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Oktokolo

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Posts posted by Oktokolo

  1. 5 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

    One of the criticisms I often read of TDM, especially in other venues where it is being unfavorably compared to the thief - is that AI acuity balance by default seems a little unfair where a slight misstep can feel like it brings the whole map down on you.

    I have the suspicion, that most of the unfair acuity is caused by room-to-room leaks. When you can hear a guard walking by outside the room as if it where inside the room, chances are that the audio system actually assumes it being inside the room. Dmap can't warn you about improper room-to-room sealing - and beta testers are often experienced players, which barely make any noise anyways. I expect there to be tons of these internal sealing bugs in existing missions.

    • Like 1
  2. I really doubt that i would use this feature myself and chases are a pretty rare occurence in my playstyle anyway.
    But enabling humanoid AI in general to open unlocked doors whithout pausing could make AI door handling look way less robotic.
    Slamming em open would definitely be a bit over the top most of the time though. So the quick open probability and door open/close speed factors should probably be configurable for each alert level on the AI.

  3. On 6/18/2022 at 2:40 PM, Obsttorte said:

    I made a little test run on a new job using this feature.

    Looks like multiloot® finally solves the problem with hard-to-frob coin stacks in the common under-the-counter cash box. Almost every mission has one or more of these. It is a far better solution to the problem than the totally-not-a-crosshair frob helper.
    I will definitely use it.

    Btw I played Prey too - but totally missed the multiloot® feature. Would be nice to mention it in the tutorial and have a descriptive tooltip in the settings as it is quite an unexpected quality of life feature when comming from games which don't have it.

  4. On 4/8/2022 at 9:48 PM, Zerg Rush said:

    Meanwhile in old China they used this thing

    Repeating crossbows where pretty inaccurate and mostly used balistically by non-soldiers to rain clouds of bolts on the battle field.
    I doubt, that they would be a good weapon for a guard or the different player characters in TDM.

  5. On 4/10/2022 at 9:57 AM, thebigh said:

    I don't mind so much that the doors open automatically when you pick them. It's that they always seem to swing towards you. I'm in a lit, tiled hallway trying to pick a door before the guards come back, that's tense and atmospheric. And then the door swings in an annoying direction- that's just a nuisance and somehow reduces the tension while increasing the danger.

    Yes, in a lot of missions, the architects are ridiculously ignorant about door opening direction. In general, doors should open into the rooms, not the hallways. And while there don't seem to be any regulations about that in "the city", that is something, authors surely could know from first hand experience as it almost always is that way in real life...

    But we also see timberframed buildings with vertical beams cut by windows in most TDM missions, so i doubt that architectural realism is valued a lot in this community...

    • Like 1
  6. On 4/4/2022 at 6:48 PM, wesp5 said:

    Yes, but sadly this breaks some missions where a door opens on a trigger and isn't frobable afterwards if it didn't.

    Don't worry, i play with doors not automatically opening and report all such cases i stumble upon. So in general, missions released till a month ago should be fine. And when playing a mission at release date, noclip still works as advertised.

  7. On 3/25/2022 at 11:07 PM, thebigh said:

    The one that bugs me is lockpicking a door and it inevitably swing out towards you. There's not much really to do about that except for mappers being aware of which way their doors rotate.

    You can configure doors to not automatically open on unlock in the settings menu.

  8. 24 minutes ago, thebigh said:

    Yeah, I got good use out of the moddb articles. But an itemised list of specific new models would have been handy too.

     

    I have seen a few ancient links to posts from like 2005 that no longer work because of changes on the board. I didn't know there was a secret dev board as well. I hope it features a creepy little girl reading prophecies out of an ancient tome.

    Proof of the ivory tower's existance:

    • Like 1
  9. 5 hours ago, wesp5 said:

    So as I know you used the x-rays in your own mission, do you know who decides what goes into the core mod and what doesn't? Is this discussed in a seperate core developers board?

    Sometimes i stumble over links to posts that only result in an eaccess denied message.
    So there seems to be a hidden private board somewhere in this forum where the devs discuss all the really interesting stuff.

  10. 9 hours ago, wesp5 said:

    For now this is only a feature that mission authors could use in future missions, and of course it would be better if it was included in the core game, because I don't know if any mission authors would use my patch as their base ;).

    If they would use your patch as a base - wouldn't players using your patch get crashes because of duplicate definitions or script objects?

  11. 3 hours ago, thebigh said:

    I don't mean to suggest it's definitely not worth the effort. Just trying to get an idea of how often data corruption does happen. It seems like the kind of thing you could have a checksum to verify. If any individual file fails its checksum, delete only it and try downloading it from another mirror. This would be better than assuming the whole download is kaput and starting from scratch.

    The updater knows the checksums - it scans the installed files and compares checksums to known ones for the desired version to select the files to download. So only replacing the corrupted file and continuing with the downloading is the logical thing to do.

    Almost every web server and browser out there also supports resuming of partially downloaded files - so if we had checksums for individual chunks of N MiB in size, only at most N MiB would need to be redownloaded on corruption or disconnect.

