RJFerret

Not exactly: tdm_ai_showdest 1 This shows where they are trying to get to, including steps before the next path node, but those kick in after the line is drawn to the path node so you can actually see. Note, change target doesn't seem to rip a target out from under an AI in the midst of things, it needs to be implemented before they get to that node.

Heh, every day for hours upon hours until InnBiz was released a couple days ago. ;-)

No crash here, and I kept it up and running from when I downloaded until a couple days ago, so over a couple weeks (I hibernate my laptop to avoid rebooting).

I'd use the stim/response system instead, so I could make the objects within frobable and remain so (since once the player sees them, it's no surprise if they grab them, even if they choose to close the door). To do that, put a trigger response on the item(s), with "Set Frobable" checked on. Target them each from both doors. Set the doors to trigger on opening (the default: "trigger_on_open" "1"). This way the first door opening will make everything frobable, and the next door will be redundant, and closing will have no impact. It's unlikely players will frob through the doors since the doors are frobable themselves, and if they do, so be it, they already saw the stuff and know what's coming.

I've seen it advised to not use timescales greater than two as physics gets messed up. I've even found 2 might cause AI to struggle with tight spaces and get stuck. So don't consider it absolute, but 1.5 or or lower values do speed up gameplay nicely in some circumstances.

Not to be too literal, but rather than limiting it to a preset scripted form, why not... Shift drag a brush out, click the "Make Room" button on the left. Done, custom. Note, it's easier to drag it to the size you want to begin with rather than tweak it (which requires many extra steps). It's also recommended to insert an AI or standard door prefab for size comparison. This would be cool, as there are standard aspects to the process when done manually. The easiest way is to hit space to copy your first room and drag it next to the first. If they are to share a wall, be sure to delete the extra one. Select the adjoining wall, shrink it down to where an edge of a door should be. Copy it (space). Slide the copy to the other side of the door, size to fit exactly with same process, ditto top and bottom. (I've totally glossed over details.) Another way is to use the Clipper tool to cut two verticals on either side of where the door would be, then two horizontals for top/bottom and delete the brush from where the space should be. Right-click to insert a path_corner entity and connect it to the previous, done. Prefab chests/boxes come with keys, drag the key to the guard, bind. If your Entity window isn't open, hit 'n', click name, type it in the box. Maybe. Of course, there's already an editor that does that! ;-) Since the wiki tutorial hasn't worked for you, perhaps you learn better by seeing than reading? Perhaps look for Youtube videos of using the editor?

It's not just the missing GUI, I copied/modified a GUI from another mission and it crashed in midst of loading.

I uploaded a patch to hopefully resolve this once and for all, update 1.48 uploaded March 8th, 2014, one change: patches key rarely not being frobable in one of it's possible spots It's currently available from the download link in the first post, https://drive.google...dit?usp=sharing, and now updated in the in-game downloader too, thanks Bikerdude! For those who have already played past the first night/map, there's no change/benefit to updating. For those who have yet to play, the new version would remove a slight chance of having to restart the first map if this rare bug happened to you.

Could you simply have the one that should be following head to a path_wait before heading toward the node of the leading AI? I had to do the same for teleporting in two AI who went on the same path once, delay the follower a bit. PS: I'm glad you've made progress, but sometimes it does seem two steps forward, one step back, but in the end we get there!

Edit: Patch uploaded to resolve this. Oh no, that sounds like a very, very bad bug. :-( The good news is it's also very rare, has something to do with timing I believe, I thought I had it all taken care of when I added a significant delay but... I'm sorry, the only solution will be to restart, as saves prior to this point won't be frobable either. Odds are the key will show up in a different place, but even if it doesn't, it should be frobable. I'm sorry that happened, I totally believed it was fixed and since "fixing it" had not been able to get it to fail (be non-frobable) again. :-( Totally weird the guy going through the wall though, although apropos I suppose. Yay on the doll deed! :-) That's the first report of discovering an objective, yes, that one's kind of lying out there in the open. ;-) The others aren't so apparent. Again though...*sigh...my condolences the key bugged and will require restarting, I truly thought that couldn't happen anymore (and only had it happen twice in the three months prior to my supposed fix for it). Gah.

With the ambient light method though (which I had in my first map), how do you coordinate the texture so the player can look up and see when the next change is coming?

