Foreverhood sanity stories

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 18:52

Done!

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 10:09

Finilised the new blueprints to dusty valley today; this means i now have a clear picture on how much content must be built for this level to be classified as a "finished build", meaning the map is more or less done, minus some of the scripting and gameplay issues. Dusty valley (for those of you who aren't the beta testers browsing this forum) Is the largest map foreverhood currently has. Peaking at about 5 megs in size, dusty valley has begun to give zdbsp a problem with its size. There are now roughly 54000 sidedefs within the level, compared to the 53-something it had before i began re-working it this afternoon. For some reason, zdbsp will force compression of the nodes making doom builder disregard the fact that they have been built. I get a friendly error message that there was a problem building the nodes (map errors?), although in checking the map for unclosed sectors and sutch, the checks return just fine.

So, i switched over to Zennode, which works like a charm minus the 8 minute compile time it takes to build the nodes for saving the map. Well, at least it works.

With dusty valley well on its way to being classified as a finished map and the badlands (the second most done map) following close behind, i think after these next few sections get finished that i will put away the computer and go back to finishing the enemies for the game. There are roughly 7 or 8 more characters / enemies / people things that need to be concieved, drawn and digitised. Besids, i need some time to dwell on the worlds that still need to be built.

So the gameplan currently sits with the levels being finished by the end of the month and the new enemies and texture resources ready for early september, when i presume i will craft the last of the sections of the world. Perhaps by then there will be an offical zdoom release. I'm not programming a single weapon until all this madness in the unofficial build comes to a halt. Theres simply too much going on at this point to make any concrete judgements about anything involving decorate.

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 4:54

updated screenshots at the moddb site.

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 5:41

man, i havn't talked about foreverhood in a while now.

Anyway, the site has been updated for you all to check out. Its got a whole bu8nch of current screenshots from gameplay as well as a few showing the new things added to foreverhood, such as the cameratexture path signs. Take a look:

The mod stands at its half-way point awaiting for some intensive modivation to kick in. I've finished off and polished everything i've built so far, so its time to start creating stuff from scratch, which will require some careful planning on my part. With the current state of my part time job in question, i'll have to shift careers within the next month or so as well as finding a place to live outside of my basement. Both are things i dread.

Perhaps careful planning could have saved me quite a lump of time when it came to my ACS scripting. I noticed the other day that my hub wasn't defined as one. So after defining the cluster, i was pleasently suprised to find all my scripts are non-functional when the player re-visits a level. With four library files and severalhundread more in the actual levels, this could be a while. Hopefully the problem rests where i think it is, and its nothing a multi-dimensional array can't fix (to keep track of my assigned character dialog from level to level instead of writing new variables into the same array) With any luck, the problem might be just two small things. Realistically, i can see myself spending days on re-writing a simple function call.

*Sigh*

Oh, foreverhood is entered into the 2006 Independent gaming festival. Perhaps this will broden the amount of exposure the mod is currently getting. I was so eager to release a demo for people, but the problem currently is the mod can be beated anywhere from 6 minutes (my personal best) to about an hour or two. The second half will add a lot more of the classical shoot-em-up gameplay we doom fanatics have grown to love over the years. Hopefully that will stall most gamers for about an exdra hour. Shortest TC since ZanZan; Go skadoomer.

Post by **Paul** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 17:48

Can't wait for this

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 20:56

foreverhood is ready for opengl and polymost. Are you?

Post by **wildweasel** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 21:04

Looks more impressive every day. I'll be surprised if you don't win at least one IGF award, considering how many amazing effects you've managed to pull off with such old technology. Seriously. This has some amazing architecture.

Cutmanmike · Post by **Cutmanmike** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 22:10

Will it run on my machine is the question at hand.

Post by **ellmo** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 23:14

This is the most impressive thing I have seen since RTC. And it has everything that it takes to even surpass RTC...

I'm sometimes speechless when I see your progress ska. It's not because of architecture, but it is great as well, but I love that strange atmosphere. These are only screens, but your work creeps me out. It's like being nowhere. Phew!

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Wed Sep 14, 2005 16:37

Cutmanmike wrote:Will it run on my machine is the question at hand.

Its being built on a clunky PIII 700 mhz laptop with 256 mb or ram and a 32 mb geforce go card. Currently there is only one area where the fremerate tends to lag a bit.

Post by **Paul** » Fri Sep 16, 2005 15:25

I have a couple questions regarding Foreverhood Brian. I was wondering-should I ask them stragith ahead or should I pm You?

My hesitation is reasoned with the fact it'd include some swapping of development secrets. This does not bother my person but I'm not aware wether You'd like Your secrets (Foreverhood's infact) to be relieved in public.

Should I ask some questions here or go on with the private messaging system?

Thanks in advance

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 2:31

Paul wrote: wondering-should I ask them stragith ahead or should I pm You?

PM me.

My hesitation is reasoned with the fact it'd include some swapping of development secrets. This does not bother my person but I'm not aware wether You'd like Your secrets (Foreverhood's infact) to be relieved in public.

I'm all for sharing certin secrets, like ACS and texture meathods. Others like gameplay and character sketches i'd prefer to keep quiet.

Skadoomer · Post by **Skadoomer** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 3:09

small news update.

Yes i have been working on foreverhood, and it may be a while before any new content gets shown. I've been multi-tasking lateley to try and build the style of the remaining levels i need. The Level structure is changing a bit from rugged outdoor areas to more mature indoor structures for the later areas of the game. I'm still running through the motions trying to carry over the foreverhood style into these new areas to make sure there is a unified flow to the entire thing. So far it seems to look good.

I did hit one bad problem though: color. If the indoor areas are going to stand a chance against the outdoor ones, they have to have a different feel to them. If you can follow this logic, the feel comes from the textures, and the textures have to have a certin color vibrence from them. I absolutly hate making great RGB work only to lose the entire feel of the texture to the limited colors in the platette. So, i've decided to overhaul the palette.

So, i took the origional palette, this:

And trim away some of the doom fat, reposition some core colors and leave some room to expand. Ultimately i came up with this:

All of a sudden i have a few more spaces to work with so creating textures with a certin color vibrence isn't an issue. I have 46 more slots to use, so i must be wise about what i use them on.

Best part is there is no difference in any of the current content, however this means i have to re-import all the current content into the wad file. So far i'm half-way done with this process.

I've hit a weird problem though: XWE dosn't want to read hi-res files(large .bmp's) that are written by photoshop cs2. I can't understand why, but after automating the batch conversion for the game graphics, i get a bizzarre "read beyond file" error. Hopefully csabo will have a solution for this.

Soultaker · Post by **Soultaker** » Thu Sep 29, 2005 4:10

I got that same damn error when I was renaming DDF files in XWE.

Post by **ellmo** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 13:54

Your pictures have kinda... vanished. Have you removed them from the server or what?