August 2000
I'm trying to start my own set
of Drakan servers, with different kinds of levels alternating after a certain
amount of time. Right now, I'm thinking of changing it daily, but
I'll just have to see what happens. There's not much time to write
today, so I'll just leave it at that.
There's nothing much going on
tomorrow, so I'll have some real time to wander the campus and see where
all my classes are. Madison is a huge college, with a lot of people,
and it's easy to get lost. I come from a secondary high school, the
School of Environmental Studies, which only has juniors and seniors, and
there are only about 400 students there. This place has almost a
hundred times that. So, it's a bit of a change, but I'll get used
to it. I'll even find a way to update this site from here, I'm sure.
If you see this entry, of course, that means I've figured it out.
You won't see this entry for
a while. I successfully set up my computer at college, and got connected
to the Internet, which is much faster through the dorm's Ethernet cable,
but I am no longer able to use my FTP program to upload files to The Sine
Wave. I'm still keeping up with my entries, though, because I'm not
giving up yet. I'm just glad most of my other programs work, and
I can still make Drakan levels. But will I have time for that after
classes start? I'll have to wait and see, but now, I must go to bed
because there's a convocation or something tomorrow in the morning, and
I don't want to be missing events during my first few weeks.
This entry will be my last one
from my house here in Minnesota. From now on, The Sine Wave will
be written from my room at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, if I
manage to get my computer set up there. I'm leaving Tuesday, but
tomorrow my family and I have to get everything packed up, so I won't be
able to use the computer. My pre-departure multiplayer Drakan ground
duel level, Cosmos, is ready after being tested
by Axial.
The time I have left before college
is almost over, and in case I can't play Drakan through the firewall there
or something, I'm putting Meridian on hold for a few days and making what
may be my last new multiplayer level. It's a duel level, because
they can be done quickly and work well with Drakan's net code. I
have compensated for errors in the game engine, as well as the complaints
from players about other duel levels. My new level is called Cosmos.
Just as in Edge, there is more than one duel weapon, but you start out
with all of them in Cosmos with the katana as the default. None of
these weapons have sparkle effects or flames or anything like that, because
there's a bug in multiplayer that sometimes leaves the effects behind from
dropped weapons. Also, to make this level the best I can, there are
four arenas, each with a different setup of healing pads. These pads
can be used during a duel if everyone decides the rules allow it.
I hope this level will have staying power in the online Drakan community.
Once again, there isn't a Meridian
update today, but this time it's unplayable in the state it's in right
now. That's because I'm adding an entirely new section to the level.
In the original Drakan, Arokh didn't get to do much while Rynn was away
in a cave. While I can't change Arokh's autonomous AI or switch control
over to him alone, I can make it so it's implied that Arokh did a great
deal of work while Rynn was elsewhere. In this case, there are two
paths in the level. On the easy path, you return to Arokh after deactivating
the force field and travel further through the canyons and go into a cave,
destroying some power crystals that deactivate another force field.
It's important that I make this so you don't have to get off Arokh at all,
because if you go the difficult way through the canyon alone as Rynn, then
I'm going to set up a detector to perform a series of tasks that makes
it appear as if Arokh deactivated the force field and destroyed the enemies
in his path all by himself. The enemies on the easy path will be
weak, of course, because I want it to look like it's possible for Arokh
to not take damage on his apparent solo quest. I'm not going to have
Rynn take damage arbitrarily to simulate Arokh getting hit.
Getting packed for college will
be a daunting task, but it's something that has to be done. Today,
I planned out with my family what I would bring, and what we still needed
to get. This is going to be a major change in my life, and I hope
it's for the better. I'll be getting a higher education, but there
will be so much responsibility and I might not be mature or experienced
enough to deal with it at first. This page will still go on, though,
but it might not be updated for a few days after August 28. You probably
already know all this from earlier entries, so I won't talk about it anymore.
Nobody was answering my Question of the Week, so I've removed it, and it
will return after my computer is set up at college.
In 6 more days I'll be at college.
I don't know if I'll be able to set up this computer in my room there,
but I'll try my best to find some way to keep this page going if it won't
fit. That's why I'm trying to work harder on Meridian lately.
I got a lot more done today than I usually do, but there's a bug with the
fortress section of the game that keeps the player from seeing that the
canyon after it is textured and now has a few enemies. Here's a tip:
when the switch disappears after you get the rune, type in "opensezme"
in chat mode, and the stone will lower. There are also some stones
at the end of the fortress that need to be lowered in the same way.
