An End, Once and For All

Hi all! Hannibal here,
It has been a long time since I wrote anything in this blog. Actually, I cannot remember the last time I actually posted something of value. I wouldn’t like to be of those that suddenly disappear and doesn’t say a word so here I am!

It has been almost three years of living in a foreign country (Ireland). I really enjoyed the time I was here, but I’m finally coming back to Spain in order to improve my life and having a big change. The experience in that country has been awesome and I will miss every single moment; it’s always hard to leave behind all those things you have enjoyed for a long time. I always enjoyed mapping and since I first left Spain on 2011 because the Erasmus, I tried hard not to lose contact and keep mapping. Apart from the parties, football, trips,etc. one of those good experiences I had in Ireland was mapping in CS: it has been always something I really enjoyed no matter how far I was from my home.

The first year in Ireland I spent a lot of time playing CS:S (ZM/ZE), following the status of my current maps and designing or imagining how LMS would be.  I didn’t have too much time on the first months, so the only I could while I was walking through the streets and when resting at home was thinking about how LMS would be by drawing, writing notes and imagining in my head how the scenes would be: I spent hours and nights about thinking in the scenes and gameplay at the same time I was playing music in my head; everyday while returning from work I was thinking in the story while listening music with the headphones; I probably wrote more than 20 pages of ideas and etc,… After a year, I started getting crazy: progress was slow and I had a ton of things to do. I couldn’t finish it without help, so I asked for Kaemon (you cannot believe how hard I tried! I wrote a kind of contract to pay him for the help and you wouldn’t believe the quantity I offered). To be honest, not even with him was possible to make what I was thinking; I needed a whole team, but, at the same time, I wanted to be the only author of my last map. It was extremely hard to fit mapping in the Irish lifestyle: after 8h of being in an office, I was too tired to stay another 4h (as I used in the past) mapping, so sometimes I just mapped 3h or 4h per week which made the process extremely slow. I was getting on my nerves because it was the first time ever I was working and I saw I couldn’t have time for my hobby.

Time passed and after months and years CS:S was bleeding out. CS:GO was growing up and players were leaving CS:S, and especially the ZE. I have seen servers of 50 slots where I couldn’t join because it was full be with barely 6 or 7 ppl (sometimes empty). Even though, I wanted to release this map; I didn’t care of the quantity of players. I can remember telling Kaemon: “I don’t care if the map fails, I just want to finish it because it’s my dream map”. At the 2^nd year I actually was getting annoyed with the map. I couldn’t see the end of it. I touched all limits many times including the round time in ALL the stages. It was too much for a single person. Source SDK was not enough for creating this kind of map (Source SDK it’s like an editor of 10 years ago or more). Every single time I wasn’t mapping I was thinking: “I have to finish the map… I cannot believe I cannot finish it… it was supposed to be my hobby”. It went extreme and some days I wanted so hard to see a feature completed I didn’t sleep until 6am (I remember saying ‘Good morning’ to Kaemon sometimes in Skype). In the end of the development, I was really tired. I enjoyed it, but it was getting actually harmful for my health and my mind. I had enough to worry about in my job so all this together was mind blowing.

And then I had the map completed, but there was the last part of it: testing, fixing bugs,… In the end, I finally could see if people would accept it or not. I tried luck with changing completely the way a ZE map needed to be played, and I thought that would be innovative, but I was wrong. In the end, the map wasn’t as I expected: the size was too big, the detail was to low (because the limits), the gameplay wasn’t as I wanted (some kind of maps simply doesn’t work online), etc… I spent an additional three months fixing and testing but it wasn’t enough. I could improve the gameplay but I finally gave up. I crossed the line and it turned out that mapping wasn’t fun for me anymore. I didn’t want to know about the map anymore. When I made a stable version, I felt the thing finished, not as I wanted, but it finished so I was happy with it. From that point, I felt free again so I stopped mapping. I have to admit that not only mapping but playing ZE wasn’t as fun as it was before : ( (I never thought I would say that!).

Working in IT (computer software development) and mapping it’s a bad combination since your can spent probably 14+ h per day, from Monday to Friday in front of a screen, and that’s, obviously, not good for you.

Because all this, I decided quitting mapping in Counter Strike with no return point. I don’t want to say the word, but I have to: I’m done with Counter Strike mapping forever!

