Binary Bonsai

I created a seperate page for the level reviews and stuff from the previous newsupdate. It can be accessed from the gallery, nothing new, just a copy-paste job.

In other news, I’ve started work on my Cloud City level, I’m getting some funkiness out of Raven’s native compile tools. Their lighting is sooo bad! But rumor has it that Ydnar’s (Shaderlab)

Q3Map2 is coming out for Jedi Knight 2 and Soldier of Fortune 2. Rejoice!

Well here I am, last day of housesitting for my family. It’s been a wonderfully relaxing week, but now I figure that I’d better get back to doing something. So here’s a small update of sorts. In a nostalgic trip (I get those every once in a while) I went searching for reviews of old maps of mine, and here’re some of the links.

First up is ZeistDM1 (Zeist – The Coming), a small tournament map I made in a week back when Q3 was quite new. Personally I love playing on it still, not to stroke my own goat or anything. the gameplay is fast and furious. It can be downloaded from Fileplanet which at time of writing has 1300 downloads registed. Weee. Mod on Demand’s Review of ZeistDM1 (Score: 8 of 10)

“I think we have to keep an eye on this Karma”

LVL’s Review of ZeistDM1 (Score: 8.52 of 10)

“The action is fast, and the weapon placement is not bad at all. Three is more than enough for a fragfest.”

“Eine großartige Map. Ich denke eine der besten 1v1-Maps überhaupt. Sehr schnelles und gutes Gameplay.”

(“A Great Map. I think it’s one of the best 1v1-maps out there. Very fast and good gameplay.”)

Yogibaer‘s Review of ZeistDm1 (Score: 88% – German)

“The optimal solution for a fight between two people.” (Translated from German)

“Quake3Stuff’s Review (Score NA)

“[…] should be downloaded instantly. Nuff said. Go get.”

The other map I have available is my Poseidon Incident map. Now let me just quickly break down the situation surrounding The Poseidon Incident. The thing with it is that at the time when I was making it I was also the leader of a Half-Life Total Conversion called USCM: Infestation. At the time we were busy working out what kind of levels we were going to have. One of the ideas was to have an underwater habitat very much like Deep Core in The Abyss. Chris Ashton (who is now with Valve) was working on the texture set and I was trying to come up with the basic design of the habitat. At that time the Half-Life Editing Resource Center (which has now relocated) held a mapping competition, and I thought WTF and entered the small teaser level I had done. And I won… (Link to webarchive, no images)

And then the mails just started pouring in, I must’ve gotten several hundred mails asking me when USCM: Infestation would be out and where to get more and so on and so forth. And then 3 months later Fox shut us down for "copyright infringement". Which is fair enough I guess. Either way, this is all that ever came of the project officially. Some of the models, most notably a marine was later released as a playable model for Half-Life, Chris Ashton asked if he could use the textures for CounterStrike, where they now officially recide I believe, and the Poseidon Incident is pretty much the only real trail left of USCM: Infestation on the net. Oh well. Overall people seemed to love the level but hate the shortness of it :|

3dmr’s Poseidon Incident Review
“New textures compliment some nice architechture and good use of ambient sounds to produce a very atmospheric environment.”

I Am Half-Life was too lazy to post a review so posted the readme instead :D

I found a few other links as well, but it seems that time has taken its toll on the Internet :) Oh well. Now if only I can find a copy of it to post here as well.

Worth noting by the way, that I had in fact done about 50% on a full version of the Poseidon Incident back in 2001 when my HD crashed and left me with nothing. I might go back some time and finish it simply for the nostalgia of it all.

Yes I know, for a guy who likes level design as much as I do, it’s pretty damn sad that I only have 2 maps available for download. But unfortunatly I just haven’t been able to find the time to do any more between school and my work. So for now this’ll have to do.

Weeee, I got tickets for the Jarre concert on the 7th of September! Bought them yesterday online and they should be in the mail by now. I’ve been waiting for over 10 years for this, can’t wait. I’m an electronica kinda a’ guy :)

So over the last 1 and a half week (or is it weeks… ah whatever) I’ve been playing some D&D 3rd Edition with a couple of friends (4 of us in total), and I must say that it’s reignited my craving for roleplaying again. Previously I’ve always played RPG’s within the same group as such. It’s a fairly large group, but we’ve all more or less played with each other many many times, so perhaps that’s why I sort of stalled out some time ago, I don’t know.

Whatever the case, I was happy to play with some new faces and in a new way. And also I found the 3rd edition D&D rules to be really good. The D20 system as it’s called is also what powers the new Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars RPGs. And although I can take an occasional fantasy RPG, I’m much more of a sci-fi kinda guy, so today I picked up the Star Wars Roleplaying Revised Book. Running in at 380 hardcover fully-coloured pages it’s quite a nice book, but the price is pretty damn ridiculous as well (400 danish kroners, which is about 54 Euro).

