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demagogue

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Everything posted by demagogue

  1. On first blush that could be a good idea, and maybe even calling "0" some variation of "Perfect" or "0 (Perfect)". It'd be good to look at a mock up of different options to think & talk about it. For some reason I can't easily find a screenshot just now and I forget how much room we have there.
  2. If it's any consolation, it's a very old complaint. IIRC there's a reason why it hasn't been fixed, it's more complicated than you'd think, since it's been brought up a lot.
  3. It's probably a good idea for every mapper to get familiar with Blender (or their modeling app of choice) for little tasks like this anyway. It's practically the Photoshop of mapping. We should all should know it well enough to jump in, throw something together and import it into the game when we need to.
  4. @Destined, others have said this, but I think your point works the opposite way. It's not the role of the core game to dictate what a mapper does (I mean within reason; it shouldn't help mappers make a completely different game). It's the role of the core game to give options to the mapper to make the map they want. Some may want to also make electric lights & robots disable-able and some may not. Even though I brought it up, I don't have a strong opinion about it though. It'd be a kind of gimmick arrow for special case FMs, not for normal use anyway. In line with that, I think actually the best way to have it is for a mapper to just rig a normal broadhead arrow with a new model and put an S/R on it that triggers a particle, short circuit sound, and turning off whatever it touches. I mean, I think it's something a mapper could make for their own FM without needing source code support. So there's nothing stopping a mapper from making it now. For that matter, I think a flash arrow could also be made by a mapper, since we already have a function for the flash effect; all the mapper would need to do is have a script or S/R trigger it in the right place when the arrow hits. I'm switching to a different point which is I think the debate here isn't about whether these novelty arrows should be in the core mod, but whether & how mappers can make their own for their own FMs, and then if any turn out to be wildly popular, we can talk about wider use of them further down the road. And if a mapper doesn't want to go to the effort to make them for an FM, now that we've floated the idea*, that kind of answers the debate by itself. * Now that we've floated the idea again. I think most players don't appreciate that maybe 99.5% of ideas they have, the team already thought about it and had a 6+ page discussion on it back in 2005~2009 going over all the pros and cons in exhausting detail, and then 15+ years later a player thinks about it, and the whole debate replays itself. XD But sometimes some things are still new.
  5. Kind of funny to see wesp5 being the one saying now hold back a second on a crazy feature proposal. I think he's saying about the same thing I was. Not sure it's necessary, but I don't think there's any hard reason not to have it as another option if a mapper wants it except a general rule against feature bloat, which is admittedly a respectable reason too as we have a kind of minimalist approach. I actually wasn't meaning to argue in favor of it per se (yet), just that it'd be interesting to see in action and think about it from there.
  6. I think it sounds like a cool idea. Like all proposals, lots of playtesting is what matters. You can have an intuition about what's good for gameplay, but you can never know until you make up a prototype and people play it and give their input over a lot of iterations. So I recommend making a prototype first, and maybe a quick video of it in action to get people interested in trying it out. Currently you can already throw flash bombs, so I think the main issue is how using an arrow changes the mechanic vs. just throwing it. Of course it can go further and you can aim better. In theory, I think having it as an arrow, as one option, makes sense, just because, if you were a professional, wouldn't you want a little better control than just throwing the thing? This reminds me of another kind of 'contraption arrow' that's come up before (I think T2X had it, and maybe some other FMs), which was EMP arrows that short circuit out electrical lights. That might be pushing a bit far though, as it's starting to look too far out of the tech of our world.
  7. Have any of you ever played the Thief2 multiplayer mod? Some of the best experiences I've had in an FM happened when I was using it. I think I was already saying this before, but for our gameplay, the best kind of multiplayer is definitely coop. I know comp, thieves vs. guards is a thing too, and it has some fun moments, but it descends into chaos more often, not really the style of our game (slow and methodical), and you have to have a bigger group of good people for it to be fun, which doesn't happen often or for long. Whereas with coop, you really only need one or two friends. It's actually better with fewer people. So scheduling is so much easier, and just playing normal FMs is already usually perfect for it. So you don't even need special maps, and we already have over 100 FMs ready made for it.
  8. Here's my attitude. If you have an idea you think may be interesting 1) you can expect you'll get pushback whether it's a good or bad idea (people have intuitions, but for a lot of things no one really knows how good or bad it will be until they've seen it in action), 2) you don't have to care. If you think it's an interesting idea, there's bound to be other people out there that think it's interesting, 3) but, especially if it's not a popular idea, you can't expect you'll get much help making the feature happen either. So at best, what you're really talking about is a feature you make for your own FM. And if you actually start making it, instead of asking is this feature a good idea, if you ask more concrete questions like how do I dynamically change spawnargs with a script, or how do I teleport in a completely different lockpick in (if the dynamic spawnarg switch doesn't work), you'll probably get a better response with actual answers you can use. Also, just the act of trying to make an FM and going through tutorials is going to teach you probably everything you need to know to make it happen. Generally speaking, it's an open source game, so practically anything you can imagine is possible, but some things take more time than others. This I think is quite possible (I gave two ideas of how above), but it might take more creativity and tutorial diving than usual to solve. I'm a big fan of FMs trying out new mechanics, even things that I think may not work well, I'm curious to see how it plays out anyway. So I say go for it and try to set it up, and let's see how it plays. Make sure players know about it in advance though, and be prepared for it to get slammed.
