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demagogue

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Everything posted by demagogue

  1. A few points.... - Oh I doubt you're going to get map authors involved in this, and bugging them about it is asking for hostility. This is something a group of interested fans need to want to do on their own, for its own sake, as like a kind of meta-game in itself, if it's going to get worked on. And thinking about getting quick action is also not the productive approach I think. The Mapping Project was a thread that went over something like 8 or 10 years, little bit by little bit. It's a meta-game people played off and on for their own amusement, to solve a different puzzle every other weekend, and I think that's the better way to think about it. - Making a script to collect all the readable texts into one searchable database I think would be a cool project for the same reason it was done for the Thief Wiki, just as a compilation of texts from the world for the record. It doesn't have to have anything to do with this project, but it could help support this project. But anyway, one thing I learned from the Mapping Project is you shouldn't prejudge what's going to give you information. There were plenty of times some random aside in a readable gave us a little clue about where an area was. But I also did say some fan should make a summary of the important lore bits they can draw out from scanning readables over time to actually be useful for a project like this. I recognized that much. - As for Springheel's point... there are different ways to look at it. One is having lore to help authors make maps. For that purpose, I think he's more or less right. There's enough now for people to make stories for their maps, so they don't really need this project. But I don't think a project like this needs to have much if anything to do with that to begin with. A project like this, to my mind, is, like I said, a kind of meta-game we can play as fans, to make a lore bible as a creation in itself, not to help FM authors (although they can use it if they want to), but to be a creation that stands alongside FMs as its own thing. - And on that, to consider Spring's point more broadly, as for what level of detail to shoot for ... I think a good lore bible should read like a good history book you might actually find in that world, like the histories of Edward Gibbon, Tacitus, Livy, etc. Some big landmark events, some dramatic scenes and interesting personalities, and some good storytelling and handwaving that makes the empire look grander than it actually is. This is all just my personal take of course, although I'd emphasize (from a long experience in this community, like 20 years) that it's a bad idea to bother people to goad them into participating with this or any fan project. Just have it out there and make it look interesting; and if people want to join, they'll see it and join.
  2. Speaking of organizing, if somebody wants to get the ball rolling, the first thing we should do is pull out the readables & barks (audio files) from FMs. That is someone should spend a few weekends reading & listening through them and pasting at least lore-carrying ones into one catalogued document. If someone could code a script (like in Python) that could do it automatically that would be even better. Since it's all in a standard format, doing it by script wouldn't be that hard. If you know the Thief wiki, they catalog all the readables and barks by the file names, and then in lore discussions like the mapping project, people would link to a specific one to support this or that proposition. In our case, you'd want to title them by the FM name and then file name, then the entry name, then the text. So one entry would look something like below. This would give us the fodder we need to get started, and it's a good kind of project for a fan that would like to contribute something but isn't into mapping or making assets. Edit: They or someone should also make a summary doc that summarizes the important lore points from the dump to save everybody having to trawl through everything just to get the important bits. ---------------------------- stlucia.pk4 saintlucia.xd Journal_Priest1 ---------------------------- [Page 1] October 4th The Lord Builder hath granted us a great boon. Today the widow Madeline did bring to me a gift she bought from a merchant who did just return from a pilgrimage to Torino. The merchant claimed that the trinket was a shard from the head of the True Hammer, just as merchants sell to the pious but gullible souls in a dozen market- places in the city. The widow, bless her soul, did have a shine in her eye that I have not seen since her husband did perish at Belhaven hospital, so I had not the heart to tell her but accepted her gift without comment and placed it next the statue of St. Lucia in the front chamber. As I did pray quietly there, feeling the weight of all that had happened and asking God for a sign to reaffirm my faith, the statue did most suddenly begin to weep. I could not believe mine eyes. T'was if The Lord Builder were speaking directly to me through His servant St. Lucia.... [Page 2] October 21st The shard seemeth to be but a simple piece of metal, yet when I hold it, I do sense some kind of power within. God hath responded to my prayers in a way that I did not dare to hope, solving my crisis of faith and the poverty of my parish at once. For donations from wealthy visitors, who would never set foot in this church but for the weeping statue, swells our coffers as it hath not been in a generation. Even two Moors--foreign infidels from the south--have visited to see the statue! With the new donations we can begin construction of new works to honour the Master Builder. First repairs upon His house and those of His people, then new walls, gutters to keep the streets free of refuse; my heart soars to think of it. October 24th His Eminence the Archbishop is coming here to witness the miracle and thus pronounce it so. With all the trials and plagues that this city has endured these last years, such a thing could renew the faith and vigour of all our people! ----------------------------
