Posts by Fletch

  • EA buys 20% of UbiSoft

    I wish they'd buy Acclaim or Midway.... then it would be like the big monster swallowing poison.

    Hey Klein, do you have stock options with Ubi? Because right now your shares are going up. You might want to sell a few off and build yourself a financial coushin for the... you know... impending doom.

    Good luck and god speed, Kleiny.

  • pulling all nighters

    Let's recount some of the more amusing sleepless nights:

    Prom night in senior year we all stayed up. crashed around noon watching a movie. Yeah that night sucked...

    Freshman year I had a few all-nighters for finals. Also, one night I had a date that got canceled. She then called me up at 11 to see if i still wanted to hang out. So we watchg a movie and then got coffee (which turned into a 4 hour conversation). Then we went to Perkins to get pie and more coffee. I eventually crashed at like 3 in the afternoon. Sleep cycle was fucked up for days.

    Junior year my friend and I drank through the night until the sun came up. Then we got McGriddles (aka God's Candy). I eventually fell asleep on the couch on their porch at like 11am

    Senior year number 1 I was working on a video editing project through the night. Finished around 8AM, went to class, turned in the project, and went to sleep around 3 or 4. The project was riddled with time gap errors because i was so unfocused.

    Last summer I did a short biking/hiking/kyaking endurance race where basically because we were slow on the first day we only had like an hour to get sleep, so we all stayed up instead. Kyaking on no sleep when you're completely drained is funny. You litterally go in zigzags.

    If you want to stay up, work on keeping your mind focused. Don't sit in dark rooms. Don't sit in the dark. Don't do a repetitive chore. Keep your mind engaged by lots of things (music, light, activity). From my endurance race I learned some people play solitare because it makes sure that their mind and body are communicating and that they can count and recognize patterns.

  • Suprnova gone forever

    well, my tv show site is still up, so i guess i'm still like 90% okay. but now i'm going to have to find a place for music. lucky for me i downloaded a shitload a few days ago, so i have music for my road trip back to texas.

  • Finding a mod team worth your while 101

    Quote from marque_pierre

    Here is another question. Don't know if it just me or what, but there seems to be a lot of modding outfits that will ask you to use whatever you already have in your portfolio. Like reuse it in their mod. That's gotta give you a very patched and ragged mod, artistically. Anybody else heard of that?

    I would say it's fairly standard for a lot of mods. Historically, mods were originally divided into two groups: total conversions (TCs) and partial conversions (PCs). CS and DOD would be TCs. They doesn't use any original HL content (well, maybe a few old textures in some maps). Rocket Crowbar and Sven Co-Op would be PCs since they use a lot of HL's original content.

    It is really easy for PCs to use previously made content. Usually their mods simply overwrite previous code, meaning old maps would be compatible (i.e. you can use your HLDM maps for Rocket Crowbar and you can use your existing TFC maps for Wizard Wars). So mappers who already have solid content in one particular realm might be asked to package their maps with a mod like this. It's sort of a mutually beneficial thing. The mod gets some quick mod-specific content for their initial realse, while the mapper gets their map some more exposure with no additional level tweaks or compiles. The thing is, a lot of these types of PC mods will suck, so if you plan on doing this, make sure the mod doesn't suck ass.

    Now, TCs are a different story. TCs usually need mod-specific content to make use of their gameplay and entities. In these cases, the mapper is going to have to go back and tweak their map to make it compatible. This is actually fairly common, even if some mappers have a bad view of it. Mappers tend to like this because it means they can inflate their resume with another map with little work involved. Mods still lke this because they can usually get some good looking maps for initial beta releases. The downside is that maps don't always port well between two different styles of gameplay.

    For some historical perspective, cs_siege was originally a TFC Hunted-style map. It actually won second place in a PC Gamer contest if I remember correctly. Now when CS was coming out, N0th1ng ported it to CS and it ended up becoming one of the most popular maps for a hell of a long time. But you can still tell that the map probably wasn't designed for CS. Similarly, FLF was populated by "cs-reject" maps for the longest time. Most of the popular FLF maps were originally maps created in the old CS forums that never went official. FLF kind of acted like the minor leagues for mappers at the time.

    So, no, porting old content is not out of the ordinary. It's been around since modding first started. But when deciding whether to port old maps, I'd say still apply the original rules. IF you think the mod sucks or will suck, then don't associate your work with it. If you think it's cool, then go ahead.

  • DM_Rebar Beta 5 Release

    another wierd bug with the rpg trap is taht you can shoot a crossbow bolt over it when there are barrels there and teh rpg will go flying (even though you hit nothing but air). Also, the green dumpsters shouldn't be static. Standard HL2DM convention is that while you can't pick them up with the grav gun, you can shoot them.

  • dm_rebar

    Quote from DUFFY

    personally i think you should spice it up a bit since its a construction site....what do i mean? put some breakable scaffolding that have gigantic concrete barriers or something on top and if you break it it will kill the guys under itjust a suggestion....especially if you're planning on entering this into the contest....because if i were them i would want to see the "omg super cool amazing physics" some how incorporated in a new way (besidse tossing an explosive barrel in someones face)

    the problem with that is it's only a one time thing. the second somebody does that, it's over. Anything that is dynamic in multiplayer maps needs to be repeatable for it to have any merit.