Sorry I didn't get those finished.
It's really not fair that Meridian
is taking so long and isn't available to play yet, but I talk about it
all the time. That's why I'm going to periodically release different
versions of the first level, still in development, until it's done.
After that, I'll release new versions every time I make a new level or
fix any really bad bugs. Most of the fortress is done now, and here's
a view of it:
I haven't done all the meticulous
layer visibility work that Sageous, one of the developers, does on his
levels, and I don't know if I'll have the editing skills to do it, so the
frame rate inside the fortress might get a little choppy. You can
download the current version here, and the file
will be updated as new ones are produced. I'll have it listed on
the Drakan links page with the version number.
The world is constantly shifting
and changing, and I'm always the last to know. Today was kind of
a dark day for me, so forgive me if I don't have much energy. It's
not as bad as it could be, but it's made me start thinking about stability.
Maybe Internet forum communities aren't as stable as I thought, particularly
the Drakan forum and a few others I visit. It just seems like they're
all falling away sometimes. I worked on Meridian earlier today, tweaking
the magic spells so thay have the right sound effects and inventory icons.
But that's not the real reason why that level series its taking so long.
The truth is, I try to work on it every day, but I only spend about an
hour to 30 minutes on it. I don't have much free time on the computer
anymore, and I've been busy playing multiplayer Drakan, plus those three
games I got for my birthday. But like I said, the Drakan community
seems to be fading to the point where I can't find a populated server late
at night, and maybe if I spend more time on Meridian and finish it faster,
it will bring more life to Drakan. Perhaps I'm just dreaming, but
I like to believe it will make things better.
Linking to a text message in
Drakan to activate it is impossible, but I am able to have a certain area
for which a message works and have it be disabled at first, but enable
it after an event happens. I've set it up so at the beginning, after
half a second, Rynn and Arokh have a dialogue after Arokh flies up into
the air and sees that the force field is closed. I'm also making
a new style of door, with the frame being the jump gate model from multiplayer
and the actual door being a stone that slides underground when the door
is opened. It's one of the new styles of mechanism and architecture
which were lacking from Dragonmech. In one of the later levels, I'm
planning on putting in an indestructible domed city with a door powered
by an underground energy source. This will be integrated into the
plot.
Today, I added more sound effects
to the first Meridian level, but I haven't even finished the fortress area
yet. I did set up the force field deactivation lever, which is also
going to control a gate in the city because I have it set up so that the
cave entrance on the other side of the canyons teleports Arokh to where
you are, and it wouldn't make much sense if he went right through the force
field, especially if you don't even deactivate it in the first place.
I'm not taking the Playstation
with me to college, so it looks like Final Fantasy VIII will remain a mystery
to me until I come back in December, and I don't know how long that vacation
will last. My Question of the Week hasn't been answered yet, but
it's kind of a lame question because rumors and industry news don't really
matter, and unoriginal games have already been talked about plenty, so
it will be changed on Sunday if I can think of a better one. Once
again, I spent most of today getting ready for college. It starts
in less than 2 weeks now. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to be the
one who freaks out all the time as soon as I get there, or soon after anyway.
On all my trips, I've been the freakout spaz, always doing something to
make a fool out of myself, but my trip logs don't really go into that because
it's kind of embarrassing. At the Japanese camp, Mori no Ike, I got
picked on and obviously didn't take it well because they didn't stop.
In Florida they said I had negative energy. In Utah, I ended up saying
some really disturbing stuff, and on my birthday, too. In Costa Rica,
I had a really bad sunburn for half the trip, after the surfing at La Cusinga.
That's why I didn't include any pictures of me in Monteverde or San Jose.
In Japan, I kept my cool for most of the trip, but I spazzed on my host
family when I thought I might have put them in the poor house by leaving
the Internet connection open for too long, and again when my umbrella broke
in Tokyo after I tried to shake the rain off. Speaking of which,
I should probably contact my host family again, to see if my blunders actually
did cost them a lot of money. If they did, then I'll demand that
those costs be charged to the trip sponsor, New Perspectives: Japan, on
account of the fact that I'm an imbecile and they should have expected
this kind of thing from me. My number one priority in college is
to not freak out, followed by a healthy social life and good grades.