  3. As I understand it, Bridgeport is on the southern coast of a high latitude continent on the western edge closeish to a Spain / Anatolia-like mixed Ghazi-Builder region, Menoa, Ghazi being the Islam-counterpart. To the direct south is moorish territory, which can be like traditional Ghazi territory (Iraq), and the Baghdad equivalent should be down there, or more like North Africa and the Ghazi center is much further ... east? Edit: Probably west makes more sense. The role of Bridgeport is roughly equivalent to Constantinople (because of the proximity to Menoa), but it has some London flavor. It's still Builder, but a more orthodox brand and it's inflected with the Asiatic-equivalent influence compared to Catholic-like Builderism. To the far east also on the coast is the capital of the Empire, both the political and religious center, Sancta Civitas. There should be a political and theological tension between Bridgeport and S.C., and it's moving towards a break, but currently it's still one unified Empire. Bridgeport is still very much a commercial hub of the Empire. To the north are the Germanic/Baltic-like pagan tribes that are on a spectrum of less Empire influenced as you move north. Edit: I think of the empire more like the Carolingians than anything else, a few major urban centers claiming control over a the whole eastern side of the continent, but really diffuse and fragmented, less than what the HRE was, but more than whatever Germany was after 1600. XD In my reading, the world takes flavors from medieval European and Middle Eastern / North African history, but it mixes them up a bit.
  4. Just to add a few cents, since I recognize what you're saying. I had a few things in mind in the quote of mine that you're referring to. First is that I actually scripted a full campaign the purpose of which was to introduce our world and some evocative lore, The Dark Campaign. It treads a fine line between the two poles you're talking about. It doesn't introduce much more lore than it needs to for the story and leaves lots of things open, or hints at larger things, but the story is also intentionally scripted to give FM makers a base in lore to make their own FMs from. So I was first talking about getting out this big cache of lore I'd already compiled & extended for that project. Second, my mind about canon is that it organically grows from FMs in a way ... how to explain it ... sort of like the way the Bible was constructed. There were a lot of texts saying a lot of things, but the generally recognized community leaders recognized the texts and facts that had the most authenticity and authority and canonized them. FM stories are like folk legends then. An FM should feel free to come up with whatever lore it wants for itself. So now it has a kind of folk lore status. But it doesn't become canon unless it's recognized, so that you can keep the good stuff and throw out the slush. Third, the context of what you were directly quoting wasn't me proposing an official declaration of canon like a Lore Bible. What I had in mind there was a coffee table lore book as its own stand-alone art project, where the same rules above apply. It's lore, but only what's recognized as canon from it should deserve any status of canon. (Another wrinkle, people can disagree, and you can have schools of thought, which I like the idea of.) Fourth, maybe most important, all of this meta-talk doesn't really mean much. What matters is having texts right in front of you (I'm using the term "text" as a shorthand for any artifact, a readable, a map, a convo, etc.) and going piece by piece and having a discussion, well, does this deserve to be canon, all of it or part of it or it needs to be translated. The best example in our community for this kind of thing is the Thief Mapping Project and the canon debates involved in that. A Dark Mod Lore Project might look something like that thread with one major difference, which is that it wouldn't only be debating canon out of existing texts, it would be debating canon in the creation of the texts themselves. So there has to be an inspiration element to it. Somebody is going to have to tap into the spirit of the world and get some kind of inspiration from it, write out what that inspiration tells them, and then it will be up to others, the recognized canon gatekeepers, to recognize if it's the "true inspiration" of a prophet or the ramblings of a false prophet or some of it looks inspired and some of it looks false. And then the debates can go from there. My point there is, the debate is probably more important and interesting, as an artistic and fun project in itself, than the answer. But the nice thing is it also ends up with an (evolving) answer that we can use as lore. Like with the Thief Mapping Project. The great achievement of that isn't so much the map itself, but the 100 page thread