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Old topic: SteveL had most of the basics of func_occluder \ antiportal working but was struggling with shadow handling and a few related concerns. Quake mappers would probably love the feature since they've already been using it for years but it's hard to say whether TDM \ Doom 3 folks will really want to add another optimization workflow? Admittedly func_occluder seems to be easier to visualize than portal closure behavior so it might not be as error prone.

A fun mission for me requires a few things: I prefer smaller, more densely-packed environments instead of larger city blocks. That's not to say city missions can't be fun, but they run the risk of being exhausting, confusing labyrinths. From my perspective missions with smaller environments provided an increased chance of me finding all the loot, secrets, readables and other content. I've missed major areas in city levels purely because it's so easy to skip areas without realising it. I'm not a fan of undead and spiders because they can be difficult to kill, or at least, to kill without making a whole lot of noise. I like missions with human enemies because for the most part I can deal with them quietly, and as such it provides an opportunity to clear out areas first and then look carefully for loot and/or secrets. I really enjoy missions that have some sort of mystery, either as a starting goal to resolve, or when a seemingly straight-forward mission is designed to go badly and the mystery presents itself mid-mission. Keeps me engaged. I don't like KO or kill limits. I can tolerate kill limits more but I really hate having to limit the KOs I can make in a mission. I know some missions only have these limits on the higher difficulties, but sometimes those difficulties also have higher loot and even extra objectives that I want, but I have to deal with the KO limits alongside them. The best missions either don't have limits at all, or they are optional objectives that don't cause a mission failure if breached.

TDM was never meant to be fully realistic, it would become impossibly difficult were that the case. None the less I still find myself wishing more could be done to make AI feel less like AI, especially when handling hostile encounters (usually the player). While like most aspects this could never be truly perfect, one area feels like it could be noticeably improved: Giving AI some form of long term memory, rather than just one alert level which goes back to zero after a short time. Here is the reason why I'm saying this: Walk inside your average heavily guarded mansion and step into the bright lights, making all the guards clearly see you and chase after you to attack. Once you've had enough fun repeating the process, hide somewhere and give everyone enough time to cool down. At the end of it all, hide somewhere in the shadows where you can barely be seen and let a guard walk past you: The guard will just say "is there something over there", at best waiting a few seconds and saying "probably just the shadows" before walking away... the same man that may have chased after you for 30 minutes and should by any logic know an intruder is still in the house, I mean come on Now I'm aware we have a basic persistence system: If I remember correctly an AI that's encountered the player and was alerted enough to draw their sword will have its acuity permanently increased by a slight amount. This however makes no noticeable difference as the AI behaves mostly the same. They'll keep telling fellow AI an intruder is in the area, this definitely helps but it's only a dialogue change not accompanied by noticeable modifications in behavior as you'd expect. Obviously massive modifications might be hard to do now without upsetting existing players since it would make everything harder. As such any such attempt would likely be an experiment and, if successful, a new menu option for the difficulty settings. Still I felt like suggesting my imagined solution just in case there's a point in considering tackling this. My idea: Replace the one-time bump in acuity with a paranoia level independent from the alert level... think of the existing alert system as short-term alert and the new one as long-term alert. The standard alert level of guards is slowly added to their paranoia level, thus the more time a guard spends being alert and the higher that alert is the more fear increases. Paranoia level may be allowed to decrease over time but at a far slower rate than the alert level: If an alert guard will typically take 3 minutes to fully calm down after losing track of the player, the paranoia level should take at least 30 if not 60 (real life) minutes to fully go down to minimum... even then it shouldn't drop below a certain degree after that point was reached, for instance just 50% of the maximum paranoia. This long-term fear level would have several effects on an AI as they patrol on their normal route... the ones I've thought about are: Increased acuity as they'll be more alert. This system would replace the existing simple bump we have in that regard, with a more fluid effect and also stronger effect. Increased playing of voices and idle animations: Due to being afraid the guard may talk to themselves or others a lot more frequently and babble excessively. Walking could be replaced by running for a while, even on path nodes that don't have the run flag. The AI would still patrol that same route just at a faster pace. As a map feature set by FM's: Some path nodes can be filtered by fear level, may already be possible with the simple system but I never tried it. An AI paranoid the player is still around but having resumed their normal patrol route may choose to patrol a more sensitive area it normally wasn't going to, which would be a fair way of punishing the player for being seen by having that AI start guarding a sensitive location from then on. If the paranoia level is allowed to slowly decrease, the guard may decide to go back on this decision... the player could then do something else for 15 minutes around the map till the guard abandons the paranoid patrol route. Here's an idea I like: AI randomly getting scared for no reason, thinking they see the player in every shadow even when there's nothing there. A scared guard normally walking on their patrol route would randomly become alert for no reason, typically when walking through a dark area, causing them to draw their sword or randomly run around for a second. The problem here is this effect would be random: Imagine you're hiding accordingly but a guard randomly freaks out and bumps into you, most players would find this unfair.

