At The Fountains Of Sadness

Urgh I need to write a blogpost.

Tomorrow, no wait, actually on Saturday, I'm going home on vacation. According to Pope that is too often, but this is how it works to live in a socialist state. So I just wanted to put some words here on this page of mine, to give an illusion of life.

I've got two levels I've been working on, one is one I need to finish because I promised, but I think I made it kinda crap so I've been trying to rework it as good as possible. The other is some other dumb project I've started and restarted and restarted so many times and so long ago I keep losing track of what I meant to do with it.
Also I had this idea for doing a level like this:
You play through an empty landscape, then exit.
First repeat, the landscape is filled with ancient buildings.
Second repeat, the buildings are ruined, nature has reclaimed a lot of it.
Third repeat, modern structures fill out the ruins, push back nature again.
So the point is you play through the same yet different level from A to B four times. (Though not like that freakin insane speedmap some crazy insane dude (was it speedy?) made.)
Anyway my idea was to keep it small and simple and let the iterations add details. I haven't done anything with this but I would like to try. Mostly because I've got a hateboner for old stuff merging with new tech. BUT NOT STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK IS THE DUMBEST SHIT EVER! Like Metroid Prime instead.

This Opera Unite thing.
It's a feature of Opera that lets users host services on their personal computers that are accessible to the WAN through Opera's proxies. I took a look at the documentation, and the actual services are essentially web servers written in javascript with some magic host objects to handle connections and file IO.
I've got this idea (COPYWRITE DONT STEAL!!!!1) that you could make a turn based roguelike/diablo/D&D using this. The DM is the person hosting the Unite service, he's got access to some dungeon editing tools, and during the game he can use his 'Evil Points' to spawn monsters and generally make things miserable for the players. The players connect to the DM's service and can then be selected by the DM to join the game (otherwise they'll just spectate) where they'll get to select a class and maybe some stats. (All very simple though.).
I think this would be a fun project to work on, but I'm not sure what would be the best way to implement the actual interface.
Client/server interaction would be done via AJAX. Would it be best to implement the visuals in google.maps-like tiles/javascript or in flash? You can really do a lot with layering transparent PNGs using javascript these days.
This is another thing I'd like to do.

I need to learn how to use Maya. OK, I kinda know how to use Maya in the most basic way, but I need to get good at it. I've been running it for a bit at work and a warezed version at home, but I'm lacking motivation for it. Besides the whole job security bit.

I've been meaning to cock up a way to make Ogier able to make levels for Source engine games. Some things like displacements can't be supported of course and would ultimately have to be done in Hammer, but just being able to do basic editing in Ogier would really improve my morale for making a TF2 L4D level. (Which would then be another project to do I guess! SIGH!)
What it would be is some app that scans the Source game's files and extracts all the textures and entity definitions and converts them to Ogier format, and then another app for exporting xmp to vmf.
I'm not sure if all that hassle is worth it for just being able to make more levels I'll never finish though.

I bought an iPod (classic, 120 gigs, black). Woe unto me.

The weather is hot. Dreadfully hot. I hate it.

Ah yes, music.
Lately I've been again into italo disco, which owns. Then I got my hands on all of Thomas Bangalter's stuff, because I've been meaning to do that, and that owns too. Then for some reason I have been dismissing what Guy-Man had been doing on Crydamoure, which was dumb of me because all of that owns too! Entire fucking label owns! It's insane! (Something unrelated I found just now) Then I started listening to Phoenix which is mostly ok but they've got a few songs that totally own too. Also I got SND's Atavism, which owns. Can't find any actual tracks from the album on youtube though, but here's something else that totally fucking owns anyway. And I caught up with some older Fennesz albums now that they were up on bleep, which also (surprise!) own. Clark's got a new album out too but I haven't had a chance to listen properly yet.

Ok. That's it. Peace. Soldiers are cute.

There's too many problems with this Quake thing in its current form, so I'm abandoning it and I'll try to incorporate the best aspects of it into another map. Maybe.
I need a fresh perspective though, so what I'd like for someone to do is to download it and look at it and tell me which areas work the best. (Mostly visually.) I'd like to aim for something more claustrophobic and compact.
http://files.myopera.com/christig/files/honey.zip
Unfinished crap is the best crap.

