The map editor for Project Vega has been giving me BSODs. We’re guessing it’s a hardware problem on my end, but at the current moment in time I have no idea what the exact problem is. I’m just a little depressed that I finally got to where I could focus my time on Vega but now a silly BSOD is mussing everything up. So my mapping has halted altogether until I can figure out what the problem is . As a result, boredem was swamping me last night. My sleep schedule is also completely inverted (stay up till 6am, go to bed and wake up at 6pm… ). I thought I would try to stay up all night and then go to bed at a regular hour the next day. Although staying up watching television all night wasn’t going to work; I needed to do something to keep my mind active. I thought back to this thread that was posted at Doomworld about a speedmapping session. I decided to do some speedmapping to keep me awake. The limit was supposed to be 100 minutes, but as usual I get carried away and it ended up being about 5 hours. No biggie, I had fun and it kept me up all night. Unfortunately I am too weak and I took a 5 hour nap at around 1 pm

If your interested, give it a spin. It’s a Hell-flavored map named “Dominion of Madness”: Download Here : /idgames link 173 KB

Some screenshots:

I love releasing big projects. In the aftermath I’m able to relax in a way that I simply cannot do when I’m working on something. That usually gives me ample time to reflect on my future as far as this whole game design racket is concerned. Not to mention inspiration usually flows like a river when your not having to manage a bunch of people on a big project. I find it slightly ironic that in the process of creating something in a community setting, my creative juices turn sour and I go into a sort of inspiration lock-down. Managing a project is certainly NOT easy by any stretch of the imagination. Especially if it’s a community-made project. I had already decided that Claustrophobia 1024 was going to be my absolute last community project for Doom before the project even officially started. And my decision has only been steeled after the project’s release. As much fun as they can be, it’s a very stressful and labor-intensive thing to do, especially if your also contributing content to said project. But perhaps the biggest decision I made while working on Claustrophobia 1024 was this – my involvement in Doom mapping is going to be drastically reduced in the future. My involvement in the community will likely become pretty limited as well, although I will still be lurking around

So basically, I will not be starting anymore community-geared Doom projects of any kind in the future. At all. Period. I’ve lived through three major, moderately successful community projects and I think that’s pretty dang good. But I’m going to be way too busy to do another one. Not to mention my interest [and stamina] have waned quite a bit with community functions. As far as my contributions to other projects are concerned, I’ve been looking through what I had left to do as of Claus1024′s release. Thankfully there’s not a whole lot left for me to do:

• Jimmy91 wanted me to go through his CC4 map “Suburbia” and spiff it up a bit. Shouldn’t take long at all.
• I have two more claims in the Greenwar II detailing project. I started on the first quite a while back and I would really like to finish it up. As for the second claim, I’m not sure that I’ll work on it or not. Just depends on how my schedule is looking at the time.
• There’s this silly little project called “Vaporware”. Some of you may have heard of it. I’d really like to stick to this project and [eventually] make a map or two for it. This is on the very bottom on my list of priorities since the other contributing authors will likely take quite a while to actually finish anything.
• There’s also this other silly little ZDoom project that I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say anything about. However, unlike with Vaporware, I don’t know if I’m going to stick around and make anything for it. Though at this point it’s looking like I probably won’t

So what’s the big thing that’s apparently diverting my interest and attention from Doom? What, you don’t know? Why, it’s Project Vega of course! Big man Carn has been working incredibly hard on it these days. We’re shooting to have a playable demo ready in time for this year’s QuakeCon, which is sometime this August. Since I’m a mapper, that means I’ve been working on part of the demo mapset that will ship out with the playable demo. Actually the entirety of Vega has slowly but surely been diverting me away from Doom. Since this is a very important project to me and the rest of the team, my free time has been moved over to Vega related stuff. At the current moment in time, Project Vega is at the top of my list of priorities and I imagine it will stay there for a while. If you haven’t check out Project Vega yet, then what are you doing here? Go check out the Development Blog and the Developement forum at Skulltag.com!

For some reason it feels like this post should be more melodramatic since I’m becoming significantly less active in Doom. I guess all of the violent demon slaughtering has left me desensitized But all is not lost! Aside from all the leftover bits of mapping I have left to do, there is one last thing that will likely be my legacy to the Doom mapping community. I won’t divulge any details right now though. But I will say that it’s going to be a personal project; all of the new content will be made by yours truly. I wanted to start on something that would allow me to exercise my laziness to the fullest extent of it’s amazing powers. You know, something that would allow me to work on a map once a month and then post teaser screenshots every other month. My own Mordeth, if you will If such as thing is ever started, I’ll post a bit about it. But until then, I’m a Project Veganaut!

