FAT BLOKES IN THE SAND
Yes it's holiday season again!
Hats and Spiders, Lights and Doors
It's been one of those days. It started at 3am last night. Waiting for the drum and bass show to finish recording I was poking around on a shelf. I picked up my pointy hat and was startled by a spider as it scuttled down the point. I dropped the hat and fetched a tall, thin metal tube I use for catching spiders. I found it somewhat odd that the thing hadn't acted like usual and run for a dark corner, but had stayed with the hat. This made it easier to catch, which I did. But poking around the hat I saw the reason.
The damn thing had built its nest in my hat! Somehow the brim was folded under itself. Inside was what looked like a pile of white powder surrounded by cobweb, except that there were a number of lumps in the middle. I reasoned these must be the eggs. No wonder the mother didn't run off. In fact the mother was desperate and angry enough to escape the tin tube I caught her in - yes, one minute she was there in the bottom of the tube, next time I looked, it was empty. I've never known a spider that could climb up the shiny walls of that tube before... Have you ever seen one try to escape a bath? It just falls down again!
Already quite freaked out and full of adrenaline there was no way I was getting to sleep in a room with a nest of baby spiders that could explode at any moment, spewing forth a thousand tiny screaming demon spawn to rend my helpless body to dust under the guidance of their vengeful matriarch. I got my pool cue, put it into the hat and very slowly and carefully carried the hat downstairs and threw it out the back door. I never saw the mother again, but could not stop thinking that, having lost its babies, it was enraged and in a frenzy and having nothing more to lose, would still try to exact vengeance!
Needless to say I didn't get to sleep for hours. Oh, and then I was woken really early by a guy drilling holes outside my window; the neighbour was having a satellite dish installed.
I pulled myself together and went out with a pair of tongs and a ruler. Gingerly holding the hat I swatted the nest. It detached all in one piece! I was expecting it to explode and spew babies everywhere, but thankfully it didn't and also only seemed to be attached via its edge to the brim.
Having explained this bizarre event to my mum we decided we should probably clean the shelves, so we took everything off them and dusted and so forth. I threw some stuff away, amazingly. Unfortunately my clip-on spotlight, which has for some time had a loose connection in its moulded plug, now doesn't work at all, so I'll have to get into bed in the dark - or stay up until it gets light again, whichever.
Then finally a bit later I heard a crash from the kitchen and found my mum holding one of the cupboard doors... One has never been quite lined up right and the extra stress put on the hinge caused it to snap, suddenly. Having no replacements the only option was to take the door off the cupboard completely. I made some remark about the house being about to fall down.
Thankfully, though, that seemed to be the lot. Nothing else has gone horribly wrong or broken or exploded today. There's only one thing unresolved.
I never did see the mother spider again...
thud, more like whimper
Here's a new thing, I received a request earlier in the week from Crazy Dave of Link of the Day to write a review of a WAD from that CD he sent me. The WAD's name is bf_thud!
It turned out to be 29 maps(!) Yeah it replaces all but the two secret levels and the final map. I must confess I've only done about half of it, but the majority of maps seem to feature one or more of the following characteristics
- Smallness (most of the maps I've done in under 10 minutes of game time)
- Not a great deal of monsters (I've only seen one over 100 and many are under 50)
- Small rooms, somewhat cramped
- Way too much health and ammunition and stuff. There's a megasphere on nearly every level.
- Annoying puzzles and lots of them, many involving switches that rise out of blocks in the floor (and they reminded me of those evil cube robots from Terrahawks)
- Tiny levels should not try to use all three key colours. Putting a key in a 64x64 square surrounded by locked doors of another key colour is contrived and looks stupid.
- The maps are allegedly based on the names of the corresponding Doom 2 maps, but I can't really see it.
Having said that, I remember maps 11 and 13 being pretty good; 11 is a large circular thing and 13 is a town. At least I can move around properly in them.
I probably would have got further but I found them somewhat of a chore to play. The construction isn't bad and I didn't spot any obvious mistakes, which is quite refreshing for such an old set of maps. However I found the puzzle oriented gameplay annoying, especially during the number of numerous occasions that I'd killed all the monsters on a map but had all the annoying puzzles left to do. Oh well. If I find any later levels that make it worth it I'll let you know.
