Why jinxed? I have started a lot of projects and stopped a lot of projects short and I’ve found that often projects fall through very quickly after I write some kind of blog post about them. Hopefully Strata will hold on to completion, I’d certainly be very upset if it didn’t!

Here’s just a bit of an overview of what’s going on.

I’ve been wanting to do a territory control map for ages and I initially dismissed it as an impossibility due to the ridiculous amount of ‘smushing’ one would need to do in order to make all the points fit in the space provided. Last year, after deciding that I needed to make the diagonal rounds have more than one route between them (a major flaw of tc_hydro) I decided to give it a go, with minimal planning I ploughed straight into tc_aeolian which ran out of steam mainly due to a lack of creative juices required to make 6 unique areas as well as the paths between each point simply not fitting properly. Ditched.

Second attempt saw a central area that could be used by all 6 rounds which had promise, but ultimately ended even sooner than the first attempt.

Next up came strata, renamed and revamped I managed to create a complex system of tunnels in the centre that could be reused for multiple rounds and still provided two distinct routes between diagonal rounds. This got through several alpha versions which weren’t too bad, but they suffered massively at the hands of the complicated system of tunnels I’d made, since that’s what most of the map was: tunnels. The walk time between areas was huge too.  Ditched.

Over six months later I pick it up again, almost entirely from scratch but with one difference: this time there is only one diagonal round. Well OK, two differences. There are dinosaurs now!

(red/blue version) (I know a plesiosaur isn’t technically a dinosaur)

In other news, I’ve written up the .vmt feature $reflectivity and its uses for increasing the amount of light bouncing off a given texture. Give it a read.