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Making some lava flow and sculpting some rock today.

In this instance, I thing playability takes presidence over absolute realism. It simply looks better if there is some ambient in these situations.

Catching some of these new fishes: https://streamable.com/qb49h

As promised, here is the Arx: End of Sun fish set up as a wandering 'ambient' AI in TDM. Download link Remember to credit the EoS team if you use it (their asset licence is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported). It should work as randomly moving scenery. Anything else might work - I hit one with the blackjack and it bit back - or might not. EoS stopped its fish flying out of water with some custom code to allow a maximum flying height. In the absence of that, if you want to put one in open water all I can suggest is seeing whether a monsterclip 'ceiling' works. The AAS and scriptobject are from the Elemental, but the dimensions are taken straight from EoS; you may find the swim animation occasionally clips into the floor (presumably preventable with monsterclip if it's not sand/mud/etc.). This is the first AF/ragdoll I've made. I think I generally got rid of the bad behaviour, but fish are slippery creatures. Textures are in TGA format straight from EoS; you may want to convert non-normals to DDS before FM release. (Normal maps are actually unused by default; see .mtr for details.)

For rat hunting. If your rats decided to build a bunker. Gas operated, box fed, falling block cannon with revolving loader mechanism. It is a mix of ideas from the Forgotten Weapons channel.

Were signals of no use? That looks to be how you're 'expected' to find out whether a mover has arrived or been blocked.

I can confirm that a monsterclip ceiling is required above open water to keep the fish from flying around in the air above.

I originally threw that idea out of the window, but now that you/sotha show me this. I mean if that is ok? Lets see what the others say

@Sotha has a very nice solution to this, I think; he binds a light he calls "nightvision" to the player here, so it will only light up a bit the direct area:

To slightly expand on Springheel's (entirely correct) answers: We have ambient light in dark areas because the object of this game is to hide in shadows, which means it is not feasible for the player to have to rely on a light source like the D3 flashlight. Although the Dark Mod player does have a hooded lantern, if you take this out you become extremely visible to all AI, so you can only use it when you are alone. While there are games which avoid ambient light and make caves completely dark, these are not typically stealth games in which the player needs to avoid emitting any kind of light. If Dark Mod missions were completely dark, then you'd either be looking at a completely black monitor (as Springheel says), which would be pointless and entirely un-fun, or you'd have to carry around a light source and alert every enemy you see, which defeats the object of a stealth game and turns it into a (clunky and hopeless imbalanced) hack-and-slash adventure.

Something to really watch out for here is that sys.waitFor() or sys.waitFor(self) don't work in scriptobjects. So if you just use sys.wait(x) it won't care if the mover gets delayed because it was blocked and it can get thrown off course. The way I solved it was to compare current position with target position every 0.1s in a looping script. If both are identical, the mover has arrived and can start moving back. I also compared current position : previous position to detect when the mover was blocked in order to pause movement sound.

I think idsoftware also made pitch black shadows for performance reasons and not only to force people to use the flashlight but I agree, ambient light should always be present, pitch black scenes IMO artistically just look bad and like you said they just strain the eyes more, imagine traveling on a all pitch black level, where the only thing you saw was within the radius of your flashlight cone, in real life light bounces around, so a single flashlight or candle can light a entire room, but in games especially those using real time per-pixel lighting like idtech 4, you will just see a circle of light surrounded by pitch black.

This should be fixed now on SVN,

Mappers can disable ambient locally, if they want. However, I am of the same oppinion as New Horizon. That being said, you can disable ambient via r_skipAmbient 2. Please note that it also disables SSAO, as that effect only applies to ambient.

I ran through most of Down by the Riverside with notarget to check if there's any outstanding bugs. I don't think the following have been reported here yet, spoiler tag for screenshots.

Now that’s how us redneck’s do it!

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