Airship Ballet

Think of all the additional gameplay options! Laxatives, softeners, hardeners, all used to give the player plus or minus points on the Bristol Stool Chart, which in turn affects smearability. You're onto something.

The light gem doesn't actually measure the visibility of the player in TDM. It measures prettiness.

Yep!

No, I'm planning a mission with areas of varying difficulty, cost and encouraged approach. I want areas with pinchable wall lights and areas with a good reward that'll cost you a water arrow to get through easily. You need both, rather I want both. Like I super see the merit in extinguishable wall lamps, but you're just rattling on about realism and getting your stuff in and changing what's already there rather than expanding the options at hand. I think some time in the future I'll just go make one.

I can't see alternative light solutions not making it into the core mod if they're done well. If they didn't, they'd be released to mappers who would put them into their maps and allow everybody in the community to play with them anyway. Besides, an option would split the community into those who do and those who don't. Also, the more freedom you offer players to tamper with their difficulty settings, the harder it is to map for them. It's already difficult to balance acuity, and there are already people with settings on max complaining to me because they can't get through a mission completely unseen. Now I can't reliably use oil lamps because there's an option to render them completely defunct? It'd be the worst. It needs to be a separate entity that can be used, knowing for sure that it'll be switchable and is able to be placed as such. If this is now just a thread where we're lamenting the folly of man I'll happily bail and let nothing happen at all.

Except it's not an ideological thing in that sense. It's a "no you can't overwrite our work but by all means make your own in addition" against a "no your work has to be undone I want it my way."

http://youtu.be/tBmqQUdPUCc

dude

I just think it's better to point out the elephant in the room and suggest an alternative, to keep it going. You never really know that it's pointless until you've given up. Dude might come back with a fully functional switchable gas lamp alternative, and that'd be great. I mean I'd suggest otherwise, that there's at least some correlation there. When I think comfort I think of having settled in, thrown off your shoes, gotten rid of your work face and put back on your own. If a community is just really cold, impersonal formal debate, it's far from comfortable, to me at least. Yet when anybody's more casual than that, throws in a little joke, gets irritated, someone's always all "woah woah pump your brakes Son this is a sterile speaking environment." That sucks, really. I wanna make friends, people you can talk passionately with, rather than dry remarks and simple statement of opinions. but maybe im just a dork like that

No but that's what I'm saying. It isn't, at all. Like, that's just plain not personal. It's like when somebody in a conversation goes "awkwaaaaard." It wasn't awkward until you called it awkward, and it's not an issue until somebody derails the thread telling people to stop being so gosh-darn hostile. Making fun of someone's receding hairline or whatever, it's bullying, but tackling one another's arguments just plain isn't. It's like some people want nothing to get done, for fear of upsetting one another. People just have a weird threshold, or the preconception that anything other than agreement is hostility. It's like to some people we're all doomed to never be comfortable talking to one another, so we have to pretend it's parliament, that we can't poke fun at one another because it wouldn't be proper. It's the minority, but there's one for every thread that gets somewhere, I swear. actually even MPs often debate with a bit of snark

My God, it's just a discussion. How is this a "controversial", "heated" thread to you guys? I'll honestly never understand the weird tendency some people have to just hop into a thread and be like "Guys calm down the people next door can hear you talking. Also I have nothing to contribute to the topic. Also I'm better than you savages." Maybe it's me, but jeez, nothing would ever get done if you had your way. Anyway, my suggestion is to just create/comish a model and create a switchable gas lamp entity with it. I'd be cool with that being included in the mod. Doesn't step on anybody's toes, doesn't cause any consistency problems, doesn't change anything that's already there, adds more to the game. A switch in the options menu is just lazy design, would still ruin some maps, blah de blah. If you'd like something of yours to make it into the game, you need to pull your finger out and make it happen. It's community-driven, it's entirely down to you. A bunch of people appear and shout stuff from the sidelines and get irritated when nothing comes of it, as if their idea alone was enough to spur a bunch of busy people into changing their project at a moment's notice. Go make/ask for a pretty oil lamp to be used exclusively in tandem with your idea and you'll have my vote for sticking it into the core download, because I'd use it for easier areas. Keep having a fit and being all passive-aggressive, and it'll be dead in the water once you lose interest.

