demagogue

To be technical about it, "nosound" is a script function to stop a speaker. "Silence" is an actual sound .wav file that plays nothing, so you can still have the speaker "play" an arbitrary .wav file, e.g., for the ambient system, then use that to easily not get a sound, as you might do in the popping case as mentioned... Or that was the theory. (The popping problem was fixed after I added that, but I was never 100% sure that was the fix that did it.) But the issue in any event now is that now countless maps already use "silence" references in their location_settings spawnargs, and it's dicey changing things that mappers add themselves because they won't update with TDM changes, e.g, as opposed to using stock resources that automatically carry TDM changes with them into new versions.

If you'll allow me to take a bird's eye view of this ... remember back in 2016, when they nutcakes were campaigning for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US? The joke back then was, no matter how crazy one side got, the other had to outdo it. And I was wondering which flavor of crazy was going to be more permanently damaging to their respective country. At the time I thought it was going to be Brexit, since that's "forever" and Trump was only 4 or 8 years, but I underestimated how deeply Trump's admin could undermine all of our institutions., even after he's left. But then I also underestimated the wreckage that was going to be left in Brexit's wake. ------- Fast forward 6 years later and I'm still not sure who has the worse deal. Even if this law doesn't pass, it seems like it's putting on display how dysfunctional UK politics is now, like the ultimate exercise in dissociation -- trying so hard to ignore how shambolic the post-Brexit political & economic situation is by hyperfixating on problems that aren't problems with truly batshit legislation. (You can correct me if my reading of it is off.) But if you've been paying attention to the Jan 6 hearings in the US, you know the US still won't be outdone. The problem isn't that the hearings are bad. The problem is that they're a slam dunk case against the previous administration and GOP, but it's only (apparently) making the whole GOP circle the wagons and double down on their insanity. Not to mention the SCOTUS decision that's going to allow the criminalization of abortions, the arguments behind it could just as easily apply to criminalize birth control, or gay or transgender behavior, and I have to imagine in some states there's a sizeable part of the population chomping on the bit to do just that. ------- On the topic of this law itself, of course it's a mess. It's weirdly chauvinistic. UK-legal-compliant browsers & the extraterritorial bit? Didn't the UK just go to a lot of effort to tell everybody it was done with multilateralism and would be much happier as a fading second rate power? It's a tall order to follow that up with this. But the big problem is the part about net neutrality. The more control the state wrangles the Internet into, the more it's just going to whip it into some propaganda mouthpiece for megalomaniac & tyrannical demagogues (& not the benevolent kind like me). I'm all for strict measures to protect children from child pornography, get it off the net, and punish anybody uploading it or any server or site hosting it. But forcing people to maintain their identity for sites is asking for people to be targeted, tracked, and coerced, or putting in the architecture to do that when the bad guys get into power. The problem is even if this law fails, I think they may keep trying until they make it work. This is all a stupid road to dystopia we're on.

My memory may be failing me, but I thought there was a key you could press so that frob helper turned on while it was pressed. It may have been that somebody gave instructions to bind a key to do that job through the console. But anyway I really liked that system. It would stay off, but when I needed it, I could press that button and have it when I needed and wanted it. (And IIRC this is what I've done, but it was already a few years ago now(?), so I don't remember all that well. I did try it with it always on for a while, reflected on it, and still didn't like it, XD or didn't like it popping up when I wasn't asking for it. But I liked being able to easily turn it on & off. But this is just me; I don't presume to speak for a whole demographic or anything.) And like I said before, the team can do whatever it feels is best as long as I or anyone can still set that up, or set it up however they like.

