Apex X | History

Project History

During the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2019 my cat, whom I had been caring intensively for since the end of 2013 for unrelated issues, had what I believe to be a stroke, as a result of high blood pressure from stage 3 kidney failure. It was the most unpleasant and destructive experience of my life since mid 2017 and it wasn't known how long she would live. Indeed, at the time I thought she might be put down right then and there.

Instead, she began to recover with my hour to hour care and a complete diet switch with a plethora of day to day drugs. She lost half her health but gained it back over the following months and her sight gradually returned to her.

It was an extremely unpleasant and vibrant reminder of the limitations of one's abilities, the expectations one should have of life, and what actually matters about life. Since 2017 I had been on a deathspiral of extreme depression and I felt completely aimless in all walks of life. Other than running D&D games, whom of which I continually struggled with in terms of time and motivation, I did absolutely nothing with my time. Casting, which already had slouched heavily since 2015, began to sharply taper off and every year saw less and less releases.

Most importantly, I had lost all intent and desire to dream. The gaslighting and hostility I encountered in 2017 struck a resounding blow to my confidence, my aspirations and my desire to pursue related subjects any further.

Snowball's life and death battle in the end of 2019 brought everything back to me in a wild frenzy of panic and despair. When things began to cool down and I adopted to yet another harsh schedule of caring for her I came to realize both of our time in this world was quickly drawing to a close and the opportunity to do anything I had wanted to do in my youth, to even attempt to do anything, was almost entirely spent.

However, when put under the extreme pressure of the moment, I did something uncharacteristic. I decided to pour the remainder of my energy otherwise not spent on D&D or on the cat into a completely baseless and reckless attempt to build a project in Unreal 4.

The Birth of Apex J

While I had been working with Unreal on and off since UT99, I had no actual experience doing anything meaningful whatsoever, and my Retribution and D&D maps didn't expose me to the way the editor or engine actually functioned. HKS handled all the heavy lifting behind projects like the UT99 mutator and my map edits in UT2004 were slapstick at best.

And so, the hope I could make a project was quite unfounded. I hadn't proven I had the skills or dedication necessary to construct anything competent since 2009, with failures like Retribution and my early D&D games fresh in my mind. A UE4 project stood to test every fiber of my being, from my technical understanding to my concentration and, of course, anger management.

When faced with the trials of the dusk of 2019, though, none of that mattered too much. I knew my task would be daunting but I intended to make one final swing at it regardless. I knew full well that should Snowball's situation turn for the worse it would destroy any last shred of coherence I had left in my life.

Within two months of making this decision I had accomplished a significant amount, although most of it I owed to constantly harrying HKS for help and shaking him down for incessant troubles that came as a result of my addled brain and learning disabilities. I had converted the Worgen Female from WoW, completely refactored and appropriately remastered over a dozen animations by keyframing exports without a rig, constructed a weapon system that allowed seamless swapping between weapons and weapon states for different attacks and combos, damage and stagger handling, advanced custom materials and prototype Niagara particle effects, and an AI that handled all of the above while navigating Z and handling ledges.

Indeed, in but two short months I had gone from nothing to having a demonstrable conceptual prototype that showed the basics of combat including hit recovery mechanics and AI that could handle nearly any map I could throw at it. Of course, it was a simple barebones prototype and many problems still remained, particularly the fact I had to use Blender for model edits since my exports to 3ds max were producing extremely buggy results.

Blender is quite possibly the worst program I have ever used. It's nearly as unstable as CV5 or Stargraft and the UI manages to be the least intuitive and least transferrable of any software alleging to be used for production activities of any kind. I had no skills in organic modeling and my attempts over the prior 18 years had all proven futile, so to hope to use Blender to model clothing, hair, and a tail for my model was utterly insane. I made many changes to the model, adjusting proportions and bone weights to fix Blizzard's incompetencies left and right, but advancing the model was not possible.

Furthermore, I was quickly reaching the limits of what I could accomplish by just changing around keyframes and positions of individual bones on keyframes. My results thus far had humiliated Blizzard thoroughly but I needed more than beating up kids at the playground. I needed a functional library of decent animations.

As the project pushed more and more into passing concepts and learning and into needing to actually build a more robust basis for my player character I felt more and more aggressively pressued into fixing the animations and getting some kind of solution established for the model, at least the important parts like new hair and a tail.

