Sotha

I've made an assortment of custom models loot for my mission. For some reason they do not frob-highlight. Does anyone have any ideas why or how to fix this?

Excellent! I'll PM you as soon as I get the thing uploaded..

Due to RL problems and mapping preference I cannot hold back the release of The Knighton Manor fan mission any longer. So I suppose it is time to betatest and release this map. This is a small/medium sized map, about the size of The Beleaguered Fence and The Glenham Tower. (Sotha-sized so to speak. ) The Knighton Manor is a prequel for The Beleaguered Fence. Any volunteers? 2-3 experienced mappers would be nice. Also, Melan.. You've been so fantastic betatester in my previous map releases, so I would be really happy if you helped me out once again. I'd also like to the testers pay special attention to the readables. I'm not a native english speaker so I really need help in that area. Thank you very much! After I get this map out, I'm gonna take a looooooooooooong break from mapping, at least half a year. I'll still hang around here and happily play other mappers contributions.

Heh.. Just spotted this during my WIP map testing. I had an objective which forbids killing, but I didn't have the player responsible box checked. I was simply wandering around and suddenly the mission was failed due to the do not kill objective. I guess the phantom killer stroke again. Poor AI's are dropping like flies.

My intention was not to upset, sorry. It is still a good mission, make no mistake. Okay, I thought it would be nice to have a system which is comparable with others. I'll be nice and rate it then. Appearance: Excellent. Standard Bikerdude stuff. Gameplay: Good. Would have been excellent without tough clue and lack of AI. (Would have been only OK, if the city part would have not been so fun and nice.) Story and text: Excellent. It would have been nice to have some more details in the in-game objective-list. I had to save, restart and check the briefing again to know what to do with the fake skull. Due to AI limitiations? Okay I did not know that. Separate maps in inventory, then? City map, Sewer map... Feasable and possible. Impressive. I recommend focusing and perfecting one mission at the time. I can imagine multiple unfinished missions can result in a burnout. I repeat, this was a good mission. I just listed some of the downsides. The cathedral rooms were not very interesting because they all looked the same, therefore the use of the word 'clone.' That is the weird thing. I just came here from my map test, where I have a big outside area with four (!) AI's visible. And it runs smoothly. But then again, my area is nowhere near the high detail level you had in the cathedral. I keep outside scenes rather low-poly to make sure multiple AI's can be on screen. And my mission is smaller. Well, it is the mappers job to choose the clues he places in his mission. It is, however, important to remember that this is a game and it should be fun. If the clues are too vague it will result in frustration and that is not fun. And it is a shame that a good mission gets abandoned by the player because he can't read latin and cannot make progress. I felt like quitting at that stage, but I'm glad I didn't. I understand that setting the clue difficulty right is really really difficult. But in essence, clues should be contained in the game world. The solution should be found in the game rather than the player picks up a dictionary in the real world. If there was a latin-english dictionary in the mission, the situation would be entirely different. No problems, glad to be of service! Know also that my feedback is not intended to aggravate you, I'm more like trying to bring up points which would improve your future work drastically. At least in my opinion.

Worked again on my map after a long pause. It was very difficult to get going because I didn't remember at which stage I was in. Not going to leave this map unattended anymore. I'm working at present to get it to betatesting and released. Then it's off my hands.

Finished. I'm not rating this, because the rating system in the thread is not compatible with the ratings all the other missions are using. Incompatible rating means it is useless to rate this using these options. Finally, you should learn how to do alpha gradients on your briefing images to avoid them being 'boxy.' Here is how: 1) get GIMP 2) open your image 3) layer->transparency->add alpha channel 4) Go to Layer>Mask>Add Layer mask 5) when prompted to select a type, select "Layer's Alpha channel" 6) check to make sure you're set to edit the layer mask (it should default to this) NOTE: What's going on is the "White" of your mask is the "visible", the "black" is the "invisible", and of course the greys are in between. 7) Set your foreground color to White and your Background color to Black. 8) Choose the gradient tool. 9) Set your Gradient to "FG to BG (RGB)" 10) Your White-to-black gradient is now the visible-to-invisible alpha channel gradient. You'll have to work with that to get the effect you desire. I hope this helps. And finally, thanks for using my briefing system. This is the first real mission that uses it.

