Do not mistake my appetite for apathy!

Going at a steady one post per month...

So I've been on my Easter break and next week I start my final term of my first year at university. Let's hope it goes as well as the last two terms. During the break I saw lots of friends and family and did lots of mapping. No surprises there. For mapping skip the next paragraph, for my personal life keep reading (weirdo).

My Uncle had his wedding on Friday (no he's not called Prince William), it was a lot of fun and the food was grrrrrreat! Congrats to them both. I recently saw Thor at the cinema. Thor is a great film, go and watch it. I went mountain biking near Thetford and I can't wait to go again. I also did a cycle ride from Welwyn Garden City to Stevenage. It was interesting watching the scenery gradually become grim and grey. Saw lots of friends on various occasions, nothing much else. It's been a good holiday!

CP Breakout
My mapping contest entry CP Breakout is on it's way. The deadline is May 25th and I'm a little worried it won't be finished by then, but a deadline is exactly the sort of thing I need: I've been working on Bunkerdash on and off for almost 18 months *perfectionist* no idea if it's actually a good map. Anyway, Breakout, the layout for this one turned out to be asymmetrical to start with but then symmetrical at the end. So far, not a wise decision. The main result of such a mash-up caused picnics in my case:

Thanks to The Crazy GFL for hosting this for me. More testing will happen soon, then hopefully I can go overdrive with details and lighting to make it look dark, damp and ugly. Although not too much because then it would be a dungeon, not a prison. Soon Eventually I'll post in more detail about this map and its development, hurdles, mistakes, and triumphs!

bunkerdash_b2

Busy
I was pretty busy a few weeks ago with various bits of coursework. The free time I had while we had coursework was spent watching Battlestar Galactica (kick ass show) and playing some Minecraft on Luke's server (screenshots will come). Then for a week or so I enjoyed having no heavy deadlines looming. I went home last weekend and saw friends and family and I realised that I miss home a lot more than I thought.

Mo'Creatures
On the topic of Minecraft me and my girlfriend tried a mod called Mo'Creatures. It really adds a lot of great things to the game like horses you can ride, birds that each have a unique song, cool new baddies... etc but there were a few lame things about it. Ogres will tear down your creations, birds will eat up your seeds, easy mode is often too hard, sharks are retarded... I spent a lot of time on peaceful after installing this. However, once Dr Zhark updates the mod to work with the latest Minecraft update (yay beds) I will install it again.


Mapping again
Once the deadlines were out of the way I finished up pl_bunkerdash_b2. I haven't changed much really. In b1 the map didn't get a chance to be played on a full server (see 'Technical' in this post) but I still got some feedback on aesthetics. I've worked with that feedback as best as I can without spending a lot of time on it - I want to re-release it asap so that people can play on it properly. The 3D skybox needs a lot of work so that's the next priority for _b3. After that, I don't think there's much left to do!
TF2Maps.net thread

first

Been meaning to make a blog for a while. Let's see how this goes.

pl_bunkerdash

Before I blab about this I should say I've been working on pl_bunkerdash since January 2010, about a year, and it's a level for the popular online fps game Team Fortress 2. That's the short intro for the level and part of the reason for this blog. I'll write about why I started this project another time if there's interest.

pl_bunkerdash_b1

b1 for "beta 1" or the first beta version of this map. For me, beta meant I was happy with the gameplay of the level and all that's left is making it look pretty. Well, it looks quite pretty now...

...and today it was tested on a server provided by tf2maps.net. I got some good feedback but there was a fatal issue with the map that caused the server to crash with too many players. In a later post I'll show you any interesting stuff in the next version in a lot more detail, for now, if you like, you can visit the forum thread. There's also a few more screenshots of the map there.

Technical

The crash that my map was causing was due to the "edict limit" of the Source Engine. Source can have up to 2048 dynamic entities allocated to the entity dictionary at any one time, go over this limit and the engine crashes. I didn't know about this until an hour or so ago so I don't know much more than that. I do know, however, how to fix this. It involves using less entities. Tricky, I know. Seriously though I pretty much spammed point_spotlight without really realising (something like 400 of them, there's quite a few in that screenshot, and they're made of like 3 entities themselves (I'm just quoting someone cleverer than me here)).

I didn't experience this error myself because the map alone has 1942 entities, plus me (the player) and any entities I might produce (sticky bombs etc). On a server with more players you can see how a crash would occur. Here's some more info on the issue.

I gotta say: much credit to the dudes at TF2maps.net for finding out what caused the crashes - I had no idea.