Development Blog!

Once again I find myself thinking, and looking at my blog know its been way too long since I last updated it. I’ve been really busy since the last post in September, and a lot happened! I’m not entirely sure where to start – as usual.

First of all we’re working on getting the latest patch for Missing Information out which is really close to being done (there’s bound to be bugs in it, so there might be a 1.5.3 after all, who knows) September 20th the change log was like this

• Odell crash fixed on the Borealis
• Updated Rooftops map
• Updated animations on the Flaregun
• Updated Combine Soldier models
• Updated binocular skin
• Updated zombie model
• Tweaked the Stalker’s damage

January 17th, after a billion delays the change log was like this. Almost three times longer!

• Odell crash fixed on the Borealis
• Combine Elite will not attempt to use the Pulse Rifle’s secondary attack if not equipped
• Updated Rooftops map
• Updated the Borealis maps
• Updated animations on the Flaregun
• Updated zoom effects on the sniperrifle
• Updated AK47 model
• Updated OICW model
• Updated Physgun model
• Updated credits.txt to reflect current roster
• Added e3_under to the E3 presentation
• Added phong lighting to several models
• Added normal maps to several models
• New particle effects
• New Alyx model & skin
• New Stalker model & animations
• New Incendiary Rifle (I-Rifle) model & animations
• New Combine Soldier models
• New MP5K skin
• New MP5K sounds
• New binocular skin
• New Classic Zombie skin
• New HUD icons for several weapons
• Tweaked the SMG1 firing rate
• Tweaked the SMG2 firing rate
• Tweaked the Flare guns reload time
• Tweaked the Stalker damage

Of course there’s a couple of changes that aren’t included in the changelog, but they’re not worth mentioning.

There’s a couple of reasons for the delay of 1.5.2. First of all, around the release of 1.5.2 Skidz, Hyperjag3 and I did some intense work in our decompiler which we managed to complete the mesh, animations, facial animation (flexes), collision model, LODs and the entire QC output in about a week (so pretty much the entire decompiler is done). We did well, and it delayed 1.5.2.
Around October I was going to a fancy party wearing a suit and whatnot. I invited a random girl I met at a previous get-together. Long story short she’s now my girlfriend (we’ve been together for 6 months next month – 8th May specifically). She’s been taking alot of my time. Mugofdoom, Isotope and Red have been busy with school and other personal stuff.

The Missing Information team have had some changes too. We’ve said good bye to more or less all the old members (tundra_cool got hired by Gearbox). On the other hand Junk from Team GabeN is now part of our team. We have more or less merged with Team GabeN. Junk made some huge changes to the entire Borealis while we’re waiting for some of the last content for 1.5.2.

The Axel Project made their first release which is a set of updated binaries. I haven’t tried them myself (at least not enough to say anything about them), but I’m not impressed based on what I heard. While we’re talking The Axel Project and whatnot. ApertureGaming opened again, and shut down. Apparently the host let it run without any bills being paid, which is also the reason it isn’t running anymore.

On another Axel Project note they also had their first leak, which I guess was more critical than any we ever had in GabeN. Ben was kicked off the team and decided to leak the source code to several sites such as RIN. Ben is a former Team GabeN member, but was kicked because he didn’t really have any talents. Most of all The Axel Project seems dead. As far as I can tell from their site they’ve lost some of the data in their database (lastest blog post, loads of posts in their forums etc.). I haven’t talked to anybody on their team, so I wouldn’t know.

Regarding my blog itself, I’ve changed the comment system so its using DISQUS. Which means that you don’t have to register a user if you already have a Disqus user. This hopefully stops all those spambots from registering too!

