Summer Time
The clocks go forward an hour so it gets dark an hour later, so you save an hour's energy in the evening. But you have to put the lights on for an extra hour in the morning?!
Subversion's profligate use of disk space*
rjy@vile:/tmp$ svn co file:///svn/rboom/trunk rboom-working
rjy@vile:/tmp$ svn export file:///svn/rboom/trunk rboom-export
rjy@vile:/tmp$ du -hs rboom-*
5.0M rboom-export
11M rboom-working
It annoys me that it insists on keeping two copies of every file, even when the repository is local, or otherwise accessed over a fast connection (for some value of "fast") Also, why the hell does it fill working copies with temporary files when you do a merge, and then totally fail to clean them up afterwards? (Hint: have a look in .svn/tmp) This seems to be a new thing in Etch, the version in Sarge never did it.
* Disk space isn't as cheap or as large as you think it is. It's unreliable and needs backing up regularly. Typically a CD/DVDRW drive will be used. Therefore you must keep at least half or possibly as much as two thirds of the drive free, in order to have room to make a tarball of the existing data and split it into appropriately-sized pieces.
Maps
1squares.wad - possibly the original slaughter wad? It's pretty boring though, as the gameplay is the same all the way round (open door to roomful of monsters, use door as choke point, kill them as they move into the doorway) Not much opportunity to get a huge infight going.
xenosx9 - 9 deathmatch maps, but each has a small population of monsters. Quite good fun, can get top-heavy sometimes.
Congestion Control / Congestion Control 2 - from 2003, replayed recently. Good-looking, lots of detail, weird texture theme though, they use pretty much all the themes they can in the same level. Kind of like Doom E2/E3 in that respect (but with a lot more detail, obviously) Gameplay: not as hard as I remember. The sequel in particular is so overstuffed with ammunition it's almost trivial. Both highly recommendable nonetheless.
Clock and Bulb Enumeration (2007 remix)
It's a year since the infamous Clock and Bulb Enumeration post. Let's see what's changed:
- the watch is another year older, but it almost didn't make it - see below
- the alarm clocks actually wake me up now for some reason, it was when I switched from using the buzzer alarm (a horrible noise I want to turn off as soon as possible) to some news programme on Radio 4 at 5:30am (which is quite interesting, while not being in depth enough to be annoying)
- the pink lampshade is replaced with a white uplighter which, while losing the quirky charm (i.e. blatant eccentricity) of having a bright pink and green colour scheme, has pretty much doubled the amount of light in here, which is something I've wanted to do for a while.
- I managed to replace at least one of the spotlight bulbs with a compact flourescent, but it's kind of redundant now with that new uplighter which basically makes the entire ceiling into a light source. Fewer bulbs means a lower electricity bill though. God knows I waste enough leaving the computers on all the time.
I feel inexplicably that things have improved since then?
How to give yourself heart failure changing a watch battery
While trying to take some pictures of a lunar eclipse (and failing miserably to get anything decent) I had absent-mindedly pressed the light button again, like that time at the cinema. This time the battery drain was too much and the thing was completely dead.
I wasn't really bothered initially. Fortunately I could steal a replacement out of an otherwise useless christmas present, and I've had the back off it before, I've got this absolutely miniscule screwdriver from somewhere or other that does the job nicely.
However when I put it back together I nearly had a heart attack because whenever I pressed any of the buttons the entire display scrambled itself. I thought I'd just broken one of my most precious possessions.
Feeling rather hopeless I took the back off again, but somehow realised I'd failed to sufficiently tighten some of the tiny screws inside the watch that held the battery in place. After tightening them again all was well.
This has been another of my interminable stories about apparently breaking electronics and ploughing the depths of despair but somehow managing to come out the other side. I tell you life is like a rollercoaster (sarcasm) (ironically pointing out the obvious) (brackets)
Quick post about Vae Victus since it's now like six months old and I keep putting it off. Two seven-map wads, one from early 2005 which I totally missed, but played after the sequel was released.
They have a similar theme, you start off with techbases, then some castles and fortresses, ending up in hell. The "hell" part of the original is very much inspired by Deus Vult, I mean it's practically the same in a few places.
The first has obvious problems with zdoomisms including solid hanging bodies in tall sectors, implicit passuse and maps with monsters at extreme distance and height difference which were obviously placed by someone more used to having mouselook.
The sequel is largely bug-free, and as I said, quite easy. All the maps are doable from pistol starts without much trouble, and indeed you can quite easily do a mission run of all seven maps if you have an hour to waste.
