Dungeons & Chimneys: Introduction

What is this? A new post on this long-forgotten blog? And a new section, too? Astonishing! Could this be the umpteenth attempt of resurrecting The 9th Circle of Hell? Yeah, it is!



"What is to expect now? Are you going to talk about dungeons? And chimneys?? You have finally gone nuts, haven't you?" These are some of the questions I suppose my readers (the two of them) will be asking. What is the purpose of this new section? Easy answer. As you might know if you have been following my other blog (in Spanish), I have been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in the UK, and that is one of the things I will miss most, for the UJI has no Games Society in which to spend hours rolling dice and attempting to murder Tim.

Given this situation, I felt sad about not being able to play D&D anymore. Suddenly, I had an epiphany (noun; an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure), possibly caused by the British lack of sun: I could be a DM! I could run my own D&D game! I didn't feel that I was prepared for this responsibility, but I couldn't hurt to try.

Comeacrossness: Italian Singers

Greetings, people!

When I have class until late, I usually have dinner at the Pizzería Agora, in the UJI. It's a good place to eat, with Asturian Veal as the main ingredient for its dishes. But today I'm not talking about the food: today I'm talking about some people I saw there last Thursday.

Nihon FTW (日本 フォ デ ウィン)

Greetings! I don't know what's happening but, on the recent weeks I had more contact with the Japanese culture than I've had within the last two years.

Hammertime: Need a displacement here!

Hello there!

One of the most fun steps in the creation of a map in Hammer is creating terrains, aka displacements. It is also the one that causes most errors, at least in my maps.

CP_Parchis (remember it's just a codename) includes a castle on the top of a mountain, so terrains are essential. Since it is a floating castle, those mountains collide with the edge of the map - the skybox. This usually causes lots of errors. I've been trying to put up with the following problem:

Finding displacement neighbors...
Warning: invalid neighbor connection on displacement near (4.84 3584.00 0.00)
Warning: invalid neighbor connection on displacement near (-64.00 4096.00 0.00)
Warning: invalid neighbor connection on displacement near (2.96 4111.19 143.51)

Comeacrossness: Scrap crap dealer

Hello there! So much time since I posted some Comeacrossness: it seems that weird people are scarce in Castellón these days. Nevertheless, yesterday I saw a strange man.

HammerTime: The CP_Parchis Project

Greetings!

In this new section, Hammer Time, I'm going to talk about my first steps at mapping with Hammer. Hammer, in case you are wondering, is a map editor for the Source Engine (HL2, TF2, CSS, etc), also known as VHE (Valve Hammer Editor). I already had some experience with this tool, although none of my first works is good enough to show it here. I suppose my current project won't be succesful either, but I just want to write about it. So, here we go!

Exam Article: L4D Saga Review

Hello there! It's been a while since my last post in this blog. Sadly, I don't have so much time nor ideas, and when I write something, I tend to write in Las Chancletas de Hermes (you know, my other blog). But now I have something in English I wanted to show you - although I know no one will read it.

Recently I made a preparation test for the Advanced Cambridge Exam. One of the exercises in the Writing part consisted on writing an article of 180-220 words, comparing two videogames: their graphics, pros and cons and prices. Piece of cake.

This has been one of the best writing exercises I've made ever - my score was 18/20. So I decided to publish it (the corrected version the teacher gave me back).