Last year, we offered a fair amount of coverage of E3 despite lacking the resources to attend in person.  We provided links and summaries and commentary in one gigantic news post.

This year… Nothing.

Why?

It’s actually quite simple.  If you look at our E3 post last year, you’ll notice that we covered mostly the PC related topics and only really looked at the consoles for their next big upgrades or to see games that would have at least a PC port.

This year… the upgrades have names.  And that’s about it.

Okay, that isn’t totally fair, but it is a serious issue for me.  We now know that project natal will be called “Kinect”.  The urge to steal a joke from Atop the Fourth Wall is incredible here, but I’ll resist.  We also know it will be bundled with XBox 360 Slim.

That’s right, no next generation consoles were revealed here.  Just a “slim” version of the original that can completely destroy your disk if you move the system while it is spinning.

The PS3 Move and Eye thing looks decent.  But really, it is still just a Wii rip-off.  It should work better, but then again, so should the Wii by now.

So what did Nintendo announce?  The 3DS of course.  Built in 3D, this is a great idea and I am honestly most likely to pick up one of these some day.  But seriously, where’s the new controller or console?

More importantly for me, where’s the PC advancements and announcements?

Well… basically, they’re all in with the consoles.  Yes, we can expect a lot of console ports in the coming year.

Don’t get me wrong, Fallout New Vegas looks nice and Portal 2 is good news.  But really, we’re looking at ports of Medal of Honor, CoD Black Ops, and other games.

Oh, and a BFBC 2 add-on pack.

…

yea…

…

Announced for PC in 1997

The simple truth is, I still pine of the days of Duke Nukem 3D and Tomb Raider games.  Back in those days, there would be countless photos and news posts.  Huge game announcements would be made there.  The entire event was one massive spectacle.  The consoles had big news.  The PC had big news.  The hardware had big news.  It was all huge.

E3 1997 gave us Half-Life, Unreal, SiN, Quake II, and Metal Gear Solid.

On a side note, can you believe Alan Wake was debuted in 2005?

E3 took a nose dive toward the end of its public run and was restructured as closed door meetings for 2007 and 2008 with around 15,000 in attendance total.  Compare that to the 2005 estimate of 70,000.

Max Payne Gameplay first shown at E3 in 1998

The key here was that so many “outsiders”… read that as gamers, bloggers, and effectively the entire customer base… had started attending to make reports.  The scaled back shows were limited to “industry professionals”.

I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong THAT idea was, but it happened.

In the end, I feel that the 2000′s in general brought a bit of a change to E3′s nature, dragging the presentations into a purely console focus and more or less dumping anything else.

Don’t get me wrong, PC developers and hardware groups may still be there… but when was the last time you saw them given top billing.

“but that just reflects the market,” some of you say.  Sure.  Consoles are nice because they come equipped for your games.  No maintaining an expensive computer system here.  And lovely extras like movies and blueray players also help.

My point isn’t that PC is better then everything… that’s a given…

No, I’m simply disappointed that more time and space isn’t given to PC, software companies, hardware, etc.

I can sort of understand the focus on PS3 this year for Portal 2 simply because PS3 had been completely abandoned since the orange box.  Knowing people with the PS3, I’m certainly glad VALVe finally gave them the attention they deserved as paying customers… even if it did require MicroSoft demanding money from free DLC to finally change Gabe’s mind.

*sigh*  I digress.  I’ve gotten very far off topic.

We didn’t cover E3 as heavily this year because I didn’t have the time to sift through all of the news to find the few genuinely good announcements.  For what it’s worth, E3 has drastically improved in the past two – once again open to the public… sort of – years.

Even so, I don’t see any reason to report on E3 again until the show improves further, and especially when the developers come up with new consoles and games as opposed to Wii rip-offs, “Slim” products, and a hearty supply of sequels.

Seriously…

When E3 revives its glory days or betters them, we’ll pay more attention.  Need I point out that I question whether we would even be able to attend such an expo… even if we did have the needed funding… even in the current “open” format of the show?

What do they consider “credentials” anyway?  Driver License?  Web Site Receipts?  A really big role of one dollar bills?

I’d rather stick with QuakeCon, A-Kon, and other conventions that really focus on the most important people… the customers.

After a lengthy hold for annotations to be added into this video set, the Pernumbra Black Plague walkthrough is finally ready for your viewing pleasure.

Visit the Pernumbra: Black Plague Walkthrough page to view all 16 parts.  Or watch the first part below.  I suggest watching in full screen.