  9. I think the logic is more like: multiplayer would be awesome for coop in FMs with some close friends. That's a good enough reason to work on it by itself. But as long as one is working on it for that reason anyway, they may as well add functionality for thieves vs. guards since it wouldn't take comparatively that much more to pull off, and some people really like it. Part of that point is the observation that coop or player vs. player functionality by itself probably wouldn't be enough for thieves vs. guards. You'd need some more features tailored specifically for it to make it work well, like mechanics to make sure the teams are balanced, the invisibility mechanics, well, basically the things you see in Thievery, although we have the chance to improve on its systems.
  10. It was great while it lasted. I guess if anything it shows that the best hope for guard gameplay in TDM is if we get multiplayer up and running. That's always been my biggest dream for TDM from the start.
  11. Re: Finding an internal leak, I think the quickest failsafe way is make a copy, change all the visportal textures for the two leafs to a solid brush texture, put the starting point in one leaf, then cut a hole to the void in the 2nd leaf, then when you call the point_file, it's going to run from the start point through the internal leak out to the void.
  12. The FM that's most like that I think is Emilie Victor for Thief 2, http://thiefmissions.com/m/EmilieVictor. There are some other fairy tale-like FMs for T2 like any of KFort's FMs, https://thiefmissions.com/search.cgi?search=%2bauthor=Kfort. I can't think of any like that in TDM offhand. My work in progress is a fairy tale FM, so it would be, but I don't know how long that'll take to finish.
  13. Japan has a shrinking population, isn't taking in immigrants, its business culture is so conservative and xenophobic they've practically shut themselves out of the global economy, and it blundered itself into the worst liquidity trap and stagflation in history by far, leading to what used to be called the "Lost Decade", but is now more like the Lost 30 years, getting ready for the 4th decade of it. China on the other hand has a massive slave labor force in combination with an open economy and the largest single market in history by far, they're aggressively forcing themselves into other country's markets with their One Road thing, not to mention a million person military and a government with absolutely control over everything that happens in its borders. The two aren't really comparable.
  14. I think the main issue is that the AI are not suited to thief-like behavior. You might try to fake it with patrols or the RITS system, but that's a pretty thin system that breaks easily and you couldn't really replay it. But ... I think if an author were very clever and careful, and they spent enough time with it, they could make a system that works pretty well. So I think it can be done. It'd just take a lot of cleverness and work.
  15. I also mentioned nurbs. Do a forum search for nurbs to see threads on them, but to start off you can read up on them here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20163-roadmap-for-tdm-in-2020/page/5/&tab=comments#comment-444657 Edit: Somewhere on YouTube there's a video showing a will-o'-wisp flying around using this system, so you can see the system in action and know where to find an example. I even think FenPhoenix was the one that uploaded it. I'd post it if I could, but I can't find it just now. But if you search enough on YouTube or just ask FenPhoenix maybe by PM here or on TTLG, you can find it that way.
  16. Sounds like exactly the job for a particle effect, at least for the moths. If you do a kind of moving particle cloud of them, it'll look random enough. For the bats, I don't think they'd circle a light so much as swoop around. And for that I think you'd use animated models on nurb curves and trigger different ones randomly to get your randomization.
  17. Trump would be all too happy to abandon Taiwan, and he's already abandoned Hong Kong, but hopefully his days are numbered. As for the Uyghurs, I wrote a report about their plight. It's on such a massive scale, comparable in scale to the Nazi holocaust in the sense it involves millions of people affected in one way or another, the detentions are over a year and basically by quota (at least 1/3 people detained without question), incredibly abusive, and even if you aren't detained there are 100,000s of cameras and phone scanners and 10,000s of homestay security officers that literally live in their houses and "marry" the daughters (i.e., a state sponsored rape and race-cleansing campaign), etc. When problems are on such vast scales and multiple levels, you have to address them at a vast scale and multiple levels. Pressure on the government I doubt would work. Educating the population isn't likely to work. Facilitating the escape of the population to other countries can only go so far. Targeted economic sanctions might help pressure the forced labor part, but the problem is the forced labor is so tightly integrated with the broader Chinese supply chain economy that it's almost impossible to tease out the Xinjiang contribution from the entire Chinese export market, and I doubt any country is going to just completely cut itself off from the Chinese market. Educating foreigners about it would be good for playing the long diplomatic game though. It's a problem from hell. I wish we could do more.
  18. AFAIK there isn't just a global setting for it (but that'd be an obscure setting if it existed, so you'd have as good of a chance of digging through Doom3 tutorials or the code to find it as anyone else), and different things are localizing sounds in different parts of the stereo field for different reasons, so it sounds like it'd be hard to rig it source by source as well. I'd also think you might be better off doing it through your operating system or just, you know, turning your headphones around.
