Sotha

Or then the mission is going to be crap, because I'm focusing on the wrong things..

:laugh: I am sure the designer is clever enough to put a trigger that teleports everything getting close to the skybox into space. Typical problem is that everything going to space loses it bearings during the teleporting..

Hey, yeah, that would be nice. The three best maps are obtained by the 'normal' voting and then there would be a separate final voting where the winner is chosen by "which one map should win" voting. It would increase excitement, since you cannot estimate which map will really win from the normal votes. And the community would have the final say which map is the best of all of the contest entries. Fidcal is the boss of this contest, so it is his decision. What say you?

I agree! It would help a lot to have a wiki tutorial on the stuff.... *wink wink, nudge nudge* Say no more..

Inspired by Graymans excellent vertical contest entry, I am considering the possibility of making one character unique in vocals in my next mission. Before going any further with this thought I want to ask a few things here just so I know what I'm stepping into. I've no experience in recording nor voice acting. 1) is it possible for a mapper to create a light vocal set, say one or two barks per category, and use it for an ai. 2) where can I find a list for the barks I need? 3) I do not have any experience in this kind of endeavor: how much work is it? Recording, .oggifying, soundshader creation, how to mash everything into a vocal set? 4) Is there anything else I should take into account?

First thoughts after seeing this post: "A platformer? Oh, no! It simply CANNOT be GOOD." First toughts after seeing the player spawn place: "Oh, no. It IS another platformer. Booring. " First toughts after seeing the outside: "WHAT THE!? OMG. *stunned* <big pause>" And after that I was just giggling at your ingenuity. And yes, I felt somewhat nauseous. Never had that before with a computer game. Um.. Hard to evaluate this.. I fiddled my grades up and down and this is the final grading. Gameplay: good. Can't say more. It's not a sneaking game. It's a platformer. But it was great fun gameplay wise. Not too easy. Not too hard. Good. But because TDM is a SNEAKING game, one would expect some sneaking or thieving. So no excellent grade, unfortunately. Appearance: Excellent. It looked good. But the verticality aspect upgrades my grade to excellent. This map uses verticality very well. It is dependant on it. It does it quite nicely. Story: Tolerable. Nope. No story here. It would have been cool to jump from the swing into the kings suite with tons of readables on the history of the swing. Might have been cool to have some crowd watching the swing from the distance. But hey! It's a platformer! It does not need a plot. So finally, I suppose I was wrong when I saw the post. It's a platformer. It's good. This mission is the proof that TDM can be used to create unbelievably large diversity of missions. I'll end in a silly comparison: If TDM is Half-Life 2, then this map is Portal.

Well, maybe, but all kinds of voting systems would have their own limitations. Maybe an objective oriented view helps: This contest is not about someone winning, but sparking a steady flow of high quality maps for the community to play. Recording the players subjective impression right after playing and some statistics indeed selects the winning map. When enough people feel great after playing a mission, that mission probably wins. However, the ranking system also applies outside the contest. Later, when new players come to TDM they can check the ratings and maybe find the excellent missions before the poorer ones. So, this system has some advantages over simple "Which map wins a) somewhere, betrayal... choose only one." Statistical collection of subjective impressions is probably sufficiently accurate measurement for the most liked map in this contest, since there is no big prizes, sportscars and supermodels involved. Nothing, of course, prevents people trying the missions they're forgotten about again and readjust their votes before the official voting ends. It certainly would be interesting, in an academic point of view, to do the simple "who wins" -poll after the contest to see how well it matches with the winner of the collection of impressions..

Hail to the voting deadline! I'm pretty sure that now when people know when contest voting time runs out on 11.09.2010 (Vertical contest, WTC day, intentional?), they're gonna play the missions soon so they can vote while the voting box is still hot. Everyone, it's time to download the missions and start playing and voting! At present it looks like Grayman is winning, closely followed by Bikerdude, me and Fieldmedic. My ratings probably will not change much anymore, but other missions are still going to almost double the votes they have now.

Heh.. Nice to see that the community has clever ideas for workarounds, but... Wouldn't it be easier, while waiting for the proper fix, simply cut down save&load cycles and deal with the mistakes you make during a mission? It is a matter of taste of course, but saveloading removes a lot of tension and excitement. Try cutting saveloading. It really boosts gameplay. I wonder if there was an *option* for Iron Man (Iron Thief?) difficulty setting, which prohibits saving.. It would truly mean something if someone ghosted The Glenham Tower, for example, in Iron Man mode..

As for secret guilds.... This is a free community. I see no right for anyone to prevent you from starting an unofficial Halloween Contest Thread 2010 with rules and start gathering enrollments. Deadline: all missions should be playable by halloween! Plenty of mapping time for those interested. Would be cool!

-Oh.. I thought it would be fun if we had some standard times for contests. There could be the summer contest and the christmas contest. It might be difficult to get mappers for other times, because the aforementioned times are the ones when people typically have extra time. But if you manage to get mappers to participate, then sure. I don't mind having more missions available, as long as they are high quality. The problem is also that if we have too many contests, we will have people who make only maps for contests, because of the visibility. And contests make it rather dull in the sense that we will have many maps with same aspects. After this vertical contest, I'm not sure I'm gonna like seeing tower or tunnel maps for a while...