I’ll write a capsule review later when I’ve gone through the entire book, but suffice to say that I’m looking forward to running nuts with blasters, spaceships and lightsabers again :)

So, today was the release day of the infamous America’s Army. A tactical first-person shooter made by the U.S. government themselves with the purpose of getting teenagers to think about joining the army.

7 million tax-payers dollars went into the development. Not that I care, I’m from Denmark, I’m just happy that I get a free game, a game running on the Unreal 2 engine no less. I do however have a couple of moral problems with the use of this game as a recruitment tool.

First of all, the US government (Lieberman primarily) seems to be very much against games, accusing them left and right for having to do with the murderers of Columbine among others. And yet they actually go out and fund a game that’s meant to portray the most dispicable part of human culture? I fail to spot the logic. Especially seeing as this game has a T rating (Teen, which is 13 years and up).

I understand that we’ll probably see more and more of this coming from the governments, but I can’t help but feel somewhat … naucious about the whole affair. I dunno. It just brings a lot of questions to mind about what’s right and wrong when the government is portraying war. Make no mistake, there’s a huge difference between whether or not the government made this game. If they hadn’t it would just be another tactical squad-based FPS, but now it’s a propaganda tool, and with that the responsibilities are suddenly increased many-fold.

Either way, my initial point was that this game made me realize a range of things about the Internet and more specifically the people who use it. First of all, most gamers today are 13-14-year-olds, or at least so they seem. There’s no respect for the common good, it’s me me me. I went onto Gamespy, there were over 2100 people in the same chatroom at once, and 50% of them at least were typing. Most simply joined in, didn’t bother to wait and see what was happening and started asking questions.

“I can’t do this”… Well no-one can, which you’d know if you waited for a second. If you bothered with reading the manual, then maybe you’d know why.

“I’m getting this error”… So are other people, it might just be that it’s listed in the ‘known errors.txt’ file that comes with the game…

“How do I go on to infantry training, I’ve tried and I can’t do it”… So have everyone else, and no-one else can either…

And my favorite “Gamespy sucks ass, it’s so fucking stupid yada yada, servers are slow, pings are bad, I suck”. Because what all these people fail to realize is that Gamespy is nothing more than a fancy chatroom that lists a range of servers that you can join. It doesn’t run the servers, it doesn’t have anything to do with the bandwidth, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything except it helps you join a server simply by doubleclicking a servername. There are a lot of things that I don’t much like about Gamespy. Primarily their adverticement things (Casino Online, so help me god if I ever meet they people in charge of this… I really would get the urge to slay them dead… Anyways…). But the bottomline is that the service is quite good. You get pings, playerslots and server info all in one place. Now if only they would optimize and standardize the program it would be almost perfect.

Now the reason people were complaining so damn much was because the servers (of which I counted only 18 with 16 player slots per server) that held the infantry training game which you had to play were down or filled.

What were they thinking? 18 servers with 16 slots each? And the whole world wants to play their game… what the devil were they thinking? I understand that they want to get this game out on the 4th of July, national pride and all that, but if they had been just a little smart they would have included a dedicated server client with it, and I’ll promise you that servers would have popped up faster than you could join them.

Why didn’t they think it through?… Alas, it might as well have been the producer or publisher or whatever the hell they use since it’s a free game, that had been pressing them to do this, and as in the rest of the gameworld now a days, that’s such a major mistake that’s never helped anyone. No developer, publisher or game has been furthered from being pushed into release. But this little thing called money seems to blind people from seeing this clearly, and so we end up with a load of problems or issues as the enduser.

For instance, Neverwinter Nights.

Such a great game, I really really like it. I just bought it yesterday (although I’d been playing it for a week or two), and although it does fulfil a lot of the things that BioWare had promised, it also still has a lot of issues that if taken care of could elevate it to being the best game of all time.

For instance. The game comes with a toolset. With this toolset you can make your own maps. Forests, dungeons, cities, caves and so on. About 8-9 different sets I think. But you can’t make a castle in a forest… Castles only exist within a city… No castles in rural areas either… What’s up with that? I can understand certain technical difficulties in making it work, but seriously, if they had done that, then they would never have to work again, they could live off of NWN…

Given of course that they released the sourcecode (not all of it, just the parts that touch gameplay, like with Quake and Half-Life) and allowed us to create new tiles for the landscape. All of the sudden you would be able to do anything. You could modify it to become a cyberpunk world, or a WWII game…

It would be endlessly open to modification – But it isn’t, and that really dissappoints me

Well, I’ve rambled for long enough. Let me just send out a greeting to Bj