Howdy there.

It's been a while since my last dev. journal, so I figured it was time to update you all as to what I've been doing :)

Last week I began upgrading my PC, but I didn't have the money to buy all the parts I wanted to buy in one go (poor student syndrome). Because of this I was going to buy the CPU, Motherboard, and a naff graphics card (PCI Radeon 7000), then sell all my old stuff (A7N8X-E, 9800 pro, 3200+ XP), with which I could buy some more memory and a nice graphics card with a few days later (or at least that was the plan).

As often happens on eBay the idiot who won the bid for my old CPU (3200+) didn't pay me, which had the knock on effect of me being able to afford the extra gig of memory, but not the graphics card, so I've been having to make do with this Radeon 7000 for days now.

I didn't truly appreciate how much of a performance hit a PC takes when a decent GPU is taken out of the equation till this week. Anywaaaaaaaaay... because of this I really didn't manage to get half as much done as I wanted to.

This week I've got tons to do:

1. Skin the detpack (an unskinned render of which is available here).

2. Create some decals that Jesse has requested for use in Hunted.

3. Unwrap and skin some props for Hunted that our new modeler Bile has created.

4. Create some map textures for use in Monkey for ChemicalBurn.

5. Continue creating all the signage for the maps (Flag Room, Arrow Right, Arrow Left, Etc..)

All in all, a busy week's in store.

Hoody Hoo! Dat's the code fo' dem killas!

You know what sucks? Stayin' up all night, and then sleeping all day. See, when you were a kid you and your friends would lie about the time you stayed up all night long, ate two large pizzas by yourself, and drowned your neighbor's cat in the toilet. Just you, not me -- I did all of those things at least twice a week when I was a kid.. in.. a world?

I don't remember when I first stayed up in excess of 24 hours, but I know the longest I've ever stayed up was 38 hours, and I think I may of fallen asleep with my eyes open once, twice, or maybe even hamnocapt times.

Where.. am I going with this...

Pretty much just ignoring everything else, Jon and I are just wanting to "finish" Hunted. Stuff is constantly changing, and stuff we made when we first started on it now looks like complete gorillas ass, which is not to be confused with the gorilla finger. We're always requestin' more props to be made, like that big ballin' Hummer you've seen with all those naked strippers in the back. Of course, I think it's implied that strippers are naked, or we'd call them clothers, and who wants to pay money for some dirty woman to get her clean clothes all over you when you could have a dirty woman get her dirty dirtyness directly onto you. See, 'round here, we call that a bargain if you use two hands instead of one.

Anywho, yeah, there's gonna be all kinds of customness in Hunted, and hopefully when you play Hunted you're gonna bust a nut.

There's nothing bad in this, Schtoofa, alright, so back off monkey boy. See folks, usually that bastard takes all the really sophisticated parts out my dev journals to get them down to a PG rating, but I live in a XXX world.

What?

Also, Schtoofa is my hero and he works hard every day. I hope that sometime I can meet him and buy him lots of beer, because he deserves it.

Hallo mein freund,

I had a slump for a while there whilst I had to finish jury duty, which was really time consuming and boring (but thats all cleared up and I have re-entered the fray with a passion for being a do-er). I completed a number of props, and really I'm learning something new about the hl2 engine everyday, figuring out specs, animated bits 'n bobs, opacities and the like, so I'm producing some good stuff visually.

On the animation front, whilst on a tea break I tripped over a magical machine thats called an animatron. I hooked it up and now its doing all the movement animation for me, I put one of the snipers in charge, so now I can go to the ball and wear my new dress, joy.



End Transmission,
Captain Innes of the Rusty Space Bucket.

Howdy, strangers. It's been quite a while since my last Dev Journal update, as I'm sure you're all aware. I'm currently training for a marathon in November and work has kept me pretty busy as well.

But, I have good news: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insur- ...

Anyway! I'm currently working (almost done) on a sniper feature that I'm not allowed to talk about (much like that scout feature I wasn't allowed to talk about). It's a pretty cool idea and all it really needs is some gfx in game and it will be complete for the time being.

I also started on the deathmatch map, and by started I mean opening up hammer and then pestering jesse/jon/defrag about displacements and playing with them [the displacements, not jesse/jon/defrag -- although I'm sure they would like that too] for a couple of hours. Actually, I did a little more than that but it's still not much more than ideas in my head atm.

Hi everyone. Had one of these dev journal thingos for awhile now; been a bit preoccupied lately though and it's taken me awhile to get around to it (or indeed, anything else this past week or so).

I also didn't really want to mention much until after the GL render was up for all of you to gawp at, in case I stole my own thunder. Or something.

At any rate it's there now, and it's already featuring in-game!... Albeit in a totally unanimated and untextured state so you're unlikely to see it any time soon (although I am informed decs is doing a damn good job skinning it). All I personally have left to do with it is put in those wonderful animations that'll tie it all together, and a couple of other neat touches. 'Fixing' a model to look good in first-person is a surprisingly tricky task, but for anyone wondering the method isn't lost on me. Although you won't be seeing any of the GL stock in first-person (since it's all off-screen), the bits that are there are looking pretty damn hot. I've already decided to nickname this thing 'the beast', as it ain't no glorified pea-shooter -- that's for certain.

Also, for any folks looking at the render and wondering: yes, you will manually load in each of those rounds into it before flicking it shut with a nice satisfying 'click' sound. Hopefully anyway. Such features are left mostly in the realm of the programmers, and their dark majiks are largely foreign to me.

The animations, though, are being left alone for now due to a couple of reasons, and my work's shifted focus towards modelling the soldier's best friend (no, not a grenade...). We're talkin' ol' Rockets o' Fury. Modelling a rocket launcher is proving a bit tricky so far, simply because it's surprisingly difficult to make [what is essentially] a tube look interesting; however, a few ideas and tweaks are getting thrown around and I'm sure we'll have something to show for it fairly soon.

Once I've got that nice 'n' sorted I'll provide all you kind folks with a bit more insight into the modelling process, particularly for the first-person weapons (which is, as you have no doubt already guessed, what I'm mostly concerned with).

Working with the FF team so far has been pretty fantastic - everyone's got a lot of heart for this mod and an equal amount of skill and ability to match it.

But now, I must get back to polishing my tube.

Sayonara - FLCL