I was using the term more metaphorically. There was a design philosophy. Whatever the literal doc itself said wasn't really the point. Well I shouldn't have referred to it as such since it wouldn't be on point anyway. Most things got pounded out in the dev forum across countless threads, but that's harder to explain. I was using the term "design doc" as a cheaty shorthand so I wouldn't have to explain. XD Anyway, long story short, if there's a vote among the devs to change a thing, I trust everyone on the team has the best interest of the game in mind, so of course it's proper they can change something like this that way. I wouldn't vote for it, but I'd respect the vote and be fine as long as I could turn it off. I think one characteristic of this as opposed to the light gem or inventory widget is that at the end of the day this is reticle, and reticles carry a lot of baggage with them in games. Somehow they change the relationship of the player to the game space, at least with my feeling of them. I always turn off reticles in any game I play for that reason (although like I said before, I'll cheat sometimes and turn them on in rare cases; but I don't like them in any game as a rule). So that's one part of this.

I was thinking about things like frobbing coins and doors, but you're right about containers being an innovation, and more generally that realism and era don't match up all that well when you get down to details. But that wasn't really part of my point, so it's best to rephrase it. The point is there is a category of player that hates screen bling, or will say they hate it (we're really talking about a whole philosophy towards games & immersive sims), and that type would view TDM is the kind of game where you can get relief from it (etc.). I don't know the best way to summarize that in bumper sticker form for a button. Any way you try there are going to be problems, like you're saying. But it's still a real category. I'm open to suggestions for the best way to succinctly describe what it is. I was trying to throw a bone to people that don't like the default and wanted another option that worked for the other player type that says frob-hassle is a pointless frustration, but I agree with this. Having some big-scale option setting moment is a bad idea, so I'd even retract the suggestion. But that would just lead me back to: ideally we keep it the way it is because it's consistent with the design doc from the very beginning. You can't micromanage or tweak a design philosophy forever; it's a kind of endless feature creep. Now that I think about it, that's probably closer to the root issue. There are always pros and cons with different features. And here if you're talking about two different types of attitude, which the same person can even go back & forth on, you can't win. But at a certain point a feature becomes part of the character of the game, so it's best to stick with it. That's only my view though. (And I like that frob help is an option out there I can use sometimes.) Of course another option is what Springheel likes to do with his loading screens, which is having hint texts on the Main Menu screen that inform players they can do stuff like this that they might never notice otherwise. That's a good idea for other reasons because there are quite a few things that would be hard for players to know but which they may find really useful.

The options I think might be good are, 1, if they made it default at the start for, or it's explained in the tutorial mission, which a lot of people play their first time. Then people know how to turn it on & off when they want it either way. The other option would be a setting-setting that comes on with a first install with a prompt like "what kind of experience [or UI] do you want: 1. An authentic or more realistic experience closest to the classics in this genre, 2. a UI designed to make game play more accessible and fun with less hassle, and then the system picks different sets of options based on one's answer to that. It's obvious or anyway intuitive to me that people in the "1" camp are going to be alienated by these features and people in the "2" camp would find it hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want them. Part of our entire MO in our design doc from the start was to make the experience as pared down and closest to reality as reasonable, with UI features putting things in the world just to the extent the medium was limited in giving world-feedback to the player. More to the point, it didn't like the turn to screen bling that started happening after 2004, so made an intentional point of limiting the bling to what was necessary.

One of the first maps I made for TDM I think back in mid-2009 when it was still and development and not even released yet, was (meant to be) a straight up remake of Magnetic Scroll's Guild of Thieves. You start on the lake in the boat with the Master Thief facing you, jump to the jetty, and then you're on the path to the crossroads. At that early time there were a lot of things I didn't know how to do ... how to make a realistic road, how to make an open world & nature areas, how to make the caves, etc. In the map you can see me giving my best effort at it, but it's kind of a mess and it didn't get far. Also it's a big undertaking, so I ended up going with a small contest-like FM, which is the FM I released. As for the original game, I got close to finishing it. I don't think I actually completely finished it. At some point I just read the final story, so I know how it ends. It's such a good fit for TDM. I might even come back to it someday, although probably not in a way that overlaps with this FM.

I have my FM I started around 2003 I still tell myself I want to finish someday. It's great to see mappers coming back to projects. I like that this game will always be around. Whatever else happens you can always come back to it.

The tribute video I posted on my own social media was also Never Let Me Down. It just feels like the right pick. It was a bit surprising. Depeche Mode doesn't feel like a particularly old band to me. Like Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones feel like old bands now. But not DM. RIP Fletch.

