Sotha

I can confirm this. Winning AI in one to one combat is really easy. I just beat a revenant in 1t1 combat easily. Combat difficulty = normal. It works like said by OP: AI spots you. Prepare sword to hitting. The revenants chooses to block correspondently. Stand in place and wait for the revenant to get bored. When they do, they drop the defence and try to attack. Now, you can release the mouse and move backwards. You get a hit in, and the revenant misses. Rinse and repeat and you will win if you have enough room to back down and no other enemies attack you. I am not sure if it an expoit, though. If you get attacked by multiple enemies, you are screwed.

There are no fighting focused missions. Some missions do have forced fight as part of their plot. If you want to fight, try Transaction. That has a single forced fighting session as a plot element. You might also want to try Lich Queen's Demise. The revenants in that mission respawn if you kill them. That should perhaps make the mission more "fightable" than most.

About thrown bricks... Could we let the AI cheat just a little bit? When the AI detects being hit by a brick, get current player position. AI goes WTF and moves to the position. Sure the player has time to move between brick throwing and brick landing, but considering the fly speed of brick is fast and throw distance is short, the delta between the throwing position and the position the player is when the brick hits cannot be too different. Could this cheating be applied to AI who are shot with an arrow and survive? Currently, you can pepper an AI from the darkness with arrows until they die and they passively take hits without doing much. Would it be better if the AI cheated just a little bit and would run to the shooting position? It would be similar abstraction to the "arrow to the head does not kill alert AI" rule. The AI feels the direction from which the attack came, and attacks there to avoid being hurt again. Of course some additional fuzzyness could be added. Instead of sending the AI to the exact player position, send the AI to random position within 5m radius of the player position.

Yes, Grayman's children are on par with tripleA title AIs, if not exceeding them. I do not claim to know anything about AI programming, but some of the critique presented in the video feels a bit unfair. The list of possible situations a stealth AI might encounter is long and complicated compared to shooter AI. It surely is very difficult to get the AI to react appropriately to every foreseeable circumstance. So hats off and cheers to all the AI programmers. Ours have done a particularily good job!

What an amazing mission. I've completed the first part. It kept me so absorbed that I failed completely to go to sleep at my normal time. Todays gonna be loooooong day at work...zzzzz. Great mission. I hope to play the second part soon! Thank you for you work, this mission is really impressive. Any tips for a fellow mapper how to reach similar visual quality? What is the secret in making locations so "lived-in?" It seems to be natural talent and effortless for you to maintain consistent ultra-high quality visuals. How do you do it?

Modeling stuff for Blender. These will work on Blender 2.7. Newer version compatibility has not been tested. Arcturus made a blender rig file for male and female AI: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14970-blender-rig-for-standard-male-npc/ It works, and I've been using it in my animation activities. Exporting with ARX:EOS md5 exporter is possible. Everything seems to work, but the animation file sizes sre slightly larger than with other exporters. Be careful though, some other blender md5 exporters bork the AI bounding box which causes weird shadow clipping. The Arx exporter works fine. Link: http://arxendofsun.solarsplace.com/downloads/io_scene_md5.zip I made a very short instruction guide here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14970-blender-rig-for-standard-male-npc/?do=findComment&comment=325423

@obst, it is Rayleigh scattering in science terms. The further scenery is, the more blue or desaturated towards blue it is as blue light scatters more than longer wavelenghts. Anyhow, for me this is a lost cause. Foflights cannot be done with skyboxes (to simulate RS), if textures are scaled down, their repetition becomes painfully apparent... Probably a skilled photoshop artist is needed, not a mapper.

Here is a screenie and the .map if someone else wants to try to improve it. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwR0ORZU5sraQWFpQlZNYXg2eTQ/view?usp=sharing I just can't get what it causing the unnatural crappy look...

I gave it a try but it just looks shit. Not going to even post a picture. I can't do it but maybe someone else can.

+1! and me too! I hope it will be successful!

I did some analysis and yeah, it looks like it is easy to place objects in the incorrect place in the skybox. If a human is 1.8m or 88 DRunits tall, then DR units are ~49 units/m. Thus if you do a decent cityscape vistas, like the view from Uspenski cathedral, Helsinki: The buildings shown are roughly 100m away in a nice long vista. Thus the object should be 4800 units away in in game geometry or 300 units away in skybox geometry. Closer objects should probably be in the playing area. Just throwing some rules of a thumb here to get a feel what the numbers should be like. For a hilltop church like the Uspenski, one would do *Square play area of certain dimensions with border buildings in the play area rather than skybox. *Check play area size and make a large skybox with a "play area dimensions"/16 forbidden zone in the middle of the skybox and then *pepper 1/16 buildings into the skybox 300 units away from the play area. That might probably work.

Hm.. I tried to make believable 3d skybox in the past, but it was difficult. I tried a concept of a mission where the player climbs to a tall tower. Tower supposed to be in game, and the surrounding city in the skybox. Since the tower was really tall, the surrounding cityscape needed to be very convincing and moving skybox camera was used. I made 1/16 scale buildings and pasted them into the skybox room. It looked like crap. I could not exactly put my finger on what was the thing that made it look wrong. Perhaps the building models, perhaps the lighting, perhaps the streets. Everyhting in the skybox area looked weird somehow. I dunno. Because I could not identify the problem, I abandoned the attempt. Perhaps it would need to work like this: tower in game area. Immediate surroundings around the tower in game area, other cityscape in the skybox area.