Finally I bought myself a new monitor since I was getting tired of the amount of space my old Samsung SyncMaster 2032BW (20″) gave me. 1620×1050 just wasn’t enough for me. So I bought an Asus VW266H a nice 26″ monitor. All screens in my images directory will now be in the resolution 1920×1200 ! While I was at it I bought a HDMI cable, since the new monitor got DVI-D, VGA and HDMI inputs so its a monitor I’ll be able to enjoy for a long time. I got tired of my old Nokia 5310 XpressMusic too, so I’ve ordered a HTC Desire. More on this when I get it. I’ve thought about ordering a new GPU, but I don’t know. My Asus GTX260 is still able to play most games.

I do believe this is all that’s worth mentioning. I’ll update this either when I get my new phone, release 1.5.2 or some other interesting thing happens!

This one goes out to my big sister! Peace nigger!

1st of July
I took off to Roskilde Festival, and what a fucking awesome experience! The trainride took about 5 hours and was boring as hell. I found myself standing alone at Roskilde Central Station having no idea where to go. Pretty quickly I found a girl in the exact same situation as me (it was her first time too). We decided that we might as well go together, and found our way pretty fast.
Met some other random girl that asked if I couldn’t pretend to be Swedish. Sure I could! Suddenly she was all over me, until one of my friends yelled shit about my cock, suddenly she was running away instead. Hilarious!
Only attended one concert that day – Casiokids (Danish), which was surprisingly good!

2nd of July
One concert again, another band I didn’t know – BETA Satan (again surprisingly good).

3rd of July
First big bands were going to give concert today. Artists such as Radiohead, Teitur, MGMT, Duffy & Bullet for My Valentine. (18 artists all in all that day – full schedule here).
I attented Radiohead, Teitur and The Dø (Finnish artist), and probably some I don’t remember.

4th of July
44 bands today (schedule)!
I didn’t really go to any of the big concerts, only passed by. A friend and I got lost from our group so we roamed around like idiots. Decided to hear Band of Horses, followed by random roaming around. We managed to hear Gnarls Barkley‘s biggest hits, hear most of VETO‘s concert, and finally decided to find a place to sit which just happened to be at Kings of Leon concert at the Orange Stage. I managed to got lost from the entire group so I decided to hangout with some girls which gave me free wine – laugh out loud. Roaming around with those bitches and hearing The Streets, Spleen United and finally Familjen was just awesome!

Especially The Streets was awesome, has to be the best concert of my life (so far?)! You just had to be there!

5th of July
47 artists (schedule)
My 20th birthday! And what a day! Must have been the best birthday ever! Free beer from random people, naked interview on Australian TV, and so many other great experiences! My big sister and I already started celebrating at the The Streets and Familjen concerts and some random dude gave me three beers – awesome!
I attended The Fashion, Neil Young and somewhat The Chemical Brothers.
Oh, and apparently you MUST have your goddamn phone on you all the time, even when it doesn’t have any power left, so you can reply to peoples text messages RIGHT AWAY! Not doing so will make them annoyed and angry. Whatever.

6th of July
(Schedule)
Going home, work tomorrow. Had to return some stuff I borrowed from random people so I started out going to my big sisters camp and give her the t-shirt I borrowed from her. Next up the girl that slept in my tent, she forgot her pants and shoes

Overall it was one of the best experiences of my life, for sure!

GabeN matters and things not related to Roskilde Festival now!

I’ve been working on some decompiler stuff lately. Posted a thread on HL2W and Skidz gave me some great ideas and made me look better at the SMD format, so I figured out why the mesh comes out wrong, but I haven’t delt with it yet – since it more or less require me to rewrite the entire thing

Oh and I managed to recover everything I needed from my dead old harddrive, so hurray for that.

Not sure all of this post makes sense, I wrote it over several days and couldn’t be bothered to read it through due to my hangover. Which reminds me. I’m so fucking awesome when I’m drunk!

Can’t be bothered to write more here, bet you haven’t read half of it anyway so whatever.

A lot of weird and random stuff happened since last time I wrote anything here, and I feel like summingit all up (before it’s too late, or whatever (I tend to forget stuff (parenthesis in parenthesis))).