In trying to write tonight, I’ve had to consider various topics and found most just needless.  Finally, after constantly returning to the same idea of addressing some of the criticisms Cat-Life has received, I decided to give in and make that entry.

No, I’m not going to simply argue with critics or anything so juvenile.  Rather I want to again reinforce a few points.

First, the mod has done exactly what the team set out to do.  That is, to please the fans of our mod.  Honestly, if you expect to like every mod you ever play, you’re lying to yourself.  Mods often fall to a specific target audiance and ours has been happy with our demo.

Moreover, I expect that the fans will be fairly happy with the cleaned up code and debugged maps when the mod is ready for a beta update.

But all of that brings me to the second point.  This mod is NOT for everyone.  Let me give you some examples.  Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a short news item about Cat-Life when the demo finally released.  Their take was that the mod felt too much like a mini-Gordon and not enough like a cat.  Specifically, the reviewer felt that a cat would not attempt some of the dangerous jumps and such.

His loyal commenters mostly agreed… which is to be expected.

Meanwhile, Philip of planetphilip has sort of jokeingly said that he needs the cat to have major upgraded abilities and has used a chainsaw and a grapling hook as examples.

And, let us speak only briefly of Redfox’s Hitler-Jesus cat with head mountable laser which Emanuel from Podcast17 has indicated would have been more enjoyable and funny.

Let’s think about this for a moment.  Hitler-Jesus cat with head mountable laser, chainsaw, grappling hook, and that acts like a real cat and not an action hero.  It would be great if we could pull that business off, but… no… just no.

We can’t be all things to every player.  It simply isn’t possible without painful and destructive compromises in concept.  Ultimately, we either make ten different mods and tie them all together in one package [a prospect that would likely take decades to develop], or we make one project and see it through to the finish.

For the people that have been following us from the beginning, it’s only fair that we finish the original concept.  They were the ones that saw us through thick and thin.  They are the fans that have waited seven years for a demo release.  And, as of that demo release, they are the ones that speak of how much they enjoy it.

Third, the mod is not perfect.  I have said this enough times already.  I don’t really care to continue repeating that point.  We are a mod team, not an indie team.  Nor a game studio proper.  A mod.  And most mods never get this far.  It was the sheer tenacity of a few loyal people that kept this mod alive so long.

By 2007, when development resumed after years of downtime, the original project was basically gone.  It’s source version was gone.  We had nothing but BiGToM’s desire to see the project finished.  And he was doing all the work by himself.

Thankfully, additional team members joined, but we still suffer from our old problems.  Often a member joins because they want the fame that accompanies the project.  They want to see their name in a magazine or something.  They produce quality work samples to prove their skills, but then never do anything.

They don’t even contact the team to talk about the project.

When we are asked what is happening with the mod right now, all I can say is that bluefire from In Development is working on the cat code and BiGToM is debugging the maps.  I’m not sure any of the other team members are still active.

And THAT brings us to the fourth point.  I am not the Team Leader.  BiGToM is.  I have said before that I am the Gabe Newell of BWL.  And honestly, that’s an accurate principle.  I am the site administrator and make the big decisions.  Team Cat-Life is only a portion of the site and BiGToM is Team leader.

I trust him to make the project.  My role in Cat-Life has been mostly hands off.  I try not to get too involved in the development and handle the press releases as several folks have trusted my use of English more then their own.  That started with FG offering me a news job and Special Forces Team recruiting me to be their public relations as well.

When I knew that Cat-Life was going to be released without custom code, I rushed to make some code.  Since then, I haven’t done anything else except work on public relations and stay in communication with bluefire.

Fifth, we DO indeed know what a story is and how to use it.  Unfortunately, there are limitations to what we can do with GoldSource.  The project as it stands will be a basic story that we have continuously stated we would not be discussing publicly.  I don’t expect the story to be very deep or emotional… this isn’t Dear Esther.  It’s a story about a pet cat trying not to die.

I can’t even begin to go into detail about the story because I haven’t read it all myself.  And let me add that the Cat-Life prologue I have pointed to more then once now as proof of concept is a “fan prologue”.  I have said this many times and yet I still get questions regularly.

It isn’t even the bloody mod story, let alone the mods back story.  That was made before BiGToM even took over the project.

So then, what does all of this mean for Cat-Life?  Is it a bad mod?  Is BiGToM a bad leader?

