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 | Scrap it and rebuild from scratch | |
| Posted By: Forrest of B.org | Date: 8/17/06 10:46 a.m. |
| In Response To: Re: Thanks for all the input--and apologies... (Adam Ashwell) : For years I would begin to make maps, and then start thinking what I had
This is what has kept Eternal in development for so long. Originally it was going to be simple map pack for Infinity. Then, I thought, "that's stupid, there's tons of map packs out there... and besides, what we've got so far really sucks anyway. It needs to be better, and more... something. Needs more everything." And so I set about redesigning what already existed, and adding more things to it... new textures, new monsters, new weapons, landscapes, etc etc. This would happen about once a year; start scrapping and rebuilding things, planning for new things, changing the story around, etc, because what we had so far was teh s00k and look at how much more other stuff we could do that we're not. The texture set in the released versions of Eternal is the fourth one, not counting the original Infinity textures, and that's just counting on the basis of "need to at least partially retexture levels to compensate for changed textures". Within each revision were still more minor updates. The textures in Eternal X, while they didn't require a whole lot of retexturing, are different enough that I'm calling them v5, and even since the first major updates that required some minor retexturing, I've gone over them over and over again because after a few months of not looking at them much or closely, I'll go to play just for entertainment's sake and go "bleh... God how did I ever think that looked good?". Funny, just the other day Adam here looked at the new textures in the prologue from our first alpha build (which is up on the dev page if anybody wants to check it out), and was like "wow I love the new Jjaro textures". I said "wait... have I even uploaded the new ones yet? I'm still tweaking them." He was talking about what, to me, were now the OLD, ugly Jjaro textures, but are new compared to the ones in Mk V. Hell, even Eternal X itself is another one of these "scrap lots of it and rebuild it bigger and better" schemes. The original plan was to finish up Mark V's missing levels and monsters (still haven't finished those missing monsters - I need a character artist! please, anyone!), then get some more skilled mappers like Don, Adam and Goran (and now Andreas too) to go through and tweak/polish the existing maps, with the instructions "anything you don't like, make better". Except much of the time, they've found it easier to scrap the old map and rebuild a new one in a similar design scheme than to try to fix up the old one. Which is fine by me if it gets me better maps faster than otherwise, but it's still sad that so much of the old stuff falls into the "you don't like" category. Not that I blame them... by comparison to the new stuff these guys have made for me, especially with my shiny new textures, I can't believe any of you enjoyed Mk V at all. Which is the upside to this whole thing: what I had originally planned for what was then called Forever More would have sucked balls. Durandal giggling (yes, giggling) maniacally and running across the spacetime continuum for no apparent reason. Olifant (the character that eventually morphed into Hathor) going "rampant" (again, for no apparent reason), which merely causes him so start throwing gangsterisms into his speech. Missions to seek out "Jjaro terminals" just... because... uh, they're the Jjaro, and they're writing all their secrets on these public access terminals in this place that you're in for no apparent reason other than Durandal came here and you're chasing him. A level where you run into many copies of yourself due to an accident involving a time machine and a photocopier (just kidding about the photocopier), and for some reason all the other "you"s decide they hate each other and fight it out in this little room, which exists, uh... floating somewhere in space? Oh yeah, and the Pfhor are a long lost client race of the Jjaro, who are even bigger and badder evil alien slavers who now live in the Andromeda galaxy, and built the pyramids and enslaved the peoples of ancient Earth before vanishing from our galaxy - you guessed it - for no apparent reason. And in the end, after battling a W'rkncacnter and personally killing Pthia (who looks like a Roswell grey alien) to defeat Olifant, who has possessed her body (an idea that's kind of making a return in Eternal X), you wind up in medieval France with a computerized sword into which Durandal has been downloaded, and walk off into the sunset. ...yeah. I may have mixed up several different versions of the old story there, but you get the point. The point I was making is, so long as you don't give up, and keep revising things, scrapping and rebuilding might be OK. In the end you could wind up with something decent, while what you originally planned to release may have been crap. There's a middle ground between what you (Adam) do, where you make some pretty damn good stuff, but keep scrapping it because you personally think it sucks - and what I've historically done, where I keep making stuff that I think is OMG COOL LIEk p0N13z!!!11one1eleven, and then realizing by comparison to other people's work, or other people's comments, that yeah actually that really does suck. So yeah. Uh... Eternal X coming soonish. Very special date I hope to make next year. Mapping around 75% done now, still need some a few new monster and weapon graphics (somebody please help!), some bugs need fixing, and that's it. Alpha 1 is now available on the website, but I think it sucks in comparison to what's on my HD right now, which will be released as Alpha 2 as soon as one more map is done. (Releasing the Alphas as we finish map work on each chapter). Hopefully the final product won't suck, but I'm not making any promises. Stay tuned.
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