And so it ends. A little over a year ago we started the inspirational sequel to Congestion 1024. It was a bumpy ride to the end and I’m surprised half of the Doom community doesn’t hate my guys by now . But I think everyone did an excellent job and the end result should be lots of fun! I was surprised at how much fixing and tweaking I ended up doing so close to the project’s release (see the last changelog entries). I’ve been awake all night trying to smooth out all the bugs and now it’s almost 9 am. Needless to say I’m tired But without further adieu, I present to you Claustrophobia 1024!

• Downlaod Claustrophobia 1024!
• Readme

I took some screenshots of each map the other day. They are in order from first to last map, top-to-bottom and left-to-right.

I’ll be throwing this into /incoming sometime soon so it can be archived and reviewed in /newstuff. I hope you guys enjoy all of our hard work! And I sincerely hope that we got all of the major bugs squashed and that I didn’t inadvertently introduce any new bugs while I was doing that last minute tweaking I’d like to thank everyone who has helped out with this project and who contributed a portion of their valuable free time to make this project a reality! Thanks so much guys, I’m glad we got it done

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and sleep for 2 or 3 days.

So you may notice some pretty new updates to the site (again). I was curious how Agent Spork was able to have seperate blogs on his page. Apparently up until his latest update to his site he had multiple copies of WordPress installed (which is what I figured). While I was on phpnet.us, I didn’t really have that option. And as it turned out, it was a pain to keep up with since you had to update both installations of WordPress separately. Anyways, I asked him about this a few days ago, and he figured out a new way to do this. He pointed me to this plugin called the Advanced Category Excluder…which does pretty much what the names describes. However I was having some trouble getting it to work…until just a few minutes ago! The problem was whenever I wanted to link to a particular category (in this case, the “Updates” category) it would take me to the archive of that particular category. I wanted a seemless setup where it looked as though I had to separate blogs on the same site, so linking to the archive of a category wasn’t what I wanted. Spork then mentioned to me that he had a custom category.php file that was very similar to his index.php. I looked through my theme’s files and I couldn’t find a category.php file…but I did find an archive.php file. So, I backed up my current archive.php file, exported my index.php file, renamed it to archive.php, and then uploaded it into my theme’s directory. Viola! It works like a charm . So now there is a separate section of the site where I can post my site updates apart from my Mekablog. Pretty cool, eh?

I’ve also made a few other minor updates here and there. I have added and updated my links to include Warhouse, Phenomer.net, and Doom Builder 2. I also got rid of my “Other” page since most of what I’ll be posting, content wise, can all go in the “Design” page. The “About” page has been renamed “Info” (and I’ll likely add to it in the future). I’ve also condensed and simplified my post categories. That’s pretty much it

And so, the development of Claustrophobia 1024 is finally starting to come to an end. It’s been nearly a year since the project started…and boy what a year it has been! Through all the ups and downs that the project experienced, I’ve had a blast working on it and I’ve learned a ton of new stuff for Doom mapping and project management. And I certainly hope that the rest of the team has as well!

With the release of Build 2 for the testing team, I decided to go ahead and set a release date. At first I thought I would keep the date private from the community and only share it with the testing team, but then I decided against it. Since then, two more test builds have been released fairly close together. I decided to keep a changelog of all the fixes/tweaks/additions/etc from the release of Build 2 to the final release. So far everything is looking pretty good and I’m confident that we will be able to meet our release date pretty easily! What’s that? Oh, you want to know what the release date is? Sure thing! It’s June 17th, 2009!. Which is, as of the time I’m making this post, only 3 days away . At the current moment in time, we only lack a finished music track from Jimmy91 and he’s planning on finishing the track this weekend.

The wad will be jam-packed with all sorts of goodies. 32+1 excellently designed 1024 maps from various Doom community members, load and loads of new graphics and textures, lots of custom music, and a bunch of other new stuff. Since it’s Boom compatible, it will be able to reach a pretty large playing audience (which I think is great!). We’ve undergone a fairly intensive testing regiment, which is one reason why the release has taken much longer than I anticipated. But all of that should pay off in the end! If anything, it should be many times better than what would have been released during the project’s first go round while Death-Destiny was leading the project

So if you were a fan of Congestion 1024 (just like I was) then keep your eyes peeled for the release on June 17th! I will definitely be making another post here about it…likely with lots of screenshots