OrbWeaver

Good God, it's like reading a bunch of 90s Microsoft executives discussing open-source in this thread. Open-source developers are idiots giving away valuable IP for free, open source is communist, open source licenses are viral and take ownership of your own code, open sourced code is abandonware which will wither and die, open source will put commercial developers out of business, yada yada. That this is the development forum for an open source game makes it even more bizarre. Neither ZLib nor PNG are GPL licensed, so that's flat-out misinformation. I suppose companies might be doing this with other libraries which are GPL, but it's very risky because you are likely to get caught and the GPL has been ruled enforceable in court.

Right, that would make sense. Normally what I do is bring down the console in order to switch to another application, because otherwise the game window continues to capture the mouse and I cannot click anywhere outside the game (which is not ideal in this situation, because now the console is obscuring half the window and I can't see the live updates). I must have tried Alt+Tab without bringing down the console and that is what entered the strafe mode.

I tested it and it looks pretty good. Live camera synchronisation from DarkRadiant to the game works. The game position moves in realtime as I move the DR camera around. Synchronisation in the other direction works if I choose the Sync camera back now option, but not in realtime. I don't know if this is expected. Hot reload works. I can change the colour of a light and see the change immediately in game if I choose Enable map update mode. Something weird happened to the camera in game at one point — I could no longer rotate in place, because horizontal mouse motions suddenly turned into left/right strafing. However I can't reproduce this reliably. Maybe I just pressed something in game without realising it. Overall this is very exciting functionality and I'm happy to merge it even in this early state. Being able to click through light shaders in the light inspector and see the lighting change immediately in another window (with full soft shadows) is amazing, and really helps to avoid the limitations of the DarkRadiant lighting renderer.

I've only tested compilation so far; I'll try to do some actual testing of the functionality this week assuming I don't run into any issues compiling the latest game SVN.

I merged your PR into my own topic branch for testing on Linux, but I haven't merged it yet into my master branch because Greebo mentioned in his unit testing thread that he is still planning to merge my master branch into his own repo, and I was worried that integrating your PR first might make this more difficult. Although it probably doesn't affect the difficulty that much (in terms of conflicts etc) whether he merges my master followed by your changes (in my topic branch) as two separate steps, or if I merge it into my master and he then merges my master into his repo in a single step. So I guess there's no reason I can't merge your changes into my master branch, although note that this doesn't in itself create a Windows build that other people can use, because Greebo makes all the Windows builds by hand and they are built off his repo, not mine. TL;DR summary: I'm happy to merge your changes into my source this week and I guess that they will make it into the next official DR release if there aren't any major problems, but we don't currently have any predicted release date.

It's easy to forget that humanity isn't a monolithic civilisation. Have you ever thought about how bizarre it would be to take modern technology like airliners or even battery-powered flashlights back into the stone age? Then you realise that you don't even need time travel for that: there are literally societies living right now who are still in the stone age. Remote tribes in jungles or on islands who are still chucking flint-tipped spears at each other as if the past few millennia simply never happened.

Delighted to hear that a mapper is actually using my ambients. I guess this map will be next on my list to play.

Admittedly I haven't tried it yet for a second time, but I would tend to rate Prey quite highly for replay value because you can play the game in a different way (e.g. using more human skills vs more Typhon skills etc). There are also different objective choices you can make but if you didn't find the story that engaging maybe this aspect won't be of interest to you. I've heard that if you do another playthrough there is an area you can go to where you get back all of the neuromods you accumulated during the first run, so you can hit the ground running with upgrades.

This must be one of the most hilarious suggestions for a Thief-like game I've ever heard. Random "friendly thieves" appearing out of nowhere and telling the player to complete their objectives. Perhaps the player could be followed around through the entire mission by a squad of four friendly thieves, giving helpful hints at regular intervals. "Don't forget to use your water arrows, Dr Freeman!". That seems to be the standard mechanism and will be well understood by players. It's a very common mechanic from MMOs and other games — activate the three pillars to unlock the sealed door and proceed to the next area etc.

There is no connection whatsover between Prey (2006) and Prey (2017) other than the fact that they have the same name and are first-person shooters. I actually liked the 2006 game with its weird physics-defying portals and creative use of the Doom 3 engine, but I don't think it was anywhere near as well-known or popular as its 2017 namesake.

None of the official mission servers are backed up? Yikes. I would have thought you'd want one master server with full backups and maybe version control, and this is the only server you upload to, then a bunch of mirrors which just replicate whatever is on the master server without needing their own backups.

Psi powers come from neuromods. None of them are available at first so you might not have access to them yet. I can't remember exactly when it happens but there is some interaction with the aliens which gives you the power to scan Typhids and then unlock various neuromods which give you skills like mindjacking and various psi-based damaging abilities. The disadvantage of taking lots of psi neurmods is that the turrets identify you as alien and will shoot at you.

I more or less completed this one last weekend. I say more or less, because although I reached the Mission Complete screen, I didn't find the hall of the ancients or the map, which sounds like it might have been interesting. Based on what I did see: The initial sewer section was possibly my favourite area yet. I particularly like underground areas and this one felt very realistic (not that I have any idea what a "real" sewer would look like), with a noticeable Half-Life 2 feel. The heavy locked gates were impressive and gave the impression that you were trapped in part of a much larger whole, which added to the believability. Perhaps a few too many helmeted guards for my taste, although strangely some of them (but not all) could be knocked out. Although given that this is a prison it makes sense to have heightened security, and I did get some good use out of my gas arrows. The "horn-like" ambient music which plays when you first enter the compound, although decent in quality, is really loud. Even with my ambient slider set to 50% it seemed overpowering, while turning up to 100% it became deafening. I would suggest the volume could come down by a good -6 in the sound shader to bring it into line with other ambients. I never worked out the significance of the well (although I really liked the wooden ramps on the stairs — a nice architectural detail which added a lot of interest to what could have been a very boring corridor). Since there was a guard in there I assume it must have been important, but although I knocked him out and swam around in the water I couldn't find anything at all. Ditto with the measuring stick. One thing I've noticed in your missions is that if something is mentioned in a readable it is almost certainly important, but I never found a measuring stick or worked out why it was significant. Perhaps I'll have another go and see if I can find that secret hall. Maybe it has something to do with the well.

Try using more Psi powers, if you have them. You can recharge psi quite cheaply (even for free if you have the suit mod that allows you to regenerate psi whenever standing in the yellow "coral"), and powers like kinetic blast and mindjack can really turn the tide of battle. For the Nightmare, I don't bother trying to kill it, but just hide from it. It is quite large and cannot get into small spaces or use lifts, so in many areas it is quite easy just to hunker down for 3 minutes until it goes away.

The thing I found about Prey is that the difficulty varies hugely based on your upgrades and equipment. For example, I found the military operators very challenging either to sneak past or defeat in combat (especially when they respawn), but if you get the Typhid upgrade which allows you to hijack them for 30 seconds, it becomes trivially easy. Hijack one, off it goes to fight amongst the others, wait a few seconds and you can hijack another one, repeat.