Ugh I suppose I'd better update this piece of crap but I can't be bothered to do it properly so here's a list
- CC2: my map had some weird problem that nobody noticed until I got hold of a beta version and found they'd silently fixed it and rebuilt my map with some shitty nodebuilder that fucked all my glass doors and fake 3d shit up with all HOM everywhere and not only that zeroed the reject map. So after a brief "discussion" I fixed the thing myself and resubmitted it. Then they uploaded it, supposedly finished, but it wasn't so it got taken down again. Don't ask me what's going on. They want to move my map to map16 as well because it's so hard.
- From that discussion I discovered there's a patch that makes the latest zdoom build on linux. Okay great at last I thought. But no. After jumping through all the hoops required to get the thing to build, I couldn't get it to make any sound, and more importantly it locked up X on exit. So, fuck it.
- I've started making another map. In September I made a small thing called bridge.wad in order to work out how to do bridges with fake floor-over-floor. I made it look pretty decent and decided it could be the base for another map. Think of a huge plain bisected by a river of deadly slime, that looks empty but suddenly fills up with monsters. I've named it "Sector 14" in honour of that hilariously daft line at the start of Alien vs. Predator.
- A number of the issues I had with firefox in the previous update were fixed when they removed whatever the holdup was to getting 1.0 into sarge. I still don't like the tabs and had to muck about with about:config to force it to open new windows in tabs but I've got more used to it. I can post on the forums without the browser driving me crazy and that's the main thing. Thanks to everyone who wrote to me about this.
how ironic
I'm supposed to put something funny here but I don't think I could even if I wanted to
Did anybody else watch the epoch time pass 1,100,000,000
New hardware required me to upgrade my Debian installation from Woody to Sarge (stable to testing, if you prefer) Here is a list of just some of the things I don't like about it:
- Most obviously it has increased its disc space usage by 50% without actually gaining anything much. This would have been much higher had I not had the foresight to uninstall Galeon (and let Aptitude uninstall all the Gnome libraries it depends on - I do like Aptitude's ability to distinguish packages deliberately and automatically installed, but that was in the old version too)
- Upgrading Galeon would have resulted in Gnome 2 being pulled in. Not just the libraries, but all sorts of applets and services too. These people clearly have not heard of the term "dependency". Galeon, a web browser, does not need all the shitty little applets and services a standard Gnome 2 installation comes with. Applications depends on libraries, not other applications.
- So I tried to switch to Firefox. First thing, it's not the latest version, because of course Sarge won't let it in until it's all up to date and some shitty architecture that nobody uses is holding it up.
- The fonts are shit. RISC OS had better antialiasing in 1988.
- Firefox has no concept of how tabbed browsing should work. In Galeon the tabs felt like they were part of the program. In Firefox they feel like a quick hack bolted on. After all all Firefox has to do is be better than IE which is not hard. It can't even open all new windows in a new tab, despite my setting "browser.tabs.opentabfor.windowopen" to true. And it can't open new tabs next to the tab from which the new tab was spawned, it has to open them right on the end which is miles away. Seriously Galeon's tabs are so much better than Firefox's in almost every way imaginable, there are at least half a dozen more holes I could pick.
- Also isn't Firefox meant to have mouse gestures? Or is that in a version that Debian still deem to be part of "unstable"?
- Why the fuck has my compose key suddenly stopped working? I suppose Linux has a philosophical objection to keyboards with Windows keys on them but since they're there you might as well set them up to do something useful, right? Not any more!
Why does everything go wrong? Even Doom has not escaped the Scourge of Sarge. In particular the underlying SDL libraries to which PRBoom links work differently. Before, sprites and walls in the distance would still have detail, and indeed by increasing the resolution you could see stuff further away from you without them having pixels missed out by the scaling routine. Now, sprites that would be "out of range" on a 486 running doom.exe in 320x200 are plotted with similar loss of information, and so everything looks pixellated.
It is as if, instead of the game plotting onto a 640x480 canvas, it is plotting onto a 320x200 canvas and then SDL is scaling it up. I don't know if it's possible to change this behaviour using environment variables but it is incredibly annoying and makes fighting at a distance all the more difficult.
bonfire night more like bangfire night
I should have saved this quote for today
I would rather drink a beer than win father of the year
I finished doing Alien Vendetta from pistol starts on HNTR. I don't think I can be arsed to write a review. Come on, it's 32 maps, I'll be here all day and you wouldn't read it. It's one of those map sets everybody should play anyway. That said it's not brilliant, some of the later maps are a bit sprawling and I felt went on for too long. As a humourous aside it's quite easy to see how much inspiration Deus Vult took from the final maps in AV.
I've moved onto the original Community Chest megawad. It varies, a lot, as you'd expect from a compilation made this way with relatively little collaboration on maps. I dare say the sequel will be similar. No, it's not out yet. Anyway in the original I got past map 6 at last, then having previously done 7, I skipped 8 and 9 and am now up to 12 or so (4, 8 and 9 are from Redux, about which at the time I remember thinking would need to have ammunition carried forward to have any chance to succeed on the later levels. Imagine, you have 20 shells and a shotgun, not much health, and 8 revenants come out of the walls in a small area with hardly any room to dodge. You need a bigger gun)
