Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20191109053343

Curious. I spend most days lately getting more and more detached from the world. I could detail out a lot that wouldn't exactly make sense to someone else due to it sounding like incoherent ramblings.

No, the plan was to add additional enemies for it. I have an idea exactly what I would try to do, but the main issue now is just space. If I can find a way to add it, it would be the next opponent. Don't want to say too much in case I cannot.

Oh yes, I am quite familiar with the community opinion that Spawns suck. This is pretty much where I am at odds with all of them, I absolutely love the Spawn for the exact same reasons. I love things that can kill you with ease if you aren't quick. In fact, this pretty much is a good thing to explain the design mentality of the Hell Scrag and Blazing Fiend. Both are made to be evil things, but that is the fun in it all.

You are right, we actually have a regular user to administrate now! That means we can do administrative duties like... uh... what are admins supposed to do again? Mine mostly involved me supposedly breaking the Wikia by making redirects. Thinking back, I am not sure why it was such a devastating issue, I am guessing it had to do with their inexperience combined with my random ambitions to touch things.

You know, that is something I never really mention as I feel horrible bringing it up, but yes. The Wikia has become a sort of project of mine I have tackled for years, a sort of stable thing to enjoy. Sure, there are other games, but in the Quake 1 content I had the mods and levels which pretty much were entirely my little thing to work on. It was an excavation project to be excited about, even if I could only move at a slow pace due to the limitations around me. Minion being involved means now that the project isn't really just me anymore, if anything it feels like a revolt against the people because I was moving too slow for them. It makes me feel worse since it feels like a punishment for not being able to do Quake stuff as much as I want. It feels in the way like taking something I had put a lot of focus into, then jumbling it all up. I know it is a silly way to think; this is a community based thing and especially as an admin I should be welcoming of other people. Other people is something I should be welcoming. And yet, the most it really does is demotivate me further, since it feels less like I am needed and that my limitations become all the more apparent. He gets the ability to play a lot more and it eats me alive. He recently tried recommending games, which went as well as you can imagine. Sometimes I wonder if I am not the right person for a Wikia, I almost need an isolated echo chamber where I can entirely avoid the passage of time. I shouldn't feel like a part of my world is dying due to a Wikia entry. It feels like greed, especially as I likely cannot ever cover it all. And yet, it tears me down a lot. Every time I see a new mod, I almost question if I should just quit doing them myself. I wish I knew how to work past these feelings, since I know them to be unreasonable, and yet they bring a lot of pain. I got hurt even more when Minion decided to lie about having a brother with OCD because somehow it would make me happier to have someone to empathize with. I feel the opposite, I feel like the issues were made light of and that he could never understand me. He blatantly lied to me and couldn't understand just how conflicting with my world that is, how much that goes against me, for a reason that didn't help in the slightest. On the one hand, I see him trying to be nice, but on the other he makes so many missteps that end up hurting me all the more. And he tries to be some sort of hero about everything. I don't want a knight in shining armor, I don't want to be treated as an inferior being. So, yeah, on the one hand everything is stuff that should be relatively harmless for your average person. But the problem is that, because I am far from normal, I feel like my world is being destroyed.

In fact, that explains a lot of what has been going on lately. With the Wikia project essentially getting ripped from my arms, I started arguing that I at least had my mod to work on. Sure, Minion can add a million different mods, but it still will lack any support in my mod (which thankfully I never released the source of so that people could start jumping all over that and leaving me in the dust once again), which means my presence would still bring some sort of validity to it that didn't previously exist. I started getting a lot of hope in that. So reaching this wall isn't just a question of sacrificing lines, it is more a question of killing one of the last hopes I really had. It tells me that, without even reaching 1997, I managed to run out of space. The compiler works, so no matter updated compiler it won't fix it. GLQuake from 1998 can only handle 550KB. The most I could do is somehow destroy things further by swapping to a modern source port, but for how long would that work? That feels like borrowed time at best, like I would just extend things a bit further until I hit another limit and had nowhere else to go. No hope. Nothing to look forward to. I still got commentary at least, but hard to really justify that in comparison to say a documentation project or a mod with practical use for everything. I feel like my time is really past, like I no longer really have a right to do Quake stuff and enjoy it.