So, thank you all. For the ones who are still playing and those who are not, and for those who have been visiting the blog. Thanks for playing my maps and Counter Strike Zombie Mod in general. Those years have been amazing and unforgettable (at least the ones before LMS!). Thanks for the great support, hours of testing, donations, comments, videos, etc… I will miss all the community, mappers, admins and players. That was a part of my life I will never forget.

Just a bit of nostalgia. I can remember the day I placed a block in the Hammer editor and saved the file as Mines_Of_Moria.vmf, probably eight years ago; I can remember the day we first played it, which was basically the first map I saw to be extended up to 5 times, then the people forced a vote to change the map, and vote it back again; the funny stair scene and the Gandalf sacrifices; the games we had in Mount Doom, with the ring bearer screwing the game or the last run being so intense; I can remember the epic escapes in Helms Deep where 8 humans needed to run through 40 zombies; I can remember those games in Paranoid, were twenty people with items like a car, a flying cat or a turtle thrower fight against the Balrog, the Gargantua (or Titan) and the Pyramid head while everything was flying away; I remember the many tempests we had in Mako reactor Extreme mode end (probably, one of the most epic moments I have had playing CS:S), and how the people sent me hundreds of demos and videos for the contests; and finally, the huge plays and epic wins of Minas Tirith, with Gandalf lighting the black room or the White Knight facing the Balrog while the meteors… Obviously, I cannot forget all this, and again, I thank all you are reading this and the ones who will not. For making me so happy : )

And, I have to specially thank Kaemon for all the support, games, jokes, tests, map helps, skype calls, critics, opinions, keeping the blog alive by writing amazing posts… Without of him, I wouldn’t have continued mapping the way I did. Kaemon is one of the bests persons I have met and I won’t lose contact with him after this : ) Without him, I could probably have stopped with Helms Deep. So thanks my friend, for all these years. I never laugh that much playing/testing in CS:S

Special mentions also for the next people:

• Lourdes, my girlfriend, for all these years supporting me! I had hard times with LMS but she always encouraged me.
• Maese Danielot, for giving me good ideas and being the director and indirect maker of Mako Reactor map (I followed his guidelines for the creation of that map)
• Metro, for being so close the lasts times and helping me on testing. Also for encouraging me!
• Zacade, for your awesome support and help in many cases, thanks!
• Lunatxz, for helping me on map testing and being so good admin. The savior of Paranoid map (map not compiling and helped spotting the issue; he spent and uploaded probably more than 80 versions)
• Kaesar, for giving me such good animations for LMS!
• Zan, for being so good and being a good supported, thanks mate.
• Luffaren, for being such a good mapper, I learnt things from you : )
• Cmer, when the golden age of ZE, the admin who ruled Supreme Elite, he was always available for updating/changing the map to one of mines at any moment! Thanks!
• Salem, for being an awesome master admin of the early years of i3D. You uploaded Mines of Moria, my first map ever, and you also were good to me : )
• Freeze, for doing such good maps and be so good person. One of the bests moments of ZE.
• Serious Samurai, for being so good player and mapper, I envy you and your Helms Deep at L4D!
• Tony Montana, you are an awesome admin and player. When spectating, me and Danielot were always watching you, what a show!
• Riperzz, so nice supporter, I can remember how good times we had in Steam Gamers.
• Unreal, thanks for testing so many of my maps and telling me the issues, great supporter!
• Patrao, very good admin, player and tester. I really enjoyed your help : )
• S-Low, thank for providing me the Nazgul model! I also grabbed many other models from your posts, you are one of the reasons we can see many models in CS:S
• Punisher, I never saw a guy playing like you in my maps, was impressive! Good supporter.
• Masak not Soldier, great player and supported, reported a good number of issues also.
• Sandfly, no words for this lovely admin, he left CS:S a long time ago, one of the nicests persons I have seen in the games.
• Eastsider and Westsider: awesome skilled players, the most of the times I joined I could see one of you playing.
• Maverick, Aksarak, Jester, Ventura, Crispis, Killerspain, Sephiroth, Kado: before mapping I was a CS:S player, we always played together using Teamspeak; one of the funniest years of my life.

I want also thank all the communities for supporting me, releasing my maps and giving me back feedback. The most of them are probably gone, but they will be always and forever, part of the CS:S ZM/ZE history.

