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So, I'm not very good at blogging, although I like the idea of it. I figured the first post should act as an introduction. Since it's very easy to find anyway, here's some information. My name is Sean A. Lusher and I live in Columbia, MO. I'm married. My wife and I started dating in 2006, got engaged in 2009, and married in 2010. We just bought our first (and hopefully only) house in July of 2016. We live with three cats, (two are ours, and if you visit any of my other social media, you'll see lots of pictures of them, they're very photogenic), and two of our friends. As a little aside, I know there are a lot of people that are kind of weirded out by the idea of a married couple living with other people. I'm not entirely sure why this is, beyond the fact that it's not traditional, but we've tried living alone. Did it for a year. Living with people, (people you can trust and are reasonable, obviously,) is definitely better. I'm a writer. Currently a self-published writer, looking to become a somewhat more traditionally published writer. I began writing consistently in 2004. I wrote fan fiction for about nine years solid, with the occasional foray into original fiction. In 2008 I finished my first original novel. It was crap. Later, I rewrote it. In 2009, I won a contest at a convention for writing a short story in a certain amount of time. I was up against a couple of dozen others, one of them being a professional. (I still wish I knew who it was that was the professional published author.) I also got a short story published on a free online website that no longer exists, to my knowledge. In 2011 I got a sci-fi/horror novella published by Damnation Books (They no longer exist in their original form either, thankfully). I then self-published a short story and a novella for the Kindle. I kind of just screwed around through all of 2012 and some of 2013. I got two more novellas published that year with Damnation Books, a contemporary horror and a fantasy tragedy. I regret it, they sucked at their jobs. Hardly made any money. I think that perhaps, altogether, with those three titles across however many years they were published, I might have made 100$. Though my self published titles didn't do any better. In 2012, my wife and I moved to New Mexico, as she got a good job. Good enough that I no longer needed to work the awful minimum wage jobs I'd been working for several years at that point to support first myself, then us. It took a little while, but I finally produced my first full length novel that seemed worthy of publishing. It garnered a great deal of attention on WattPad, getting over 250,000 Views and hitting #1 in both Sci-Fi and Horror on the site. From September of 2013 to December of 2016, I worked on a series of Sci-Fi/Action/Horror stories called The Shadow Wars. The series features fifteen novels, three novellas, and nine short stories. I didn't see any real success until early 2015 and while I enjoyed about six solid months of upwards success, I've since had my income cut in half. Twice. For no discernible reason. I'm still lucky enough to be piecing together enough money to cover the bills so that I don't have to work. I'm currently preparing to start up a second pen name and attempt to get published with an Australian horror publisher that I think would be great for me and my ideas. The reason I'm doing this is because I think I can reach a wider audience and I'm honestly exhausted from doing EVERYTHING by myself. I'd like to have someone help with the workload of creating and publishing books. Although for several years I had a very good friend of mine, who was exceptionally talented, creating cover art for me and some occasional marketing, I now do everything by myself, and after three solid years of writing a fifteen novel franchise, I'm exhausted. So, now that I've spent the past several paragraphs talking about what I've done, I'd like to take a moment to let it be known that I have no illusions about myself and my writing. I am as successful as I am, (not very, at this point, I could probably make more at a full time, minimum-wage job), because I am lucky and because I work pretty hard. But mainly because I am lucky. I don't believe I'm owed anything, and I'm happy for every sale, every read, and every comment on anything I write. I try to find a happy medium between writing what people want to read, and writing what I want to write, and I think I do okay, for the most part. As for my writing itself and my ideas, I think that, on my good days, I'm about average. Most of the time I feel like what comes out falls pretty far short of what I had hoped would come out, but I know that basically every creative person feels this way, and honestly, it's for the best. Feeling like you produce crap motivates you to consistently try harder, which means you get better. So, for the record, I don't think I'm special, important, or even particularly interesting because I have written books or because I'm lucky enough to scrape by on what I manage to pull in each month. I don't even think I'm all that intelligent, to be honest. I've worked through a lot of crap over the years, and I'm on some light psych meds nowadays, and I've evened out for the most part. At this point, I just try not to worry about whether or not I'm good enough, or smart enough, or whatever. It doesn't really work as much as I'd like, though. Honestly, how I look at my life can be summed up in a two quotes. The first is from House: "Yeah, if we were all satisfied with what we had, what a beautiful world it would be. We'd all slowly starve to death in our own filth, but at least we'd be happy. Listen, I need your self worth to hang on this job, for kicking ass here to be all that lets you rise above miserable. If waking up in the morning is enough, then I don't need you." And, probably the one I apply more often to my problems, a quote from Rick (from Rick & Morty): "THE ANSWER IS DON'T THINK ABOUT IT, MORTY!" Whether or not I'm good enough or smart enough or whatever, honestly doesn't have a lot of bearing in my day to day life. What really matters more is that I don't think about it and just WORK, just get stuff done. Overthinking things, in my experience, leads to a huge amount of procrastination. And, for the most part, kicking ass at writing is, a lot of the days, all that lets me rise above miserable. Maybe not the picture of mental health, but I managed to get fifteen novels written in three years as a result of it. And I hope to get a lot more written. So, that's basically me in a nutshell. Honestly, I'm a boring person. I spend 95% of my awake time in my office, at my laptop, doing something related to writing. What little social contact I get comes from my wife, my roommates, and typically one other friend who I go to watch crappy movies with once a week at her house. (Right now, we're working our way through Friday the 13th.) And really, it works for me. Despite that, I do actually really like talking to people. If you have questions, feel free to shoot me a message anytime and I'll more than likely get back fairly promptly. The only other thing that I feel is worth mentioning right now is that I'm working on a feature-length written adaptation of Lego Rock Raiders. It'll be a little bit before I get to the actual writing portion, but it's going to happen, and I've got a good feeling about it. -Obsidian

