hirn → internet

So I was able to play a couple of rounds of Boom Blox yesterday. First results: my arms hurt. Well, I guess I’m just not used to physical activity, the same thing happened to me the first days after playing Wii Sports back when I got the console. Boom Blox has several modes of play, one of them involves throwing baseballs and bowling balls at the towers of blocks in front of you. I may exaggerate the motion a little too much, but I kept getting weak in one arm, then changed to the other until that one hurt, changing back again and so forth. With the result of a hangover in both arms. I guess I should work out some more.

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In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a deadly trapdoor triggered by throwing physics objects at a certain point. In our HL2DM mod Babel Babel, the teams playing against each other have the option of throwing boxes lying around the arena at targets on the other teams’ side of the level that trigger a series of trapdoors in the ground. If one of the enemy teams’ players happens to be standing over one of these hidden trapdoors, he will face his certain death at the bottom of the pit.

I had some trouble getting this trapdoor to work at first, since it seemed to work fine - as long as no player was standing on it at the moment it was triggered. In this case, it simply refused to open at all. After browsing the net a bit I found several hints on how to make the trapdoor work correctly and combined them in the following tutorial. As always, you should already be a little familiar with Hammer, because I won’t tell you all the icons you have to click on.

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GTA IV has gotten a lot of extremely favourable and even “perfect” reviews. But after having played through the  story line and currently sitting at around 77% completion, I think the game doesn’t really deserve these high rankings. To be fair I have to say that I was unable to try out multiplayer yet, which I am certain is an excellent new addition to the series and warrants higher ratings. But the single player experience offered hardly any innovations over previous GTA games. In fact, it’s just more of the same while looking a little better than before.

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