It may not be the best thing to focus on but it's something I've failed
at for my whole life. All right, enough self-pity. I don't
need you to pity me either because as of now, I'm not going to freak out
anymore. If I do, I'll isolate myself from all other humans, never
go on the Internet again, and live as a complete and total hermit in the
wilderness.
Most of my time lately has been
taken up by preparation for college. I'm still studying that Japanese
textbook, learning all the stuff that doesn't overlap with my high school
lessons, and getting in shape for all the walking and biking I'll be doing.
It's going to be hard, but I'm sure I'll learn the layout of the campus
soon enough. Now, there's not much time to do anything computer game
related, but I hope I'll get some time in school away from studying that
I can use to update this page, work on projects, and play games.
Today, for a change of pace,
I played Diablo for a while, as well as trying to get a few of the cave
entrance object classes to work in Meridian. Now I can see why Diablo
was so popular - it has a simple system to learn, and you can spend a lot
of time accessorizing. If you don't like that shield, for example,
you can buy a new one after slaying some monsters and taking their gold.
If you want to be able to wield that long sword, then you can build up
your dexterity and strength until you're powerful enough to use it.
It's kind of like System Shock 2 because you can customize your character,
but you have to start as a character with one skill built up at the beginning.
I've been playing as the Warrior because the melee combat is easier than
archery or sorcery, and there's a good selection of weapons and armor to
choose from. I don't have to worry about strength requirements, but
I am limited on some items by magic and dexterity minimums.
Cutter Slade, the Ulukai, has
been exploring more of the landscape here on Adelpha. Today, through
the eyes of the Ulukai, I paid my first visit to the temple Fae, but was
quickly shot down by the guards. Somehow I need to weaken Fae Rhan's
army, but how? Perhaps I should finish my first task, finding Maar
and getting more information. I had that hallucination about the
human and the dragon again. This time, they were exploring a mysterious
world of sand, rock and water, battling strange-looking bearlike creatures
and armored soldiers with flaming javelins. My fellow Talans, I suggest
we try to find this world by recreating a daoka, which can only be done
with a material known as Grimstone. I know not what this material
is, or how to find it, but I must continue my search.
I have been exploring the world
of Outcast, my friends, and I have much to tell you. I am the Talan,
Zeoc, and I come to you with a request. Read this account of my travels
so far in this mysterious world of strife and intrigue, of power and chaos.
As I assumed the form of Cutter Slade, I jumped partially up a mountain
until I hit the limit, and then I talked to the Talan elder, Zokrym.
He told me to find the five Mons and defeat Fae Rhan and Kroax, the evil
usurpers of Adelpha. They had brought much suffering to the farmers
and the workers of Shamazaar and Talanzaar, and turned Motazaar into a
wasteland. It used to be a beautiful place, with mountains and grass,
but now it is merely a pile of rocks on magma. I looked with my usual
wide-mouthed concerned face, saying things I knew not, about the rods of
hot and the eleven of seven hut. As I jumped across the platforms,
I had a feeling that in a past life, I was a female of Cutter Slade's species
and I had a reptilian companion waiting for me somewhere. I paid
no heed to this hallucination and was soon in Motazaar, where I wanted
to see if the crusher would kill me instantly. Did it ever.
You may have missed it last year
because I was on the Utah trip, but today is my birthday. That's
part of the reason why I got those 3 games - they were gifts, and they
were also only about $10 each, so the combined cost of those games was
less than a single one of the newer games. I'm putting this entry
up early to see if anyone wants to wish me a happy birthday.
Well, nobody saw the page, but
I only had it up since about 12 hours before now, so I should have said
earlier when my birthday is. Sometimes it all gets caught up in the
story of the moment, like the latest games and demos and info on Meridian.
Anyway, I tried Diablo and it seems like it could be interesting.
I haven't played it much because I'm playing so many games at once.
Today, I reached the second world in Outcast. Before that, I downloaded
the demo of Heavy Metal FAKK2, and I haven't even gotten to the real combat
yet. Also, I worked on Meridian earlier, putting in some hidden magic
crystals, some landscape objects, and the force field generator.
Sometimes I wish there was more time in the day, or that I could make a
warp bubble around me that would make everything around me and my computer
appear to move really slowly. But then I wouldn't be able to surf
the Internet, for obvious reasons. Maybe I should just give up sleep
forever and go insane. I'm pretty much there already.
