Visual update

Hey people, I came up with a way to show you the status of the next episode without having to make a new post every time. Behold:

This is a rough representation of how completed the episode is. I probably couldn’t have made something like this until recently, since there are hundreds of smaller elements involved with mapping, lighting, and animation. While I’ll be releasing it as an entire video (can’t promise on Youtube though), this one splits up relatively nicely into 3 different parts, so that’s how I’ve marked progress indicators on here.

I plan to update this image every few days until the episode is done. If you notice it moving slowly, that’s likely due to those last remaining red bars under “animation.” So you can just refresh the image if you’re wondering how things are coming along. It won’t be updated to the hour or anything, I recommend checking back every couple days if you’re dying to know what’s happening. I probably won’t have any new announcements until I’m much closer to done. Now you can see how close that is!

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Also a rant on the Source engine was linked to me today by one of the animators that I thought was worth pointing to:

http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/valve-you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourselves/

This guy appears on Podcast 17 and reviews all sorts of Half-Life mods. There are good points here. I have a LOT to say on this topic, but I’m going to wait until after the episode is done. While I am struggling with bugs daily, I’m also working with an older version of the SDK offline, so I’m only fighting with the bugs Valve added a couple years ago and never fixed, as opposed to the new ones they’ve currently added. From what I’ve gathered, if I had to use the SDK in its current state today, the episode might be impossible to finish. Good thing it’s not!