Referencing City 44's Downfall, pt. 5 - posted by Cargo Cult on Wednesday March 12 2008

In other news, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is fantastic. And so's its bigger, image-editing brother...

Edit: additional photos available on Flickr!

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Referencing City 44's Downfall, pt. 4 - posted by Cargo Cult on Monday March 10 2008

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Referencing City 44's Downfall, pt. 3 - posted by Cargo Cult on Wednesday February 6 2008

I've spent the last couple of days making new textures out of some of my photos taken in Warsaw. And to make sure they look appropriate in-game, and that I've got enough bits and pieces to recreate some real-world architecture, I've been creating some test buildings.

No snow or other inclement weather yet, and everything is still fairly undamaged - but I'm proud of how things are progressing. These aren't true Out of Time screenshots due to all this work-in-progress prototyping thing, so enjoy!

Other MINERVA news - firstly, thanks to everyone who voted for my mod in the ModDB Mod of the Year Awards. Fifth place! And number one single-player mod! ... Okay, so there weren't so many other big released single-player mods last year, but now with the mighty ModMatic to advise and cajole you all, there's no excuses for this year...

Also, the officially unofficial (or perhaps unofficially official?) MINERVA Wiki opens its doors. Plot dissection from the forum, tabulated, analysed and documented to extremes! You have the data, now draw some inferences.

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¹³⁷Cs → ¹³⁷Ba + e⁻ + ν̅ₑ - posted by Cargo Cult on Saturday January 26 2008

Having finally finished the much-punctuated S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl the other evening, I'm interested to note that there's a sequel, sorry, prequel in development - entitled S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. With an estimated release date of 'Q1 2008', no less.

Will these fantastically underestimated Ukrainians manage to make their own, self-imposed deadline? Who knows (and to be honest, I'd be happy for them to miss it) - the first game was a grimy, broken, but fascinating experience, and I’d love to get back to wandering around the Zone again.

The idea that in-game architecture can just exist without any gameplay-oriented purpose rather intrigues me - the game is designed around the world, rather than the world being designed around the game. But for the sake of MINERVA: Out of Time, I think I may just do my designing-both-simultaneously thing. I don't think you'd want to wait until approximate 2013 for a release!

Oh, and why doesn't Unicode appear to have a subscript e? Myself, and the world of physics, are most disappointed.

Edit 2008-01-27: Acolyte of the Week award for cypher543, for finding that elusive subscript e! ... We shall now return to gaming discussions.

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"Um, Whoops." - posted by Cargo Cult on Monday January 14 2008

No, really - thanks, Dreamhost. Thanks for charging me $763.20 for no reason. Yes, there was a refund a mere ten hours later, but the awkward downtimes, general reliability problems, shutting-my-database-down-without-warning incidents weren't much fun either.

So, goodbye to Dreamhost, and a big hellooo Bytemark! And hello to any possible website downtime over the next few days. I'm moving hosts again - which is always bound to go well...

Edit 2008-01-16: MINERVA? 'intriguingly weird', according to CVG's article on The Best PC Mods. Ever!

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