I got 3 games from the bargain
bins today. So far I've been playing Elder Scrolls: Redguard and
Outcast, but I still haven't installed Diablo. Redguard is a game
that unfortunately came out between the time when most games didn't need
a 3D accelerator and the time accelerator support was absolutely necessary
in the eyes of gamers. It only supports 3Dfx, which means me and
my Nvidia card are basically out of luck. I have to run the game
in software mode, and even at 640x480, which is its highest resolution,
it runs slowly on my system. The company that made it, Bethesda,
doesn't seem to be supporting it with patches for Direct3D or mouse control
or any of those other things we take for granted in games. At least
there's an interesting story and game world behind it. Outcast also
has a great story, and the gameplay is better because it supports the common
mouse and keyboard combo. The graphics are rendered differently than
other games, using voxels and antialiasing and water reflection effects
that aren't supported by 3D accelerators. I know antialiasing is
supported now, in the newer cards, but Outcast doesn't support acceleration
at all. It is confined to low resolutions, the highest being 512x384,
but my TNT card messes up the display in Outcast with resolutions higher
than 320x240, so I have to use that. But unlike other games, Outcast
makes that low resolution look fairly decent. It's not like in the
Quake series, or Drakan, or Unreal, where 1024x768 is the norm and anything
below 640x480 looks like a mess of pixels. I think it's mostly the
antialiasing that makes Outcast look good at these low resolutions.
Tomorrow I'll play more Outcast and install Diablo, and I'll see what all
the Diablo fuss is about. Maybe I'll get the sequel if the gameplay
style is fun for me.
Now I'm placing all the enemies,
and their obligatory waypoints, for the special items in the fortress,
such as the armor and the rune gauntlet. The orc leader waypoint
thing works great now. If you catch up to the orc and kill it, the
minions in the gauntlet room will all be behind the rocks, but if you don't,
it will be waiting for you there and its minions will be ready for the
attack. I'm also placing plants and trees there, but they're making
the frame rate worse so I'll have to use visibility togglers in some of
the hallways. I have a feeling like I'll be the visibility toggler
expert once I'm done designing this blasted fortress.
One thing you may have noticed
in Dragonmech is that there weren't any ambient sound effects. It
wasn't that obvious, though, since you can't turn off the music when it's
playing as a looping sound effect that's always on the camera, but sounds
really add to the atmosphere. I've added some dripping water effects
to the caves and put wind up high in the sky, in open spaces. If
I have rope bridges, the obligatory triggered creaking sounds will be there,
and perhaps mysterious voices will appear when the villain is near.
The villain this time is Andar, a ghost who acts friendly at first but
then decides you need to die. I didn't really spoil the plot because
Andar will be suspicious from the beginning anyway.
It seems that in the first orc
attack in the fortress in the first Meridian level, with the scripted waypoints,
has a flaw. You can escape the minions, chase down the orc, and kill
it before it gets to the rune gauntlet room. This could actually
be changed from a flaw to an advantage you can take. If you don't
kill the orc leader, the minions in the rune gauntlet room will be ready
for you. If you do, it will never reach that room to tell them about
it. Maybe I'll have them be sleeping behind the rocks or something.
Today, I got to practice some
Japanese in kind of a real life situation. I was playing Drakan online,
and there weren't any Japanese people on there but there were some of my
friends speaking Norwegian. They wouldn't tell me what they were
saying, because I had joked by turning all the words into English ones
that looked like them, so I started to speak Japanese to them. Of
course, they started doing the same thing to me that I was to them, so
it wasn't really study per se. But earlier today, I did really study
some Japanese from the textbook, and there is some stuff I haven't learned
yet, like the cause/effect syntax and a lot of the vocabulary. The
reason I started playing Drakan today was because I just wanted a quick
game on the Arena levels, but I ended up testing a level online.
It's called Lunice Siren, by Lirah, and it looks like a good duel level.
I don't know if it will be on servers as much as the mainstay maps Rotation
and Resurrection, both by Mr. Anderson, but if it has a good catch, like
the sharks swimming around the edge of the arena, it should be interesting
to a lot of people. There are a lot of Drakan maps that are really
good but are underplayed, like Andhorn by Lord Stone. That's one
of my favorites.
I did it! I made a sequence
in the fortress in my new level Meridian using triggers and waypoints.
