Design

The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind of all sorts of things. Well pretty much everything but mapping . I got my hands on some Armored Core ports for the PSP recently and much of my gaming time has been focused on those. I even went as far as to compile a Hidden Parts Guide for it since the community hadn’t filled that void yet. I also recently made the decision to go back to school and finish up my degree. There were some personal issues that sorta hindered my college endeavors and really almost made me say “the hell with it”. But I realized that if I don’t go through with it, I may regret it. So it’s very likely that I may have to cut down on my mapping and other activities this coming Fall; it sorta sucks but I think most anyone would agree that it’s way more important. On top of that, there have been some really retarded issues that have been coming up in relation to my extended family. Long story short it’s put a lot of stress on the entire family as well as myself. So, I don’t know, it’s just extra baggage that I don’t care to be carrying around right now. It’ll probably also put some sort of hindrance on me as I head back to school as well as my personal and communal projects.

With the time away from the computer, I’ve been pondering my various projects and involvements in community related efforts. I was actually having a somewhat hard time getting away from Doom Builder a little over a week ago when I wanted to take a break. This time I was either having a hard time convincing myself to even turn the computer on or I was too busy dealing with bullshit or something else. Really, I could probably do with a few more days off from anything computer related. But seeing as how I don’t have much else to do during the day that doesn’t bore me to tears, I decided to hop back and and put my focus into mapping. And so that’s what I’m going to do!

I thought it would be a good idea to cap off where I’m at on each of the projects I’m working on. And also to briefly list off my future plans for each of them.

Vela Pax
The last time I stopped working on this, I was about 35-40% complete with MAP05. To give you a little perspective, from my last blog post with the work-in-progress screenshots, I was probably somewhere around 10-15% done. I’ve been moving at a steady pace on the map although it’s been a somewhat slow pace. Slower than I’d like, anyways. I’ll begin working on this map again today and hopefully I can progress a little faster now that I’m working my way into base layout. My goal is to be half-way or more finished with the project before Fall hits.

There was a concern I was having about the music; specifically the file size of the whole new music chunk. I have pretty much found all of the tracks that I want to use. The issue is that it’s going to be somewhere around 19 MB of extra space. If you think about it, that’s not a whole lot by today’s standards. But in comparison to the file sizes of a Doom map, it seems sorta lop-sided. I made some swap-outs and sacrifices here and there and I was able to find a working play list that equaled 10 MB; in comparison though, that 9 extra MB doesn’t really seem to make much of a difference. The music is in .it tracker format and they are of pretty high quality. They convey the mood I want for the maps almost “to a tee”. With some of the maps going to be a hour or more long in play length, my reasoning was that the large music file size was worth it in that regard. I would really like to hear opinions on this. But I think in the end, if I really think the music fits the map and works well with the project as a whole, then I’ll just have to overlook the file sizes and ignore the file size nazis.

Supplice
Ever since I started working on Vela Pax, things have slacked off tremendously with Supplice. Which is no surprise; I can only focus on one thing at a time and I don’t like working on other major projects until I’m done with the ones I’m working on. I guess you can chalk that up to my horrible multi-tasking skills. The only real work that has been done is the music; Jimmy91 is the man to thank for that. He’s been making some amazing tracks given my weird tastes and requests. Jimmy is really the only man whose done a considerable amount of work on the project so far.

To be fair though, I have done a few things since I first announced the project. Jimmy and I have discussed many of the project’s ins-and-outs in depth and we have a pretty good plan to work by so far. I attempted to try and create my own textures for the project; this is still pending but I will likely make a final decision on if I want to pursue that option once I make a few more textures. Right now it’s still mostly working out how we want to approach the various aspects of the project; we are pretty close to the point where actual work needs to begin so that we can knock out all of the resources and begin mapping. However I have planned on finishing up Vela Pax first before I start any major amount of work on Supplice again.

TSoZD
At this point I’m not really even sure why I’m on the team for this project . I really haven’t done a damn thing since I was put on the team. Other projects have been eating up all of my time unfortunately. Things have really been moving at a snail’s pace other than what essel and Vader have been working on. I recently had a discussion with essel about whether or not I was still interested in the project and what ideas essel had to get the project moving again. I’ve tried on a couple of occasions to break myself from whatever I was working on at the time and try to get something started for this. And every time something would prevent me from getting very far.

Basically, I’m still very interested in the project and contributing to it. The problem is that with all of the stuff I’ve got coming up in the near future, I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to work on this. My goal is to try and start something before my classes start this August; that way I will at least have some ideas and a base to work from when I do have the time. After that, the trick will be trying to balance this with Vela Pax, other real-life activities, and school work.

Vaporware
So this project is pretty much in the same boat as TSoZD, unfortunately. To add to it, there are a number of Eternity-related editing additions that I’m not familiar with. As far as the mapping process is concerned, that’s going to slow me down a bit. Although I have done a little bit of work for it so far; I made a font set for it a while back although I’m not even sure if it’s going to be used. And I try to remember and test out the work in progress maps that are posted when I have a chance. But no, I haven’t started any mapping yet .

I was planning on doing 2 or 3 medium-length, hell-themed maps for the project. And whenever I can seize the free time to do it, I will. I don’t know what that will be though.

Long story short, I’m back in the same predicament that I didn’t want to be in and had worked hard to get out of when I hopped on board Project Vega Too many projects to work on/contribute too, not enough time and little-to-no tolerance to hop around from one to another. I try to remind myself that they are just games; they are nothing to be stressed out over. But I guess with everything that’s been going on my own little world, it’s sorta been eating away at me. So I’m gonna try and drown myself in some mapping for the time being