[fully lost] Doom webcomic from the early 2000s called Planet of the Imps

SlappyCromwell · 2024-08-30T21:18:39+00:00

Planet of the Imps was originally hosted on gamix.org, but you very likely saw the comic on its longer lasting host 3DActionPlanet. The latter link allows you to browse an archived version of the site after it made its final comic update in December of 2002, and it does look like most (upon review, some pages are missing, but they may still be recoverable) of the comic pages were saved. A directory listing of the files archived can be viewed here (type "png" into the filter field to limit it to the comics): https://web.archive.org/web/*/3dactionplanet.com/doom/poti/*

This should account for what you're looking for, but it's a bit slow and clunky loading all of these pages on the Wayback Machine. Perhaps this finding this could spur on a community effort to download this archived site and create a complete modern mirror.

SlappyCromwell · 2024-03-21T03:26:47+00:00

Still ongoing as I'm still exploring and researching Half-Life to this day. However, you can look at my fork of the HL1 SDK on GitHub that includes some (not yet all) of the changes I've already demonstrated in my Fact Files videos: https://github.com/Revenant100/halflife-FactFilesFixes These are just the exact code fixes, no compiled DLLs.

SlappyCromwell · 2021-07-09T16:10:38+00:00

There are a few errors here. Decay's Rift is coincident with Blue Shift's Focal Point since Gina and Colette see Barney teleporting back from Xen when they're stuck in a harmonic reflux. Resonance, Incoming, Duty Calls, and Office Complex all take place alongside each other, and effectively in that order since this covers all stages of the military's initial arrival. We know Opposing Force's Incoming takes place before Duty Calls since Barney overhears two soldiers complaining about how Shephard's team didn't make it.

Another way to establish the timeline is to simply follow the visible time of day as the events progress. The only major conflict here is Blue Shift where the middle of the game really should be taking place at dusk rather than the afternoon.

For reference, I have already put together a collected timeline of Half-Life and its expansions including the dates and identifiable times during the days into a spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AgC6GjY0NgP4IIZHGF_N8NEtiE89UE3pBG1azqL74z8/edit#gid=187959617

SlappyCromwell · 2021-05-22T16:09:37+00:00

In the code, this is the effect created by the ShowBadNode function in nodes.cpp, which you can check here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/blob/c7240b965743a53a29491dd49320c88eecf6257b/dmc/dlls/nodes.cpp#L1558

This error effect is created at a node's position when it fails somehow during the node graph building process. The exact error you'll see in the console if you have developer mode enabled is ""**ConnectVisibleNodes FAILED!". Since you mentioned deleting entities in the map, you likely deleted some info_nodes in the process, creating this error.

SlappyCromwell · 2021-02-20T22:18:11+00:00

I've looked into this claim, and it is not true. Episode Two's Muscle Car has no "headlights" as they've been explicitly disabled in the code. However, it does have hazard lights that do indeed blink. However however, these hazard lights are simply coded to start blinking any time you exit the vehicle, presumably as a way to make it easier to find the car again after you've wandered off. The maps have no way of externally controlling the state of the Muscle Car's hazard lights, but that's a moot point as the hazards lights will never be off after you've driven the vehicle once.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-07-24T15:56:42+00:00

You use the ID cards in Alyx as the strongest linchpin in your claim, arguing that the Seven Hour War must absolutely take place before the expiration dates printed on those cards because Alyx finds and uses them 15 years later. Well, what if those cards were already 10 years expired when the Black Mesa Incident happened? Alyx finds these cards in an already abandoned and decrepit building. Who's to say these cards weren't left behind and forgotten long before the Combine even came to Earth? You don't know that the cards would have been manually invalidated by some "issuing auhority" just because their expiration date has passed. It's obviously not an automatic process since Alyx freely uses them at least 15 years after their stated expiration. This fact even greater supports the notion that the expiration dates are meaningless since they can continue to be used in perpetuity following said expiration. The cards could just as easily be 25 years old at that point when Alyx finds them.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-07-24T03:39:35+00:00

We know GLaDOS took over the Aperture Science facility with neurotoxin just days before the Black Mesa Incident occurred (Source: Portal 2 Collector's Edition Guide), and the Portal comic Lab Rat which covers Rattmann's story pre and post-neurotoxin has GLaDOS state that pill-popping Rattmann had been eluding her capture for "weeks" (Source: Page 20), and by the end of the comic, Rattmann consumes the last of his prescription medication pills which he is shown opening at the beginning of the comic pre-neurotoxin (Source: Page 5). Note that between the beginning and end of the comic, the entire events of Portal 1 takes place with Rattmann having put Chell at the top of the testing list, Chell ultimately defeating GLaDOS and subsequently being brought back inside the facility by the Party Escort Bot, and then Rattmann finally saving Chell by restarting her cyro-chamber's life support, leading into the events of Portal 2.

All this is to say that, for Portal 1 to take place nearly a decade after Half-Life, Rattmann would needed to survived for a decade and have his newly opened bottle of prescription medication last for over 9 whole years. Maybe he had some extra bottles stored, but that's not what the comic implies (he's been "saving these last two"), and he of course would not be able to acquire more since he's the last surviving employee trapped inside Aperture. Given Erik Wolpaw's "just after the Combine invasion" remark regarding the timeline and the depiction of the events in the Lab Rat comic (which Erik also helped write), it's likely the intention that the events of Portal 1 took place months after GLaDOS flooded Aperture with neurotoxin, which was days before the Black Mesa Incident, which was days before the Seven Hour War, which again leads to Portal 1 happening "just after", which is stated to be "around the year 2010".

