After a quick shower, I stumbled downstairs and found Wils, Fluffy and RR2DO2 in the seminar being held by Discreet on 3DS Max - interesting developments include a great new tool coming out that’ll be free for mod makers called Gmax and the possible integration of Q3Radiant in 3DS! There was also a fantastic overview of patch modelling, which until now I’d never quite understood.

We set off for lunch at about 1:00pm, and after a long walk over the field to the area where all the café’s and diners are, you wouldn’t believe my luck but I stumbled upon a Waffle House!! I quickly convinced the others of the importance of us visiting and establishment of such magnitude, and we all sat down for an excellent meal of Waffles!! My faith in the United States was restored.

Hellchick gets the low down from the Q3F Dev Team

Back at the Hotel things were winding down, so we took the opportunity to do an interview for Hellchick of GameSpy/PlanetQuake and TV interview for "A Deathmatch Diary", a documentary by David Spell that might end up on Discovery. If we’re lucky he might even have the time to make a short promo video for us - which would be kewl.

Probably the strangest event of the whole week happened during the interview with Hellchick, when a guy walked over and said to me "Hey! I’ve seen you on TV! You’re a TV star!", to which I replied "Ah, The Quake Republic show?". I then noticed who I was talking to - Todd Hollenshead - Biz Guy of id Software! Things are definitely weird when Todd recognises you before you do him :)

Oh the price of fame (big grin).

We also managed a quick chat with Tim Willits, who time-permitting will provide Wils with some constructive criticism on any areas that Wils feels he needs help with.

We then set about crossing off the remaining things on our todo list. Anyone else of note in the hotel got visited by us, and either asked for support, advice, hardware or a T-Shirt (grin), before we bumped in to SPOG and TTimo again. We were keen to get the source code for Q3Radiant as RR2DO2 had written some plug-ins for it, so we kidnapped TTimo and headed back to our room to make use of the excellent high-speed internet link.

SPOG shows us some ticks and tricks with Q3Radiant

Once this was all sorted, and with very little in the way of seminars going on, we said farewell to TTimo, and Wils, Fluffy, RR2DO2, Spog and I headed up to my suite where we set up a notebook and convinced SPOG to show us some tips and tricks in level design. While everyone stared incomprehensibly as SPOG made the most perfect curved tunnel you’ve ever seen in about 15 minutes flat, I made the coffee.

We then settled down to watch a mad Texan TV channel all about hunting animals. Now as a vegetarian I’m normally turned off by this sort of thing, but found it curiously interesting nevertheless - lets face it, I still have an unhealthy obsession with weapons in pixel form, and you wouldn’t believe the sort of guns and paraphernalia you can buy in Texas. In fact at the very time we were watching the hunting channel, Tim from NOW TV was off shooting a Glock 9mm at some mad gun club out in the countryside!

As part of my QA responsibilities, I felt it necessary to test out our television fully :)

At some point that afternoon I also managed to blue-screen the television, proving that Microsoft really ARE everywhere!!!

The rest of the evening was fairly chilled with RR2DO2, Wils, Fluffy, Cro, Tim, SPOG and myself heading back to The Trail Dust for our last night out. Everyone had huge steaks, and we finally found a beer that contained more than 2% alchohol, so Fluffy actually got a bit tipsy too!

Back at the hotel we all remarked on what a fantastic time we’d had, all the great people we’d met and the incredible contacts we’d made while we were there, and though tomorrow would signify our journey home (15 more hours in cramped seats and airport terminals dammit!!!) - the rest of the team felt that one final and most important thing remained to be discussed - everyone felt I should be renamed from Locki, to Paul ‘My Bathroom’s Smaller Than Everyone Elses’ Wedgwood :)

See you there next year!