Oktokolo
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Posts posted by Oktokolo
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5 hours ago, stgatilov said:
You can only get version 2.09 using tdm_update.
I had a plan to show warning to players still using tdm_update, but this plan failed because I did not manage to force it to self-update. There is new tdm_update which shows warning, but players can't get it
We will delete some stuff on the server when 2.10 is released, so tdm_update will stop working completely.
I think confusion should go away soon after that.Maybe, allow the updater to update to an itermediary "2.09a" where the only change is the added installer and that the post-update script replaces the updater with a shortcut (or symbolic link on linux) to the installer before starting the new installer.
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38 minutes ago, Dragofer said:
My regrets are that this takes up one of the difficulty slots, so one potentially can't have expert-level mission design without save restrictions, as well as my earlier points about unfair deaths and losing progress if you run out of RL time for your session before you make it to the next save room.
I spent an hour researching the save restriction system, writing a tiny mod that turns it into the opposite and testing it on the only mission using the save restriction system available today.
So it doesn't matter anymore, whether any difficulty level also contains save restrictions or not.
Authors are free to experiment with save restrictions without having to consider the impact on player experience for us few who like to be able to save whenever we want.-
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Just now, wesp5 said:
I always play on easy after reviewing what additional objectives might be added. Most of the time only the loot goes up and I take whatever I find anyway ;).
I played almost all the missions ever made for TDM and am pretty sure, that you get more AI, more random patrol routes, less player tools (most often still more than plenty though), and sometimes even better hidden switches/routes/loot when playing the Expert difficulty of a lot of missions.
The support for the three (not sure whether you could have more) difficulty levels is well-integrated into TDM and used by almost all authors to some extend.
Tying some arbitrary restrictions to a difficulty level is just the most boring and obvious thing, a mapper can use the system for. -
6 minutes ago, stgatilov said:
Core game changes won't happen until 2.11 anyway, so mod definitely has its place.
But I'd be happy to include save cheat in the core game.
Maybe also a command to get/add specified of gold.I don't like the other stuff: all that hacking with objectives system...
I don't like hacking the objectives system either - but someone has to give us special snow flakes our safe space where we can blackjack everyone with no remorse...
Hardest step is to find a way to only prevent objectives from failing when that would actually make the mission fail.
After that, the objective-related stuff would probably be almost the same for all the different restriction removal mod flavors. -
5 hours ago, stgatilov said:
Do you mean it can break a mission because it does not consider what would happen if someone dies?
Logically, removing no-kill, no-knockout, not-seen restrictions can indeed break a mission.
But minimal loot and save restrictions don't change gameplay at all.UPDATE: Wouldn't it be better to integrate a console command into the core game?
We already have cheats like: god mode, get all loot, show keys, successfully finish mission.
I think it would be OK to have other cheats there too.Yes, every modification can break things. Even the anti save restriction mod might be able to do that at least indirectly by making players forget to use save items which may or may not need to be useed to trigger plot progression.
And yes, extra challenge switches like this should be in the core game... But they aren't.
As you can already read in this thread, some people indeed are just afraid of
greatnessfreedom of choice. They don't get, that a minority of players wants to be able to mix and match difficulty modes - like in "i take all the AI and objectives but without that save/blackjack/loot/ghost/kill/whatever restriction, that has been slapped on top of an otherwise fine missions like some <whatever-ingredient-you-don't-like> on an otherwise good pizza".
I definitely understand, why devs probably won't want to get involved in heated strawman battles about "progressiveness" or whatever absurd crap people come up with - just because they make another aspect of the game configurable from the settings screen or even just the command line.I guess, having stuff like this packaged into one tiny mod per changed thing is the best solution i can implement without becomming a TDM dev. So i did just that.
Whether i actually manage to get the other (definitely more complex) mods working and whether they will break tons of missions, i don't know. But "Save At Will" literally only consists of a trivial change to just one core script file not used for anything else than the save restriction system. So i consider breakage to be unlikely.-
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1 hour ago, AluminumHaste said:
Not a big deal, even if it remains this way, it's a simple thing to edit the map and remove the feature if we really want to play the mission.
No need to edit maps as there now is a mod for that: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21267-mod-save-at-will/#comment-469781
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The recent discussion about save restrictions (peter_spy especially) convinced me, that the time for restriction removal mods has come.
The first of the series disables save restrictions. Just drop zzz_saveAtWill.pk4 into your TDM folder and play any mission at any difficulty without save restrictions.
Implementation details:
I made tdm_savegame_admin::updateLoop in scripts/tdm_savegame_settings.script just set unrestricted save mode instead of whatever has been configured by the mission author.