First of all I got my black tie back, so hurray for that! Secondly I’m starting to feel old, guess it’s about time, I just realised there’s only five (5th of July) days till I’m turning 20 Also, did I fail? Reading my own post over again makes me laugh, and it hurts.

June 11th, 2008 (WORLDWIDE!) Team GabeN started accepting applications for our beta, if you feel you’ve got what it takes, and want to be a part of it, sign up! Make sure you read Junk’s post on it.

I “accidently” posted a link to my decompiler in IRC a few weeks ago (I think?) and Lamp got a hold of it, leaked it. Oh how we laughed at the idiots complaining it was broken! Other than that it’s going quite well with the decompiler (except for the fact I haven’t worked on it in a while). I ditched the mesh for a while, and I’m currently only focusing on animations and the QC script.

Viktor finally commited suicide, at least that’s what we’ve been told (I’m working on getting it confirmed). If I recall correctly he did it the 17th of June, 2008. As a tribute to Viktor, he’s going to be featured in our Half-Life 2 story line, and I set up this directory of images that’s been made over the years to make fun of him. Make sure you’ve got this song in the background while looking at those images! Honestly though, I always found Viktor awesome as hell for so many reasons (hence why I made this).

First a warning, parts of this paragraph will contain strong sarcasm!
Guess it’s time to confess. GabeN did it. We paid his parents to pick on their autistic son (yes Viktor suffered from autism) just like we paid Kevin Mitnick to deface shitty Internet forums. Last big confession. GabeN also paid Osama Bin Laden to arrange 9/11. That’s right. GabeN got access to an insane amount of money we spend on making other peoples life miserable.

Last thing. God I’m glad I finally listened to the advise my friends have been giving me for a LONG time!
I think that was about it, I probably forgot something, but I always do.

See you around guys!

(Also, what’s up with all the parenthesis in this post?)

Warning: Long post a head. Too long to read edition below!

Woah.! The previous weekend has got to be the most awesome in a long time! The party friday was just perfect. Probably because I was drunk more or less all day and night. There was this big party in the city I live in. We started out right when I got home from work, watching some people play sports etc. went home got ready. There was a couple of weird situations though, when I arrived at the party again, this girl came up to me.

Apparently she knew me, but I didn’t know too much about her, I’d only talked to her twice. Sadly she disappeared. So a mate and I went to another city. Met some friends which went home relatively fast, and my friend disappeared with some girl. To be honest I’m not sure how it happened but I found myself talking to some other girl, long story short I spend the rest of the night with her and lost my last tie (lost my red tie a few weeks ago to some other girls, those bitches!).

We planned going to McDonalds when we woke up, but we somehow ended up playing minigolf while getting drunk again, which I sucked at (minigolf that is).

Last personal thing. I had some trouble with my phone about two weeks ago, I couldn’t do shit. I didn’t feel like sending it to Nokia so they could take care of it, instead I spend saturday fixing it. Works perfect now, due to my awesome talents. Lost one number, but who cares?

Enough personal shit.
I just opened Visual Studio and I’m getting ready to work on LogThatShit, which is a note tool I’ve been needing for a while. Furthermore it’s my delving into C# and the .NET Framework. Originally LogThatShit was supposed to be a small tool GabeN could use for creating changelogs easily, but I’ve been coming up with a shit load of awesome ideas and things I want to try out. Turns out I forgot a shit load too. I used to write notes in Notepad, but I lost everything to a Blue Screen of Death (I didn’t save it ).

Things related to my work with the Source engine. I decided I wanted to update the VGUI panels, fixing a few memory leaks, and getting those smooth corners like retail have. Progress images can be found here. I’m looking into doing some alpha stuff like retail (too!) but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around that right now.