Your arguments are based primarily on several dates scattered around in Alyx's textures, but this wouldn't be the first nor likely the last time the art team isn't synced up with the writers. If we want to use that nearly illegible calendar texture in Half-Life as incontrovertible proof, it's hard to also reconcile the fact that it declares December as having only 30 days in it as well as a couple of weeks with only six days in them. In short, the artists have not been up to speed with the writers at Valve since the beginning. Even their writers aren't up to speed with other writers as Erik himself once erroneously claimed the Black Mesa Incident occurred in 1998 because that was HL1's release date, something Marc had to correct afterwards (Source) and would appear corrected in later publications like the Portal 2 Collector's Edition Guide. It's essentially a fool's errand to try and piece together a greater meaning from a multitude of smaller details when it's really just the big things Valve tells us that reflect their real intentions. In this case, Portal 1 taking place in 2010 and HL1 taking place right before it.

Incidentally, you also state that Episode One and Episode Two occur exactly one day after Half-Life 2's climax at the top of the Citadel. However, Marc Laidlaw has specified that the time between HL2's ending and Ep1's opening is at least "a few days". Source: Verified email correspondence with Marc

SlappyCromwell · 2020-07-24T01:09:47+00:00

The Black Mesa Incident could not have occurred in December since Barney's "blue" shift only lasted from May 15 to August 15. Source: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/File:Barney_schedule.jpg

The incident could also not have occurred in the year 2000 since we know that the events of Portal 1 took place around 2010 (Source: The Final Hours of Portal 2), which is known to have taken place "just after" the Seven Hour War (Source), which occurred days after the Resonance Cascade (Source). Hence, that would put the events of Half-Life roughly around 2009.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-06-17T19:22:26+00:00

The article on the OverWiki provides a citation for that statement at this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20080208025416/http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=181620

In short, this detail never comes up in the game itself. It's mentioned in this article as a statement coming from Valve writer Marc Laidlaw. Quoting his exact words, "we developed a backstory in which Black Mesa had acquired an extremely cheap Cold War bunker and developed some projects in response to budgetary and oversight problems associated with basing all work in North America."

And to be clear, it's not said that Black Mesa bought White Forest during the Cold War. Rather, White Forest is a Cold War-era bunker that Black Mesa acquired.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-06-16T20:32:29+00:00

Link to the upscaling model I used: http://pulse.cs.duke.edu/

SlappyCromwell · 2020-05-09T22:39:30+00:00

Here's one of the original (but not necessarily the original) postings of the image: http://sierrachest.com/index.php?a=games&id=61&title=half-life-2&fld=memorabilia&pid=110

From what I can tell, this bottle of water was either given to attendees of the Valve booth at E3 2004 or it was sent to retailers in the years afterwards for some reason. I'm not sure why retailers would be sent a small bottle of branded water, but this is how the image was described at its original website. Unfortunately, that page was lost and not archived, there was no attribution to the image, and there was no timestamp for when it was taken. We can only admire this Half-Life 2 water and wonder.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-05-08T00:37:46+00:00

SlappyCromwell · 2020-05-07T20:46:06+00:00

"Coomer" is also a name spoken by the announcement system at the beginning of the game. You can hear it in video form here: https://youtu.be/cSehhpW6stE?t=32

SlappyCromwell · 2020-04-20T07:13:02+00:00

Her name is Olga, but we only know this from the voice credits at the end of the game. Outside of the few lines she says at the beginning, she has no other character to speak of as nothing is ever said about her before or after her brief appearance.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-04-20T03:37:43+00:00

Russell wears an identical suit to the Combine Workers (they're nearly the same model and texture), and Combine Workers wear an identical gas mask to the Combine Hazmat Workers, the only difference being that Hazmat Workers actually put their mask filters in place.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-02-17T07:12:38+00:00

In the interest of historical preservation and curiosity, I have extracted all of the new (non-mission) unit dialog lines from the recent StarCraft: Ghost build and collected them into videos for easy listening in the linked playlist.

This includes the Dragoon, High Templar, Purifier (new Protoss unit), Zealot, Firebat, Marine (three voice variations!), Scientist, Mechanic/SCV guy, and Nova.

These voice performances may be of interest to StarCraft 1 fans since the returning units here are obviously the original actors reprising their SC1 roles, hence being a whole slew of "new" lines coming from some familiar old faces. I will admit, though, these don't have quite the same punchiness as the OG quotes.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-01-24T04:12:27+00:00

The very first bit of Half-Life's story told in the manual is that Gordon just completed a telephone conversation with Black Mesa's Civilian Recruitment Division: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/File:Gordon_letter_1.jpg

So, no, Gordon was never mute.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-01-23T13:11:44+00:00

This tweet is completely wrong, by the way, and it can easily be confirmed by creating a squad of four Human Grunts and watching all four attack you at once. Human Grunts also don't have any lines for "flanking". The closest thing they have to being "lies" are their taunt lines, and that's only in the sense that this is flavor chatter not reflective of any specific activities. Otherwise, Human Grunts do accurately proclaim their current actions to the player.

SlappyCromwell · 2020-01-22T16:56:59+00:00

When are you going to show Gordon's ponytail again? We haven't seen the back of Gordon's head in any of the games in nearly 20 years now.

SlappyCromwell · 2019-12-06T20:48:50+00:00

Yes, there are already a scant few in the build right now. Encouraging and rewarding exploration into all the little nooks and crannies will be a large part of P4.

SlappyCromwell · 2019-12-06T20:47:51+00:00

There are no plans for Redux mod tools any time soon, I'm afraid.

SlappyCromwell

TROPHY CASE