Discussions with HKS took us down the road of him buying a bunch of assets for me, including animation sets and a new model for the player character. This was an unexpected and sizable investment I didn't know how to respond to and I felt obligated to figure out a solution with what I was given.

Unfortunately, we both had greatly overestimated the capabilities of Unreal's animation retargeting system. It was repeatedly and erronously advertised as something that could handle different proportion models, but the slight differences in proportions from the female characters typical of the marketplace and the default UE4 mannequin skeleton most animations are built for and that they claim to support is enough to utterly fuck animations beyond the possibility for the average end-user to fix. Days turned to weeks turned to months, and eventually the project died as all hope for a reasonable player model solution failed and I knew I would likely have to redo a tremendous amount of work if I invested time onto building stuff just for the mannequin. Furthermore, I lost a lot of motivation through the process of being forced to use Blender, whom consumed extreme amounts of time and proved to be the most frustrating part of the project by far, to produce results I ultimately had to throw away anyways.

The experience was damning of my time with custom content.

Fall of 2020

On August 5th, around noon, Snowball was put to rest. Her red blood cell count had dropped over the half-year prior without anyone being the wiser and she fell into a deep lethargy. Her quality of life quickly and sharply dropped. The experience of her dying in my arms is one I will carry with me to my grave. It is one I knew would eventually come, some day. It was, above and beyond, the absolute worst thing I had ever experienced and likely ever will experience.

This crushing experience, especially when I had thought we had stabilized her enough for her to survive for a while yet, came rather suddenly and thoroughly killed my way of life. I tried to force myself to work to bury the pain, but it wasn't long until I quit casting. I had made the decision prior to the event to run a final D&D short adventure, a choice I had come to regret over and over as struggling with the aftermath of Snowball's loss was a brutal mixture of forcing myself awake to numb my senses and burying my head in the sand. Nothing I could do, however, staved the pain of the silence in the following winter.

Christmas came and passed. A time where, at least usually my Grandmother, some degree of celebration was had. The years prior I had put up a tree and decorated everything for her. No such request was made this year. Snowball liked to sleep under the tree. It would remind us of her too much. Now, in 2021, all of our Christmas decorations, bags, the tree and everything related are all gone, sent off to the junkers along with most of the rest of our belongings as we brace for homelessness. Smokey near died in January as well, another unexpected and traumatic experience costing around two thousand dollars - the sum of years of savings, all WuFlu gibs, months of food money, and several generous donations - and one that dig a deep wound even deeper.

And so, summer of 2021 descended upon us, and I made a small discovery that had the potential to shift the tone of the dark years to come somewhat.

In spite of everything that had happened I still made semi-regular visits to the ue4 marketplace. I used the editor every so often for D&D maps, a process I was moving away from due to lack of success, and of course the launcher opens with the editor and sometimes I would look around, asking myself if anything had changed. Indeed, something had changed - a new model was up for a kitsune that drew my interest right away. It wasn't anything like the models I was working with prior and at the time it was much too expensive for my budget. I asked the author about the bone structure and if it worked with Frank's animations and the response I got was utterly useless. I shrugged, accepted defeat, and moved on for the day.

But, for some reason, that night and the follow day the matter kept nagging at me.

"What if it does work?"

I had no reason to believe it might change anything from my previous experiences. I had absolutely no reason to believe anything would be different. HKS had previously handed me the ultimatum that in order to make things behave properly with what we had I was looking at changing every single animation by hand. Not only was this unrealistic to do it was also well beyond my skill level.

A queer thing overcame me in the hour of the following day. I decided to research the youtube channel of the author of the previous asset we had worked with and checked if he had made any new videos. ALS4 had come out since I last worked with the project - my final acts were to put our models on ALS3 - and he had a new video regarding that. In this video he commented that the two-handed weapon animations that came with ALS4 didn't work with his models because his character's arms were shorter. They weren't a great deal shorter, but it was enough to completely desynch the weapon and totally fuck the orientations.

I contemplated asking him about this, and eventually settled on doing so. He would soon reply to me, linking me to another video he had about adjusting keyframes to fix twist bones. He believed that this may work for the weapons. I hadn't been aware the editor was capable of doing this, it was likely a relatively new feature that got skipped over during my occupation elsewhere.