• i3D
• SteamGamers
• STFU
• iCANNT
• Supreme Elite
• Syndicate Gamers
• Plaguefest
• CTA
• Geclan

Im sure there are many other players to thank and communities for never forgetting. To be honest, I had a list of all the people I wanted to thank (+100 names) if that day would come, but it’s on a HDD far away from where I’m, indeed, I wanted to make a summary video and include that list, but I’m afraid this will not happen. I’m sorry for those I missed. I may have forgotten the name, but will never forgot their remembers : )

So, what’s next? I’m growing/getting older, but that doesn’t mean I had lost the taste for videogames. In fact, to be honest, I cannot wait for coming back to Spain a build a good game station for playing Killing Floor 2 and Grand Theft Auto V and keep playing as always. I also play CS:GO so I will give ZE/ZM a chance also.

I suppose Kaemon has it’s on plans, but I’m no one to tell them. I will keep in contact with him, and who knows what happens in the future : )

About Last Man Standing, I’m giving away all the Source files. If a good mapper wants to “resurrect” or “save” this map, please, let me know and send me an email to rafuron@gmail.com. If I get no notice, I will probably release everything (post it probably in Gamebanana) and let ayone to get anything from that map, or make any version, under WTFPL license (do what the fuck you want to public). I had plans to port it to CS:GO or make ZM maps from that map (there are 5 stages, and you can basically extract up to 4 zm maps from each one…)

Again, thank you all for everything! Never forget.

Thanks, you can always find me in Steam. The show must go on!

Rafuron, Hannibal [SPA]

More ports to GO, V6 in May and Bad News for LMS.

First of all, let me inform you that the guys at Rules of _p released last week a new map pack with 40 new map ports from Source to GO. As far as I know all of them are new to CS:GO, enjoy!
I just learned about this right now (before pressing the “post button”) so I just added it quickly in front of the already written post. You can download them from HERE or HERE, or just look for the the links bellow their POST.

As I mentioned at the end of the previous post, its about time I give myself an ultimatum concerning the release of Mako V6. Maybe with a release date I get more serious about it (we did release Serpentis after all!).

At first I started working on V6 quite fast (and furious!) and the map was advancing at an unbelievably fast pace; so much that I was hoping to be done withing a couple of months; but then I got busy IRL and had some problems and the whole thing slowed down. When that happened I really tried to get it ready for April’s Fool in the hopes of fooling people into thinking it was an April’s fool when in fact it was the actual release, but it wasn’t ready in time as I ended up not mapping for some weeks.

However now I’m back to work and V6 is advancing just fine again. I would love to be able to narrow down the release date more, but there is still work to be done… Whatever the case I will be releasing in May (knowing me probably midnight of the 31th) even if its not completely done, and keep working on the finishing touches afterwards while people test what has changed. Releasing without it being 100% complete shouldn’t be a big deal since I assumed from the very beginning that a couple extra versions (V6.1 and V6.2) were going to be needed anyway, at the very least, no matter what, as we always end breaking something while doing changes and fixes. (BTW, even if V6 doesn’t have a new difficulty, V6.1 or V6.2 may).

As for Hannibal… Its not set in stone I guess, but is not looking good for Last Man Standing. He went on a break and traveled during his holidays and what not. At first he wanted to go back to LMS after the break was done and leave the map fixed and playable, but I briefly talked to him the other day and doesn’t seem up for the task anymore. He hasn’t regularly played ZE for years and looks like its time for him to completely move on… I guess he can still change his mind, specially if I happened to volunteer helping him, something he wanted me to do from the very beginning, but is not looking good…

Worst case scenario (him not working on LMS anymore) he already mentioned that he would leave the assets (textures, models, notes and .vmf) to anyone willing to fix the map. So at least there is that. Sorry for the bad news.

Next weekend… not sure, there are many things I want to post about. However, if Hannibal is really giving up, he mentioned he wanted to do a “Goodbye Post“, I just don’t know when he would type or post it.

Two new Makos, none from us!

So, I have been quite busy and tired lately. Worked a little on the map, but way less than I wanted or expected. My holidays are over and I get back home from work quite tired these first days. I wasn’t going to post anything either today, but I felt like I should (I’m already breaking the one-post-per-week schedule that I tried to impose myself) so I forced myself to type this short rant.

Anyway… Just wanted to let you guys know that there are two new “Mako versions” going around, and none is from neither Hannibal nor myself.