Addendum: I might have got further had I not, via an unprecedented chain of events, been inspired to start developing elixir for the first time in months. However its completion is still strongly within doubt, as is the status of the CC2 project. I'm still too scared to go back to Doomworld.
suddenly the penny dropped
damn that hole in my trousers' pocket
The Week in Doom
Two maps, both for (the Ultimate) Doom. Yeah okay I've not done as much as usual, sheesh.
UNDRGRND.WAD I downloaded this one out of curiosity because it was rated zero on doomworld's idgames index. It's fairly typically messy architecture for an old map. Think oddly shaped rooms, random texturing, odd lighting, too much strobe effect by half etc. Think basically a maze but with frills. It imports a couple of new textures for a bit of extra spice but the most striking part of the architecture is how you appear to start in a tower that's sunk into a hole in the ground, complete with windows looking out onto the rocks.
It's easy enough to play although towards the start there is a secret corridor that allows you to bypass half the level. I suggest you take it but don't go in the teleporter else you'll run out of ammunition, go back and go the proper way instead. Doing it in the correct order will yield plentiful supplies of shells and all the heavier weapons (and having used the secret corridor you'll have a computer map to find them)
Hey okay I seem to have posted way too many spoilers already, so some general remarks to finish off: The map is linear and cramped, but it's pretty fun. Although there are some awkward moments it's rarely overwhelming provided you don't fall into the trap I did. It's nowhere near great but certainly not worth the zero it was given. Give it a go if you're bored I guess.
The Real Wright Junior Senior High School I have really mixed feelings about this one (and you know what that means, it means fucking tons of words) At face value and if you play it as you find it, it's utter shite. I mean it's a map some guy has made based on his school. That's never a good sign. It looks like crap. The floor plan is all very well and might as well be authentic, but it's totally flat (how many schools do you know that don't have an upstairs?) and in fact all the rooms except the big one in the middle are the same height. Either that's because it's supposed to be the school hall or because there's a spiderdemon in it, I don't know. A couple of the walls didn't get their nodes built correctly and you can see through them. There's no decoration whatsoever; indeed in total it uses about five wall textures and two flats (jargon for floor/ceiling textures), all editor defaults. One of those walls is the exit switch. Hidden behind an unmarked, locked, secret door. Fantastic!
If it looks awful it plays even worse. You are given a shotgun and two boxes of shells, then the rest of the level - and I mean the entirety of the rest of the level - is sprinkled with backpacks and medikits. And rammed full of monsters. You can see how he's just put them in, randomly, without any care at all. Many, including the aforementioned spiderdemon - which predictably is sitting on the key you need for the hidden exit door - are stuck to each other and rendered quite harmless (the game engine thinks the movement of each is blocked by some or all of the others, hence none in a stuck group can move or shoot or anything) There are over 700 monsters in total and the skill levels don't reduce that number at all. And having only a shotgun, you very quickly get pinned down in one of the many dead ends, overwhelmed, and torn to pieces.
In short, it looks like arse and plays like a fucking nightmare. So why do I have mixed feelings?
I like large maps with hundreds of monsters. I nearly deleted it, but it having over 700 monsters made me think. I wondered how it would be if I played it with god mode and all guns/ammo. Okay there's no challenge in god mode but after a couple of runs this way I knew it would work without it.
So, suggestion 1. You load the map and before you do anything type IDFA to give yourself all the guns and full ammunition. The halls and classrooms of this - no, I can't say it. It doesn't even look like a school, but the rooms and corridors of this map then become a mass firefight and running battle as you use all your tactical knowledge to avoid getting trapped by monsters and killing as many of them as you can. Use shells on imps and demons and save the rockets for the barons. If you get into any real danger, BFG the entire corridor. It's great fun! Plasma or chaingun sweeps come in handy when the boom-click-click rhythm of the shotgun becomes tiresome and you feel like a change. You never run out of shells because of all the dead sergeants dropping shotguns, and there's all those backpacks too.
