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Mortem Desino

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Everything posted by Mortem Desino

  1. Even though I've been absent a long while, I still find myself dreamily wishing for the free time to do TDM mission development. When working on new research projects I'll find myself involuntarily thinking, "hee hee this could be a fun texture or readable or bit of map architecture." Or I find myself absentmindedly responding out loud to odd noises with a drunkguard-like "must've been rats!"

    1. datiswous

      datiswous

      If you had the time, what would you like to work on?

    2. The Black Arrow

      The Black Arrow

      An amazing little mission, we can all hope 😀

    3. Mortem Desino

      Mortem Desino

      "Little mission" is exactly the right advice. :) I have the same issue in writing: I need to learn how to condense, condense, condense.

      Another example: Whenever I research ecclesiastical history, I've got a nagging voice in the back of my head, asking, "Could there possibly be a parallel event in the Builder's Church?"

  2. You look like you could use some more content. Take this pk4 and toss it alongside your current FM resources, and open up "box.map". I did a little bit of work in this area years ago when I thought to myself, "TDM is definitely powerful enough to do some out-of-the-box settings. I wonder if I could make a sci-fi setting?" So I wrote definitions for a bunch of CC BY-NC-ND textures, shamelessly stole a wrench weapon from another D3 mod, and got to work on a map. I didn't get much more done other than a small hallway, and a fancy door with special AI-handling. But open 'er up and give it a whirl, noclip around (there's only three rooms). I'd much rather someone get some use out of it than it sit unused on my hard drive.
  3. I, also, like Moonbo, don't enjoy entering debates like this for the same reasons he noted. I especially hate to pop in just for this after I've taken a long hiatus from TDM. However, I'm quite disappointed in some of the dead horsiness around this subject. Which also means that it condones slavery. Contradicting your claim that it "made it immoral". People used the Bible, including the New Testament, to justify slavery until the 1800s. It's amazing that no one noticed that it made slavery immoral until after society started to have ethical problems with slavery. Springheel, I know for a fact that you're much more thoughtful than that. "The bible condones slavery" was already an unintelligible dead horse argument in the 19th century. And surely you recognize the several logical beggings of the question in your bald assertion (if I may syllogize it thusly:) "people have used the biblical text to justify slavery; slavery is ethically unacceptable; therefore I need not pay thoughtful attention to what the historic biblical text or historic Christianity actually has to say regarding it". Which people, and where, with what arguments? Which texts from the New Testament? What kind of slavery? Christian Thought has an ethical basis upon which to call slavery immoral -- Don't you need one of your own in order to say the same? And even if most Christians had supported slavery (and they never did), we surely don't make consensus gentium a test for truth? Slavery as a metaphor in New Testament theological discourse is common knowledge. Paul, being a good educated 1st century man, used several legal metaphors to talk about Soteriology and the relationship of man to God -- slaves, sons, citizens, property managers, and more. That is the purpose of slavery in the places where it acts as metaphor. You asked about the text from Ephesians 6 including, "masters, treat your slaves in the same way [as you would Christ]." If you are trying to pull that paragraph out of its meaningful literary context, in order to think of it as a bare standalone ethical maxim, you'll be sorely disappointed. If you're looking for veiled calls to social revolution, you'll be equally disappointed. Consider that the exhortations in the second half of Ephesians have an established foundation -- Paul isn't beating the church in Ephasus with a philosophically groundless moral bludgeon. There is a Christological and Soteriological premise for his cohortatives toward Christian living. Hence Anderson's argument that "the general idea of the texts is to recognize the brother in every servant and sort of to subtly suggest society to change its attitude." Even the very short letter of Paul to Philemon the slaveowner follows this pattern (in short: "Before you even consider what to do with this runaway slave, who is your brother in Christ, consider first how God in Christ has dealt with you.") One of the only philosophical stances against slavery in the whole modern era (outside of Christianity) is Kant's Categorical Imperative and Enlightenment natural law theory. Two historically laughable disappointments with regard to abolition. Even the anti-Christian Marquis de Condorcet had to begrudgingly admit that "only a few philosophes have from time to time dared raise a cry in favour of humanity [over against slaveholding.]" Enlightenment natural law theory died when 19th century men discovered that there were hundreds of non-Western nations that didn't conform with the "rationality" of Enlightenment Europeans. And even if someone could demonstrate the correctness of either of these ethical systems, will people even follow it when it goes against their self-interest or value system? Thomas Jefferson is a perfect example -- he gave lip service to slavery being a "hideous evil", but he still remained a lifelong slaveowner, never attempted to stop his financial dependence on slavery, remained racist not only to people of color but also antisemite, and he made slavery a constitutional right in the expanding territories. Meanwhile in Christianity, all classic Christians have always held that "if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come," and the transformed Christian's value system and worldview will have soteriological motivation to treat his neighbor as himself. Finally, let's bring some empirical and historical force to the arguement. Figures like Granville Sharp and William Wilburforce should need no explication, but permit me to quote a few other thinkers on this subject: S. Scott Bartchy, “Slavery,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: Henri Wallon: Histoire de l’esclavage dans l’Antiquité (Written 1847--and already writing on the beneficial historic Christian impact on slavery in antiquity!) Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization (2001): Philadelphian Quaker Benjamin Lay, All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage: (1737): William Warburton, A Sermon Preached Before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1766): John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1774): Charles Elliott, Sinfulness of American Slavery: Proved from Its Evil Sources; Its Injustice; Its Wrongs; Its Contrariety to Many Scriptural Commands, Prohibitions, and Principles, and to the Christian Spirit (1850)
  4. I'm still alive! (Just working 12-hour workdays.)

