Sotha

There was an issue with the AI animationa. The animation exporter was borked and ruined the model bounding box during export. Now, if the player looked slightly away from the AI when it was playing the borked anims, the AI would wink out of view. This was fixed by using the proper animation exporter. You might be able to check the bounding box with r_showskel 1. Or something similar. The AI is inside a box of which is the bounding box. If the box winks out, then that might be the reason why objects disappear at weird viewing angles.

Played this just now. Cool mission! I gave top scores for the appearance and story, but gameplay I rated only average. Rationale below: Nice mission overall, a lot of new ideas here. Good looks, interesting story. The implementation of the horror broke some rules, but then turned too predictable. But that did not terribly go in my way of having fun with the mission! Thanks, Grayman!!

It makes me wonder if forests could be done with modules, too. Like this: http://www.bestoldgames.net/img/ss/lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos/lands-of-lore-the-throne-of-chaos-ss3.gif Mapper makes a boxy room with skybox texture walls and grass/forest floor. On the walls the mapper lines up premade "forest facade" models. The "forest facade" works like building facades made by Springheel, and is impassable forest+shrub wall. In order to let the mapper to adjust the tallness, the modules would have "roots", middle "trunk+leaves" and "top canopy" parts. The mapper can make corridors wi

Yeah, Knighton can give you good hints how to make the exterior rooms. If you have ultra simple exterior with a fog, you could do it like I did in Glenham Tower. If you have a lot of fog, making exteriors is easier as you need less details. Note that you do not want to have fog inside the house, so you need to teleport the fog light away as the player enters the house. This means a jarring sudden fog disappearance and some sort of antechamber between outside and inside whre you disable the fog. Oh, and never do diagonal visportals. Just keep visportals boxy and simple. If you have a malfunct

I try to avoid exterior areas and this is why 1) they are boring in terms of gameplay. Lots of darkness and room to outmaneuver the AI. 2) they are many, MANY times more work to make look and work good than interior areas. 3) if there are height differences in organic landscape, monsterclipping is a lot of work. (The AI pathing is not built on patches or entities. It is generated on worldspawn brushes.) All these combined means that if you are maing exterior areas, you are spending a lot of time building something the player just breezes through to get to the good/tricky/interesting parts o

Nice lines! It is great to have another talented contributor around! Welcome, welcome!

Does the AI need to know these things? If there are AAS areas in both A and B, the mapper can teleport AI from A to B with no problem. What I am unsure of is: can the mapper make an AI fly from A to B using a special animation where the AI origin moves with the AI. If so, one could make a climbing animation to replace the flying. This would serve as a way to make scripted AI climbing. I.e. the AI cannot REALLY climb at will, but the mapper could fake it for some story purposes. Like how Alyx climbs that apartment building in Half-Life 2.

Correct if I am wrong, but can climbing be faked with animations? Consider two AAS areas. Area A is on the ground and Area B is 128 units (1 floor) higher. Like this when viewed from the side: B XXXX X X X $ A XXXX What happens if AI moves to position $ and plays an animation where the AI moves upwards (with origin) and then towards B and lands on AREA B. When the anim ends, is the AI now in B? If so, then we can give the AI the ability to climb. But they can only do it on patrol (path_anim) or conversation (play anim.) And also climbing would be height specific. You could hav

Played this just now. Fun little mission. Wow, it was difficult. I really struggled getting through. Lots of light, guards and even that damned torch guard. Very tense mission. Quite the story, eh? Not bad for a speed build. Not bad at all! Thanks for the mission! Oh and I did not have performance issues.. Well other than MY OWN performance.. heh

The log output says:

I tried to run tdm_updater, but saw this: Nothing seems to be progressing and the update seems to get stuck until the installer chooses a new one. These "yourvserver" mirros seem to work very poorly... Should they be removed from the mirrors file? The updater seems to really prefer this mirror, and each file takes a long time while I need to wait for the mirror timeout. This could lure away new players as the updater seems to hang.

The voice of The Dark Mod!!! Goldwell has provided me and many other FMAs top-notch lines for years. We are so fortunate to have you around, man! You are awesome! <3

Not from me. I had a cool start, but then ran out of steam and time.

