What a year, huh? Anyway, I'll keep it real short this time (wrote this before writing about the projects), even shorter than last year because making these pages like blog posts is such a pain on its own.
Let's begin with something more interesting and more playable.
This project should have happened sooner or later. It was the right thing to do. I personally had lots of fun playing through Bright Island through Advanced Multiplayer 2 (check out the next section!), and writing code for proper porting of it was rather an interesting experience.
I've finally participated in a mapping event, can you believe that? I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat and unique but sadly there were only two maps, one of which is mine. I won't reveal too many secrets about it yet and why it's a demo, maybe you can figure it out yourself. But for now, enjoy my fancy modless entity hacks on that map.
For some reason I got an urge to remaster and re-release my maps this year. I've been planning to do more projects but it's gotten pretty stale after the release of this pack. Either way, four maps from the 2014-2016 period with less annoying bugs and in a language that you can comprehend! And also a SSR workshop release for the special kind of players.
Mostly Serious Sam mods but also a couple of interesting projects.
Let's start with something BIG. This project was born by a miracle. Last year I started experimenting with building my own game executable file for TSE 1.07 and it was going pretty great! Then later this year I thought how great it would've been to have a better patch for classic games instead of those half-assed releases in Steam. Sure, for its time the patches were great and useful, but overtime they've become quite annoying. And then I thought: hey, maybe I could make my own patches and make them RIGHT. And so I did.
But I'll be real for a second and admit that I'm getting a bit carried away with them and I'm afraid of breaking everything at some point by adding too much untested stuff like it has happened with my mods a lot recently. But to my defense I'll say that classics need this. They need those features and they need proper modding outside of complex C++ and SDK setups. I'll try my best to keep up with frequent updates that add so much cool stuff that you might never want to return to vanilla.
Another project that has spawned seemingly out of thin air. I've noticed how many people were whining about issues with packing their maps into GRO files (especially in Revolution, the problems of which you kinda deserve) and so in like a week or something in Spring I made this tool. But I haven't released it until Autumn because it was still a bit unfinished and I couldn't release source code at the same time because of dependencies. And also a lack of graphical user interface...
Still, it's good that I've released it now. It's very simple to use, really. And the source code is now open as well, though it needs some rework that I'll get to next year.
You thought it was dead? Well, yes, it was. But through a bunch of unnecessary pain I've finally released a second public beta. I've kinda given up on this project at some point. I got too careless and began getting bugs left and right, which are still present in the newest release. But alas, I can't fix them anymore.
And now that I think of it, half of the features could be integrated into my classics patch as simple plugins. It already has options for changing items and some properties of player characters. But I still recommend you give this mod a try, it's extra fun even on your own.
I've been planning to release this stuff after releasing the first beta of AMP2 back in December 2020, but since another release took so long, these patches never saw the light of day until now. I really adore this mod, it's a classic for me, so I wanted to make it more fun. Who knows, maybe you'll get lucky and won't desync while playing it through AMP2!
This Christmas video from 2020 was recorded on the initial release of AMP2 under the mod's hood.
Okay, so remember that tiny mod pack from a couple years back? That's what this is but all in one mod + two new mods! One of them (Slowdown Bug: Ultra Deluxe) was a standalone release right before I started working on Chaosbox as a whole as an experiment to see how much the game degrades as the in-game timer goes on. And it degrades, alright.
I can't really recommend you play this because it's pure chaos. But hey, maybe you'll find it fun for 5 minutes.
I've been working quite a bit on Serious Sam SDK to make it as universal and usable as possible. A very special feature of it is that it allows building mods for all game versions using the same code. It's based on TSE 1.07, so you can even get The Second Encounter features such as a Sniper rifle and Zorgs in The First Encounter!
Also this SDK includes a separate branch purely with engine components that can be reused for any project on Serious Engine 1 to make it compatible with every game, like I already do with my classics patch.
In the last quarter of this year I started working on the aforementioned SDK a lot because my classics patch depended on it but I also wanted to improve the mod SDK itself and one of the things that kept bugging me is the lack of features in entity source files. And because of that right before releasing the last classics patch update of the year I made my own entity class compiler specifically for use with the mod SDK that already includes many nice features. Even some that were backported from Serious Engine 1.50.
And by the way, this project contains source code for multiple versions of ECC under their own build configurations. That includes vanilla ECC for 1.10 and earlier, new ECC for the mod SDK, ECC for Revolution (the SDK of which is still in development, look out for that) and even ECC for 1.50 (the SDK for 1.50 beta patch is also in development, don't you worry about it).
And last but not least, my own freaking framework on C++. And before you ask why the hell would anyone need that when there's Boost and Qt, I'll tell you that it's me who needs it. I've developed it primarily for myself and my personal projects. Before I would develop things like Dreamy Structures, Dreamy JSON and even a scripting language. And all of these projects depended on (or just reused) the same exact code, which also became incompatible with each other if you decided to combine the projects. Besides the fact that I was still missing many useful features and that the code quality between those projects was varying.
I also realized that I might want to write utilities for Serious Sam without having to use the entire engine with its structures and such, so I made my own. And the first significant project that I was able to develop is a converter from Source engine's SMD model format into Serious Engine's SKA ASCII formats. Another one is Dreamy GRO, which is quite important. I just wanted to write nice and reusable code with all the features already built-in, such as a JSON tokenizer with the variant class.
This framework is still young but I will continue to improve it and hopefully it will make my coding life just a little bit easier.
Neither maps, nor C++, but still neat stuff.
This is a rather funny project that I wasted spent my time on. It's Heavy TF2 (first name: Heavy, last name: TF2) in Serious Sam! You wouldn't believe how much time it took to match those voice lines. Some of Sam's lines are just replaced with laughter. But I realize now that I could've just reused a couple of lines, for example between TFE and TSE. Version for Serious Sam Revolution is here.
Very spontaneous project that I made basically because I wanted some variety in terms of textures on the Run For Life map. It includes sources of textures as paint.net project files, so feel free to modify them however you like.
Just a font for the in-game interface that I've been personally using since 2012. It has never been uploaded online until this year, so consider that a 10-year anniversary present. I think it looks cool.
Only upon creating this page I realized that I've only uploaded five videos this year and two of them are trailers for Serious Sam projects.
Well, check out these two High Quality Rips and a demonstation of what I discovered in cursed depths of Serious Sam Revolution code.
And with that, I conclude my year. Let's make even more crazy stuff next year!