debating why it looks like it looks, and then the map is just the final form of all that debate. This shows one of the major differences, by the way, between a company just tossing out lore for entertainment sake (which probably doesn't mean much to us, since we can't trust they really love their own world) and a community pounding out the lore based on discussion, shared understandings, and mutual love for this world and this game (which really means something to us). I agree it shouldn't be the kind of project that crushes a world's mystery with the blazing antiseptic and unforgiving light of reason. But it should also try to come up with the "right" answer. The Mapping Project is a good reference again. Another good reference is the kind of debates medieval scholars had for that matter. They weren't doing real "science" like we think of it today. They were trying to be precise, but mysticism was built right into the middle of it as well. And again, there can be different schools that take different tacks, and that's great. tl;dr: Less meta-talk, more lore debate. We can talk forever about the theory of it until we're blue in the face, and it still doesn't matter. Let's just start laying out proposed lore and start talking about it and see where it takes us. That's my proposal for this thread.
  5. You don't have to make it so complicated. To use the example given here, start the tutorial mission. As soon as it starts, open the console (default "cntl + alt + ~"), and paste in "setviewpos 333.11 -1872.76 220.25 4.9 88.0 0.0". Then type in "envshot <filename> <size>" with some file name like "tutorial_screenshot1" and I need to experiment with the size, but I imagine it needs to be some exponential of 2 like 512 or 1024 (it defaults at 256, which is much too small to be useful), and you'll get the images in the "env" folder in your darkmod folder. I'm going to cruise around some FMs I like and find some nice scenes I'll edit in the setviewpos coordinates for later.
  6. Custom art like this is pretty much the textbook case for using custom assets for a specific FM and not standard. I think this kind of art would work well in a non-standard FM, so I would be happy to see an author use it, but not outside of that.
  7. I used to make these in my youth. Well, I have one of those mini-sets you can buy sitting right next to me now of a music room. So obviously I still do. But when I was younger I was more ambitious. I remember making a village from a book. But a few I made from scratch by hand. The one I remember, probably late-80s, was the mansion from the interactive fiction Deadline, with the roof off and the rooms modeled. See I was mapping long before game editors were around. So it's apparent why I picked up dromeding right at the start. Me & my brother used to have epic wars in our house where each side had a castle in one room, but those weren't made by papercraft. SeriousToni's fan-made wallpapers is a good reference. I can see how they were kind of promotion oriented, but they were fantastic just as fan art on their own merits. I remember using them as desktop backgrounds or something like that at times. Well whatever you want to call it, it'll be fun to see. The other cool projects I've really liked are when people made costumes or props or wearable props inspired by Thief. That'd be cool to see for TDM. And speaking of the game Deadline, games used to have what they call "feelies" (I believe Deadline was the first game that did that), gizmos they'd package with the game. That would be really cool to see too, like an old parchment map of Bridgeport, or a water arrowhead, or a lockpick set, things like that.
  8. I really love papercraft projects, so I love the idea. Like any fan project, you'll usually get a better reaction just doing it because you want to, and then posting images or videos of your work that people will react to and give you a motivation boost, as opposed to having people weigh in on whether the project is worth doing in advance, much less recruiting people without having done any work yourself on it or any indication that you're committed to the project. I think a general rule of thumb is, if it's really interesting to you, there are bound to be other like-minded people that will also think it's interesting. So if you stay true to your instinct, other people will be into it for the same reason. I don't think promotion is the right framing though. If you do it at all, I think you should do it as its own stand-alone project you share with people, like fan fic or fan art, which I'm surprised we don't have more of. While we're at it, someone really needs to write an official history of the Empire and a lot of associated fanfic to give our world backstory. And someone ought to make an art book with screenshots across all our FMs and some story, as if it were like one of those travel photo books. Something people put on their coffee table for discussion and just to flip through for fun, or in your case actually make the things. I see the idea you're talking about as something along those lines. "Promotion" by itself is kind of a narrow view of the point of doing something like this I think. If it's really honestly only promotion that you care about, you don't personally care if it's papercraft or fridge magnets or whatever, then I think things like Twitch streams, podcasts and gaming music videos are better for actual promotion. I'd like you or someone to do the papercraft project because they want to do a cool art project on its own terms.
