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Hi all! Sorry about taking so long to write this news post, but I've been pretty jet-lagged since I got back, and I've had a lot to see to... my net connection went down for a couple of days, as well, which didn't help. Anyway:
The trip to Dallas went very well, except for a slight mix-up in transit at LA. Time was short after getting through immigration, and I was told that I was departing at Terminal 7, so I walked over there... only to find out that I'd been misinformed, and needed to backtrack. Arriving back, I found a gigantic queue waiting for me... luckily, though, the flight had been delayed just slightly, so I actually ended up being on time.
I'd arranged to meet Ditlev from the Buzzybots mod at the Dallas airport, to save on taxi fare... he's from Denmark, so it worked out well, us both being Vikings ;). Got to the hotel (which was really big, by the way... its lobby looking like something out of a James Bond film), and slept a lot (I'd been awake for almost all of the 20 hour journey).
A lot happened over the next couple of days... writing everything out in detail would take a while, and its length might scare some readers away :), so here are some of the highlights:
- Met up with the other mod developers, as well as Cliffe, Eric Smith, Erik Johnson, Doug Lombardi, and Autolycus... having talked with Erik Johnson and Autolycus a bit in the past made this even better, in some way. Everyone was friendly, and generally great to meet.
- Got to meet Nivekdev and Deathbog, in person! That in itself would have made the trip worthwhile.
- The Valve guys took everyone out to eat on three separate occasions, so we got to talk about quite a few things.
- Got to play Counterstrike with all of the people mentioned above, as well as Frank from the CPL.
- Indirectly 'met' LevelLord from Ritual... and Nivekdev and I got to meet Cliffy B. from Epic directly.
- With some help from Frank, Cream from HL Rally and FrieChamp from MonkeyStrike managed to find id Software... and ended up getting a tour of the offices, as well as being shown some of Doom 3! Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding before they left (someone told me that they'd given up on the idea), I missed out on this, but ah well.
- On the way back, Cream and I managed to get to Santa Monica and look around for a couple of hours, which finished things off nicely.
As for the mod expo itself: Valve supplied us with two systems on which to demonstrate the mod, since it wouldn't be co-operative with one :), and the other mods were mostly running rolling demos. It was good to see the other mods running, though unfortunately I was too busy to catch more than a glance at each. The expo was started a bit earlier than normal, since Epic was just finishing off a presentation in the room next door, and a lot of people were likely to walk through on the way out of there.
Deathbog, Nivekdev, and I sort of took turns demonstrating things, talking to audience members, etc., and got some encouraging reactions from the crowd, especially regarding the replacement systems and Project Guilty's textures :). There were unfortunately a couple of crashes caused by .dem file playback (not SvenCo-op's fault), which cut down on our audience at one point, but other than that things went well.
As you will probably know by now, Deathbog got onto the live webcast -- the clip can be viewed HERE! In the background, you can see me (on the left), and Nivekdev (on the right), playing Project Guilty on our (temporary) GeForce4-enhanced CPL machines :). As Sniper mentioned earlier, the second person interviewed in the video clip is Frederick Bode from MonkeyStrike, who is in no way associated with SvenCo-op.
As a whole, everything was even better than I could have expected, and I had a heap of fun, especially meeting everyone. Many thanks to Valve for flying me over, and for making us all welcome once we arrived! I'll have to start work on that Sim Sandwich mod I'd been planning, and apply for the next mod expo ;).
Thanks to Nivekdev and Deathbog for all their help with the expo/etc. They did an amazing job of promoting Sven Co-op!
Also thanks to Sniper for holding the fort while we were all away... sounds like there were some serious forum problems while I was away.
Well, I think that about covers the major points... if anyone has any specific questions, ask me on the Forums. Some more details should be included in a couple of different interviews, over the next couple of weeks. Nivekdev should be uploading the pictures he took of various things, pretty soon, as should some of the other mod guys. I'll post some links once those are ready.
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