jaredmitchell

Hey, it's in this thread.

I'm stepping on every rake I can in this thread, huh? I was last active here prior to then, thank you for notifying me though.

Thank you two so much! I may make good on your offer for help later. The map is now posted in the Beta Testing forum. If you don't have access to those just DM me and I'll send you the link.

Well now you tell me that's a possibility! Yes that would be much more convenient, I should look up how to do that while waiting for feedback to come in. And I did use the readables editor at first, but it kept having issues with relocating what I had already written. I imagine that's related to your first point of project configuration. Hopefully I can go forward a smarter mapper now.

Hey everybody, As some of you have seen, I started streaming myself making a level for The Dark Mod, with the intent of showcasing the process of making a level. About a year after starting, I'm releasing the first playable version of the map, and would like people to play and give feedback. It's still very early on and very rough; mostly I'm concerned about the layout of the map at this point and the "funness" of it. If you're interested and okay with filling out a survey I can review the results of onstream, let me know! I'll post a thread for the map in the Beta Testing forum in the morning.

It's probably also for gameplay and level design reasons; if there's two characters standing around in an area the player can access (or shoot at), what happens when the player attacks them, or if they're merely spotted? What if this is a sequence that they need to pay attention to in order to to complete the mission (i.e. it gives the player a necessary piece of information) and it gets interrupted? It's probably no wonder why the conversation in Eavesdropping in Thief II happens completely behind an unopenable door. :P I kind of have one in my not great map; to deal with the problem above, the two guards won't play the next line in the conversation if either of them have an awareness of the player above a certain point. Regrettably, this doesn't interrupt the currently playing line (I couldn't figure out a way to interrupt currently-playing VO), which can lead to some awkward moments if they start chasing you.

Oh, that's smart! I think that might work. I was assuming prior that the exterior would be part of the off-stage recreation. As for getting the pathfinding working on the exterior, my concern is that the monsterclip brush seems to form collision, not just AAS data, so I don't know if there's a way for the guards on the deck to "sink" through to a lower level when the ship changes locks. I think I can fictionalize reasons why there wouldn't be any crew outside, so I'm not too concerned. Anyways, thank you! I think I have a way forward now.

I've thought about the teleporter idea, but I don't know how viable it is, given that the player can jump off the side of the ship into the water from any point on the top decks. If there's a trigger or set of triggers that could be attached to the ship, and I could get the offset of the player from the ship's center, then maybe. Do they have to be absolutely still while the transition happens? I ask because in the context of the canal, the ship only moves vertically at a couple of different spots. I made a diagram for my design doc: The elevator wiki page is ambiguous, but it gives me the impression that both the AAS solid and AAS obstacle brushes used form an invisible floor at each stop for the AI to walk on. If so, my thinking is that I could just have a few planes of AAS brushes and selectively toggle them as the ship progresses: Is this viable? EDIT: Should mention that the proposed solution above would be paired with AAS obstacle entities lining the perimeter of the ship that would move with it, in order to prevent AI from walking off the sides of the ship or bumping into the walls. I'm assuming you can set the AAS obstacle entities' position, as I've been successful in doing that for the func_liquid volumes that will form the water of the canal.

Hey there, I'm writing this with egg on my face. Basically put, the level I'm currently working on depended on the assumption that I could get AI patrolling and pathfinding on moving platforms. Unfortunately I think I misremembered what TDM can do, as I've quickly found out that monsterclip brushes need to be worldspawn. Does anyone know a way around this, a way to achieve a similar effect, or am I just shit out of luck? The concept of my map centers around a ship moving through a multi-lock canal; the player is supposed to sneak onto the ship while it's moving, steal an item off the ship, and then get back onto shore. My assumption is that having enemies on the boat would require the aas32 data to update. This is the map I've been streaming the making of, if it helps to have a sense of how far in I am. I've been messing around with small experiments in test maps to find a workaround or hack, but I've been unsuccessful. I tried looking at using aas_obstacle brushes, but they only seem to generate walls for AI, and not a walkable surface (despite them being used as such in this example on the wiki). Push comes to shove I can just have the ship docked and static throughout the mission, but I feel like that's not as fun. Any ideas?

As people have mentioned above, the scripting language for idTech4 is pretty similar to C++. However, it and C++ are also close to C#, which I think is an easier language to learn. If you don't mind spending time in another engine, Unity has C# support, plus a ton of video tutorials and a really well-documented set of functions for C#. I mostly say this because the Dark Mod wiki articles are pretty threadbare, and it was easier for me to figure out how scripting for it was different from scripting from other languages. If you want to jump right into TDM scripts, though, I'd be willing to help you through what you specifically want to do, and I'm sure plenty of other people on this site would say the same.

Holy crap, how many open-source versions of immersive sims based on idTech4 are there? Next thing I know you'll tell me there's a Terra Nova one.

Given this community's love for Looking Glass-style games, I recently got Arx Fatalis for free accidentally. I downloaded the demo data from Steam, but had to install the open-source version, Arx Libertatis, to get it to run. I've been playing it for the past couple weeks and the game hasn't stopped me from playing further, which took me a while to realize. I'm wondering if this would work for other people as well. Given that the game's now open-source, you can create mods and compile the level editor yourself, which I figure is also of interest to people here.

Huh, funnily enough I've been working my way through Pathologic the past couple months. I'm playing the original version from 2005, which is a bit tough to understand at points, but I think it's successful at communicating what it wants. I agree with Anderson, play the original, and then we'll all get a chance to contrast it with the remake when that comes out.