When you're seen by the armored orc in the passageway, it yells at the
two other orcs standing beside it, and they come get you. Then the
armored orc runs into the room behind you and yells at the two orcs there,
making them come get you too. Finally, it runs all the way to the
room where the rune gauntlet is, where it waits along with four other orcs,
who will come at you from behind the rock ridges. I'm really getting
the hang of this waypoint sequence stuff.
There is a limitation with the
text message function in Drakan. If you try to type in or copy into
the parameter box a message that has more than 512 characters, the editor
will crash. I don't know why this happens, maybe because of a memory
overflow or something, but it just won't support big dialogues. It
looks like I'll have to split them up. As for the Tuiri character,
I've decided to use an animation model that disappears in a bright flash
on the screen when the text message disappears. When I need her to
move, like from out of or into the sky or to another room, it looks like
I'll be using STOMP for that.
I've finished the texturing in
the city, which is actually more like a fortress, and now I'm working on
adding the Tuiri spirit and putting messages into the game. My first
efforts, which were to use animation demos or waypoint followers, aren't
working as I planned because Tuiri won't move after the message is triggered,
so I might have to use STOMP for this one. I'm really inexperienced
with STOMP, but I think I can learn it and use it well once I master the
interface. The editor crashed while I was making up the first of
my text message dialogues. That's not a good sign, but I'm sure everything
will work out in the end.
One of my favorite mods for Unreal
Tournament is Unreal4Ever, because it has a lot of cool weapons that you
can make appear randomly on a level. I especially like Full Nodepath
Spawning because you can fill the level with all the weapons and ammo from
the mod. There are about 30 to 40 weapons, and most of them are effective
and fun to use. My favorite is the katana melee weapon. When
you equip it, you can run really fast and jump really high, so you can
outrun your opponents, and it does a lot of damage. It also has a
secondary function that works like the Translocator but takes a while to
charge up after you use it. It shoots out a purple beam, that teleports
you to where it stops. You can telefrag opponents this way.
I played a game of single player Unreal through UT and summoned the katana
on the first level, and found it to be very useful in the game. It
even let me go places that I'm not supposed to, like over the gate to the
Chizra temple and on top of mountains. When a titan showed up, I
would just activate the purple beam and teleport into it. This trick
also works with the Translocator if you summon it.
The ground level of the city
in Meridian really needs some work, so I'm adding new textures to it.
First, I made some rock ridges in the ground that are inside some of the
rooms. Then, I put a grass texture on the outside of the city.
This was only necessary for where you could see outside, but it was easy
to do and I wanted to be thorough. I'm only going to put plants where
you can see them, because I don't want unnecessary models to lower frame
rates. When I put enemies in the city, I'll probably use visibility
togglers, partly because of the unnecessary model thing, but mostly because
if I didn't, all the monsters would come to me instead of waiting in their
rooms. That would be a good strategy sometimes, so I might just use
togglers on some enemies. I just don't want to have an enemy that's
supposed to be guarding treasure but charges at you even if you don't approach
it. Now, I'm still doing texturing, and I'm adding patches of dirt
to the grass in some places. It adds more variety to the graphics,
and it makes sense because the city walls block out some sunlight.
I'm trying some new things with
layer design in Meridian, like underwater caves. In my last level
series, Dragonmech, as well as all my multiplayer levels, there haven't
really been any complex underwater layer structures. I'm working
with a basic one in Meridian, but I'm having trouble with the ceiling layer
not being recognized as being underwater. This doesn't affect swimming,
but when the camera moves around to under that ceiling, the screen doesn't
have the blue filter anymore, and the ceiling doesn't shimmer. I
have remedied that by placing an invisible layer between the floor of the
cave and the ceiling layer below it, of the underwater cave. The
vertices over the ceiling have been changed to the water type, so now everything
works all right. I also finished with the flooded canyon, placing
health crystals on the cliffs and adding some giant dragonflies as initial
enemies. Then you go into the cave to fight spiders, but don't worry,
you won't be fighting bugs all day. The city on the other side of
the cave is home to orcs and Wartoks.
There's only one month until
college starts, and I need to get in shape for all the walking I'm going
to be doing at the huge UW-Madison campus. I went on a bike ride
today, along the usual path, and got tired more quickly than I have before.
Of course, I did just recover from pneumonia, but now I need to do other
stuff to get ready as well, like learn how to be more independent.
This isn't one of my two-week trips for high school, after all. I'll
be on my own, away from my family, for a while. I plan to keep in
touch with them, but I won't see them until the holidays.