peter_spy

It's also an easier route^. It's not that there are no good games, movies, and in particular, no good music these days. It's just that the goalposts have moved. Quality stuff that used to be on national radio, tv or in major magazines, have moved elsewhere, to their respective niches. But there is an enormous group of people who would rather complain that things went downhill, and still demand that good stuff is spoon fed to them via mainstream media, rather than do some digging.

If anything, yes – just climb surfaces with a body, period. No weird "climb this but not that" situations. Although it will force mappers to build high enough walls to prevent players from moving bodies from a location, if that's something a mapper would want.

I'm sure it will be great, if from now on mappers will have to ask players to set a cvar to a certain value whenever they release a mission, so it doesn't break gameplay in their map.

It's not simple, because "low" is a subjective category, and whether you plan to include some margin of error on that (I'm not even asking about how you plan on calculating that, or explaining that to players), you'll receive tons of complaints by players and mappers alike, who'd either think this range should be higher or lower

How would you design such training, on which assets, and how would you make mappers always remember to include that rule in their maps?

Assuming that is a design failure, whether in map, systems or other That's why it is generally better to have fewer and simpler rules. Speaking of disabling jumping while carrying a body, I hope you are aware that it will effectively prevent players from climbing a rope with a body.

That's the thing I've been thinking about the other day; how do you teach players what is waist-high exactly, and what margin of error is okay? In commercial games this is usually done with visual language; a set of distinct assets and decals that are immediately recognizable throughout the whole game. But TDM has all kinds of assets made by different people. My worry is that it would be more of an exercise in frustration for players, who will have to try and guess the rules by trial and error. And what is perhaps more important, you can't force mappers to recognize the new rules and use them consistently in their designs. Hell, there are still veteran mappers that don't care about being consistent about a similar thing, but with the jump and mantle height, making objects like bookshelves that look climbable but are just slightly out of player's reach

Nope, a regular one. That said, there is not much other damage info in the console (like when you attack AI or AI attacks you). When I hit an AI, I only get something like "AI PAIN", and that's it. There is no info on damage sustained by the player either, just a "MISSION FAILED" message on death. Having more verbose info on player and AI health and damage dealt/received would be quite helpful for debugging. Maybe an AI health value for g_showEntityInfo?

I think you should just see it in a console, it's similar to player damage, e.g: Btw. that "51 landing damage" was actually dealt by a falling barrel, so this syntax is rather misleading. "Dealt" should rather be replaced with "received".

Hmm, I was able to reproduce it several times yesterday, but for some reason I can't do that today I use simple settings, 1440p, Fullscreen, Vsync on, Uncap FPS off. Nothing unusual, 60fps at all times. I tried it with vsync off and uncapped FPS, and had the same results at ~250 FPS. I even went as far as to drop an AI from 2560 units – it kind of glides through the air, in slo-mo like fashion, hits the ground, and it's still an unconscious body, not a corpse

Check the actual damage amount in the screenshot. It's almost 40 000. Edit: also, bodies dropped from that height fall flat. I haven't tried the max possible height yet, maybe the ragdoll does kick in after a certain point. Perhaps the whole thing should have a separate thread

Yup. Player jumping off a rope at 192 uu gets 0 to 5 damage, unconscious AI falls down and gets squished by a planet. Nothing to see here folks, just another day in the wacky TDMLand

There are other complications though. How much fall damage should player take, if they decide to jump off a rope with the body? Should the player let go of the body or not? Also, right now it's much harder to jump off the rope with the body than without it. Why? And last but not least, how would you teach players these things, possibly without much hand-holding and text prompts explaining the rules? I guess I'm with @STiFUon this one, if you restrict dropping the body, you'll save yourself (and mappers) a lot of headaches. But even that doesn't solve all the problems, I know I'm in the minority in these forums, but as a player, I really appreciate the beauty and efficiency in simplicity of the design. Not overthinking everything and adding more and more rules for the sake of realism (or anything else).

Personally I'd rather not have it, but there are missions which already depend on that, so my opinion is irrelevant. The most important thing here is to see whether the falling damage can be reduced to something players would expect and won't feel punished by.

In order not to complicate things, and to keep the world rules fairly easy to grasp, I guess the body shouldn't take much more damage than player's fall damage? At least as a player, I'd expect something like that. And also to prevent players from accidentally killing someone, reloading a save is never fun.

Oh my, this really needs addressing. Not only can you climb a rope with a body, you can also drop it while on rope, and if it's an unconscious AI, it will take absolutely massive damage. This is dropped from approx. 192 uu:

I finished Volta 2 a couple of times, and I don't recall climbing a rope or vine with a body being mandatory. Maybe it was one of options. @kingsal you know best whether that was your intention or not?

I'd say that's not the best analogy here, because dynamic lights or moveable objects and physics are mappers tools, so they can be added or removed at will. You can create a mission with static environment and lighting only, and if you can make it interesting, more power to you. And, it doesn't affect any other maps, retroactively. But, if you change aspects of the core mechanics e.g. player abilities, that is carried over to every map you play. In other games, you don't see major updates to player abilities; noone adds wall-running to a game that didn't use wall-running before – at least not without reworking geometry of all maps. I agree with the rest of your post though, just thought that there is a certain distinction here (things controlled by the mapper vs being at players' disposal on map start at all times).

What you basically described a post earlier is punishing the player for something they couldn't possibly know. That's awful level design.

You really think this^ is a good mission design? "Player learned the lesson"?

If anything, it's reasonable not to change the player character move set, because it has been nailed down years ago, and people have been building maps around it. Unless you plan to meticulously replay all the maps in all possible playstyles, to make sure everything is ok, that's a poor idea. Having it as a mod and letting people try it out might be a better option.

Even if you take a few factors out of the equation (making a change for literally one FM author and possibly "some players"), you implemented a change in player character movement model / added new gameplay rule – and you're surprised it wasn't implemented during public beta testing of new release... Not to mention that situations like that (with the code) happen all the time, in both amateur and professional setting. E.g. Lately I was working on a solution for one of our modules not working correctly on Mac. I spent the whole day researching the topic, finding and testing the workaround, but ultimately my PR was declined. We found out that the actual problem was with borked installation process for one of our dependencies. Well... I could have spent that day on something else

This is basically "do include my work ASAP because I worked so hard, or else *sulk*". This is similar case: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21679-beta-testing-211/page/10/#comment-482352 This is neither a commercial product, nor a phishing email. That sense of rush and pressure is artificial. These releases typically do take long, and even then, there are often many things broken by mistake or omission. Often there aren't enough people to test stuff, or they're not competent enough, etc, etc. There's little point in hurry.