New Year, New Decade

I've been meaning to write a new post on here for awhile now, so what better time than the last day of the year? I'm not really sure what to write about though, so I guess this post will just be me listing a few things I'd like to achieve in 2020.

To begin, a lot of my time mapping this year has been spent on mods / games where everything stays private. For 2020 I think I'd like to try and spend more time working on more personal projects and things that I can release publicly. This hopefully wont be too hard with the release of the Dusk SDK which seems to be coming out soon.

I'd also like to try and spend more time with Blender. At the moment I have a very basic understanding of the program. Being able to create models seems like a pretty required skill to have, especially when using a lot of modern game engines.

This also extends to spending more time with Unity and ProBuilder, which I already find so much more enjoyable working with than any of my time with Unreal. Seriously, Unreal bloat was a huge headache to work with. Even the Epic launcher was annoying to use.

Unreal complaining aside, I really need to start writing more posts on here. With more personal projects this will probably change. I was also thinking of starting a level design class with like homework and downloadable examples, something akin to what John K has set up. It wouldn't go over how to use the tools, but instead be about overall design stuff. Not sure how this would work.

Anyway, that's all.

Postal 2 - Mario Map Pack

Heres a video I've recorded of a collection of Mario themes levels I released back in 2015. I think that this may have been one of the most technically advance things I made and finished for Postal 2. Learned a lot about how the npcs worked as well as the proper way to create textures,(Mario textures without mipmaps are HARD to look at.)

P.S. This video is also a pretty decent test for Youtube quality. I used Handbreak to compress this video from 1.38 gigs down to 339 mb. I think I could do a little better on quality, but this is the best I've gotten so far.

UE4 Learning Project

I've started trying to teach myself about map creation on UE4. So far I managed to find the BSP tools and how to set up better viewports.

As a fun project to try and get more familiar with the editor I've decided to remake an old Roblox level I made back in 2014.

Roblox Version

UE4 WIP

I've found the BSP tools pretty clunky, more so than UE2, Really makes me wish that there was a modern engine with good BSP tools. 

Postal 3 Unreal

If you didn't know, a demo map for Postal 3 Unreal was released a few days ago on the steam workshop. I think it's one of the most impressive Postal 2 projects I've ever seen, you should seriously go check it out.

In fact, it kind of makes me want to start making Postal 2 maps again. Anyway, here are a couple screenshots I took of it.

Classic WoW Day One Screenshots

A few random screenshots I took from World Of Warcraft Classic's launch.

With the amount of people some quests where you have to kill a specific mob were almost impossible, so I just skipped them and grinded mobs. I managed to reach level 9 after like 5 hours and then the game disconnected me for some reason.

It's been fun so far.

Classic WoW

Bought a sub in preparation of WoW Classic. Let me introduce you to my undead priest, Bokomoso.

I've never really played a priest before, looking forward to trying it out as my main. 

A Few Movies

1. The Phantom Edit

To those who don't know The Phantom Edit is a fan edit of The Phantom Menace, and while it doesn't completely fix the movie it does alleviate a lot of problems the original had. It mostly just cuts out a bunch of Jar-Jar's silly scenes and ​other unneeded stuff. The download I got also came with an editor's commentary track, in it the dude goes over the reasons he cut out certain parts and the different editing tricks he used. I'd say it's worth looking into for that alone.

2. ​Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms

I seriously challenge anyone to watch this movie and to not cry during it. ​The general gist is that this kinda elf girl, who's life spans hundreds of years, adopts a regular human baby, who's life spans regular years. Theres also a bunch of other things that happen: wars, espionage, genocide, ect. But going too much into any of that would be spoilery. I wholeheartedly anyone watch this movie, it's really good.

3. Soldier

I found this movie while binging movies from the Alien cinematic universe. This movie is a kinda spin-off sequel to Blade Runner, taking place 17 years later; so yes, technically it takes place in the Alien cannon. This movie was really dumb, Last Action Hero / Starship Troopers action movie type dumb, so incredibly fun dumb. It's about this soldier who is discarded and comes across dumpster trash people who live on a trash planet. He befriends them and ultimately has to one man army protect them. Really dumb, really fun.

Roblox Pagodas

Roblox is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine, I don't play it as much as I did when I was a kid but I do still enjoy occasionally making levels with its editor. I started working on a CTF game set in feudal Japan. It's been pretty fun working on it so far, though I'm not sure if I'll actually finish it.

Anyway, here are my pagodas so far.

Besides the obvious color differences, these buildings only share the same colored roofs. Every other color is unique to that team, so red team's base features warmer tones while blue's are cooler. Lighting will be done the same way too.

The interiors need some work. I need to reskin these lanterns and do some stuff with the lighting. I'm also not sure yet how I'm going to make the second floor accessible by the player. I'd like to avoid using ladders as they tend to restrict player movement too much. Though I'm probably over thinking it considering it's a roblox game.

Levels of Dusk

Here are just a few locations from Dusk that I thought were cool. If you haven't played it yet you really should, it's a really good game.

E1M3: Old Time Religion

The level starts off in a serene area in front of a church. It's probably one of the more peaceful and relaxing locations in the game. It's also a pretty good use of backtracking, as the whole level loops back on itself that you'll visit some places multiple times. It's also houses the first boss in the game.

E1M5: Sawdust

This level does a great job of making you feel like you're out in some back-woods boonies place. Also the aesthetic of old abandoned sawmills is super cool and strangely kinda comfy in a way.