Other anti-restriction mods, i might do (most likely first):
- Disable knockout restriction objectives and remove knockout immunities from AI
- Disable Min loot objectives
- Disable forced ghosting objectives
- Disable kill restriction objectives
- Open for suggestions-
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12 hours ago, Fidcal said:
Another way of doing this is using something like the save potions in Kingdom Come. They're not cheap or easy to get early on, but you need them to save.
If i remember correctly, the "Savior Snaps" save system was the very first target of mods in that game...
Maybe, that is the real solution to the whole save/kill/blackjack/ghost/minloot/whatever restrictions problem:
Mods for fan missions.Does TDM already support mods overriding mission behaviour?
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Enjoyed this mission on easy to avoid save restrictions and had fun.
The ancient tomb theme never gets old and the mission executed well on it. The low-poly art style hints at the Tomb Raider series - and there indeed is some well-measured jumping and lots of verticality in this mission (yes, a map would have been nice).
SpoilerI am pretty sure that i dodged a bullet by not playing it on the usual expert difficulty as save rooms would have been waaay too far apart.
It probably also will be one of the few missions, i never play on normal or expert until someone makes an "arbitrary restrictions override" addon allowing to turn off save and knockout (not used in this mission) restrictions...There where nicely laid out physics puzzles (boxes to be dropped, huge vases to be rolled down stairs), but none of them does enough damage to the undead to not be disappointing. The 2.10 beta might be to blame for this.
Shooting gems from a ceiling and wall worked fine though.I am no fan of zombies. But in this mission they where well done. Killable by whatever weapon you want to use with one hit (broadheads kill with one headshot as they always should).
There seems to be enough equipment to kill everyone - twice.
But i avoided the entire outdoor horde by walking on the unpowered rail (finally a mission where the obvious and logical thing to do actually works) and hoarded most of the stuff to sell when back in town...This mission is not perfect but pretty good in all aspects: A tripple four.
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13 hours ago, Araneidae said:
I have a large pool of downloaded missions ... but I can't just drop them into my fms directory because the downloader won't recognises them as already downloaded. I see that I have a "downloaded_version" entry in missions.tdminfo, but to my dismay there's no checksum or anything like that to validate.
I'd really rather not re-download 900MB of missions. Is there any way to check which of my missions are correctly up to date and just manually copy them across?
I normally just copy the whole fms folder from the old version to the new one after a fresh install. If i don't do the a fresh install, i copy the whole TDM folder and then just update to the desired version.
I had some missions refusing to update properly or getting stuck in an update loop some TDM versions ago.
But i deleted the offender's folders and after the redownload of just that few missions, everything was fine again. -
On 1/22/2022 at 7:36 PM, kingsal said:
Right. I just want to avoid the case where players download them, get excited and then have to jump threw hoops to run the missions .
Just state the required TDM version prominently in the anouncement, so direktlink clickers know what they get themselves into. Getting more users to install the beta is good - more testers means a better TDM with less bugs faster for everyone.
The Beta seems pretty stable to me. So it isn't likely, they get a worse experience by playing on the newer version anyways. -
On 1/20/2022 at 4:55 AM, kingsal said:
I would suggest we don't put the missions in the downloader until they can be properly played in the release.
Missions can state the minimum required TDM version in their Darkmod.txt.
They are not started by older versions then. And iirc they aren't offered to older TDM versions for download either. -
21 hours ago, Anderson said:
Just inter alia.
AFAIR potential copyright violations (TDM assets are released under a non-commercial license) where not a reason at all - not even "inter alia".
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"help" and "?" typed in the console could list available commands with a one-liner about what they do.
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2 hours ago, Spooks said:
I think people need to be aware that they can fully customize the hue and transparency of the outline to suit their needs, at least through the console.
Yes, definitely important knowledge.
So as listing available console commands isn't something i ever managed to do ("help", "?", "list", "commands", "cmds"... nothing i can intuitively come up with, lists them)...
What actually are the commands for setting hue, saturation, luminance and glow-width?
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While definitely clearly visible even in dim lighting, the black glow outline (preset 6) looks good to me.
It still has some glitches. But they don't jump right in your face in dim to dark environments. Most environments in TDM are dim or dark. -
9 hours ago, stgatilov said:
As far as I remember, the wording was changed because "install" usually means downloading something, or doing some nontrivial os-dependent work. Nothing like that is done, you just select the mission, and restart engine in order to e.g. update main menu GUI.