Being 60 to 70% through, I can safely say that this is the game of the year for me. Didn't have such a fun time since, well, Prey, I guess. The game doesn't hold your hand at all, which is so refreshing after all these dumb AAA grahics demos. I can only highly recommend this, if you're remotely into this kind of setting (I guess most of here are anyway).

The problem I have with antiportals is that using them is too hard. If the obstacle is small, then antiportal won't help much. If it is huge, then it's probably some building and you try to optimize outdoors area. The antiportal over whole building makes sense, but: Rectangular antiportal is not enough: you need something that fills as much of the building's volume as possible, at least a box or two crossing antiportals. Are you really 100% sure player cannot open doors and look through the whole building? Are you sure you would set antiportal in such a way that it won't block something visible? Your antiportals cannot affect all areas like visportals do, because when player is indoors, the antiportal will block his visibility. You want antiportal to work only when player is outdoors, so you need some filter with locations. It becomes so messy that if a mapper wants to optimize his building, he just better place all the portals around and hope for the best.

Occlusion culling is not as easy as it looks. For instance, if you simply check entity's bbox against individual brushes, then most of the entities behind walls would pass the check because no individual brush covers a whole entity completely. Also, there are dozens thousand brushes on large maps, you cannot iterate through them naively. On the other hand, this is close to the concept of "antiportals". That's when mapper puts an "antiportal", ensuring that everything behind it is occluded, and the engine takes it into account whenever it works with portals. But this requires work from mapper, and I don't think it would provide much help. To get serious benefits, you need to recognize the whole wall consisting of many brushes as a single inpenetrable surface, at which point you necessarily have something really complicated. I thought about doing Umbra-like occlusion culling on brushes (with automatic portals and conservative rasterization inside), but I realized it's ton of work. There is always something else to do. By the way, the recent change is not about what player does not see, it's about what light don't see/hit. Just rendering a surface is very cheap because of depth prepass, but light interactions are costly with all the textures, soft shadows, etc. Realizing that you don't need light interaction on something you see is quite beneficial. The problem with original Doom 3 engine is that it basically lights up all objects within light volume. With the exception of static shadow-casting lights, portals are just ignored! I have expanded usage of portals to dynamic lights. It might sound funny, but there is still some room for improvement in this area...

Sorry for that: I try to be short but at the same time detailed and it ends up as the later. Scripting can accomplish some of this if you need it to, such a core change should of course be done in root if possible, not sure how radical it would be at this point in time though given it would involve gameplay / difficulty changes. Curious what others think and if anyone has even better ideas on the basis of my suggestion.

Oh yeah, I should second this as well. A mission is not fun if it's designed to be painfully tedious in terms of dodging the visibility of the AI. I can't remember which mission it was, but the mapper must have been in a bad mood that day since too much of the interior of an important building was lit very brightly with non-dousable light sources, with few if any viable hiding areas to obverse patrol routes. I don't know what the intent was, maybe it was a challenge for elite players or something, but it wasn't fun and I resorted to my power move of the "notarget" command just to make it bearable. Forget even looking for loot in such environments.

What I'd like to see is being able to review the objectives when the mission is over, as extra pages on the Mission Statistics screen.

dev16809-10394 is released. This version might give a noticeable performance boost depending on a mission. Let's hope it does not bring along more bugs

Good logical layout of the map for the sequence of objectives. Nice atmosphere, that includes the design of the map and the background music for me. Difficulty, meaning it should be fun to play, and don't overwhelm you with loads of elite guards. Variety. There should be different tasks which make sense in the context. Regarding the last point, I like city hubs in missions, like in Goldwell's Shadows of Northdale part 1, which also add optional side quests. Speaking of Goldwell's missions, I think they're perfect in terms of difficulty as well.

Edit: Spoilered because no one likes hearing Casandra's prophecies. I'll just say some of you guys need to get your heads out of the sand on what's happening with AI. It's not the end of the world, but it could definitely be the end of your world if you fail to heed the steamroller rumbling towards you. There is ample evidence out there to determine who is being honest and who is spreading self-serving lies, you just need to get over your own biases and look for it.