The best FM I can think of for only pure sneaking is the T2 FM Midday Escape. (If you don't have Thief 2, you can watch a video of it.) You just have to escape a town with guards every 20 feet or so. I thought it was great. It pared the whole game down to the most bare essentials. I'd like to see more FMs like that in different settings. This was a contest FM too. Because the player weaves in and out, it's actually all laid out in a pretty small space. You don't need much for this kind of gameplay, and I think someone could make the core of the whole thing within 2 weeks. It's a good idea for a first FM because it won't take long to make if you keep it small and tight like this one.

I don't even really remember, since I didn't hear it in its own time. It just has that kind of wistful sound that brings you to a place.

I'm listening to this while I'm opening up this thread, so I guess I may as well as post it here. It's nostalgia incarnate.

Edit: I wrote a lot trying to speculate about what your root problem was. I think I've boiled it down to the solution that's just written at the bottom in Edit3, if you want to cut to the chase. --- Replacing a spawnarg does the same thing as changing the inheritance. Okay, to literally answer your question, you could make a duplicate of the class entity from which it's inheriting "snd_closed", and then delete or replace that "snd_closed" with "nosound", "0", or "-", then have the inheritance call that modified duplicate version. But then it's just going to cut off again after snd_move ends like you just said you don't want. So that doesn't really solve your problem. So don't do that. It appears that the problem isn't snd_closed per se. It's that you don't have a transition sound from snd_move to silence. What I think you should do is use a sound editor like Audacity, take the end of the snd_move file, and then make a new & clean cut off sound at the end, like a quick fade off or play with the manipulations until it sounds like a drawer stopping would actually sound. Be sure to crop it so your fade off sound seamlessly fits the end of the snd_move. Then package your new sound in the sound folder for your mission and make a new sound shader for it, and then fill "snd_close" with the address to that sound. Read the wiki page on custom sounds for the details. Edit: Unless I don't understand your situation. ------ Edit2: It sounds like a timing issue, like snd_close is happening (and cutting off snd_move) before you want it to. In fact, you don't want snd_close at all. Is that right? Okay, here's the issue. The way the system is designed is to allow for closing sounds of any arbitrary length. So it plays snd_move as long as its moving, sometimes long, sometimes short, then snd_close plays at the moment it's finished. So you'd want to always break up your sound into two parts, one for the "still moving part" that can play on repeat for any length of time, and one for the bang of the closed part that plays only at the end it, that would fit just as well if snd_move only played 1/2 way through or if it played 3 times. So then you always get a seamless move and close sequence for any arbitrary duration from half a second to 5 seconds or whatever. Would that fix your issue? It kind of looks like you want a combined move & closed part in one sound file. But the system is not really designed for that. It's designed to play while_moving -> snd_move, at_end -> snd_closed in sequence, so you make your sounds fit that template. If you want to change that template itself, so it only plays snd_move to its end every time no matter what, now (I think) you're talking sourcecode changes, which is not something you can just fix for your FM. (But I'm not 100% sure about that. There may be a way to do that, but I don't know about it.) ------ Edit3: Oh, well if it's that last part that you want, then there's another really simple thing you can do, which is completely cut out the snd_move and snd_close altogether, use "nosound" for both, but when somebody frobs the drawer, have it like a button that calls a speaker attached to the drawer that just plays your close sound as a one-shot independent sound. It will get rid of your cut-off problem. But the catch is, you'll need to set up a script or trigger system so it only plays every other time (when closing, not when opening; unless you want it when it's opening too, in which case just trigger it every time).

Right. I was talking off the cuff and should probably have said something like "at least" 2 scripts (edit: I almost edited my last post to add "at least" too; but then I guess I forgot to) or 2 relevant to the discussion at hand. I think there probably are other algorithms--I haven't looked at it in such a very long time--but they didn't occur to me. I remember the rat one of course because if you spend any time with DR, when you run a map after changing the geometry without dmapping it, you'll I think always get an error that the rat pathfinding is broken. So it's easy to recall

Looks cool. I always thought DR was a great editor to build with. I mean I was originally coming from Dromed, which is a nightmare to build in in every way. So I was never sure if I liked DR just because it was so much better than that (a low bar) or if it was legit an objectively good editor. But then I see other people from other backgrounds liking it, and that lets me know it's not just me.

