Welcome to 2012. This will be a great year for Missing Information. We’re planning at least one release this year, and hopefully loads of media will be published too! I’m glad to say that we’ve managed to more or less fix the notorious “Too many vertex format changes in frame, whole world not rendered” error with some fancy Area Portal work. Even though hunting down that error turned out to be quite time consuming I’ve had time (and more motivation) to work on other things. I’ve worked a bit on Industrial

These images are pretty good candidates for the world’s most boring media – and they’re not even official hah! Anyway. From time to time we see various modifications trying to remake that famous Raising the Bar story Valve published in 2004 with their “Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar” book. Most of them tend to fail fairly quick because they’re either not committed enough or simply doesn’t have the team for it. We’ve seen two modifications that’s been hanging in there for a while, and I’ve personally found it interesting to see their updates.

Dark Interval

My impression of this is basically Missing Information back in 2005-ish. There doesn’t seem to be anything particular they’re focusing on at first. They’ve released images of several different areas which suggests they’re pretty much working on everything at the same time. Latest media updates have shown the Manhack Arcade. The quality of their latest updates have certainly been a lot higher than the first few updates. It’s definitely a mod worth watching out for.

Half-Life 2: The Origin

These guys have changed their names a couple of times but it seems they’ve finally settled on “Half-Life 2: The Origin” (previously Half-Life 2 – Beta Source). Not sure what to say about this. They’ve posted buildings in their last couple of updates that’s basically model versions of buildings. While I haven’t seen them ingame, I’m fairly certain that it’ll give them loads of headaches (speaking from experience here).

Good luck to both mods though! Hopefully we’ll have some new media ready for you guys. I might be posting some more images of stuff I’m working on.

Hey what’s this? A new theme and an update?
5 months since the last post. I really need to update this more often.

Missing Information is it dead? No. That’s the short answer. The long answer is really the usual answer. Our lives take up too much of our time. It doesn’t really help that Valve still haven’t released the Source 2009 code base (which would allow us to fully support the Mac), or anything else that’s useful to the SDK (fuck that hat shit they released earlier this month). We haven’t posted anything remotely interesting on the Tub either. Here’s a recap anyway.

Terminal. Fuck that map. Apparently the Source engine can’t handle this map anymore, and our attempts to fix it has been fruitless so far. We are struggling with “Too many vertex format changes in frame, whole world not rendered” appearing in the map at certain angles, stopping parts of the map from rendering. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to track this down yet. I took it on as my personal case to figure this out, but I’ve given up on it to be honest.

As for the Episodic model. Apparently it didn’t work for Valve, and it isn’t really working out for us with our current motivation and time. Instead we’ve decided to release chapters instead, in no particular order since we’d rather work on stuff that’s interesting for us to work on. We’ll hopefully be able to share more information about this soon.

School

As for my personal life. I moved to another city and went back to school in late August. Which is nice since that actually gives me more time to work on Missing Information and relax when I get home. For those interested my education will result in “AP Graduate in Computer Science” – if I recall correctly.

Windows Phone 7

My HTC Desire was stolen a couple of weeks back which meant I needed a new phone. I had the HTC Sensation (Android) in mind but suddenly got interested in the HTC Titan instead which runs Windows Phone 7. I was worried the Facebook integration from HTC’s “HTC Sense” would be something I would miss too much. Turns out this isn’t something I miss at all since most of those features comes with Windows Phone 7 out of the box. So far my best experience with a mobile OS. Honestly though I did consider the iPhone 4 for a while since I like its built-in “Find my phone” stuff. However those features are in Windows Phone 7 too including the ability to make it ring if its lost (and you don’t have another phone available to call it with). I was even more pleased when I noticed the ability to remotely wipe the data on the phone – excellent if it gets stolen. The HTC Desire was able to hold a charge for about 12 or less (depending on the usage). My HTC Titan can hold for 2 days and 6 hours on one charge – what a world!

Specifications of the phone can be found here.

That’s all for now folks, I hope some still reads this blog eventhough its updated like twice a year (I hope that’ll change too!).

Might as well start this one with its been a long time since I wrote something here, and a lot happened since last time – that seems to getting a bit classic around here. Might as well make this clear. Missing Information is not dead and version 1.6 isn’t released (a few users and moderators at HLFallout thinks this is the case, for some reason).

There’s been much kiddy drama since last time, something I promised myself not to bother commenting on. Said kids wouldn’t listen anyway because… Well I guess because they ARE kids. It’s not my job to parent them so let them be.

