Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Baddcog

Member
  • Posts

    5348
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    13

Everything posted by Baddcog

  1. I imagine he fixed the issue with difficulty levels dropping guards HP by the wrong amounts. Which was the main issue with guards going down too easily. Still I think the bow sway on load is the only option to fix sub-machine bow
  2. Having Regrets : Thief II Total Crap Contest mission by Schwaa (aka ME ) http://thief.nov.ru/...arent=iEA91E857 I thought the total crappiest idea for a mission was to have to return all your stolen goods. I lost (I even built the map in the shape of my name, lol) (moar contest info) results http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=111310&highlight=crap+contest Well, I can't find the original thread but the beauty of Dromed (in this respect) was that it was a subtractive engine. Even with sloppy work you couldn't get a leak. So sloppy un snapped brushes and general bad practices was the point of the contest. On top of annoying game play and whatnot. As bad of an idea as it is, you can't believe how hard it is to break good habits after you've mapped for awhile. To not texture align, not snap brushes, etc...
  3. Another teaser: The least optimized area in the map, I have a couple more portals i can place but it is huge wide open. Still I have 5 guards there chasing me around and fps isn't dropping below 50 (on the pc anyway, my laptop is a bit laggy in most 3d games). (not a lot of details but I think it'll be alright - in this case I'm happy with having a very large area as a trade off for small details). Seems like the 1.08 update really did boost performance quite a bit. if performance seems bad for some systems i might just make easy difficulty performance mode and have a lot of func_statics and models that won't be present. Most of the base terrain is in, have a couple shortcuts and dead end city gates to put in. And the main location, so that'll take a week or so probably. Then it's just improving/aligning textures, adding details, sounds, patrols, objectives, read ables...hmmm, starting to sound like a long way to go
  4. Seems old maps might be hard to account for. Whether or not they used portals on areas with glass doors and whatnot.. The sound interpolation based on open state sounds cool, it could possibly be tied into the texture fade based on open state we had discussed?
  5. Yikes 8O Well, I know (if I do enter) that I have no chance of winning based on that kind of unusual gameplay. Most likely I'll just gear it more towards assassination. (300 rooms and 1 line of script code maybe )
  6. The lack of players being able to clear an entire mission using very few arrows... reality... better stealth/difficulty. What would be lost by losing that feature?
  7. Well, rethinking arrows... They were pickable in Thief so I never thought about it myself. It does seem to be unnecessary for the most part. Typically broadheads are quite abundant and cheap in the store. Players loadout usually has them, they can be found scattered around maps... I wouldn't mind seeing that function removed. Of course that would also require checking every single map to make sure it wouldn't break them (is it possible a map has only one arrow and you are required to use it multiple times? - doubt it)
  8. then there's noobermoar... can user names get any more complicated (mine is always missing at least one consonant too )
  9. Honestly it's about 3 minutes of work (select half mesh, drag uv's) but no biggie. Like i said if we make an arm invis then the hit detection would be messed up anyway so probably better not to even worry.
  10. I've got a request that should be simple enough... Can you give him a full uv island ? ie: no mirrored texture. It's fine if you bake him in half, then just do a photoshop job to give him 2 halves instead of one (they don't even have to match up) and swap the uv's from one side onto the other. Here's why... If everything is on unique uv space we can just make a few skins and alpha out the bones that we want missing. then instead of splitting the mesh in to several materials zones the skeleton can just be one material and later on anyone can make an alpha skin to remove any selection of bones they want at any time. (i dunno, an idea. There still might be problems if an author removes an arm, but the ai can still hit with the arm, etc...)
  11. Only footstep volume propogated to the ai. --- He does massacre fairly easy in that vid. at first he is on grass and charges from the dark. So he should be pretty silent, he even made it a point to charge from an ai's shadow. The first guy goes down with one sword hit, maybe that should be, he was unalert and looked like a peasant (at quick glance). However, the second guy is alert and also goes down with one sword hit a second later. Now maybe he is not ramping up quick, maybe he is just too weak. Obviously Springheel pointed out an error in the HP of AI. But when he charges into a room full of guards and only takes one hit yeah something's wrong. The guy on the toilet was funny though. But still, he was sitting in full light and the player runs in, alerts him and he still goes down in one hit. It seemed like only a few of them even took more than one hit to kill anyway. Just wayyy to easy.
