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Melan
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Posts posted by Melan
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If you keep your sealing geometry in grid 8 and 90-degree blocky and as simple and straightforward as possible, the risk of getting leaks is greatly reduced. Maintaining the mission is much easier.
Using this blocky-simple-sealing-geometry -approach, I've never had much issues with leaks and weird results. For example, when I made Glenham Tower, I lost a lot of time bugfixing a weird sound leak. The sounds from the outside was leaking inside the tower, even though the tower was properly sealed and visportalled. It turned out that sealing worldspawn must be 8 units thick. I had slanted 8 units thick, so it was thinner than 8 units. This caused the sound to leak. When I widened the slanted sealing walls to slanted 16 units thick, the sound leak went away. Had I used simple, blocky approach then, I would have not lost time to seek out the issue.
Also, as veteran mappers know, slanted geometry may start deteriorating due to the floating point rounding issues. At least at some point it did, it might have been fixed already.
In short, hours of mapping experience indicates that keeping sealing geometry as simple as possible (8 units thick, 90-degree blocky, non-slanted) is generally predictable and safe. Using slanted sealing geometry may result in strange and hard-to-troubleshoot issues, i.e. "asking for trouble."
I was asking because I haven't noticed this problem. Perhaps it comes into being when you use very thin walls (which I try to avoid for both aesthetic and realism-related reasons), but using angled and rotated architecture doesn't account for it. Some slight deterioration can take place over time, but that is typically not too severe, nor too hard to fix with a little work. Keeping everything a standard 90 degrees looks like extreme caution to me - and a waste, because you are missing out on a lot of cool shapes.
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How long does a Greenlight campaign last? One month?
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When working with worldspawn brushes, then the mapper needs to be more careful. I would make sure all worldspawn brushes are blocky, 90-degree and in grid 8. Slanted sealing worldspawn brushes is like asking for trouble.
Asking for trouble how?
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You can get in there too, but you have to go around and approach from another direction.
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raymeld: Definitely not.
You have to be searching in Messer Beric's mansion. One of the upstairs rooms - of his wife, I think - has a key to his ground floor study, and in the study, you get a key to the wine cellar. The secret switch is in that room under a shelf of bottles.
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Necrobob's missing, that's who. He hasn't logged in here since January 2006, and on TTLG since April 2016.
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Oskar Kaubisch - Eisenach, Wartburg. The Elisabeth Well at the Knight's Hall, 1926. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Martin Luther had both lived in the castle (several centuries apart, ofc.).
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There are briefing templates which are easy to set up and which provide moving images and text, but for voice and more sophisticated animations, you have to go outside the mod.
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The majority of missions use custom assets of some kind, but they tend to be the easy stuff, mainly textures and the odd model or sound. To give you an idea about their prevalence, take a look at the mission list sorted by size. Missions with very few custom assets (like much of the Thomas Porter series) weigh in around 10-15 MB for a moderately large map. All the rest is custom stuff! It always depends on what's included in the core mod and what isn't, though. I could substantially downsize my FMs after my textures made it into the standard package. Penny Dreadful 2 was over 100 MB, and we got it down to 43 (there is still a lot of custom stuff in there, particularly voices, but less than it used to be).
That said,
- you can easily make a mission with what's already in the mod;
- you don't have to make everything yourself - there are people with specialised skills who can and will help you do this or that.
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Neat! Kinda frustrating they are still using images from the 2008 version of St. Lucia, but still, the trailer is there and should make a good impression.
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Thanks! And nope, not a bug.
It is a piece of ambience, but there is not much you can do about it.
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That's something! Guess you could voice the whole campaign if you wanted to.
I'll add you to the ongoing conversation (no pun intended). -
If you need any voicework, count me as interested!
What kind of voices do you do?
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Libraries with piped in sewage... How classy.
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raymeld: You will not need Thief 2. You will need to run fmselect.bat (or thief.exe -fm), and I think set up a few folders where the FM selector will store the missions.
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LFG.HU, by yours truly.
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Although it is more than five years old now (
), it may be interesting for beginners to look at the thread where I documented making Fiasco at Fauchard Street, a small-medium-sized mission using newbie-friendly and time-saving methods. It can give you an idea on what kind of work goes into a mission, and how you can manage the workflow. Of course, you've got even more tools to work with today - including modular architecture, optimised code and a generally broader asset base.Another, related point: Fiasco is not a micro-mission. I see the "1-5 rooms" suggestion, but I'd recommend going a bit further. You don't need to create a sprawling FM, especially not on your first try, but if you make those 5 rooms, you can make it 10 and get away with it.
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I didn't come to TDM as a complete newbie, but I did pick up the much more obscure and ornery Dromed without any sort of technical or programming background. It was less scary than I originally expected, and went surprisingly well. Now DarkRadiant is much more user-friendly than Dromed, and it has become even more accommodating since its first versions. By more-or-less following the A-Z tutorial, you can gain most of the skills you need to make a mission, and if you are stuck, just ask on the forums.The rest is imagination and perseverance. Making levels is always time-consuming, but I'd estimate a beginner could create a decent-sized maps over one or two months, or a small one in a few weeks - and that's without the new architectural modules.
You don't really need to learn modelling to make a mission (I have never created a custom model, although I have asked people to make a few simple ones), while creating custom textures is fairly straightforward. But at this stage, TDM has more than enough base assets to let you develop a mission of your preferred type (except monster missions, since at this point we only have giant spiders and fire elementals).
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Hint: First, you must find the lion.
Then, find a way to get behind the lion.
Spoiler:
What you are looking for is right in the same location where you found the book mentioning the puzzle.
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Not for lack of trying, though. I remember when Ion Storm were still talking about giant free-roaming city missions for Thief 3 (this was very early), people were full of ideas they wanted to realise when it released. I even told myself I'd try my hand at making one, years before I even tried Dromed - although my brother dabbled in it, and made Everyone's First Haunt-filled Cathedral Mission (would have been a solid 2/10 if it ever got released).
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Thanks! What kind of voices do you do?
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I provided the vocal lines for the cynic character so I can do one of the merchants.
Are these scripts already written?
Yes, please head over to the campaign conversations thread, and look around for anything you like.
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Thanks for the offers, folks! As Bikerdude wrote, this mission is fairly far along, with complete architecture and mostly complete readables/AI patrols/soundscape, and what we really need is to clear a few roadblocks in our way.
Obsttorte, we do have your mission cutscene!
What we will need is either an additional campaign intro (you have access to the campaign forum, I'm referring to this one), or the expansion of the cutscene you made. The additional challenge is that we will need some drawn backgrounds and images that aren't based on screenshots. We can be more economical than our original plan, but it is still work. We are in contact with the great Joe Noelker, so he can record some lines.WRT additional voice acting, we will need the following kind of voices:
- Smart guard
- Dumb guard
- Two merchants (critic/cynic voices)
- Someone who can speak with a tone of harsh authority and sarcasm (multiple lines).
- Someone with a clear voice (one line)
- Someone with a calm and measured voice (one line)
These can be combined.
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That looks scary as hell; I would be afraid to ride it.
Steam Greenlight: TDM is ranked #1 atm.
in The Dark Mod
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That's really cool, and a testament to all the work that has been done in making this mod, then turning it standalone, then refining it even further.
In the unlikely event we don't make it, we can still benefit from a slogan like "Too hot for Steam", or "VALVE hates it! Local man discovers one weird mod to help his thieving!"