There are actually two pathfinding scripts, one for human-sized AI and one for rats. So rat sized AI are okay.

T2X did that trick I think. It's a bit non-diegetic for my taste, although people have different opinions on it. (I wouldn't like it if there were only a few keys, but when there are more than 6 or so it starts sounding better.) I think it's another good example of an alt mechanic people should be able to add in themselves. Someone may have done it somewhere already as a mod, if you search the forum for it, because I know we've talked about it before. You can at least press "k" to cycle through keys very quickly, click, click, click...

I think the design is established now for the core game just as a matter of legacy. But I think it would be a good idea to make ones with the other design and make them available for individual FMs to use if a mapper wants. Any asset can be changed for an FM, so the answer to your first question is yes. I say go ahead and make them and let's see how they look in game. We're an open source game. Make what you want to see. That's always been the TDM way!

The editor is a tool in the service of a mapper getting their vision into the map. I think having brushes more accurately reflecting their final state, or what's most useful for the mapper to have it reflected as, can be fairly seen as contributing to that task. At the end of the day, mapping has as much to do with the attention and motivation of the mapper than the technical aspects by themselves. And the benchmark is what mappers find useful. I'd think of it as in the neighborhood of grouping; it's a mapper added tweak for mapping purposes. So I think it's a worthwhile feature to have. That said, it'd call for a feature request, and I don't know how high the relative priority would be for it, which is another issue.

Isn't rewinding time just another way to say perpetual autosave? Or do you mean the world actually animates backwards so you can pick your pick-up point? Anyway, just knowing what save does, the processing burden would have to be too high. If I were doing it, honestly I'd just hack it with an updating screen record, autosave, and play the recording backwards to the autosave point. Aside from the tech burden, I think it's a bit too gimmicky for my taste. Just my aesthetic opinion. A couple of us have thought about a scifi/cyberpunk version of TDM. I would love to see that! The issue with porting it back to Doom3 is that it's locked to Doom3, and there isn't too much to Doom3 beyond just the vanilla game. (It doesn't have so many fan maps or a mod scene anymore.) But if it were a Doom3-like scifi shooter that was friendly to fan maps & released for free, that'd be cool. That said, I would be happy to see the improvements ported back into the Doom3 engine if somebody had the initiative to do it. Lord knows it could use it, and it'd be a path of least resistance if someone were that motivated to update the game's engine.

It's like the Diablo 2 version of Thief. Pretty cool if someone is in the mood for an isometric action RPG to have a Thief-inspired stealth-version to play. I like the idea looking at it from that perspective. I remember when we first got the TDM engine up and running moving the camera to follow the player isometrically, and I was thinking about making an FM in this kind of style, making the game more action and platform oriented. I still might do it sometime. (Our player animations, bare as they are, are not really up to the task though.) But it's cool to see someone really take that idea and make a full game of it. Good luck with it!

Cool. For my campaign I scripted, one mission took place in the Inventor HQ for Bridgeport, called Secrets of the Inventors. I was thinking a lot about how to represent them and their areas, and I'll be really interested to see how other people portray them, because there hasn't been that much representation of them in FMs.

Haha, wow, I don't think I'll ever tire of hearing how awesome we are. I've always thought we're awesome. But sometimes I wonder if it's just our little bubble, and maybe a few people at PC Gamer, where we think that. It's really cool when people from outside our bubble come in and let us know that it's not just us.

Gothic 2 is generally considered to be the peak of the series. Or there's more consensus about how good G2 is, whereas Gothic 3 has more mixed opinions. I used to think about it as similar to Bard's Tale 1-3, but that's a pretty ancient example now.

I think a more general statement would be better, since UI shouldn't presume your intention, something like "X surfaces are selected for retexture.", which will have more utility than just a notice, but it's also a notice.