I turned 25 recently! It was nice. I got to enjoy a game with the Somnolians (more on that in a moment), I had cake with cannoli filling, I got some music autobiographies I'd picked out and my mom paid for (I'm hard to buy gifts for and we were in the bookstore, so we figured that'd be the easier arrangement), and Caby and Savannah drew me some stuff!

Click both for full size! Check out the texture and halftoning on Savannah's! And the Setter PC wallpaper in the Cammy one! That's my real one for the eMachines Box!

Gosh, they're both lovely. Caby wasn't sure what to draw me, and I requested a badger boy because I miss when she'd draw him all the time, and because her and I have been playing our Minecraft modpack Pinede and sharing screenshots of our progress on Murad in the server, Savannah surprised me with a studious desert Maldwyn! I really gotta draw that boy more, but he's absolutely a better fit for the University than guild work, I can say that much.

Gifts aside though, I really wanted to spend some time playing something with the group for my birthday, and I figured it'd be good to finally test MXDM1, the Quake dm_lostvillage remake I started last year and finished this Spring. If you remember the post I did on building this level back in April, I mentioned I hadn't tested it yet and had no idea how it played. I figured it'd be fun, given lostvillage was fun, but Quake is a different game, y'know? Plus, it just needed beta testing anyway, with all the decoration and some of the additions to the layout I did. Who knows if I fucked something up somewhere.

Anyway, I spent a few hours learning how to set up a QuakeWorld server and configuring EZQuake for dead simple "download this and type this command and you're in" play (since Somnol isn't exactly made up of boomer shooter deathmatch aficionados), dropped it in the chat, and here's some screenshots:

It was a lot of fun! We went three rounds, all of which I captured for posterity on demos. I did surprisingly poorly and my software-rendered, hyperaccurate QuakeWorld client running on the eMachines Box got a nice solid 25-30fps throughout, but I was just happy to hang out and fire at people. Caby, Savannah, dcb, and Connor all got in on it, and Savannah and Connor basically dominated. Amusingly too, because the server package I was using announces your server to a master server, we actually got some random QuakeWorld people dropping in right at the tail end of our session, so we went for another twenty minutes with some slightly more experienced players in the mix.

I did find some things to fix in the level, and I got some further feedback in a deathmatch Discord server I'm in from one of the regulars. The big thing was that the level was too dark. I used very little minlight, no fill lights, and set the _bouncescale to 0.5, and paired with the _bouncecolorscale setting in ericw-tools, which multiplies the lightmap with the colors in the textures for some gentle extra colored lighting and results in somewhat dimmer lighting thanks to Quake's overall dark palette, it was a little hard to see when you have your game brightness set to minimum. I preserved that in the screenshots for posterity, that's fixed now. I also heard from that Discord guy that my 3D trim was likely to prevent people from bhopping through the level, and I've since decided this is a feature and not a bug. Playing with bhoppers sucks ass.

Beyond that, it was mostly fixing and tweaking the lifts, preventing some stucks, and adding more item pickups on the ground. This wasn't so much a thing to fix, but I learned nQuakesv's FFA mode has powerups (Quad, Pent, probably biosuit) turned off by default for some reason (or maybe I accidentally disabled them and didn't notice?), and it was only through ten minutes of digging through commands after playing that I found the way to put them back on. That kinda sucked—I had a fun slime area with a Pent and some other powerups scattered about that just went unused during the session and tarnished some of the map's luster. Ah well, we know better for next time.

And yes, next time! Now that the infrastructure is all set up, over time, I'd like to build up a small rotation of custom Quake maps for a SomnolQuake server. There's something extremely gratifying about building the game world that you and your friends play on, and Quake is excellent whether you're playing with ten people or two. It's all about what the map supports—and I could probably have a good 1v1 map cranked out in a week or two. Small projects always please me greatly. Really, more games with the group in general would be nice. I've been trying to consciously set aside time to spend time with people again and do things, because it's easy to let them grow distant over the Internet otherwise. Gotta get out there and make good memories!

I'll also likely be porting MXDM1 to Deathmatch Classic. I haven't played on Mr. Maxwell's servers in a hot minute, but he's said he'll run any maps I make for him, and this is as good of one as any. Given how similar the games are, I doubt it'll be a big job.

Expect this one for download on mari.somnol soon!