Gildoran

Ok, thanks! I'll have the lantern item toggle icons when used...

BTW, is there any chance you could provide an icon for the lamp when it's turned on, with the lamp in the same position, but brighter and perhaps with a soft glow around it?

@Ascottk: Those icons look great! One thing that I think needs to be tweaked is that the potion icons need to be be fully opaque, at least for the metal end-caps. (any transparency should be due to the tdm_inv_opacity cvar) The reason I'm interested in working with inventory icons, is because I'd like to experiment with subtle animations, just to see how they look. (though I expect the Thief crowed would get annoyed if they were too obvious) For example, you know how the in-game potions ripple? We could have the potion icons subtly ripple in a similar fashion. Also, if we set up the materials right, we could provide a way for mappers to create arbitrarily colored potions without needing to add assets. @NewHorizon: The reason it doesn't pitch much is because it's just a flat 2D icon that distorts itself to pretend to be 3D (like how old SNES games used mode7 scaling to simulate 3D views) and if it pitches too much the illusion becomes obvious. I made it that way to avoid using a 3D model, so the inventory GUI wouldn't need special code to handle the compass. (which could make it more complicated) In fact the compass is sort of intended to illustrate the power the inventory code will hopefully give mappers - the compass uses no special code at all, so a mapper could have designed it as an item for their map without needing to modify the SDK, HUD or any existing assets. They'd only need to create some new images and write a script. Edit: Actually, it might be possible to make an improved compass icon that would allow for full pitching...

As for advertising, I think whether or not I have a problem with it depends on how its done. I don't mind in-game advertising that matches the game world and doesn't break immersion. To use an example from the article, I would very much object to see a bright and shiny listerine add in de_dust, but there are places where I wouldn't have a problem with them at all. For example de_trainyard (I forget if that's the right name) takes place in a warehouse district, and has advertisements on the sides of trains (and maybe on billboards) for some fictional product called something like "FizzyPop Dog". I wouldn't have a problem seeing it replaced with advertisements for real products if the advertisements are sufficiently faded and scratched up to match the environment.

I wholeheartedly agree!

Those look great! I'm sure you'd have no problem becoming a beta mapper.

Could you be more specific? When you say "even a simple black box", do you mean windowDef blah { background _black } or windowDef blah { backcolor 0, 0, 0, 1 } ? Does the border show up if the alpha is 0?

If you intend to create textures for TDM, please check out the texture resolution guidelines and the common texture mistakes.

Easier said than done... according to Sparhawk "the IPs they were rather distributed", which makes it difficult to ban based on IP.

Materials can receive arguments as input, and alter their appearance based off of those arguments. In the material shader, they're referenced as parm0 through parm11, and each is a floating point number. Entities can control the shader parms their materials see by setting the keyvals shaderparm0, shaderparm1, etc. (I might be remembering their exact names incorrectly) Parameters 0, 1 and 2 are typically used for an entity's color, and the entity color you set in D3ed will affect these parameters; when you set the color of a light, you're really setting parm0 (red), parm1 (green) and parm2 (blue) on the light entity, and its light shader reads these parameters and changes its color/brightness based off of them. Parameter 3 is sometimes used to store alpha, especially by window-defs. When you set matcolor to "0 1 2 3", the material for that window has parm0 set to 0, parm1 set to 1, parm2 set to 2 and parm 3 set to 3. Most materials will abide by the convention that parm0, parm1, parm2 and parm3 represent red, green, blue and alpha respectively, so there's a lot of materials where setting "matcolor" to "1 0.5 0.5 1" will make it redish and opaque. The source image for each stage of a material can be tinted with the expressions "red x", "blue x", "green x" and "alpha x", where x is an expression. "red 0.5" will multiply the red channel by 0.5. The keyword "colored" is a shortcut for typing red parm0 green parm1 blue parm2 alpha parm3 in a stage. For your case, I would recommend using "colored" instead of "alpha parm3", since "colored" allows the user to control the color of the sparkles. (I had suggested "alpha parm3" since I couldn't access the id dev site, and I wasn't sure if "colored" affected the alpha channel) For setting up sparkles, I would also recommend looking at how I did stars, and maybe setting up a table to control when things fade in/out and move around. I think the sparkling could be done entirely in the material without any help from gui scripting.

(sorry about taking a while to respond - it's raining so I'm barely able to get anything through) I generally avoid material stages that omit a blend line, because I'm not exactly sure what type of blending D3 will assume. (my current best guess is that it does "blend gl_one, gl_zero", meaning it overwrites what's on the screen without any transparency). Assuming this is true, it has a white rectangle because the material tells D3 to overwrite what's on the screen with white, and makes no mentions of transparency. In the second case, with the "blend blend" line, you're telling it to blend based off of the transparency in the image, but you're not using the matcolor as an input anywhere, so it ignores what the windowdef tells it to do. Try adding "alpha parm3" to the stage - this will multiply the source image's transparency by the transparency of the matcolor.