Suggestion 2. The problem was that you have to rely a lot on the shotgun, because its ammo is by far the most abundant. But it is slow. I thought, why not convert it into a Doom 2 map so I can use the super shotgun? It doesn't require any texture conversion as all the textures used are in both Doom and Doom 2, all you need to do is rename the map from E2M1 to MAP01. You can do this in a Doom map editor or directly editing the map name in the WAD directory in a byte editor or even by going
perl -pe 's/E2M1../MAP01\0/' wjshs.wad > wjshs2.wad
at the command line. Note the dots on the end of E2M1, so the original and replacement strings have the same length. Then, proceed as before, starting the map and typing IDFA, etc. The super shotgun, being three times as powerful, allows you to remove three or four imps at a time and demons in a single pull of the trigger, far less annoying than the two, or more usually three, rounds the regular shotgun requires.
In summary, this level is total rubbish that just happens to play quite well if you are willing to type in a cheat code at the beginning. Good night.
EMAIL OF THE DAY (2004-07-22)
Subject: ...
From: Matt Kimber <....@.................>
To: RjY <.......@............>
Date: 22 Jul 2004 21:34:13 +0000
I
GOT
SERVED.
1845 <Spark> matt says go and do something with your life because your updates are boring
Oh no!! And this is a really long boring update about stupid hardware shit, whatever shall we do.
IT'S JUST A BOX WITH SOME ELECTRONICS AND A HUGE BATTERY IN IT
Powercuts occur on average about once or twice a year here, ranging from dropouts lasting half a second to several-hour losses. As such I always meant to get some sort of power protection but cost and various other things always made me put it off, stupidly. Even the last powercut, the effects of which were apparently pretty severe, was an entire month ago. But finally something has been done.
Last week I took delivery of an APC SmartUPS. It's a pretty old model with a serial connection. I got the 620VA version because I wanted one that's powerful enough to run two computers a cable modem and a big monitor. It surprised me when it arrived, it was a lot smaller than I was expecting but it was really, really heavy. The battery sparked at me when I connected it up inside the unit like the instructions said, but I was expecting it.
Two IEC320 plug to IEC320 socket leads were supplied, the intention being you get your old computer's power cable with whatever strange plug your country has on one end and an IEC320 socket on the other and use that to power the UPS. Then you put the plugs on the end of the supplied cables into the sockets on the UPS and the sockets on the other end of the cables into the plugs on the back of your computer. I guess this would be better with diagrams but I'm not going to make any.
Note on terminology: plugs have pins (sometimes called male) and sockets have holes (and are sometimes called female) You might think the plug is the thing on the end of a cable and the socket is the thing on the box you put the cable into, but no. Somewhat embarrassingly it took me an awful long time to find a good way to remember which is which. This might explain a lot.
Anyway having two IEC power cables (that is, a power cable with an IEC plug on one end and an IEC socket on the other) I could put the two computers on UPS power but I still needed some way to power the cable modem and the monitor. The monitor could be powered off another IEC cable but the cable modem runs off one of those DC transformers so it needs a regular socket to plug into. So having talked to Iain it was time for a bit of DIY...
It turns out you can go to an electronics shop and procure an unwired IEC plug, an unwired 4-way trailing socket and a length of regular mains cable. These can then be joined together. It's just like wiring regular plugs only more fiddly, especially in the case of the IEC plug which is about half the size of a normal British mains plug. I spent all afternoon putting this thing together and I was quite pleased when I tested it and it worked. Also it means I have a spare 4-way adaptor because I preferred to make a completely new device rather than fuck up an old one; and it's black, unlike all the others which are white, so I can tell which one is on battery backup. Not that it matters much as its right under the table and inaccessible without considerable effort.
While shopping I also purchased a small length of Ethernet cable because the UPS has sockets for network surge suppression. Instead of plugging your modem's ethernet wire straight into your computer you plug it into the UPS then put a wire from the corresponding socket on the UPS to the computer. This was probably unnecessary as firstly any power surge would reach the cable modem before it hits the UPS's power surge suppression and secondly as far as I'm aware it's a fibre optic cable, it runs on light, not electricity like a phone wire, so how exactly are you going to get a power surge? Oh well, it was more for completeness than anything else.
So finally today I rearranged all the cables, put in my specially made 4-way adaptor, plugged everything in, and turned it all on. Happily nothing exploded, even when I plugged the Risc PC and its monitor in as well and thus had three computers, two monitors and the cable modem running off the UPS (and I simulated a power loss and it coped) I am going to say this has so far been a worthwhile endeavour, although it could still all fail so don't go bringing this up as a counterexample when I say I fail at everything I do.
