So what does a sick wolfie do on Sunday? There's nothing to do. Wasn't feeling well enough to go to church, eat, or any other activity that requires moving around... Poked around some old games, but I needed to DO something. I needed to wrap my mind around something and actually DO something. What did I wind up doing? I checked out the Guild of Writers Wiki! Not the lightest reading there is... But, for some reason, reading everything Paradox has been posting lately has got me in the mood to read up on Age making. So I reinstalled Python, Blender and the whole trove of Uru building tools and decided to go on an entirely new crash course!

The last time I tried this was almost exactly last year... August 19, 2007. I managed to churn out a pathetic excuse of a dinkwad Age and then kind of let it all go to the back burner for some reason. (Think I tried to shoot for my second attempt at buying a computer... Something which failed then and also failed this time. My primary source of income decided to stop being an option so I've been without anything to do, but that's another post entirely.) Starting over from scratch again, I managed to remember a few things that made it a little easier to get Uru and Blender up and running and ready to export my artwork. Behold, "Age 3" in all its initial glory:

Why, yes... Age 3 IS a reference to Gehn's method of naming Ages. In fact, Age 1 and 2 were the only two other attempts I ever made at creating Ages (Age 1 being pictured in the post last year) and I no longer have the source files (or Age files) to them. So for all intents and purposes, I burned the last two Books I wrote because they were mangled beyond repair. This one, however, is far above the quality of my last two Ages, even without textures. The sky was really fun to do... Well, if you asked me then, I would have told you that UV Mapping is probably the single most insane thing I've ever had to work with, but in hindsight, it was just plain fun. The next several hours consisted of me building collision barriers so that your avatar would at least realistically not be able to scale cliffs without the proper climbing gear, and turning that brilliant white terrain into a lovely rock:

I even managed to brighten the sky a considerable amount without using lights. (In fact, I made the sky emit light...) I would say the traversable terrain is roughly the same area as Myst Island, but obviously devoid of any life, plant, animal or otherwise (excluding me, of course), and was proudly generated using Terragen. It took me an incredibly long time to get the rock texture to look natural like that... My first attempt was all jumbled up and it looked like... I'm not sure. "Noisy teeth" is what comes to mind. But this time it's all smooth and beautiful. The textures provided on the GoW Wiki are really amazing.

My grand plan is to at least put dirt and grass textures down in the valley where people can actually walk around. Rock for the mountains and the "go away" places... I'm theorizing about trees, too. Nothing fancy, and most likely the ugliest things ever seen, since they'd mostly be tall poles with two flat textures to give the (glaringly fake) impression of 3D branches. I have my own sand and grass textures that I've used for a 3D scene I printed out for 4-H a long time ago, so I'll probably experiment with those and not rely so completely on the walkthrough. I'd already been able to import terrains into Blender, so I was at least able to personalize the Age a little bit.

I'm not even really a member of the Guild of Writers... Or maybe I am and don't know it? Not sure. I mean, I wore the shirt in Myst Online when it was on Gametap, and I registered on the forum when they got that up and running, and I followed the "guild politics", so to speak, but I don't figure there's a whole lot of people there who'd enjoy seeing me around, so I haven't really made my presence known. Haven't run into any problems yet, though... There's so much stuff I can read right now, so I don't really need to bother anyone.