So Doom’s 16th birthday has come and gone. I was gonna celebrate by playing some Episode 1 while eating some cake, but I was too busy most of the day (I did play a little bit…no cake though ). For you Doom-heads out there, I’m sure you caught this year’s Cacowards. It’s been a really great year for releases and quite the busy one for me. Of the wads that won awards, I really enjoyed and highly recommend Harmony by Thomas van der Velden, Mapgame by Ravage, Plutonia 2, and UDMX by UniDoom. I’ve still got to play though some of the other awarded maps, but those that I listed are definitely my favorites this year. (I’ve heard very good things about Demons of Problematique 2 and Legacy of Suffering). But the biggest surprise of all…I won the award for the year’s best mapper!! Wow…, I think it didn’t really hit me until today. It’s really a huge honor and I’m still kinda dumbstruck by all of it. Of course the irony in all of this now is that my popular nickname of “Lazyadon” is now more ironic than true, which I find hilarious! Anyways, as I said in a comment of Carn’s Vega post about my award, I realize that in the larger scheme of things, this is just an award from a community of a 16 year old game that most of the regular video game population pays no attention to these days. So maybe my shock and appreciation seems a bit out of place given that. But for me, I find it too awesome for words. Doom mapping…well, mapping in general, has become a significant activity in my life and I enjoy it very much. This award only shows that people truly do enjoy my efforts and work and it makes me want to stick around for the long haul and keep contributing to the community at large. And that’s most likely what I’ll do . So thanks to everyone who thought I deserved this award! I cannot put into words how much I appreciate it and I intended to stick around and keep mapping for a long time to come. Also congratulations to everyone who won an award and to everyone else who was nominated! I’ll be looking forward to what’s in store this coming year with much anticipation. I can’t wait to get my trophy in the mail Scuba Steve!

….

Oh, did you think that was it? Well, it’s not. pcorf happened to mention that he would love to see a “WOS” style wad by me in the Cacoward thread at Doomworld. Incidentally, I’ve been planning just such a project for a really long time now (since IGPack release…maybe a little earlier). I wasn’t sure when I wanted to announce it to the public, but his comment made me want to just post a little snippet about it. The name of this project is “Supplice” and production officially started 6/14/2009 (around the same time I was having those computer issues and was unable to work on Vega). I’m planning on another post later on to discuss the overall goals of the project, but I’ll go ahead and say just a bit about it. It’s going to be a Boom compatible, singleplayer map set (possibly COOP compatible). Lots of my inspiration will likely come from wads like Scythe II, Suspended in Dusk, etc and from mapper’s such as Vader, Espi, esselfortium, Dutch Devil, Agent Spork, afterglow, and a few others. One big thing I want is for the majority of the content to be made by me and me alone. So things like new textures, monsters, graphics, music, sprites and maps (duh) will all be made by my own hands. Certain things I’ll probably have to outsource (like monsters sprites and, possibly, music). I want the general theme to follow closely to Doom’s theme but at the same time I want it to have it’s own feel and atmosphere. It may even have some sort of crudely written skeleton story that will stem from the Doom saga in some way. At the moment I’m doing ALL of the resources first; mapping will only start once that’s out of the way (I can only focus on one thing at a time). So far I’ve made some graphics, a bunch of textures, and some new monster behaviors but that’s it. I haven’t been able to work on it (or much else) since I’ve been working though. I’ll make another wordy, drawn-out post about it later on where I can go into more depth about the project’s goals. So let’s leave it at that for now.

However, if your reading this and your getting excited, then just get yourself unexcited . The biggest reason why I didn’t want to announce this was because I have no timeline set for this project. As in, I’m putting the largest majority of my free time into Project Vega first and foremost. I will only work on Supplice when I can, and I have no idea how often that will be. And given the project’s scope and size, it’s likely it will take a very long time before anything of interest is presentable. But I can atleast say this; I plan on working on it and finishing it as long as I’m able. So if you are truly interested, keep your eye’s peeled for my official announcement post sometime in the future.

I hope everyone had a fun and safe Thanksgiving! To add to all the delicious mountains of turkey I gobbled down today, Greenwar II was finally released! It took about 7 years total of work and lots and lots of mapping on my end (more than I was planning on doing :p ) but it finally got finished. It was a lot of hard work and everyone did an excellent job, so we’re all glad to see if released. This was definitely a pretty cool Thanksgiving

For the time being, I’m hosting Greenwar II on my webspace until the /idgames link is put up. Once the /idgames is up, I’ll replace the link with it. Grab it below!

