• SiN Emergence things

  Mark Sowden • 2017-03-20 • Article, Projects

  A long time ago now, one of my many hobby projects was looking at how feasible it would be to produce an open-source reproduction of SiN Episodes, so that work on it could essentially continue (or to just otherwise bring it over to Source 2013). I decided to return to this today and felt it would probably be interesting for a few to share how this is going right now.

  I actually ended up revisiting the project as a result of an article I was working on to explain how you can get the SiN Episodes SDK functioning again. Unfortunately it seems that the steps I used previously will no longer work as Valve has changed how Steam’s config is set up, which was part of both the solution and the cause of the problem to begin with.

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• Dominant Species Patch

  Mark Sowden • 2017-02-06 • Announcements, Game

  This is something I’d been meaning to post for a while now but unfortunately didn’t quite get round to it, primarily because I wasn’t entirely sure if its content was right for this website. Having thought about it, this is a step towards helping preserve an old game that many otherwise may not have heard of before so it makes perfect sense to post it here.

  Dominant Species was a game that was released in 1998, and it seems to me like a game that was somewhat lost in time with very little attention given to it as far as I’m aware but seems like a unique game for its time. It certainly has a charm about it.

  If you’re not familiar with the game, it was developed by Red Storm Entertainment. The same guys that have developed countless Tom Clancy games. And it’s a 3D RTS, which according to Red Storm themselves, was one of the first 3D RTS games as well which definitely makes it quite significant.

  On a whim I came across the game online and ordered myself a copy but I guess to no surprise the game struggled running on modern operating systems (such as Windows 7/8/10), in particular it failed to initialise a fullscreen instance of the game and it also fails at detecting the CD properly.

  After spending a while poking and prodding the game though, I not only found a list of launch arguments for the game that allowed it to run in a windowed state, which worked around the issue initialising it in fullscreen, but I also managed to track down where the game attempted to check for its CD to ensure you had a valid copy of the game and disable it through the wonders of reverse engineering.

  I did also experiment with a wrapper to try and get the game running in fullscreen but after discovering the launch arguments I didn’t go any further with this. It’s something I’d like to return to though at some point in time as it would be a wonderful learning experience.

  Keep in mind that I’ve only done this for the singleplayer at this time, so right now the multiplayer menu will still ask you to insert the CD.

  

  I guess you could probably consider this a crack? Maybe when I have some time I’ll get round to doing the multiplayer as well but this should be relatively easy to do. Unfortunately it’s been a long time since I did this so I don’t have my notes available right now but if anyone else makes an update to this then be sure to let me know and I’ll be happy to mirror it here.

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• Unreal Technology Demo (September 2000)

  Mark Sowden • 2016-11-28 • Game, Unreal Tournament, Video

  At the European Computer Trade Show, on September 6th 2000, Epic Games unveiled a technology demonstration of the Unreal Engine, showing new features and capabilities they were introducing to the engine.

• Let's Speculate! Half-Life 2 Lighting Zoo

  Mark Sowden • 2016-08-29 • Article, Game, Half-Life 2, Let's Speculate!

  The Lighting Zoo, otherwise known as ‘lightingzoo’, is a level included in the pack of development VMFs that was leaked with Half-Life 2 back in 2003. It’s one of the lesser interesting levels in the pack of levels, but we’ll be covering it anyway just to quickly get it out of the way. Obviously on this occasion I won’t be bothering to produce a video but expect a number of screenshots demonstrating the level.

  The map is marked as being last modified on the 6th of May 2002 but it’s hard to be sure as to who the original author was but it was likely produced by someone within Valve who didn’t work primarily as a level designer, more likely the work of one of the programmers at Valve. We can pretty much conclude this as the map features incredibly simplistic geometry, though includes a few different sections that seem to test the capabilities of the lighting tool, VRAD, at the time; displacements, animated lights and normal maps are featured in the different sections of the level.

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• Left 4 Dead 3 Models?

  Mark Sowden • 2016-07-30 • Game, Left 4 Dead 3, Video, Analysis
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