A Very TF2 Halloween
http://www.teamfortress.com/pumpkinpatch/
Being the TF2 obsessed freak that I am, expect me to be nowhere but on said game for the next weekend. Homework be damned!
Ah yes, College.
Well, since I blew this weekend doing nothing but sleeping and watching movies, it looks like I'm spending the next week dealing with an abundance of school-related materials. Also, apparently some projects were larger than expected, so now I get to even have more work! So yea, expect me not to touch anything not related to my schoolwork for at least a week.
Out of boredom spawns productivity
So around 3 AM I was dicking around TF2 with a friend when I thought "hey, wouldn't it be fun to replace demoman pipebombs with something that forces the hit players to rtd?" (For those of you in the dark, rtd = roll the dice, a mod that gives a random good/bad effect to a player who rolls). And so after some time, the mod was made and we spent a good 2 hours 1v1ing on with demomen, with him unfortunately constantly rolling god mode and health boosts. And so after that, I went to sleep, and decided to improve the plugin a bit, make it work for any situation, and then release to AlliedMods. And then I did, despite some hiccups while posting.
And then I fell asleep again, then woke up to write this, and now I'm going to watch Stargate: Universe. Which by the way, sucks pretty bad so far and I'm HOPING it'll improve eventually after they get through the "BAWW WE'RE TRAPPED AND CAN'T GET HOME AND SHIT IS BREAKING DOWN AND I'M GOING CRAZY" phase. I'm serious, if I end up sitting through a whole season of this bullshit, I'm going to be pissed.
Library Expansion
So, due to the lack of creative direction, fro has gone nowhere in terms of mapping except for random modifications of the single library map, and random (read: generally pointless) worlds. So I've decided to take the initiative and begin expanding the main library, as the library is the main focus of the story of fro. If things go as planned, I will be creating a very simplistic set of maps, and hope that Moon will actually be able to improve upon them. This, of course, was the original plan on how we're going to design things, as it's quite hard to simply tell him "I want a massive library" and expect him to know exactly how to lay it out. Teamwork is essential.
So that is yet another project I'll be dealing with soon, but probably not too soon as this particular weekend I'm quite bogged down in school work (Calculus exam studying, paper analyzing various aspects of Jane Goodall's book, 2 programming projects where one of which may actually take more than an hour, and an online anthropology exam). Also let us not forget the ongoing search for the issue that's causing the Freeze Tag plugin to malfunction on the DDR #10 test server, and finishing converting fro's codebase to the new, cleaner and less headache inducing format.
So, has anyone found a way to clone humans yet? Because I would love some copies of me right about now.
MAZES EVERYWHERE
While digging through Sourcemod plugin requests, I noticed a thread that suggested some sort of maze map generating plugin. Now, I don't think the poster wanted a plugin that actually created the maze, but instead wanted something that would randomly move spawn points and maybe place sentries around. And thus, this gave me an idea. Why not have a plugin that randomly generates mazes? Empty, box map (Something I can actually do in Hammer!) and wall entities that are placed via an algorithm. I mean, it's not like I've never written maze algorithms in my spare time before, I have at least 3 variations laying around. So why can't this be done?
I'll tell you why, because I have no clue how to spawn entities (but I can surely learn that!) and can't make a simple wall entity (probably can learn that too!)... well, maybe I can't spawn too many entities (but I .. wait, what is the limit before lag?) Surely, this will be something I wish to test out in the near future. Turn it into something like randomly positioned control points or flags and we're in business. I don't know how fun it could be to play, but from a design standpoint, it sounds like a fun project.
(Note: Doesn't mean I'm actually undertaking this project... it was just something I'm theorizing. Or maybe it does mean I'm starting on this, who knows?)