Obsttorte

If you reset your bios, no data on your hd will be deleted. Normally this is done by connecting two pins on the mainboard. Regarding new OS if neccessary: Linux is for free

But is it moonlight or maybe streetlight, which would come from different directions?

Question: You've said it checks the distance during the combat. Does it check the distance before the combat (to decide with which weapon to attack)? If not I would suggest the following: put a distance check at the beginning so the AI can decide which weapon to attack with (If not already there) while combat, if the distance changed in a way making it necessary to change the weapon, just end the weapon state (I guess this causes the AI to put away it's weapon and as still alerted to draw the appropiate weapon afterwards) maybe include some sort of timeout variable, so the ai does not switch the weapons on and on if the player repetively closes up and take distance (maybe favor melee weapon once the player was close enough and is still reachable for a certain amount of time)

But there must be code to tell the AI to draw his weapon (and which weapon) and to put it away again. (And some code telling the archer to run into me to defeat me )

Regarding ranged AI switching to melee weapon. I noticed weird behaviour with this, too. I did some testing with a city watch archer. The archer has attached a dagger by default. There is a spawnarg "melee_range" that seem to handle at which distance the ai should go to melee mode. The funny thing is, that it doesn't. It just keeps running at you. You can test this by increasing the melee range. So it seems that the ability of switching weapons is partly implemented, but the switch never takes place. I took a look in the code myself but must admit that I didn't find anything related to this either. I hope anybody else has more luck as this "pushing you into the next corner" behaviour of ranged AI is a bit nerving.

I'm also not sure of the benefit gained by this approach. In my last FM the grass outside consists out of roughly 2000+ grass entities. I mean, each single one may not have a very high poly count, but in the sum ... . I just set them to noshadows and disabled clipping IIRC and there never occured any performance problems to me. Personally I think that the highest performance impact is caused by lots of shadow casting lights (in combination with a high poly count especialy) and particels. I don't want to say that this approach is a dead end in general, but especially when thinking of the time needed to create all those models it may be a waste of time. In addition I don't see any reason for FM's with large outdoor areas as mentioned always. This is not Skyrim. And even if they are, they may not need to be high-detailed in every corner. Regarding the look vs. performance argument: You got a point there. In the end it comes down to the modellers to create all those models before it will make sense for the mappers to actually use them. If there is only a LOD entity for half a dozen different models out of 100+ that may be used in a map, using them won't give a tremendous performance boost IMHO.

You got a point there, although I think that in a "normal" TDM mission scenario this kind of situations may not occour that often.

The objectives system has the player responisble mark. So it can differ between things done by the player and not. Shouldn't it be possible to adopt that mechanism over in this case?

Beneath the shadows also the collision mesh gets corrupted by that. Never tested inline though. Guess I must give it a shot as I'm using rezised models quite often.

Thanks for playing my FM. Just a few remarks to ghosting: on the lowest difficulty you don't have to ghost on the medium difficulty you only have to make sure you are not seen only under the highest difficulty setting you should not be heard, too As said this mission aims to be difficult and was designed for ghosting. If you don't like that, you can choose a lower difficulty setting. Making it optional isn't an option (because I personally don't like optional objectives).

1280x1024, 5:4

Than I guess I mixed up the terms. With multiverse I've meant what Taffsalot described. (But thinking about it I guess it was used for the idea of our three-dimensional universe beeing part of a higher dimensional universe/multiverse whatever). IIRC the last thing has something to do with the string theory, which is, as these several universes for every decision thingy something that can neither be proven nor falsified (and therefore rathe senseless IMHO). Science tends to sometimes turns to creed it seems. I prefer things that can be proven.

Don't want to dimish the discussion, but you should keep in mind that the whole thing behind this multiverse theory is just a mathematical model. You can also describe the roll of a dice by stochastics, but you wouldn't say that all its sides show upwards until you look at it, right? So whoever drew the conclusion of a multiverse existence has most certainly not understand quantum mechanics. (Don't want to say that I do ) I wouldn't take such pseudo-scientific jabbering too serious.

This sounds weird. Wouldn't you defend yourself when attacked, independent from who is attacking you? Also I think that a guard or a builder should have a higher rank then a beggar or a whore. Don't know how high the impact on gameplay is though. But it sounds a bit comic if a guard steps beside to make room for a beggar.

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Animation_playback_speed

I think this depends on the genre of a game. If it is an adventure, I guess this is OK. For an ego-shooter it would be not. TDM is somewhere in between I think, so it really depends. Actually the player should not be forced to write down sides of paper. But if it will be only a couple of notes, I guess it's fine.

To complete the post: In the model definition put the lines anim idle_X models/md5/chars/guards/proguard/idle.md5anim for the proguard for example. X must be all the idle animations. He will not be perfectly still, but at least he won't scratch himself. If this isn't enough, I guess you have to create your own animation.

Then you have to write your own def and use that instead. Look at the defs in the AI pk4's. If you make your own by creating a copy under darkmod/def/ and delete the anims you should get it working.

Try "-" instead of "idle"

anim_idle

This is something you have to test in game. IMO the player shouldn't always have the possibility to hide in the dark. So having some bright spots where the player can only pass during a certain time period when all AI are looking somewhere else isn't that bad. But this also depends one the level of tension you want to have in that area, the amount of loot that can be found there, etc. I would adjust the lights in front of the windows a bit, so they fit the glass color more. A bit more blueish may be good.

I'm not sure this would work. The problem is that for the camera image the image itself still needs to be evaluated. So I guess this would increase the performance impact instead of decreasing it. EDIT: I think that, as the idtech4 engine is originally designed for indoor areas, it's a bit cumbersome to get good looking and performing results for other hings. Other engines are designed for outdoor purposes, and if one want's to create a game with such, they better stick to them. On the other hand, if someone want's to create high-detailed indoor areas with realtime shadow-casting lights, the TDM engine would be preferable. I fairly doubt that for example the engine used for Skyrim would reach that in the same way.

There is a "noshadows_lod_x" spawnarg where x is the lod distance the object is at. As the spawnarg "noshadows" is used on both objects and lights, I guess this could be handled by that.

Before 1.08, TDM ran only smooth under linux for me. Under Windows I always had around 15 FPS even in small/low detailed maps. In addition, both my scanner and my printer are not supported under windows anymore, bot both run under Linux without having me to install any drivers at all. So I guess this is really a matter of hardware. I have an ATI card and the driver didn't caused any problems to me yet. Referring emulation. Did you try wine?

Nice shots, especially the first one. I would add a bit more decoration to the alcoves and bulge the bottom a bit, but that's just me. Is this Vengence II?