Blogs - Neon_Knight

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!

Real life and a lack of an own PC prevented me from developing OA stuff for a long time. It's been more than two years since my latest blog post, and I'm starting to lose my english speaking (I'm not a native english speaker, as you may have noticed). Anyway, I've came back, and I'm trying to complete as much stuff as possible.

Oh, yeah, and there was a new OA release last year, 0.8.8, which included a lot of stuff. Most of the maps from the latest version of my own mappack were included there, so I need to update it. I'll be doing it soon. I've also took my hand on oasago2 and improved the visuals a bit. I hope to have done the same for the performance, though sago007 and I agree that the map needs a remake.

I've also started porting older versions of OA's maps after meddling with SuperTuxKart (a game I like so much... I hope to make tracks for that game once I finally learn how to use Blender). These maps are now packed into a single archive for players' own convenience. Unzip in the OA folder and play. The addons section of that game included older versions of the game's tracks, so I figured out that players might like these older versions rather than the newer versions included with the game. However, these versions are considered non-official releases, as we want to get rid of everything which makes OA FOSS's favourite punchbag. OA3 should be what OA should always has been in this regard. Many maps are being reworked, models improved, ugly stuff being deleted, and with the amount of content OA currently has, there's no real need for remakes/knockoffs so maps which are inspired by other maps are already being sent to a tribute mappack or being reworked so they have less "ripoff" feel.

Talking about mappacks, in December of last year some members of the forum started a Community Mappack akin to those of bigger games. The rules were pretty simple: stuff should be GPLv2 and the mappack must work flawlessly in a clean OA installation. Other than that, there's a lot of freedom, and this year's mappack is looking pretty awesome. There're 13 brand new maps by 4 different authors (some of them with a pretty rich prontuary on Quake mapping), and extra work by some more collaborators, and I'm daring to say that the quality of that mappack is on par with many of Q3A's best maps and packs. You should pass by the forum to check that pack and help us with any feedback.

Anyway, I'll be talking of most of the other stuff in other posts. By now, see ya!

I've heard time and time again that OpenArena is dead and that everyone should move to other games. While it's true that it has been a year after the latest patch, and two years and a half after the latest full version, this in NO WAY means that development in the project has stopped [SeriousSam]FOREVER[/SeriousSam]. (And don't worry, OA won't take 14 years of development.)

To get an idea of what was already done: (A LOT)

1. If you are using Windows, install a Subversion client, like TortoiseSVN.
2. Do a checkout on http: //www.openarena.ws/svn. (Without spaces) Revision: HEAD.
3. Run the file Build-pieced.bat in Windows or buildpk3nix.sh in Linux. Also run Build-missionpack.bat or buildmppk3nx.sh.

1. Create a new folder, where you're going to throw everything OAdev based, for example, OAdev.
2. Create two folders baseoa and missionpack inside of this OAdev folder.
3. After you run the building files, you'll see that there are some new files with the pk3 extension in the same folder as those two batches. Move them to OAdev/baseoa.
4. Now download the latest binaries from here. Uncompress them in the OAdev folder. You also need to move the dll files from your OA folder to the OAdev folder if you're under Windows.
5. Now do another checkout, in a different folder, and from http: //oax.googlecode.com/svn/trunk. (Without spaces) And, again, use the HEAD revision.
6. If you're on Windows, go to the folder windows_scripts and run every bat to create the files. If you're on Linux, just go to the checked out folder and run make.
7. Go to the build/[release]/baseq3 folder and move the vm folder to OAdev/baseoa.
8. Finally, make sure that you don't have any additional pk3 in your personal directory. (For example, C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\OpenArena\baseoa or /home/[user]/.openarena/baseoa)

And now you're ready. Just run the executable file and check out what's going on!

See ya!

Heya!

I've rescued some layouts from older backups which were unfinished. (A B-shaped 3-level layout, a non-finished remake of q3ctf1 with a Hydronex look, and a map where the fight takes place in the top of a building) Possibly, I'll be polishing them and merging with an idea Peter Silie gave to me long ago for a CTF map.

Sadly, I've lost forever an awesome CTF layout I did some time ago. It consisted of seven rooms with two levels each one: the flag base, a big L-shaped room, another lateral room to this one, (each of those three for each of the teams) and the central area, all of them connected by, at least, two ways. I was very happy with what I did in that map, so far. The only copy of it was in a pendrive which was damaged permanently. I should have done more copies of that map. -.- The only person who has seen that layout, so far, is "anyone/acc", the guy who made those awesome textures for oa_dm3 and oa_dm5. I've asked him to do textures for that map, (previously to that, we were working on a remake of oa_dm1 until he was aware that the remakes would be aparted from main OA in future versions) but he rejected the idea. :(

Talking about CTF, among the OA unofficial maps, there are many versions of OA's official map oasago2... I mean, I don't have anything bad to say of sago's awesome map, aside of some performance issues which were corrected in it's moment, (after 0.8.1, the changes weren't included in 0.8.5 BTW) it's one of my favourite official maps from OA, but there're many oasago2 versions out there... like UT3 and the lots of maps which reused time and time again the assets from DM-Sentinel, or the lots of Deck16/Face versions back in the UT days.

And since I've mentioned "Unreal", in somewhat related news, I've installed (three weeks ago) and beat (last tuesday) Unreal and the expansion Return To Na Pali, for the Nth time, this time in Unreal difficulty, heh. After finishing the final boss in RTNP, I became aware that OA needs something else to break the castle mood of many of it's maps. We have already industrial maps, temple-like maps, even generic and space platform maps. But I sense that something else is missing. The Unreal series (or, exactly, the Tournament games) was known for it's variety of visual themes in the maps. Perhaps what could fit in OA is an Ice map (in one of my mappacks I did a somewhat poor icy map) or a map which takes place in a cave a la DM-Rrajigar from UT2004, or the Rrajigar levels from Unreal. After all, we're not bound to the orange/brown mood of Q3A. (And before you tell me, I know, the 4th and 6th/7th tier of Q3A are different to the rest, as well as the CTF maps) I might experiment a bit with SimonOC's awesome tutorials about terrains and terrain blending for Radiant. He did, after all, the map La Bastille, and many of the maps for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

I might as well retexturize one of my already built maps as a cave/ice map, somehow.

See ya!

Well, let's see. You have the details at the top of this page to know who am I.

Something else? Ohm... yeah... I'll be using this blog to document my work for games, especially for OpenArena, as well as many other things gaming-related.

Since there's not much info about OA development, I might as well talk a bit about that, as long as leileilol allows me to tell that. :P

Nothing more to say by now.

See ya!