Level Design Portfolio and Tutorials

Happy New Years!

I’ve spent the past few weeks re-working an older RTCW map I made (over 5 years ago).  The map, allied_home (aka red_oak), is a close replica to a neighborhood I grew up in.  It was in a dire state; the construction/optimization was poor, lighting terrible, and the objectives were without focus.  It’s been a lot of fun addressing these issues.  In fact, the whole process is really inspiring me to write a few tutorials, such as:  creating alpha textures, working with entities, scripting, creating wav files, etc. Anyways, I figure I am about 50% done… so roughly a month from now it should be released (we’ll see).

The plan is to wrap up Allied Home once and for all, update my mapping reel, and run it on my omni-bot server (currently offline).

Here’s a WIP screenie!

So far I have converted more than 50% of my Softimage MOD Tool Curriculum to the format of this site. This is a 5 Day course that was originally designed to be instructor-led, in a classroom environment. That being said, I will also be adjusting the presentation (as I go) to be meaningful outside of a classroom (i.e. online tutorial). More to come…

Well, as is blatantly clear I have yet to find time to devote to RTCW, WildWest, Half-Life 2, or Unreal mapping. I have a new job that requires a good deal of my time, so it just hasn’t happened. I wont make any promises to myself as to when new content will land on this site – but given that I still think about mapping, and watch videos on the subject constantly, it IS only a matter of time.

As stated previously, a few of the things I still want to do:

• Make Project Phi content available for download.
• Tighten up the older RTCW tutorials and create a few new WW ones.
• Continue working on the Softimage Mod Tool Curriculum conversion to the format of this site.
• Return to mapping for Return to Castle Wolfenstein (and the WildWest).

As eluded to in previous posts, continued work on the Project Phi mod has been indefinitely canceled.  Towards the end of 2009 we began to hit a wall, and production came to a stand still.  After an extended break, a brief effort was recently made to push the mod to a new engine, recruit new developers, and have a second go at it.  Unfortunately this was a little half cocked and momentum to do so never really occurred.  So after much deliberation it has been decided to indefinitely cancel further development on the mod.  Neither myself (the project lead), nor a number of our key developers has enough time these days to see this through.

That being said, the work that was completed should not be wasted and lost to time.  I still feel that strongly about what we were doing.  Therefor the MOD is going to made available, in it’s current alpha development stage, for other interested persons or teams to use in their own projects.  All files will be available in both their raw and half life 2 compiled formats.  We would love to see another team take over the Project Phi development entirely, however we would be as equally pleased to see individual Project Phi content used elsewhere.  We nearly created a whole world (on paper at least), with concept art, character and props models, soundtracks, environments, and much more.  Again, the ultimate goal is to see these works of art used one way or another, even if it is not in the Project Phi world.  Details to follow…

And on a related note, I’m not sure how much new content will be coming to this website, at least any time soon.  It started as – and will likely end as – a Return to Castle Wolfenstein mappers resource.  There is still work to be done in the unfinished tutorials section, and I will likely return to RtCW mapping as a hobby anyways.  So who knows, maybe there will remain a need for this site (if only for my own reference).  I guess only time will tell. 

Not that I have a legion of followers or anything, but in case the casual browser of my site is curious, I am changing my online handle from shLep to stormy (hence, it’s now stormy’s haus of mapping).

So to reiterate, maps, tutorials, etc that are made by shLep now belong to stormy.

In other news, I haven’t had much time to devote to learning UDK, but it is still weighs heavily on my mind – just need more time to get to it. That and continue to fill in my tutorials section with sample maps and further readings.

Hopefully more to come soon!