Skaruts

Is there any real advantage in auto-closing a window that is see-through? I mean, I assume the portal won't close until it's supposed to anyway, regardless of the window being open or closed, so I'm wondering...

The title may mislead a bit, so let me expand on what I mean exactly. I've had this problem for a long time. When designing a building, I usually don't know exactly what to put inside it. For example, if I'm designing a police station, I know it takes interrogation rooms, a mess hall... office booths... cell blocks... and I'm already running out of ideas. It surely takes more stuff than that. I've been trying to design a museum and I'm having a bit of trouble deciding what to fit in it, besides the art galleries. I met a guy once who's job was specifically to plan this sort of thing out for architects (I think), basically listing them what a functional building needs to have inside it, but I don't remember what the job was called. Googling isn't helping me much, so far (I'm trying different search terms). How do you people do it when you aren't sure of what to make of a building?

So I've been complaining about this and that here and there and haven't yet taken the time to deliver some very deserved praise. Shame on me. So here it is, my thank you thread. (I don't mind if others use this thread for the same end. It's always good to have less threads saying the same thing, right?) Some back story: I've been craving for a proper stealth game for years, and thief seemed like it was dead (and in two weeks we'll probably confirm it really is). I tried replaying thief 1 and 2, but during the first mission I just couldn't keep going. For some reason, even though I nearly worship certain old games, I just can't play them. I tried my most favorites, such as thief, Strife, DK, JA2, XCOM Apocalypse, Pizza Tycoon, GTA. Carmageddon... to name just a few, and I just can't keep going past the first level, and I don't really know why. Not even Thief 3... but in this case it's maybe because I replayed it a couple of times before and I burned out. Modern stealth games don't really cut it for me (frowning at you Dishonored). Either the stealth elements are just dumb and stupid (AC, a stealth game??), or a plain fudge like Betheda's thieving (isn't all bad, but........... it's bad). So, modern games, bollocks. Back to old games. Oh wait, I can't play them... Though dilemma. I could keep going if I was playing a proper remake. If a modern game brings back the feel of the old one, I'm a happy panda! I couldn't play the new XCOM for too long, it's not bad game, but the XCOM title makes me expect a proper tactical game, I couldn't play Jagged Alliance 3, and these are way worse in comparison to the new XCOM, I want my money back from Duke Forever... I couldn't stand Doom 3 even (which is why I hadn't tried, nor looked into, TDM before - I could go on all day about how bad D3 is, so don't tempt me - same with Oblivion). I've been craving for something to chew on, and found nothing at all. Found plenty of messed up crap . And none of it are stealth games... So I'm feeling like I'm going "down the shi'er". Then I found TDM. And this is what I found so great about TDM, is that it feels like thief (it kinda lacks that Josh Randall music style though :S). At first I barely even noticed the differences (the ones that prevent copyright issues), I just felt like I was playing thief! Another interesting thing was that I read the gameplay article on the wiki and learned that there were guards with helmets, but they fit so nicely into the game that I only noticed them after I crossed paths with them quite a few times. The lockpicking mechanics didn't feel out of place either. Everything so far seems to fit perfectly into the game. I not only want to thank you for the mod, but I also want to congratulate you on the execution of it. The voice acting is amazing, very... natural. And oh, am I a voice acting critic.... I keep destroying bethesda on this subject (and many other subjects) whenever I can, and I praise Valve endlessly for it. I try to be fair, but it's something I take as very important in games, and not a lot of games get it right. I must congratulate the voice actors here (I'm not yet fully aware of who they are). Other than that, aesthetics are also really good (textures, models, etc - non-mapper stuff). I wouldn't expect this level of standards when considering taking a look at a mod. I might not find this level of quality a few years back, but to be fair that wouldn't hurt my opinion. I like good graphics, but to me it's by far not as important as the gameplay and sounds. That said, it's still surprisingly good. Also, that said, the mapper sided stuff seems to be doing very well. The standards here blossom some really good quality and good looking stuff. So I found a "remake" of one of my most favorite games ever, which looks amazing, plays very solidly, feels pretty much like the original, and has entertained me for a lot of hours already. Plus, it's on a BSP engine (quake based? I don't know if doom engine is based on quake's engine per se, but seems too similar), which I happen to be quite acquainted with, and that allows me to scratch my mapping itch that I had nagging me since Valve destroyed my beloved HL2dm for which I was mapping for a few years (and where the mapping quality standards where as good as the bottom of my toilet after I let go of a generous, reeking torpedo). What else could I ask? I'm sort of living the nostalgia of my teenage years with this game. For all that and more, thank you all so much. PS: Now I just need Jagged Alliance:Flashback, Carmageddon 4 and War For The Overworld to be some proper remakes/reboots, and I'll have all I need to morph into a teenager for real. And someone in this freaking world should remake Strife!

