I'm sure you've heard praise for this album by now...

elfs already wrote a very nice review of the new Linken Park album, Meteora. I feel like writing my own, though we both agree quite heavilly about the album as a whole.

For those with ADHD like me... it rocks, go take your Ritalin and enjoy the music. :-)

I always liked the approach Rage Against The Machine took with their music... but I despised their executation. Too grating, trying to force the thought down your throat, almost going out of their way to add barbs and burrs to scratch one's throat on the way down.

Much like them, Linken Park has a split ensemble. One vocalist is a very fine-grade rapper, like Coolie he's easy on the ears and able to get his message thumping into your ears. The other vocals are somewhere between sung and screamed, a gritty, digging screech that still keeps that slick feeling, piercing like Tori Amos can be but still smooth at the same time.

So, if you see the album, snag it. Hell, just get the tracks first, give them a listen and see if you like it before ya' buy, but definately give it a chance if you're a fan of any older Linken Park, any Rage Against the Machine, or Evanescence as a newcomer that bears similarities, though the latter blends closer to Tori Amos with the vocals.

And on a completely different note...

...I'm officially an absolute bitch with Q3A coding now...

In the last 24 hours, I have:

• Gutted the codebase, removing all powerups and armor
  
• Compacted the remaining stats, including merging flag handling to a bitfield
  
• Removed the 'entity' health flag, in lieu of client-only health fields
  
• This changed one thing for simplicity, bodies no longer gib, period
  

These changes are purely prep-work for more drastic changes to the codebase I'll be finishing in the coming days. This work is towards a Q3A mod based on the universe of Akira Toriyama, the creator of DragonBall.

No, don't expect Goku or anyone else showing up in my mod, just the battle-style from the anime and manga. Beams will most certainly exist as well, with an interesting twist for controlling them that I've worked out that will make them easilly-predicted with the existing infrastructure in the game.

Health levels will be tracked to a FAR larger degree of accuracy, as 100 hit points just simply doesn't cut it to deal with everything from the scratches and dents to the outright rending of the original anime. Possibly seperated into area-specific damage as well, though that's still to be decided at a later date.

Something else I'm working on, is creating a first ever for Q3A-based mods. A skeletal-animation system like Half-Life. The game engine supports it, but there aren't any tools to export to the format in question, known at .MD4 specifically.

I'm going to begin work on finding a way to export to this format in approximately one month. It would be in two weeks, but between this week, next week Mark's possibly departure for Virginia for work, and everything else, I doubt I'll have the spare time to do everything I need to do in only two weeks.