I am quite glad, I loved the original skin and thus felt he had to be included. I hope the sounds for him came out good, I definitely like them. It sounds evil, you will know you are facing something that could wipe out a Shambler with ease just from hearing it. You are very right, the Hell Scrag served a very similar role there. They were very quick to kill you, but surviving was such a satisfying feeling against them. You are also right, they shouldn't be as common as say everything else. I think the formula I mentioned above, 1/10 for every Fiend, seems to work well. I tried doing 30, but found that to almost be too rare, you could play through an episode without really seeing one. So rare that it is almost impossible to find just felt a bit too rare, especially since you likely would die quickly to it and then never see it again.

Also, yes, very important to balance these guys. If you can get them to chase you and not kill you in the process, you can cause a lot of destruction. It is quite the feeling to be chased by something that gibs an army of Shamblers within mere seconds.

Yes, that is definitely one of the big issues at this point. I thought since Quake was auto-expandable with things like resolution that it could handle code; I always figured you could compile anything and have it work granted everything played nice together. Having this sort of wakeup call is highly disappointing. Sacrificing features isn't really worth it, not for an additional reskinned entity.

As for a genius solution, it only prolongs it slightly. I think I could do a bit more trimming and add another opponent. But of course we also have to be thinking about expanding in case I find some other good mods. When I started adding monsters to the generator, I did it with the belief that I wasn't really prohibiting everything else. Now I feel demotivated in regards to creativity, since I rather add something someone else made that seems worthy of including than something of my own shaky quality, especially since we are playing with only so much space. Really depressing, since things like the Blazing Fiend were really making this mod into something which would include a bunch not found elsewhere.

I really don't know what I am doing for the future. Long term solution was to do everything 1996, make one large mod for it, then fork it and make an even more complex one for 1997. The problem is that I apparently can't even make a 1996 without running out of room. I guess that is the most depressing part of all this in my eyes; for all I have done, it still was very little in the grand scheme, and I intended to expand with a bunch. I intended to eventually hit total conversions and try to recreate each entity in the mod. I intended to take the expansion content and add it as well once I got to it. Now it feels like those sort of dreams are just too ambitious. And I don't even know where to go from here. The whole hope for Quake was to have a game where I could just keep building up and up, a game where I could find continual content and add it to one of the most moddable things of all time. Now it turns out we can't have that. I feel far more demotivated to even continuing, since running across some great feature will just make me need to kill the last bit of remaining space.

In fact, it wouldn't matter if I had plenty of space still. What is really killing me is that Quake is finite. That this whole project is finite. And that all the ambitions I had, to one day have a server with thousands of generated opponents, was a pipe dream and not a real possibility. I just learned how to control rarity and make things rarer or more common. Yet it feels like a small victory as I can't even expand on that feature much. With the idea of using custom skins to make more enemies, I suddenly got a lot of inspiration just for this one part. And yet now it turns out that I got lucky that I could even fit in the Blazing Fiend. I was lucky I could get the Laser Gun to bounce off armor. Any features I am adding are now luck to even get implemented. And it will only get worse until the space eventually dies. That in turn kills my hopes. There is nothing to really look forward to now, since the endgame goal is always something with limits. And suddenly Quake becomes a painful reminder of all this hope dying.

It is like my entire "Quake career" has been smashed to bits. I am not even sure there is a way to recover. At the very least, I am not really motivated to continue. At the same time, I have no alternatives for what I even want to do. There is nothing for me out there. Nothing but sleeping and hoping for life to eventually end. Every single time I try to build myself up, try to find some bit of happiness to cling to, it always falls apart. And now it happened with Quake, my sanctuary for the last near decade. You know, no matter how bad I had it, I always had this. No matter how bad I had it, I could never fall as low as I am falling now.