I have no trouble at all just smacking unaware people's backs. I never have to aim, literally just look at them from any angle behind them and swing, and they go down. I've never had difficulty with it at all, and it's usually the sort of thing I mess up in other games. Other than my swing hitting low ceilings or light brackets, I've never had any consistent trouble, so I find it hard to believe it's anywhere near as precise as is being suggested.

Why thank you, saves me the trouble!

I think you believe everybody here is conservative, or stubborn, or something, because they disagree with you. Like I said, make a variant, offer it up, do as you please, but accept that the people who decide what goes into the core mod don't see the point in making the game easier by allowing a player to click on oil lamps to put them out. I don't either. It's dumb, really dumb. We've already established that consistency is important, also that people value realism to differing extents. I talked about game mechanics and that, along with a lot of what else has been said, has flown over your head. Maybe it's unrealistic to require a water arrow, I don't know, and honestly don't care. Not only do I have a considerably lesser experience with real-life oil lamps compared to the surprising majority here who do, but the lights work fine as they are now. It's not a case of proving whether or not oil lamps can be snuffed, it's a case of the game having a flaming light that cannot be snuffed, that is more refined than a torch but not electric or gas. That's a game thing, not a realism thing: you need something shiny and presentable that isn't raging away like a torch, but that can't be snuffed by hand, for gameplay balance. Take away oil lamps, and how am I going to make a respectable hallway difficult without using electricity? I can't use torches, and I can't use candles or lamps. That's the purpose oil lamps serve, the gap they fill. That's not going to be changed because it's potentially unrealistic that you can't spit them out.

I'm actually not sure why that is; to my knowledge the reference is in the right place: merrypainting01 { qer_editorimage models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_ed wood diffusemap models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_d bumpmap models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_local specularmap models/darkmod/props/textures/painting01_s { if ( parm11 > 0 ) blend gl_dst_color, gl_one map _white rgb 0.40 * parm11 } { if ( parm11 > 0 ) blend add map models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_d <---- Pretty sure it's this line. rgb 0.15 * parm11 } // TDM Ambient Method Related { if (global5 == 1) blend add map models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_d scale 1, 1 red global2 green global3 blue global4 } { if (global5 == 2) blend add program ambientEnvironment.vfp vertexParm 0 1, 1, 1, 1 // UV Scales for Diffuse and Bump vertexParm 1 1, 1, 1, 1 // (X,Y) UV Scale for specular vertexParm 2 global2, global3, global4, 1 fragmentMap 0 cubeMap env/gen1 fragmentMap 1 models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_local // Bump fragmentMap 2 models/darkmod/props/textures/merrypainting01_d // Diffuse fragmentMap 3 models/darkmod/props/textures/painting01_s // Specular } } Anybody know what's up with it?

Only gone and fixed that for you avn'I? Just replace the skin file with this one. Added it to the zip too, obviously.

goddammit that was my joke that I never used

For real, though, make a variant. You don't need to overwrite what's already there. I know you just love realism--in this fantastical game about stealing candlesticks to make a living no less--and we're all aware that you can, indeed, snuff oil lamps with spitty fingers, but you're going to give somebody an aneurysm with your approach to it.

I voted no. I enjoyed every second of it too. Ohhhhh.

If only the online wasn't 33% suburban gangsters, 33% Russians and 33% 12 year olds, I'd have played those heists more than once each.

I intend to release... uh... 3. By the end of the year. One is 90% done, the other is like 60% done and the other I'm just starting. I jump around a lot. I was making something with Kyyrma, then he dropped out for work, so I'm planning on finishing the final 10% alone. I made a monastery that was supposed to be the third mission of Quinn Co, but felt it didn't fit well with what I originally wanted the campaign to be, so I've recently started a new one. I've got one big building done of that, but I've no idea how big it's going to be so far. But yeah, one map finishable in a week when I bother, one map maybe a fortnight of work, and another maybe a month or two, but the first two won't be done until that is. tl;dr I'm bad at sticking to one project so a bunch are coming out at once, but not early in the year.

I'm all for adding extra layers to the gameplay, but that's ridiculously arbitrary. Lights are fine as they are. Direct the think tank elsewhere.

I think we got off on the wrong foot here. You're right, man. I say we go the whole hog, remove the ability to hide in shadows entirely. I mean, slightly darker corners are hardly going to hide the shape of a grown man. That super ruins my immersion. Gameplay balance? Psh! Sacrifice it all for 'mershun I say.