Skaruts

I wasn't even thinking in terms of difficulty, really. I like hard games, just not so hard that it becomes boring and too quick-load dependent. I like to find a balance, and thief to me is more about the story and the "puzzle" that it is to get through guards and stuff like that. I like to ghost. And I didn't change the difficulty because I was still getting a feeling of what "forgiving" means in terms of gameplay. What I was really thinking is that there seems to be no "grace period", as a youtuber called it (he thought the same too, but didn't lose time confirming it). The very moment they notice you, blackjacking is out of the question, no matter how many hairs distance it is from their head. It's what it seemed to me, at least. And that's kind of annoying. It screws with my suspension of disbelief. And I have to agree with the elbow thing. It doesn't make sense when you think about it. In a upwards hand movement, the elbow never surpasses the hand. Extending the elbow forward requires a slight effort and leaning a shoulder forward. But I didn't want to point that out, I was already complaining so much... But I still need to play more to see if it happens again and if it's the elbow I'm hitting or if it's really the lack of a "grace period". I certainly don't want it like it was on Thief 1 and 2 where you could nearly run around everywhere, the guards were as deaf as doors. That's no fun. But I want a bit of slack for fairness sake.

Ok I got the blend blend mode and the alpha channels working and it actually looks great, but there's a glitch that I can't get rid off... I solved it for NoDraw quite a while ago, but I can't remember what was the cause, and I just can't think of anything now. You can see the vis portals on the back rendering in front. (Alpha channel if full white just to make the glitch more noticeable.) Any clues, anyone? EDIT: Seems like I just solved it somehow. It's something to do with either the alpha channel or my tga saving settings. But still, the Wasser texture renders on top of the vis portal texture... I haven't messed around with the wasser. Damn... EDIT2: Found the problem. It's a natural consequence from blending. I don't understand the math completely, but basically, with blend blend, the higher the opacity on the alpha the less visible the front texture becomes and the more visible the back texture becomes. So basically what's on the picture is the front image becoming fully transparent and the back one becoming fully opaque due to the equations involved, when being drawn to the buffer. Lowering the alpha (less opacity) solved it. In some other cases the problem was that the other textures didn't have alpha yet, but had blend modes in the materials. So the "problem" is "solved". I'll share this for whoever is interested in using it when it's ready. I'm doing a personalized version of the textures for a cleaner and clearer look, but I'll make transparency for the original ones too. Thank you all for the help.

Yup, I did it, pretty much how you suggested. But the transparency didn't look any decent, so I'm trying to fix that.

I'm dumb... Of course an alpha channel doesn't work if you don't place the modified image back in the pk4... But the blend blend mode is creating glitches for some reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz4INLEmh_I

http://forums.thedar...ditor-textures/ Ok I exagerated the math. But you still select/deselect something for each of almost every thing you do.

It seems the blend modes are more or less the same as what photoshop does with layer blend modes. Except that you're actually imputing gl keywords to make them. http://www.benmcdowe...odes-in-opengl/ I tried multiply, but it looks bad. I superimposed the same textures in photoshop just to double-check, and it looks exactly as bad. So a way to deal with the alpha directly is probably what I want instead of blend modes. And I was just now trying that, but it seems the alpha channel doesn't change anything. I must be missing other parameters in the material definitions for that end. (or I'm doing something wrong with the alpha) As for having a separate alpha image, I don't yet know the parameters to use it either.

Add, Filter, Modulate and all those seem to be presets that combine two of those gl_ arguments. They are listed here (search for Stage Keywords), but they don't explain what these arguments mean beyond the self explanatory names. Obviously they are related to opengl, but... ...hmm!

Well, if the patrolling guard just stood there next to the railing, you wouldn't have any challenge, there's no way you could get to his back in that spot. The entrance is well lit by a lamp, and the only way to get past it without harm is if you hurry inside the house. The thugs on the fire will spot you but not for long enough to do something. But that's only possible without the patrolling guard there. If he's there the entrance is fully denied. And blackjacking him is out of the question too. There's no way you get away with it, the other two thugs will see it very well. Of course that this is only true if you care about not messing stuff up. If you enjoy or don't mind stirring up the hive then you could still get in.

So long as you don't get Gold for blackjacking and killing and stuff like that (which I assume XP might have been earned from that too, before), it makes sense that you get gold from stealing. But it still seems a bit stupid that you get the money instantly (except if you actually steal coins or something). They could have made it so you could go to a shop, sell your "acquisitions" and buy stuff with the cash.

As far as I'm aware they took back their XP decision and replaced it with something else that makes more sense. Can't remember what. (this raises the issue that has been pointed out elsewhere: that someone ever thought that could be a good idea is amusingly distressful, and deems the adequacy of this team to produce this game as questionable) As for the queer "magical powers" à la Dishonored, the "PRESS THIS KEY TO..." that show up all over the screen as if we had chimp brains that couldn't memorize 20 keys, and all that lame stuff, they seem to have made it so you can turn all that crap off. So, as far as I'm concerned it can be a good game, despite being a bit of a dumbed down "press key to succeed" type of game. But not up to par with the series by any stretch, especially considering it 2000 and freaking 14 and we should already be light-years away from the "press key to succeed/win" type of mechanics, but from what I've seen and read the environments are just as soulless and gamey as the games from the 90s and the characters are as two-dimensional as a B-movie from the 80s... etc. Not that that isn't to be expected these days. It's just depressing. I'll reserve my judgement to after I tried it. I'll reserve my money up to that point too.

