December 2000
- 31 -
The end of a millennium
We are now officially entering
the third millennium of our common era. I know the date it different
for other calendars and it's not such a big deal for people who follow
those, but to people like me who follow the calendar that says we're going
into 2001, it's kind of special. Tomorrow will be the first day of
the first month of the first year of the third millennium, and that kind
of day only rolls around once in a lifetime. Of course there wasn't
the great commotion over it like there was for Y2K because there was very
little danger of computers crashing all over the place. It will be
interesting to see what happens to my old version of WinZip back at school.
It was the only thing that was affected by Y2K on my system, displaying
"bad date" for any days after 1999, and I'm wondering if it will say 1901
from now on. It will be interesting if it does. I really should
upgrade, but I don't want to spoil my only relic of the pre-Y2K computer
days.
Well, I just ate a few chocolate
coins, and that has inspired me to come up with another story idea.
It's about a homeless person who finds a chocolate coin wrapper in the
garbage that isn't bent up too badly, so the homeless person picks it up,
decides to try to use it for currency, realizes it's actually a Norwegian
coin replica, gets a lot of money by becoming the CEO of a huge computer
company, and then flies all the way to Norway to become homeless again
and try to use the coin wrapper for currency there, only to get found out
and be arrested. Now that I think more about it, that isn't really
a story I want to spend a lot of time on right this minute, so I won't.
I'm slowly dreaming up the story
for Journey to Azenera. So far it goes like this: Rynn and Arokh
are lost after falling through the rift at the end of Drakan. They
end up trapped by some force fields in the barricades of Emi, a city in
the west part of the island of Azenera. While they are trying to
get out, they meet Tuiri, the spirit from Alwarren who was freed by Rynn.
She can move on to the next world whenever she wants now, but has decided
to stay in the world. Arokh finds this rather strange because soul
shadows usually want to move on the instant they are freed. Later,
while going through an underground passage, Rynn meets a death mage who
claims to have defected from the Dark Union at the volcano and taken shelter
under Hari, a small farm town. He tells Rynn he knows where her brother
Delon is, and promises to show her the way. After meeting the death
mage, Rynn and Arokh emerge into the town itself and find out something
that shocks them. The town is occupied not by humans, by the creatures
identified by Rimril as goblins. They are really a species called
the Kavoh, who are usually friendly and intelligent, but many have been
enslaved by the Dark Union and forced to fight. Not all Kavoh on
Azenera are peaceful, though - some of the magic-using slaves have been
stationed near fortresses and canyons, away from the main cities, by the
Dark Union. After Rynn and Arokh go through the town and disable
another force field in the rainforest of Saiha, you end up near a large
generator in the region of Kamiu. The death mage tells Rynn to destroy
the grimstone power source because it will open up the next force field
blocking your path, but Tuiri is suspicious about the idea that such a
big generator would be needed for a simple force field. So, Rynn
goes on her way, and Tuiri stops her before she can destroy the generator
because it turns out it is actually the power source for an underground
sanctuary that the Dark Union has tried to infiltrate but could not get
past the creatures guarding the power source. The death mage has
been leading Rynn and Arokh to destruction all this time! Rynn finds
the real force field generator switch and turns it off and gets back on
Arokh to search for more information on where Delon could be, and if he's
still alive, but they are stopped on the other side of the force field
by the death mage. Here is where we learn why Tuiri is still in this
world: she knows of an ancient enemy, nearly the equal of Navaros during
the war, who has been hiding and stirring up trouble during the Dark Union's
new uprising. Tuiri has been seeking out justice especially because
of what this enemy did to her people. It is revealed that she is
not from Alwarren after all, but from eastern Azenera. She was part
of a force called the Sorilian Outriders, who knew the ways of magic never
before learned in Azenera or anywhere else. They fought hard against
the Dark Union, doing their best to keep the Kavoh from being enslaved,
until one day they were riding through a trail and were suddenly ambushed.