  12. I hadn't thought about entering, still not sure whether or not I will. But I've been making pretty good progress on my map and haven't decided on storyline yet. If it's close enough by the time the deadline runs around I might have to gear the gameplay towards the contest. guess i'll see how close i am and what the final deadline is looking like before I decide, but i am pretty committed to releasing this one, been too long, I have an urge to do at least one more mission and a decent TDM one at that.
  13. note to self : unless I never get to it... Need to add entity for model : models/darkmod/lights/non-extinguishable/simple_square1_unattached.lwo (appears to not have one
  14. here's a tut for visportalling street sections. I did it pretty quickly so just a rough guide: http://wiki.thedarkm...portal_Tutorial (this one is an explanation of vp's and has really simple drawings) http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Visportal Hammer cuts everything up into leafs (well, it cuts terrain brushes). Each leaf has a list of leafs that can be seen from it, so they render when you are in said leaf. The area_portal is a manually place leaf division. Doom3 has NO leafs. So the author needs to make them. And that's done by placing a visportal (aka area-portal). the good thing about hammer is that it's automatic, the bad thing is that it can make way more leafs than you really want/need so you have to change details into func_details (no longer worldspawn brushes), you can also place the hint and skip brushes to clean up excessive leafs or tie them together (been awhile) Good thing about Doom3 is everything can be worldspawn and you don't get excessive leafs (slowdown). bad of course is that you need to place visportals manually. But it's really not hard, you just have to think about placing them at corners/doorways, keeping sight lines lower, etc.. Basically all the same techniques you use in Hammer. That engine doesn't like extremely long sight lines with tons of details either. We also have func_statics (think func_details) which help keep tri counts down too, and since they are entities they can have shadows turned off, be doors/elevators...
  15. how about we slightly increase what the ai hears and slightly decrease what the players hear. that should give us perfect balance ---- But like i said before, before we go and add 3 dB to all sounds we'd need to do thorough testing to see if it's just arrows or everything. Lowering the cutoff might be a fix, but that seems like opening a can of worms. Everything has been pretty well tuned to sounds that alert the ai and sounds that felt proper to the devs as we adjusted sounds. There obviously (at least with arrows) seems to be a gap between ai and player. Lowering the ai dB threshhold would have serious changes to ALL sounds. Footfalls and whatnot have been tweaked pretty decently. If we lower the dB then ai could hear you easier correct? Then we'd have to tweak all the footstep sounds again. The player registers these sounds more through what they are doing/how close the ai are, not the actual sounds themselves. You know you have to sneak up on a guard, you don't listen to your footsteps and think 'ok, he can hear me now'. So I'd say that's just a no go. ----- however tweaking some sounds like arrow impacts to make the ai/player threshold 'seem' even would be much better IF it comes to that. At least that way we are only changing impact sounds. And only if we feel the gap exists between player/ai. (it's possible the teacup sound level is more even than arrow level). This would result in minor changes that I doubt any players would even realize happened. Does anyone now really realize that an ai can't hear an arrow quite as far away as the player? You mentioned it but you were testing sounds. I've never noticed it in game either, but if it's an easy tweak that can tighten up the game why not? ===== Still, as stated before, this is of less concern than fixing the portal threshold because a guard can sound right on top of the player when he is not. That can create confusing gameplay. ======================= about the werewolf and lantern bot... imo it would be bad to have ai of different hearing levels. Yes, the lantern bot works on hearing, and the werewolf obviously would be more in tune. But too much of the game depends on the players footstep sounds. If we lowered their hearing relatively then crouch walking would still alert them (and nobody else). So you are around a corner from one of them and don't know it. You are being careful and crouch walking and all of a sudden an alarm goes off or a werewolf pounces you. All of a sudden you have to change your entire gameplay style to match the possibility you'll encounter a very rare ai.
