Sotha

Meeting IRL sounds like fun. Best of luck! I envy those who can go, just like that, to another country to meet people. I wonder if a meeting like that could be arranged 'in virtuo:' DayZ standalone players of the TDM community could agree on a server and meet in Chernarus/Solnichiy and have a barbeque party with lots of Rasputin Kvass. And guns of course. I could attend that one as the time investment is much lower. (Let's not tell AB the venue or she comes with a kill team and snipes us dead. Or fills the area with bear trap and land mines.)

Wow! Best of luck! I promise to make you a map for it when you get it ready!

Pardon my ignorance, but why does a singleplayer game need a server browser? Or are you making a multiplayer mod of darkmod?

*Picks up jaw from the floor* This... This mission is magnificent. A diamond. Everything about it hits the perfect-zone. A masterpiece of commercial quality, nay, better than the modern crappy AAA-titles, given free to the community. A shining example for us puny hobbyist mappers! Thank you so much for making this mission. It is clearly a labor of love and I can see the endless hours put into forging it into perfection. The work has been worth it: this mission will be one of the greatest missions TDM will be remembered for. I tried to write some more comments but I cannot. This mission was perfect in all regards and I loved everything. I can just silently marvel, humbly, at the excellence I've been exposed to.

Thanks! Know any good starting values?

Anyone have some good tips how to make good looking water in TDM? I was thinking of making a dilapitated fountain that overflows, but the water textures look quite bad and... non-watery, more like a spell effect.

Scenario: I am a medieval guard. I see a thief I shoot an arrow at him. I hit. He falls down. The one thing I'm NOT gonna do is call it a day and wander off. The one thing I definately will do is walk to the body and push my sword to their throat to make sure they are dead. Otherwise the thief might come back to get some revenge for the arrow I put in him. And that is just the realism argument. Spring already gave the gameplay argument, which is much more valuable than the realism argument.

Scouting orb would be fun for a gadget-oriented thief character. A mapper could make one as a custom asset for their mission. Playing dead is a bad idea and would make no sense at all.

Gotta wait for the update to get this along with other candy. In the mean time, mappers should start stocking their WIP maps with pantries full of delicious healing items!

That was a lightning-fast fix, StevelL. Great job!

Thanks, but I've merely just confirmed the issue. Now we need an awesome coder/scripter/def wizard to actually fix it... That's where the real work lies.

Done. http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4166

Proof: I let AI kick my ass before killing them. 25 delicious "atdm:moveable_food_apple", which the editor claims: "An apple a day keeps a doctor away. Two apples a day keep two doctors away. See under Moveables/Junk for apple core. This food heals 1 HP when eaten." After eating all 25 apples, there is absolutely no change in the health bar. End conclusion: food healing does not work as advertized. Shall I file a bug tracker entry? It would be fair if the food healed 1 hp if it is promised to do so. Eating a full pantry would easily give back around 25% health, which would be significant in gameplay terms.

That does not necessarily mean the healing effect is working.

I could swear it heals nothing. It would be easy to test: add a testmap with a bunch of eatables and one AI. Get hurt and eat the food to see if the health bar moves at all.

Thanks for playing, I'm glad you liked it. Yep, all the scenes were made in DR. Daylight missions are possible to do: check out Fieldmedic's Reap as You Sow. Daylight makes it very difficult, though. The AI is brutally observant when the lightgem is at full illumimation. Yep, TP series is very hard. With my later missions I've become more soft.

I dunno... Hearing that on repeat would be unpleasant after two cycles or more. I am incapable of producing any music, so I really don't know what I am talking about... But! Some ambients are timeless. Like the piano ambient (mansion_piano02a) in TDM. It gives the atmoshphere, but it doesn't get old if you listen to it for a long while. I guess the secret is the rather long delays between the identifiable instrumental sections. Reverse engineering how mansion_piano02a has been put together and incorporating your sample using the same recipe... The end result would work like this: 1) ambient hum, like an air conditioning or drafty halls. Could be low steady level wind. 2) out from the ambient hum, section 00:00 - 00:05 of your sample fades in. "...Dingggg Donggg..." Then fades back into the ambient hum. 3) ambient hum drones on for some moments. 4) out from the ambient hum comes 00:05-00:15 of your sample, again it fades back into the ambient hum. 5) and so forth. That would give the location some spooky, ethereal feel. Would probably not suit a mansion, but maybe a magically distorted cave complex filled with undead.

It would please me greatly if you one day gave it another go with a less-hindered approach. I, on the other hand, will try to remember the stuff mentioned here when I map again. Some criticism, indeed, had its place (that silly lobby. To be fully honest: The lobby is the core choke point of the whole mission. The central nexus. Everyone passed through that way. I never was quite satisfied with it when I worked with the map, but ultimately fixing the crowdiness would have required large map redesign, which I didn't want to do in order to get it released one day) and there is always room to improve and learn something new. Such is progress: we learn by doing. Thanks!

Add context and beautiful it becomes.