We had some down time at Gabe’s Love Tub back in July because our old host Snakez (administrator of legendary HL2World & Flamehaus.com) couldn’t afford the hosting anymore. Long story short, Andy got a copy of the Tub including the database and domain for free which means he’s now hosting it for us. Shortly after this incident we had a team meeting where we agreed it was time for the Tub to grow up. So basically there’s a new friendly attitude in the Tub

Missing Information is progressing. I finally took the time to finish the pages on our main site (honestly this didn’t have that high priority). We’ll be doing a media release, and announcing some change in a, hopefully, not so distant future! Look forward to this!

While we’re at it. Some of you might have noticed we updated the GabeN Wiki with more information about the old story line, and somewhat the progress of our project.

And finally let me mention The Axel Project while I’m already talking about leak related projects. I got a rather rude message from one of their members calling himself Ben (he used to be on GabeN) about one month ago. See for yourself here. What I now find very – well not really sure whether this is hilarious or sad, but I’m quoting

we got v18-v20 bsp support
shared model support
full v37 model support
bloom
and a bunch of other shit
so fuck you and your gay gaben team
…
youll see in 2 or 3 weeks

Let me now, for hilarity refer to the latest post on their website/blog.

As you can see in this image there is no such thing as working bloom nor proper shader support on nVidia GPUs.

Not really sure why I’m bother pointing this out. Especially not when there’s other interesting news such as we’ve disabled hotlinking from our sites (includes the Tub) which have resulted in hilarities! This is all for now, I admit this isn’t the best post I’ve ever made but I wanted to test the script Andy <3 wrote for me

As all of you probably heard Michael Jackson died. Certainly not something I expected, but then again. Oh well. He was a great man, that’s for sure.

I kinda feel I’m repeating myself in every post I make here. So lets just get it over. Missing Information is not dead! And neither is GabeN (we got our forums back up recently, in case you’ve got any questions) and Andy is still working on GabeNet. It’s temporary shut down, which explains why you can’t connect.

I myself have been working on tracking down a lame ass bug, regarding the Citizen models in the leak, I most likely have introduced myself ages ago, and didn’t really investigate until now. The weird thing is it only happens when Citizens are spawned in a certain way. Something I haven’t done anything to.

I’m leaving for a while since I’m going somewhere. If you want to know, just take a look at my previous blog entries, one of them explains it. I’ll have turned 21 when I return. The girls I’m currently living with will have moved out (they graduated three days ago – so congratulations to them), and new ones might have moved in. How about that?

Not entirely sure I’ve said everything I said. Who knows, I might return in the middle of the week to say hello. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten something but I have to go.

Finally I’m just gonna leave this link here. Not really sure why seeing how it’s thing of the past.

Gabe’s Love Tub might be gone when I’m back, but who knows. I’d rather not talk about that before I’m certain. If it is gone though, doesn’t mean Missing Information is dead!

Alot have happened since last time I posted anything here, and at the same time nothing have really happened. I bought myself a new system. Specifications are

Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 2032BW

CPU: Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz

Motherboard: ASUS P5K SE/EPU

Memory: OCZ Reaper HPC Edition Dual Channel – 4 GB (2×2 GB) – 1066 MHz / PC2-8500

GPU: MSI nVidia Geforce 7900GTO

OS: Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Ultimate (SP1) 64-Bit

The reason for using such an outdated GPU right now, is the lack of money. I’m planning on buying a nVidia Geforce 260GTX. The 7900 is an old one my dad used to have, but his powersupply crashed and damanged the GPU. Which gives me awesome glitches in games. Laugh out loud. Downclocking it a bit helps a little.

When I ordered parts of my system I ordered my memory from some Swedish online shop. Which turned out to be a big waste of time, and money apparently. I cancelled the order, but I just found out today they still withdrew the money. Fuckers. So now I have to deal with that retarded shit.

I decided to go with Windows Vista 64-bit. I heard a shitload of dumb stuff about 64-bit operating systems and Vista from a bunch of idiots that don’t know shit nor have tried it themselves. I wanted to experience it for myself, which I certainly don’t regret. Everything is just so much faster.

We’ve made some progress in Team GabeN last month. Nothing big and exciting but I guess it’s worth mentioning. Using 64-bit Vista broke the leak since it doesn’t support 64-bit, we fixed that (turned out to be alot simpler than first anticipated). A bunch of other, minor bugs, were fixed too. On the mapping part, Junk have posted some awesome stuff from our Terminal map.

I, of course, have to mention my decompiler as usual. I’ve done some work mostly with animations. Current output it gives (well June 16th) can be seen here. Unfortunately only a few modelling applications support these messed up animations (3ds max 7 will).

Other than that nothing’s really happening. Only alot of personal shit I don’t feel like blabbering about here, and some internal GabeN stuff we aren’t talking about (yet?). Last but not least I predict this week will be shitty. I actually were going to mention shit about the leaking of Half-Life 2 (as most people know GabeN have been in touch with Axel G., and therefor knows a bit more about all of it )

Let me just say these last words for now “September 30th. Worldwide”