I like ghosting, but I also like a challenging blackjack here and there. I always play on the hardest difficulty, except when it limits blackjacking, unless it's well justified and it's not a generic single mission. The same goes to killing, even though I never kill (really never). Single missions usually feel too isolated in terms of story and context for these limits to sound pertinent. I will more easily accept them in campaign, but like I said, depending on how believable the justification for it is. For example, compare these objectives: From a mission where I'd completely despise the limitations and play an easier difficulty: - A master thief doesn't leave a trace. Don't blackjack anyone. - You're a thief, not a murderer. Don't kill anyone. This bores me... From a mission where I'd embrace the limitations. - Lord Joe mustn't know about you until your buddy Jack tips off the citywatch (suppose you're going to incriminate him). Don't leave any traces. No blackjacking. - Killing anyone might start a civil war if they don't see anyone to blame for it. No killing. This challenges me. Killing might be merged with the first objective, but I made it like that just to complete the point. I still share the notion that a map devoid of AIs is a boring map...

Thanks.

Well, I managed to solve my problem one way. But I don't know if the additional patches it took to achieve is a good thing. Do patches affect performance anymore than brushes do? Here's how it looks and all the patches I used: Basically I created a bevel instead of an end cap and aligned the texture from the brush to the patch with paste natural (shift+mmb). I then just copied the bevel patch along the places where there was no variance. Then I started copying it to other places where I had to move vertices, and the way I solved the stretching involved with moving vertices was to copy and paste the shader either from the walls to the new patches or from one patch to another (only from and to the ones going in the same direction). So I had to play around with that. In some cases the shader looked mirrored, and I've been trying to replicate this on another set of arches and I'm having trouble solving the mirror problem. Also in some cases I needed to rotate the shader 180º and it instantly aligned well, in other cases I still needed to copy/paste the shader from the adjacent patch once more after rotating the shader. Somehow it worked out. Note: I didn't mess with horizontal or vertical shifts on any of them. It was wall shift+mmb and rotation changes (I'm not sure if I did any ctrl+mmb somewhere). I'm still wondering if there isn't a faster and more intuitive way... There's nothing in there that helped with the way I was doing it before. EDIT: Wait, scratch that. I thought you meant the surface inspector. Gonna check it out. EDIT2: Still doesn't seem to do anything useful about the stretching. So far.

Ctrl+mmb (paste projected) is how I managed to align all those textures. But they stretched on top. If I do shift+mmb (paste natural) the texture stays fine, no stretching, but then it doesn't seem to align well with other arches and walls. EDIT: is there a way to cut a patch in two? If I could cut them I could use two patches for the arches. If I place brush on top and paste its texture into the arch, it aligns well on top but stretches on the sides. So if I could exclude the bad parts on two patches, it could work.

In the center of the arches. If there isn't, I'll cover it up with something, I guess.

Having this issue with the light gem while recording...

That bed looks really cool. I'm not too sure about the gold hammer either. It seems to stand out too much like SteveL said. However, if that's supposed to be the bed from some high-ranked pompous clergy, then maybe it's fitting.

It seems qer_trans and qer_alphafunc don't work with DR. I found some old posts from Greebo saying this isn't supported by Doom. So it seems my plans are really screwed. If only I could understand why it's just those 3 textures that show up in game in FM maps as opposed to my test map where they all show up, then maybe... I'm not too hopeful though.