You welcome! We are quite civilized around here. Your posts have been civil as well. Disagreements are okay, perhaps we all will learn something from each other. I do not ghost either. I don't see the point: a "ghostable" mission has the special requirement that all the AI look the other way at some point or are similarily "occasionally disabled" in gameplay terms. Or that there is a specially designed "path of darkness" that leads the player through the entire mission. This kind of design means that there is a single one superior way to beat the missions, which is not good in my opinion. I like it when the mission is challenging, requires tool use, gives the tools and allows the player to figure the rest by themselves. When I play, the procedure looks like this: I avoid save/loading. I might save a few times, just to have a fallback position if I die suddenly. But I never load if I make a mistake. I load if I die. This makes the game more exciting and interesting. Savescumming (i.e save, take a step, get discovered, load, take a step, get discovered, load, take a step, do not get discovered, save, repeat...) kills all excitement for me: the mission becomes a chore. Observe and evaluate situation If it looks like I can avoid the AI, I will do so and continue. If some AI are clearly present a high risk (they spend too long time in an area or they clearly observe the route I need to take), I try to look for another way. If that is not possible, I must and I will eliminate them. If I do eliminate, I need to take care of the mess (bodies, blood, weapons). Playing without using tools is odd: why make it more difficult for yourself, when you could just use a tool and get easy time. Using tools is fun, too! A nice distraction + gas arrow can take out a roomful of guards and that is H I L A R I O U S! If she was alerted, then she searched a bit around the body, then gave up and resumed her normal patrol spreading the word of the body as she met other AI. I still do not see why this is problematic. It happens. It is part of the game. The coders have created the behavior. It makes sense. It makes stuff a bit more challenging but it doesn't end the game. She is a witness you can eliminate if you do not like her to spread information about the intruder. So that you can hear someone is walking outside before opening the door? The feature does not have anything to do with AI predictability per se. It is just a tool to hear if someone is moving around before you make your move.

If it is too difficult, do not play on expert difficulty. Choose the easier difficulty levels. That's what the easier difficulty levels are for, right? To give you easier time in order to avoid you not getting frustrated. If the game is too hard, you can also tune the AI acuity in the options. I do admit the mission lobby area was maybe too frequently traveled by AI. BUT! it always depends on patience. The area may be full of AI at one moment, but empty at the next moment. You can also switch off the light and dash through. Or you could blind the AI with a flashbomb and run past. One of the principal benefits of RITs (the things that makes AI do different thing every time they arrive to a room) is that they make the AI more lifelike. There are some TDM missions where the AI are the usual robots-on-rail we are familiar with other commercial stealth games. I find them a bit boring. In TDM, it is a big benefit that we can breath more life into the AI. Sure, it makes the missions more challenging, but -given the overwhelmingly positive feedback I've received for my missions- I think it is one of the stuff people like in TDM. It is clear you disagree and it is okay. I personally like it when AI behave similarily to real people. And finally: what SeriousToni said! You could KO the AI and wait for some moments to see if someone else comes by. Or leave a mine there to do the guarding for you.

Chakkman, could you please explain in detail: The maid found the body you left. Why was this bad for your experience? You say you want to be in control and to be able to plan. You can plan your actions. The unpredictability means you need to take the unpredictability into account. Being in control. It is a game with random elements. You have full control over the player character, but having full control over the AI would not make any sense. You do have partial control over the AI with tools. Use them. If the amount of AI is too much in some area, wait till they are alone and blackjack them. Clear the area and make it so that you can go past the area undetected with your skill level. There are plenty of places to hide the bodies. But there are also the risk of them being discovered. That is the price of the KO. And if the bodies are discovered... well, it all goes back to the original question I asked but was left without an answer: So what? Why is it a bad thing if the body is found. It is not game over.

Thanks for the message and I appreciate that you liked the mission. For me, games are about decision making. You make a decision to KO someone. If you make that decision, then you have a body to dispose. Then you need to make a decision where to toss it and so forth. I love unpredictability and I like to include it in my missions. I made the mission, but even I do not know where the AI goes at what point in time. This, in my view, improves the replayability of the mission. When you play the mission again, it will be different. You can make a new set of choices and the game flows differently. You have different opportunities at different times at different gameplay instances. You KO'd someone. You hid the body poorly. KOing someone will mean that there is the risk that the body will be found. To avoid that risk you need to avoid KO'ing people. Making KOs makes stuff easier (no guard), but also more difficult (body to dispose). Okay, the maid found the body you left. So what? The mission will not terminate because of the found body. The maid freaks out, probably runs to get a guard. Then the mission continues. Perhaps it will be more interesting after the guards are alerted? Also, remember putting a body somewhere visible might make a great distraction. Or if you don't like the message of a body to get around, put the body in a room and a mine (a gasmine if you are nice) in front of the door. If someone tries to go there, they are also removed from the game. Decisions, lots of decisions, lots of play-styles. There are many ways to play a stealth game and all the ways are correct. But I always wonder, why people expect to be able to pull the mission through without making a single mistake, without causing any disturbances and without causing an alarm. Those things are part of the gameplay. It happens. It is okay. Nothing wrong in it. Stop quickloading and embrace the alert guards (with a flashbomb, then run away, hide, and continue the mission normally after the AI calms down). I remember someone once wrote that a FPS shooter has a wide margin of error: health 100% and health 0%. You play and you lose when health is 0%. Wide margin. Then they said that stealth games have a binary margin of error: the AI is not alerted or the AI is alerted. A narrow margin of error. This, of course, is rubbish. The stealth game has the same margin of error as the shooter: as long as you are alive, you have not lost. Getting the AI spooked just makes stuff more interesting and possibly harder. But not too hard if you remember to use the tools at your disposal. The biggest issue, I think, is that mappers often give too little equipment, and the players forget to use them.

You could examine U2: flock .pk4 to see how it is put together. Objects of interest: /materials/briefing.mtr and /video/ulysses_briefing.roq