Ryan’s Blog

What a year it has been. Since I started this site a lot has happened. I started college, the mod team had a big release, and I realized how hard it is to keep a blog up to date (obviously), but I am going to make a better effort to keep this up to date with things I find online that interest me, my projects, and just what I have been up to.

Since the last time I wrote I have started college at the University of Advancing Technology. My major is 3d art and animation, and if everything works out I hope to work in the game industry one day. My first year was alright. My favorite class I took was with motion capture and animations. I learned the pipeline animators used from capturing, cleaning, and eventually attaching them to a model and putting them into a game. This was during my first semester. My second semester I took more generals and I took a class about Games and Society. We looked at both sides of the ever growing topic of games and their effects on society. I thought this class was really interesting because we heard about news stories that we have never heard and some that we have and we discussed and shared our ideas on the matters.

Other than school I have been working and working on the mod Goldeneye: Source. After over 2 years we finally released a new build for the public to play. The mod was downloaded over 1500 times in the first night. This has been an on-going project and we will not stop until we are completely done.

Another thing I have been doing is playing with my camera and taking pictures. I will try to find some to put on here to show what I have been up to.

That has really been about it. Not too exciting but that has been what ate up my time following my last post.

I know just from the blog title everyone has huge expectations of what this could possibly be about right? Well yes Goldeneye 64 and the original Red Alert were amazing games, that’s not what I am going to talk about. I am going to be talking about the work I have been doing on the mod Goldeneye: Source and the new Red Alert 3 beta.

First let’s start with the good news, Goldeneye. Recently I began to redo and revamp a lot of my older work for the upcoming release. I started with some of my very first props I ever made for the mod. It is neat to see the improvements from my originals to the new counterparts and I am glad I spent the time to get them up to par with the rest of the art in the mod.

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Hi and welcome to my blog. It’s not much right now but I plan to update this with stuff from my work from the mod team I am on. Lately I have been focusing on getting school set up and haven’t had much time to work on the mod, that and on my free time Team Fortress 2 steals my attention.

For the past few months the team has been working on transferring the game to the new version of the source engine that launched with the orange box last October. Base game play is in and we are starting to work on adding more weapons and game types along with the finished HUD for the game. The main thing that is taking awhile is that all the model assets had to be recompiled to work on the new engine since they changed the format of the models. Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as it sounds since we have had lots of people helping with the mod since it originally started and model source files aren’t always available to recompile. I will occasionally post some news on the mod on here.

In other news the TF2 Heavy update is out. This update seems to be the biggest update to date with an entirely new game mode, 3 weapons, and 3 new maps along with 3 level variants for the new game type. One thing in the update that is probably my favorite is the new environments. Lumberyard leaves the desert floor and is perched up in the mountains. It is a new environment but unfortunately the buildings still look the same. I can understand that it would have pushed back the release of the pack if they had to make all new art assets for a new environment to be used in a single map.