Dr. Zin

There's a Discord server for this project? EDIT: Shit, right there in the first post.

I'm pretty sure Dusty already handed off the project to @Matthias, just saw a message he sent me a couple weeks ago asking about progress on MAP13. I've been super busy and put it on the back burner, so there's been no progress since my last post. I should have some time to work on it over this month, but can't promise to have anything done before March at the earliest. If you guys are looking to get this wrapped up soon I'm OK with dropping the slot to someone else.

Megamek should run for you and is free, though it can be a bit of jumping off the deep end to learn how to play (it's a full turn based implementation of the rules for the Battletech tabletop wargame).

Also Devious Deviance MAP05. EDIT: Totally slipped my mind, @RED77's MAP01 of the same wad uses different starting keys depending to give a unique progression on each difficulty setting.

"Short Circuit" is also a banger, though in a different style that almost hearkens back to Mark Klem. Shame it was paired with "The Siege II"...

Here's some really rough shots of a couple areas of MAP13.

The project's target is limit removing, we shouldn't have to worry about intercepts overflows. Most of the map looks like garbage in game due to unfinished texturing (lots of HOM), but I'll try to get some pictures up in the next few days.

Got some work done on MAP13 this weekend, but found there was a lot more work that needs to be finished than I thought.

MAP13 is still in progress, should have some time this weekend to finally get some more work done on it. Also, I agree with Kain here, MAP35 should be dropped if nothing is done yet and if 33 and 34 are complete it would be better to move them to one of the empty slots.

Eh, not a fan of the site but I think the moral panic is somewhat overblown. A lot of the people talking about how Tiktok is destroying teenage attention spans were mainlining Youtube Poop videos fifteen years ago; teenagers have always had the attention spans of goldfish. The same goes for stupid/dangerous stunts and pranks: has everyone forgotten planking, the cinnamon and marshmallow challenges, or all of the "Jackass" inspired stunt videos of 10+ years ago? Again, the platform is IMO essentially worthless, but to me it seems like Tiktok bashing has served as a very convenient scapegoat to direct scrutiny away from the other social media monopolies. Boomers rant about Tiktok corrupting the children between the conspiracy theories they are fed on Facebook, Gen Xers fire off tweets about how Tiktok destroys attention spans, while millennials are posting on how the site is just a bunch of attention-whoring clickbait to score upvotes on Reddit.

Isn't POTS the "disease" caused by sitting too much, and the main treatment is just standing up and walking around regularly? Anyway, fun story time: the other week I was googling the names of people I hung around with in high school and found a court document detailing a case involving a guy I haven't talked to in 18 years. To make a long story short, this guy had a friend working at a blockchain/IT company who was able to get my old "buddy" a $40 an hour summer internship there. The internship get extended to the end of the year, but the company ended up laying off 13% of their employees in December and our protagonist's contract was ended a week early, with a $5000 severance. Well, that wasn't good enough for our man, so he claims that his friend and another employee told him he was going to be offered a permanent position. Then he files a federal lawsuit against the company for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act saying he was fired in retribution for his disabilities of: "Sleep disorders, POTS and chronic sinus infections." The company files a motion to have the case dismissed stating that our protagonist was not fired for his "disabilities" (it was a general layoff), that he had never been offered a permanent job and he had never told them of any of his medical conditions. Furthermore, he took several weeks off work towards the end of his contract without telling anyone and still filled out his time sheets as if he was working full time. Our hero does not challenge any of the evidence presented by his former employer, but instead throws his friend under the bus claiming that the dude who got him the gig told him not to tell the HR about his "disabilities." Oh, and he didn't understand that the job he accepted was a term internship, since "he's never had a job before." While a hilarious statement for a dude who was in his early thirties at the time, this is also a blatant lie: he started working right out of high school (around the time I stopped hanging out with him). The judge ending up issuing a summary judgement in favor of the employer and told our protagonist to fuck off in legalese, noting you can't claim discrimination for a disability you told nobody about and that our man had wrong or nonexistent citations of US law in his initial lawsuit. When I knew him our hero was a smooth talking, manipulative and lazy bastard and this is all totally in character for the dude; I guarantee most of his "disabilities" were self diagnosed. Anyway, nobody else probably cares but all this was highly amusing to me.

I'm still working on my map, currently busy with my job but hope to be back on it in August.

Is anyone still working on getting the kinks worked out of the "beta" DW idgames front end?

Yeah, the first couple decades of the internet spoiled us because organizations were willing to offer cheap or free hosting as a loss leader. Even nominally non-commercial entities are contributing to this, there's a shitload of information that was hosted on university websites that has been deleted due to students graduating, faculty retiring/leaving the institution, or the insidious organizational website redesign and "cleanup." I've seen the latter cause a lot of damage on hobbyist run websites too.

Safe for the moment. The amount of video stored on YT is ungodly huge and 183 hours of new content is currently uploaded every minute. Storage isn't free, at a certain point they will be incentivized to clear out videos that aren't reaching a certain view threshold (90% of videos on YT have less than 1000 total views by Google's own admission). If I were a betting man I'd wager within the next 2-3 years YT will announce mass video deletions. I think they key is that they make money on some YT videos. As stated above, Google themselves acknowledges than 90% of YT videos have less than 1000 views, and it wouldn't surprise me if over half of the videos on YT have <10 views. Obviously YT keeps their internal profitability metrics close to the chest, but I would bet most of the videos stored and indexed on YT servers cost more than they bring in. At a certain point YT has to ask themselves why they are spending money on content that hasn't been viewed in the better part of a decade, and so will be motivated to start mass deleting the deadwood (if they aren't already). Keeping server farms running ain't free, and eventually hoarding such a flood of data becomes impractical. I'm no hardware engineer or database designer, but developing, maintaining and continuously expanding a system to store, index and deliver large files at an instant's notice isn't a trivial task or cheap. Again, someone is going to say, "Why are we paying to host videos that haven't been viewed in over five years when we could delete them and put off building the next multi-million dollar server farm for six months?"

