The Quake News

Quake project: Dead.

Well, here I am. Again.

After getting to a mostly playable state, I found that my game just wasn't all that different or fun. I blame a lack of vision, and too much focus on Quakey details like fucking around with Blender to get models in, fucking around with Worldcraft, and AI wankery. My original plan of having a running-away focused game ala Penumbra got muddied somewhere along the way, and instead I came out with a very run-of-the-mill shooter with baddies that can climb walls and stuff. Correction, an extremely fugly run-of-the-mill shooter with baddies that can climb walls and stuff.

When it became clear that I really needed to refocus on a new gameplay point, and shift the game into a more doable direction artistically, once again Blender stood in my way and kicked me in the balls.

I can't express my hate for Blender quite enough. I explored changing model formats from Quake's native and throughly awful and archaic mdls to something more like Half-Life's skeletal animation driven mdls. This requires exporting into an .smd format from Blender. My pain started here.

After much searching I found a user-made smd exporter for Blender. My only problem? It didn't work for my version of Blender. "Easy solution!" I thought, "I'll just upgrade to the newer, and therefore better version of Blender!"... WRONG! The newest version of Blender completely changes the bloody interface into something new and remarkably unintuitive, rendering most of what I learned about getting around old Blender's remarkably unintuitive interface completely moot. Still, I fought on.

I then struggled with the fan made smd exporter, which struggled back at me even more. Still, I fought through the pain for several hours and exported a nice little test model.

The next part? Getting the thing into the game. Now, the format is fully supported, keep that in mind. Anywho, hours of googling and looking for a way to get my new format into the game reveal... Nothing. It appears that nobody has any light to shed on the matter. It has been done before, so I know that it is at least theoretically possible, but I sure as hell can't figure it out. Not that I gave all that much effort into trying. The Blender-to-dpm pipeline sucks shit, I have to run my model through two different exporters to get my dpm, so by then I have no idea where the problem lies.

Bottom line, I'm done. I'm pretty sure that if I bashed my head against the wall a bit more I really could figure it out and get it in game, but I'm just not up for it anymore. I'm tuckered out, and when the fun little project that I could add little bits onto here and there turned into a monster of a project that required serious effort to tackle, I knew it was time to call it quits.

I've learned a lot, but now it is about time to shoot this baby in the crib.

*bang*