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Moonbo
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Posts posted by Moonbo
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Hey Salama,
I'm glad you're enjoying the mission! To be honest, I'm not sure what the names of the paintings are, most of the come prepackaged with the mod itself. The only custom ones are
The portraits of Thomas of Gurgan
, and those just came from a random internet search.
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you can frob the loot through the sarcophagus walls, a bit cheap but it works.
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I originally posted this in the TDM beta testing thread, but wanted to post my thoughts in public too:
WOW! What a great mission! I think it just topped "Patently Dangerous" to be my favorite Dark Mod FM ever. The sheer level of creativity, the scale, the variety, the attention to detail, and all the little touches and quirks really remind me of something that would have come out at the start of the Thief modding community, when the possibilities seemed endless and everyone's imaginations were running wild. Just full marks all the way around.-
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What a great mission! I can definitely see the similarities to Transitions into Chaos, which is a very good thing. Great atmosphere, tough but fair difficulty, interesting plot, and very well done level design. This one's onto my top five TDM missions :-).
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Looks great, but the Builder altar cloth really should have its own texture. Right now it looks like someone draped a carpet over it.
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Wow!Looks great!
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Not sure if these are needed, but saw this on reddit today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4ege5t/i_have_made_some_free_public_domain_audio_of/
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It's personal preference at the end of the day, but I agree with Melan. In my maps I used a very slightly blue ambient and it seemed to work well.
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Ah cool
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Just an FYI that there is a limit to the number of characters that can be on a single page with Obsttorte's script. I think it was under 200, so I ended up having to swap out pre written journals via a script (which I could do since the player got the updates in a fixed order).
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Hey Gilou (great name by the way
),Thanks for feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the mission and it could give you a few hours of enjoyment.
-Gelo
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A big way to simplify this is to make your walls thick enough that you can run caulk brushes through their interior such that they don't poke out even if the walls curve. You'll need to chop up your meshes strategically too.
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In general Doom 3's physics just arent as complete or integrated into gameplay as something like Half Life 2. There are sadly a lot of things that just don't work outside of the most basic simulations :/.
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Why not just use a func_bobbing or func_mover?
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Thanks Ladro, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
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Hey Ladro,
Ouch. There is a known bug that some people run into in "the second chamber" where if they teleport before the instructor finishes speaking the game will freeze up, but hopefully this is just a corrupted download :-).
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Hey Ladro, when are you getting the crash? Is it in the first or second mission? It doesn't look like a malloc error - you might want to try redownloading and see if the error is still there.
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Looks great Goldwell!
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Trigger once linked to the trigger hurt.
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Just a video I saw from a youtuber I follow who went through the XBOX 360 version of Dark Souls 2 and pointed out places with poor artwork. It's a little repetitive after a while, but it's a good pointer on things not to do while working with textures (and makes me think "wow, even the pros make mistakes!"):
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In looking at the Thief games (and TDP in particular), it’s amazing to me how much world building they were able to do with relatively few assets and low-rez textures. I think they pulled it off due to:Information Rich Assets - while most textures/assets in Thief are functional (brick, carpet,etc). There exists a category of asset (statues, paintings, glass windows, banners, carvings, tombs) which are information rich. They’re not generic, but specific and match to the lore and setting of that part of world (such as the paintings showing the Trickster being banished by the Master Builder, or the images on Hammer tombs). The statues for example had a lot of info carved into them, whether it's hammer iconography or the presence of keys in the keeper statues. Just by looking at these you could tell a lot about the people who lived or had lived in these places. It’s honestly something that's missing from The Dark Mod (though understandable so as not to pigeon-hole mappers).Narrative consistency - the art assets blended with the readables, dialogue, AI skins, and other world building devices. The AI would use and talk about the things represented in the art assets which lent them authenticity.Location variety - As Melan mentioned, things switched up as you moved through geographic space. Even in the City environments you had stony/dark exteriors, and rich colorful interiors. Also the texture/information "set" changed with physical locations. So the Lost City was very different from the Haunted Cathedral, which was very different from the City. This variety not only helped keep the player’s interest, but it also created a much larger world in the player’s mind which stretched far beyond the rooms they were walking through.A small aside, but AAA games tend do the above quite poorly because it takes so long to build modern high quality assets that the focus is on a consistent art direction (which makes pretty stuff that looks well together) rather than on art design that supports the narrative.Anyways, just my two cents :-).