No… none of the above.  BiGToM has done an excellent job and deserves to be commended for doing so much of the work by himself and of his own initiative.  And Cat-Life will be a fun mod about a cat trapped in Black Mesa.  Yes it will be buggy, but… you could always make something to improve the mod.

Do you make models, maps, or know how to program?  Then why not make something.  Do some of the work yourself and be a part of a very unique mod.

As for Cat-Life Source, well… that is a different matter entirely.  Given the shortfalls of the GoldSource engine, I feel that Cat-Life will not be as great a game as I would have liked.  I think Source would be a better platform and had I been administrator back in 2005 or earlier, I probably would have insisted on use of Source.

That said, now that we have a mostly completed project, we can start looking to future projects and what we want to do.  If you want to see a better plot for the original Cat-Life, get started.  BiGToM has previously stated that he would like to make our materials open source when the project is finished so that community content for the mod can be made.  He would like to see someone develop a deathmatch game.

But the Source project is different.  I am taking the lead on that game because I want to see something wonderful.  :SysOp: has tried to offer explanations of how to develop mods on multiple occasions and sadly, through difficulties in translation, his comments have sometimes felt insulting.

Though he means well… we know how to develop a mod.  We just don’t have the most important role, as is the case with many mods, a coder.  Thankfully bluefire has stepped in for the GoldSource project and I want you to tell him “thank you” for his service when you get the chance.

dimitri is helping with the source version, but I fear that time issues may have broken him away from the project.  It has been a while since he last contacted me so I don’t really know what he may have finished from our to-do list.

If you can code for source and want to help, let me know.  It would be great to have more help here.  I’m not doing much further until the code is ready.

But what have I said about this project so far?

Not much.  Cat-Life: Source will be the same idea we made with GoldSource, but using a better engine.  Additionally, the story will be changed for one that I have in mind.

That being the case, if you have read any of the links I posted on ModDB back during the demo release, then you will know how grand in scheme this mod will be.  I have very big plans in mind and a darker story with some amusing secrets.  We have a few gags already lined up, but the plot will not be as humorous.

Honestly, I think many will want to know what is different about the story.

Everything.

Expect to begin the game in a kitty litter box for instance.  Expect to learn about why you are smarter then other cats.  Expect to see some important parts of the original game as they finally meet their end… for example…

Wait what?

oh… alright.

Just one.

Expect to have options in certain parts of the game.  Though linear in nature, you will be able to choose between two paths to reach the same goal in some places.  At one such place, if you take the vent shaft on the left it will lead you to a collapse in the vent.

Crawling through a crack in the wall will bring you into the Sector C test chamber in it’s last moments of existence.  The crack and vent behind you collapses and traps you inside.  The main blast doors have fallen and the entrance is now blocked by debris from the ceiling.  The blast window is unreachable as it is too high and the walls are made of metal.

A grinding sound draws your attention to the center of the room.  Suddenly, the massive anti-mass spectrometer’s main column crashes to the ground, smashing the scanner below and shaking the room violently.  A cloud of dust fills the chamber and you can see and hear the column teetering for a moment before it tumbles onto it’s side.

Then a cascade of debris and rock begins to rain down as the ceiling begins falling apart.  Chunks of rock and concrete the size of small trucks begin to tumble into the room.  You’re only hope is to scramble across the room before you are crushed and scurry down into the delivery system.

Of course, this is all some distance in our future now.  We still need some source code and I have some more writing and design work to do.  Also, we have several other mod projects to consider.

This week I have worked to clean up the forums to better match our new intentions to focus more on creativity and development.  Thanks to that, some of my other projects are visible.  We have at least three other mod ideas we want to make eventually, not including Cat-Life: Source or the sequel I also plan to make in Cat-Life 2.

And with four or five machinima projects in the works, plus custom content for those, and the list of stories that spans several more topics, we have plenty to work on.  I am openly looking for a Source modeler, mapper, sound designer, etc… but not just for Cat-Life Source.  I need many of these items for my stories and the new machinima shows we have planned.

The new project forums will all be updated as I think of more items to add.  So make sure you stop by the forums from time to time.

I’ve made some fairly small changes to the site over the past few weeks.  Most notably, I removed the Team Blog forum.  Since our site is using WordPress again, I see no reason to continue making journal posts in the forums.

Thus, I am creating a new category here… the Journals.  My own little feature is “From The Wildcat’s Notebook”.

With that explanation out of the way we really should get started with this entry.