This was a good mission. What I didn't like: *defocused. Big town, lots of meaningless places. Good thing I had a map. I find it appealing to have a single location that is well focused. Here you had maybe little too much of everything. *keyhunt. This is also related to defocusedness. Lots of keys, lots of doors that cannot be picked. When I started the mission, I headed directly to the main location, but could not get inside, because the gate was locked. Frustrated, I started wandering around. I knew what I needed to do, but I could not get to the location. I wandered in locations I didn't feel I would even want to go, but I had to because I could not go where I was supposed to. I was irritated not being able to make progress, but I had to wander aimlessly. Finally, about to give up, I wandered back to the compound I was supposed to go to... AND THE GATE WAS NOW OPEN. I didn't have any clue why it was open, and I had not found any key for it. But at least I got back into the mission. Those felt quite critical problems for me, but good thing I didn't quit. What I liked: *Ultra-high detail. Windows, vistas from apartments. Wow factor indeed. *Use of light. This mission, in indoor areas, shows specialist quality level in the use of lighting. Lights of different color, custom locale fitting ambient light. Cool candy. Very well done! *Good AI patrols. *Custom conversations and player remarks. There is so much stuff to love, so I cannot give it a poor grade for gameplay. But the aimless wandering and keyhunts almost killed it for me.

I actually have OBS installed but I've not configured it. It was faster to do it with a known workflow using old software than use time to learn the new one. Yep, I must be getting old: it is really easy to get stuck in doing just the way I've always done them.

Played this just now. It took me 1.5hrs, with a stealth score of 51. No knockouts or kills. Interesting plot & mystery. Well designed mission. Excellent aesthetics. I even got a map, which was certainly necessary, due to the complexity of the manor. Space was very well thought of and I really liked the architecture and the use of verticality, so that stairs shift the level inside a single floor. That breaks the flatness in an interesting way. My only gripe was the handling of the grates. I was causing a lot of alerts when I tried to move them out of the way. Other than that, this mission is a masterpiece! Excellent job! Thanks for making it!

Thanks! Yes, it will be a simple package of files that add a "atdm:citywatch_gunner" people can just add into their mission. (Or simply add an atdm_X_archer and def_attach the gun to them instead of the bow). The package should contain gun model, def files and animation files. No source changes are necessary. People could even replace the gun with their own custom weapon model. Let's see.

Citywatch raid with the new equipment: Looks like our AI are headshot specialists. Any idea how I can change the rate how long they have to cool down before attacking again?

Bridgeport Citywatch Armoury Upgraded! Recent deal with the Inventor's Guild has brought new arsenal to our ever vigilant law enforcers! The IG Mark III Perforator is expected to bring terror to the hearts of the the thieves, rabble and other would-be-criminals. Loud, deadly and accurate, the new weapon is not expected to fully replace the old, slower longbow guards, as the Perforator still has some design issues, not to mention the high manufacturing and licesing costs. Still, the mere sight of this experimental yet deadly device should be a good deterrent for criminal activity. Bridgeport has never been safer! I've always wanted to do a gun for an AI and now I had some time for a miniproject. The gun was modeled quickly with DR and I was interested more in functionality than aesthetics. If you think, the gun is ugly, please feel free to make me a better one. It should be around the same size. The origin should be in the middle of the wooden handle, and the gun muzzle should point towards the x-axis. That way I do not need to readjust the hand/holster rotations, which is boring work.. I fooled around with the AI defs and managed to get the correct animations in order. The AI will have the gun in holster, pick it up and shoot the player with it. On todo list: *Make AI always use the gun. Now if the player gets too close, the AI gets flustered and will not fire. It is probably a spawnarg job, but I do not know which one. Any ideas? *The gun shoots broadhead arrows. I need to make a new projectile for it. I was thinking of making the gun very deadly, maybe 70-90% damage to player's health. The projectile should be very fast. *Needs BANG! sounds. *Make a proper shooting animation. Now the AI uses use_righthand animation for shooting. Also, the gun could be single use: the AI shoots it once, then drops it and picks up a dagger. I'm not sure yet. This would open the door for easy implementation of various other kind of single hand missile weapons: small hand crossbows, heavy hand cannons, blowguns, etc.

For me it is either carpenter's work area or a writing desk. Yeah, used Amiga Workbench,too, but sometimes too much guru meditation...

Lowest level of cat "AI" 1) make a sleeping cat model MD5mesh 2) when player goes near it, the cat goes MEOW! (alerting nearby AI) 3) cat plays run-away-at-unnatural-speed animation and disappears In game effect, the cat would be an "alarm mine." It could be implemented with a func_animate and a trigger. If we have resources for more elaborate behavior, it could also react to sound, which is not possible with mere trigger work.

Cute cat you have there, nice work! Is the little beast gonna be a fully animated character? If that is the case, it should be an MD5 model, right? To swat as many flies at once as possible, it might be a good idea to think about general quadruple animal animations. So that eventually all our cats, dogs, wolves, sheep and platypuses use the same animations to get as much stuff working with minimal animation work... But yeah, I know, I thinking waaay too much ahead here.

If someone is capable of doing a 3d skybox with cityscape, would it be good to document the process to the wiki? That way the knowledge stays available to those who want do custom skyboxes, and mappers could easily learn to make their own.

Cute furries. But +1 what SeriousToni said (in 7161). We prolly need most a feral pagan-looking character or some humanoid monsters like werewolf (almost done), rat-people, spider-people, praying mantis-people, or distorted cthulhu-people. (People and humanoids, because that is what we have animations for...)

Wiki pages updated, added slanted door guide: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Doors#Slanted_or_Tilted_Doors Enjoy!