So after settling a few difficulties with some of the Advanced Challenges and tweaking the menus a bit, the creative process of making One Point One has come to a close. There remain only a few small barriers between what's on my C: drive now and what I can upload:
Recompiling all maps from scratch
This is the most boring and tedious step, especially since there are 49 total maps in One Point One:
- (1) Chambers 1-4
- (26) Chambers 5-30
- (4) Escape maps including the end sequence
- (9) Advanced Chambers
- (0) Challenges and Advanced Challenges (use the same maps as the originals)
- (6) Backgrounds (I was getting sick of the one I had before too...)
- (3) Alpha maps that'll show you a glimpse of some of where some of these ideas came from. One dates back to early 2008.
This part is rather Not Fun, and it's what I'm doing while writing this article (4 of 49 as of this sentence). The computer does most of the work, but it's slow and uninteresting to watch. It's necessary for lighting purposes and keeps filesizes down. After the maps are compiled, I'll need to build HDR and LDR cubemaps (calculate reflections) in the engine for each map and regenerate node graphs. The latter are what AI use in the Source engine to figure out how to walk from point A to point B and are (obviously) unnecessary in this mod. However, improperly built nodegraphs will cause an annoying "AI DISABLED..." message to appear. Worse, GLaDOS won't speak and turrets won't shoot, which makes about half of the levels unplayable.
Shell Scripting
Since I've been able to successfully run Gamma Energy on a Mac through an annoyingly complex hack because VALVe still don't actually support Mac sourcemods, I'd like to ship a shell script that pulls this off for you. This script is already written, but I'd still like to test it on the final version. On the Windows side of things, people have enough of a problem with "Copy the gamma_energy folder into your sourcemods directory" already. Installing One Point One is a little trickier if you want to keep your unlocked chambers and high scores in tact, so I've been working on a Windows installer. However, as great as I am working with Bash, Ruby, and Python, the Windows shell and I aren't really the best of friends. I don't want to write this in something that's not bundled with the OS, so I'm in kind of a predicament here. I'll try my best but if anyone out there knows a simple way replace a few seds with something more Windows-y, I'm all ears.
The Final Test
Though I've been testing the game at every step of the way, it's best to give it a good once-over to find anything that might have gone wrong in the last few days. After I've made the final zips, I'll install and play through from beginning to end twice - once with HDR and once without. Every so often, something doesn't look right even though recompiling the map without changing it will fix the problem. This step is also to ensure that each chamber correctly unlocks the next level and the appropriate bonus maps and that the installers are working correctly.
Upload, Update, Nap
The final step, obviously, is to share the completed work with everyone, post a nice little news update, then maybe try out this whole "sleep" thing everyone keeps telling me about. I hear it's quite relaxing.
