Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist
Other more hip and with-it mappers like metlslime and Vondur are releasing their map sources under the GPL or some equivalent legal mogumbo. Someone prompted me about mine, and I really didn't see why I couldn't follow suit. Now everyone can make terrible ports and conversions of my maps to Urban Terror and Nexuiz using mismatched evil8 textures. Happy birfday:
- [ Lun3DM1src.zip ] - Contains one .map file used to compile the final release, and the original blockout .map which it evolved from.
- [ Lun3DM2src.zip ] - Contains final .map and original blockout (Quake 2 format, loads in q3/gtkradiant fine). The easter egg in this map is retardedly well hidden, and also stupid.
- [ Lun3DM3src.zip ] - Contains final .maps for both regular and CPMA flavors, plus original blockout.
- [ Lun3DM4src.zip ] - Contains final .maps for both original Lun3DM4 and CPM23, plus several original blockouts modified by me and wviperw over the course of a few weeks. The evolution evident here is really striking.
- [ gridironsrc.zip ] - Contains the .map file used to compile the final release, and that's all because I built it as I went.
(At this point in time Swelt is apparently AFK long-term, and I'm not going to release the source for that without his permission. If I hear a yay or nay from him I'll edit these words as if they were never here.)
Some other things I'm working on right now and pretty much past making promises about finishing:
LunSP2: Tons of things need to happen to appease my ambitious plans for this (3 maps, new monsters, a new weapon, and it'd be nice to have music ...) but I've actually managed to keep a fairly steady rate of headway. I've tweaked out modelgen to import an ASCII frame definition and written a python exporter for said ASCII format for Maya, which has made creating models for Quake a total breeze. That'll probably appear in the project box sometime soon. I know engine mods will also be required for LunSP2 (although not for insane graphical purposes), so there's that to do, and I suppose eventually all this coding is going to have to lead to some actual mapping ...
Lun3DM5: Better known to those who've played it as LRA1D, this was an itemless map I knocked up for the Raven Rocket Arena crowd before the great Raven cool-people exodus of 2006. My new plans are to take the layout and experiment with just how much lightmapped static mesh Q3MAP2 will let me get away with, the goal being "the whole map."
A TF2 map: Layouts are being scribbled furtively on paper in the backs of Madison bookshops, and I have visions of merging the volcano-mastermind-lair chic of the main location of The Incredibles with 60's modernist/brutalist concrete and flagstone architecture. We'll see if this one gets anywhere.
CouchCrates™: I thought of this idea before Portal spawned plushy companion cubes in the Valve Store (you bastards), but I have plans, materials, and equipment for making small brown shipping crates using the same materials and construction as couch cushions. KungFuSquirrel has already declared "omg I want three so I can stack them." Sewing and cloth-craft are not my forte, however, so buying that sewing machine could turn out to be a terrible error in judgement.
Thu, Mar 6th, 2008 | 1:21am | 7 Comments »
This is my review of Cloverfield:
By the end of the first half hour I was hoping dearly that every last one of those happy, attractive twenty-something pricks with too much sex and money to know what to do with was going to fucking eat it by the end of the film, and special thanks to several of my friends for pointing out that I did not get my wish as I'd left the theater thinking I had. Naming the point-of-view character Hudd was clever.
Oh, spoilers and stuff I guess.
Bonus Edit: Lunaran.com has gained a fabulous reputation in the spam world thanks to the efforts of a certain toolbox, including email from this domain being blacklisted by both Yahoo and Hotmail. However, I'm feeling suicidal so I thought I'd enable comments for this post to see how they work out. Surely this is the last thing the server will see before choking to death on spam.
Thu, Jan 31st, 2008 | 10:24pm | 5 Comments »
I notice I only updated this page four times during the entire 2007 year. I suppose that could be considered lame from a certain point of view, but 2007 was a pretty crap year thanks in no small part to repeated rejections and refusals from pretty much every angle that one could possibly receive such treatment. Unemployment and homelessness were new experiences, but good old loneliness reprised its role for another fifty-two solid weeks. Perhaps I'm just wanting the wrong things (not gay).
I don't really have the right to complain, I realize, when I remember that it could have been a hell of a lot worse. My friend Len had a year that made mine look like one long vacation (which, in part, it was), the details of which I can't really share because it's none of your business, internet, and besides which he'd kill me if I did.* I offered my time and effort to help him with the only one of his hurdles that I could: performing a daunting array of restorations on his classic old house in order to make selling it a feasible proposition in today's bum market. During every visit, his frustration, perserverance, and uncompromising worldview would combine to produce quite a lot of solid gold, which I'm sorry I didn't think to begin recording sooner:
"Well, it's hump day, and if it doesn't rain, it'll be a dry hump day!"
- on Wednesday
"Oh come on, you can work a fork better than that, you booger eatin' moron."
- after I complained about the finely diced lettuce in a salad
"This stuff is like Cool Whip ... I hate Cool Whip."
- describing spackle
"I was raised in Providence. (Not Heaven. Rhode Island.)"
- on growing up
"They were weak!"
- on toasters he'd returned to the store
"You ever whistle and hum at the same time? It's like having a face kazoo."
- after whistling and humming at the same time
"That isn't funny enough to lie about."
- after saying anything incredulous
"Honestly, I didn't expect to live past 25."
- on life
"You could have used his head to crack walnuts."
- on a rabbi
"It's a can opener."
- after asking if I knew what a P38 was, to which I had replied, 'A gun?'
"I'd have been better off putting my pants on my head and running around the yard screaming."
- on an unproductive day
"There's a big difference between classical guitar and that country western inbred codependent bullshit."
- on Roy Clark
"Well, that's not gonna do much good."
- upon climbing into his truck and seeing his keys laying on the hood
"You know, I could pull the truck and the trailer all the way up the sidewalk and grass to the front door. Do you think they'd mind?"
- on quicker ways to move into my apartment
"Well, excuse me for thinking outside the fucking box!"
- when I called him a redneck for considering it
"If you ever have a dollar, rent that movie."
- on Blue Thunder, starring Roy Scheider
"They should make sex lube out of this stuff. Seriously, you could use it to slide an elephant uphill on sandpaper."
- on wire-pull lubricant
"If you ever need someone removed from this world, just let me know. I know guys that'll put you in a room and then throw the room away."
- in gratitude for thanksgiving food
"I didn't realize I was under a fuckin' microscope!"
- after seeing my list of his quotes
* I spilled paint on the hardwood, once, and his (I suspect calculated) means of ensuring I never did it again was to be very gracious and understanding of what was really just a dumb mistake, and then, while we cleaned it up, make idle conversation about what he felt was the safest and most efficient means of disposing of a body. If nothing else, 2007 really improved my tarp discipline.
I have to keep my cranky old man quotient up by complaining about stuff. Fortunately there's a bunch of new games out!
Bioshock: The hype surrounding this game's impending arrival never swept me up, since most people seemed more inclined to sell it to me as "a game that's art deco!" and not "it's a successor to System Shock!" like they should have. I only finally played SS2 about a year ago and thoroughly enjoyed the exploration and wealth of interconnected things to do - the design was right up my alley. I didn't even mind the weapons constantly breaking. Now that I've installed Bioshock weeks after buying it, and started playing it after losing the disc again for another few weeks, I can say the real thing has also mostly failed to grab me. Mapper and kindred spirit Kell managed to crystallize my thoughts better than I had managed to thus far: pretty much the same "point at things and shoot them" gameplay and "science has gone awry and unleashed some deadly freaks that you are now trapped with" excuse of a story, while fun, do not represent an "amazing leap forward in storytelling" just because the game lives in an art-deco pineapple under the sea, and the fact that everyone thinks it does is probably the worst part of the game.
It's still entertaining enough thus far to be worth continuing, but has suffered from a painful prevalence of unnatural-feeling Doom3esque forced encounters, where I can feel the designer reaching in with some triggers and imposed circumstances just to fuck with me in some canned manner he feels is clever.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: I really can't say I'm too terribly impressed with this either, as it just keeps coming across like Halo Wii and also you occasionally turn into a ball. It hits on the two big negatives that have so far defined "next gen" games for me: levels that play like the designers phoned it in the whole project, with totally arbitrary "puzzles" that consist of scanning some interesting bit of art, then following the instructions that the designer wrote for me in the scan results; and levels that look like the level artists didn't know when to stop applying detail until the only thing saving the display from illegibility was to blur it all out again in post.
The Wiimote mechanics feel really good, however, and while playing Metroid 3 I'm dogged with the constant feeling that I'd love that very instant to be making a shooter for the Wii, and not be playing this one.
Portal: What kind of fanwanking can I really provide here that hasn't been covered by the whole internet already? I stopped trying to figure out how the inventors of the start-to-crate-time review system could allow a game they penned to feature a crate as an indispensably lovable "character", because it only made me mad to think about, and simply enjoyed everything else instead. Portal's strengths are its sense of humor, and its size: it has a small amount of excellent ideas and no shitty ones, and the package is scaled to fit. This could be a fantastic trend, since there's plenty of games that try to make a small amount of excellent ideas last a weekend by padding them with failure, because goodness knows there's such a dearth of fresh ideas going around the industry.
HL2: Episode 2: I remember when Episode 1 (then Aftermath) was announced, reading a comment from someone at Valve stating roughly that what people wanted at the time was more Half Life 2, and that was fortunate because at that point Valve was very good at making that. Three years and two episodes later, I want to complain that our appetites for "more" Half Life 2 are pretty much sated and maybe it's time to roll that production bus on down innovation lane again, but I feel weird because, well, it's not like Portal isn't there, it just doesn't have Gordon Freeman in it, and it's not like Episode 2 wasn't still a blast.
Honestly, I just wish they'd provide a little explanation for what the hell all these rockets have to do with all these ginormous portals, because while most of Half Life's science is pretty fictional as it is, it still makes its own kind of sense, whereas the constant launching of things into orbit as an almost completely unexplained major objective gives off a strong odor of phlebotinum.
Team Fortress 2: Actually, now that I think about it, what the hell is with all the rockets? This game's full of them. Do Valve just really like them? I only counted one giant raygun in TF2, and it was a medium raygun at best, certainly not fit for destroying Washington DC, or the sun, or whatever. See, in TF2 you can do that, just say "it's a big evil nefarious rocket for, you know, whatever. Have fun!" Poor rocket to raygun ratio is all I can fault it for, though, and perhaps also that you're required to play it with internet people, who have so far empirically proven themselves to be a bunch of twunts. I adore the art, however, and I hope it can prove to at least one developer that realism really is a tool, and not a goal.
Join us next week for "Beach Bowl Galaxy? More like the Pain in the Ass Galaxy!"
I can be said to have one of those lists of things I have to do before I die (of natural causes at least - the other list's quite a bit shorter), but it's rather quantum in that I don't really know what's on it until I've scratched at item off. Over Thanksgiving I discovered that the list includes seeing a live orchestra perform the Star Wars theme and Imperial March, conducted by John Williams himself. It is really something different altogether that way.
For the past seven months I've been a freeloader. Allow me to explain.
Plans formed in my head to depart Raven Software at roughly the same time my previous apartment lease would be expiring. I was nearly positive I'd be moving out of Madison, because Human Head didn't attract me too much and that pretty much wraps it up for Madison area game developers (with the exception of Filament, about whom I did not know), so I let the lease lapse rather than renew it just to get socked with a twice-the-rent fee when I broke it a month or two later. It wasn't a bad place to live by any means, but I had grown disillusioned with the place. For one, it was convenient to Raven (which I increasingly wanted to avoid), and the mall (which I had always wanted to avoid) and not a whole lot else. Oh, I could walk home from Don the Muffler Man when I needed car repairs. That's about all. Thus, I made zero friends and found zero interests outside the Raven circle of friends. This proved to be a major issue when the entire circle of Raven friends quit and moved away, leaving me suddenly a lot less surrounded by friends and a lot more by myself.
For another, being ground floor with northern exposure, it was cold as hell in there all winter.
The illustrious and immortal Rick "Rickmus" "RJ" "Superfly" "Baby Face" "Iron Hands" Johnson offered quite kindly to let me take up residence in one of the crazillion spare rooms in Johnson Manor until I got myself in order. Finding the new job proved to take longer than my glowing references assured me it would, during which time Rick himself defected to Gearbox, leaving me as Higgins to his Mr. Masters (thanks to Dave for the analogy). When I ultimately decided to stay in the area and took a job at the infant Big Rooster, I had to find an apartment in Madison again.
Finding an apartment in Madison makes me angry.
Problem 1: I decided to be picky. Rick had no ultimatum on when I had to be out (and I wasn't paying a dime), so I seemed to have the time. Something near campus or downtown, I thought, would be nice, where I could just walk out of the apartment and find something unique to do. I also hoped for a building with some architectural character to it, having found myself rather allergic to soulless post-modern apartment complexes.
Problem 2: Being a landlord in Madison is apparently the best racket in town. Thanks to a guaranteed influx of 40,000 UW students every year, nearly every lease in Madison begins and ends on August 15th. It was still May, so no problems there, except that area property managers had allowed the huge demand for apartments to gradually edge the lease signing dates back to the previous November, at which point I didn't even know I was quitting. Apparently I'd already missed all the good boats. Surely juicy exceptions will present themselves, I thought, and laid myself prostrate at the feet of Craigslist.
I saw nearly twenty apartments, some of them crapholes (I still have nightmares about certain showers I've seen, and while I won't name any specific property managers, god damn Steve Brown Apartments those things were nasty). Others were burdened with some alternative dealbreaker or, in several cases, were exactly what I wanted right up until they were yanked out from under me. Some new favorite grind marks in my teeth:
- The one off State Street where someone had thrown up on the door
- "Ask about parking" in the ad translating to "We don't have any, we just wanted to get your hopes up high enough to draw you into a showing and waste your time"
- Applying for an apartment within hours of seeing it, and being told weeks later by the landlord that he was still waiting for another application he thinks "might be pretty good too"
- Potential roommates that declared me "not the best fit" only as long as it took for their first choice to flake out on them
- A building with missing siding and gutters hanging off the soffits with laundry accessible only through an exterior cellar door
- The bathroom that smelled mysteriously of tuna
- Being in the car on the way to a 1:30 showing and receiving a phone call at 1:28 letting me know it had been signed to the people that viewed it at 1:00
August 15th had come and gone. After an entire summer of horrible luck, just being out of goddamn Johnson Manor was looking pretty tantalizing no matter the cost. With reluctance, I turned to the complexes.
First one I went to see, I was stood up by the landlord.
"Fuck this," I thought and decided to start walking down the street and apply at the first place I came to. The first place I came to happened to also manage a property blocks from Big Rooster, which happened to have a one bedroom opening within days just like the one I'd vacated, which happened to come with a rent special and indoor parking. I had been trained by the downtown real estate scene's constantly bending me over to be prepared to apply for an apartment at a moment's notice - credit and prior rent information in the back pocket, checkbook in the front, and a desperate need to have an address again - so I hurriedly applied. Now, fully seven months after the last lease ended, I'm back in a soulless complex on the ground floor with northern exposure near work and nothing else. Like enjoying the relief at the end of a terrible movie, I'm only content so far as I actually have a place of my own again.
If the smoldering frustration subsides by this November I might - might - give downtown Madison another shot, this time well in advance of next summer. Predicated, of course, on whether I find enough new hobbies that it ceases to be important to me where I live or if I just develop a habit of stumbling home drunk from the nearby Great Dane every weekend.