Visible is a boolean value about whether or not to spend CPU processing a windowdef and its children; It's either 1 or 0, not anywhere in between. It doesn't act like an alpha channel, so you can't give it a value like 0.5 or transition from 0 to 1. (well, you might be able to, but it'll suddenly go on/off rather than smoothly fade) For what you're wanting to do, you should instead transition the matcolor from "1 1 1 0" to "1 1 1 1" or vice versa. The last two "0.7" "0.7" numbers are the starting/stopping "inertia" (I'm not sure if that's the proper term). They're used to control the acceleration/deacceleration of the transition. IMHO, it might be a good idea to construct a sparkling material instead of manually fading sparkles in/out.

What?! How dare you slander the great US public school system! (please ignore the fact that I can't even find the locations of major cities on the eastern half of my own country, let alone find other nations)

I'd say "negative light" is sort of innaccurate; you're applying a multiplicative render pass to the surrounding area rather than subtracting light. (so no matter how much light you add, it'll still stay dark) But I guess the effect would be much the same to the player and I'm pretty sure the lightgem would be effected by it. Something to note is that it would darken the frob highlight, so it'd be a bad idea to use intense filter blendlights; if you used a dark-arrow or something to create a spot of pitch black, frob highlights wouldn't show up in the pitch black area at all. You can see a poorly implemented example of what I'm talking about with the soft-shadowing under the beam in this post. (in a real map, it'd probably be lighter and softer) To add such a thing to your map, just place a light and change its type to filter_blendlight (or something like that - it should be near the top). The brighter you make it, the more it darkens the area; a white light will be perfectly black at the center. Note to the curious: As far as I know, no "dark-arrows" are planned for TDM, but I seem to remember SneaksieDave wanting to implement something like that for his maps.

For things fading to black, I'd recommend either using a fog (e.g. a pitfog) or using a filter blendlight. Filter blendlights can also be used to slightly simulate soft-shadowing under eaves, behind support beams or behind bushes if you use them lightly and carefully. They're not perfect for shadows though, since lights shined into them won't brighten the area up, but that might not be noticable if the blendlight isn't very dark.

But even if you wanted to, COULD you eat a seal? I think not. Ergo, polar bears are better than you.

The reason I said @oDDity was because a while back he was stating that humans are the ultimate creature, etc etc, so I thought I could use that debate as a pretext for posting the link. Also the style of this clip reminded me of things oDDity might say... "Penguins mate for life. You probably don't even have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Penguins are happier than you. And they're better than you." The intent of posting this isn't to start another animal comparison argument. I just thought it was a funny video.

I think settles the debate once and for all. (heh, I saw that and it reminded me of oDDity - I think everybody will agree)

How do you want them to blend?

Although I might not be remembering correctly, I believe the argument to rotate is measured in terms of counter-clockwise revolutions. (eg, to rotate 90 degrees clockwise, you'd rotate by -0.25) It may be worth noting that (I believe, but haven't tested) rotate doesn't work well with normalmaps, since it probably just rotates the image sampling without modifying the normal texels. (in other words, you can't use it to make spinning gears in the game-world; you need to put the texture on a face that's really rotating) PS, the id dev site's material keyword list is always invaluable anytime you're doing material editing, even if it doesn't always give a complete description of how things work.

Er, sorry... I meant "objectives", not "objects".

I completely agree... the entity editor drives me absolutely bonkers too. If I want a list of things I can enter, I look in the entity documentation that's displayed in the entity browser in D3ed. It has a list of keys and what they do, and double clicking on a key even automatically types it for you. Plus, there's cases where you can't get a list of every possible key... for example readables, where the keys depend on the GUI.

Is it just me, or does the spider in AluminumHaste's pictures look drugged/dead? Spiders don't usually bother me much, but scorpions and especially centipedes really creep me out. That video of the centipede capturing and eating the mouse made me cringe. I've been to Texas a few times, but luckily never encountered anything too nasty. I did get bitten/stung by fire-ants on more than one occasion though.

Yes, but those are predefined languages... That doesn't seem to happen with user-defined languages. (if you can manage to create a user-defined languages that's equivelant to the C or C++ languages, please tell me!) I'd be perfectly happy with editing the xml files that determine the predefined languages, except that the list of predefined languages seems to be hard-coded rather than read from the language file at runtime.

Actually, I think you can add that via editing shortcuts.xml... Try adding this line: <Command name="compile this file" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="120">C:\mycompiler\compile $(CURRENT_WORD)</Command> Unfortunately, support for user-defined languages sucks (it has terrible parsing, incapable of figuring out the difference between /* and / * and has no concept of escape characters for C-style strings), and I can't figure out how to get it to add more lines to the builtin language menu, so I'll be sticking with UltraEdit32 for now.