Position: Almost everything
Occupation: In transition
Age: 23
Listening to: Nox Arcana
Well everyone, big announcement. I am officially done with working on JPDS - for all time. No it's not a late April Fool's joke.
So the big question - is it finished?! That depends on how you want to define the word. I do not think JPDS ever had the potential to be fully realized as the visions that were had for it. They were always far and beyond extravagant compared to what was reasonably possible with our resources. Not that Tres couldn't handle it - but WE, the people bound with hunched backs in front of our monitors, can not or should not do the work which would be required to get there.
Last night I finished a period of nearly 48 hours with NO sleep or rest, and in the second half almost no food. The circumstances of my life have become such that I needed to be rid of this project, so I committed to ending all work from me on JPDS before I went to sleep on Sunday night. Well, Sunday night came and passed without JPDS being in a position for release.. Mind-boggling progress was and continued to be made through yesterday, but it still was not enough for the insane amount required. So I just stayed up and kept working. It worked amazingly well as long as I didn't do any physical exertion and just stayed at the computer the whole time.
Last night at about 0130, at long last I reached my breaking point after 6.5 years, and the realization hit me that I simply was not going to finish JPDS. I realized that sometimes you have to lose a long-term investment in order to make new ones, and that's what I'm doing here.
Reasonably playable versions of the levels - JPDS~streams, JPDS~plains, JPDS~trails, JPDS~HRS, JPDS~forest - are ready to go and will be released through Tatu along with the JPDS engine itself and sizable additive TPAs. Streams is the most complete of all and besides a few small bugs, it's a completed no-corners-cut level with tons of scripted mechanics going on everywhere. Plains is more or less in the same position, though not as complex a level. The others are in various states of non-completion but overall what's missing is scripted mechanics and not gaping holes in the play area or some such. In fact, Trails has a ton of working puzzles to delight yourself in. You just can't eat the mushrooms, sorry.. that would have taken another hour or two and I was at the end of my line. It also has plentiful dinos (with new vocals in all levels) and some events scripted with them. HRS and Forest also have several working puzzles. In fact, HRS is mostly complete too, since it has no dinos.
Many thanks to the people who contributed in massive or small ways to this project. I hope what survives now can do it justice. Tatu and I should be ready to release these things in under a week. In a few more weeks we'll be opening the private JPDS forum for all to see. There are some neat gems in there and lots of story written for JPDS that never made it into level-form. I also plan to release the last one of all-one-level versions of JPDS1, which is at least a couple years old now, for an entertaining time traveling without interruption through a gargantuan level of over 55 thousand objects and 4096 meters across. We come to it at last.
EDIT:
The first release of Jurassic Park: Dark Secrets is now officially out. Since I know some of you complain about not being able to complete large downloads, it has been split into 5 archives, the first 4 being 50 MB each. Download it from the link on TresCom's mainpage:
http://trescom.org/
It contains the engine and all files required for JPDS~streams (other than the three non-menu TPA files from Trespasser build 116, without which you will get no sound). The other levels and their files will be released soon.
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Some people have reported corruption errors with the files, stemming from from the split archive feature. If this has happened to you, or if you want less files to mess around with, you can use the following download links to get uncorrupted files.
The engine and its files:
http://www.mediafire.com/?813f5oi9lcpg0c4
The level:
http://www.mediafire.com/?6xnce427xudogfu
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JPDS Plains is now out! viewtopic.php?f=46&t=8888
And it states quite clearly in my first post of this thread what you will need in order to get sound.