Lordy, I can’t believe it! Mekworx has actually survived a whole year. Ok yea, the first post is marked for October 30th, but the site was actually created on the 29th. I’ve had other personal sites in the past for silly things that I either never updated or were destroyed before I could actually do anything with it. This is the first time that I’ve been able to keep and [somewhat] maintain a personal site for any length of time. I know there aren’t many of you out there that bother strolling towards this small, boring webhole, but I still think this is an event worth celebrating

Up to this point, Mekworx’s has mostly served as a web log for my extremely mind-numbing going-ons that I feel pertinent to share with all 3 of you that visit here. And indeed, that was one part of why I wanted a personal website. The other main reason was to have a place to showcase all of my creative works…sort of a portfolio. But the Design page hasn’t seen much love…and the Info page is just plain pathetic. It just takes so damn long to update that crap (seeing as how I have a lot of crap ). But I have been planning on doing a major overhaul to the Design page for a while now. When will it come? Whenever I can get a day or two just to myself (in other words, I don’t know). I want to come up with a better way to organize everything. And I also want to layout a better template for these sorts of pages. If all goes well, Doom won’t be the only game that I’ll be making content for in the future, so I want a more general organization and template. There’s also the issue of updating the Selenite theme (the current theme) to fix various visual bugs. I’m probably gonna have to outsource to fix some of them . I do plan on doing this sometime though. Preferably sooner rather than later. Once I can get some organizational groundwork laid, it will take a lot of work of me in the long run. So, that’s my plan for the future of Mekworx right now!

So if your reading this, give a quick Happy Birthday shoutout for Mekworx! I gotta give many thanks to my man Wartorn for providing a more permanent home for Mekworx. Without him, it’s very possible that Mekworx wouldn’t be around today to see this birthday. Thanks alot bud, I truly appreciate it And I also want to thank all of you who have taken some time to drop by and browse/read all of my crap. I know my ramblings lack any sort of depth or entertainment value and I apologize for that. I doubt that it any of it will get any better in the foreseeable future. But maybe…just maybe…I’ll be able to make it slightly more bearable

Oh and as a bonus, here’s an extremely old Armored Core site of mine that happens to still be kicking: Cannon Works Inc.. Cannon Works Inc. was the name of my design garage. It came from my design fetish with the Grenade Launcher weapons. Wow, that crap is old

It’s true

I’m sure your all wondering why in the hell I’m on the Vega team. I mean, this guy Mek, he’s too lazy to do anything! Fortunately for me, mapping is one of the few things that keeps me from turning into a lump on the couch

So what have we been working on in the past few weeks? Well as you may already know, we’re still in one of our visual phases. Esselfortium and I have been working on the visual style of the game. Since the decision has already been made for us to go in the direction of cel-shading, we’ve been trying to find what I’ve been calling the background of the style. As in, how the maps and other related bits are going to look against the foreground (the foreground being the cel-shaded models and whatnot). My task in this goal was to make the map that would help us flesh out this look, which would then be used throughout the rest of the game. Essel was tasked to make the textures and….Carnevil and TheDoomFreak slacked off (I’m kidding, of course!).

Up to this point I’ve done lots and lots with making map structures, but until recently I hadn’t really done much with the lighting and texturing. Needless to say I’ve learned a lot…and I’ve still got some learning to do. But tonight we have gotten closer to our goal of finding the art style; I finished up the demo map! Would you like some screenshots? I’m happy to oblige!

BONUS SHOT HERE YES

Ok ok, before we get ahead of ourselves here, a few notes:

• This is just a preemptive strike: NO, this is not Quake 2. I’m serious. Really.
• The map uses 99% all brand-new textures made by essel. The exception is the skybox, which is from UT2K4.
• A slightly useless but interesting bit of information: This map is actually a Deathmatch-style map that I started on for practice. I named it Quayplex and I’m going to be sad if we’re never able to play multiplayer on it (/me pokes Carn).

So hey, mission accomplished! Right? Well…yes and no. The “look” isn’t quite where we want it. I don’t think we’ve pin-pointed exactly what needs to be tweaked just yet, but yes a few of us also thought it came off as Quake 2-ish. Since I’m still learning the ropes as far as texturing and lighting goes, it could be that I need to work on those aspects more. Or it could be the fault of that UT2K4 skybox. Or it could be the textures. Honestly, I’m not sure right at this moment. And please, feel free to share your opinion on this matter! What does matter at this point, though, is that we’re on to a great start. Not to mention what’s done so far does look very cool (in my opinion atleast). With some more discussion and tweaking, we’ll be able to figure it out really soon . I’m certain that I’ll be sharing more screenshots with you guys in the near future, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled!

You guys know all about the silly new fad that let’s people know what your doing every second of every day called Twitter, right? Well, since I set one up to help people follow the progress of Project Vega, I decided to look for a WordPress widget that would display some of my latest posts. And so I found this plugin called………….wait for it…….Twitter for WordPress. Now you can see my last 3 tweets in the sidebar under the Archives. Pretty neat, I guess

Oh and sometime soon I’m hoping to update the theme (ala suggestions and fixes Jimmy91 brought up a while back). I would have done it before now, but I’ve been too busy. Speaking of which, I’ve got some Vega stuff to work on