Takin' Care of Byzness - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Takin' Care of Byzness

#### Tue, Oct 19th, 2004 | 2:57am

I don't feel terribly well right now, and haven't for some time. And it's only the mid-term. I suspect I can count myself among the heartily blessed should I live to see Thanksgiving.

But what the hell do you care?

There's a new map on the site. My joint conversion of CPM18 with Swelt is finally done after much hemming and hawing on my part. The problem was, I hemmed a whole bunch, and realized that because of the strange bounds of the English language I couldn't avoid further hawing as well, and that was a lot of time just shot right there.

Byzantine progresses, although not quite in the manner I had hoped. See, I'm a moron. Allow me to explain.

Take Checkers, the drive-through burger place. Checkers is unique amongst fast food chains for its ingenious deployment of not one, but two drive-through lanes, one on either side of the building. Naturally, this puts a delivery window on either side of the car, so that one lane is for drivers who are by themselves, and the other is for drivers with a passenger riding shotgun, and morons like me that don't pay attention and have to put it in park and climb over the fucking seat. You see?

This isn't just limited to food service, though. Oh, no. I'm a moron 24/7, including when I rummaged through the Doom3 assets to determine what I'd have to do to change the monsters' stats and such to adjust the gameplay to my liking. I looked through the AI .script files and was disappointed to see no references to monster health, damage dealt, etc. It was all just stuff about animation. There was, of course, that monsters.def file, but I'm a bloody genius that knows that a .def file is just a little entity descriptor that Radiant needs in order to know what size to make the bounding boxes.

I concluded that genuine monster changes couldn't be made without the SDK, and set about waiting for it.

Even after Obihb released a single-player Doom3 map with a new monster in it (a rather rotund and hell-knight-esque cousin of the Shambler) I still didn't take the hint, or even have the idea to look in Obi's .pk4 to see what he did.

Needless to say, the SDK came out, I still didn't find what I was looking for, went back, and discovered the magic of Doom3's .def files. The upshot of all this is that I could have been spending all this time on gameplay adjustments and Byzantine map alphas and had some playable bits up and going first, which was my goal all along, but instead all I have to show so far are some map textures and drawings. Now I'm so deep into classes this quarter I probably won't have time to get to it until I fly back to E-town (not to be confused with its much larger neighbor Chi-town) on turkey day.

I suspect I might also be able to count myself among the heartily blessed should Byzantine be completed by the time I graduate in May. There's a lot to do between now and then.

I'm going to curl up with my pillows now, so I leave you with this: