Recently people have been asking me what I have been up to so I figured I’d post an update on my blog again.

So that’s three projects that I have been working on.

I hope to post more about these projects in the near future but as of right now I am focusing on getting all my school-related work out of the way.

Be sure to keep an eye on the blog. Biohazard and Top This! should be done soon.

Anyone remember that good old Half-Life 2 mod? Nobody?

Suicide Survival is one of my all-time favourite Half-Life mods and it’s a shame no-one really plays this any more.

Suicide Survival was released back in 2008 and it was pretty popular for a while. People played it pretty much every day for a few months and then the mod started to fade away into the distance. Even I quit after a while not knowing that I would miss it later.

In Suicide Survival you either play as a gardener who is dressed up like a pilot or you would play as a shrub. The gardeners would throw gardening books at the shrubs to get rid of them and the shrubs would try to get close to a gardener to blow up shortly after arriving at his feet. Yes, the shrubs are explosive.

The mod was pretty much just a Team Deathmatch game featuring books on gardening by Barbara Bush and suicidal shrubberies mixed with audio clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now in 2011 with barely any updates on the Suicide Survival website, I came up with the idea to port some of the Suicide Survival maps over to Garry’s Mod.

Garry’s Mod is a sandbox mod that you actually have to pay for. Which might sound a bit weird but it’s the one mod that is actually being sold on Steam. Of course it took it a while to get there but that’s not the point right now. In Garry’s Mod you can either mess around in the so called ‘sandbox’ game mode or play another game mode created by the players of the game.

There is one game mode called ‘Fretta’. This game mode is developed by Garry (the creator of Garry’s Mod) himself.

Fretta basically allows players to create a bunch of mini-games and let players vote which one to play next. Then the game mode loads up a level associated with the mini-game (or people vote for a level) and then the players play a few rounds of that mini-game.

One of these mini-games is called ‘Suicide Barrels’ and it is very similar to Suicide Survival. It lacks a bunch of my favourite Suicide Survival features but it will suffice.

I’ve been porting one of the Suicide Survival levels or maps as they are referred to in the Source Engine, to the Suicide Barrels mini-game. I have also been thinking about coding a mini-game version of Suicide Survival itself but I will most likely not go ahead with that.

The first map I ported over to Garry’s Mod was ss_garden2. It is the level featured at the top of this post.

This map has quite a few flaws though. It’s brush geometry (also known as building blocks) are pretty messy. When designing levels in the Source Engine it is always recommended to keep your levels neat and clean without any overlapping brush geometry but in this Suicide Survival map and most likely also in the other map files there are a lot of overlapping brushes. The level also allows the ‘survivors’ to hide in the garden house in such a way that it makes it nearly impossible for the shrubs to get to them before they get shot.

I’m currently modifying the map and I hope to release a more balanced version soon.
The maps will be hosted on the JokerIce Fretta Mini-Game server for those who are interested.

Thanks for stopping by.

Now I will have to upload awesome images every time I post something. Woo!

Now that I have a spare week I can spend time on bGame and hopefully my TF2 animation since that one has become a little dusty in the past few weeks as well because of school projects that required some more polish.
No worries though, me and my team got an A for that project.

Currently you can register on bGame as a developer and view your registered games on the Developer Control Panel.
The front page shows the 10 Top Rated, 10 Top Downloaded and 10 most recently added games.
News will possibly also be added to the front page but I’m focusing on the functionality of the control panel at the moment.
Planning to add features like editing the game entries when logged in as it’s developer and editing the developer’s profile.

In the end the ratings will also be converted into stars instead of just having to look at some boring numbers.

I’m quite liking it. I’ve basically finished my part of the project.
I just have to do my homework for this week and I should be able to work on my animation again and hopefully I’ll sprint through the initial shots.

I originally was assigned to only two pages but later on I also filled in the homepage because that was still empty. I added features like three column showing the 5 most recent replies of several categories and the most recent events organised by semi-fictional student organisation.
It’s a Dutch site so most of you won’t be able to read what’s actually on it.

Progress on the storyboard has been slow but I guess I could get it done this week. As long as it doesn’t interfere with school.

So, expect weekly updates. If they don’t arrive, feel free to spam me with comments and/or messages.

I’m currently storyboarding my animation project. Since I have only written a rough summary of the animation down, this will be really useful. It’s a way of planning your animation. I don’t really feel like writing a complex script and since the events are rather simple it’s easier to just start storyboarding.

I’m making this storyboard in 3D. It might sound odd but I find this to be easier for me than drawing a bunch of 2D frames. It allows me to sort of ‘storyboard’ the sets as well. Giving me a rough sense of scale.

I’ve still got my school homework to attend to though. I should know better. Why am I writing this blog right now!? I should be studying!

On the left you can see an image that shows the Engineer’s imported rig (ignore the face rig blocks on his face). As you can see it’s a bunch of dots.
Dots that use forward-kinematics (FK) instead of inverse-kinematics (IK) and I’m not a big fan of FK rigs. I use FK to only finetune my animations in most cases or fix messed up rotations of body parts (because my rigs are often lacking proper rotation support).

In the image on the right you can see a few of the control bones I’ve already added. I’m no expert when it comes to rigging but this will suit my needs for now.

If I wish to make it a really good rig then I’ll have to add controls for the fingers and feet as well. The feet for example do not have a bone that controls their ground contact so I will have to manually adjust the feet all the time when animating.

The thing is that I still have to import the other classes as well. I need at least one more class for the animation I’ve got in my mind and the time I would have to spend on the rig is probably better spent on something else.

I’m sure I’ll do it later but for now this will do.

Here’s a little render of the engineer imported into Blender though:

And here’s an image of the one of the problems I’m experiencing when joining the shapes with the rigged mesh. (left: blend shape, right: rigged mesh)

That’s all for now. Stick around.

This album features tracks I released in the past few years so some people might have heard the tracks before but for the newcomers this is a great way to get started.
I’m also planning on releasing another album featuring classical and crossover tracks that I’ve made in the past two years.
Click here to check out the new album!