    1. Show previous comments  3 more
    2. Sotha

      Sotha

      12 hour work days with capability to do drunk vocals?

       

      Work truly is the scourge of the drinking classes!

       

      What do you do for a living anyhow?

    3. Bikerdude

      Bikerdude

      Welcome back fella.

    4. grayman
  5. Well, I can kind of fake a projected shadow by using an omni, and moving the light_center. blendshadowtest.map.txt blendshadowtest.script.OPTIONAL.txt
  6. Good gracious. A very young, relatively incompetent me in that old thread.
  7. "blendLight" is just a global keyword within the material definition. It's a cheap operation because it simplifies the light interactions to not bother with the normalmap et al. Most of the light textures under lights/shadows/ are basically black splotches on a transparent background. The material shader just uses a "blend blend" stage. The ones in the NHAT forest (lights/shadows/shadow_canopy6) are different -- their stage is "blend gl_dst_color, gl_one", which would actually light up polygons. For some reason, I seem to remember that they don't work as a projected light, only omni.
  8. Hmmm. I'm getting a Master's of Divinity; maybe I should flesh out a short scriptural, systematic, historical, and practical theology of the Builder Faith this summer.
  9. My personal favorites come from when I invited a German colleague of mine to watch an old American gangster film. (Spoken with a thick Eddie Robinson/Bogart/New York accent. ""Go give him what for." "Yeah, what for?" "That's right. Clean his clock! He spilled the beans, and he let the cat out of the bag." "You got it, boss, I'll give him the works."
  10. None taken, sir. Hmm...this reminds me of a silly TDM video I made some time ago...
  11. I was going to release this on April Fools' day, but I might release it instead as a video for the Thief Mod Competition. (NSFW Language) http://youtu.be/wPkcN9geVt0
  12. Indeed. I cringe every time I hear my old builder vocal set. I haven't gotten sick of hearing myself as Benny, though.
  13. Second that. I, for one, wouldn't be at all insulted if any of my amateur recordings get bested. I'm not sure how much foley work you do, but what I heard in the ambient track was grand!
  14. Keep the barebones worldspawn "shell" of your map on a decent-sized grid--and then put all the details in the world you want inside of that worldspawn shell. This is just the way BSP map building has worked since Quake 1. If you neglect that and you get internal leaks, then that is the source of all kinds of grief. Internal leaks can mess with map compiling (as you just found out), it harms performance by rendering more than is necessary, it can cause odd rendering bugs (esp. with lights), it can cause sounds to propogate in odd directions, it can confuse AI pathfinding, and more. EDIT: Ah, RJFerret beat me to it. I used to do AutoCAD work for a local Battlebots team. If the CAD drawing of a machine part was "eeehh, it looks good enough", the actual BNC machining the part would reject it with an error message, or it would yield an obviously inferior piece. Think of it just like that. Your worldspawn doesn't need heavy intricate details (in fact, it's usually preferable not to.), but it should be a robustly foolproof leak-proof base.
  15. I don't have DR on this computer, so I can't check the map file, but it seems like one of the walls of your room is a func_static? That'd definitely cause an internal leak, and be the cause of all kinds of goofy artifacts after dmap. EDIT: Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of the telltale signs of internal leaks.
  16. The fact that you can see the side walls of many of those brushes may mean that something is going awry during map compile. When you dmap, those faces should have gotten optimized away.
  17. That's peculiar. I'm unsure whether or not this will solve your problem, but intricate brushwork like that should never remain as plain worldspawn. Turn that into a func_static and seal your worldspawn behind it.