  16. It's difficult to say what degree of inaccuracy is going to be liked by players. I like the 2-3 second sway idea at the beginning of the shot because it really doesn't change much. It simply slows you down a bit so you don't have semi-automatic bow anymore. If you are just slightly patient you still have the same accuracy as you are used to. It doesn't require doing anything more than fix ai health bugs. (and that's only because something seems amiss there) it doesn't require changing damage.... it's pretty simple, pretty realistic and basically solves the issue.
  17. ^rough_natural_mixed I had DR open... doh, ninja'ed ---- Speaking of prefabs, i'm just now going through and looking at all the prefabs we have. We can always use more, but there's a pretty good mix of a lot of stuff. @ authors... You can save quite a bit of time picking a couple things here and there from the prefabs.
  18. ^I think you took that out of context. I'm not asking if the sounds are too loud or soft (i know those are adjusted in text). I'm asking what we would need to do to make it accurate between player and ai. As your example, a player can hear the arrow further way than the guard can, but the player would assume the guard would hear it the same. We don't want to make the sound louder so the guard can hear it, because then the player will just hear it further away. Same issue exists, just at a different distance. We need to make the player and the guard both aware of the same sound at the same distance.
  19. Well, player/ai hearing an arrow is another can of worms I suppose. First would probably need to test several noises to make sure it is consistant (throw rock/teapot, fire arrows, etc...). Assuming it is: Do we need to adjust sounds made by objects? Is this in code (ie: dB)? I hadn't really considered this to be an issue before but I think it's legitimate. Still it seems separate (to a degree at least) from portal sounds. I was more concerned about voices/footsteps before. Seeing as how you can hear an ai walking through glass, you assume he can hear you (but he can't??? that depends on if mission author used locations, and since the player doesn't know that, and the player can hear the guards well in ALL cases, they assume they can be heard in all cases). I still the the location settings being even for player/ai is most important. -------- Though having player and ai hear noises all the same regardless of portals would be an improvement too. If I shoot an arrow from nearby a guard to distract him, I can hear it but it doesn't distract him then something is wrong.
  20. Well, you can run a map without portals and see how bad it sounds. Some early maps had pretty bad visportalling and it basically sucked. But like I said, if an author wants a sound 'leak' that's easy enough to do with a fake wall.
  21. Well, it depends on the type of wall for one. But we can't account for every possible instance can we? Even if on the other side of the wall the sound needs to travel through air... and mappers need to portal for good performance. I'd say don't worry about it, nobody has ever complained of this type of instance have they? The major complaint is not hearing the same drop in volume as the AI hear. An author can always leave out a portal if they think it would make the sound more realistic. Hell they can drill a hole in a wall and fill it with func_static (and vis_portal it for that matter) so it looks like a solid wall but has somewhere close for sound to travel through. That's like 3 seconds of mapping for a very specific event. I wouldn't code around something that odd or rare. --- I also wouldn't recommend hard coding values for sizes of holes. If a mapper feels it's important to have a certain hole allow less sound they can put a location there. It's really not that hard. Again the main issue is that an ai might barely hear the player, but to the player it sounds like the ai is right on top of them.
  22. @ Ob (several posts were made...) Well, thief is a stealth game by nature. It has always favored the player play stealthily (sic). The entire game is based around trying to be as stealthy as possible. But the original game never forced you to ghost. I never complained about your map forcing me to play stealthily, I complained about it forcing me to play in a ghost mode. There's a difference. You can sneak, get spotted/heard, get away and still continue to play stealthy without being forced to reload. Not being seen/heard is GHOST rules that hardcore players adapted for themselves. Just as some players like to KO every guard and throw them all in a pile. The game never told you to do either but it always allowed either. (with possible acception of some original mission having a no ko, or friendly ai or some such - but it was the exception not the rule)
  23. it's brand new and wiki list is lower priority than a lot of other things
  24. funny, after I posted that I went in game and was getting some spikes down to 40 and 20 fps from 60 that I hadn't noticed before. I realized this time I had quite a few programs running in the background. I shut them down and was back to a smooth 60. (vsynch)
×
×
  • Create New...