Sotha

All those details make my head spin. Amazing work! <3 <3 <3 \ <3 <3 <3

Another visitor! Stay a while; stay forever! Welcome aboard!

I got a VP gone haywire when I made Knighton's manor. In my case, the VP was wrecked by monser_clip brush that intersected the VP. It once I made sure nothing penetrates the VP the problem went away. Afterwards I've been ultra-sensitive of having VPs not being intersected by any worldspawn brushes, and also having the VPs fitting snugly on the surrounding worldspawn brushes. I also create VPs with the DR "create visportal" function (right click). Never had much VP woes afterwards.I hope this helps.

Then your triggers do not work. Maybe test them with a toggleable light? Trigger_multis may trigger the object multiple times while the player is in the trigger. Player goes in the trigger. On, off, on. Player leaves the trigger. Looks like nothing happened, but it is working.

Interestingly, it will work only if the player_clip brush has "hide 0" on it. Now the player_clip func_static is solid. When it is targeted, it becomes non-solid. When it is targeted, it becomes solid again. If I put "hide 1" on it, then it never works, as it never existed. Targeting it has no effect. So make sure the "hide 0" is on first, then target it so that it is in the state you want it to be initially, and then use it as desired. Here is a test map where it works (the player cannot walk between the two columns unless they pull the lever). You can copypaste the text from the spoilers to a .map file and use it normally.

Maybe make brush of player_clip. Make it func_static and give it "hide 1". Now it is passable to player, but if you trigger the func_static, it appears and the player cannot pass. Trigger again to make it passable again. Not tested, don't know if actually works like this, but commonly "hide 1" func_ststics reappear and disappear when you triggee them.

Played this last night and now. Feels like my mind was raped. Ow, yep, It hurt a bit, but I kinda liked it in a perverse manner, in the end. Interesting piece of work. I'm glad I played it, even if my mind feels a bit frail afterwards.

Remember that you can always ask around for help in this thread! That's what it is for.

There was an issue with the AI animationa. The animation exporter was borked and ruined the model bounding box during export. Now, if the player looked slightly away from the AI when it was playing the borked anims, the AI would wink out of view. This was fixed by using the proper animation exporter. You might be able to check the bounding box with r_showskel 1. Or something similar. The AI is inside a box of which is the bounding box. If the box winks out, then that might be the reason why objects disappear at weird viewing angles.

Played this just now. Cool mission! I gave top scores for the appearance and story, but gameplay I rated only average. Rationale below: Nice mission overall, a lot of new ideas here. Good looks, interesting story. The implementation of the horror broke some rules, but then turned too predictable. But that did not terribly go in my way of having fun with the mission! Thanks, Grayman!!

It makes me wonder if forests could be done with modules, too. Like this: http://www.bestoldgames.net/img/ss/lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos/lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos-ss3.gif Mapper makes a boxy room with skybox texture walls and grass/forest floor. On the walls the mapper lines up premade "forest facade" models. The "forest facade" works like building facades made by Springheel, and is impassable forest+shrub wall. In order to let the mapper to adjust the tallness, the modules would have "roots", middle "trunk+leaves" and "top canopy" parts. The mapper can make corridors with the models or organic round fillings to the boxy skybox room. Add few model trees to the middle and the forest scene would be ready. Could it work in practice... I am not sure.

Yeah, Knighton can give you good hints how to make the exterior rooms. If you have ultra simple exterior with a fog, you could do it like I did in Glenham Tower. If you have a lot of fog, making exteriors is easier as you need less details. Note that you do not want to have fog inside the house, so you need to teleport the fog light away as the player enters the house. This means a jarring sudden fog disappearance and some sort of antechamber between outside and inside whre you disable the fog. Oh, and never do diagonal visportals. Just keep visportals boxy and simple. If you have a malfunctioning portal, finding and fixing it can take a lot of time. I've taken the habit of keeping the visportals simple and making them the same way. Never had issues with them afterwards. You might want to check out my Bakery Job video series. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18707-fan-mission-the-bakery-job-by-sotha-20170309/ Remember, when mapping, if you keep it simple, finding issues and fixing them is simple as well. It is a fun hobby once you get into it. Happy mapping!

