TDM: Commands and variables...

[STiFU]

Hey, I was checking out the tdm specific console commands today and I found some things that I wanted to discuss. So here we go...

 

The reason why I had a closer look at those was, that I wanted to alter the frob-highlight in color and amplitude, because sometimes, I simply can't tell whether an object is highlighted or not. For instance the

Box of cocaine in the Warehouse

(lootobject) of the FM Patently Dangerous. Apparently, there was no such command and I'd be happy if you'd include something like that (if possible at all): tdm_frob_color in HEX and maybe also tdm_frob_brightness, but depending on how the frob-highlight is implemented, the latter variable could be unnecessary. I don't mean to turn it into an TDS-frob-highlight-orgy, but it's really hard to distinguish sometimes as it currently is.

 

But there were also a couple of other things

• tdm_show_loot: Sometimes, after I finished a map, I feel like I want to at least see where all the other loot is hidden in an FM and checkout a lootlist for that reason. This beautiful command makes lootlists redundant, by showing how many items are missing and highlighting their wireframe (or something) for a couple of seconds. I love it. Thanks Dark mod... (I couldn't find the mentioned item in Patently Dangerous without this command by the way, although I stood multiple times on it beforehand and looked next to its side faces for loot, so frob-highlight-customization would be highly appreciated)
  
• tdm_show_gameplaytime: This is nothing important, but I found that once enabling the gameplaytime overlay, it cannot be hidden again. The timer just stops counting up (no refresh), the moment you set this variable to false.
  
• tdm_ai_showfov: Now this is interesting. When activated, you see two cylinders showing the field of view of the ai. But why are there two? I assume one for them is for relaxed and one for alerted state. Anyway, what confused me a little was, that the guards appear to have a circular fov. Shouldn't that cylinder rather be formed like an ellipse to simulate peripheral vision? I understand that these cylinders don't necessarily represent the "stim-sensivity" of the NPCs, which could then be "zero'd" on the vertical borders, but if they do, this should be changed on the long term I guess. When the player is located above or below eye-level, he should be harder to notice.
  
• tdm_showko: This variable seems to be a rudiment from earlier TDM-versions, which appears to have no functionality anymore and was replaced by tdm_ai_showko. I guess it could be removed.
  
• tdm_lg_*: I played a little with these variables presumably responsible for the lightgem, but it didn't change anything noticeable on it. Is this one a rudiment as well?
  

 

Lastly I wanted to suggest to include a "Restart Mission"-Menubutton. This is only a minor tweak and by any means not mandatory, but I was a little afraid to click "Quit mission" in order to start a new game, because of the loading time. Luckily, loading the level all over was not necessary.

 

Thanks for reading...

Edited November 1, 2009 by STiFU

[Sonosuke]

Lastly I wanted to suggest to include a "Restart Mission"-Menubutton. This is only a minor tweak and by any means not mandatory, but I was a little afraid to click "Quit mission" in order to start a new game, because of the loading time. Luckily, loading the level all over was not necessary.

 

Dont know much about command lines yet but yeah a restart button would be nice!

[Stardog]

If you type tdm_ai_showfov without a number it tells you that one is for vertical and one is for horizontal FOV.

[Mortem Desino]

• tdm_lg_*: I played a little with these variables presumably responsible for the lightgem, but it didn't change anything noticeable on it. Is this one a rudiment as well?

I wouldn't recommend playing with those unless you really know what you're doing or know how the lightgem rendershot works. Otherwise you may be breaking maps, letting yourself hide where FM authors don't want you to, or ruining missions because you're unable to hide at all.

[STiFU]

Thanks for the heads-up MD, but I always restore original values after testing, so that's not going to be a problem. There was a command similar to something like "tdm_lg_show", which led to a grey transparent rectangle appearing on the lower-left corner of the screen, so I thought that this was a command for an old lightgem, which was not supported anymore. Hence my assumption about the rest of the tdm_lg_* cvars not working.

 

If you type tdm_ai_showfov without a number it tells you that one is for vertical and one is for horizontal FOV.

Ah ok, I forgot about the built in command description. That answers the complete showfov-paragraph.

Edited November 1, 2009 by STiFU

[Springheel]

There was a command similar to something like "tdm_lg_show", which led to a grey transparent rectangle appearing on the lower-left corner of the screen,

 

That's the rendershot of the diamond model the code uses to determine how much light is hitting the player.

[STiFU]

Interesting. There is no wiki article explaining how you do all the lightgem calculations, is there? (Search didn't turn up anything useful) Not that I wanted to change anything, I am just interested how it's done.

[greebo]

You can always grab the sources, if you're actually interested in the inner workings. Wiki pages would be nice of course, but I don't think it's realistic to expect full-blown articles about all our code approaches given our understaffed coding team.

[STiFU]

I understand and have downloaded them just now.

 

I don't mean to bother anyone here with the frob-highlighting-issue and since no one reacted to it anyway, I and a friend looked into that ourselves. He has altered the frob.vfp, but it didn't change anything in the game. Is the frobhighlight color and brightness hardcoded?

Edited November 2, 2009 by STiFU

[greebo]

The frob.vfp program is not active. This has been part of Rebb's frobhighlighting improvement project, but in the end we ran into an issue with TGA files (they ended up with a heavy green tint in-game, which (we think) is due to some sort of limitation in the closed source parts - can't remember exactly).