Sotha

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.

Okay dokey. Here goes. This mission had so much potential, but unfortunately it did not live to it's full potential due to some issues. Make no mistake, this really is a good mission. But it could have easily been excellent or outstanding, but sadly just missed the mark. As an ending remark, I truly have to say that Bikerdudes missions seem to evolve at a mind staggering rate. I just had to fire up Business As Usual just to compare this mission. You mapping technique developes very rapidly! I'm eagerly waiting your next map.

Argh! Getting utterly frustrated here. I've completed all objectives, and been looking the exit for too long now. EDIT: nevermind. Found it. Writing a review now...

I also put medium in my map. Also, took the liberty of changing "Size (MB)" -> "Mission Size"

Thanks, Summer! Thomas Porter 1 on currently in the works. It's going to be the heist of Captain Knighton's Manor, which was mentioned in the Beleaguered Fence. It'll be finished in the next 1-3 months. Also, remember to cast your votes for both missions! I hope you enjoy The Glenham Tower! Remember, the undead are powerful, try to sneak past them rather than fighting them face to face.

On size: I can not see any benefit in estimating file size in this list. Instead it would be fun to know the size of the mission the mapper is aiming for. Some suggestion comparisons: Small: thiefs den 1, outpost Medium: beleaguered fence, builders influence Large: the heart, the alchemist

I updated my release date. For now, I am using Thomas Porter as the name of the series, according to the player character.

How odd! I have the keys CURRENTLY like in Fidcals before screenshots. It is really difficult to see the keys. Fidcals brightener certainly looks like a big improvement. The keys probably should look like that by default. I personally find AI bound objects so difficult to see, that I usually blind frob everything, a habit which certainly should not be necessary! EDIT: oh, and I am using default tdm settings. Only thing I've changed was the screen resolution and gamma according to the trainer.

Cool. Is there a before and after brightener screenshots? Would love to see how it brightens them...

Okay. Tried to get my work in DR, but I am running into trouble here. Arcturus' tutorial says: I have installed the scripts, but the exporter does not have the option "UV image as material!" When I open the file in a text editor, there is no reference to TDM materials I can change manually. Assistance, bitte? I tried ASE exporter versions 0.6.9 and 0.6.10, but neither has it. I cannot proceed since I cannot get the darkmod materials set up on the model.

Ooh. Got an eureka-moment for the uv mapping. Now textures are aligned much better. The cylindrical parts were easy: I just added one seam according to Arcturus's tutorial and unwrapping provided nice results. The pointy parts are difficult though. If I add a seam and unwrap, the faces are not rectangular in the uw editor. They are rotated so that they are aligned circularly. The only way to get them rectangular was to first make the pointy parts cylidrical, then apply uv-map, the then make the cylinder back pointy again. So much to learn... But it's rewarding to make progress every now and then..