  9. As a community mod, I think one of the jobs of FMs is to help develop the lore. So make something up, and if it's good enough it will become part of the canon.
  10. Looking at that image, that wall is the 4th element hit by the light after the first func_stat that creates the shadow. That makes it sound like the render engine isn't backtracking far enough to the shadowcasting element. You could test that by moving or temporarily getting rid of some of the middle brushwork and see if the shadow casts then. But one way you could at least fix the problem if it's a rendering hiccup is to reduce the light radius so it doesn't reach that wall, and then maybe have some invisible lights in the other directions if you want the light to spread in other directions.
  11. There's a spawnarg on lights that turn off shadowcasting (for optimization reasons), and these lights will go through all objects and brushes. So the first thing I'd check is that that shadowcasting spawnarg is turned so that it casts shadows.
  12. I'm of a mind that controversial features should always (to the extent possible) be map-specific. And if an author is going to have the feature in at all, then they should do it without compromise. It's better to have a generally unliked feature that's at least done the right way (that some people like), without compromise, than to compromise it and have more generally liked but wishy-washy gameplay. Be an author: Have a vision, go all out, don't compromise, don't ask for permission*, be loved or hated and nothing in between! * But you still gotta betatest. People might not like your feature, but you should know the consequences and player reaction, it should still work for everybody as intended.
  13. It's clearly not ever going to be a standard feature, but I think you weren't asking for it to be. I think there are two ways this could happen in a more limited form that would get more sympathy. 1. An individual mapper could use the mechanic for only their map, and... 2. Someone could rig a patch that players that like this idea could drop into their game folder and it would create this mechanic for all maps just for those players. I think the first idea, if it works like what Bienie said, I think all of that could be scripted for an FM... The inventory limits, the slowing movement, using the shouldering mechanic, etc. As for the 2nd, whether that same script or something derived from it could be applied to all FMs is something I think might work but I don't know. But it's worth somebody trying if there's a lot of interest in it. I've always thought the best way to learn the code for this game is to have a personal project like this that motivates you to figure out how the code works so you can do it. And the great thing about that is then you can help out fixing other things or have other ideas for features that can benefit all of us. So while I don't really like this idea myself (except seeing it in an individual FM might be interesting), I encourage people interested in it to try their hand at implementing it.
  14. I don't think the devs are going to consider something like this. But I don't think it's as difficult to code as you might think. This is one of those projects that's well within a fan's ability to mod in for themselves. I'd search the forums and the source code for anything to do with head movement, and I think it wouldn't take long before the key code you'd have to change pops up.
  15. This isn't really the best place to ask this, but I can't think of anywhere better to ask. Where is the screenshot used for the 2.08 release post (below) taken from? It looks great, and I'd love to visit that scene. I was going to guess The Painter's Wife, but after playing a good amount of it I doubt that's where it's from.
  16. Some features I think it'd be cool to see are collective stealth score stats on the score screen and a fully animated werebeast. I'd like to see an ambitious campaign that presents something like a canon story for the mod, like introducing the major areas and factions and backstory. My pipedreams are multiplayer and maybe a physics rehaul. I'd also love to see a cyberpunk fork, but you can't really call that a feature. I think every single thing I mentioned, sans the werebeast, is more appropriate for people outside the core team to work on. So my expectations aren't that high. But it'd be great to see them if they come.
  17. There's probably a script command that works, but the easiest failsafe thing I'd try is just make a key that unlocks the door, put it in a blue room, and then script the key to frob the door.
  18. demagogue

    Outer Wilds

    I just picked it up and played about 2 hours. It's a special game.