E2M5: The Escher Labs

The Escher Labs starts off as a kind of generic, cramped, laboratory level; before opening up and becoming this weird, escheresque (hence the name) labyrinth. It also has two genuinely scary moments that legit got me a bit unnerved the first time that I played. David Szymanski  also did a dev post about this level, it can be read here.

E3M5: Blasphemy 

Most of the levels from the third episode are super impressive visually; though this one stuck with me simply because of the giant tornado that rips through the cathedral.

E3M7: Homecoming

One of the last levels in the game, it's a bit more story focused than the rest. With combat taking a backseat to the scenery. There's also some cool platforming and anti gravity stuff that happens. 

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PostED - Custom Textures

I use Gimp so I'll be using it for this tutorial. You can download Gimp here; you'll also need to download a plug-in to create .dds images, it can be found here.

The first step in creating a texture for use in PostED is to have a picture be compatible for importing into engine. This just means making sure the image resolution is a power of 2, so 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, etc. I think the maximum resolution the engine can handle is 2048x2048, I may be mistaken though.

Anyway, once you have your image ready open it in Gimp. Next go to File>Export as, and rename the file to whateveryouwant.dds.

Once you click export a window like this will pop up

In these settings set Compression to BC1/DXT 1. If you're creating a texture with transparency set it to  BC3/DXT 5.

Make sure to set the Mipmaps tab to Generate Mipmaps. These control the lod the texture will have at distance. Not Generating Mipmaps usually just makes the texture look really aliased and harsh. As seen below.

Once you have your texture exported go into PostED and open the texture browser. It's the button at the top that looks like a picture frame. Once you find it go to File>Import and import your texture. A window like this will pop up.

Name the Package tab to "Mylevel". Setting it to this makes it so your texture is saved into your levels file, meaning that if anyone ever downloads your level your texture will be downloaded with it. 

Name the Group tab whatever you want. This tab is for texture organization, if your importing a wall texture you should name the group tab walls. It helps a lot in the long run.

The Name tab can be set to whatever.

As for the options you don't really have to do anything for a regular texture, maybe set the Surface Type if you want your texture to have specific walk sounds. If you we're importing a texture with transparency you'd check the Masked box and set Compression to DXT5

Once you've set up everything you want your texture should be ready for use in game.

Introducing Reroll

Reroll is a motivational app I've been working on and off on for a few weeks. Rather than be like other motivational apps in which you have to write down a bunch of goals and do other super active things; Reroll allows the user to simply click a button and have the app direct them as what to do.

Basically it's the neckbeard challenge from 4chan, but in app form.

I made Reroll in Gamemaker 1.4, the hardest part of this was definitely getting all the android studio version stuff situated. All the guides for working with setting up the android stuff for Gamemaker seem to be outdated, so most of my time working on it was spent googling compile errors.

Also, a huge problem with the app is the way I decided to display text. Rather than have text be vector based which would help with scaling on different devices, I decided to have all of them be PNGs, so they end up getting pixel-y on devices with smaller screens.

Check it out if your interested in it.

Crypt Of The Damned

I started working on a new Postal 2 project, Crypt Of The Damned. It's hopefully going to be a 3 map mini campaign in which the Postal Dude wakes up in a crypt and has to fight his way through a cult. I haven't really figured that much out though, so this is mostly just conjecture.


Here's a screen from the first map. I'll try and post progress about it from time to time.

PostED - Level Transitions

Linking two maps in PostED is pretty easy.

Add a Map Exit actor to the first map you want to link. The Map Exit actor is found under the Special Actor tab. In order for the Map Exit to work the player must touch it, so make sure that it's somewhere the player can reach.

Now, open the properties of the Map Exit actor and go to the Teleporter tab.

Click the tab that says "URL". This is were you type the name of the map you want the player to teleport to. The map we want the player to teleport to is "Transport2", so type Transport2# into the URL field. The hash-tag is required at the end of whatever level you're linking too. Be sure to substitute the Transport2 map name for whatever map you're linking too.

If you linked the maps correctly, then you should teleport when you reach the area you put the Map Exit actor at. You also need no special actor teleport in the second level, just a player spawn.

My Experience With Weebly

I've used Weebly for quite a bit, it's super simple to build a website with and includes a html editor; so if you know what you're doing you edit your site as much as you want. However, there are some incredibly annoying aspects of it that ultimately drove me away.



1. The Weebly Branding

If your using the free plan your website will include Weebly branding: a favicon, footer, and a yoursite.weebly.com domain name. This makes sense for free sites, it entices the user to buy a domain. However, if you do decide to buy a domain you'll still be restricted to having the Weebly footer and favicon.

The only way to remove this branding is by buying a premium plan, which is $14 a month. So factoring in the cost of the website, with is $20 yearly, you'll have to spend $188 yearly just to edit the favicon and footer. Thats way too much money for someone like me, who only writes blog posts every few weeks, which also leads into my next point.



2. Weebly's Blogging Sucks

Weebly's blogging options are bad, they're extremely underdeveloped and uncustomizable. The biggest gripe I have with it is the archive system. They don't collapse and display by month. This means that if you're an active blogger your sidebar will end up looking like a bit like this.

As you can see I wasn't even that active on my old blog, and yet there is a huge list of dates. Also, clicking on a month doesn't even display a list of post made then, it just takes you to the last post made. This means that the user has to comb through every post made that month if they want to find something.

Terrible.