WuphonsReach Blog

Just (3) quick shots of the south flank crossroads now that I've reworked it. This is a semi-full detail lighting compile with flare (took 20+ minutes just to light/shade the map).

Layout of the river banks. I'm using a temporary texture (dark grey) on the river banks as a place holder. Eventually, I will duplicate all of those meshes and do some alpha blending to make it look more natural. But for now, I'm more concerned with getting the overall shape...

Here's some very early work from the BetaBunkers test map. This is the north bridge with a Panzer IV driving across it. You can see that the bridge is just wide enough for the tank. The side walls are too high, although they provide a very nice "turret down" hiding...

This is a defensive position on the upper left corner of the map. (What will be SE in the game, if I remember correctly.) It is designed so that players can put a tank in hull-down position (almost "turret-down") while guarding the wooded road and the bridge in "http://www.wuphonsreach.org/blog/ of...

Here's a fun pair of maps. This is what happens when you brainstorm with markers and a piece of graph paper.Goals for this map:- Something about the size of Barbarossa, but smaller then Smolensk (two maps put out by the After-Hourz crew). Barbarossa is a popular map size, large enough...

Just two screen shots from a bit of mapping I was doing where I was considering creating a central town for a map. The key idea was that there would be a river running up the middle of the city that tanks and vehicles could use as a travel path.Here's...

Just recompiling my old blogs that have to do with CoD.CoD Compass Bug fixCoD - Interesting map projectsCoD:UO StalingradCoD concept maps (towers)CoD - Concept Map (underground storage)CoD Mapping LinksCoD Texture ListingCoD:UO screenshots (Foy)

Almost lost a city (or three) to a surprise attack by two different enemy civs this past week. I had a pretty good defensive position, the southern half of a triangular peninsula. But my southern cites were only lightly defended. Most cities had a fighter plane, one modern unit and...

Played a few more games in CivIV. Terrain defensive bonuses are very powerful and should definitely play a prominent role in strategy for defensive play. I've talked briefly about the basics before, but I can now expound on that a bit more with additional play under my belt.Assuming that the...

I've got what I think is going to boil down to a war on my eastern front. China is attempting to press my territorial boundaries and has been building new settlements along my eastern front. Naturally, I've also been attempting to build new settlements there as well as moving troops....

Oops, I made the mistake of picking this up recently. There goes all of my free time. It's a turn-based strategy game (akin to MOO/MOO2) where you need to beat all of the other civilizations to one of 6 victory conditions. There's a nice tutorial which walks you through the...

Dug out my old copy of SimCity4 recently. I may even update my Negishi region at some point (or place the files online for download again). I had to pull them in the past due to bandwidth issues, but I now have a lot more bandwidth then I used to.One...

The Quiller series is one of those cold war delights. A book series about an undercover british agent who goes very deep undercover behind the iron/bamboo curtains. One turn of phrase used is "throwing the ferret down the hole to see what it can find out". He's often completely cut...

Thinking about the current design of classes in EQ2. When you start, you have no class (or role) from level 1-2. At level 3, you're forced to pick one of the 4 main archtypes (fighter, mage, priest, scout). Then, at level 10 you pick your sub-class (3 for each archtype),...

Went back and managed to do the carrier (2nd) level last night. As always, I play on the top difficulty level (Realistic) in god-mode. What's nice is that god-mode keeps track of the number of deaths (you still take damage, when you hit zero hitpoints it increments your death count,...

At this point, I'm going to say that I've (mostly) figured out the Fort and Pier levels (3rd and 4th) for Far Cry. FortI can wipe out the beach patrols and the one manned boat that gets summoned, and I also wipe out the leftmost beach patrol. It's pretty easy...

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex - This site has reviews for the first 20 or so episodes of the first season (it's missing the last 6 eps). Has a decent amount of information, especially trivia or a bit of backstory about odd cultural references.

So let's take a walk through the first mission of Far Cry, which is appropriately titled "Training". If you read a lot of the reviews on the web, I see that a lot of the reviewers make the same basic mistake as I did. That is, "Run and Gun" will...

So, I've been mucking around with Far Cry since I picked it up back in November. The basics of it is that it's a first person shooter, modern day, where it's you versus a zillion and a half enemies on some tropical islands. There's a mystery involved and there's a...

They recently changed the giants in Nektulos Forest, but here's what they looked like back in December 2004.

Just a screenshot of Sorish in seller mode. Also shows off some of the UI and my normal window layout. This is where I stand when I go into seller mode while AFK.

Sorish's hometown (Big Bend is a suburb of Freeport, each suburb houses 2 different races as they come off the boat).

Found this while digging through my log files for information on the EQ2 froglok race (still has yet to be uncovered).The following passages are from either Commonlands Creature Catalog, Outside Freeport Creature Catalog, or a book about the sewers of Freeport. One of the books contains a brief mention of...

Three screenshots of the top level of Blackburrow (a dungeon off of Antonica).

Pictures of the 5 horses in the West Freeport stables (Feb 2005).

Two shots from East Freeport.

