Progress Update - and Stuff™! - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## Progress Update - and Stuff?!

#### Fri, May 11th, 2001 | 7:20pm

Never mind that Stuff™ business. it's a private joke. :)

I started slinging brushes for Coriolis Force the other day. Things were going great, lighting is a pain in Q3 as always (I've yet to try out a modified q3map Friction found me, mainly because it's not based on the latest q3map), but I began to notice all the textures I did last August look a lot better in Photoshop than they do in Q3 with lights shining on them used next to one another. I'm now going to have to go through all the textures I made and adjust them for brightness, sharpness, contrast, detail, color, saturation, and a host of other tiny little things. this shouldn't be too hard since most of the textures are based around just a few base textures, but I'll still have to resave all the copies of each one. bluh.

Needless to say, it's a bit discouraging, if only temporarily. I don't really feel like going through all the textures and fix0ring them at the moment, but as I was poking around with them I found e:/photoshop/DoomQ3/, left over from when than and I really honestly thought a Doom deathmatch mod for q3 would be a good idea (it would because Doom DM rocks, but you can imagine what legal hilarity would ensue). There's a bunch of stuff in here I really like - I converted the greywalls, the starbase walls, and miscellaneous floors and ceilings. Needless to say (didn't I just use that phrase?), I started playing around again with those, combining them with new material, and pretty soon I had taken off in a completely new and entirely olive-green direction. I dunno, I think I may start working on a Lun3DM3, just as a release ... :D Besides, Lun3DM2 was released last June, and Coriolis Force won't be arriving for a wee while yet (ah ha, ha), and I'd hate to deprive you all of the moonly magic for too long.

I've started modelling a bit for CF too, mostly items. At this point I'm going to have to do a bit more creature modelling than I would like, but I think it's necessary to preserving the good gameplay and monster mix I've created (with the grateful assistance of Aardappel, Metlslime, and the various posters to the QMap "Hitscan Enemies Are Dumb" thread) and should prove to be a good learning experience. IE, either I'll learn to animate or I'll learn I suck at it. :) As far as enemies go, I'm going to have to model a scorpion (done) and animate it (not done, but not forseeably difficult as it's just a big bug) as well as a guard dawg (I wonder how I'll get sound effects for that ... just go piss off somebody's dog and bring a tape recorder?) and two humans. Yes, I originally didn't want to model humans, but the way I see it, I can get two extra monster models (which I'll need) if I use the Grunt and Lucy animations and just attach a new mesh to them. Voila, problem solved. er, so long as Mete Ciragan adds Character Studio .bip support to Milkshape in the future. :)

I also have begun perusing the Q3 1.27 source code, just to try and get myself acquainted with it (the more coding I can take off of Mickey's hands the better), and while I doubt I'll ever really understand the whole mess (for every element in the game, such as a weapon, there's like ten different functions in ten different files that all relate to each other in variously complex and not-understood-by-me ways), it has provided some amazement (Carmack actually WROTE all this stuff!?) and mirth:

> i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?

It's funny because I have no idea what's so noteworthy about that line. :)

Finally, I apologize for the fact that you can't go "back" to this page without it refreshing. I'm not sure if it's something to do with http cacheing I'm just not doing with my HTML headers, or if it's Fragland, but either way I know it's a pain in the bum (it is for me, especially because it's probably tripled the rate of increase of the half-arsed counter I implemented over there on the left). I'll see what I can do.