I mentioned my decompiler in the last post, but I forgot to mention what I had really done. Guess I was way too focussed on embedding that YouTube video!? Anyway. I’ve figured out why it looks like this. The decompiler doesn’t parent the vertices to the correct bone. I know what to do, I just need to write the code which I can’t wrap my head around either The mesh isn’t really that important, since Bob The Builder released his 3DS Max importer before he got a bunch of legal threats from Valve (I doubt you’re reading this Bob, but contact me if you are). What we really need is the animations and QC file. My decompiler already generates the QC file more or less perfectly (old QC examples can be found here).

Some of you might already know, but I still think it’s worth mentioning. Pawnstick and I opened our own forum, since we’re just awesome at everything we do. So why the hell not? Which brings me to this. This time it isn’t GabeN that’s getting blamed for shit, but actually Odessa’s Leaky World.
Of course we aren’t taking threats from a 15 year old kid who can’t manage his own shitty phpBB2 forum. It actually made me laugh so much my stomach hurt

I think that was all for now, I think this is the longest post so far, but I was waiting for the train at the time, so I didn’t really know what to do.

Nigger please! Too long to read!
Drunken stories in the first paragraphs, programming, GabeN, decompiler and Odessa’s Leaky World in the last paragraphs.

Woah.! This post have been written loads of times in my head, mostly at work when there’s not really much to think about. It’s going to sound like some generic American movie, like American Pie: – Well I can’t think of any smart title so you’re going to have to come up with that yourself.

Things I could write in this post could be how I nearly died, how I passed out and didn’t know where I was when I woke, how I lost my tie or some of the other crazy stuff that happened since last post (only 19 days ago!) but it’s not going to be about any of those things.

Travis Q (Travis Quentin Carrey) died about two months ago, I realised that a few days ago when I needed some advice on something, that isn’t really important now. Travis Q died due to drowning 11th april 2008. His dinghy capsized off the coast of British Columbia near Kitamaat Village. Some people actually thought this was some sick joke. How you could be that fucked up to think GabeN would joke with something as serious as death? Enough about that.

Yet another paragraph starting with I. I was going to write something about the girl I mentioned in this post – I messed up. Dead harddrive. Things going wrong. but turns out I simply don’t know what to write. So I’m embedding a video from YouTube with London Beat. I heard it on the radio, I already knew the song, but it simply overwelmed me so I stopped working without noticing. The lyrics more or less says everything.

I was bored like any other day, and figured it was time to work on my decompiler again. Kyle made some stuff that would make us able to get the newly introduced jigglebones QC parameters.

Finally No More Room in Hell was leaked last friday by our awesome Rapidshare supplier BosmouZ. Props to him for mentioning GabeN in the NFO – Surprisingly haven’t we been blamed for this one, yet. Everything except the latest (binaries) source code was leaked. Which means the original source for models, maps and some materials are out there.

Protip for people with access to important stuff like that: Don’t use “4554″ as your password.

Rounding up this post I’ll just mention these things quickly. I’m not going to be drunk once this weekend (which is almost over, really). Woah.! Huh? I did some work on Kleiners lab a few days ago, and I’m about to do some more. Blake’s power supply died, so I’m buying a new one for him next week. That’s right. I’m buying a new power supply to a somewhat stranger. That’s what GabeN do!

This has got to be the weirdest post ever, seeing it mostly involves real life stuff. Something I never imagined I’d use this blog for. Who cares.

I bought a Xbox 360 the day after my previous post. A mate was selling his, including two controllers, two games (Gears of War, Poker Championship), and a wireless network adapter. $290 and it was mine. Bought Call of Duty 4 on an online auction yesterday, so I’m expecting to have that tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have my new phone back tomorrow too.

Haven’t really done anything coding, or modding wise for a long time which is kinda annoying. Spend all weekend drinking which means laying off the drinking isn’t going quite as planned. At least I know how to be nice to people while I’m drunk, instead of acting like an idiot all the time.

Now that I’ve got my external harddrive, I’m starting to think (oh shit!) about getting my data back from my desktop. Which is something I’ll look at tomorrow, if I have the time. Which I probably won’t have.

