Hellkeeper's Note

Overhaul in progress

I added a link to UDN's UE2 section to my "Links" page as it no longer shows up in Google's first results, having been superseded by Epic's new help platform for their more recent engines. I hope it's not about to vanish from the Web.

Working with BSP-made meshes in UT2004, I've been relying on a perl script to automatically remove unneeded polygons from brushes before converting them into meshes (this fixes many lighting issues, which are caused by overlapping vertices, incidentally) by matching a specific texture. This was a tedious process as it involved saving the brush(es) in a separate file and manually setting the texture to look for (or sticking to a specific texture forever) each time. In order to do away with most of the process, I have scripted my own tool. A simple copy/paste of the brush in the text field will spit a list of all textures used. Select one and it will process the brush, removing any polygon with the corresponding texture reference.

I have tried to proofread most of Hellkeeper.net with only a few old updates to go through. I will not waste my time going over the whole list of tutorials as I plan to rework the entire section. I need to rewrite and re-illustrate almost everything, removing duplicates (as some tutorials written for Unreal-Design had quasi-clones written for Projet-3D) and ordering tutorials in a logical progression with clear categories.

This is a long-term project to make this place slightly more useful and useable. I already reworked a lot of backend stuff and I'm now trying to enhance and increase actual content in an effort to fight the current state of the Internet. Simplicius' small essay mirrors not only my impression but that of many: there are fewer and fewer interesting websites each day, time is spent browsing a handful of social networks and news articles, with very little content and a lot of technology dedicated to being as outright hostile as possible to the user. As I was lucky enough to build Hellkeeper.net with the help of forums and websites aimed at curious teenagers, I realize I have been an unknowing disciple of the Small Internet: in my ideal world, I browse pages which are mostly text, load instantly and focus on content made by actual people interested in the topic they're writing about. I feel a personal responsibility to make Hellkeeper.net this kind of place you only stumble randomly upon by clicking on a link at the bottom of a forum post dated 2008: the type of intimate web-space where everything looks janky, outdated and a little off, but with interesting links, articles and pieces of information about things you've never heard or thought about. Things like Amisa's antique site or someone's personal interpretation of Plato's dialogues. I miss those days.

Hellkeeper, 06/10/2024, 02:17

New content (it's been a while)

I wrote a small tutorial about two quality of life fixes for UT2004's editor, including a link to metallicafan212's (awesome nickname) fixed D3D renderer which removes the selection freeze issue. This bug has been the bane of my existence for 5 or 6 years and made building DM-Empire, DM-Corten and ONS-Heir a true test of my patience. Though I'm very proud of how well I managed my frustration each time UnrealEd meditated on the meaning of life for 50 seconds when I selected a surface, I probably lost a few years of life expectancy from the spike in blood pressure every single time it happened. The tutorial also explains how to definitively get rid of the old bug of the Surface Properties window.

Because I had a lot of time on my hand, I also wrote this funny Victoria 1 guide on how to make Uruguay a major player. This is based on an old strategy one could find on the Victoria wiki which no longer exists.

Finally, shortly after reworking the php behind Hellkeeper.net, I wrote a little snippet to automatically convert distances from Unreal units to the metric system and vice versa and inserted it at the bottom on my tutorial on measures (in French).

Hellkeeper, 08/09/2024, 01:24

We are BACK, praise Shai-Hulud

Amazing isn't it?

After being static and dormant for 7 years, Hellkeeper.net is finally back to its old self. Whoever is still reading might have noticed the return of the "Archives" page on the right-side menu. That's because I finally found the time and motivation to hone my 15 years old hobbyist-level programming skills and fumble my way into getting all the dead php working again, doing away with the defunct database of old times, like an ant clumsily wielding the powers of God. The last thing I had written before the event was the release of BR-Riveting, quickly followed by the site's collapse and its revival in 2018 (for DM-Hightitude's release, which remained the first news on the frontpage until now in 2024) as a hardcoded empty shell. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to recover most of the frontpage articles I had written and sort through them (not every immature scribble deserved to be salvaged).

But wait, there's more.

This also brings back RSS syndication, as the feed was also dynamically generated. Does anyone still use RSS anyway? Seems pretty dead to me. But then again, I never used it myself anyway.

What does that mean from the reader's perspective? On a surface level, not much, but a lot of text has been exhumed, notably several map's post-mortems and notes taken during the making of DmRiot, as well as reports of map releases. To me, these are interesting reads nowadays, bringing back memories. The oldest note I've recovered is from February 2008, a small lifetime ago.

Working on the website made me realize how old everything is. I might take the time to revamp a few things here and there now that I've delved into it.

Update (13/05/24): Everything is now working as intended.

Hellkeeper, 08/05/2024, 00:52