I made a mental note to get back to the subject, and sat on it for a while. Then, I had an idea. The author for the Kitsune didn't have any skeleton images on the product page, but they might have on somewhere else they posted. Indeed, the Artstation had such an image. I did some side-by-side comparisons between them and the other asset we had.

Honestly, on surface glance and without being able to overlay the images properly, comparing them didn't seem like it was a big deal. I could see the arms on the Shadow were shorter, but it didn't seem like it should have broken the animations as badly as it did. The Kitsune, however, had nearly identical arms and legs, though the feet and some other areas were different.

The next day, the asset went on sale. I felt a pressure at this point. I kept asking myself why I gave a shit enough to care. Was there still any desire to do anything with this project, especially after August?

I thought back to when this all began, and Snowball's final days. I felt she had never been happier. I stayed with her day and night for months, only ever leaving her side when she was peacefully at sleep. She loved the constant attention and was always purring, sleeping on my hand or my chest. Before we took her to the vet she was rolling around on my hand under her hiding place she had taken to in the final days, enjoying getting her back tickled. She was hiding there because she was sick and knew she was dying, her red cell count was a third of where it would be when transfusions are considered. But still she enjoyed life when it came to greet her.

How could I not live like that? How could I allow the hate from third parties in 2017 to cloud me, how could I allow the fear of tomorrow drive me, how could I allow the failures of the past restrain me? What had happened to me?

When I discovered I still had most of the money left behind that Epic gave us when UE4 went free years ago, I decided, on the spot, I would make this decision.

"Stop thinking and start doing. Go find out if it works. You won't know just sitting here looking at images. Only actions can spur results."

This is what I told myself in that moment.

Life is a terrible, dark place. There is no future, and very little in the present is really worth fighting for. I feel as though I am coasting on the last stretch of the track on the bottom of a colossal drop. Why would I bother hesitating on something that hardly costs me anything other than a few minutes of time to investigate? What am I afraid of? Failure? Why would I be afraid of failure? That doesn't break a trend. I don't lose anything by failing yet again.

What kind of results am I expecting if I actually end up with something I can use? Do I genuinely believe I can break an 11 year trend? Of course not. Then what the hell is the harm in trying?

Forcing Momentary Decisions

I face a crossroads and I spontaneously decided to make a decision to invest. I intentionally overrided my gut instinct to not bother and let it go simply because I knew that if I didn't have the answers it would keep bothering me. I don't particularly know why it was bothering me. I had sworn off content creation other than finishing my current D&D projects many times over. I didn't foresee even having a roof over my head by the end of summer. But those are the same things I faced during the end of 2019 as well. In such cases, I thought about my little girl instead. Her life was without hesitation, and my care for her came without hesitation. I did not question the days without sleep, the precise hour by hour drug schedules, the costs or even having to go into public spaces in taxis and subjecting myself to unbearable anxiety attacks. I did them for her selflessly and would do them again, and all because her happiness and comfort meant more to me than my own. To see her healthy was the only positive thing in my life after July 2017. And, Smokey, whom I had come to regard as being much healthier, nearly died not even half a year after she did - and he had a similar health scare a year earlier.

I have become rooted in time of pain and resentment. I committed to projects involving people I should never have involved over and over again. I had too many times believed and trusted in third parties I had no business giving my faith to. My project process became split, dependant and even political. It cost me all of my passion, all of my aspirations, everything. The aversion to even hoping I could change anything has become so strong that I had to force myself to purchase this asset on the spot, a mental struggle that rivalled that of the most dangerous moments of Snowball's life. Why? How could such a frivolous thing strike such conflict in me?

Experiences shape who and what we are. Every time I've stuck my head out of the trench, be it in 2012, 2014, 2015, or 2017, it's come to bite me in the ass with increasing ferocity. So much so I could never depend on myself to make the correct decisions.

What then is the correct decision here? At the moment, I believed it was to give change a chance. To nurture a distant curiosity that yet lingered in darkness, abandoned for over a year since I last set down my hopes to accomplish anything meaningful with my twenty years of content development. Not because I felt I could accomplish anything, but because I wanted to do things again. I wanted to have something to take my mind off the D&D grind and something to look forward to in my day. I wanted to explore and see things move again.

I wanted to live again.