For close to a month now, I have spent my spare time working on the Cat-Life code specifically trying to edit the player POV.  :SysOp: from ModDB was helpful and offered up the location of the hull definitions.

And I also, only a day or so ago, discovered an old tutorial by omega and Corvidae regarding player scaling in GoldSource.

All of this new information has been helpful and I think everyone involved.  With that said, none of this help has been exactly what we need for Cat-Life.  Valve’s prediction system tends to trash the constant vectors we set for our hulls and defaults back to the standard 72 unit height.

I posted a thread in the forums showing off the easily controlled POV [ Link ] back on the 22th of October.  At that point, I had spent only a few hours on the idea.  It was after that post, and with a few more hours of work in my free time, that I learned the useless nature of hull definitions.

In short, they made a cat with an invisible six foot clearance.  Toying with the code, I learned that setting the variables could affect what the game rendered, but did little else.  The collision system itself is a part of the aforementioned predictions.  So… I need to override prediction without learning every tiny detail of the Half-Life source code… right?

Well, no actually.  I simply needed to find the tutorial by omega and Corvidae.  With it, I could basically override the hull reset using a simple module and a custom hull file for compiling.  But that’s where this matter again becomes tricky.

The tutorial is for scaling the game in full… not simply the player.  So I’ve had to make a few truly ugly hacks and some of the stupidest… silliest… worst use of hard-coding I have ever done.  Why?  Because, as I said before, I don’t have time to really study the code.  That’s precisely why we want a coder specifically and BiGToM was willing to offer a reward for that coder.

More specifically, using the custom hull and hacks shrank the player while basically maintaining the other monsters in full size.  But… their origins are now lower.  This means that they seem to sink waist deep into the ground.  To fix this, I am simply modifying their individual hull settings.  Of course, I’m not finished with this and the dead bodies still fall under the ground so I have some more work in my future.

Honestly, this really is a poor coding job on my part.  It works just fine… I’ve even managed to turn a bug into a fun little feature… the monsters can effectively step on the player and hold them in place while attacking.  It’s not perfect and really is just a bug, but it’s pretty fun.  You’d better not let them get too close now. XD

Once I finish this ugly mess with the hulls, I still plan to make a secondary fire bite attack and possibly work some clones into the code for Cat-Zombies, Juvenile headcrabs, and military dogs into the code.  I also do plan to try to add wall jumping, sprinting, and DarkVision to the game.  Nevertheless, I’m making no promises as this has already taken up more of my time then I would have liked.

Seriously, we need a full coder and not just me toying with the code in my spare time.  I have a number of other projects to work on besides this code and once I’m done with my part, I’m sure there will be bugs that will need cleaning up.

Outside of Cat-Life, I’ve been re-assigned at work again.

Another false accusation that a client made while half-asleep and angry that he couldn’t eat during the night due to diabetes.  Long story short, I should have been cleared by now.  The client recanted on his accusation the next day.  The state investigator cleared us that same day and by the end of the weekend the investigation was back in our facility’s hands.

This also was over in a day.  I was a float… which means I was working on a different home then the one I am actually assigned.  And I was only working on that other home for 2.5 hours, never worked with any of the clients, and never really did anything.  I was reassigned because the client wanted to report all of the on-duty staff at that time for a false abuse allegation.

I really don’t understand why I am still reassigned.  I’ve learned that the two men that I worked with didn’t properly document all of the client’s behaviors that night, and that is the only reason I am still working in the campus laundry.  They wanted to basically punish us for not writing all of the client’s behaviors down.

Shameful isn’t strong enough a word to describe this facility and it’s parent government organization.  Politics is too important to these people.  Enough so that they ignore their employee’s rights.  Is this supposed to be a long and disgracefully stretched-out investigation?  Are they really supposed to punish us without conviction?  Should I even be included in any of this?

Of course not!  This business is, for lack of a better word, retarded!

This is a big part of the reason I’m taking so long to make the Cat-Life code… I don’t feel like working on it most days of the week.  And when I do, I have a very short time to do so.

This madness gives me limitless stress, physical strains (as I stand all day long on a conveyor belt digging through soiled linens and clothing ),  a disrupted sleep schedule, and prevents me from maintaining my daily lifestyle (exercise, proper eating, sleep, etc).

Nevertheless, I have been looking at some changes to make on the site.  I have four video projects planned and Syrus, Radu, and BiGToM have all already volunteered.  I will go into more detail on those projects in a video update soon.

