{"id":4729,"date":"2009-08-28T09:27:54","date_gmt":"2009-08-28T13:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4729"},"modified":"2009-08-31T11:15:18","modified_gmt":"2009-08-31T15:15:18","slug":"stolen-pixels-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4729","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #120: Her Scandalous Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

As promised, Breen has Zoey on the show and interviews her. The result is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I apologize for the overkill light-bloom. It is really, really, hard to get new textures into the game and to figure out what they will look like when they show up. I simply didn’t have time to tweak it and tone down the background. I do plan on fixing that when I can.<\/p>\n

I pretty much went crazy with Hammer, the level editor used to make stuff for Valve games. It turns out that Hammer is a hole into which you can dump an unlimited amount of time. I started out just experimenting with the thing, and wound up with a full-blown project on my hands. Here is what Studio 17 looks like now:<\/p>\n

Live, from Studio 17!<\/td><\/tr>
An hour. That’s how long it took me to figure out how to get a masked texture (the show logo you see on the right) into the editor, paste it on the wall, and also make it show up in-game.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

You’ve got a host’s area, the center stage, and a space off to the right for the band. If I had access to stuff that looked anything like musical instruments, I’d have set up a few combine there. I figure a metrocop, combine soldier, combine elite, and a stalker would make a pretty decent band. (EDIT: OOOhhhh, perfect!<\/a> Like I said, this thing is a time-hole.)<\/p>\n

Here is what the stage would look like from the stands:<\/p>\n

A shot from the stands.<\/td><\/tr>
A shot from the stands.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Yes, I made stands. Yes, I realize there was no reason in the world to do so and that it was a complete and total waste of time. At some point I realized I was making the studio because I wanted to, not because it would necessarily be useful. I sort of imagine that Studio 17 is somewhere in the Citadel, and the audience is made up of the pod-prisoners you see in the game. The various revolutionaries and political dissidents that have been imprisoned are brought here five times a week for a show. <\/p>\n

Live, from Studio 17!<\/td><\/tr>
Shamus! You made all those chairs?!?! Actually, no. Those are the seats from the train car at the very beginning of Half-Life 2. I just copy & pasted them until I had an auditorium. Runs fine on my PC, but I’ll bet this room would murder a machine that was mid-range for Half-Life 2.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I was set to do a series here, but last night I sat down to make some comics and disaster struck: Garry’s Mod was updated, and the update broke the saving system<\/strong>. Any attempt to save the game causes an instant crash<\/a>. Boo. While it might be theoretically possible to make comics without the ability to save, it would be so tedious and so much extra work (and so terrifying) that it couldn’t possibly be worth it. Grrr. <\/p>\n

A couple of people have asked if they could try the level. I’m actually fine with that, but I have no idea how to pack the thing up for distribution yet. I seem to need to put textures in one place for them to show up in Hammer, and another place for them to show up in the game. I’ve got texture files strewn all over the place from trying to sort that out, and I can’t even tell which ones are needed. It’s… messy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As promised, Breen has Zoey on the show and interviews her. The result is here. I apologize for the overkill light-bloom. It is really, really, hard to get new textures into the game and to figure out what they will look like when they show up. I simply didn’t have time to tweak it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}