Yeah, so that looks like a failure to me! A month later and I haven’t had any motivation to work on it in weeks so I think it’s dead. It was worth a try but obviously this strategy isn’t going to work for me. I’ll try something else next. Blueprinting was clearly not enough for me to maintain momentum – try and try again!
Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category
Blueprint Experiment – Done
Sunday, December 20th, 2009Blueprint Experiment – Day 5
Sunday, November 15th, 2009I think I’m nearing the end of these blog posts. I know where I want the level to go from here and, as I said, it’s a small level so it shouldn’t take too long.
I’ve begun texturing some areas so I definitely feel like my brain is satisfied with the general structure at this point. Looking forward to finishing this layout!
Blueprint Experiment – Day 4
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009I’m torn on how to post screen shots these days as the level progresses. I want to show how the level is moving along but at the same time I don’t want to give it all away before you even play it. I guess I’ll focus on tighter 3D shots from now on but go full monty on the orthographic view.
We’ve moved just over 700 brushes now and I think the end is in sight. As I said, this level won’t be huge or complicated – it’s just an experiment. 
Blueprint Experiment – Day 3
Sunday, November 8th, 2009I’ve started to flesh in some combat here and there as I see a good scenario emerge. This doesn’t seem to conflict with the overall goal here as the combat is emerging from the blueprint process and the blueprint isn’t being compromised for the sake of it. It’s nice to have the two things feed on each other.
As an added bonus, I think I see what I want a large part of the level to be, thematically speaking. I also have a large chunk of the player path worked out in my head. Just gotta lay down the brushes.
You’ll also see some textures in the newer shots. I’ve decided that I’m going to texture any entities that are in the level. This allows me to see at a glance what is interactive in the level. This is having a cool side effect where I find myself wanting to add more entities because the area seems too static. Even if it’s busy work, it’s always cool to see something moving rather than a completely static environment.
Blueprint Experiment – Day 2
Thursday, November 5th, 2009Expanded the level a little, added some minor detail here and there and cleaned up texturing alignment.
266 Brushes
The Blueprint Experiment
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009I’ve decided to try a new tactic for building Quake levels. I recognize that a large part of why my Quake levels often end up on the scrap heap is because I get too caught up in the details. You know, what textures should I use, adding more detail, tweaking lighting, etc. And those things are valuable, don’t get me wrong! But when the level itself isn’t complete, they are something of a waste of time.
When I was a younger man, this worked out alright regardless. I would have enough energy and focus that I could detail out a map as well as develop the layout and restructure things (aka throw away work) as I needed to. I didn’t care. These days, I care.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start with this WAD file that I created:
This is what I call my “blueprint” WAD. This contains the basic texture shapes that most Quake WAD files use (including the case where you rotate them 90 degrees, of course). My plan is as follows:
- Lay out the level in it’s entirety using the blueprint textures, focusing on flow and monster gameplay.
- Add a minlight and a sunlight. Tweak the sunlight until it gives the level the look that I want.
- Add extra geometric detail and hot spot lighting sources. This will probably also be the stage where I start to apply real textures since lighting and it’s interaction with the textures becomes important.
- Remove the minlight and add small fill lights where necessary.
This is the basic plan but things may change – we’ll see! For now, I’ll update fairly regularly with the status of the level and where I’m at with it. This is where we’re starting from:
LevelEd Preview
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009So since I got LevelEd working again with my threading fixes, I’ve started reworking the interface a little. The texture browser is now a floating window that can be resized and placed wherever you want it. It also supports multiple WADs now which is really nice. This frees up that bottom right pane to become another ortho viewport so you now have 2 of those. Here’s a shot to show which direction things are moving!
I’ve also refactored the input code so that it’s very flexible now. I’ve changed the default controls for LevelEd to more closely match UnrealEd (which is what I use all day at work). This makes it easier on me and now I can add alternate control schemes without too much trouble since it’s all nicely abstracted.
The new input code has allowed for some nice features like allowing easy zooming in the texture browser. It works just like it does in the ortho viewports!
I Am Such A Bad Programmer
Thursday, October 15th, 2009It’s hard to believe that someone hasn’t come to my house and taken away my compilers yet. I’m serious.
Remember how I said that LevelEd was broken under Snow Leopard and I wasn’t sure how to fix it? Right, well, it turns out that the problem is that I had the renderer running on a thread but there were multiple threads making calls into OpenGL. This causes major problems, including Kernel Panics (hard lock on a Mac).
So once it dawned on me that the threading was probably at fault, I put in an NSLock to control access to the OpenGL drawing routines and now the editor works again.
What I don’t understand is – How did it ever work on Leopard? Why does Snow Leopard expose this problem where Leopard didn’t? It’s either software gremlins or maybe Leopard had a much more relaxed approach to threading or something.
At any rate, work can now continue on the endless project known as the ToeTag Editing Suite.
The Body Is Willing But The Mind…
Thursday, October 8th, 2009OK, I think I’m done with this wacky idea of writing a cross platform level editor. It’s just way too daunting. In my youth, I would have dived in and starting coding up a storm but my current self looks at that mountain and wonders, “Do we really want to climb that again?” Python is interesting and I’ll probably keep learning about it and writing programs in it, one of them may even be a level editor, but it’s going to take a back seat to actual creative work. Being able to load up GTKRadiant in a Windows boot partition and make levels when the whim strikes is far better than having to wait another 6+ months until I can get enough time and energy together to make a new one. Again.
So I blame Apple for whatever they did to break my editor. I blame myself for not being smart enough to deduce what the problem is and work around it.
Blame for everyone! But at least it’s pushed me to realize that I need a break from coding. Now to push some brushes around…
Learning By Doing
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009Yay, more Python time. How can I have no children yet still have no time to work on hobby projects? At any rate, I continued in my quest to get a wireframe version of DM1 loading this morning. I’m really liking the basic Python way of working. Not having to care about variable types is really refreshing.
Flexibility
It’s really nice to work with something this fluid and dynamic. For example, variable length argument lists are an absolute breeze in Python. Check this out:
def myFunction( *args ):
print len( args )
for arg in args:
print arg
That’s it. I can call myFunction with any number of arguments and it will “just work”. I LOVE that. Setting that up in C++ is such a pain the ass by comparison.
Memory Management
Something else I’m really digging so far is the memory management and I think it’s time that I came clean on this issue. I can now freely admit that I can’t be bothered to work in a language that doesn’t have garbage collection. I just don’t have the time or the patience. I want to write code that does productive things, not code that goes through gyrations trying to clean up after itself. It’s 2009, you need to provide garbage collection or I’m not using your language.
Learning By Doing
I learn best when I’m doing rather than reading. I started out reading a couple of books on Python and while that helped me establish a baseline of knowledge I find that I really learn best when I’m trying to write something for real. Just this morning I’ve picked up how to do static member functions, variable length argument lists, and gotten a much better understanding of how a Python program is structured.
Back to the doing and learning…