I definitely recommend you play VV2. VV is worth a download, but you will need to cheat in a couple of places and probably not bother getting 100% kills.
Links: Vae Victus, Vae Victus II
High/Low 2
Here's the sequel to a previous map, well, it's more like a followup. Episode 2 style this time. Except for one thing it's pretty much an improvement. It looks just as good, which means in fact that it looks better because I think it's harder to make a good-looking episode 2 style map than episode 1. I think it plays slightly better as well - typically great layout, flows excellently, everything is just where you need it to be. Although the red key is absolutely trivial to grab out of sequence, so much so that it doesn't even feel like a speedrunning trick, in fact some people even mistook it for the correct route to take!
The only real trouble with High/Low 2 is there is a very noticable ZDoomism at the end that stops you finishing the map. Line 1757 is a stair builder linedef and so needs a tag. Then if you try to make the obvious fix it doesn't work because all the stair sectors are tagged 60 (and need to be, so another effect earlier in the map works) but they aren't in ascending numerical order. There are a few other little problems as well, due to lack of proper testing. I saw an imp stuck in a wall, some odd and quite unnecessary reject map bugs, and in the room with the two barons that rise up out of the floor, one of them is meant to teleport but it can happen that you teleport instead and end up stuck in a tiny holding chamber! Oh well.
I want to recommend this map but I can't because of the bugs. Without them it would be an early contender for map of the year. Top ten definitely.
SITE MERGE
When the renewal of my domain name came up recently I decided to merge my sites. Well not instantly, you know me I can't make an instant decision over anything, in fact I've been thinking about doing this for like most of a year and I did most of the work a month ago, but, never mind. Anyway, two reasons: firstly it's easier and there's less messing about, but mostly because well it's about time I stopped using a brand name based on using RISC OS. I mean I hardly use those computers any more. It's sad but there you go. (Recall the ARCH part of anARCHy is from Archimedes, the whole word being a system type in Elite)
The namespaces don't overlap except for the root, and there wasn't anything but ssh key fingerprints in troa.ath.cx's root and so they can go. Besides it was totally insecure, if someone hijacked my dns they could just put up a replacement page with new key fingerprints on and nobody would be any the wiser.
I've used this fancy thing called HTML::Template which makes a few things easier, and generally just tidied up the code. Casualties include the tracklist which I will probably eventually move offsite with the mp3s. Plans for the future, well, maybe I'll change my mind and make a news feed and turn SNAFU into a Planet clone, who knows? I mean I was going to do that before, until I realised RSS is horribly retarded. Also there are a few CSS tweaks I could make. Finally I want to make a local mirror of /idgames with a frontend that doesn't annoy the frogs out of me but that's a long way off.
Feel free to use whatever domain name you like to link to here, although I suppose the ones with "rjy" in them are preferred. Also I refuse to make any guarantees I won't break everything at some point in the future but you knew that anyway.
10 Sep 2002 Revival
So I was reading my diary for 10th September, 2002, and found a list of six small maps. First, two maps by Ed Cripps:
- Reunion 1 A small episode 1 style base map running on E1M1. The theme is all right but it's a bit dull. Needs to have more interconnection. It's also very easy, there's never that much to shoot at.
- Reunion 2 Sequel to previous, but also replaces E1M1 so you can't load them both at once. A little better, but still nothing to write home about. Slightly harder too. The ending suggests there will be a third map to follow, but it doesn't seem to have been made.
Now some of Pablo Dictter's Ultra-Detailed Corridors:
- A Lonely Place To Die This replaces E2M2 and its theme is very much episode 2; destroyed, abandoned, hell-corrupted techbase. It's literally flat - the floor height changes only very rarely. It looks like it shouldn't be hard but you can easily mess up your ammunition and run out.
- ...and death came along The same author's next creation. Techbase style, runs on E4M1. It differs from the previous by not being so flat, although it's still basically corridors. Some extra interest and replayability - you can take one of two routes to the exit, and two blue keys to facilitate this. One route is easier than the other - my advice is when you have the red key, go back to the door you already passed. Lots of hard-to-find secrets, some inside other secrets. The first room of this map is vicious.
More Dictter, but he seems to have learned maps are more interesting when you can see into other areas of the map.
- Pretty Hate Marine: Entryway A small map, replacing E4M1. Highly detailed, very cramped techbase. Lots of interconnection, windows etc. Secrets which are mostly just tiny rooms behind miscoloured wall textures.