    Some of TDMs pk4s are hundreds of mega bytes in size and there still are regions (like Australia, China or Germany) where a stable and fast internet connection isn't the norm yet.
    I myself only had a slow and shaky wireless "broadband" connection for some months last year. I had to surf the web with images disabled sometimes... Downloading TDM would have taken days (but i would have still tried if i hadn't it installed already).

  12. On 3/12/2022 at 9:53 PM, datiswous said:

    In fact I just tried installing on a linux laptop. It installed fine till 100% and gave an error that it couldn't open a pk4 file (one of the starter missions). Then it deleted all files, that took the installer 12 minutes to download. I wonder if I should try again...

    So what you actually want is corrupted files to just get redownloaded from another mirror instead of cancelling the installation?

  13. 3 hours ago, kano said:

    Well, i guess, apart from facing criminal prosecution in a country, he would never visit anyways - he also is a combatant now. Might have way more drastic consequences than just ending a career.

  14. 21 hours ago, thebigh said:

    There's also the issue of how to handle speakers with smaller radius than those of your footsteps.

    My suggestion is to just use the volume of the sounds, the player hears - as that is, what has to be calculated anyways.

    It isn't the most realistic way to do it. But it is cheap and easy to gauge for players as they can hear the noise level at their position.

  15. 21 hours ago, thebigh said:

    The problem with that is that some sounds, no matter how loud they nominally are from their spawnargs, shouldn't interfere with interfere with guards being able to hear the player. Imagine a big city ambient speaker consisting of background hubbub like indistinct voices, crickets chirping, and a dog barking somewhere in the distance. That might have its volume set pretty high but it absolutely should not interfere with guards hearing your footsteps.

    The base ambience loop normally isn't loud at the player position (and every single time it actually was, it also was quite annoying). So yes, it should lead to an acuity adjustment factor of zero.

    The acuity adjustment factor can be offset by a constant value to achieve that.
    And a bonus would be, that volumes below that offset value would actually lead to higher acuity - matching real world experience.

    So: Less acuity in noisy environments - but more acuity in silent environments.

  16. 12 hours ago, DeTeEff said:

    The player is sneaking around in a room with lots of humming machinery and loud sounds. It's very annoying that the AI has super hearing and can distinguish that THAT sound came from the player and thus, he is alerted to your positon. Would it be possible to add some kind of sound mask when designing a mission so you need to produce more noise to be detected?

    Player action audio masking could even be automatic.

    The cheapest solution would be to reduce player-generated sounds by a factor determined from current overall ambient loudness at the player position. Sounds at the player position have to be calculated anyway, so the extra CPU load should be negligible.

    Obviously, that would be a pretty naive solution, because noise at the AI location would not be taken into account.
    But it would still be an improvement to immersion and mappers could still tweak the acuity of the common machinist working in the boiler room.

    • Like 1
  17. 3 hours ago, Dragofer said:

    Nato is a defensive alliance which does not invade neighbouring countries, unlike Russia.

    Thought experiment: The Warsaw Pakt still exists and Canada is about to join it. I know exactly, what the USA would have thought about that.

    Yeah, sure, i would really like to believe Nato to be a purely defensive alliance while we drone civilians to death in various countries far far away. The thing is, that we literally fought wars for oil.
    I would like to be on moral high ground against dictators like Putin. But sadly its all moral flatlands till the horizon. There aren't any hills to stand on.

  18. On 3/7/2022 at 11:44 AM, Kurshok said:

    I remember hearing that Russia's economy, under the sanctions it is enduring, could only last the war 10 days. It is now on day 12. Is Putin starting to have to dip into the offshore bank accounts he and the other oligarchs have taken under the table for years to fund the war?

    The thing with Russia is, that it actually can be fully self-sufficient when managed correctly. It has fertile land, fossil energy deposits (oil, gas, Uranium), sustainable energy sources (wood, wind), building materials (stone, clay, sand, wood), iron ore, some other ores and even diamonds...

    With a strong leader they could be fully self-sufficient in a matter of a few years. But they don't even have to, as they share a border with China. China is the biggest single market and basically the factory of the world. China also could easily be self-sufficient - and is working on that since a few years already.

    Russia + China = World dominance! Both: Economically and military!

    We are pretty stupid, so we force Russia to finally make friends with China right now. We should have not expanded Nato eastward back then in 1999. But now we are also in a world trade war which we actually started. Could be worse: We could also try to invade Russia in winter... again.

  19. 11 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:
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    Hmm ... interesting - While this fixes the issue when auto open on unlock is disabled, it now breaks it when it is enabled as the door will not open all the way. I am sure I messed this up rutting about the script originally.

    Looks like doors have a spawnarg "open_on_unlock" set to "1" by default. That spawnarg is ignored for users with "open doors on unlock" set to "no". You could try setting this to "0" to make that unfrobable doors behave the same for all players.

    • Like 1
  20. On 2/20/2022 at 7:29 AM, stgatilov said:

    Try to delete tdm_installer.ini?
    The only possible explanation is some kind of permission issue.

    Thanks, Worked. The installer first failed with ini not found. But after restarting it, it worked and found beta210_8.

    Can't have been a permission issue - TDM is installed in an ordinary c:\games folder not protected by the system like all my games. As game devs are ultra-ignorant when it comes to adhering to any platform-specific standards even on the mainstream desktop game launcher OS, i don't install games into c:\program files...

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