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.

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.

Recently the team has been focusing on mainly art since our coder Jon (Killermonkey) is currently in the process of moving. So while he is away we are working on finishing up art assets that he needs to continue coding the mod as well as art that the mapper’s need to work on their maps. The whole project was restarted from scratch on the code side of things, but luckily this time around with a restart we had a bunch of art assets. All the old art can be transfered to the orange box update of the source engine with just a recompile of the models. We have been doing some small scale testing with the team and so far the game has been really stable even with us messing around trying to break the game. As the game code is getting closer to where it was before the switch Jon has also been adding new gametypes that showed up in the previous releases. Lately we have been testing a new version of You Only Live Twice. Apart from a few minor bugs the gametype works.

Now on to the bad news, the Red Alert 3 beta. All I can say is what a disaster. When it isn’t logging in that is the problem, it is network issues with multi-player games. When it isn’t those the keyboard doesn’t work, or if the keyboard works the user interface and buttons don’t work let alone respond to pushing escape on the keyboard. After hours of fighting with forwarding ports and jumping through rings of fire I have played one game and it wasn’t even with my friends. So far if I try to play with any friends and we all have firewalls down, ports forwarded, updated drivers, and anything else you can think of we have done and yet we get a lovely error that says that the game is waiting for the NAT refresh to finish. Is there an option for LAN play, nope no where in site even though it is a multi-player beta and they want to test online play a LAN feature would have been nice. Instead of fighting with ports we could all just jump on hamachi and play on a lan server fine, no problems. That’s how we do it with command and conquer 3 because the net code in that game is horrid too, and EA so far looks like there is no intentions to fix their net code making their customers suffer with a broken product.

Now on to something more than the problems. The game keeps the same look as red alert 2 and so far the music has been similar to the music from the first and second. I will update this section with pictures from the game and some comments on the units and gameplay after I actually get some solid play time in without errors.

As for the new blog, I am still getting used to wordpress and will end up finalizing the theme and layout of my blog. Right now it is just a custom theme I have been playing with to get a feel of how everything works. It will be a bit of a learning curve but I will try to get the site finalized and post a blog everyday or every few days.

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.