End of Spring Break 2016

Looking back on my start of the break post, I didn't realize how far I'd come in one week. I'm just going to jump right into it and show my progress.

I finished this side street






Then touched up on the other.


Then completed the plaza






You may of noticed the abundance of metropolice. Well that's because I figured out how to make them patrol! Now I have a team patrolling the streets, one patrolling the plaza, and then a few more standing guard at 'key locations'. I'm still nailing down the balance between the number of police and patrol locations. I doubt I will end up with the 15 patrolling the plaza like I had when I was messing around.

What's next? I have two more areas to finish up, then we move on to lighting, detailing, scripted events, and some sort of narrative. Walking around a combine occupied city is fun (At least for me) but that's not what people want. They want a great story, action, and memorable characters... I can offer only a bit of that.

But it's time to start up the school grind again. This term should be quite a bit easier than the last and not having 5:30pm-8:30pm classes is a huge plus. I also need a bit of a break as I spent quite a bit of my break working on this. Time well spent if you ask me. Next week I want to make a video showing the metropolice patrolling and some of the weird behavior they can have.

Spring Break 2016

Here we are, finally made it to spring break. Long awaited but too short as always. Only the first two days into it and I've made progress on my map. As you saw previously, I wanted to start by building my own little street block but then have it move into a court yard area. I originally started with a court yard inspired by the iconic one in City 17, but I decided it was too small and generic. As I have always planned to include HL2 beta content, I decided to base the court yard off of a mix of C17 and E3_Terminal, a leaked HL2 beta map from 2003. It's much larger and has more of a grand train station. Obviously I can't just copy and paste all this stuff into my map, so I'm making progress one building at a time.

I don't want to do a wide shot of the courtyard until it's finished, but here are some of the buildings I've added to it.







Last is the train station I'm working on, with citadel and all.



So progress is slow but I'm really enjoying the time I'm putting into it. The skybox is being really finicky and sometimes just doesn't show the citadel at all, so I'll have to work on that.

Other than that, there you have it. Actual progress. I plan to get much more done over my break as far as completing the layout of the city and it's buildings. Then comes lighting, NPCs, decoration, additional content, scripted sequences, and some sort of narrative.

I actually told some IRL friends about this blog. So if you are here for whatever reason, Hi there!

Dead Week.

Oh man, I missed last week's post. In my defense, it was the start of Dead week and now we are at finals week. This isn't a blog for my personal life so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but things aren't looking good on my end. The odds are stacked against me here and it seems like graduation is going to be put off by an entire year. It's not the worst thing in the world I guess, I mean, at least I'm still working towards my degree and will get it one day. Still makes me feel like shit though.

But Nathan! Shouldn't you set aside your modding dreams that you aren't making progress on and focus on school? Nah. I mean I admit I need to focus on my personal life and make some drastic changes, but I'm not going to give up on my mod. The LEAST I want to do is release one completed map. Maybe just something to walk around in or small fight scenes. It's not like I'm taking time away from the rest of my life to work on it, THEN we would have a problem.

I still want to make a Source Mod, a Source Filmmaker short, a Unity game, learn programming languages... and it's the dream that one day I will be able to do this stuff that keeps me going. This blog is my whiny corner of the internet that keeps reminding me to work towards that and have something to show at the end of the week.

The the end of this week, I'll be done with finals my spring break will of started and I can continue working on my map/playing around with programming languages. Hopefully next week I will have something to show, at least talk about something more interesting life mods or something.....

Also, how am I getting page views? Who is reading this? I don't know what those few people expect of me, but there won't be anything interesting here for awhile.