The first one goes by ZE_FFVII_Mako_Reactor_V6test16 and is, obviously, for ZE. Just to be clear: it has nothing to do with my version, is not mine released nor leaked, its changes probably won’t be on mine, is just something from another mapper entirely.
From what I know the author is a russian guy that I believe goes by the nickname Betnik and that made it for their own server and to have fun. It has some nice additions and details (and quite some cool lightning in some areas) but I didn’t play it enough to really judge, as I’m not sure about what gameplay changes he did in total (apart from some obvious ones). If you are a Mako fan its worth checking out at the very least I guess.

The second one, made by Tony Montana, is called bhop_FFVII_Mako_Reactor_V2 and as the name indicates was made for bhop servers. Just don’t expect anything completely different as is pretty much just the good old map you all know edited to work in bhop servers.
Take in mind however that bhop is not really required but just a tool to grab the materias (thats the map’s objective) faster; so if your server doesn’t have timers for people to beat, it may make little sense to you.

Sorry for not posting anything this weekend. I will give myself an ultimatum for Mako Reactor V6 and let you guys know about it on this weekend’s post!

Back to making Mako!

Okay, first of all I wanted to confirm (for those still in doubt) that the last post was indeed an April’s Fool all the way through.

I can see how it could have been taken seriously on the first lines (me being tired of slacking and even giving up on mapping), but seriously, guys? You didn’t take the hint when I started to talk about how mapping for CS:S and CS:GO was completely different? 😛

Then, just in case and for good measure, I went about naming that not-existing CS:GO defuse map Cosmo Canyon as to avoid copyright issues with Square Enix and to so it doesn’t get related to Final Fantasy VII… Well, apparently most of you never played FFVII nor tried to google it because, as it happens to be, Cosmo Canyon is a quite notable FF7 location 😛

Meteor crashing against Midgar (ZE FFVII Mako Reactor’s city) as seen from Cosmo Canyon’s top.

Anyway… Fun is over and work needs to be done. I have right now 10 (9 because I kinda wasted this one already) free days and I will try to get as much of Mako Reactor V6 (for CS:S, don’t worry) done. Let’s see if next week’s post can be about its testing! Wish me luck!

By the way, I didn’t post last weekend because the April’s Fool post was going to come too quick afterwards and to give it sightly more credibility. XD

APRIL’S FOOL DAY: Sorry guys, bad news…

EDIT: APRIL’S FOOL!

Sorry for not doing a post this weekend, but I was having some serious thoughts about my life and what I’m doing with it…

I kinda got tired of slacking so much, is not fun anymore… And not only with my own projects (which is kinda to be expected, as they are usually just too big) but also when just doing something as simple as a new version of an existing map like is happening with Mako Reactor right now. It should just be a quick fix (specially since I got some people helping me) and for some reason is taking me forever… So that’s it, I give up, I quit. Enough wasted time.

It was a tough decision, but I think is for the best, both for myself and for you guys: No longer will you be taunted with maps and versions that never come and… who knows? Maybe in my new endeavours I will be able to finish something and have some actual chances at releasing it so it may be enjoyed by the whole community… Just not the CS:S ZE one 😦

So that’s it. I quit mapping for CS:S and starting today I will do something completely different for a change, a new and fresh  thing that I expect is going to way easier and less time consuming to work with and is completely unrelated: mapping for CS:GO!

I have many ideas to work with, and I’m trying to decide which one to choose, but I think I will go for doing a Defuse Map for Competitive CS:GO and enter the CEVO Mapping Contest with it. For it I will salvage some of the areas I had done for Junon (including the cannon itself) but since I don’t want to have problems with copyright issues with Square Enix (since I’m doing a map for a different company’s game after all) I was thinking about changing the name to something else…
So far, since the cannon is the most prominent part of the map, and cosmetics are all over the place this days, I was thinking of naming it something in the lines of “Cosmetic Cannon“, but I don’t like the name origin being so blatantly obvious… So then I thought about changing it to “Cosmo Cannon” (is shorter and easier to pronounce, and some people may relate it to the cosmos)… But then, since I didn’t want to spoil people in the name that there will be a cannon, I thought about throwing a curve ball and miss-spelling it on purpose as “canyon” so they expect a canyon instead of a cannon. Any thoughts on renaming it “Cosmo Canyon” as to avoid any relation with FFVII?

Anyway… That was it. Sorry for the inconveniences and false promises. See you next week! I will try to take some photos of Cosmo Canyon for you guys!