  18. What exactly are you looking to accomplish? Including the playermodel in the envshot? Or do you mean keeping the cubemap from moving and rotating with the playerview?
  19. Yep. Just feed it the right argument. Straight out of the source code: common->Printf( "USAGE: envshot <basename> [blends]\n" ); So, envshot poolreflection 1024 1 will give you six 1024x1024 tga images in darkmod/env/poolreflection_XX.tga. If you're wondering what "blend" means: it just takes x number of screenshots, and blends them together as a sort of anti-aliasing (It's particularly useful around particle effects and moving shadowcasting lights.) EDIT: I think it's been mentioned elsewhere that large envmap images can be distorted or get a borked side. I'm not sure if this was fixed in a D3 patch or not.
  20. +1. I would definitely want to have software-powered (e.g. OpenAL) delay and reverb. That project, however, has been swapped from front burner to back burner many times. As I'm certain Deadlove knows well, there are many games whose SFX had a bit of reverb baked into them, and generally sounded okay when EAX was piled on top. But you are absolutely right that the generally-accepted practice nowadays is to keep them dry. That is also my personal preference.
  21. Assuming you're an American, I'd totally cordially urge you to submit this as a mod for the Square Enix Thief mod contest. With some caveats, of course--it's not like you can distribute the UW1 demo, but you can create a video demonstrating your work!
  22. I believe they were originally going to be some clothing rustling, but I never got to recording and implementing them. I think the grunts were used just because they were available and more convenient. But yes, they were added for mere aesthetic value. As far as I can tell from the definition, no player sounds other than footsteps have sound propagation properties. Some would make sense to have reverb applied -- such as the death shouts, or the the landing grunts (because they're accompanied by loud propagated footfalls.) I'm not sure how familiar you are with the inner workings of sound shaders, but here goes: OGGs or WAVs are very very rarely pointed to by themselves. They are instead put into a sound shader definition (*.sndshd). That tells the engine certain properties about the sound, such as: volume, whether or not to loop, where the OGG files are, how much decay with in-game distance, and more. Most commonly, a sound shader is made so that one sound can be randomly chosen out of a collection (e.g. choose one footstep OGG out of eight). When an AI is walking around and running its walking animation, there are certain points in the anim that will tell a soundshader to play one of its random OGGs. It ends up looking like this in the definition: anim walk1 models/md5/chars/guards/proguard/walk.md5anim { frame 8 footstep frame 16 sound snd_rustle frame 25 footstep frame 33 sound snd_rustle } EDIT: To answer your question: you could add some subtle reverb to the armor clink-clank or clothes rustling, and it would probably be fine. I, personally, think that it is unnecessary. The rustle of chainmail and the clatter of armour is something that is generally audible only when quite close to the AI. The illusion of distance and loudness caused by adding reverb would sound out-of-place. I could be wrong, though. EDIT 2: The revenant chain rustles have bugged me for a while. They sound like placeholders hastily cut out of some other SFX.
  23. The reverb, to me at least, gives me the illusion that an AI is going to hear me e.g. when I quaff down a potion, or when I grunt while mantling -- neither of which is true. Player sounds don't propogate. I've always thought of the player sounds, even grunts, as a soliloquy playing in my own head, not out loud. So the dry original sounds would probably be truer to that concept.
  24. ...oh. Shows you how long I've been away from DR.
  25. In such a case, it'd be useful to be able to specify how many milliseconds after the start of an anim, rather than triggering after the animation is finished.
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