Mortem Desino

The fact that you can clearly hear a builder acolyte muttering some prayers only when very close serves to heighten the intimate danger of sneaking around--and TDM earns more tense and exciting gameplay moments because of it.

I'm quite familiar with that practice, and it's done that way to compensate for the fact that people will play their games on crappy-sounding TVs, crappy-sounding laptop speakers, mediocre headphones, all the way up to HiFi surround systems. Bioshock Infinite is probably a good example of this practice. Elizabeth's vocal lines, whether shouting or almost whispering, pretty much have been brought up to the same amplitude. Ditto for Deus Ex:HR. Half Life 2 also compressor/limiter'd the hell out of their vocal lines and Foley SFX. Doom 3's SFX exaggerated it even more. It's common practice, and it's usually very beneficial for action games even down to old-school adventure games. Whoever did Thief 3's audio design followed most of these action game conventions to a T. So whenever you heard an AI shout or bark, it was extremely jarring. Good! But!-- if you heard an AI merely yawn or stretch or mutter or even whisper, it was also just as extremely jarring. That's just poor sound design. If you were to ask any mixing engineer, they'll tell you that too much compression is very fatiguing on the ears. And Thief & TDM both require sitting quietly or patiently sneaking. To avoid such ear fatigue, a lot of TDM's elements of sound aren't heavily compressed or normalized, and many of our SFX aren't heavily compressed or layered. (Personally, I wish some of them were run through a fast limiter, just to get a few more dB of "punch" in them). I'll totally agree that you can address that large volume gap in the vocals, but I would do it more gently than AAA action game sound design would demands. As for foleys, your prof's machine gun probably didn't sound "real enough" until he layered the actual machine gun recording with a book slamming, a few other gunshots, a burst of pink noise, a wooden plank 'crack', and an explosion. That's just the way foleys work -- If it's recorded real, then it probably needs something more to make it sound flattering. If it sounds bigger than real, your brain thinks must be real. I've even done that with a kick drum while mixing music: It needed more "punch", so I slammed a book on a wooden crate.

The reverb sounds pretty pleasantly neutral. You've got a good ear for balancing both wetness and decay time. I think you could be a bit more gentle with compression. You don't necessarily need to normalize all the barks to around -0 dB. My particular set, "Drunk", lets idle/muttering peak between -10 and -6, whereas shout/combat peaked near -0. Then again, every voice is different and benefits from different approaches to compression. For example, I thought mine sounded a bit better when I more aggressively tamed the peaks, rather than "digging deep". From the technical side, one issue I note: when one bark is interrupted by another bark, the first is instantly muted. When the original recording is relatively dry, this isn't too much of a problem. With the introduction of a couple seconds of reverb, this cutoff sounds awkward. This is why some of us wanted to wait until run-time software-driven EFX effects would get implemented in the engine itself.

You are one awesome dude. Reading peoples' thanks in writing is really uplifting, whether you're a dev team member or not. On the subject of XCOM, though, I wonder if you ever whetted your appetite on the original UFO Defense? As a kid, I grew up playing it on my Dad's 486 computer (or beating it with a monkey stick until I progressed), and I rescued the floppies from his basement when I found that the ultra-configurable OpenXcom came out in 2013. Nostalgia aside, there seem to be some newcomers to that game that are really enjoying it.

DR Texture Tool, my man.

Hey, another chum that migrated from Hammer! Welcome! If you've got a good handle on how to use hint/skip, then you're already prepared for visportals. The Hammer map compiler was pretty smart at figuring out good visleaf separation (assisted by the mapper's hint/skip). In idTech4, you have to think through visleafs yourself. Otherwise, visportal rules are very much like areaportal rules. You can put several visportals side-by-side if the hole it covers is irregularly shaped. Visportals with more than 4 sides (e.g. an octagon-shaped hole) can work, but are generally advised against. In idTech4, a visportal touching a door, or a visportal with a func_portal point entity touching it, are very much like a HL2 Areaportal. The first opens on activation (no linking required), and the second opens at a specified distance). I wish we had something like a func_areaportalwindow, coz all visportals "pop". The larger areaportals in HL2 that you would close with trigger brushes are largely automated in idTech 4 (i.e. they're turned on/off well enough just depending on their visiblity) idTech4 has no equivalent to an Occluder, unfortunately. Even though they were a CPU hog, they could help a lot with large outdoor areas.

All the nostalgias. You are one awesome dude.

Nice. I'm still kind of interested/stumped in how water could get handled in conversion. It seems to me that UW1 just generates its geometry like any other floor; the player just interacts with it differently. Since idTech4 uses brush volumes for water, it seems like this would have to be something done by hand.