Sorry, got busy and didn't have enough time to get anything done for this project!

Honestly it's not surprising, most of these "free" online services are moving towards restricting what they offer for free or are squeezing users into monetizeable accounts to try and turn a profit. The "free as in beer" internet services of the last fifteen years were driven by interest rates being held super low after the 2008 recession, since borrowing money was almost free if you were a corporate investor/venture capital firm looking to gamble on startups. As long as there was the carrot that eventually one of the big monopolies would eventually buy your company for the investors to get a big payday they'd keep pumping money in and offering these services at a loss. Now interest rates have gone back up and the big boys aren't buying every loss-leader service just because it claims 75% market share, so investors now want to see their startups actually turn a profit. Hence the clearing out of old data filling up servers and trying to push users into accounts that can be used to collect personal data and package it for sale, and potentially upsell to paid accounts.

Sorry, but you and I are the much maligned Millennials. EDIT: Wait, almost in your thirties? You're in the that awkward transition group between millennials and zoomers.

Letting off the trigger of the plasma gun early and watching the trailing end of the stream kill a heavy enemy like a Baron.

I'm not saying what you're doing is bad, or that you shouldn't make maps directly inspired by their counterparts in CC1 and CC2, just that you don't to feel limited to directly copying that style. I wasn't trying to criticize your work.

As someone who was there for CC2 and CC3, I would not get hung up on trying to make maps that "fit" the slot because there certainly wasn't that level of thought being put into the originals. The order of maps in those projects was determined by who was the first person to call a slot. Hell, MAP32 of CC2 wasn't even intended for that slot, it was moved there after being submitted because it exceeded the segs limit and would crash some of the ports of the era. To give some context since you weren't there at the time, Community Chest was originally the yearly Doomworld community project (kind of like the Doomworld Maximum Project is today), though that kind of fell apart when CC3 ended up in development hell. Community members would sign up and put their best effort into making a map, which lead a kind of "box of chocolates" effect where you have everything from beginner's maps (CC2 MAP21, MAP26) to gimmick maps (CC2 MAP23), abstract concept pieces (CC2 MAP24), special effect showcases (CC2 MAP07, MAP29) and even giant puzzle maps (CC1 MAP29). If you want to capture the spirit of CC1 and CC2, you shouldn't try to imitate MAP19 and MAP32, you should instead try to make an interesting Boom map showcasing your skills.

IMO it's better to focus on one map and make it the best you can (even if you aren't totally satisfied with it) than trying to put together two and half-ass each. Personally, I've found trying to work on more that one map at once (even if I haven't started the second) gives me mapper's block. I think if you drop the MAP19 slot Dusty shouldn't have too hard of a time finding someone else to work on it. If it makes you feel better, so far you haven't wasted anyone's time. I'm still working on MAP13, and I think there's another 4 maps or so that haven't been submitted yet either.

What you're going through is a tragedy, there's no way around it. Though right now it may seem like the obstacles facing you are insurmountable, with time you will conquer them. There's always the opportunity to start over (unless you commit a heinous crime and get sentenced to life in prison - so don't do that), especially since it sounds like you are pretty young. Financial issues are transitory, I've known people with crippling debt who turned it around to own their own house within five years. Don't try to repress your grief, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other - things will get better.

I came back to the community in summer 2022, so the biggest thing I learned was that a couple people actually remembered some of my maps from 10+ years ago! As for my actual skills, it's easier to do a list: 1. Only work on one project at a time. Technically I'm breaking this one right now because I'm working on a map for Community Trunk and said I'll try to get a map done for 30 Aliens, but I won't lay a single line for the latter project until I've uploaded a beta version of the CT map (hopefully in the next couple weeks). While some people thrive on bouncing between projects (which can be a great way to get around mapper's block), I've found that for me that tends to lead to partially completed skeletons of maps that will never get finished. 2. Moving away from the "room-hallway-room" type of layouts that dominated my earlier work. I started working on this on some unreleased maps I made during my hiatus, but really focused on it for "Upon the Plane of Eden," my contribution to Devious Deviance. This trend is continuing even further in my Community Trunk map. 3. This could be a whole post in its own right, but making maps whose game play I enjoy, rather than trying to make game play that appeals to some nebulous concept of "good game play" floating around the community. Basically, I hate to play maps with difficult or challenging game play, being instead more interested in exploration. My early maps (CC2 Map26, uplink.wad and DAC7 (duplex.wad) were built to my tastes, but some critics called them "too easy" or "boring" to play. I started ramping up the difficulty in my later maps, but ended up creating levels that didn't enjoy playing myself. I'd consider the peak of this to be "Upon the Plane of Eden." Even on HNTR I need to put on God Mode within the first couple minutes of play or I get slaughtered. This isn't to say that I hate my "harder" maps (I'm extremely proud of what I made in Upon the Plane of Eden), but I've come to the realization that maps don't need to be difficult to be "good." If anything low-difficulty maps are an under served segment of the community, and low difficult doesn't necessarily have to mean boring game play. After all, who doesn't like mowing down clusters of low-tier monsters with rockets and plasma? Going forward I'm planning on making more low-difficulty maps that fit my ideals of gameplay, but I'll be sprinkling in some harder maps too when the mood strikes me.