Another Great Weekend Coming Up
This week sure seemed to fly by fast! Just the way I like it. Now that it’s “finally Friday morning,” as they say on the radio down here, I can hopefully get out of here a little bit early, head home and pop a Voyager DVD in the deck. I’ve also got Wolfenstein project stuff on the front burner, plus some work to get done—I’m taking my wife’s car in to have something looked at, washing the Trans Am and doing some revisions to a client website. My wife and I rented a movie to watch and we’ll be hanging out as usual on Sunday, our mutual day off.
How about those Detroit Pistons, eh! I watched Game 3 of the NBA finals last night, and boy, was it ever sweet. The Pistons destroyed the Lakers by 20 points and never once trailed in the entire game. After a disappointing Game 2, where Detroit had the win in the palm of their hands and let it go to the showboating La-Las, it was great to see Billups, Wallace and the others come back and really school those Hollywood types. Awesome stuff!
Throughout most of this, the media circus surrounding the NBA finals has been heavily weighted in favor of the Lakers. Last time I happened to see the sports section of USA Today, every single headline was about the Lakers or a Lakers player. Well, last night the commentators finally began to acknowledge that Detroit was playing the superior game, instead of just concocting excuses that LA was off or making mistakes. Comically, though, at the end of Game 3, when the final score was displayed and announced on ABC, they had it reversed—Pistons 68, Lakers 88—and the commentator even read it that way. As Sparse said, “Guess he was almost paying attention…”
In the realm of Wolfenstein, I’ve decided to scrap most of the hard work I had recently done on my new project. Originally I had planned a few engine enhancements—a couple new door types, some new sound effects, new actor sprites, a slew of new wall textures which I had had-designed—but after playing a 60-level mapset called acktung, I have decided to get rid of some of these features and go back to a somewhat more pure Wolfy experience. I’ve thrown out all non Wolf/Spear textures, scrapped the new doors and sound effects, left in the old actor sprites (except for the SS and the new stormtrooper, which I’ll get to), and trashed the three levels I’d created so far.
Suffice it to say, acktung really inspired me. (Before you ask, the name of the mapset is spelled that way because the designer calls himself “ack”.) Those levels are pure Wolfenstein—no other changes to the game at all—and in just the few hours I’ve spent with them, I can see they’re some of the best designed levels I’ve ever played. Ack is an old-school mapper and has been doing this since the early nineties, maybe even before I got into it. His technique, like mine, is very much evident of his old roots in the hobby, but he seems to have a broader range of design styles which I’ve not really achieved. The people really seem to like it, because acktung consistently ranks in the top five Wolfy mapsets of all time.
So, I decided to start again, and create a new mapset which was more like acktung and my second release, Conflict in the Fatherland. There are still some changes, but I tried to keep them all very “Wolf-like.” I’ve added some walls from Spear of Destiny and a few new gun sound effects. I’ve replaced the blue SS with the custom blackshirted one I designed a few years back, and the mutant—since I’m tired of mutants—has been replaced with new artwork of a half officer / half guard type guy with a cyan uniform, and who now behaves more like an officer than a mutant as well (except with more hit points). I’ve also added some music from Spear and the Blake Stone series. These elements do enhance the game, but it’s still distinctly Wolf and players will feel right at home with it.
Now, as to the levels! After throwing away the last three I worked on—call them “warm up” maps—I started anew, and spent some time creating a new E1L1 for my project. The result is a pretty difficult map with all kinds of areas for guards to sneak up behind you; the pace is very frantic and it’s a rather complex level for an episode-starter, being that both keys are required to exit. After finishing the final playtest, I thought to myself, “Now this is the kind of level I was after.”
While the Wolfenstein project continues, what else is going on? Well, since my wife is working tonight, I’ll probably spend some time with the new notebook computer, configuring my account for future use. My wife is using the machine daily now, and she’s quite enjoying it—there haven’t been any further problems. At first I thought I was experiencing a defect wherein the notebook would lock up every time you closed the lid (apparently a lot of people with newer Dell Inspirons have this problem), but it turned out to be a goofy configuration issue with Kerio Personal Firewall, which I was able to correct thanks to someone who posted on the Dell support forum. I’ve already installed my Adobe applications on the machine so I can handle stuff from work while I’m on the road, but that’s about it—I still need to install lots of other things. But there are still 41 GB left on the 60 GB hard drive, so no worries about free space.
Well, time to get to work—I hope this workday goes by as fast as the rest of the week already has!
Categorized as Life