Is there any texture information on the initial .map geometry export whatsoever? Even distinct missing shaders? There's a fixup utility in DR that will automate texture/model/etc. replacements by parsing through a text file. e.g. # Material shaders: MATERIAL: UW1/TEXTUREGRASS => textures/darkmod/nature/grass/thick_grass01

http://xkcd.com/979/

As a kid, I used to feel very apologetic about Krondor, since one of the people consultanting was the critically-acclaimed novelist Raymond E. Feist. The vast amount of flavor text was well-written (not by Feist himself, as I understand it), and it was implemented in a way that made it go perfectly hand-in-hand with gameplay. Few things have made my heart sink quite like running across some Keshians throwing handfuls of plague-ridden mulch. I definitely agree with the survival difficulty problem. It was poorly balanced in a few concerns: Resources were very precious (in many ways, a good thing), which resulted in requiring a modicum of grinding (Not too much grinding required--also Good). The problem was grindable--namely, respawning--enemies did not exist in the game, and many enemies dropped too little to make combat feasible. What I did to get through the game was I used a savegame editor to bump up everybody's skills +10% at the very beginning. That was enough of a skill bump to smooth out the learning curve, the scarce resources, and the occasional backtracking-for-healing (and Owyn could actually earn money playing at the local taverns.) The downside was that later chapters' combat felt less satisfying. Everything else that I needed to know could be gleaned from the gog.com manual. Or I cheated for extra restoration potions. (I really wish I had the source code to this savegame editor. I have to run both it and Krondor in a virtual machine. It seriously needs to get rewritten/recompiled in VB .NET. Otherwise, you can just hex edit the values yourself.)

I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream was great. I'm a big fan of Harlan Ellison's short stories, and this was a real treat. I've got to spend a bundle on tuition, so no new games in my budget for a few days yet.

You can adjust the parameters of the "heat haze" shader, and make it overlay the GUI to make your view swim a bit. In fact, I think I left a prototype in the package of The Creeps. textures/darkmod/custom/creep_wave_more { qer_editorimage models/darkmod/props/textures/generic_d_ed discrete nonsolid twosided translucent deform turbulent sinTable 0.015 (time*0.5) 10 { vertexProgram heatHazeWithMask.vfp vertexParm 0 time * 0.002 , time * 0.002 vertexParm 1 3 fragmentProgram heatHazeWithMask.vfp fragmentMap 0 _currentRender fragmentMap 1 textures/sfx/vp1 fragmentMap 2 textures/water_source/vp_water } } How about making a texture skin for a ghost using nothing but this swimming turbulance and the shadowmesh?

As a kid with an Apple ii/e + Wasteland (and who accidentally overwrote my older brother's game ), I'm really excited about Wasteland 2.

Absolutely right. It gets rather tiresome if there are too many in one enclosed area (as opposed to the aforementioned Metroid games, which only occasionally led you backwards through old areas.)

Regarding the keyhunt: that's an old-as-dirt gameplay device called a "gate". In fact, that's the main device used in the old Zelda games and Metroids to force the player to complete certain objectives before allowing them to progress to certain new areas. This is just a slightly different way around using it. And maybe it does feel slightly unfair, especially if the prerequisite objective is simply "explore to find the key", if the key isn't very strategically placed by the mapper. That allows the un-pickable door to act as an obvious indicator to the player -- "There must be some game/story progression behind this door. Gotta go complete something else first, I guess."

+1 for the Blue Snowball. I believe a large chunk of vocals for The Nameless Mod was recorded on one of those. I'm a big fan of almost all of the microphones made by BLUE -- particularly the Yeti Pro for mobile recording (For a swiss-army-knife microphone, it actually sounds pretty fair), the enCORE series of handhelds, and the Bluebird. I've also heard that their brand new Blue Nessie is a great-sounding idiot-proof USB mic.

Background noise-wise, it's only as good as the room you record in. Self-noise-wise, It's only as good as the interface you record with. I've used Shure's X2U interface for over a year now, and it's pretty robust. It even made for great foley field recording. Shure even sells it bundled with some of their microphones. I've never used that particular interface. TASCAM is mostly budget equipment, but that looks fine to me. A hobbyist musician friend of mine has used the TASCAM US-1800, and it's good enough, which is all he asked for, and all he needs. And the Shure SM58 mic has been an industry standard for decades. It's specifically engineered for vocals, so nobody can complain about that choice.

I would bring that up with the mission author, not the base mod devs.

Done. Ready to add to SVN. nom_1.mp3

That floor texture doesn't draw a 3D-rendered reflection. In fact, I don't know any texture other than the mirror that draws a 3D-rendered reflection. If it's not that you're concerned about, I personally think it's a poor cubemap to use on all default reflective surfaces.

The default door speed has been one second long since TDM 1.00.

I like it. Feedback on BJ failure right now is practically nonexistent. For a little while, I had thought of a very short grace period after a failed blackjack that would still allow the player another quick attempt. This came from seeing a ton of Let's Play videos in which people frantically mashed attack even after failing the first attempt.

Brilliant! So you're already over the big hurdle of wrapping your mind around mapping technique, especially visleafs (visportals in idTech4; Hint/Skip in HL2). As mentioned, The Crucible of Omens could probably use some fresh motivation.