  19. The problem is that FMs are incommensurable. A "10" would be a fantastic score for a massive FM and a terrible score for a tiny contest-sized FM. So it means somebody would have to play through all of them and personally judge the fair rate of its difficulty in a way that's equal across all FMs, and keep doing it for every new one that comes out. That's a bit unreasonable. What if the author disagrees with the proposed rate? What if the author's idea for the rate is actually quite inaccurate? If it's such a high burden, you might have multiple people doing it, but then how do you make sure they're being consistent (without just adding more people checking)? Or you just don't, and then the ranking can mean much different things for different FMs. But I think most of all, it's just something that interest will ebb and flow, so work on it may be inconsistent. All of that said, one might add a cheap normalization system like "Steal Score / number of AI", or probably it'd need to be a little more involved than that, "X - Xmin / Xmax - Xmin", where max and min are ... uh, a function of number of AI... I'd have to think through that. Or have a difficulty coefficient, like 1-3 AI = .1; 4-7 AI = .2; etc... Maybe one could add another modifier based on AI-mutual-proximity (AI next to one another are much more difficult than a large FM with isolated individual AI). Etc. Another problem is that difficulty probably doesn't scale linearly either. But it might be hard to figure out the curve, and how would you measure it anyway? Poll players, rate it by the % of FM time they're "in danger", etc, etc. It'd take some careful thought, but at least it'd be a universal system that might be somewhat meaningful. But because it'd still be prone to error (even serious error), I think it'd be better to put it in parentheses or in some context to cue the player that the rating may be absurdly wrong. But then players don't understand it and just think it's buggy and we get lots of complaints why their ranking is so ridiculously inaccurate in a given FM and people are going to tell you how stupid and broken the system is, etc... So it may take a lot of iterations to work out the kinks. Well, if someone wants to try it, they should definitely get a system up and running we could test and work out the kinks over a lot of FMs long before it's going to players. It's hard to judge if it'd be a good system for our game without having a working model we can consider concretely, as opposed to abstract speculation.
  20. Looks great! You ought to put up a video here so people can really appreciate your accomplishment. (This isn't a good texture pack for this setting, but it gets the job done.)
  21. I'm wondering how much coding support would also need to be done. It sounds like some of this would call for cuing and cycling through idle animations, cycling through animation variants for different things, and for things like mantling, to do it justice you'd want the animations to be in line with the different mantling mechanics, i.e., responding to things like cancel conditions, morphing a jump animation into a mantle animation, etc. Just off the top of my head, some of that sounds like it needs code support to handle it, which is a bigger can of worms than just making a few stock animations.
  22. I understand that animations are hard to make and even harder to make look good, but you'd think in 15 years somebody could just bite the bullet and make them... Alright, I can look into it (after/if I finish some other projects). I've been making models for my own projects in Blender and lifting animations straight from Fuse (which is awesome system once you get used to it BTW. You just remodel their stock model, and as long as you keep a small set of key vertexes in basically the same key places, you get to use their ~400 animations for it). But I've been looking into making and tweaking some of the animations for my own purposes. I suppose I could look into the TDM player animations. I don't know if it affects gameplay, e.g., with the movement, bounding box for collisions, falling of ledges, things like that, side-effects which were admittedly annoying in TDS. Presumably it'd be ideal if it also had no effect on anything and was just a visual effect; but I don't know if that's possible as it is the model.
  23. I clearly don't visit this sub-forum often enough. This is such an awesome feature! Thanks & cheers all around!
  24. The first thing you can do is change the design a little where approaching Objective B will trigger B as the hidden objective, and give you (repeat) your revelation there. That way they can at least go ahead and fulfill B while they're there and go back to A to fulfill it later, and from their perspective it looks like they were meant to do that. Basically you design it as if you expected the player to take either way in the fork, as if you meant for them to do that, where each side of the fork still gives new information so feels like a revelation and "progress" (it's just the order of revelation A->B vs. B->A works a little differently, but both independently work and look intended, and you get the same end result either way). I did something a little like this in my FM with the hidden objective being triggered also as you approach it (I think through a nearby readable), so you could do things in different orders and it always flowed as if it was meant like that. It's part of thinking in terms of non-linear, hub & spokes model level design, where you design it so the player could visit the spokes in any order and it feels like the "intended" progression the way you word readables, etc. Another way is a "key" mechanism. You either can't get out of the "area" in the west part or enter the east part unless you fulfill A, where the act of fulfilling A itself gives you the "key" to make progress, although it doesn't have to be a literal key. It's also something you can build into the level design. When a player enters a new area, they know there's "something to accomplish" there, and they shouldn't leave until they've gotten whatever they're supposed to get from it.
  25. This guy is a key character in my closest-to-finished WIP FM. You can't really replace him without ruining the effect. So if it gets put into working order, I can actually release it as intended.
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