Yes it can be triggered by a regular trigger brush, but no, it won't change the current path the AI is on from my experience. It's only useful before they get there. Why do you need a change target at all? Might the path_waitfortrigger point to the appropriate next path node to begin with? (Or are there other conditions that might end it which you want to go another way?) Might need more info, but my initial thought is to have another path node after the path_waitfortrigger, and have the change target alter that, to insulate it a step away from the AI's plans. The other issue might be one of timing, if the trigger is releasing the AI and a millisecond later changing the path target perhaps? In which case, I'd add a delay via a trigger_relay to activate the AI a tenth of a second after the other busy work is taken care of.

Yeah, I used "bad grammar" to squeeze "First Night" to "1st Night". As a workaround, might you have a short label, but have a dummy objective purely to display text with more detail at the top of each difficulty? You could have it's display removed upon map start, so it would only be seen when players are choosing difficulty.

Erm, I don't believe nobody has said they won't, nor they can't. However, the suggestion has been made in the past (I myself last year said something similar), and people are responding so you know your contribution is appreciated and heard. This is also a helpful community that would love for you to not have to wait to appreciate the game, but enlighten to other views that might ease your experience. :-) If the game were modified to work how every new user is accustomed to their previous games played, it would serve nobody! One solution I use is a programmable keyboard, so that the same keys do the same things in different games/different character skills in the same game. Does that mean your suggestion is invalid? Nopes. It just means you have another option at your disposal. :-) The purpose of the thread is what you initially used it for when you offered your insight. However rather than your suggestion just being met with silence, folks like to offer greater awareness and alternatives that might make your current play more enjoyable. You never know, a future version might have the frob function do something other than activate things like you ask. Or conversely, someone else might like the idea and provide an alternative. I imagine TDM will continue to see improvements, will they be what you individually consider an improvement? From this course of conversation, I'm guessing maybe not?

1. Yes, to Caulk (other nodraw is not sealing geometry, your visleafs need to be sealed) 2. Caulk instead of portalsky for the top, then func_static building tops will show through (if their origins are inside the visleaf) 3. Yes, for proper sound propagation, as well as rendering performance. Otherwise what happens in an alley would be heard in a neighboring alley as if the building between were not even there! For more details: http://wiki.thedarkm...portal_Tutorial

No need to be sorry, my view can't be wrong anyway obviously, but it's easy to see for oneself; of course there are a couple exceptions (which might be what you were criticizing me for), as there always would be, but it's the nature of averages, particularly when you have a mix of people voting with a bias for more mission creation. Were that true, then missions like Flakebridge Monastery and your own Glenham Tower (among others), included in top five picks by multiple people, would not be so far below missions in your tally list that are not mentioned once in this thread. (Heck, there are others listed here way down at the bottom of your list.) Please don't believe your own list, or that there's a correlation between poll votes and quality, your missions are better than it makes them out to be.

I disagree, there's not greater beauty than fun game-play! Yes please, or could it simply be a prefab? (Discounting the leaf connecting tubes for the lights-that-shall-be-avoided.) My next map I'd not started on yet, as cloud shadows would be a key element.

Um, isn't that all the missions with polls? If you check, every mission has most votes for 4 of course. (People don't vote 1 or 2 as it's rude/mean, so the bell curve means similar votes for 3 and 5, with the most landing at 4.) If you look at the least popular missions, the most votes are 4, if you look at the most popular, the most votes are 4, and there is obviously no correlation to quality. I know of two options, one is sort the wiki list by undead so you can exclude them: http://wiki.thedarkm...or_The_Dark_Mod Sadly there was a forum thread of favorite missions without undead I thought but I'm unsuccessful at getting Google to bring such up atm.

Filesize you mean? Filesize doesn't relate to size in RAM or speed (directly). To quote Wikipedia's article on DDS, "...which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs".

More semantic differences between us. If definitions are so broad to include other tangentially related things, then the term becomes meaningless. The things you list for passive aggressive are their own emotions/reactions (and only one is relatively passive). My point might've been missed, or my "n't", the "or" would be exclusive for me obviously, as the latter half isn't intentional; and ignorance/naïveté isn't trolling behavior, it's its own behavior. Which leads to a curiosity of mine now, I'd hazard a guess that you might be an "N" communicator in Myers-Briggs personality typology, do you happen to know? (I'd perhaps even go so far as to guess INTP. As an ISTx, ascribing all these other meanings to something that already has its own meaning, doesn't correlate in my thought process.) PS: You probably won't be surprised to hear the examples you put as funny under schadenfreude sound a bit tragic to me, not amusing at all. "If someone was an a-hole" doesn't relate, as people aren't always such, are more complex than that, and if they are hurt, suffer, regardless of behaviors toward me personally. Also laughing at someone's misfortune is experienced by them as ridicule, which worsens the circumstance for them, rather than helping. Expressing sympathy or commiserating with them in those situations instead, helps to alleviate their suffering (speaking of philosophy, now you've got me sounding like a Buddhist, heh).