I am archiving the GargArena mod.  I will be archiving the old “Friendly Garg’s site” stories as well.  They’ll still be available to view, but will be in an archive area instead of the main story pages.

These and some other changes are directed at moving the site forward.  I want BWL Development to stand on it’s own instead of relying on FG’s old content.  We have several stories now from the BWL era and I want to help shift the site focus more toward creativity, gaming, and so forth because I feel the site is a bit mired in the old days as a Half-Life fan site.  We’re more then that.  And I believe that its time we started to act like more then a fan site.

I still have two pages of Operation: Save the Friendly Garg to color and assemble, and I plan to make that more of a series.  Yes it’s a half-life fan-fiction of sorts, but it’s a good project and is intended to be a series of sorts.

I also plan to continue An Average Citizen.

However, Errant Pixels will move away from Half-Life and become more about our active members.

I also have a possible story/comic/mod concept in mind for my Trinegate Universe (Mature rated Sonic The Hedgehog storyline – It’s considerably more grown up).  Also, I plan a Duke Nukem project due to the failure of 3D Realms to produce Duke Nukem Forever.  All of this is the subject for a different entry though.  A few companies and their projects have provoked me now and my pen is ready to show them how it’s done.

Of course, I have some completely original works too.  As I make progress on them, I think I’ll offer samples in the VIP section of the forums and eventually even the main site.  Once those original stories are finished, I’ll offer the full product for sale in book form eventually.

I’ll be looking into BWL, Cat-Life, and Ambition & Honor T-Shirts much sooner.

And the Ambition & Honor Forum RP will be prepared as time allows.  The A&H comic will also eventually be properly posted and as issues are finished, I’ll consider selling printed copies of that too.

Back on the Half-Life front, all four of the upcoming machinima projects will be made with GMod.  One is a mock trailer for “The Most Epic Game Ever Made”.  Two of the projects will be on-going series concepts with one based around “The Source” and our active forum members in an action-adventure format.  The second series will be more of a clip show… but… well, I can’t say much but it will be different from everything you’ve watched on YouTube in that format.

The fourth project doesn’t have a forum in the Studio Offices yet, but it does have a name.  “Team Play” will be a running series of videos based around the Half-Life 2 story-line.  The details are both complicated and secret… so… moving on.

I’m still working on the second of “The Source” stories, The Corrupted.  That series is turning decidedly more serious, but without forgetting to have fun.  I’ve completed some 39 pages so far and have a number more already shot.  They simply need assembly.  The rest of the story will be completed and the entire project posted when I have the time.

VIP’s can check out the first 30-pages of that story in the VIP Lounge forum.

After The Corrupted, I plan to continue that series, but first I plan to make my new version of Barney Time.  This is a project I sort of quietly announced some time ago.  FG and I discussed it briefly on deviantArt, but I’ve kept it quiet.

I’ll be “re-imagining” the Barney Time series rather then continuing FG’s stories.  You may recall that the Barney Time Source stories were short and a little limited given the age of the original series and the drastic changes of events between HL and HL2.  You can thank Valve for ruining that series. =P

My re-imagining will be a new story based roughly on the old.  Written in a marginally more serious light yet incredibly outlandish in concept, the story will incorporate the HL2 series of games from the start and will likely be easier to follow then the original.  This story won’t be a series though… it will be one stand alone “epic”.

Conundrum, my “novel” crossover fan-fic, will be completed over time.  I must apologize for the amount of time this story is taking, but I only work on it one chapter at a time in its own turn.  With all of these other projects, it takes a while for the line to circle around again.

The forum RP threads are moving pretty slow now.  I restarted “Downfall” some time ago, but it has yet to see any interested players… which is just as well.  I’m a little busy at the moment and wouldn’t get around to updating very often.

Such is the case with Cataclysm.  That RP has been much slower as I have deliberately waited for the “do nothing” responses from each player.  Basically, that has been an excuse to put that game aside while I work on other projects.

I’ll update it again pretty soon weather Syrus posts his move or not.  The story is about to take a fairly dramatic turn and we’re about to enter the build up for the climactic battle.

My, but that is a lot of text.  Since you’ve probably all stopped reading this already… let me just say that the first “tl;dr” comment will receive a quick and painless (mostly) death.

I think I’ve spoken enough about the current goings on as I have a number of future posts that will address these matters in better… more focused detail.  Hopefully, the business with work will turn around and/or I will find a better employment option.  I certainly hope to get more project work done soon such that we can start having some regular new content that expands on this site’s true purpose.

Until next time… see ya.