as promised in my last .plan update, i'd like to talk a little bit about what my "next project" is! if you know me on discord then you probably know that it's not a secret by any means, i've just taken a little while to realize that this is what i wanna focus on for the next month or so.
the working title is VERTIGO! it's a short first person shooter set in the top floors of a highrise, and heavily inspired by Half-Life and its sequel. so far i've been developing some more advanced shooter mechanics for it compared to BITCH HELL. primary and secondary ammo types, proper shared ammo pools, weapon recoil, 3d viewmodels with animations, etc.
i want to use this opportunity to work on my programming skills with writing enemy behaviours and enabling the level designer (me, usually) to create cooler and more "immersive" sequences without a bunch of bespoke code. i've always been jealous of how Valve pulled that off with the Source and GoldSource engines. you could do so much cool scripting in just the level editor alone, because there were so many general purpose entities to use in scripting. plus there was a versatile I/O system available right there in the editor!
i can't really hope to get to the same level without modifying TrenchBroom and writing a shitload of new code in my own engine codebase, but i can atleast get part of the way there! yay!
here's a few other things i worked on this week:
- sent in a pull request to the IQM devkit fixing the Blender exporter for Blender 4.3.
- started tinkering with a Python script to convert TrenchBroom maps into Source Engine VMFs, specifically to facilitate easier Source Engine mapping on Linux.
- used TrenchBroom to build a blockout recreation of Marc Laidlaw's "Hazard" level concept from the development of Half-Life 2.
i hope ya'll enjoy the remainder of the year. it's been a long one, as always... but we persevere.