Edit: I almost forgot. I also wonder if something is fundamentally broken with the map or if all the glitches I'm experiencing are only on my computer. Whenever I ride an elevator, I sometimes get stuck and take damage in transit for some reason. I have no idea what causes it, I'm suspecting it might be some timing issue the engine has on multicore systems?! Wild guesses are my forte!

(Food sucks. I hate food.) I should maybe try to learn to cook some more interesting things, because as it is now I don't really want to eat anything for neither lunch nor dinner. For some reason I've never been able to make anything really good with chicken. I wonder what other people's secrets are.


(Quake thing.) Map sucks now. I decided I wanted to have an end battle for once and started coding a new boss monster. After a week I remembered I'm not very good at this modeling biz and like uhhm I suppose I'd have to animate him too. So it's probably not happening anymore. I ran out of static entities too. Anyway the guy was going to be a possessed suit of armor pierced by lots of spears that hovers around and attacks by having his spears flying around trying to stab the player. Not entirely 100% sure of how the gameplay was going to be but it was going to be awesome. I wrote some clever qc for moving entities along splines though.


(TF2 thing.) Engy/Soldier, the new thing? Look what a cute couple they make! Too bad TF2 is entirely fictional and not real at all! Can't find anything like this on XTube!
Alpine textures weren't as cool as I hoped, but I dunno, I'm not really feeling for playing TF2 anymore, much less mapping for it.


(Music?) So another Squarepusher album is out. It kinda sucks/is boring in my opinion. (Edit: A Real Woman somewhat rocks because it's so weird. Delta-V is cool too.) I really prefer it when he makes more straight up electronic stuff and not all this jazzy bass noodling crap. God damn do I ever hate jazz.
The Go! Team still fucking rules though. So great, all happy and cheerful and shit.
Bochum welt owns too. Got R.O.B. in the mail a few weeks ago, it rocks so hard.
I'm still listening way too much to Quaristice as well, especially this track from the Quadrange EP.



(Moviez.) Saw hellboy 2, was kinda meh which is sad. Hellboy really rocks hard in the comics, but the movies are way too lighthearted and jolly.
Warezed some Uwe Boll films, dunno why. Uwe is such a weird little creature, can't help but love him.

(Gamez/Ps3.) In a week or whatever WipEout HD comes out on PSN. I gotta play that even though the design sucks now. (They should bring back you-know-who.) And I assume LittleBigPlanet is pretty much done now and out in a little while as well.
So about now I need to get a PS3. Will see if I can borrow one from work (like I borrowed my 360). I kinda want a new TV to go with it though, because the old fat screen I've got now is all wobbly around the edges and barely does progressive scan without emitting smoke. Thing is though if I get a new TV I'll have to get some sort of speaker setup as well, and then I need some crap so I can hook up my PC to them as well. (I've only got some shitty pc speakers I bought six years ago.)
Then it all becomes A Project because I don't know what the hell to buy or don't buy, and I'll have to argue with myself over what I need (my old TV), what I want (happiness in 1080p, 5.1 surround), and what I deserve.

(Crushing depression.) Oh god yes. Every day.

(Unreturned love.) Never. Gonna. Happen. . . Deal. With. It.

When anyone übers me I freak out and flail about wildly for 8 seconds before I go "oh right, maybe kill some guys" and then I run out into a battle (as a pyro or something) all gung-ho and shit and then either the charge expires or my medic decides to heal smarter people instead, and I'm left in a fucking 4 heavy group rape. I'm not blaming you here, Bal. Just for the record, Bal is a great medic. When he's übering someone else.

And it never fails; I'll get autobalanced over to the other (losing) team like two minutes before the game ends, just in time for some sweet humiliation. If I were a good player I'd probably switch to a more appropriate class to wipe out that sentry farm that I know Bal's got going in the cap. But no. I'm kinda angry for being switched over so I run in there as a pyro, my flame announcing my arrival, the whole place wallpapered with stickies, a lvl3 sentry in a sweet spot, and I die and don't even get a nice deathcam shot.

That's Bal on fire in the picture there. He didn't die. Vondur was around somewhere too, killing things. Most likely me.

Moving on...
Here's some stupid shit that should have been finished long ago.

Back by popular demand; Here's the engy again because he's just so fucking dreamy and I won't let him slip down the page where we can't see him.

Finally: A knife, The Knife.

EDIT: I still haven't played any more of any of my games, and Bal has like 60000 stars in mario galaxy now and I've got barely 30.