Ah, I see where you're coming from, different definition of trolling. FYI, "passive-aggressive" doesn't really exist. It got added to a U.S. military evaluation form until they discovered everyone got labeled passive-aggressive, because, you know, it's smart to not retaliate when you'd be subject to even greater negative ramifications. Instead you redeem your ego by acting at a safer time. Or, another way of looking at it, 100% of people behave "passive aggressively" which is why it gets thrown around commonly and generally applies. My familiarity with "schadenfreude" is finding pleasure in others' misfortune. A lack of empathy for the victim (or overriding relief that their own circumstance doesn't include that), in fact that sense of distance/removal permits the enjoyment. The bystander syndrome also comes into play here. There isn't a power component to it though. The sadists I'm familiar with derive pleasure from causing pain themselves (not simply witnessing it), so in power exchange they feel an increase. They often empathize with their subjects. It's the latter who tend to provoke to get a rise out of others, in an online context, "troll". The former might gleefully watch the action. Others just lose respect for the troll, note to avoid engaging that individual, and move on. PS: I wouldn't say lacking effective communication skills amounts to trolling, since it lacks intent. In this case, the person is well meaning, trying to convey info, just doing so in a method that might frustrate. In fact, often they themselves are frustrated, "why don't they get it?/Why do I have to repeat myself"--or you see this in young children, when they don't have the vocabulary to express themselves yet. They aren't abusing the privilege of communicating and taking others' time, they just lack other resources.

I'll take your bait here. ;-) I believe this might be conflating teasing and trolling. Teasing is a behavior that brings people together, shares common ground, and strengthen bonds, often humor/funny is a component. Trolling most don't find funny, only a subset of the population with certain personality traits (as studies have shown). It's done at someone's expense to boost the ego of the "troll". The troll might find it funny. Or those who enjoy schadenfreude. But many don't find pain or hurt amusing, much less intentionally trying to bring it about in others. Posting a trolling post wouldn't activate the pleasure centers of my brain, while it does for sadists. Well, kind of, as people react to the behaviors of others. Which is why relationships (of all kinds/degrees) get stuck in ruts despite intentions. One person has a typical reaction, based on their personality, how they were socialized and how their parents responded, which results from the stimulus provided by another. They don't necessarily intend it, and sometimes see it coming but feel powerless to stop it.

1) If you have lots of quicksave crashes, perhaps use this script, which saves backup quicksaves you can restore to: http://forums.thedar...195#entry258195 3) Food restores all of 1, yes 1, health. So negligible unless you eat a 100 apples. 4) noclip;notarget are the usual ones, which may be used together with the semicolon just like I wrote it. Press ctrl-alt-~ to get the console.

I heard about a study suggesting trolls were just jerks interacting online a few weeks ago, that might've been related to one of these. I know it's the scientific method, but cracks me up that studies are done to determine that people who are jerks face to face, or on the phone, or in a written letter, are also jerks "online". But then I saw a lot of studies about Second Life which revealed people behave like people in a virtual/online environment (duh, where would they learn other behaviors that they'd never been taught?) It also amuses me that using a jargon term, "internet troll" seems to cause them to forget that "jerk", "a-hole", "meanie", were terms used to describe these people and their personalities/behaviors long before. Trolls reveling in each others' behavior is no different than childhood bullies forming gangs to boost their egos at the expense of individuals. One thing that I think has come to light for many people, is recognizing that chronological age has no relevance to mature behavior. The online medium has brought together more disparate age ranges (and example would be an MMO group, where members may be in the single digits all the way through senior citizens), and those in the younger end often behave in a more mature fashion than their parents or "grown ups".

My condolences you got stuck! First, did you place the markers from inventory? If so, check your objectives, are they all checked off and new objectives appeared? If not, a marker might've rolled/physically moved away from where you initially placed it, no worries, it can simply be picked up and moved back into place. Once they all are in place, it won't matter, as the objective is "locked"/done then and we move on. Did you read the note posted all over outside, facing you at start that night, and did it make sense? There is no objective related to loot the third night. So check that all the markers are in place, then you'll get new objectives and can go after the payment in a location you already know (so everyone and his brother doesn't see the posters and try to take your payment). G'luck!