One of the more powerful death mages had been watching them for some time,
and decided that he really hated them with all the fury in the world and
would do anything to destroy them forever. So, he brought together
a great legion of Dark Union soldiers and dragons and convinced them of
the evil ways of the Sorilians, and they all were waiting on the trail
that fateful day. The Sorilian Outriders were surrounded on all sides
by thousands of their enemies, and they were all slaughtered except one
- Tuiri. She only barely survived the attack. After she recovered
and learned what happened to the others, she joined another group in the
Order of the Flame, bonded with a dragon, and ended up leading them on
a quest for vengeance, determined to destroy the death mage. She
often made hasty decisions, and in her effort to protect her soldiers who
were stationed in Alwarren at the time, she made the mistake of setting
up a barrier but leaving her dragon unprotected. The dragon was killed
and Tuiri's bones were left in Alwarren. She became a soul shadow
trapped where her bones were, until Rynn finally returned the soul crystal
many years later. It turns out that the ancient enemy behind many
of the Dark Union's recent uprisings is the same death mage who led the
attack on the Sorilians, and who tried to get Rynn and Arokh to destroy
the power source protecting the underground sanctuary. Now that Rynn
and Arokh confront the death mage and realize what he has done, he runs
away and leaves them to be destroyed by a creature he created, called the
Lumina Dragon. The story I just told is actually just the plan for
the first four levels in Journey to Azenera, but most of it was background,
and the real content will come later in the series. Wow, this was
a long entry.
Some ideas for stories have come
to my head over the days. There are ones that may be interesting
but others could be not so much. I'm not going to tell too much here
but one of them is about another world which has a few parallels to Earth
but reveals little about it because it isn't about that. It's about
children named Lin-Ra and Sevi, and separation, and fantasies about Madralak,
a butterfly-like creature from the corona of a faraway star. This
story is more cheerful than its inspiration, of course, because its inspiration
only provides fuel for the opposition of my interests. But I just
feel moved and compelled to write a story that's not like that! I
don't know if I'm going to even start it because I have a tendency to procrastinate.
Maybe it's just, well, laziness. More about this will be in my next
entry, which I'm going to write right now.
I have six pages of material
to write for this site as of today, which is actually January 1, 2001.
The world hasn't come to an end yet, and I'm glad because it would have
been a real bummer if I didn't get to finish my Azenera series for Drakan.
I'm also going to work on a new multiplayer activity and exploration zone
called The Great Hall, and then I have to make one specifically for the
Golden Guardians clan because of their new member, Shanvar, the Guardian
of Blades. I bet you can guess who that is. Anyway, I also
don't have time to make coherent titles for my entries or silly little
puns, so I'm going to do what I do best and make up stuff. I'll try
to make it reflect my interests, though.
Other than getting really frustrated
and declaring a new sworn enemy for life, there was not much I did today
that is worth writing about. I went to the mall with my family, and
then a restaurant, then went home for a while and surfed the Internet for
a while. I did turn on the TV for long enough to watch an episode
of Dark Angel. It reminded me of a lot of other shows like La Femme
Nikita or the Sentinel or Now and Again, because they all have a similar
theme: somebody with an incredible gift joins an elite group of agents
or rebels or something and fights the forces of evil. It's a common
formula but it works when executed well. I think Dark Angel has potential
to be good, but it could be bad without fresh scripts. Of course,
that can be said for all shows. I looked on some other sites for
info on Dark Angel, and some people really loved the show while others
hated it, calling it a big Britney Spears video and things like that.
I'm willing to give it a chance, though.
Maybe "sworn enemy for life"
is a bit strong, but I definitely have someone I am slightly annoyed with
for the next 15 minutes. Sandmannj, a Drakan level designer from
way back, made a three-level series called Ever
Tear in April, and its file size is a whopping 13.9 MB. A few
months ago, lowlight told us he was running out of room on the Surreal-News
server, so he gave me the task of remaking some of my levels so the file
size is much less. So, I modified Dragonmech a little by taking out
the music and the dragonmech model, using Drakan's music and the black
dragon model instead, and I changed the Metal Arokh texture set from a
database to a collection of bitmaps to be used in the editor. So
that takes care of all my files. The 13.9 MB Ever Tear level, however,
still was getting on my nerves because how could it be that big?
