Untitled Downtown

My present project within the Source Engine: a yet untitled downtown scene, very loosely inspired by the Milwaukee downtown-area. The only textured part of this map so far is the parking garage. Partially because it is the only part of the modeling that is complete. The rest is still covered in developers textures as there is still re-sizing going on, so all textures would need to be adjusted anyway.

 

Bearing a bit if resemblance to the Bradley Center exterior is the arena portion of the map. My original plan was to have the player go through the front entry-way (but never actually enter the arena itself as this would require a large amount of modeling for an area I never intended to have the player enter).

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Survival Tunnel

Among another map I was doing for Left 4 Dead at the time, I chose to get sidetracked in to another, smaller map. In addition, I wanted to see if it was possible to create a survival map that would make survival much easier than standard survival maps.

Thus Survival Tunnel was created. As simple as it comes, there are 2 basic sections to defend from; both featuring near-unlimited weapons, ammo, pills, med kits, pipe bombs, and molotov cocktails. Granted that doesn’t mean you can just relax the entire time as tank battles may be more difficult given the small map size.

This map itself can be downloaded at the bottom of this post. To install it, simply copy the unzipped files to the Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\maps folder then run the game form the console using the following command:

changemap l4d_sv_tunnel

I was in the process of creating a .vpk file for it but never could get it to work correctly, so since I have no plans of distributing the map publicly anyway, I thought I would just release the map files as-is.

Download Left 4 Dead – Survival Tunnel

Self-Checkouts

Allow me for a minute to share some frustration with the self-checkouts; specifically at the grocery store. I am not going to rant about how it takes away jobs because frankly, I love them. What I don’t love about them is some of the people who use them.

All too often it seems people feel entitled or think they are too special to wait in lines. I hate waiting in lines at any store too, but I am not about to inconvenience others by taking an entire shopping cart worth of products to the self-checkout lane. I don’t care if each of the standard lanes has 3+ people in them (also with full carts) and the self-checkout has 3 people among the 4 total checkouts. If you have a full cart of stuff and you want to use the self-checkout to avoid waiting, tough!

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The Ethereal Plains – Announcement

Over the past couple weeks, I have found renewed interest in RPG Maker again. Having played with it on and off over the past decade, I decided to explore the newest version: RPG Maker VX Ace.

Previously I had worked with RPG Maker 95 a bit, but hadn’t really gotten in to it too extensively until RPG Maker 2000. I recall working quite a bit on an game using it but never got beyond the opening. For the most part, up until now, the most work I had done on one was to create a town, a hero, and a part of the world map. All with no planning at all; likely the reason it was never completed.

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