So, it seems me and perseverance don't get along well, heh. Quite a lot of things came and went. Mostly personal that I reserve for myself.
But this is a gamedev blog, so... let's begin.
I've been doing a lot of stuff for OpenArena during the early/later months. But lately I've been getting myself out of level design and onto something I never thought I would be indulging into: coding. I've been contributing to three different projects: translation on OldUnreal's Unreal patches, some bits of coding for Yamagi Quake II, and A LOT of coding for OpenArena.
But let's start from 2013. Be aware that this recap is mostly from memory and looking at old threads in the forums so there will definitely be things that I may be missing. With 0.8.8 being a year old, and OA3 being developed, I started to redo from scratch many maps. My usual way of redoing maps was a bit tedious, and so I spent the remaining part of 2013, 2014 and 2015 reading as much as I could about level design, both in order to improve my skills as well as to take a look at what went wrong with my older maps. Well... I wanted to throw everything I did in the past as a result. Between mod-2013 and today's I did some ports such as Blood Prison from Nexuiz and Aardappel's dm2ish and reworked some maps such as czest1tourney (which would be a fine boss map), hydronex (now hydro-oa), oasago2 (now set in daylight) and czest2ctf with plenty of fixes and a new skybox (even though I had to sacrifice some sweet weaponjumps for FPS boost which I still lament T_T). There was also a new layout for a map which got stuck in pre-alpha, as well as another pre-alpha map (this time a fun map), a cover map inspired in UT200X's DM-TrainingDay and even a proof of concept inspired in the map "Descent to Core" from the N64 version of Q2. And that's not even counting the many other ports I did in the past and which have never seen the light of day. Aside of my work I tried to lead development on the Milestone mappack, including developing two UT ports, but HEAVY personal problems (which were, let's just say... "solved" the week before the supposed release date) led me to step down from the project. As a result, I've decided to not lead any project anymore. I'm just not fit for the lead role. Oh, and I had an important hand (sago007 and Gig did a lot of work as well!) on creating a totally GPL gamepack for OpenArena!
Then, while testing UI3 with a custom campaign I've made, I've started to see many errors, especially for the newly-introduced Possession mode (FFA with a flag!) so I started fixing them... and adding ideas of my own. So far my contributions to the OA code can be resumed as: full support for the Grappling Hook, a new mode for Harvester where the skulls now spawn from the bodies of dead players instead of a central source (akin to UT3's Greed mode), fully ported leilei's UI3 changes that allow for hexcolors, MANY gamecode backports from ioq3, and new config cvars for Double Domination accounting for capture time and respawn delay. And I have even more PRs waiting in the gamecode repo. Some of them have test pk3s. Feedback is welcome OFC.
Outside of OpenArena, I've helped with OldUnreal's patches regarding localization of Unreal for the next versions. As anyone who played localized versions know, Epic sucks at translating. And this was the chance of righting a wrong EXTREMELY wrong. I hope I can do proper localization fixes for future UT99 versions now that the guys at OU got the handle of the code as well. Also did a custom SP ladder and a CTF version of DM-Agony.
And last, but not least, Yamagi Quake II. I didn't do much for the main branch (just ported KMQuake2's .ent file support) but on Zaero I've managed to squash many bugs. I have plans, though, and you may need to wait to see them in action.
Anyway, that's all for now!