Oh there is a thread like this? I was some time ago in a conference where there was a presentation on DNA origamis. That was so awesome, I was enthralled by the entire talk. Yeah, definately a Holy Grail... I'm pretty sure we will see very impressive nanostructures generated by this technique in the future.

Cool! I think this explains a lot and helps understand some of the arguments presented.

I think people use small grids because that way they feel that they get exactly what they want. I mean the brush does not change form in 'quantums' but arbitrarily. Of course it is a bad tactic since it results in terrible amount of problems. But it is human and understandable if people have no previous experience with CADish thingies, I think. Imagine a painter who is confined to only restricted movements with their brush.

-Brilliant! Great job! Now the mappers don't need to worry about ambient song volumes anymore.

Huh? Really? I've always used grid 8 for basic geometry building. Never had leak problems. I've never used larger grid. In glenham I had outside sounds leaking inside the tower if the walls were thinner than 8 units. The problem came from grid 8 walls, which were dragged diagonally. And then the wall thickness gets smaller of course. When I increased the thickness to 8 it worked properly again. Never ever use so small grid for basic geometry building. Never! Build with 8 grid or higher. Use the smaller grid only for fine object model placement.

Congrats!

Yep.. Lookin' good. (As always..)

Hm, okay, good to know. My lips are turnin' blue here. :-D Once my RL busy streak is over I'll consider getting my FM out for 1.02, instead of waiting 1.03

I'd really like to volunteer for testing, but unfortunately I don't have time... Damned real life... At any rate: Congrats for the upcoming release, Bikerdude!

Had a look at eax? Nope, I've not been at home lately. At present I'm happy with current soundscape with no need to improve that. I'll check later to see if I get interested. I'm not sure if I'm willing to see trouble if it won't work for all players, though...

I'm glad you like it! Really nice to see others enjoying the fruits of my work. I didn't do it only for myself, then.. The stages are in numerical order. The buttons you can think like this: nextbuttonx x is the stage the button click leaves. Prevbuttony y is the stage the button press enters. This is because I named the buttons simply in the order they appear: nextbutton1 goes to stage 2, prevbutton1 goes to stage 1. EAX question: no, if it requires special actions from my part... i dont know anything about this.

Well, the original idea of this briefing was to create an animated briefing to provide the same functionality that the non-graphical briefing offers. Basically show the text with pages and show a floating picture. I hated the original briefings because of the awkward delay-settings. Getting the delays right was time consuming and I've noticed in a few FM's that the text disappears before I've had time to read it. Not good. This briefing is intended to let people using the non-graphical briefing to be able to create easily simple animated briefings with pages. I main idea was not to have it flow. The main idea is to have it in pages. This briefing can show multiple images per page if the user simply adds them in the .gui file. Simply further editing of the .gui-file can accomplish probably everything people are thinking (delayed-flow-with buttons, pause button, images float after pressing next page...) about here. This briefing is exactly what I wanted and this is what I'm going to used in the future in my FM's. Others are also welcome to use it if they like it. The briefing works like this: Start briefing, show text1, show nextbutton1, put image1 in motionIf nextbutton1 is pressed, hide text1, nextbutton1, image1. Show text2, nextbutton2, previousbutton1. Put image2 in motion.If prevbutton1 is pressed, hide text2, nextbutton2, previousbutton1. Show text1, nextbutton1. Put image1 in motion. To have this flow as a menu option you would need a routine which secretly 'presses'/targets the current visible nextbutton automatically after a certain delay the user sets in the menu. The next/previous-buttons would still be visible so the user can browser forward as needed. But if the delay in the menu is fixed, like wait 30s then all the screens would take that long without taking into account the amount of text on-screen. A clumsy system. Oh, and it would work only for this .gui file. What if mapper further edits a new kind of gui to suit his/her needs better? What if the mapper wants to have a genuine briefing *movie* that flows without pause functionality? These might be really cool with spoken narrative. Add a fixed pause there and it gets really clumsy.