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Yep, setkeyval, that's the one.
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There is an entity you can use to set spawnargs, I forget the name but it's what I used in my FMs to change location music.
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No, you can change ambient sounds in real time but you need to change locations before the sound change starts playing. So in my FMs I changed the ambient, teleported the player to another location, then teleported them back to the original location. Outside of that I don't think it's possible.
Fan Mission: Volta and the Stone by Kingsal (05/26/2016) V1.3
in Fan Missions
Posted · Edited by Moonbo
A very fun and solid mission. I'm going to be a bit critical in my review, but that's only because this was a very good mission and so I thought about it a lot. Don't take any of this the wrong way, it was a job very well done:
Visuals
Overall the visuals were great to look at, and the whole mission ran very smoothly on my less-than-powerful rig (which really impressed me in some scenes!). Especially the use of the skybox geometry made the city section feel much larger and interconnected than it really was. The scale of the mansion was also just right - I noticed in my missions that I tended to err too much on the side of making things too small, but no problems with that here. Everything was large, impressive, but also believable.
Now, onto my critiques. The very pronounced use of strong ambient light colors (and their sharp swings as you moved into new areas) served to almost act like the post-processing filters you see in modern games. For me, this was a bad thing that detracted from the visuals. I've always felt that in modern AAA games (or Thief Deadly Shadow for that matter) all these sorts of filters serve to do is to wash out the colors from the scene. All the natural highlighting and texture detail of objects gets covered over by this omnipresent color scheme, which reduced contrast and made the in-level lighting more flat. Art is subjective, and part of that critique is just preference, but I wanted to mention it.
I also noticed quite a few spots where the visual quality of the level took a noticeable drop (overly blocky chunks of geometry (especially on the ceilings), tiling textures, sudden texture cut-offs, and a little bit of z-fighting) . No-one else has mentioned this, so this could just be me being picky and looking at things too closely, but given the really high visual quality of most of the level, running into these sections pulled me out of the experience.
Story
Chalk this one up to preference again, but I was disappointed by the time I got to the ending. The macro-story suffered from the same issue as Full Moon Fever (another great mansion mission) in that it was all build up with no payoff. A lot is hinted about the nature of the stone, with the light in the tower and the various conversations, but in the end it's just another object that you pick up and leave with. There was no consequence to taking the stone and no resolution to any of the various plot threads surrounding the stone. If this is the first part in a series, you can ignore this critique obviously.
That said, the minute-to-minute storytelling through overheards and readables was very enjoyable. I knew who everyone was, what my objectives were, and where to complete them. These fundamentals can be very hard to convey and you did a great job conveying them in a way that made me relate to the cast of characters. The environmental storytelling with the pagan graffiti was also a really nice touch.
Gameplay
Nothing but praise here :-). New challenges like electric plates were introduced well and changed up the pace of standard TDM gameplay. The faster than normal AI also made the game more challenging, forcing you to ambush people instead of doing the standard "creep up on people" thing. It also raised the chances of having to run into AI more than once before you could take them out, which made the level more tense.
The layout of the level was such that I never got lost, and in a level as large as this one, that's a mark of high quality. The only time I got confused is that I thought I needed to flip both of the tower control switches to open the tower door. So imagine my chagrin after circumnavigating the mansion to get to the second tower switch, only to find the door closed.
Again, really good mission - had a blast playing int and I hope you make more!