Okay, you want reasons: well firstly I haven't set up any kind of UPS monitoring software on the computers, because caco (the server) doesn't have a free serial port and putting it on baron (the desktop) seems highly illogical. That means I can't tell how long the UPS will last if the power drops out and I still have to shut everything down manually. Secondly, the UPS overload indicator comes on for a fraction of a second when the monitor turns on, but I think that's just a transient and can safely be ignored provided I don't turn the monitor on and off repeatedly. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly I suspect that my wiring job isn't quite up to scratch and especially the wired IEC plug is a shade loose. I suspect this because when I first plugged it into the UPS and turned the UPS on I had to tap the plug to get the light on the 4-way adaptor that indicates it is powered, to come on.
Oh well. Let's just hope it's been worth all the trouble, I guess. We'll know the next time the power fucks up
admire your handiwork instead of moaning about how someone else could have done it better
I kept going to write updates but being distracted. Sorry, I guess
Also I bought a UPS for the computers. More on this, and the subsequent messing about with IEC320 plugs later. But for now:
FIVE ARCHVILES AND NO COVER
Realm of Shades Seven maps, beginning with an industrial/tech style and ending up with more stone/hellish texturing. These maps are all well made, large and open, and given the authors fondness for flying monsters, nowhere is really safe. This is especially apparent on map 2.
Map 5 is also a gem but Map 4 is probably the best; it's a large classic Doom 2 computer centre/toxic waste refinery style map, made very atmospheric by wonderfully moody lighting. It is a shame that the very end where you must rescue the red key from the centre of a nukage pool was found to be impossible without using god mode. Yes I am quite ashamed but really.
With a fondness for large quantities large monsters and hard to find secrets these maps will keep you going for some time. Sadly marred by the spot where I found cheating to be necessary it's still worthy of your attention.
The Rusting starts off fairly blandly in a corridor with a hut in the middle. The corridor ends up going into a small yard outside with another small building in the middle. It's fairly dull, until you go back.
You are presented with an enormous flooded city, way down below, buildings soaring above you. It is rammed with monsters and you have to run around like a maniac. This is fun shit and it was designed to be as such. After clearing outside you get to do all the buildings as well, then one of the walls lowers and the outside fills up again with even more monsters. This is a delight to play and the scale and size makes it - at least for me, it arguably lacks in detail which some people dislike - a delight to look at.
Blastem Finally in a random search of D!1000 I found a map I've been wondering about for a long time; the map that inspired the legendary Blastem2, which as I'm sure you recall I spent much of the last couple of years being obsessed with, and latterly, recording demos for.
It's a very strange thing to be going round a map that inspired another that you're incredibly familiar with. All the major features of Blastem2 are here, but you can see how they've been expanded upon and added to... The gameplay seems to lack the flow of the remake, as the latter brings in more monsters at up to half a dozen different flashpoints, Blastem only has two such moments following the initial entry to the map. You can remove the monsters before they emerge as well.
Still I can see how fun it is and indeed I can play it several times in a row... so I might even make some demos for it... It's a shame it doesn't seem to be in the idgames archive.
Doom 3 It's "gone gold" and will be out in early August or something. It might even be good.
I'm still not at all excited, though.
CAN YOU FLY, BOBBY
BITCHES LEAVE
It's time to play NAME THAT TUNE
- A is for Ardcore
- B is for BPM
- C is for Chillout
- D is for Dance
- (They leave out E altogether!)
- F is for Flyerz
- G is for Get It Down
- H is for Handz In The Air
- J is for Jack
- K is for Kosmos
- L is for Love
- M is for MC
- N is for Nine-0-9
- O is for Oops (and this is shown out of sequence)
- P is for Pumpin
- Q is for Q-bass
- R is for Rave
- S is for Smart e's
- T is for Techno
- U is for Ultra Violet
- V is for Vinyl
- X is for X-press Yourself
- Y is for Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
- Z (Unknown, MTV fades out the video at this point)
Thanks to Elliot for finding these out. I could only ever remember A and was sure B was bass. Oh well.