  19. They just have to hear the alert bark for the alert state to pass, and the bark can spread through portals as far as the volume attenuates by distance, which for a yell could actually be pretty far, I think. I don't know if this changed, or if it was a design flub by the mapper, or maybe the alert-passing part of alert barks should have a smaller radius than the barks themselves, since one wouldn't expect to go on alert by a faint muffled sound they can't tell is actually a comrade barking an alert. You could test it by playing the same part of the FM in an older version of the game and see if it reproduces the problem (a map design issue, or a problem that's always been there) or not (a change in the mod). If you want a quick fix for the time being, you could turn down the AI's hearing acuity.
  20. When I mentioned histogram, I was thinking of the system Opus Magnum uses. It may be easier to just show a screenshot. In our case, the x-axis would be the stealth score, each unit being a 5 or 10 point range. The y-axis would just be the raw number of players that fell within that range, with the scale normalized to the max value. And the player's score would be a vertical line. I'm imagining that as an FM gets larger, the peak in the curve is going to be pushed further higher (to the right), so when the player's line appears, it's immediately apparent if they're doing better or worse than average, and how much better or worse.
  21. It brings up interesting things to think about. I think financial incentives will always be a factor, but I think our assumptions and expectations about which way they'll cut may become increasingly inaccurate over time, so 10 or 20 years from now one shouldn't be too sure. It reminds me, there's a scene in the show Halt and Catch Fire, and the year was around 1985, when a dialup modem game service was switching to ethernet cables, which for the time for what they were doing was way ahead of the curve, and one of the characters was speculating about where the tech was heading, and later they bought up a private intranet grid. Granted it's written from the perspective of knowing how the internet was going to play out and then backtracking to what people could have already expected from it from what they knew in 1985~88, so it had a bit more confidence than people could have really had at the time, but it's still an interesting scene and story arc because of what they could and couldn't predict 15-20 years into the future. For some really nuanced points they already knew how it would probably play out then, and for some other really obvious stuff now, they would have been completely blind to just because there was nothing to give them any indication which way it would play out. That's how I tend to think about speculation on future tech culture now.
  22. I'm sure you're right, but things that are expensive now get pushed lower in price over time. I'm just tempted to imagine there will be a point in 10 or 20 years where so much information can flow so fast to consumers so cheaply that the infrastructure and applications will pretty readily pop up catering to it, and (true to The Singularity thinking) it's going to launch individual and social consciousness to mind-blowing levels up the asymptotic acceleration of change that make the internet revolution up to now and all the social effects we've seen seem positively primitive and quaint. I can imagine AR being integrated into daily life where there isn't any meaningful separation between the real and virtual worlds anymore. It's hard to think that's exaggerating when we look at things we have now from the perspective of 20 or 30 years ago.
  23. One thing we might do is have the game send the server the stealth score tagged to the mission, and then it could compute a histogram that shows on the end game screen (if they're online), i.e., a bar graph of stealth scores for all players of that FM with a vertical line where the player's stealth score is, so they can see where they rate vis-a-vis the majority. That'd be cool to see and not too hard to set up.
  24. The score matches the rules for Ghosting, where they know something is there, which fits with the barks for level 2 but not for level 1. If you want to have a rule where just searches and busts count, then you can see that on the front page just by having zero searches and busts. If you're talking about modifying it, note that it took us weeks of work to get the counting right because of the cascade problem. It's never "one bust" or "search trigger", it's a cascade of like 20 of them in a brief period that looks like "one" to the player. But what a mapper could do is keep all of that system and just change the actual values of the points for each level though, like make them subtractive instead of additive, or make level 2 busts count for zero, etc. There's a way to get mapper scripts to talk to sourcecode, but I don't remember how to do it. The problem then is that it may be counterproductive to have a different system across maps.
  25. Speaking of which, look at this news that came out today. Can you imagine? If this becomes standardized everywhere someday, and thinking about what Unreal is going to be like in the next generation or so, it won't be long before there's not going to be any difference between the real and online worlds anymore, not even exaggerating.
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