Monthly Archives: December 2008

This past week as been pretty…fruitful.  Well I don’t know if ‘fruitful’ is the word for it, but I have gotten quite a lot done!  A little over a week ago I decided that I had to finish up some of my projects.  So I made a list so I would have a visual representation of what I had left to do then and then I organized them by priorty and how close they were to being completed.  At the top of the list was IGPack.

I officially started IGPack on Oct 15th, 2007 as a community effort to create a set of maps suitable for Instagib modified variants of deathmatch. At the time my goals included a fun set of newshcool DM maps suitable for Instagib and regular DM, use of new textures to vary the theme between maps, new environment sounds (doors, lifts, etc), and some simple graphic replacements. At first some of the map submissions weren’t quite up-to-par with what I was hoping for and various testing sessions seemed to confirm this. After some ‘improvement’ related testing sessions, things started to look much better in terms of gameplay and IGPack was shaping up to be a pretty cool mappack. Around that time I thought it would be cool to have a custom fontset (at the time I was using the HACX font). From there on out I kept adding to the project in various ways and it has become a pretty big chunk of a project! I added quite a bit to my list of goals (some weren’t really goals, just cool ideas). Now we have a reloadable railgun, a new gamemode variant called “Altgib” which uses powered-up Karasawa’s instead of railguns, lots of new sounds and graphics, 3 new weapons from the canceled Sabbat Martry II for regular DM games, new fancy particle effects for OpenGL players, new skins and bots, a fairly interesting campaign called “Knee-Deep in GIBS”, and lots more!

Then a few months ago I stopped working on it altogether. My interest level in the project was beginning to waiver because I was getting burnt out on Doom editing and school was taking up the majority of my time. I knew that if I didn’t take a break, I would end up fizzling out for a long time…so, I took an extended break and concentrated on other things. I continued working on other projects at the time but not IGPack; later on I took a short break from just about everything. The break did me good, I think, as I wasn’t so inspirationaly drained and tired or working on the same thing for a long period of time. It was around this that I made my project list…and then I decided to start working on IGPack again! Since then, this is the list of what I’ve accomplished from that last test build (Zeta):

• Added and finalized the new font sets.
• Successfully integrated all of the maps from SMII (most should be updated soon…I hope).
• Rearranged all of the maps to the new/final map rotation.
• Added the Karasawa, Nailgun, and ProxLauncher (so instead of removing them from the SMII maps, I decided to just keep them and then use them in other maps as well).
• Added some of the new weapons in some of my own maps.
• Fixed a handful of map bugs.
• Added new railgun sound (thanks goes to Wartorn).
• Converted the light gradient textures back to .png.
• Organized all of the entries in the wad for easy editing.
• Started the readme.txt.
• Fix the altgib code so that it no longer displays the crouch error message in-game.
• Get music for ‘Downfalling’ and maybe ‘Bubonic Jungle’.
• Get the status of the CREDMAP; if needed, make a CREDPIC.
• Add ‘bordertexture’ MAPINFO entries for maps that need them.
• Figure out what I’m going to do with the CMPGNINF.
• Set CMPGNINF dmflags to have infinite ammo.
• Fix the Karasawa idle sound so that it doesn’t ‘pop’ at the end of the loop.

Considering it has taken me almost a week solid to do all of that, I think it’s a pretty impressive list Here’s what I’ve got left to do before I release Iota Build (the final test build)

• Get the SMII map updates from Dynamix. (three maps in total)
• Get updates for ‘The Volcano Installation II’ by Mastan
• Resolve the reloadable railgun clip issue that occurs online (is a bug in Skulltag; may not work until next release)
• Possibly add new ammo pickup sprites for the Karasawa (gotta hear back from Eriance first).
• Redo the Karasawa BoltTrail effect under my new specifications (gonna need help with this one)
• Add something completely awesome.
• Fix any remaining bugs that I can track down before the release of the final test build.
• Finish compiling readme.txt.

Most of what’s left on this list isn’t dependent on me to get finished, and I’m hoping that doesn’t end up becoming a problem. Not all of it is required to be finished (like the Karasawa ammo sprites) but other things, like map updates, are pretty much a given. I’m crossing my fingers that these guys will come through for me before the end of December because I have no intentions to continue working on IGPack into 2009 (unless something utterly drastic comes up…hey, it’s happened before!).

I’ve been renewed with enthusiasm for this project and I can’t wait to release it! Although I’m a bit apprehensive as to whether or not it will be played or if it will be lost in the sea of Greenwar and Dwango and COOP servers like so many other projects have in the past (*cough*SMDM*cough*). If it’s not fun then I can understand it not being played…eh, I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how things play out