Came across an interesting page on the Marathon’s Story site. Found that bit of hypothetical influence interesting, as Halo had inspired a bit of sci-fi texture dabbling of on my part…

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on June 12, 2000.

Back in San Francisco and back to (somewhat) good health. Nine parties in seven days, with some sleep thrown in like a bay leaf, the body finally says “No, thank you,” and gets the flu. This put an end to my plans this weekend to photograph Alcatraz for a new texture set. Which brings me to a bit of a rant cut short. After months of phone calls, trouble tickets, traceroutes, pings, and a little PG-13 language, our DSL service at the house (where Shaderlab is hosted, incidentally) has continued to degrade. Perhaps I’m naive, but total outbound packetloss exactly every 62 seconds isn’t exactly the Marque of fucking Quality.

Do yourself a favor if you’re considering getting DSL. Avoid InternetConnect.net like like the plague of dysfunctional routers and “quality assurance” personnel the company is. If you send mail to Shaderlab and it bounces, or see some poor bloke repeatedly running off the side of q3dm17 like some lemming every minute or so, you know why. :)

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 18, 2000.

This week I will be attending E3 in Los Angeles.

If you’re going to be attending and would like to meet and yak about shaders, textures or mapping, or have any tickets to the Sony party you’d part with, drop me a note at ydnar@shaderlab.com.

More updates next week.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 9, 2000.

Added some proper linkage to the Shaderlab soundtrack: Tag’s Trance Trip, the stream with all the good techno kit.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 5, 2000.

Installed a new section under Shaders: Archived. This is a place for archived textures, including textures made for older engines, 8-bit textures, and texture sets. The first member is a set of Unreal/Marathon textures in a hand-drawn urban vein. Some signage thrown in there for good measure as well.

Also added today are 5 new textures in the Metal section. They are of the abused red variety.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 5, 2000.

Here’s a screenshot of a map created to test the Oxide (Urban) shader set. It demonstrates a little of what I was trying to achieve with the textures.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 5, 2000.

Added the last part of the original urban set. Decided that the environment maps I was using weren’t making the cut. Decent ones will be up here soon.

New today: Metal, Trim, Walls, Windows, and Wood.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 5, 2000.

Placed many of the textures from the sample set into their new homes in the Shaders section. Brick, cement, asphalt and concrete are represented with clickable thumbnails and individually zipped downloadable goodness.

More to come…

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on May 4, 2000.

Shaderlab will be open soon. If you’re looking for textures in the meantime, try this test release. It’s a largish (10MB) zip with 90-odd textures in tga format, along with a Quake 3 Arena shader script.

Update: File removed; please download individual textures from the Shaders section.

At some point there will be a more complete license, but for now here’s the gist: Free textures for use in non commercial maps, mods or TCs. All that I ask is a shout in the readme, and a link back here.

Originally posted to shaderlab.com on April 17, 2000.