Last but not least. I realized today, there’s exactly two months today til I turn 20, which is a weird thought. I don’t feel that old at all.

God, this was a shitty post. Oh, forgot to mention in my previous post.

Junk jumped the blog bandwaggon! Check it out.

It’s the end of the month. I promissed myself at the start of the month I’d see if I could write more frequently, well that’s not going very well. Anyway, here’s the monthly update.

I’ll start writing more on this blog, seeing that I might have more time now, for reasons I really don’t see. One of my harddrives died in my desktop, about a week ago, which means I lost loads of data. Krunchy hooked me up with a program called “SpinRite” which supposedly should be able to help me. Haven’t tried yet, since I wanted to wait till I received the external harddrive I ordered.

I’m currently at my parents house, to pick up my external harddrive (Western Digital My Book 500 GB) so I’ll probably be taking a look at that shit when I get back to my own place. No idea when that’ll be though.

I think this paragraph is supposed to say something smart, or wise. I got a new phone (Nokia 5310 XpressMusic) about four weeks ago. Broke it after three weeks because I messed up. It’s fixed though, think I’ll have it back tuesday if I’m lucky.

Last part of this post now. Which is going to suck. Hard. I don’t know whether I want to write about it or not, but I’ll do it anyway, since other GabeN members keeps telling me to blog about it instead of blabbering in IRC all the time.

Not sure where to start. I was drunk, and I was supposed to meet this girl later that night. Turns out I acted like an idiot towards her, again. I still feel bad about it. Something I don’t really do about anything.
Long story short, she slapped me and went home, I broke the screen on my new phone and with the power of magic managed to call her three times.

I’m sure I learned my lesson this time, I’ve decided to stop partying (read: drinking) as much as I’ve done in the past (well till about a week ago).

Well that was it. Now I feel like some emo fag. Think I’ll go write some poetry, cut myself while I listen to . Oh, I did some coding while on the train to my parents house, more about that later (soon)

This is going to be a short one.
We did another podcast yesterday, it’s available here for your listening pleasure (or not).

I haven’t worked on my decompiler for about a month now, since I’m stuck and there’s not really anywhere or anyone to goto for help, so that sucks. But don’t fear! I’ve got another theory I’m going to check out soon, which will make everything much more easy!

In other model related news, Krunchy and Essel (those fags don’t have blogs, so no links) wrote a tool that updates models, that are e.g. version 32 to version 37, so they’re usable with our code.

I think that’s more or less it, I’m hungover right now so this post is probably shit but whatever. Oh, I bought a new phone. Haven’t arrived yet, so no pics yet.

Exactly one year and three days ago I made my first post on this blog! Noticed by random on the day, and figured I’d better write something about it, but couldn’t really come up with something to write about, so I didn’t.

Nothing’s really going on, I’m considering inviting a few people to an internal testing session. Thoughts, suggestions etc. on that, feel free to drop a comment I think that’s about it actually

Oh, and I got a new job last friday (4th).

Figured it’s time for a little update. Might interest some, or none at all but I really don’t have anything interesting to write about. It’s the 24th of December and I figured it was time to let people know that I’ve gotten a new toiletseat! Actually I got it about a week after breaking the old one.

Other than that nothings really going on, felt like installing Visual Studio 2008 on my laptop too, and remove Visual Studio 2005 since 2008 is just so much faster than 2005. That of course involved recompiling all my projects but oh well.

I’m currently at my parents house, which means I don’t have my main computer (only my laptop) so I decided to work a bit on Hammer. Since Blake seems to work more on Subt than I did, I was assigned to Kleiners lab instead.

Screens coming up sometime soon so stay tuned !

Other than that I’m just sitting here, 7 a.m. feeling a bit bored so I’ve though abit about learning Faceposer, if I put something together I’ll be sure to post a video

Happy holidays to all of you!