Paralytik
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Posts posted by Paralytik
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Water arrows are full of a special liquid designed for dousing flame.
After having read quite a few books in my life, I've found out that the liquid is called "water".
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It's high dynamic range photography, where you combine shots with different exposure times. It can be easily over done.
Most people doing this are using specialized software for combining images, since the more "proper" manual way is very tedious and time consuming. When you see good photos that has been edited manually in this fashion, it's sometimes very hard to tell them apart from 3D renders, which is super cool. In commercial real estate photography, this kind of editing is used all the time.
http://petapixel.com/2012/01/31/how-to-manually-create-an-hdr-photo-in-photoshop/
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Well yeah, but look at the water arrow, it's a crystal vial with water in it, but it will drench a fireplace lol.
They contain more water than it seems because of MAGIC obviously.
Also lol'd about the grenade idea, instantly thought of this.
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How many tris in average would a detailed outdoor wall piece have (door, windows, ledges, beams, etc)? Guess it varies a lot due to design choices, but could you come with an estimate? Also, how does visportals work for outdoor areas, where you can see the skybox? How does the top of streets get sealed? Just one big block?
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How does this work in combination with visportals? Will the stuff you see through the camera be under the same rules regarding visportals as everything else? Say, if you have a fake window with a projected image of a room which is placed where the player can not see it, will it still get rendered from the player's position? Or maybe that doesn't matter if it is an enclosed room that gets projected.
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Nice one Sotha, a bit more clean than my sketch. By the way, is there any difference in performance between func_statics and worldspawn pieces? I guess it would be possible to make everything out of BSP brushes by moving vertices around (but keep it flush and clean around the outer edges to avoid leaks), which is kinda what I would do anyways, but with patches.
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These crooked alleys will most probably be divided up with more simple, flatter (walls and ground) areas for the AI interaction to be less buggy. Maybe just a few non-moving idle AIs standing on balconies or moving in the distance at some places where the player can not go. Nice to hear that the engine disregards textures not seen, but will the use of chaulk would still lower the map size? Then it would still be a nice type of optimization.
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This looks amazing for flags or lines with clothes hanging over streets, or similar stuff. These things should be added into TDM as models with different skins IMO!
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How is it with visportals, there's no problem with them intersecting func_statics, right? Also, the chaulk texture is not drawn in the game, but can be used as sealing the map against the void I guess? I've watched a few small tutorials on Youtube, but I got a bit annoyed by the fact that optimization using no-draw textures wasn't mentioned. Lots of blocky walls with textures on all sides must have quite a serious impact on performance when you increase the number of them.
EDIT: Also thanks for the replies so far, nice to get some encouragement from experienced guys.
+ A question about the use of patches, when texturing I hope it is possible to choose which faces of them have which textures.
Like if I, theoretically, design a whole house facade using patches.
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Amazing work Arcturus! Thoughts about the kneeling one, couldn't there be two different ones of that too? One with the head bent down looking at the ground, like a greeting/sermon type, and one like with the torches that is more a "looking for something" kneel. Maybe in combination with some subtle sideway glance/movement of the head in the latter one.
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I was thinking more of a layout like this. If the design is well thought through beforehand this shouldn't be too performance heavy, right? Pretty much everything will be func_static, no point in having moveable objects if they don't contribute to anything gameplay-wise.
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That kind of stuff is easy to do.
Just make a wide corridor and put func_static walls in there. You can twist the walls as much as you can, but the visportal choke-off points M U S T be in grid and 90 degrees.
Oh, and you are starting your first map, and nobody mentioned it already... remember the golden advice:
Start small. (As in start with a small project. Get it done. Then do as big mission as you like. Just be sure to start small.)
Yeah, was thinking about it more yesterday and the easiest thing would probably be to make wider, blocky corridors/roads and mess it up with rotated walls and building facades inside of those blocks. Then some sneaky snakey L-shapes would probably help with the placement of visportals. That they have to be placed and locked to the grid is only a matter of overall design of the alleys, which I will spend time planning long before I even touch the editor.
So far I've made a list of key elements that are important to think about regarding gameplay and immersion. Sneak-past-AI mini challenges confined to smaller areas with multiple ways to tackle them as one example. Sound cues hinting about secret locations as another. Got lots of ideas that I will try to weave into the story to make it reasonable and consistent along the way.
And about starting small, yeah, I know about that one. I will probably try to design a small alley as a first lesson to learn about how the engine works and how much of my ideas are possible. I've also started drawing building facades in different styles to make it easier with future work in-engine. As far as story goes I only have rough sketches so far.
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After a quick googling, the skeleton plus the skin, I'd expect 15-20kg
This is one of the wierdest things I've read in a long time.
