Rice, zen and level editing

I've promised to show some of my levels (and I've finally got permission to do so from customer that ordered them I hope you will not mind me showing few screens. Engine is HL2 but all models and textures are made by me and Kate (my wife, great person to work with and quite decent texture artist) so you will not find any crap downloaded from somebody' page or taken from materials provided by Valve. Oh- one thing worth mentioning- I've been testing if and how such a levels- built for HL2- transfer to TSE and to my supprise I've discovered that if you will manage to pack all of them into BSP leafs (something that works HORRIBLY and is a real-and I mean: REAL pain, something much worse then in TGE and I do not really know why) levels tend to look much better then in HL2. Normal maps, ambient lighting, speculars, transparency- all this things work better in TSE and honestly- it was one of the biggest surprises in my work with games dev.


As you can guess Hammer is my tool of trade, although I must admit somehow I liked Worldcraft much more. Might be just because I've spend 4 years working with it on various tasks and engines and my Hammer experiences are just as old as HL2. Quark ? Yes, I checked this one out and I think it has enormous potential but up to now I've been able to handle everything with old editors and somehow I do not feel ready to switch to another philosophy of working Quark offers. I had a chance to put my hands on GG brand new editor as well but... it's still alpha (beta ? I do not really recall) and I would not like to judge something that's not yet final. For now I'll stick to Worldcraft.


For a time being my company does not really have too much work for me (at least in terms of creative work) so to remain in shape I got into designing a minigame or- as somebody has rightly pointed out- an interactive show-off piece based on Torque. Shortly speaking I am going to build a japanese tea-house with a sand garden. If entire thing will look good in TSE (sorry guys, new engine name is just too long for me) I'll try turning our orc boy into a samurai and teaching him a trick or two but for now (or should I say: for next week or two) there is no point in worrying about that. Hope you will like it.