The briefing is a sort of 'front cover' for a FM, like a front cover of a book. I'm thinking it is the mappers choice to decide what kind of briefing suits the FM (s)he has created with many hours of sweat. Nothing prevents people of creating their very own briefing movies, so I think it might be an impossible task to mash all possibilities under some kind of options. And I suspect mappers are not keen to build several briefing scenes for one mission. Plus a plethora of briefing alternatives/options would only confuse the players. Let the mapper decide, as long as they make sure the briefing is player friendly. With delayed animation the mapper needs to be extra-special sure that all users have time to read the text on-screen while not frustrating other users with too long delays. With next/prev-button briefing this problem is essentially annihilated. It might also be that mappers who have used the plain-text briefing might get interested in animated briefings with this new gui, thus providing the community with graphically more impressive experience. Well, that is if mappers are not frightened with possible briefing breakage upon TDM update..

Oh, I thought the idea was not to do TDM changes which break the existing FM's. I'd like to hear the official team opinion of breaking the main menu. This current mainmenu_briefing.gui of mine is simply a modified version of the original. It gets called just like the original did. The difference is only that instead of a steady flowing animation, this one presents buttons which control the animation. My briefing gets started and terminated exactly the same way the original briefing did. So I think doing alterations to the mainmenu, which breaks my briefing certainly breaks all the existing ORIGINAL briefings too! My briefing should be compatible to changes, which the original briefing is also compatible with. Ideally imo we want a stable menu system, which the mappers can tailor to their own needs without fear of breaking changes as long as the structure of the custom menu is designed to work with the original. Giving this liberty allows creation of diverse spectrum of custom mainmenu briefings as long as the briefing creators see the trouble to see how the original mainmenu_briefing.gui works. Your suggestion would confine future briefings to be according to a certain template, without not so much liberty in the design.

Of course not! I'm just glad if someone finds this good enough to be willing to use it. Check the mainmenu_briefing.gui file: I tried to write there clear instructions how to edit the file to mapper's own needs. Feel free to ask here if you run into trouble.

Heh.. Well, going in without lockpicks, of course it's tough. It is far easier with them. All the weirdness the AI does is due to AI coding. The map does not contain any special AI pointers, just path_corners, path_waits and path_sits. Oh, and the fleepoints for the prisoners and the guards. I've also noticed in my current WIP map that sometimes (rather rarely) alerted AI just stop and stand at a fixed point doing nothing forever with their swords drawn. Bug (hard to reproduce)? EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think the guards in the barracks were set sleeping. If they get alerted badly enough, they won't go back to sleep, but simply stop in their position after the alert level has dropped? Not sure. With this I agree. I kinda learned this the hard way and it is mentioned in my FM design tips wiki article so others do not make the same blunder.

Okay, everything seems to be working, so I think it is ready now. Here is a simple test mission to show how the alternative briefing works. http://www.mediafire...ewg8ws3s9atth8g The package includes also a challenging mini-survival mission to entice people to test this!! As always, feedback is appreciated...

Well, nanofibers are really strong in the direction of the fibre. Perpendicular to the fiber, mechanical properties are of course weaker. Think about graphene, for example. And then there is the problem of foam. You can easily achieve a foam with polymeric materials (styrox for example) or foaming liquids (mmhh, beer), but it's difficult to see how you could form an airtight foam of carbon nanotubes or nanospheres. That's why I was thinking of an individual micro to nanocontainer, which you could will with gas. Vacuum is even more difficult.