I get, why the engine has to restart and that this requires a full restart of the application. But couldn't the install/select button just do both: Install/select the mission if not already installed/selected and restart the application (and therefore the engine) and start the mission by giving a command line argument to the new application instance?
When wanting to load an old save of a non-selected/installed mission, aborting the briefing to the menu would still be possible.
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2 hours ago, STiFU said:
So, to me, there is only one logical conclusion: We need a proper surface-highlight for all materials! That means, we have to retain material-based customization in some form, as I already suggested a few months ago.
Couldn't there just be a little bit of pulsating grey be overlayed over the targeted geometry?
Primitive example for pulsating grey: https://glslsandbox.com/e#78468.1 (imagine it overlayed with plenty of alpha over whatever the pixel would show when not frob targetted).
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Wonder what drove the peaks in 2014 and 2019?
And yes, there definitely seems to be a solid lower limit of eight missions per year.
Maybe, mappers are more likely to start a contest near the end of a year when there are less than eight new missions released so far... -
Now that was a welcome and healthy snack of a mission.
SpoilerNo bullshit or the usual "unexpected" plot twists - just some good ole blackjacking and looting.
Was fun to play - and i even found all the loot this time
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2 hours ago, NeonsStyle said:
Damn htf did I miss that? Deleted now, will make new update. Damn! The last thing I wanted released. Thanks for pointing that out Abusimplea. Updating now!
You missed it because you package by zipping your current mod folder instead of first coppying selected stuff to a separate folder and then zipping that.
Other stuff, not recommended to put into the pk4:
"__trash__" (38 MiB),
"savegames" (7 MiB),
"guis\assets\loading_screen_old.tga" (2MiB),
the autosave and *.bak files in "maps" (11 MiB),
the duplicated "darkmod.txt"/"readme.txt"/"startingmap.txt"/"xdata" in "sound" (all tiny),
"consolehistory.dat" (tiny),
and "xdata\backup" (tiny).
I am not a mapper, so this are only the obvious cases. There might be more or not.
P.S.:
You are probably not the only one who packs hundreds of Megabytes of ballast with their mission. Downloading all missions on a new install takes forever nowadays...-
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14 hours ago, Araneidae said:
I'm guessing that you wouldn't count the silent fall onto paper as a glitch ... just unexpected behaviour ... so it's ok. Feels a bit cheap to me, but am interested in what you think.
That isn't cheap or unexpected at all - but literally the "sim" in "immersive sim" in action.
Surfaces determines impact noise. Paper is a rather silent material compared to harder materials like stone and tile.
So of course you can just silently land on paper. Not unexpected at all (but i didn't thought about that too).Granted, a single sheet wouldn't be much in real life. But it still is just a game and the engine has its limits.
I would still allow dropping sheets and books to dampen a fall for any level of ghosting allowing the non-plot-forced use of non-consumables because it probably reduces the overall waiting time quite a bit.But as with all gameplay mechanics, you could outlaw it explicitly for "Supreme Ghost Mode".
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On 10/19/2021 at 2:40 PM, NeonsStyle said:
You're welcome. No it's just a tiny fix. The map was always big because of the intro movie. Just fixed a blatantly obvious bug that slipped in, and have no idea how it got there, as it wasn't there last time I played it. Fixed now so I"m happy again.
Glad you liked it.
So someone mentions a four times increase in pk4 filesize and you aren't the slightest curious about what happened?
Well, i was:
"sound\ambience\Sounds of Space music.wav" is 330 MiB in size and only contains drone sounds for torturing owners of bass-capable audio equipment - a pretty good candiate for deletion or at least compression into ogg-vorbis like the rest of them...-
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10 hours ago, Araneidae said:
Not sure if this is a 2.10 beta problem or an issue with the addon, but if I install tdm_loot_stealth_stats.pk4 linked here I am unable to load any missions.
Looks like there are GUI system changes in 2.10 and that addon is probably based on Dragofer's version for 2.07, which is based on the original GUI from back then. Chances are, that it has to be updated to work with 2.10 even if it worked fine with 2.09.
I recommend mentioning the issue in the linked thread if you are still interested in using the addon.
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[POLL] Should save rooms be a feature in FMs moving forward?
in Fan Missions
Posted
As https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21267-mod-save-at-will/ exists, the "no" option existing doesn't make any sense. And you missed the "Don't care" option for the second question.
To every author out there:
If you want to include save restrictions in your mission, just do so. People who don't like them, can disable them via a trivial mod. Do not feel obligated to waste one of the precious difficulty slots for a non-save-restricted hard mode or something like that. Just include it on all the levels you feel it belongs to - even easy if you fell it fits your mission.