Say hi to our newest member, QuartzRaven!
omegaslayer
milkshake
Wild Card
"Niborius" said:Yes, happy memories eh? It's amazing how your memory has things down as "recent" until you actually stop to think and realise how long ago they were.
Hey Flynn, good to see you smiley
I was also here back when Le_Chief was Aaron_da_killa smiley
My active years have been 2009 - 2012, but I've known the site since I was an 8 year old kid playing Half-Life 1 against bots on custom maps from here.
satchmo
**Dedi** said:That's a good post, **Dedi**.
Oh my goodness!
An myriad of emotions wash over me as I see the familiar colours and layout appear on my screen.
Some time ago, I clicked on an old bookmark on my browser, and to my utter heartbreak, SnarkPit was gone. I left it alone, and in a way I left mapping for good. I accepted that the time had passed and it was time to move on. So much has happened since then. Successes, failures, graduations, deaths in the family, relationships, breakups, new ones, happiness, depressing times, anxiety, happiness again, sadness, hope, and above all, nostalgia.
Just a couple of days ago, I was rummaging through my old backed up files in random locations and suddenly ran into Valve Hammer Editor, and found my old maps; a couple of maps I'd spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on. I opened them out of sheer nostalgia, to see what I'd done in my past. I didn't expect that many feelings to come rushing back. Just now I started looking up Hammer Editor tutorials and didn't find much in the first two minutes. In hope, I searched the keywords Snark Pit, just to see whether there was a remnant of our community, or at least the memorable logo of the site on google images.
When I joined this site I was a mere immigrant to Australia and hardly spoke a few words of English. The SnarkPit community was something different: a place full of people who appreciate the game of my childhood, the first game I ever owned. I was maybe 13 or 14 when I joined this community. If you track back (if they are still available) to my first posts (which I may do at some point), you'll see how primitive my English was, and how I addressed Orpheus as Mr. Orpheus because I was just a kid here among all the adults.
Having turned 27 last week, I am like a majority of you travelling down memory lane much more, and in greater emotional magnitude than ever before. The feelings I have are always those of longing. What if this, what if that. I wish I was at this stage in life by now, I wish I'd done this by now. The one thing I know is that whenever I get nostalgic, and want to hit the reset button on my life, I play the Half-Life series. And I do it almost annually.
It has been the longest time. This is the only online community I ever cared about and felt a part of. Even had a couple of you as Steam friends (who, after several years I deleted because I wiped my account to include only people I'd met in real life).
I have no idea whether anybody will have read this at all, but I guess I wrote it because I needed to, for myself as much as anybody else.
I'd love to know what everybody is doing with their lives these days, and how often you guys revisit the Half-Life universe.
TL;DR, Missing the good old days.
Riven said:It sure has taken me a long ass time to get around to replying to this.
Flynn,
That's a really inspiring post, Flynn. I think a lot of what SnarkPit has offered for a lot of folks back in the day was exactly what you described. -It was a kind of outlet for a lot of people to let loose, explore their mapping skills, and communicate across the globe with a other isolated individuals. Of course we, each of us might have been isolated in different ways and not necessarily geographically.
I think your story & Dedi's speaks to that a bit. I'm really glad you contributed then, and are now still connected with us. Even as sparse as the activity on the site is, I appreciate visiting every-so-often to read these kinds of stories. They're a kind of 'reveal' behind the curtain of the personalities we reacted with on the site back then.
My story for the last 6 years, briefly has been moving to Austin, TX after I graduated from university with my Master of Architecture, and started working for several architectural firms here. I recently passed the 7 exams for my licensure, and now finally have my license, and can legally call myself an architect here in the US!
Studying for those exams took up the better part of my time for the last 3 years, and feels like a HUGE weight off my shoulders. I've begun integrating and pushing for VR and level design with my firm for designing architecture! -We've been using the Unreal engine, which has proven to be quite adaptable, and I've started learning a bit of that for the last year, so we could take our BIM models from our modeling software into Unreal to allow clients and residents explore our models! -It's been hugely advantageous to apply my skills from mapping all those years ago into what I do now. Real-time engines have advanced considerably, but a lot of the same principles are still there. Fortunately, the Unreal engine is A LOT more versatile with level optimization then Source ever has been, so we don't have to do very much to have our full 150,000 square-foot buildings, (interior AND exterior) up and running in VR (given the beefy workstations our office uses). We're using the Oculus Rift, with an Xbox 360 controller btw.
I don't have much I can post about it, but this recent LinkedIn post from my company showed the recent conference we took our models to show-off, and what the setup looked like. My firm is called: Pi Architects [NOTE]: The young guy showing it off is not me; that's one of my co-workers who helped out on the project.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6404745970923429888
I'd like to know what everyone is up to now? Have you been able to integrate mapping into your life nowadays, Dedi & Flynn?
) but it never really happened because of the school I attended for many years made me feel like part of some other world.
Adam Hawkins
