RJFerret

I totally stand to be corrected by someone more informed, but my impression is blend lights eliminate all the light "casting" aspect of lights, and simply apply a surface decal (just like our dirt decals that blend with a surface texture) of brightness to surfaces in the space/volume. Hence they can do "negative light" by darkening surfaces instead of lightening them. I believe you might desire "light glow" instead? Which usually appears too heavy to me, but would be appropriate in a smoky or fog environment. I've seen that in some FMs and believe there was a forum discussion a couple months ago that isn't jumping out at me now, oh, perhaps done with particles? (Yes: lantern_glare_simple, other glares, and lamphazes.)

No, my bad. *facepalm. This morning I see a noshadows spawnarg I missed when I double checked last night. I'm sorry all, especially Spring for maybe giving you agita on your wonderful work, false alarm. :-(

OK, I'm so confused, I restarted TDM to be sure and grab pics if it still happened. The first play, shaggy hair, body lacked shadow. I wasn't expecting that and she moved before I got a screengrab. So I switched to ponytail wench expecting to get pic, but this time she had a shadow. So I'm baffled. Oh! Maybe it's the purple bodice skin? The ponytail head looks funnier because the neck ends in a V shape and there's no ponytail shadow.

Ah, it depends which head, the ponytail head seems to cause the lack of shadow, while another head had a body shadow. (None seem to have hair shadow, but a bald girl.)

Curious, I'm also finding the new red ponytail lacks shadow. PS: I should have specified new "wench" mesh in my original post, the original female thief has her shadow.

yw! I agree with the sentiment to add more clutter rather than changing geometry size (the latter being laborious, also extra ceiling height eases light overlaps). Extra space is safer for AI to have plenty of room to maneuver, tightening up spaces can make it trickier, especially when there's more than one AI.

Very funky, female AI body lacks a shadow for me now, but their heads creepily cast one (as well as other attachments). Male AI cast shadows regularly. True for all or just something funky at my end?

Generally I just look from below. 90% of the time it's been apparent without having to trace the pointfile, or try to figure out which end is which. I also wanted to learn how to not produce leaks to begin with, so finding likely trouble spots has resulted in my new found ability to add geometry that is sealed to begin with, or successfully be able to seal existing geometry prior to initial dmap. One big culprit is the DR tool that is recommended for making a room, which protrudes brushes from the surfaces of a brush. If you butt another room up to the first one, there'll be a grid sized gap in the floor just begging to be a leak. I also tend to build, view, build, view, instead of building a ton that may or may not need changing (I subscribe to the, it-costs-three-times-to-redo what it costs to do properly to begin with). So a new leak will most likely be in my recent change or things related to that. DR also is prone to "bad hygiene", so I learned to adapt and develop practices that minimize thing that lead to trouble. I don't know if any of this helps answer your question, or provides any useful info, but a leak is going to obviously be at edges, and if not on the bottom, where prior geometry might be oddly meeting new geometry (junction of old and new). If it's not obvious, selecting the sealing geometry and only displaying that (hiding everything but selected) often makes it clear. I'm also certainly not saying I avoid using pointfiles, they are great tools, but obviously kind of limited when it's an internal leak you can just spot before dmapping. PS: Here might be a useful example, today I added a visportal to seal off a lower corner of my map...it was going to intersect func_statics and run along an uneven edge. I stretched it out where it should cover, then simply panned the view in DR along the uneven edge. Sure enough, there was a pyramid shape where it didn't meet anything. I added worldspawn to fill the gap in both dimensions and that was it. Since most of our geometry essentially boils down to a cube, consisting of four edges on the bottom, and four edges on the top, there's only two initial places to look for leaks. I've also stopped using clipper or the subtract tool except for very specific purposes. I also make sure if I do clip something, I'm doing it on the grid, and never resize anything with a cut angle. Finally I'm more apt to drag points to make an unusual shape than clip it. Sorry to babble, if I am, it's been an unusually long day, with limited food way too spread apart, and abbreviated sleep.

In my effort to take a look (admittedly, somewhat tired, not the most critical at this moment)...I basically just played on the middle "medium/hard" setting. I don't have access to the beta section, so my spoilers will be here. ;-) I must say, I like it. I would encourage to you develop further! Yes, this map may be released as a small one (I'm more of a fan of small regular releases that getting overwhelmed with a big project) with some tweaks, but dang impressive first time out! It also already has a bit of a feel of a potential continuing mission, so perhaps make it a chapter in a series? (The prequel could be done later, and etc.)

If you've used the info_location system, the wrong ambient sound plays, or incorrect ambient light will show, if you have an internal leak, of course it doesn't point to it, just lets you know one exists. Ditto your visportals staying open. I've never used the pointfile, which sounded overly cumbersome.