Indeed. I didn't notice and I didn't remember it: The setting is solely for AI vision. I was changing the difficulty with the idea that it was overall difficulty of the AI, and I wasn't even reading it. So my comparisons were moot. So perhaps I was having trouble with the acuteness of the AI's hearing in Score to Settle. It was there that I started questioning this stuff. I remember it happening in some other FM, but can't remember which.

With and without the translucency settings. (the black ones on the top are the default Shader Not Found - but those are as they should be) The only ones that don't show up are those that I didn't place any translucency in, like caulk and shadows and some others. I have no clue what to do about this... EDIT: It's really weird though, that in actual maps from FMs, only two or three of these textures show. Collision, nodraw and entityGUI. All others are invisible...

No clue. As far as I know there's only one material shader for each texture. textures/common/collision { description "on a model : surface will be used for collision detection instead of the visual surfaces. Used for simplifying physics with complex objects" qer_editorimage textures/common/collision.tga noshadows collision // translucent // { // blend blend // map textures/common/collision.tga // } } Commenting that part solved it, but this screws my plans.

Indeed. And his eyepatch too. Found another one... what the heck...

Now this was unexpected...

But does it override the main settings? Or better yet, does it stack with the main settings? I'm asking this because I find it weird that I'm playing this training mission in hardcore difficulty and I'm just running around blackjacking guards without any problems. Well, to be fair I take the carpet and get out a few meters distance from them, and then I walk until I'm in range. I couldn't do ths in Score to Settle and I was on Forgiving (but on hard in the FM's difficulty). Guards and thugs there would get aggro almost instantly and BJ would fail a lot. Same for some other FMs. I'll go play StS for a bit.

I don't know. But my blackjacking rate was nearly 100% consistent in that map, while on other maps it never is that much. I noticed Score to Settle changes the difficulty of the AI depending on the difficulty setting of the map. Does this override the game's main difficulty settings? Or in other words, can maps override the difficulty settings?

I tried the blackjack training mission a bit, but I don't think it mimicks the real gameplay accurately, since the guards can't see me at all with just the ambient light. So they react only to the sound, and they don't reach full alert very easily, it seems. I can just run up to them and blackjack without any problems in this map. Does it make a different sound when you hit with the elbow? I was trying to discern the sounds but the guard was already attacking me and I couldn't tell for sure. Seemed like it was the same sound. EDIT: one thing I noticed, though, is that even when I bump into them I don't fail to blackjack them by hitting with the elbow.

Would love to see how that would turn out.

I haven't touched the game since yesterday. Sorry. As soon as I get to play I'll record some stuff. Probably not today, still. Too tired for slow games. But I know a few spots in two or three missions where I had a bit of trouble, so I'm hoping I can replicate this fairly easily tomorrow. Oh! I missunderstood it then. Sorry. It makes sense in that case. I thought you were talking about the upwards movement. But in this case I'm less inclined to believe I hit with it, then, but I still can't say for sure. I'll have to try to get it happen again.

Are those polygons quads or tris?

Ah, that works. Thanks! Funny that I thought I had tried all the combinations... Yea, I know about those. And it's great, but I use them more for fine tuning. It kinda bothers me that I lose the mouse aiming while pressing them. I don't really like them to be working all over the place on the inside of a small house for example. That's where I lower the camera movement to about 10 or 20. Then I just fly confortably. (you may have started to notice that I'm quite picky about controls I really am, and I can't help it - for years that I wished that I could be one to establish some widely accepted conventions - or that some did, at least) And I can bet that in a year from now I'll still want to be nagging people about that selection method.

I've been using translucent all along. I noticed later that it is actually necessary. When I said it wasn't I had probably forgotten to place the file back in the pk4. Sometime later I just unpacked it and worked from there, it's much easier and I don't make that sort of mistakes.

Usually when you get very experienced in a fast shooter you start noticing the slight differences. A friend of mine who hardly ever plays can't even notice the mouse lag that v-sync causes (which baffles me), while I notice very subtle things. I can't say I notice anything above 60 because my pc is getting old and nowadays having more than 60 is kind of becoming a luxury. I have more than 60 in DM in simple test maps, not really on most FMs.