Over the past week, I attended a course for Animation/Visual Effects, expecting to... well... make an animated project. And while that did happen, something else occurred during that week that took me off guard: The appearance of the Vive wasn't hinted at or briefly mentioned beforehand, so you can imagine my surprise. And luckily, they set up the headset for people to use whenever they needed/wanted a break, which of course meant I tried it out whenever I could (approximately three or four times). So, like my past encounter with the Play Station VR, I'll be detailing my experience with the Vive here. Enjoy! TILTBRUSH: THE LAB: PROBLEMS WITH THE HEADSET: I'm aware this isn't a good overlook or review of the Vive or anything, but right now, I'm tired, and I wanted to get this stuff off my chest. I'll come back and edit this into something better later. Thank you.

So VR tech has actually gotten to a good point of usability. Nice!

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http://oresome.rockraidersunited.com/download/469

Yeah, in the PS1 version, the overworld/main desert/pyramid area/dino park areas that are separate on PC are all one single map, you can even see the gem collectibles while in the helicopter. And yeah, Mr Hates' camp is... smol. The most notable thing about the PS1 maps is that they all use a terrain system (like, say, LR2 and LU), while in the PC version the landscapes are just models like everything else... So ripping the PS1 landscapes would definitely be more on the tricky side.

I remember in the ps1 port the jungle "overworld" area where you meet the t Rex and such must've been adapted from the big forced perspective map or something because you can walk over to mr hates camp and it's just a tiny house

My plan was to reply to this tonight (now) with pics of Castle Island, Ogel Island, and all the Adventurers Island models imported, but without textures, since all textures for LI2 models have to be applied by hand with the game open as reference (due to LI2's engine's stripping-textures-of-their-real-names-and-then-hardcoding-all-the-info-on-what-textures-go-where-into-the-exe bulls***)... But I think it's a bit late tonight to even do that. Been a busy evening. I'll get around to it later though, I'm curious too. And yeah, the Adventurers Island area you fly over definitely plays with scale to give the impression it's bigger than it is.

Hah, that's the first time I've heard of a 3D model format that supports vertex colors but not UVs... Anyway, the first thing that comes to my mind for this is COLLADA (.dae): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA Flexible, very widespread, and created for uses like this.

Is it at all possible to compare the other islands in the second game too? I'm guessing it'd be awkward with adventure island cuz the layout and scale of the levels and of the model you fly over at the start and end probably don't match up completely, but idk maybe not.

Like I said, it's WinXP. It has nothing to do with Fx dropping plugin support. WebGL is based on OpenGL, and OpenGL requires support from your GPU. It's likely your OpenGL support is limited (I doubt AMD/nvidia has taken the effort to backport such new technology to a 16 yr old, unsupported OS) and as a result, you can't play it. We're back to my original post: Mystery solved.

Have to say though, this is one thing I love about the old generation of games.... lack of babying through levels (granted, LRR in some instances does almost spell things out). It usually required a several attempts at a level to figure out what to do before you completed it. I remember attempting a number of levels heaps of times before wining them.... just.

Who wants to go on a deep dive treasure hunt?

Hey guys, before you get all excited: not back to return to the project, sorry! There's been a great deal of changes and my game studio has picked up some really awesome projects which (unfortunately for you guys) mean that all my time and efforts go into those. I won't be sharing the vector source files with the public, there's a couple of reasons. First, it's been a while and the quality of those textures isn't up to par of what I release nowadays. Next to that, since I've got my own game studio, I'd like to make sure I don't get into any trouble with LEGO or any other company for releasing their materials. I've recently been contacted by community member lordtobi909 on Twitter regarding sharing the assets. Here's what he said: That's how you don't ask for source files.