And now for something completely different, filtering in DarkRadiant... Instead of filtering out all clip objects, you can add a filter in DarkRadiant to only hide MonsterClip (or whatever else you desire). Filter menu, at bottom, "Edit Filters...". Click the +Add button. Enter Name: MonsterClip (no space or "_", or it won't show up properly) Click the +Add button to the right of Rules. Now here's the tricky secret, click twice where it says "textures/" in the "Match" column. (Not the "texture" singular under "Type".) The first click will highlight the entire line, but the second click will activate it for editing. Add "common/monster_clip" after the "textures/" so it reads, "textures/common/monster_clip". Click OK then OK again, and you now can filter Monster Clip exclusively! (If you use AAS_Obstacle, do another +Add for "textures/editor/aasobstacle".) PS: You can do the same for SEED objects. Just add two Rules, one with "textures/darkmod/sfx/seed" and another with "textures/darkmod/sfx/no_seed". PPS: Find the rules matches in the Media browser for other textures and make your own. To do something like Speakers, use Lights as a template (entityclass instead of texture, "speakers" for "Match"), now their range spheres won't obscure your view.

The former hasn't responded to my PM back then (a month ago), the latter was a resource for Tels from my understanding, but isn't particularly familiar with the system unfortunately. Unless someone new digs into it fresh, sounds like the circumstance will remain as is.

http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/file_download.php?file_id=250&type=bug Sample map. Two side by side alcoves, each with a shelf, left one has absence_noticeability enabled, right one does not. Withdraw each shelf (grab, pull back/out, drop on floor), observe you can freely jump on the right side compared to inhibited on left side.

The visportal article is very lengthy and didn't seem to have a good section it would relate to. There doesn't seem to be a Sky page surprisingly enough. I added a blurb in the Skybox Basic Details page where visportaling is talked about. Perhaps where I did as well, although I doubt I've ever searched the wiki for "City", heh, but it would've been a result googling the wiki for "visportal".

Sorry, I wasn't referring to your motivations at all. :-) That's just the purpose of jargon, to isolate others from your "tribe", a code that helped survivability in prehistoric people when they were competing for resources. It helps not to abbreviate a term until after you've defined your usage of it, then folks may search/learn regardless of one's assumptions of others' knowledge. ;-) Thanks for the further insights/examples beyond my Wikipedia explanation.

Both walls' geometry rises to the exact same height. I reverted the wall on the right side to a worldspawn brush for purposes of the picture demonstration. The wall on the left is func_static, as is the steeple behind. The "ceilling" is caulk at the height where the wall on the right is cut off. You can see the top of the wall beyond the caulk ceiling on the left, as well as the steeple behind. If I had used Portalsky instead of caulk, the wall on the left would be cut down to the height of the wall on the right, and the steeple would not be shown at all (nor would it show were it reverted to worldspawn). In my regular map (not shown), both walls are func_static, so they display to the proper height above the ceiling. Hope this demonstrates clearly!

And one I probably learned in an obscure source... Anyone designing a city has probably run into having geometry cut off by Portalsky, and raised it to accommodate their tall buildings/towers. Instead, you may use Caulk to show sky, which will reveal func_statics from other areas behind/through. In other words, if you make a tower in the distance and use Portalsky to seal your local area, the tower top will be cut off, showing the sky in the foreground where the Portalsky polygon is. However you can do the same thing with Caulk and it will show the tower (only if the tower is func_static, not if it's worldspawn brush). Similarly you may have trees or the like poke up through caulk and not appear cut off (wish I knew this back on my first FM). PS: Note currently fog may affect caulk adversely, while it won't affect portalsky.

Or vice-versa, could/should PortalSky gain the secret ability Caulk has to reveal func_statics from other leafs? (And where might that tidbit of info be best conveyed to mappers, I don't recall where I stumbled upon it in the past, but wasn't via mainstream sources.)

Gotta' love use of jargon to obscure info. I presume not semicarbazide-sensitive amine oxidase, an enzyme, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion But what darkening of corners has to do with optimizing shadows, I don't know.

Are they? Doh. I was presuming there was a technical reason they couldn't be. Part one done: http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=3663 Need to make a sample map yet.

Is there a way (via visual stim perhaps) to make item(s) suspicious to AI? This is the reverse of "absence_noticeability", in that the area containing the item is behind a closed door, but the object is likely to end up out in a hallway on the floor in whatever location the physics system leaves it. Nevermind, I just thought of and found "atdm:absence_marker", bound it to an item and voilà.

I couldn't figure out why I couldn't jump/stand to access something critical anymore (an objective item), turns out it was because I'd added absence_noticeability to an object that had to be moved out of the way. Apparently the invisible-to-player marker that is put there for AIs to notice when something is moved out of position was impeding jumping, and forcing a crouch if moving a higher object to stand upon. Just something to keep in mind for the future!

Not that I see, and the "Briefing" wiki page doesn't even mention video apparently.

Sweet! :-) Wowzers, thank you so much for the incredible insights, as someone who has done a lot of that activity myself, I am SO pleased the feelings I sought to evoke came through for you, and I'm honored you shared such with me/us, thanks!

I had to right-click twice in Firefox. It's URL is http://i44.tinypic.com/zircwm.jpg, so you could add tinypic.com to your Hosts file (or other adblocker/malware blocking software).