I try to avoid exterior areas and this is why 1) they are boring in terms of gameplay. Lots of darkness and room to outmaneuver the AI. 2) they are many, MANY times more work to make look and work good than interior areas. 3) if there are height differences in organic landscape, monsterclipping is a lot of work. (The AI pathing is not built on patches or entities. It is generated on worldspawn brushes.) All these combined means that if you are maing exterior areas, you are spending a lot of time building something the player just breezes through to get to the good/tricky/interesting parts of the map. The payoff is poor. If you are doing your first map, I would keep it interiors only. It is easier. If you must do an exterior, keep it single room only to keep it sane. If you really must have more of them, remember that they are just rooms, too. They must have a visportalled door, which leads to the next room. You must be inventive how you mask each door leading from exterior room to a another. The difference is that the exterior area room has ceiling and walls made out of skybox textures. Remember that you cannot do assassin's creed or farcry with TDM. You might have noticed that my more recent missions have a single exterior room usually. A sort of post card title view for the mission. That is good. Doing much more exteriors is not a good idea, because of the poor payoff. I mean, lets look at Down by the Riverside: the forest segment between the boat and the house. If looks awesome, had excellent atmosphere, but probably took a lot of time to make and there is not much in there. The player just walks through it without much gameplay. If AI was supposed to walk there, monsterclipping the hill would be huge amount of work. Just my opinion with almost a decade of TDM mapping experience. Others may differ.

Nice lines! It is great to have another talented contributor around! Welcome, welcome!

Does the AI need to know these things? If there are AAS areas in both A and B, the mapper can teleport AI from A to B with no problem. What I am unsure of is: can the mapper make an AI fly from A to B using a special animation where the AI origin moves with the AI. If so, one could make a climbing animation to replace the flying. This would serve as a way to make scripted AI climbing. I.e. the AI cannot REALLY climb at will, but the mapper could fake it for some story purposes. Like how Alyx climbs that apartment building in Half-Life 2.

Correct if I am wrong, but can climbing be faked with animations? Consider two AAS areas. Area A is on the ground and Area B is 128 units (1 floor) higher. Like this when viewed from the side: B XXXX X X X $ A XXXX What happens if AI moves to position $ and plays an animation where the AI moves upwards (with origin) and then towards B and lands on AREA B. When the anim ends, is the AI now in B? If so, then we can give the AI the ability to climb. But they can only do it on patrol (path_anim) or conversation (play anim.) And also climbing would be height specific. You could have clinbing for 128 tall walls in this example.

Played this just now. Fun little mission. Wow, it was difficult. I really struggled getting through. Lots of light, guards and even that damned torch guard. Very tense mission. Quite the story, eh? Not bad for a speed build. Not bad at all! Thanks for the mission! Oh and I did not have performance issues.. Well other than MY OWN performance.. heh

The log output says:

I tried to run tdm_updater, but saw this: Nothing seems to be progressing and the update seems to get stuck until the installer chooses a new one. These "yourvserver" mirros seem to work very poorly... Should they be removed from the mirrors file? The updater seems to really prefer this mirror, and each file takes a long time while I need to wait for the mirror timeout. This could lure away new players as the updater seems to hang.

The voice of The Dark Mod!!! Goldwell has provided me and many other FMAs top-notch lines for years. We are so fortunate to have you around, man! You are awesome! <3

Not from me. I had a cool start, but then ran out of steam and time.

I dunno, RPG... I don't think anyone is expecting games to be substitutes for Life. But the thing is that large complexity in game development is technical: how to draw as realistic graphics as possible. The creative side seems to have been forgotten. Million man hours is poured into how to draw as detailed scene as possible... but often the plot and the quest seems like an afterthought. Even one layer of options in terms of plots would help a lot, because then the actions of the player would have an impact on the story. Nowadays the player never has an impact on the story. The story stays the same, has no branch points and the player just plays in the space between the plot points. What I would love to see is the player playing the story as well.

Aye! Saint's Row IV, anyone? I bought it so I could play it together with a friend who recommended it. It is like GTA4, but with superpowers where the player can run faster than any car. We play on highest difficulty and it is really difficult to get killed. You lose tiny bit of health when you are shot with a bazooka and when you kill a single enemy you get lots of health replenished. These types of games are not played for the challenge, but to vent off steam or unwind, I guess. But fact is that without adequate challenge, I lose interest ultra-fast.

Good points! Another idea that comes to mind: do objectives need to be absolutely specific: "go here," "kill this," etc. What if there was some room for creativity left? Example: Objective "Bernard the poacher is in pain. Resolve the situation." Solution 1: kill Bernard (when dead, no pain.) (turns into very short combat mission which makes Bernard's friends very angry.) Solution 2: get a doctor to Bernard (turns into "escort bitching NPC mission") Solution 3: carry Bernard to doctor (turns into "drop heavy objects and carry incapacitated heavy NPC through hostile territory" mission) Solution 4: research illness, buy meds and heal him yourself (turns into separate quest, maybe with time restriction: B dies if no healing in few days). Sure, more work, but at least the player chooses the type of gameplay they are getting. Could be also interesting if the game has a system for right and wrong.