I’m quite notorious for picking up an idea, half-completing it and putting it back down again.

It’s pretty frustrating for me, let alone other people - and probably one of the reasons I don’t share a lot of what I’m working on; but I still think it’s a great way to scratch an itch and move on.

Anyway in the interest of getting out there a bit more, I’ll try to share things I come across in my project boneyard…

For the first Half-Baked Sunday: a Left 4 Dead map I was working on in 2010… The map is of the iconic Perth Concert Hall here in Perth and is based on some drawings for it.

The idea was to put together a quick Left 4 Dead campaign starting in the old tunnels under St Georges terrace, breaking through the main auditorium and out to escape on a boat on the river.

I’d still like to complete this - if only because I had such a good start to it. However trying to draw up a map in Hammer based off drawings is a major pain in the butt, and was in fact the motivation to write Jocular.

Jocular was a tool to take a set of 2d lines and extrude them into 3d walls - with control points in the map to handle alignment/scaling of multiple floors (ie: stitching extruded segments together).

Whilst Jocular was working as a tool, at some point it scope creeped to include a GUI editor as well - which then came down to a decision on what vector and 3d library to use (Jocular was written in .NET).

It got a bit too hard and put on the backburner - if I approach this again I will consider writing it in Python as a Blender3D import tool and use the features available there.

… And that’s it for the first Half-Baked Sunday, hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my stalled projects in future weeks :)