Mortem Desino

I'm not entirely certain what you're trying to accomplish. Is this a poltergeist effect you're shooting for (OOoOOoooooOOOoohhh...a floating ChaaAAaaair...) ? A func_shooter might work, but collisions don't work the same for projectiles as they do static models. You could use an invisible func_mover that you control via scripts (moveToPosition) or via NURBS curves. And then bind the model to aforementioned func_mover. But even in that case, collisions with player and with other moveables won't behave the same (though they wouldn't necessarily have to). You could also give the furniture a collision mesh and make it a moveable. You can use forcefields, then, to toss the moveable around.

I can't really type without looking at the screen anymore. God forbid I write some C++ code and accidently use a square bracket instead of a curly bracket. GASP! On the other hand, I do remember an old Mac Classic keyboard where the Caps lock was actually a toggle switch; It recessed itself into the keyboard when on, and popped back up when Caps lock was off.

Yeah, those are almost certainly CSG subtract artifacts. If I remember right, we all begged greebo to insert a big popup "WARNING: WAT ARE YOU DOING?!" the first time a mapper uses subtraction. It's a hard habit to break, but I cut my teeth on additive geometry with Half-life 1.

Yessir. I didn't publically release it because in the two years following, I made the map at least four times larger. It will probably be released as prefabbed bits & pieces glued into other FMs. (My storytelling since then has gotten much, much better. The original was quite terrible. )

Well, all ye good sirs, I've got my Halloween mission rescued, and I'm back to working on it. It'll be very close, but I'll try to finish it for Halloween. And a screenie of what I've worked on today: I do a bit of theatrical lighting at my college, so I'm shooting for a very vibrant, moody feel.

Wooooaaaaah....Double Standards alll the waaay.... A good part of the alleged "washed out texture" problem is definitely low-resolution stretching. The other part is just foreshortening + not turning on anisotropic filtering. Aside from that, I agree that the clip brush "invisible wall" phenomenon in RAGE is a bit annoying. Maybe It's just because I'm used to PC games where freedom of movement is a little more paramount. But in a Run&Gun FPS, certainly that's one way to optimize a map's filesize and squeak out more reliability. I know in a hardcore id FPS, I would hate accidentally getting stuck, clipping into walls. Maybe they're a good thing.

Yes, that's specified in individual lightshaders. For shrooms, I'd use the texture lights/tdm_round_pulse. It's a pleasant, slow pulsing.

Very nice. I love the color and quality of your voice. Your pronunciation and emphasis is just about perfect. I might not have detected it if you didn't mention being a non-native speaker. (I might guess perhaps a hint of Polish nationality?) Time-wise: I recorded Builder5 in about 2.5 hours (with some time in the beginning to get the speaker's voice warmed up and "characterized", and some time in the middle to rest the vocal chords).

The second half of the problem is that I'm pursuing my bachelor's degree . Even with a beefy PC, I definitely cannot guarantee that it will be done by hallow's eve.

I'll just leave this here.... Hopefully Toshiba will watch this and feel tortured for providing faulty hardware.

I'm afraid I have some sad news for all of you. The southbridge died on my laptop (No networking, no USB, no firewire, no sound card, crippled performance). I'll have to withdraw from the competition. I'll eventually post some screenies of what might come in a future FM. Edit: Holy dang, Bikerdude! Those are sweet!

Wow. You've just now determined that there are races in RAGE? I thought you had actually played the game; evidently, you lied to us above. Shadowhide, your so-damned-precious Quake 1 was created and designed by a very small group including John Carmack, Tim Willits, and Kevin Cloud. These three people are still Lead Programmer, Creative Director, and Lead Artist at id Software. Right now, your impressions of RAGE are alike to an 11-year-old's temper tantrums. I expect better out of you.

The physics of D3 player movement probably does not follow Newton's First Law very accurately. Moving terrain, on the other hand, is a great emulation of the laws of inertia.

The wiki is your friend.

Wow. What a terrible bit of polemic. Why is it a "poor" story? Well, in my own opinion... I thought it was a childish and uncompelling narrative. There was no real motivation for me to "find the house key" or "lay the body to rest in a sarcophagus" or other such quests. I never cared for any one character in the story. The [grammatically poor] prologue in the briefing didn't give me enough information before thrusting me into the world that you crafted. It only served to frustrate me. I really liked how it was told (namely, that you wanted to include some voice acting), but I thought that it was still poor where you chose to use readables and where you chose to use voices. All in all, since I didn't care at all for the characters, or for the world at large, the mission felt like an annoyance or a chore. If I sympathized more with the characters or the setting, maybe It would have been a more compelling (and more fun) mission. Also, you are very very wrong if you think stories are told only through dialogue and readables.

Wiki'd! Huzzah for TDM!

I suggest you get used to it. Every single modern game engine uses some form of Visleafs (visportals), or LOD, or both, to optimize performance. Half-life 2 has "Hint" and "Skip" where Doom3 has its equivalent Visportal and Nodraw to optimize world geometry. Crystal Dynamics (Deus Ex: HR, et al) uses visleafs and LOD for optimizing performance and geometry. Even the antiquated Dark engine's air brushes seperate areas into glorified visleafs that the engine can cull away. Crysis and Crysis 2 used an excessive amount of LOD, but also culled the world geometry in other ways. Even Minecraft's distance fog and "chunks" is a form of LOD. Neither DR nor Doom3 engine are the problem. Optimizing is not a magic equation that inexplicably makes every map run at 60 fps. You must know how your tools work. In what conditions do visportals close? In what conditions do they open? What entities benefit most from hide_distance? How do func_statics interact with visportals? Once you are confident that you know how visportals work, then and only then can you plan out a map that is easy to optimize and visportal. If you start building willy-nilly with no planning or forethought, you won't build something easy to optimize. Continue to wrestle with these tools, and eventually you will be able to grasp how they work and how best to use them. One last thing: If you can be patient learning this brand-new skill, we will be patient in helping you.If you cannot be patient learning this new skill, then map editing may not be a hobby for you.If you continue to cuss and throw fits, then nobody will be able to help you (nor will want to help you). If you really, truly, want to make great maps -- swallow your pride and be eager to learn. It can be very rewarding, and it can be something you can be proud of.

Most of those icons are DDS images. You ought to be looking in "dds\guis\assets\hud\inventory_icons".

Fine, fine. Here's a test map, ye ungrateful beastie. funcportal.map.txt Keep in mind that func_portal distance is not orthogonal to gravity. If you've got a func_portal 800 units up in the air and the "portal_dist" is "800", of course it's not going to open. Can't grasp the smallest functionality, and you dismiss the whole as impossibly "fucked up"...

I can just imagine the entire world quoting in unison right now: "I never asked for this."

I really like the second one (field stones in concrete). If you could draw up a heightmap (or a normalmap) for that one, it could look really good in some of the oldest parts of Bridgeport.

It seems no matter where I visit, or where I live, or what school I go to, there's a strong German community + brewery. I hail from around "Leinenkugel" land, myself.

Before I started writing up design docs, I started my search and research here. So far, I've nearly finished the visuals for my poltergeist, and have started writing special AI routines for him. Screenshots? Nope. That'll ruin the fun.

OhBoyOhBoy! I miss DR a lot, so I'll try to toss up something fun.