My senior year of college, I lived with Casey and Kelly in the “penthouse” apartment of Lindell Towers across the street from SLU. The penthouse got its name because it sat at the top floor of the building, was adjacent to the roof patio, and was as wide as the apartment building itself. Five windows on the front face of the building looked south above SLU’s campus, two windows west across the patio down Lindell Ave, and the bathroom and two bedroom windows on the east just looked into the adjacent building, which was more or less exciting, depending on what the neighbors were up to.

It was a good place to spend my last year of school. The proximity to campus made the last minute dash from bed to class pretty efficient, but when not at class or work, it was a good place to crash with plenty of room for friends.

But this post isn’t about the apartment physically; more virtually I suppose.

At some point it occurred to me to create our apartment with the mapping software I had to create levels for a computer game (the Action mod to Quake2), possibly while contemplating jumping from 14 floors. Not in a suicidal way, I just wondered what the free fall would be like.

The apartment design wasn’t too complicated, with the exception of the curved vaulted ceiling in the main room that took some time to properly fit. Once I completed the interior, I decided to fill out the other areas we could access physically on that floor and walled in (and floored and ceilinged) the hallway, elevator shaft, and began the stairwell that connected to the patio. Not wanting to create the rooms for each apartment on our floor, I just gave the neighbors locked doors. Since the stairwell had patio access, I had to add the patio, as well as an empty 13th floor apartment below ours since the patio was between floors and could see them both. I couldn’t very well leave empty spaces, which lead me to just fill in the area below our two floors for all 14 stories. This made the apartment building look more like a building, but it lacked a street. It was just floating in space, and I wouldn’t have a place to land if I jumped out the window, so I paved the block between my newly created apartment building and the empty void where SLU’s campus would be (is?).

To keep from roaming around the dark, light sources had to be placed in this new world. I wasn’t content with just placing some magic ambient light in random places as it didn’t seem very natural, so I created a few light-emitting lamps and ceiling fans inside and some light posts outside. The main room in the apartment was furnished with a couch and two chairs to provide some additional reference for scale. I created the counters and appliances in the kitchen, because it was the smallest room and I figured it was the fastest to complete. But then I decided to made the fan blades spin, which took more time than all the furnishing.

I wanted to build out more areas, like the entire street, ultimately creating sections of SLU’s campus also, but I was realizing that the computer hardware and game software didn’t really support large expansive open worlds with far lines of sight. Instead, it was more capable of handling enclosed spaces connected to each other, which is not what I wanted to do. So the grand plan that could have been was quickly halted before I wasted too much (more) time.

While the map I created of our apartment wasn’t very large, it was pretty close to accurate, which made roaming around the floor eerie. Especially since the game I made it for is a first person shooter, so I was walking around the place I lived armed with a gun painting the walls with a laser sight. An experience I didn’t anticipate having, ever. Speaking of anticipated experiences, jumping off the 14th floor is a little anti-climactic. You jump, experience a second or two of freefall, and your body unceremoniously crunches on impact with the street. Or the light post, depending on your aim. It occurs to me now I could have made some driving cars as targets, or simply painted a big bulls-eye on the ground if I really wanted to play with my jumping from the roof game, but now I’m just sounding more disturbed.

I bring all of this up now because last night I found the apartment map files and loaded this up again, after presuming it all lost from the last time I switched computers. Walking around the apartment was creepy then, it still is now.

But now is several years later, and the software and hardware support the worlds I want to create, as was evident last night while Sean and I played UT2K4 on wide open maps with lots of detail. I want the mapping software for UT so I can do some more world-building again.