As of late I’ve been messing a lot with shaders in the Source engine. At first I was using the popular Shader Editor mod to help me out which worked great for a while until I hit some issues relating to the order in which things are rendered.

Most full screen effects that are created with the Shader Editor that have become part of PPE (post-process effect) chains are all calculated and displayed after everything else has been rendered. Of course this isn’t very odd since they are PPE chains but in order to have more control of what was rendered when I had to dig into the actual shader project and figure out how Valve setup their shaders and how they manage it all. Ranging from RTs (render textures) to the shader FXCs themselves.

Luckily I got to meet the awesome Drew Watts who could help me learn how to do most of the Source shader related stuff. He even sent me some of his shaders which I was allowed to use for the Estranged mod. Which was great news because this included his HBAO shader. It’s a very pretty shader.

Funny enough the only issue I’m still running into right now for most of the time is actually rendering the HBAO before the sprites and fog are rendered so that it doesn’t get multiplied over those results. Which is kind of why I stopped using the Shader Editor. I’ve still got a lot to learn. Maybe some day I’ll be able to write a nice tutorial about the system as well.

That’s all for now. Shaders woo!

For some reason I love messing around in OpenTTD, a free open-source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I’m not that much of a good player at all but I at least know my train signs… up to a certain point.

One thing I both loved and hated about Transport Tycoon was it’s soundtrack. In-game I usually have the music muted but that doesn’t mean the tunes stop playing in my head and for exactly this reason I’ve started converting some of the MIDI files to some ‘proper’ MP3s.

I will probably convert more tracks later on but here’s the first three.

1. Transport Tycoon Deluxe Theme
2. Easy Driver
3. Little Red Diesel

I will probably create an album and make it available for download on the Music page at some point when I’ve converted more tracks.

Today I noticed that people are hitting the Suicide Survival page quite a lot and it seems that the mod itself has gained some popularity again. I had been working on a map a few months back which I never released. I’m probably going to work on it again when I’ve got time.

You can find the download links on the Suicide Survival forums.

Click here to view the forum topic.

A lot of cool stuff has happened in the past few weeks but this is one of the highlights. Working on Estranged now together with its creator and a friend.

Enjoy the atmospheric dark looming soundtrack of Estranged Alpha #5 and feel free to give feedback or just leave a comment for fun!

If you wish to know more about this mod then click here.

My dear friends and visitors,

Hello, once again!

I’m very sorry for the lack content and updates. Obviously I have been working on projects in the past few months but I simply haven’t updated my blog with them. Which I should do of course. I hope to post some new stuff soon. I’ve been programming, making music and animating so there must be something I can post on here. :p

Keep cool everyone.

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.