Sotha

Could you please summarize your method, briefly, here?

I've built some outdoors areas, and I felt that it would be nice to have convincing-looking large bushes. The kind of bush you line up between the ground and the skybox wall, as presented in both Ulysses missions. An organic line of bushes is the easiest way to mask the fact that an outdoor area in idtech4 is just another room, but with terrain ground and skybox walls and ceiling. The other big obstacle in building good looking outdoors area is texture blending. The mapper faces the work flow of i) make terrain, ii) make texture blend tricks for the terrain patch, iii) export .ase, iv) reimport the model, v) repeat iterations to make it look good, vi) repeat for each texture blend variation (grass-to-road, grass-to-rock, etc.) Very tedious. I wonder if a set of terrain pieces that would fit together would help. Getting the texture seams fixed between the module pieces nullifies benefits, unfortunately.

I have not tested it yet, but this could very be useful for custom TDM night time skyboxes. http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape/ Sure, it is for space, not atmosphere, but a skybox with these stars + standard TDM clouds might work just fine.

Thanks again, Greebo! Didn't spot any issues with the *pre3, except the rotation bug. I'm also testing *pre4 now.

I haven't seen ocn here for quite while now, unfortunately. He used to have a website, which I used to contact him when I was making the Transaction, IIRC. That website is no longer online.

Yup! Seawater now has a "sexyness" attribute attached, which is nice. I hope you can fix the remaining issues.

Haha! So, can we sue them for epic $$$? With the money we get from the case we can start a fund that makes sure nobody in the TDM community needs to do honest work ever again. ;D

Boohoo! My .roq briefings are gonna look like children's crafts next to a multimillion dollar hollywood production! Well Done, mister!

"The Origins of Caulk" sounds like an extremely rare occult book someone ought to steal from an eccentric noble, who collects bizarre things. Mapping bugs might bite, gotta get some insect deterrent...

This is a fun idea. One evening, if I have time, I'm definitely gonna visit the channel.

Love your work, man. I hope it has some custom musics..

Wow. That's some Big Brother censorship in there, Obs. The song contains audio snippets from german air raid, so that's why it has been censored in Germany, I guess. Let's just pretend history did not happen, shall we?

This is good music for my solo saturday evening with good 12-year-old whiskey. I dunno about the Hawking talking and the huge distortion that starts around the middle part, though.

Howsabout "Birefringence" I love the word. Say it. It is fun! In science it is a property of matter of which refractive index is dependent on the polarization of the light. So to say, a single ray of light (consisting of various polarizations), can take a different route through a material. This concept might be easy to expand to a philosophical level as well: sort of how things, in reality, are not necessary what they optically appear.

Nom is right. Them mushrooms look delicious. Nom nom nom.

Didn't they have radiators in the Victorian era? I would certainly expect to see such a thing in an expensive manor with electric lights. Nice looking model.

Thanks for the comments, everyone! I don't have the time to reply to all of them, but I do read every comment that appears in my FM threads. I'm glad people have enjoyed the mission so much. @Deadlove, nope, I haven't played Prey, but

Interesting discussion here. My philosophy is relatively simple, really. The TDM mission is a sea of light with islands of darkness. The player is supposed to make interesting/exciting dashes from island of darkness to the next one while the guards look the other way. Not all islands are so close that the player can move between them safely. The player is required to occasionally use boats (tools) to move safely. Or they could risk it without tools, but that is very dangerous. Or there might be a clever way to circumvent it, but that is not always guaranteed. There are areas of high risk and low risk. Some calm safe havens, too. A good really good map has it all: calm areas, tough areas, impossible area (without tools). The mappers job is to present as many different and interesting possibilities to the player to freely choose how to proceed. But make sure the decisions have consequences. That's the technical gameplay philosophy. Of course a good map needs a good plot, some gossip and a reason why the player is there. And aesthetics, but that's less important to me than gameplay or plot. Some people will agree with me and some people will disagree. It is okay. There are many ways to play a TDM FM and all the ways are correct. I guess the same applies to FM design, too.

Excellent work! To the CORE! (If unbugged and mature enough).

For me this is a non-issue. I would never bother making mission design decisions or changes because of the stealth score. The stealth score is just a stealth score and there is no reason to expect the mappers design their mission so that it is possible to complete it with zero score.

Mortz! Please do not exceed 2.2 kilomortz or the transformer will fail in a way most spectacular.

Hi all! Goldwell was interested in a pipe smoking animation I made long ago, so I dug it out from my hard drive and wanted to share it with everybody. You can get the basic files from here and it comes with a test map. You might want to make a custom entity for the smoker: this package simply overrides the tdm_ai_guard_proguard_devel.def. You can examine custom_anim_ai.def in ulysses_genesis.pk4 to learn how to do this. Files are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwR0ORZU5sracHJfWVJ2RTlPMTQ/view?usp=sharing This is what it looks like: Enjoy! Please note: I do not encourage people to inhale smoke from any source. It is absurd. Do not do it. It kills you. Thank you!