Download Greenwar II from /idgames!
(mirror)
Readme

I’ll get some screenshots up tomorrow. And, eventually, I’ll update the Design Page with it :p

[EDIT]

Sorry, I was too lazy to take my own screenshots. So, until I get the Design page updated, I’m going to steal essel’s shots :p

Click here for a pile of face-melting screenshooters.

I meant to make a post about this when it happened, but I never got around to it. Better late than never I suppose.

A user over at Skulltag named abdulmuhsee sent me a PM about a week ago asking about a download link to Sabbat Martyr Deathmatch. Since SMDM’s 1.1 release, all of the download mirrors have pretty much died. I wasn’t aware of any up-to-date download locations and the /idgames link was never updated from the initial 1.0 release of SMDM. I was planning on uploading it here on Phenomer eventually for that reason and abdulmuhsee‘s request just expedited my plan. So until I can get around to updating the /idgames version of SMDM to 1.1, use these download links:

SMDM v1.1
readme
If you would like to offer up another permanent mirror, please feel free and I will add it to the list!

There was an attempt over a year ago to try and get version 1.2 of SMDM going. Hidon [StrikerMan780] spearheaded the effort and some work was actually accomplished. However all of it was for naught; he lost all of his work in a hard drive crash and the effort came to a grinding halt. Since then little to no work has been done. I made a list of things that I had planned on fixing/updating/changing for version 1.2 which consisted of things that Hidon did and things that others and myself wanted changed. However, since it has been forever since SMDM has been release and Skulltag has been updated many many times since then, I’m sure there are other bugs that need to be fixed. After all, there was a renderer change from ZDoomGL to GZDoom since SMDM’s release . If you are reading this and you are a fan of SMDM, I implore you to help out. Post any and all bugs and concerns that you have here or in the original project thread. Any feedback at all will help out with this effort. As for plans on when any work will actually take place…it’s hard to say right now. I’m too busy with other things to take time to work on it at the moment, but it will happen one day.

One last unrelated note – I have updated the theme again with a few things I didn’t have the patience to do last night. Just some minor aesthetic changes here and there, nothing major. Again, if you guys spot any bugs, let me know!

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!

Well then, anything look different around here? I certainly hope so

So in a little less than 3 days worth of work, I have created my very own, from-scratch WordPress theme using this guide for the skeleton, GIMP for all of the graphics, and lots and lots of trail/error and Googling for code. The scheme I finally settled on actually fits me very well. If you can’t tell, it’s a grey/gold/brown-ish scheme with a pretty standard layout. I got a little fancier than I originally planned with how the graphics were laid out, but I must say I really impressed myself. I love the colors and tones; I kinda wanted to stay away from blue this time around since that’s what I always tend to lean towards…and it’s boring to me now . The irony in all of this is that the layout actually ended up being about the same width as the old Mekworx theme; it got squished as I was screwing around with the style sheet

Anyways, the name of the theme is “Selinite”, and yes, it is available for download! You can grab it here: Selinite v1.0.

This version of the theme doesn’t have the banner; instead it has the regular text with your blog’s info underneath. It’s simple enough to add your own banner if you wish though. Please feel free to use it however you please, just as long as I get some credit! Now just to warn you, there are probably numerous issues. I’ve already spotted a few oddities that will require fixing soon. I’ll be sure to post an update to the theme when I make fixes though.

I hate to end on a sad note, but in case you haven’t heard, our beloved Espi passed away a few days ago. I had been following his blog posts at Doomworld quite a bit. He had some sort of cancer in his arm, which he had to have amputated shorty thereafter. A while after that it seemed he was doing pretty well. But then a month or so back, he was having even more problems due to the cancer spreading and causing complications. I’m not terribly sure on the details, but it must have gotten pretty bad. Unfortunately he succumbed to the cancer and died in his sleep on Saturday, 8/29/09. I would have had this theme up and running sooner, but I’ve been playing Suspended in Dusk and Back to Basics in honer of Espi. Rest in peace bud, we will all miss you very dearly