31/07/2011 @22:13:47 ^23:19:05

Recently I've been on an rboom patching spree and I'd much rather be doing that than writing map reviews. So, no site updates.

On Plutonia 2 and maps numbered higher than 32

After writing Plutonia 2 I was contacted by The Green Herring, author of map33, who reminded me that PL2 was in fact the first of the modern megawads that have over 32 maps, and therefore began the trend, in a sense.

The reason is because of a quirk in the original Final Doom executable, which would allow a 33rd map, unlike regular doom2.exe which would crash if you tried. So it's a kind of very obscure easter egg.

Unfortunately in the modern era, such subtleties are lost on the majority of players who use source ports and are simply not aware of such original .exe quirks. (I certainly wasn't. I used to use Doom2's exe in the dim and distant past but never the Final Doom version - I didn't get Final Doom until late 2002, by which time I'd almost completely switched to PrBoom. Nevertheless I find this type of thing fascinating so I'm posting about it!)

All Hell Breaks Loose Revisited

Finally I got enough fixes into rboom to play this thing properly. Actually rboom didn't even exist then. I think PrBoom trunk should support it too, but I'm not sure if 2.5.0 is new enough. Of course PrBoom-Plus has supported it for ages, that's where I got the fixes from.

I notice that some of the review is wrong because of broken DeHackEd patch support: the rude demons are brown, there are no green ones that leave overlarge corpses. The green ones are meant to be flying barons, like in Scythe 2 but not quite as nasty, and there isn't two different types of them.

lame in sid

I was extremely surprised to notice the appearance of a lame package in Debian, since it was always at the top of the unable to package list. I know this because making a lame package from upstream's packaging was one of the first things I did with Debian packaging and stuff, after discovering said ban on packaging, and the upgrade replaced the same 9-year-old package I had installed...

"RjY's amazing private copy!!", rest in peace

26/07/2011 @23:04:16 ^23:20:20

1000 rboom commits

rboom has recently passed a thousand commits on its mainline. It's only taken six years(!)

Some statistics:

commits per year

% git log --format=%ai | cut -c1-4 | sort | uniq -c
     27 2005                                                            
    178 2006
     59 2007
    229 2008
    107 2009
    250 2010
    156 2011

2011 is thus far bucking the trend of odd-numbered years being relatively barren.

commits per month

% git log --format=%ai | cut -c6-7 | sort | uniq -c 
     49 01
     28 02
     88 03
     54 04
     23 05
     82 06
     98 07
     29 08
    110 09
    152 10
    172 11
    121 12

I don't know why I'm more active in the last four months of the year.

However, June and July are catching up. Mostly due to these past two months. I've done a lot recently, somehow.

10 most active months

% git log --format=%ai | cut -c1-7 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10
     74 2008-11
     68 2010-10
     67 2010-11
     63 2011-07
     59 2011-06
     50 2006-12
     49 2010-09
     45 2008-10
     43 2010-12
     43 2008-09

Of course, all of this is meaningless, since commits are not all the same size. And, especially since the switch to git in 2008, my commits have become a lot smaller and more numerous.