Quant

Just played through this mission, and had a lot of fun! My gameplay experience on Difficult (don't read if you haven't finished yet):

I'm not yet voting before I've played the other contest missions, but so far, I quite enjoyed it. Review in spoilers...

Hint: Stronger hint: Very strong hint: Outright spoiler:

Sit in a dark corner for a while and let things calm down. Outright spoiler:

Yay! Replaced that monsterclip with tdm_nodrawsolid_wood and now it works perfectly. No more "stepping down" and sound is correct too. PranQster, thanks for the suggestion; that's exactly what I tried in the beginning (trying to stick to the Wiki). I suppose that works just fine when the actual physics model the AI steps on is gapless - in my case the gaps between planks caused problems though. Anyway, got it to work (almost) flawlessly with monsterclip walls alongside the side of the "bridge". Some strange phenomenon remains though: When ingame, the planks (only the parts of them that are directly over the canal), and even the model of the AI, when walking over them, twist and warp a bit. I suppose that is some side effect of the heatHaze*.vfp program used by water materials. If it were a real heat haze (think lava) that'd look quite realistic - but can I limit the effect height for plain water somehow? (The water + overlay patch I use are just some murky ones I copied from Fidcals Startpack v3, no spawnargs modified). Oh - that brings up another question I almost forgot about by now: initially, when creating the water entity for my canal, I just copied one from the Startpack. However I wasn't able to resize that anymore (any hidden feature in DR that allows that?). So I created a new brush, fitted it geometry-wise, then converted it to the same water-entity as the template and replicated the surface textures and spawnargs. When doing that, I was thinking there had to be an easier way... is there?

Ah, thanks! I intentionally didn't raise the bridge-monsterclip to the full height, because the Pathfinding Wiki specifically said that would result in sound troubles. Will try that tdm_nodrawsolid_wood workaround.

AI falling into water Hi guys, I'm quite new to TDM and am just slowly learning the basics of DarkRadiant. Sorry if those questions have been asked before - I tried to get as much info as I could from the Wiki and Forum posts before asking. Recently I was reading the Pathfinding Wiki article and built a quick testmap to try out monsterclipping. Basically just a big room intersected by a straight water-filled canal running through the middle of it; the intention was to try out getting AI to use a model-based-bridge (just 3 (model) boards placed across the canal side-by-side) by placing a monsterclip brush below them, like this (top view): |AI size| |xx| |xx| |xx| LAND ---------------|xx|-|xx|-|xx|------------- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|xx|~|xx|~|xx|~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|xx|~|xx|~|xx|~~~WATER~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|xx|~|xx|~|xx|~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|xx|~|xx|~|xx|~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ---------------|xx|-|xx|-|xx|------------- |xx| |xx| |xx| LAND ^ ^ |MONSTERCLP| | all over | |the canal | First problems: occasionally the AI seemed to step right on the space between the boards, sinking in about a foot or so, although there was a monsterclip brush under it. Looked weird, but at least they continued to walk over the "bridge". Translating to real space, the gap between boards wasn't much bigger than 1 or 2 cm. The monsterclip brush was right under the 3 planks (intersecting the boards at about half their height). This leads me to question #1: I was thinking the collision model of the AI to be a box or cylinder, so why would it sink into the small gaps between the boards? What can I do to prevent that (apart of placing the boards so tight that there isn't any gap left [which actually worked])? However a more drastic result of that simple setup: I changed the AI path_corners to "run" -> AI quite reliably fell into the water and drowned when running unto my bridge. This still happened with inter-board-gaps closed. Had to add some invisible "handrail"-monsterclips to the left and right of the bridge to avoid that. But: further playing around (getting the AI alert and coming after me), it several times just fell into the channel very FAR away from that bridge... So question #2: when mapping something like that (channel, stream), is it always necessary to monsterclip the edge/shoreline too to avoid falling AI into it? Thanks in advance, Quant.

Finally got some time to play this. Wow, what a marvellous mission, grayman! Those mines looked so great and at the same time felt very immersive in play. Did you write you planted EACH mushroom manually(?). Don't want to even imagine the amount of time that must have consumed... but it was definitily worth it! Best mines EVER! Period. As for scripted events... not much I can add to what's already posted. Both really got me jumping way out of my comfort zone while I was slowly exploring. The bottom levels of the tower (after back up from the mines) felt a bit bland - the lightning & thunder effects were very nicely done (liked the realistic delay), but the rooms felt a bit empty. And AI wasn't really a challenge. Really liked the elevator floor indicator though. I played the latest release, so I wasn't so puzzled on what to do on the top floor as previous posters (thanks for that additional readable or maybe I would have been!). Still first I tried End-game-clip... I already was spoiled there, since I knew it from your excellent Cutscenes tutorial... but still - great! Feels so much more rewarding than the plain mission accomplished screen! Overall a very enjoyable mission. A little bit more AI challenge couldn't have hurt, but even without that I really liked it a lot.

I definitely noticed this in The Heart of Lone Salvation, The Alchemist and No Honor Among Thieves (part 1). In Heart that would have been gamebreaking, if the no-alert objective hadn't been optional. Quite a serious bug imho, because it just renders all the effort you take to hide bodies useless after a couple of save/reloads. The effect sometimes is far from miniscule, e.g. in The Alchimist I very early blackjacked the Innkeeper near the starting point and hid the body in his backroom. When I came back to the starting point to finish the mission, he was right in the middle of the street, curled up to a ball (at least 10 metres from his initial pos). If you still need saves, I'm sure I can dig up a couple, including several hard saves of the aforementioned missions. May be useful to check on how the translation progressed over playtime.

Problem found, sure enough it was covered in the FAQ, but I didn't notice it there before. It's the Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall, which blocks named pipes. Thanks for your help anyway.

Thanks for your replies guys. As rich_is_bored suggested, I attached a console dump. Catalyst AI was disabled btw. console3.txt

Hi folks, I'm trying to get TDM working, but already have problems with the training mission: I ran tdm_update.exe successfully. (Repeated that step, just to be sure, it says "All done, your TDM installation is up-to-date"). Then I started tdmlauncher.exe and installed the training mission (game did restart ok afterwards). (*1) When trying to play the training mission, the objectives/difficulty choice screen shows. After selecting "Start this mission" there, the "Loading mission" progress bar comes up; when it reaches 100% I see a "Preparing to start mission, please wait" message. After a few seconds of disk activity the game pops back to the objectives/difficulty choice screen. -> back to (*1). This is repeatable continously, I never get to playing the mission actually. Doom3 is the "Green Pepper" - "Original US-version Uncut" - DVD (from Amazon) I did update to version 1.3.1. The Doom3-game itself runs without any problems. System: Windows 2000, 5.00.2195, Service Pack 4; P4 2.40 GHz; 1GB RAM GFX: ATI Radeon X800 XT The tdmlauncher.log log file is quite unspectacular: Path to tdmlauncher is E:\Games\Doom 3\darkmod\tdmlauncher.exe Darkmod directory is E:\Games\Doom 3\darkmod\ Trying default value for engine executable is E:\Games\Doom 3\DOOM3.exe Found engine executable in E:\Games\Doom 3\DOOM3.exe Current FM is: training_mission Full argument string is: +set fs_game_base darkmod +set fs_game training_mission Starting process E:\Games\Doom 3\DOOM3.exe +set fs_game_base darkmod +set fs_game training_mission Closing logfile. Any ideas what could be wrong? I already tried to rename the folder "Doom 3" to "Doom3" because of the space-problem I read about here - didn't change anything, just yielded the same results as above. Cheers, Alex