Man I feel crap. Today is one huge trial. Posistivity vs “Oh please can we just give up and curl up on the floor”. Slowly and painfully I’m winning.
Had the big meeting with da boss about the school’s website, and that went much better than expected 🙂 Crawled back to my office (meeting was at the oxford road building, I’m at Piccadilly) and now fighting off the cold with a nice warm cup of tea (the first of many I suspect).
I’ve got one of those colds that is threatening to happen and has made my life a misery. It kicked in over the weekend. However I made the most of the time off work despite feeling crap.. Finally caught Aliens vs Predator, a worthy addition to the family, and the first three Band Of Brothers episodes (ep 1 a bit slow and boring, subsquent episodes whoaa!!).
Also messed about with the Half-life 2 map editor(Hammer) which was fun.
Made the traditional your first room map, with some head crabs a squad of zombies and an ammo crates right next to the spawn 🙂 (can you say boom!) I played about with the prop entities placeing items of scenary, such as a bush and a corpse.
Then for another quick mindless bit of fun I created a large level which was a single box room, called Sandbox, and populated it with a horde of zombies and combine soliders. I then placed a player spawn next to a pile of weapons, compiled the map and then ran it. Was pleasantly surprised when the twenty or so zombies started shambling towards the soliders who opened fire on them. This left me free to happily chuck grenades at both groups from the other side of the “box’. I’ll post some screenshots later when I get home, in the interest of science. Overall I had fun doing this.
I’ve played with the level editors for Quake/Wolfenstein (GK Radient) and Unreal (Unreal Ed) as well as Hammer (the editor for both HL2 and HL1) in the past. While Unreal Ed is the easiest and Hammer still has clunky user interface that it was when i last played with it (an ill advised attempt to build a Team Fortress Classic map) when working with HL2 entities the results are outstanding. I’m going to carry on playing with it with the aim to getting a working single player map together. I’ve said it once I’ll say it again Half-life 2, welcome to wasting hours of your life away (again)