I dunno, RPG... I don't think anyone is expecting games to be substitutes for Life. But the thing is that large complexity in game development is technical: how to draw as realistic graphics as possible. The creative side seems to have been forgotten. Million man hours is poured into how to draw as detailed scene as possible... but often the plot and the quest seems like an afterthought. Even one layer of options in terms of plots would help a lot, because then the actions of the player would have an impact on the story. Nowadays the player never has an impact on the story. The story stays

Aye! Saint's Row IV, anyone? I bought it so I could play it together with a friend who recommended it. It is like GTA4, but with superpowers where the player can run faster than any car. We play on highest difficulty and it is really difficult to get killed. You lose tiny bit of health when you are shot with a bazooka and when you kill a single enemy you get lots of health replenished. These types of games are not played for the challenge, but to vent off steam or unwind, I guess. But fact is that without adequate challenge, I lose interest ultra-fast.

Good points! Another idea that comes to mind: do objectives need to be absolutely specific: "go here," "kill this," etc. What if there was some room for creativity left? Example: Objective "Bernard the poacher is in pain. Resolve the situation." Solution 1: kill Bernard (when dead, no pain.) (turns into very short combat mission which makes Bernard's friends very angry.) Solution 2: get a doctor to Bernard (turns into "escort bitching NPC mission") Solution 3: carry Bernard to doctor (turns into "drop heavy objects and carry incapacitated heavy NPC through hostile territory" mission) Solut

Quest markers are a two edged sword. On one hand, the player is treated like a retard with bright neon lights saying "go here!" "Push this button!" "Talk to this dude!" On the other hand, if the game dev making the quest was sloppy, the player could get really stuck without quest markers. The quest giver says "you know the bridge over theres? I put the cache there." Without quest markers, the player could spend time ad frustratum trying to find the cache that actually is under a tree near the bridge and not ON the bridge. The description is too vague. Or the description is not saved in any

Good discussion as always with you guys! One more thought. The very foundation of dull quests seems to be an immediate explicit trust between the player and the quest giver. They often do not know each other and the quest giver requests the player to risk life, limb and soul to do the chore. "Go kill ze dragon!" In which the player has only one answer option: "OK! Do you want it now or immediately?" The unwritten agreement is that the player must blindly do what is asked without their own initiative. They have no choice because "this is primary quest," which must be completed to make progr

Tl;Dr: How can we get to The Quest 2.0? Do Quests in computer games really need to be so dull? Long text: I've been playing computer games recently. The one in progress now is The Long Dark, which I bought years ago and now it got updated with a STORY mode. The SURVIVAL mode is brilliant. Stay alive as long as possible with minimal gear. Resources run out and you must move on and take risks. You need to make good decisions with where to go and what to do. Your situation changes often and you are presented with a new obstacles (nope, you can't go to the place you wanted because there are

I gots the usual story: C64, then Amiga500, then 486 PC. Many of the boys around the neighbourhood did not have computers, but early game consoles like Nintendo and Sega, so I got to mess around with them as well. For the younger people here imagine the era: you buy a computer magazine from the shop, which contains BASIC program listing, which you copy from the magazine pages by typing it into your C64 to get some software. Then you save it on a C-cassette. Amazing times! C64 had tons of cool games. I've also played Lord of Midnight but my young age and poor english made it utterly incompr

What AH said. In TDM I would avoid making too narrow spiral staircases. It is no fun to spend time building a staircase which cannot be used because it causes an AI log jam. Always test your narrow staircase with at least 2 AI. They need to be able to get past each other easily. The minimum AI traversable width should be 64 units + some safe marginal. I would maybe go with 80-100 units.

I'll share too! I do it like this: 1) choose sizes. Pay attention to the fact that the staircase must go down so that right handed swordman has an advantage defending the staircase (easy to make it go the wrong direction). 2) Make a step and cut it half ways. 3) Cut it further by eye so that the steps are roughly the same size. I stay in grid 8 with few steps cut with grid 4. It does not matter if it is not mathematically 100% correct division. It is enough if it looks good by eye! 4) Move the steps so that a staircase quadrant is formed: 5) Apply texture on the steps. Align it perfectly.

Drat! I think I did have one of those "get out of Microsoft Jail free" cards lying around here somewhere.... I dunno if it is gonna be a problem for real. If the product is utter crap, people will bash it and will want their money back. In the era of internet, the word will circle around. People will avoid the product, which really matters for the company.

Very cool! Those would be awesome if the mapper wants include hallucination or flashbacks into their stories.

Yep, time limits are dangerous, and I agree with Obst that instead of instant game over a slap on the wrists is better. Some other ways of adding a time limit: an assassin AI is slowly moving through the map towards the victim the player must save. If the player takes too long, the AI reaches his target. The victims dearh does not necessarily mean instant game over. Let the death cause a lockdown, and extra guards, which the player can still bypass to complete the mission. But it should be hard: equipment use mandatory. Or just write the story so that the victims' death is sad for the pla