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Here are some examples of what I'm thinking of, if that helps to show what I mean.
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Thanks for the replies, pretty much confirmed what I thought. Too bad to hear the engine doesn't handle odd angles very well though...
The areas I would apply these things to would mostly be outdoor ones, and also to make interesting skyboxes to complement said outdoor areas.
Also for caves and tunnels it would be essential.
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Hey there folks, been lurking these forums for some time, but I haven't been very active with my posting.
Now, however, I am collecting ideas and technical details for a (hopefully) FM of my own. I have casual experience with a few different engines (Source, UnrealEd, CryEngine 2) and I understand the basic concepts of scripting. I've always been interested in making some Thief-like game to try out different gameplay elements I've been thinking of, and I got really happy when I saw that you guys managed to get TDM working standalone. Primarily my plan is to focus on sound and music as the main tools for immersion. I have a few years experience working with Propellerheads Reason for audio design and music composition.
As the thread title say, I'm interested in the possibilities Dark Radiant provides regarding asymmetry. I've gone through lots of the inspirational material in different threads, and a recurring theme in medieval buildings is their often skewed and crooked looks.
So my question is, would that be possible within the DR engine? Most maps I've seen are quite straight-angled and blocky in their design (rooms and corridors and streets all follow the same lines, with the majority of angles being 90 degree ones). Are there any specific technical difficulties with rotating, say, buildings in a street to other angles? I'm imagining severely crooked narrow alleys, with houses at different angles and things slightly leaning one way or another, and the street varying in height to break it up even more. I am aware of the fact that this approach would probably make everything harder to design (placement of visportals, texture seams, leaks/gaps, etc.), but it sure would make things more interesting.
If anyone has any specific things to say about these ideas, don't hesitate to share your thoughts!
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Many interesting things here, especially about how to draw the player's attention to possible routes and items. One thing commonly used for this purpose is movement; a swinging sign or spinning fan will be features our brain will notice instantly, even if the player consciously doesn't reflect on it.
When it comes to consistent design, I'd say it's much more important with internal consistency in the map or campaign, than general consistency over different maps created by different authors. This is something that needs to be focused on, maybe with some general tutorial-like texts on the wiki? Though, a consensus about the presentation of useable/unuseable doors might be a good thing.
About the age/time period in which TDM takes place, I interpret it as a completely fictional universe, hence all talk about which century it would be closest to in real life history seems completely arbitrary if you ask me.
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I see.
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I can see this is a really old thread, any plans on updating it with more recent material? Lots of broken links.
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I have not looked through all of the pages here, but here are some links which might interest you.
Some interesting electronic madness, labelled as dubstep/glitchhop/neurofunk/drum&bass and similar genres.
http://www.wonkay.co.uk/index.html
Since many of you seem to like metal, the Swedish band Meshuggah is seen as pretty progressive. Might have been posted before?
Mixed meters, polyrythms and darkness.
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I'm going to toss this idea out there knowing this crowd will probably shoot it down but here goes.
This engine was at one time capable of recording demos although that functionality may be broken by this point. For those who aren't familiar, it's a recording in the same vein as a movie only we capture the game state over the course of a play through and it takes up much less space. If you had a large sample size of these demos for every FM, you'd have a wealth of information to draw from for all sorts of purposes.
As a map author you'd be able to see how people respond to the challenges you present them. As a player you'd be able to gauge what missions are to your fancy. As a coder you'd be able to see exactly what someone did before the game crashed.
To expand upon the voting bit and finding missions you would enjoy playing. Imagine the player can mark missions locally simply as "good" or "bad" and the game was capable of identifying missions who's demo files fall within a given threshold of similarity. A list of recommended missions would be trivial to produce and there's no global ratings to game or scores to fuss or argue about.
It would need some serious algorithms to find out similarities, but if that was possible then one could probably also algorithmically "reverse-engineer" this data into an "optimal" archetype level, thus making this entire community redundant. Though, that would not be very fun..
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Very interesting indeed! Thanks for sharing, will keep an eye on that site, lots of good stuff.
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This type of instrument (in some iteration) has been around for many decades, I do not remember where I read it but it has been widely used in early (and later) science fiction and horror movies. One of the most interesting acoustic instruments I have heard for sure.
questions on the download page, suggestions + ideas
in The Dark Mod
Posted
A common misconception about the TDM management when it comes to updates seems to be that everyone making missions are in the "same team" while developing. To clarify, the peeps making the missions are all (most of the time) working independently, on different skill levels and with different methods and workflows. Hence, when it comes to updates, it's basically all up to the individual who made the mission to patch it for newer versions. A one-patch-fix-all is within this framework not possible for obvious reasons.