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As per my last journal, I am going to talk about stuff that I've been busy with, but haven't got the space on this site to do so, until now.

Garry's Mod Map

The map is named "Boxed Community" (gm_boxedcommunity) and it is an 'orange' map focused on being an NPC arena, while having a favorite addon of mine, the Lambda Players, in mind when building the map. I started building the map because there were two other orange arena maps I played that had issues that basically made the map hard to like despite how much I liked the layout and stuff. One map began to lag after a while after leaving its (supposedly capped) NPC spawner running for a while, especially when I was using weapon bases like ARC9. While the weapon bases tend to rob me of some of my frames, all the other maps I played held up fine. Often, it crashed with an "Out of Edicts" error which frustrated me. The other map had some issues relating to rendering stuff through doorways which got annoying as I couldn't see anything that wasn't world geometry through any of the doorways.

I liked the maps, but the issues were bothersome to me, and because I was struggling on working on another map because of how much of a slog it was becoming due to it being an older project, I decided to toss it and start a fresh new project.

The map's old name was "orangearenathing" but due to its layout, I changed it to "boxedcommunity." These screenshots basically sum up why I settled on that name :P Click here to skip the images because there is a lot of them

Yep, there's a lot to unpack here. It's not even everything. The map's not done yet. Once I add the stuff I want to add (NPC spawning, the belt section, custom posters, sounds to interactables that don't have them) and I'm happy with the map for now, I'll make an unlisted workshop upload of the map and have a closed beta with a specific server, since I know for sure there's people there that's interested in my map.

My goals are to make a map that looks and functions good, and to expand my mapping skills like utilizing more advanced map stuff and improving my lighting, especially for HDR lights (or High Dynamic Range. Basically prettier lighting). (I originally started working with just LDR, but moved to HDR mid-development. I'll still test the LDR lights to make sure they still look good even with the HDR focused adjustments).

Website

I'm just gonna put it out there. I'm sick of Toyhou.se. Yes, it's a good site and I love the open-endedness of the functionality, plus the HTML stuff and I admit I do have a soft spot for the site, but the state it's in is depressing as hell. The community doesn't make it any better ngl and I already accepted that I can't keep relying on it as a character showcase thing since either the site shuts down or the community one day decided "nah fuck this lambda20xx guy in particular lmao".

But that's just part of the reason why I want to work on a personal website. Two other reasons include:

• I neglected my Neocities site for too long. oops :(
• I found out about a neat thing called Eleventy

Eleventy is basically my answer to the question of "can't maintaining this damn thing be any easier?" How it works from my experience as of writing this is that you feed it some template files and it'll spit out a website with the same-ish file structure as what you fed it (some extra setup is needed for it to copy over stuff like CSS and images). That's my oversimplified explanation though. It's a static site generator basically XD The biggest appeal to me rn is the layouts, which allows me to basically set up a "HTML" file that I'm gonna repeat a lot (like the navbar and the footer as well as the CSS). In addition, I can utilize the front matter on the Markdown files that Eleventy gets fed and the data cascade to–

hey lambda? i don't think everyone's gonna understand what the fuck you're saying.

Oh. Oops, I guess I should explain some of the stuff haha.

Front Matter Data is the stuff on the top of the template (i'm explaining front matter data in templates specifically) that gives Eleventy some data associated with the template to fill in the placeholders {{ example }} in the selected layout, among other features. It's basically variables attached to the template. The "layout:" variable determines what layout the template uses, for example. Front Matter Data in templates uses YAML (more info: https://learnxinyminutes.com/yaml/) and looks a little something like this in templates:

---
title: Awesome Page
layout: mylayout.njk
someextravariableimadeup: /cat.png
---
# so awesome

Data Cascade is the order that Eleventy reads the data from the input. On the documentation page, Front Matter Data in Templates is second in the cascade, and Front Matter Data in Layouts is fifth in the cascade. The reason I'm pointing this out is because layout data having the second highest priority is what I took advantage of for the next part: Overriding CSS variables in specific templates.

Let me pull up some screenshots (it won't be as much as the maps thankfully)


^ btw the data cascade in this context now refers to how your browser reads the code when it loads a page. this is another part in the trick

^ little thing i wrote to show the difference between specifying altcss in the front matter vs not specifying

^ the default CSS that pages on the site have (for now)

^ the test altcss stylesheet i wrote to see if my idea worked (spoiler alert: it worked)

I took the time and effort to come up with this system for the best part of my website, the per-character CSS, because if I'm gonna have my own website where I call the shots, I might as well have fun with it!

Oh yeah, website style reveal... until I change or tweak the colors. The site rebuild's been on the backburner for a while, but it's looking good so far. I made the index page and even implemented the nav drip I had on my og site! Maybe after the map, I'll pick back up on the website...?

Damn, this was a long journal, but that was because there was some stuff I've been doing that I have to get everyone up to speed about. Maybe the future journals won't be as long, maybe they will, idk,

I don't know how regular my devlogs will be, but I'll figure out the devlog stuff as I share more stuff.