What could possibly require that much room? Today I delved into the
levels with the editor, determined to find the source of the large file
size. Well, what I discovered was more than one big file bloating
it up. No, it was several little files that little by little made
the level take up so much space. Just from playing the level, it
doesn't seem like there's much variety to the objects, but there are a
ton of added models in the databases, mostly objects that have been altered
in some way, and I really don't want to see if every one of those is necessary
because there are so many objects on the levels. I got rid of the
intro speech and all other sound effects, replacing them with ones from
Drakan, and that saved about 2 MB. Then I deleted a lot of textures
that weren't being used by models or the landscape, and that took off a
bit more. The size of the new file is 9.7 MB - a little better, but
I'm still disappointed because it really didn't look like much was changed
from the original Drakan, and frankly, the levels really don't have that
much new stuff in them to justify such a huge file size. I really
wish Sandmannj had put more effort into making the levels interesting and
fun to play instead of seeing how many slightly altered objects he could
cram into some hallways. I like the lightning ballista enemies, though.
My family and I celebrate Christmas
every year in the traditional manner, by giving gifts, and my gift to anyone
who's interested is the return of The Sine Wave. I am now at home,
and I will be for a month, so I now have access to my server and free time
to spend writing this page. I cannot work on too many projects at
once anymore, so I have to give up something. First of all, there
are just some things about the Drakan community that make me want to abandon
it for good. People around there are much too set in their ways.
There are tons of levels out there ready to download, but people are only
playing a few of them, and nobody wants to play any of the big adventure-type
maps. Recently, I was able to play a few rounds of Shock Arena 2
with Lightblade, Charr, and a few others, but other than that, nobody has
been playing it at all. Even AOH, the series of small, fast melee
zones, has seen far less play time. Duel play is at an all-time high,
though, because it works best with only 2 people and that's all you're
likely to see on the servers sometimes.
My other level, a ground level like most of the ones out there, is called Vengeance. I made some stair and wall models specifically for it. At first it was going to be a duel level with a pseudo-circular vertical wall, because the new modeler allowed for such things to be built, but the bounding didn't work right for the upper circles and I decided that I really didn't want to make another simple duel level, so I ended up making a completely different level design. I changed the circular duel arena into a set of platforms, made some other models, put it all on top of lava and added some fireball-shooting dangers, and the result is a really action-packed ground level.
I also had a level I was making called Ice Relic, but I'm not going to work on it anymore because it's such an obvious conversion that someone else was actually making the exact same level at the same time! So, I'm going to let the other author make the snowy version of Relic and I'll spend my time on other projects like Journey to Azenera.
Remember when I used to talk
about movies on here? In fact, "movies" is one of the words in the
Sine Wave description line. I'm going to start again with a movie
I saw yesterday, Cast Away. It's about a FedEx delivery worker, Chuck
(Tom Hanks), who lives by the clock, becoming lost on an island after his
plane crashes in the middle of the ocean. He is all alone and must
survive without any help, finding food and shelter and making tools out
of a few packages that washed up from the wreckage. His only wish
is to get back to his fiancée Kelly (Helen Hunt), but she thinks
he is dead and has moved on with her life. I thought it was a good
movie and really managed to capture the feeling of being deserted for a
long time. It had moments where success and triumph over the elements
were celebrated, but it never lost its atmosphere of loneliness and despair.
I got a few new games for Christmas.
Only two were computer games: Quake 3 Arena and Rune. I wanted to
finally get Q3A to see what it was like and download all the good mods
for it, but it seems that everyone might be moving on to Team Arena now.
I really wish id would release their expansion packs for free like Epic
does with Unreal Tournament bonus packs. I found the Q3A single player
game to be nothing more than a bunch of simple deathmatches against bots,
just as I thought it would be. The bots were good and knew how to
aim and play the maps pretty well, but one thing I didn't like was their
chat messages. It felt like playing on a server with a series of
one-note gimmick players. Their comments consist of mostly challenges,
inquiries about why you are so lousy, and backhanded compliments after
you kill them. Such comments would be appropriate if there were some
kind of story to the game. I guess their comments are supposed to
fit their "character profiles," but sometimes they don't even do that.
Klesk and Bones had some good lines, but other characters really had some
missed opportunities. Orbb the giant eye, for example, could have
made bad eye puns like "I've got my eye on you!" or "My mother warned me
I'd poke myself out someday," but maybe id thought that would have detracted
from the atmosphere. I'll talk more about Q3A later. As for
Rune, it's a good game but a little repetitive. I've gotten to the
demo level now after going through a cave with a zillion snakes in jars,
and the weapon I found so useful for killing zombies in the demo does not
appear to exist in the same place in the full version. There's a
bug with the fog in Direct3D, so I'm playing in OpenGL and it's running
pretty smoothly.