peter_spy

Nothing major to report yet. Just first take on custom textures and materials. Man, I've forgotten most of my workflow, so first few hours were mostly trial and error. But it will come back to me, eventually. I also forgot that making good speculars is hard You have to constantly remind yourself about the material you're working with, and whether it works with currently used normalmap. Otherwise you end with shiny bumpy mess. Good thing is, the iteration is fast, and when I know what I want, it's a pure pleasure to work on those.

When it comes to environmental storytelling, there's one area of photography that's pretty good learning material: the urban exploration stuff and the whole "abandoned places" theme. There are a lot of tacky and bad sites out there, but I know at least two that are good: http://opacity.us/locations http://www.forgottenheritage.co.uk/

I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but if a scaled mesh is saved as another mesh, that kind of contradicts its purpose (i.e. being loaded to memory once, but used multiple times, in many configurations).

And now for something completely different: How do you guys handle moving around prefab objects? As soon as I put them in the map (e.g. chests), the break up into individual pieces, which makes them hard to select. Should I group them first? In T3ed most of such objects used attachment links, so as long as you moved the base object, the rest just followed it around.

I mean, they paid tens of thousands of dollars for the 3dsmax, Z-brush and other software alone; then a few hundreds more for the work (the game was in production since 2010 or so, made by a big team), and now someone approaches them asking to release that work for free.

They'd have a good laugh for sure.

Bingo. As long as your project has a sensible scope, you can be a modeler, texture artist, and level designer. Actually, you should be. There are tons of great stuff to learn, and it's a great creative freedom for you. I'm going through my old sculpting and texturing tutorials right now, man this is fun.

Well, I plan to use mostly my models in textures in my first mission, made from the ground up, without any photos as a base Of course not at that level of quality and polish as here, there were teams of people working on that. Then again, I have all the phases and passes loosely planned throughout the year, and the map will be quite small. I should have time for something visually decent.

I'm also pretty sensitive when it comes to copyright, but I don't understand the problem here. It's not like you can copyright perpendicular gothic You don't have access to any assets, so all you can do is eyeball those objects and try to make something like it.

My bad, didn't see that 7zip used PPMd method, which is a it obscure. Updated the link with standard Deflate method zip. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ka2or3yxjkgce8p/The%20Order%201886%20art%20dump.zip?dl=1

Maybe. Maybe it can be overridden? In most missions I played the auto mode worked, but not in The Gatehouse.

If I remember correctly, in auto mode you can just hold RMB and wait for 3 or 4 sound loops to play and the door will be opened (and this takes quite a long time). In other modes you have to wait for the silence between the sound and either press LMB or release RMB as fast as possible. The latter opens the lock much faster, so it would be great if players actually used it. Edit: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#Lockpicking

There you go: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ka2or3yxjkgce8p/The%20Order%201886%20art%20dump.zip?dl=1

I'm trying to put this in one package so we can have this on our drives, but it might take me an hour or so...

This is more for modeling and texture nerds like me, but you can find a lot of inspiration in these guys' environments The Order 1886: https://www.artstation.com/artist/juanderbread/albums/11909 https://www.artstation.com/artist/anthonyvitale https://www.artstation.com/artist/budlong https://jlef.artstation.com/ https://www.artstation.com/artist/lion2p https://www.artstation.com/artist/nestorcarpintero/albums/11741 https://www.artstation.com/artist/megific https://hugobeyer.artstation.com/ http://www.artofpatrickstone.com/theorder.html http://erinmckown.com/ It's a shame this game was such a flop, as this the highest level you can imagine in terms of models, textures and materials. Absolute world class. I actually have these guys' GDC presentation on the material and environment rendering in The Order, but the whole thing is too image-heavy (over 300 MBs).

That's exactly what I did! I only read the gameplay manual on wiki because I kept dying in that one trap in the Gatehouse FM I'm thinking about putting both a loading tip, and a short note in player inventory about how the new lockpicks work.

I'm kind of more concerned about lockpicking right now. I must say, I didn't get the system until The Gatehouse, because I wouldn't be able to finish it otherwise. AFAIK, players like Fen use auto lockpicking all the time, which is slightly boring. I'm yet to see how locks and chests work in the editor, so I guess there's either a way to shorten the auto-lockpick time, or I'll try to educate players on that via loading screen tips. I'd rather do the latter, because the system is cool, once you get the hang of it.

I don't think it's 100% accurate, e.g. I managed to run + jump + mantle a ledge that was 192 U away from the jumping platform. It's a bit harder than e.g. 160 U, so I'd leave that for rare loot or highest difficulty. Edit: although the good thing is, the damage seems to be fixed. In Deadly Shadows the threshold was way higher and damage was randomized, which was a little confusing.

I hope you don't mind I slightly changed the topic to reflect what's going on Lately, apart from writing the story and thinking about general layout, I've been using DR to learn more about basic player abilities, mostly movement. I think I've got all the numbers down for mantling, walking, walking + jumping, and running + jumping. Right now I'm looking at falling damage, and one thing occurred to me. Player's mantling reach is basically 128 u, jump + mantle (ok, it's actually 144 u, but for sake of simplicity...). Now, to make a ledge impossible to mantle, you need to put it up at ~160 u. Problem is, this is exactly the starting range for falling damage to apply. It's not much, just 5 health, but the idea is not to punish the player if he falls off the ledge or miscalculates a jump. Getting back to the position where you can reach the ledge can be frustrating enough (I'll try to use it in moderation...). What do you think I should do? Hmm, I might have miscalculated something, I could swear at 160 u you get 5 falling damage. It looks like you get 9 damage if you jump and fall. That should do for now.

I always had a bit of problem with lightning, and I think FM makers have that problem in general. Games like Dishonored or Thief reboot have lightning setup focused a bit more on aesthetic side, which is ok with Dis. In Thief, it makes things a bit too subtle, more often than not. That forces players to observe the lightgem rather than the environment, which is obviously bad. On the other hand, a lot of mappers just throw one or two major lights in a room, add the ambient_world, and hope for the best. That's not good lightning design either.

Definitely, stealth levels are much harder to design, because the choice of lightning and textures directly affects gameplay, it's not just an aesthetic choice. The same goes for story and setting, that can affect a lot of factors too. Besides, making abstract maps first is pretty counter-intuitive for the brain. Typically, I have an image in my head first, an interesting location or a shape, but something that looks finished. And the urge is to get to that finished state as soon as possible, not to iterate on raw building blocks. Discipline and patience is hard

Oh, sorry for that then. I thought it was one of the faster mirrors, at least when I last used it.

Limit your mirrors to Fidcal's site and Southquarter in TDM_mirrors, and check the option not to update the list within the updater.

This one runs pretty well even on my laptop