Mekworx

Vivat Acedia

Obligatory ‘site isn’t dead’ Post

April 16th, 2009 Posted in Updates
Apr, 16 2009
8 Comments »

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately. Kind of a limboesque-depression sort of mood. I tend to get this way every now and again for seemingly no reason at all…or when I read the Skulltag forums these days (heh). I don’t feel like doing anything while at the same time I feel hopelessly bored. It’s probably a severe chemical imbalance or something :S I don’t want to get on the computer or go outside or anything…it’s really weird. I think part of it has to do with me waiting on something yet thinking that I need to be doing something during that time (when I don’t really have anything that I HAVE to do). I think this time of year is partly to blame; Spring can’t get here fast enough. It feels like I’m getting pulled in opposite directions, mentally speaking. Maybe I’m a workaholic? …nah, that can’t be it :P

Well, I’ve been trying to keep myself occupied so I can get my head out of this crazy mess. I’m waiting on Claustrophobia’s testing to finish up so there’s not a whole lot I can do with that at the moment. So I’ve been working on my map for Project Vega for the past few days. In truth I am sorta enjoying myself with this map when I’m not being starred down by mapper’s block. Doom mapping has sorta been…I dunno, stale to me the past few months. I can’t wait to do some Doom mapping that’s not tied to a community effort; a small single project that I can work on in my spare time would be really really nice. Something like that probably won’t happen for a long time though. So yea, working on this map is sorta like breathing fresh air…again, when I’m not choking to death on the caustic breathe of the mapping block demon -_-

Tomorrow (actually, today) I gotta run into town and renew my car’s registration. Funny story – My mom has been driving my vehicle for the past month or so (out of necessity…I won’t go into detail) and it turns out my registration was behind. Really behind. Like almost a year behind. If you know me, personally, then you would know that I have this horrible memory. And, you see, and my mom sorta paid for it yesterday :( . She got pulled over because the registration was supposed to be renewed before July 2008. Thank goodness we know most of the cops around here – she let here off the hook as long as the registration gets renewed before tomorrow. So I’ll have my vehicle back to go into town and straighten everything out. The fresh air will be nice and will hopefully clear my head of this damnable evil fog. But you may be asking yourself “Mech, wtf how did you get away with tags that were that far behind?”. Well, as it turns out, I had to have semi-major surgery around that time last year. Summer time was pretty miserable for me since…well, I spent most of it in my room recovering (well almost all of my Summer’s are miserable to me anyways…this one was just magnitudes worse). So I forgot all about renewing my registration since I wasn’t driving around for almost 4 months. Since then I really haven’t been driving very much at all…apparently not enough for the police to notice. But yea, it could be worse; my mom could have killed me :lol:

nyahBut I digress! Just wanted to make a post here so things don’t seem to empty and dead looking. One of these days I’ll get around to finishing up the ‘Design’ page with the rest of my silly ole projects. Maybe I can do some of that once Claus is done. I’ll leave all you loyal readers (lol) with a screenshot of the Project Vega map I’m working on. It’s from the one of the editor’s 2D views (ZY to be specific) so it’s gonna just look like a bunch of skewed lines. A 3D shot wouldn’t look any better at this point in time since 0% of the texturing is done and all of the structures just sorta blend in together. But hey! It’s all your gonna get until some offical screenshots pop up on the Vega DevBlog :3

Oh and also, feel free to check out my Twitter page I setup. I did it for Vega. Why? I dunno.

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One-Thousand & Twenty-Four Delays!

April 2nd, 2009 Posted in Design
Apr, 02 2009
3 Comments »

Alas, things hardly ever go as planned when it comes to managing a community mapping project. The original plan was to finish up testing and updates and then release Claustrophobia 1024 to the public on March 28th. I misjudged how long it was going to take to do all of the testing and tweaking when I set that date though. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a lot of experience with single player type maps either; if this were DM or multiplayer, testing would probably have been done by now :P . I now know that when it comes to polishing and testing singleplayer or COOP type maps, you need to make a little more headroom in the project’s schedule to account for testing. Lesson learned :]

At the moment the release date is set for April 5th. It’s very likely that it will be bumped up again because testing is still sorta in progress (ugh) and there are a handful of authors that aren’t around to heed any of the feedback that’s being given for the maps that they contributed. Meaning that either I or someone on the testing team will have to make the fixes. That can be a problem sometimes because you don’t always know if the original author is working on the map presently or if they are planning to. Which means that if someone other than the original author makes changes, it’s very likely that you’ll end up with two versions of the same map. It can be a bit of a mess but that happens when a project has been in production for a long time; some of the original contributors send in something and as the project chugs on into the months, they lose interest or contact with the progress that’s being made. Then sometimes it’s a struggle to get in contact with said persons to update their maps or get information, etc. I’m also waiting on some new music tracks for two of my maps that are being composed by my very good buddy Jimmy91 (I hear that school has been treating him pretty rough :S ). Hopefully he can pull through and make something that sounds wonderful though! ….oh, and I also need to sucker someone into making a new CREDIT pic (something similar to the one that can be found in Congestion 1024 would be super).

It’s always those little things that stall or delay a project. And I never seem to see them coming :lol: . But all of that aside, once we’re finally finished I think we’ll have something that a lot of folks will really enjoy playing. I anticipate that this will be ready for release very soon; once I have a deadline that I know I can stick to, I’ll be sure to make another post about it :)

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