot.
Next, I've been having lots of problems with making my win98 box compile maps correctly. It seems that any texture shader I make
causes the map not to show the texture or shader at all. I've been away from my xp box for a couple days, so I will be doing
research there to determine what's going on.
A wily duck's pond is not just Urban Terror mapping, as noted by the title "Digital Amusement Game Development". My adrenilin is
pumping as I've discovered Game Boy Advance development kits. Because of this, I have ordered a kit and will begin programming
for the GBA asap. I will continue to map for Urt/Q3 as well. I am now seriously considering gathering a small team together
to create a game/games for the GBA to further game design skills. All this attention requires lots of time, so I will update
the pond as much as possible.
05-02-2003
I spent the night reading through the Quake 3 shader manual.
While doing this, I also tried adding ambient light to ut_momentum. For some strange reason, on my windows98 machine, I accidentally made my
wall texture have a q3map_surfaceLight value of 10000, and then no matter what I tried, I couldn't get Gtk to render the map with
any other value! Everything was blindingly overbright. I gave up on this after a while, went home and tried again on my XP machine. Everything appeared to work fine there
so I'm not sure what happened.
Then I tried light blending with q3map_lightimage, which worked out like cheesecake. I tweaked around with the surfaceLight on this
to see what differences I could make. Then, I looked at the model of my computer. The textures imply a reflection of light, so I
put a lightimage on the side texture. There wasn't any real noticable difference, but I can see in the future how I could add extra
detail to things.
Just how my mind works, I'm starting to scheme up different kinds of tricks that I could make a shader do. I ran the Doom3 alpha
to see what new tricks the future holds. One of the more clever and simple tricks was taking an image of a control room with colored lights
and other technical looking things, then using that image as a virtual reflection on the window at the edge of the room. Obviously
not hard to do, but interesting though. I'm trying to figure out what I could do to duplicate the metal shader they have. We'll
see how that works out. My eye is most certainly on Doom3, as I will make almost an immediate switch to Doom3 mapping when it
comes out.
Lastly, since Gtk is always bugging me somehow, I gave Quark a shot. I quickly determined I was not in the mood for another 2 week
learning curve. :)
04-30-2003
I vamped up the pond a bit. The old articles can be found in the pond as archives, starting with archive01.shtml.
Figured either I throw together some code to do auto-archiving, or get back to mapping. Tonight I get back to mapping since my C++
project is now finished. I may have a mapping update later, or just save it for tomorrow.
In other news, Kag informs me his project is going pretty well too, as he is almost finished with his ferris wheel. It will be interesting
to see what he's come up with! In lurking around #urbanmappers, someone brought up this page
which appears to have a bountiful source of mapping and design related links.
You should sign your nick on the left if you like the pond!
04-24-2003
Ok, time to switch gears up a bit. I'm going to spend a few days on C++. My guy Mike (Frost) and I are honing our programming
skills with a simple text game "punchman2". It's the first successor to the original game I built in QBasic like 10 years ago
or something crazy like that. What? Want to see what this "punchman" thing is all about? Take a look into the pond, and you'll
find punchman! (look to the left)
Wow, now that you've played that, you'll realize that you now are part of the revolution of PUNCHMAN!! HAHAAAHAHAA!! Wait. No,
that doesn't work at all. lol. So, for your 17 seconds of amusement, go grab the .exe and have some fun, you and a friend. You
might like it. You might distro it. It won't break your computer, and if it does, your fault. Yeah, good stuff.
04-23-2003
Wow this is a late update! It's already tomorrow! Eh, who cares. ;) Well, I did it! The first beta has been
released. With the help of FSK405 Resident, some VIP's got their go at fraggin in my home! No doubt, we
had a blast!
My very special guests were FSK405 Resident, SS.KAG*Enforcer*USA, .223|Apoofoof, and FSK405 P.
After some technical difficulties, we were able to get the map up and running. I had made a quick change just before I
uploaded the pk3, changing the map name from "momentum.pk3" to "ut_momentum_beta01.pk3". I didn't realize the .arena file
relies on the naming convention. The map name in the .arena file must match up to the pk3 file name. A small but
significant mistake. I started by showing Resident around my place, then the others joined up. At this point, the first flaw
or at least unaccounted for problem occurs - I have 4 spawn points and 5 people joined up. Uh oh! So I kicked it into spec
for a while while unspeakable carnage ravaged my livingroom. Someone got the bright idea to drop nades at respawn and dive
into the kitchen while everyone else became wallpaper. LOL. I never imagined playing TS in my house, and sniping my computer
room from my bedroom was also a weird scene. Then the smoke nades flew, and considering my place isn't big enough for 4 people,
things got even more amusing. Overall, a huge success for my very first beta release. =)
Only other problems that popped up was a missing texture, and missing tga file for the minimap. After almost an hour of trashing
my place, KAG and I stuck around and played some Rommel. The knockback was a bit tweaked, so we ended up
playing it to our advantage. A must-see demo.
Putting the pk3 file together was easy. I used the tutorial at the 6th floor, and it took only a couple minutes if that. One
other bit of news, Oswald reports that there will soon be a heaping 32 new skyboxes available for public consumption. This
is GREAT news. Not having to build a skybox is one less thing I have to worry about right now. I'd rather be figuring out
shaders than trying to create a skybox at this moment.
If anyone wants to check out my first beta, look to your left and reach into the pond.
