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In a swamp, somewhere:

Not that it's relevant, but, I strongly dislike random patrol paths. For quite a simple reason: If I hire guards to guard my property, I'd expect those guards to cover a preferably as big as possible area. Without having all guards potentially at the same spot at the same time, leaving big areas completely unguarded. I can understand that random paths might, just might be a thing for NPC's which don't guard anything, but, for "real" guards, it absolutely makes no sense to me. For example, I played a mission once (won't name and shame, but, it's pretty well known), where I had 3 guards in the same room at one time. Or another where guards occasionally visited the kitchen, and one by one and more and more came, until I stockpiled the bodies in the kitchen's restroom. And when I had 6 NPC's already stockpiled there, another came, took a look inside the restroom (!), and noticed all the bodies in there, and was permanently alerted. It not only makes no sense, but, it even totally wrecks the gameplay, at least if you are looking for those very rare spots where you can actually drop bodies. I think a lot of mission makers make a big mistake by allowing such random paths, not only from a common sense point of view, but also from a gameplay point of view. A.I. has to be predictable to some degree. You can frequently read about that as well in articles about game design. It robs games off its fun and joy to play, if A.I. is totally unpredictable, and it's not realistic either. A guard has its patrol path, and, it's also appointed with other guards, otherwise guarding a mansion or anything else makes no sense, if everyone is stepping on each other's foot. That's my view, which of course nobody has to agree with. But, it's not just subjective really. There are good rational reasons for NOT having guards act unpredictably. Actually, I think another approach would be much more realistic, and also would make much more sense: A guard has a set patrol path, but, every now and then (maybe every 3 rounds he does), he sits down to eat something, or just gets a rest, making way for the player to exploit the situation by sneaking past him. That's not only more fun, it's also more realistic than a guard which is all over the place.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the patrols are randomized. Not that guards will randomly walk around and all congregate in one spot sometimes, nor that they walk along super strict paths like robots. The happy medium where gameplay and immersion is at it's best is when the guards follow a patrol route, but random, unpredictable things can happen within discreet areas. Say that the guard walks in a room, and then proceeds to do one or more of these things randomly; studies a painting, sits in a chair, stands by the window looking out or scanning a bookshelf, causing him to criss-cross the room a bit in the process. He then leaves the room and walks to the next where the process repeats. This keeps the player on their toes if they are in the room, since they can't know with precision what the guard will do next. It also seems like a realistic scenario for a bored guard. Since these paths don't overlap too much you also won't have the scenario you mentioned above where suddenly there are 6 guards in the kitchen.

There are a lot of things which are unrealistic in a game scenario, e.g. a real guard wouldn't be able to tell between footsteps he hears by another guard, or a potential thief either, and, no guard is immediately on such a high alert state, with gun or sword ready as quick as they are in games. So, yeah, of course always a consideration between playability and realism. Nonetheless, as hard as stealth games are, and as much patience they take, I think it is necessary to comfort the player a little. Also, it was a hugh UM kind of moment for me, when I saw three guards patrolling a relatively small room at the same time, leaving literally the whole mansion unguarded. Or those 6 guards I knocked out in the kitchen. That's a tad too much, and didn't really leave me with a believable expression either. Let's just say that I wouldn't design a mission like that.

I've read that in real-world security, patrol randomisation is actually important for precisely the same reason that it makes gameplay more difficult — if an attacker knows that a guard walks around the perimeter every 30 minutes, he has 29 minutes of complete security to cut the fence without any risk of being detected. This might apply more to timings rather than paths though. Humans are notoriously bad at choosing things "randomly", and you certainly wouldn't want a situation where guards neglected a particular area for hours because it was never randomly chosen, or all ended up covering the same area. I imagine that what you would ultimately do is assign each guard a separate area but instruct them to patrol at randomised time intervals.

No problem — I'm not trying to pressure you into merging it right away, just getting the code into a reasonable state so that when you do get time to merge it there shouldn't be too many obstacles.

Same here, I also feel like it's more exciting if the patrols are unpredictable. Though I think CoS 1 is probably where I used it the most.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner! The major players in the video game industry hope and dream every day about transforming gaming into a subscription service like cable TV. Instead of paying just once for a game and then playing it and or modifying it (aka enjoying it) for literally decades like we do with Classic Doom, you will have to pay a constantly increasing amount every month to continue to use the service and play any games at all. This is why, although Microsoft has open sourced some stuff, like old Windows programs that no one cares about anymore (e.g. a calculator or file manager), and they will also open source architecture that makes Linux perform better in a Windows environment (or vice versa), you will NEVER see them open source any game, ever. Because the minute they do, is the minute that someone gets it running without the cloud, or even worse, natively on Linux, without Windows, without being signed into the Windows store with a Microsoft account! All of the big boys want everything to run in the cloud in order to facilitate maximum consumer exploitation. Not only does their crusade to make everything into a subscription service facilitate draining your wallet a little bit more with each passing month, but it allows them to engage in unchecked surveillance capitalism. You can't do that with an offline single player game! Open source is the enemy of this business model, as I outlined above. As for what I personally think about this business move, I honestly can't really get that upset. Id stopped supporting Linux years ago anyway. The people who made the company an outstanding "good citizen" in the game industry left years ago. So it's like Microsoft is buying a light bulb that's already burned out. As a Linux user, the only thing this business move means, is that new id games will be significantly less likely to work in Wine, because they'll be hooked into all of the stuff like UWP and extensively tied into Windows), but I wasn't going to buy them anyway.

Most of my missions utilize RIT paths.

All of my missions use random paths to varying degrees. Sotha developed the RIT method (random, interesting things) so you could expect randomness in most of his missions as well, I assume.

Pretty sure that´s true for William Steele series, I remember a guard going one way, me reloading for whatever reason and the same guard using another path upon reloading.

Cool allready done some work on HPL1. As far as i can glean you are free to do whatever with the code but the game assets are proprietary so much the same as with idtech. Code could be used for a game but we would need to create new assets for it. The HPL engine itself is just a framework much like irrlicht engine so custom game code is doable.

That is awesome! They are doing what idSoftware did all those years ago, very nice of them.

The setting of this one was right up my alley, Sweet, sweet revenge

Here's an office suite for the most studious characters in TDM: The starting point was again something I made in One Step Too Far, this time for the navigator. Considering how much untangling of brushes, patches & rotation hacked entities it took, the original work only really served as a visual reference, but it was fun seeing this gradually turn into something. It's been added to the previous furniture & shelves pack (total size: 256 Kb), which has itself been updated with a couple fixes (missing custom painting skin and a rotation hacked scroll). Just for fun, this is what it started out as:

Btw. a shoggoth looks like this or pretty close (up to the artist to interpret from HP lovecrafts description) https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Shoggoth Quite a horrific creature bit like black goo with multiple eyes and fast as hell.