Interesting discussion, with big problems with discussion technique. http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Ad_hominem But at any rate I'll put my personal opinion here: In Finland people drink themselves to death or they smoke themselves to death. Before dying, they cause huge health costs for the country. Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes is legal. We do not need any more legal health problem aggravators. And no, I do not know anyone smoking pot, but I know many people drinking or smoking themselves to the death. I'm sure legalizing something like MJ would result in problems in the population using the stuff resulting in even more health problems. I blatantly refuse to accept any arguments that states MJ is purely beneficial to the health. It cannot be.

I updated the Mission Design Tips wiki article with this info.

I quite certain there is no tdm standard, but there are many options. If there is no written clue of the secret, put visual clues. Put a scratch decal caused by the door movement on the floor, like bikerdude did. A subtle yet brillant clue! If the secret is behind a painting, put the painting a bit rotated, so it looks it was tampered with. Generally visual clue tells the observant player that there is something odd in the room, like strangely placed furniture, or odd details like hinges on the bookshelf. Or if you say in a readable "there is a secret in this room," then you can hide the secret without visual clues. Whatever clues you give to the player, always bet on stupidity and dont make them too cryptic. If the objective attached to the secret is optional, when there is no limits for your deviousness.

Or then the mappers and the community should simply acknowledge that everyone cannot be pleased at the same time. And the missions will not run smoothly for those who do not see the effort to obtain a faster computer. The difficulty of making a 'high performance' and 'low performance' options for the mission is the fact that the definition of high and low performance computers are ambiguous. In the heart, there was the option of choosing high or low. I assumed my computer is a high one, as it is: it runs all the modern games with perfect framerates. But still the high option was stuttering for me and I had to resort to the low one. I couldn't help thinking that what kind of monster machine runs this detail level smoothly. Therefore, mappers probably should stick to decent framerates for a decent machine, instead of making missions for the computers available 5 years from now. If it works better with fewer lights, use fewer lights. Don't make a diluted version of the mission to the losers who do not have the killer machine for 5 lights. Oh, and I was playing hitman 3 the other day and a thought occured me. What's with the TDM AI anyways? Is it the AI polys or the thinking which causes performance issues? In hitman 3 there can be tens of AI's in view simultaneously, all walking, thinking and doing things, with absolutely zero impact in performance.

I am not sure. I've seen people complaining about a quicksave bug. I've never encountered such problems, as I do not use quicksaving. Normal saving has always worked for me, but I think it may be due to the fact quicksaving is fast and easy. People save and load often, thus expressing a rare bug more often. But as I said, I'm not sure. Reloading shouldn't have any issues. Only thing I've noticed is that the ambient music stops upon reload. You can easily resurrect the music by going to audio settings and move the ambient volume slider a tiny notch. Avoiding saving and loading improves the game experience in my personal opinion. The game gets more exciting as you have to deal with failures rather than just load a save.

I think it was start_off 1. Check the inherited properties. If that does not help, right click in the entity inspector and select add spawnarg, or something similar. You'll get a list of all spawnargs, shouldn't be difficult to find the correct one from there. I hope this helps, I can't check the exact method now, I am at work.

Me neither. It is going to be awful for the community if there were multiple separate versions of the maps. Map upgrades are entirely a different thing, as long as the old work is superceded. There is always things to improve. However, the best situation is that the map is polished to its full glory before initial release, and after it is released it stands on it own, without the need to improve it anymore.

How very odd. I've never encountered this in my numerous tests in this map. Therefore I can't see how it would trigger a low fps. The dust emitters may cause lag on slow computers, but they will get turned off after a few seconds, thus removing the performance load. Maybe it is a TDM bug? I never use quicksave myself. Typically I save rather seldom, only when I make major progress, and even then I do a normal save. When you restart from the beginning, try to avoid quicksave and save a bit less often?

I wonder what's the size of the .map file. Think what would happen if someone changed a texture or a model name somewhere. Fire up your text editor and time to do some find&replace. And the next time you wake up to reality it says "AAS out of date" **shivers**

Indeed! If the bike was destroyed (write-off?) it's really lucky you got out unscathed. Curious thing: I got almost run over by a car on my bicycle today. Must be somekind of international idiots-behind-driving-wheels theme week now.

It would not get to the good parts of dmapping at all, since it would ***leaked*** into space.

I also noticed this. I'm thinking it is due to map outside region visportalling. Not sure, though.

This is not a DR question per se, but a low priority question, of which answer I may or may not use in the future: Is there an AI spawnarg, which changes the amount of damage the AI does in combat? I'm thinking about melee attack, which deals so much damage that it kills the player/AI's instantly. Would fit for example, a deadly swordsman, who always strikes at their victims hearts with unerring accuracy. You know... Just to keep the player at their toes, as usual.