- Pretty Hate Marine: Starfuckers Inc. Sequel to previous and, if you liked it, more of the same! Replaces E4M2, in fact you can load both wads at once and carry ammunition forward, although I suspect that would make it too easy. Same kind of secrets that are obviously "there" but hard to get into.
Summary: all of these maps are worth playing once, so get going.
Traditional birthday update
Nothing much happened. I didn't go out or do anything different from the usual, except by coincidence (I might be doing the network expansion now but it should have happened over a year ago)
Some good news though: I seem to have fixed my infamously crazy sleeping pattern. For over four months now I have woken up at 5:30-6am. However some days are better than others - new year's day was horrible, I was kept awake half the night by fireworks - and I do feel like a recovering addict marking off "days since last drink / smoke / whatever" on a calendar.
I hope it's been long enough to make it safe to say that now without jinxing it.
Crusades & Slayer
Two wads by the same author, Richard Wiles.
Crusades. An episode 4 replacement, using the gothic textures extensively. Highly detailed and pretty much the state of the art for vanilla-compatible Doom mapping in 1999. Most of the maps have a vaguely castle-like brick/wood/metal theme, with blood and gory decorations everywhere - though the secret level is more like a techbase. Interestingly it cannot decide if it wants to be dark, foreboding, and cramped, with a low monster population but even lower resources; or light, airy and abound with carnage. And you end up in Quake.
Gameplay is challenging. Its difficulty level is just on that edge where you keep getting killed but you think "no I should be able to do this" so you keep retrying it. Indeed it was probably the first wad whose on-the-cusp difficulty level caused me to become obsessed with conquering each map from a pistol start. I'm talking hundreds of attempts, and eventual success taking an entire year. The fact that I managed to repeat this achievement recently in less than a week proves I must have improved as player!
In summary, highly recommended. One other thing, it was primarily tested with Doom 95, which is why the intermission screens are only visible on episode 1, whereas the actual maps are on episode 4. This is a known bug with Doom 95 which is fairly easy to fix using a hex editor.
Slayer came out in 2001 and I must admit when I saw it I thought "this is Crusades for Doom 2". However I didn't play it properly until very recently, and there are important differences. Firstly I think the style is more "hell factory" than "hell castle", but what quickly becomes obvious is that it is much harder - of eleven single-player maps I have only managed to do the first and third of them from pistol starts. On most I die very quickly, or frustratingly having an accident after carefully playing the first quarter.
Yes unlike Crusades this is not "on that cusp". More like having to play too defensively (which is itself frustrating) shooting at monsters from far off with weak weapons - can't approach them because it's too dangerous, you'd be in a massive crossfire and there's no health - then desperation sets in as your ammo begins to runs out, and even if you do get lucky the next bit is even worse.
I do recommend you play Slayer though, it has excellent architecture, texturing and so forth, and is good to play if you use savegames and carry your guns and ammunition forward.
Lack of updates is due to new hardware and thus forcing me to upgrade to Etch. Except that it's not all that new. Things were broken and I couldn't work out how. In fact it's a bit like that series of updates I posted a few years ago...
THE STORY OF VILE
I had been planning for some time to build another machine and in October 2005 I finally got all the bits for it. But when I tried to put it together the case seemed to be just a couple of millimetres too small to get the motherboard in. That is to say, when it was fitted in place it was fine, but while trying to make the necessary manoeuvers to get it into place, various bits on the inside of the case were in the way.
Long story short, the corner got a bit scratched. Some of those gold connector lines you get on PCBs (I don't know what they're called, I don't know about electronics) got a bit scratched.
Well you can guess what's coming. It didn't boot. I had no idea what was wrong - they keep redesigning CPU sockets so you can't just try the other components in a different motherboard. Thinking "you broke the motherboard when you installed it, moron" I gave up. It sat in the corner of my room for months.
Then a chance experiment. I noticed that if you powered up the motherboard without the CPU plugged into it, you could hold the power button down for 4 seconds and it would turn off again. But with the CPU plugged in, it didn't work and you had to turn off the power supply itself.
I began to suspect it might be the CPU that was broken, and it turned out I was right - I recently had the opportunity to test it in another motherboard, which did exactly the same powering-off thing.
Fortunately they give you 3-year warranties on CPUs these days so I could return it. Dabs were very nice about this and their returns procedure was relatively painless which I must admit was unexpected. Even more fortunately I was refunded the value I paid in 2005. The replacement cost about 40% of that! A piece of luck, for a change.