Some of these images show that I don't have antialiasing turned on (see How to make AA work in EQ2). Hopefully that gets rid of the white border around certain objects which you can see in the pictures of the centaurs.

This is my little ratonga shopkeeper that I use to sell from my inn room in Big Bend. This is the one-room starter inn that you can get for free and only pay 5sp/week in upkeep.

You'll notice that there are differing amounts of black bars on these pictures. These were taken when I was experimenting with various resolutions, texture settings, and whether or not "foliage" was turned on.

Screenshots of the area around North Freeport.

Sorish, levels 15-22, pictures of the various armor and weapons that I was weilding along the way.

A bunch of guildies got together for a face-to-face meeting at the Jade Tiger Inn in North Freeport.

Mix of screenshots from in and around The Commonlands zone.

I'm getting dumped to the char select screen sometimes when I stand still for a few minutes. It *might* be because I need to turn on port triggering on the LinkSys router.Not 100% sure if EQ2 uses the same ports (it probably doesn't), but I'll keep looking. Plus, the RPG...

Isle of Refuge: This is the starting isle where you initially come after being picked up by the refugee ship. A lot of the UI windows are still in their default location.Isle of Refuge: Showing what the Ultravision ability looks light at night (lets you see in dark places).This is...

Toasted my old Ti4600 card this week, the fan finally went out on it and I can't manage to get the old cooler off without destroying the card. So I picked up a new GeForce 6800 for $300 (which was the next reasonable step up from the FX 5900 XT).NVIDIA...

Some mapping projects that I might look at for use on the clan's United Offensive server:Office - Looks nice, sorta like an axis HQ.Trenches - Trench warfare, could be hit or miss...Abbey St. Juste - Could be a bit small.

Reverse Slope Defense - Mildly applicable to Call of Duty:UO, mostly in the lesson that you (as defenders) shouldn't set yourself up on the forward slope. But most maps in CoD:UO aren't big enough to have multiple ridges, so it's rare that you'll see this put into effect.Index of articles...

Okay, taking some stabs at a fix. Looking at the basic structure of every gametype GSC file (e.g. "maps\mp\gametypes\bas.gsc", "maps\mp\gametypes\dm.gsc", etc).A) main() function always has the following (3) lines, identical for all game types:CODEif(!isDefined(game["compass_range"])) // set up the compass range. game["compass_range"] = 1024; setCvar("cg_hudcompassMaxRange", game["compass_range"]);B) SpawnPlayer() function only contains the...

Yes, and I *think* I have properly mod'd GSC files for the maps/gametypes affected. I've played through all combinations on my personal test server and it seems to work fine. However, I'm probably going to be out of town this weekend, so I don't have time to play test it...

One of the more annoying bugs in Call of Duty: United Offensive is with the range scale on the compass that shows where you are in relation to teammates or objectives. On some maps, it's set to a pretty high value (13000) which lets you see where things are pretty...

The default range for all maps in UO is still 1024 units (I think that's the same as old CoD). Tried changing the cvar (cg_hudCompassMaxRange) for the compass when connected to a UO server, but it is flagged as read-only.Only a few maps use a different value in UO. Look...

Well, my map is crashing during the VIS portion (using CoDBuilder).Error signature:AppName: q3map.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: q3map.exeModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 0002d27cI suspect it has to do with either a model that's out of place, or a brush that's funky. Here's a sample from the compiler output (with verbose option turned on).File...

Murphy's Laws of CombatSome classics:7. Try to look unimportant; the enemy may be low on ammo and not want to waste a bullet on you.23. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at.25. Never draw fire; it irritates everyone around you.51. Sniper's motto: reach out and...

Base assault - this is an undamaged bunker.Base assault - destroying the upper part of the bunkerBase assault - upper part destroyed, now you can gain access to the basement to blow it up.Flame thrower vs tank.

Some multi-player screen shots from last night. This was a british vs german map, no vehicles, town fighting. The play mode was "domination" where you have to capture and control all of the flag poles on the map.Smoke grenade in full bloom.Being hunted by a flame thrower.

COD Textures - CHM Help File Compiled - 23MB, but shows all of the stock textures in a help file. Much easier then trying to page through the various textures.File name is CODModelsAndTextures.zip, MD5 is EFFCF03ED400ABCE25520631AC27814D (in case you need to get it from somewhere other then FileFront).

Devmap mode - useful for exploring a multi-player level that you don't know, but you want to find out what textures were used.1. Create a new link to the multi-player EXE file [ "C:\Program Files\Call of Duty\CoDMP.exe" +set thereisacow 1337 +set developer 1 +set sv_cheats 1 +set monkeytoy 0 +...

Looks like Real Life Comics has also stumbled across the Evil Genius demo. I downloaded my copy from the GamersHell website (it's around 200MB, I think).Sorta a cross between The Sims, Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Right now, it's on my "must buy" list, depending on the reviews when it...

More mucking about in the CoDRadiant editor (oh, and the new expansion pack coming out on the 14th supposedly includes the base game). This is the 5th redesign of this concept. The basic idea is for a 2-level, underground combination of a mine shaft and underground bunkers/storage. The upper level...