As suggested by Obsttorte I've been trying to make the editor textures transparent myself. So I looked at the material file for most of them (tdm_internal_engine.mtr), and found a translucent one - overdrawtest. translucent { blend filter map textures/common/overdraw.tga } I copied these definitions from there and pasted in all the others, and it worked, but not as I was hopping. I messed around with the blend modes and I couldn't get anything decent. I don't understand exactly what the blend modes do, so it's hard for me to find a balanced combination. So I went looking for other textures that were already transparent. Rain_splashes don't have the translucent keyword, but they're still transparent. They have this: { //needed to emit particles blend filter map _white } But this makes it too dark, in fact. And it turns out the keyword "translucent" seems to be irrelevant for the editor, I removed it from the others and they were still transparent. RJFerret suggested Speakers, but it turns out their texture is only transparent when viewed in the speaker entity, not on brushes. So, does anyone understand blend modes enough to suggest combinations that may give good results? Some examples from the Hammer Editor. They can illustrate my goal. I'd like to get closer to that as I can. Ex1, ex2, ex3, ex4, ex5

Me getting 60fps doesn't mean you get 60 fps.

Definitely going to try that. Thanks. Sorry to break the rule of not discussing things here, just for the sake of clarifying my thoughts and the experience I'm having: I've been messing around in the editor for a few days, two of them in full, and I can say I'm used to it already (I don't think about it anymore, I just do it). However, there's still a subconscious discomfort constantly nagging me in the back of the mind and it doesn't seem to be getting away, due to having to press shift and esc repeatedly and constantly - because selecting/deselecting things makes up for 90% (if not more) of the editing workflow and is the primordial requirement for almost every activity in the editor, it should be a comfortable action to perform. At the end of the day, humans can adapt and get used to nearly anything. That doesn't mean we should leave everything as is. One thing I usually say and keep as a personal "rule": if it doesn't feel right, then it's probably not.

Func_group's accessibility is easier than I thought, now that I learned how to convert things into entities. I was having trouble doing this because the wiki , as far as I've noticed, doesn't mention anything about right clicking the brush and selecting "create entity"(EDIT: actually it mentions it in the Must Know Basic Intro page - but having overlooked that, it took me a while to guess), and I was expecting the Create Entity shortcut would create a totally new entity regardless of having a brush selected, and that the way to convert something into an entity would be through the entity inspector, by clicking the Choose Entity Class button. Turns out the button doesn't seem to do anything in that regard. Either way, there's a problem with func_group: when I included func_statics into a selection I wanted to func_group, the create entity option was greyed out. This makes sense, considering func_group is an entity, but reduces its handiness. I would further suggest two things: 1- That there ought to be a way to group objects that worked independent from entities and was not an entity itself, so that it could be more versatile and could lose these limitations. 2-. That the method for converting to entity be made more intuitive, and that the button in the inspector could be used for this. (I would assume it's intended to, maybe just needs a fix)

Indeed. Thanks. I scratched that part. If there's anything else I missed I'll do the same. This doesn't work for me. All it does is select and deselect the same brush repeatedly.

Might have been that. I'll try to record it if it happens again.

Uncapping fps would be a great thing to test how mapping optimization effects performance. If it's locked at 60 I'm basically shooting in the dark, as I don't have a way to tell if what I did was beneficial (and how much I benefit from it) to the map's performance. I can only see this if I'm having less than 60 fps, which is a point where I'm forced to rethink map optimization. But if I make it reach more than 60 again, I'm back to blind optimization once more. Would really love to be able to uncap it. In single player games, no. In multiplayer you probably do notice some side effects. If you have less fps than the server tick rates, you'll be sending less information than the server requests (thus why you hit that perfect shot but didn't do any damage), and having a good margin of error is always good. For example, if you have consistent 120 fps, if for any reason lag drops you 20% you're still higher than the server tick rate. (for HL2dm server tick rates were usually 66 in european servers and 100 in the US servers. TF2 should be similar. I don't know how other games do it though) Of course, this is irrelevant to the dark mod, but still, there's no reason why you shouldn't have the option of 120 fps if you have a 120Hz monitor. Too many games these days still make physics frame rate dependent. I'm not an experienced programmer, but I'm not convinced that that's a good practice to make anything be dependent on frame rates. I can cut some slack on modders, but not on the mainstream devs.

It just occurred to me that most AIs when sitting on chairs are extremely paranoid. Is this set by the mappers or is it the behavior they all have at all times? Would be a bit more immersive to find AIs dipped in their readings or their card games, and completely oblivious to the world, once in a while...

Nice. I'll be working on this as a side project. Hopefully I can make something work. Thanks all of you.

I didn't have much of a choice. I was blackjacking the thugs as they were returning to their hideouts, and two of them came together, I knocked one out, and then I needed to catch up to the other before the next one came. He would walk up the cobblestone street, which would be cobblestone all the way, I don't think I had moss arrows, and there was a third thug coming further behind. I should note this wasn't even a must do thing, I had the mission nearly complete, I was just further humiliating the thugs for the fun of it, before I moved on. Whether they were conscious or not wouldn't have any bearing on my success, I had already succeeded without blackjacking almost no one. It was just frustrating in terms of how the mechanics worked. If the floor was really loud I would expect the guy to immediately be on guard as I walked my first non-stealthy step, but cobblestone isn't that loud (doesn't seem to be) and, again, he barely had time to notice me. It gave me the same feeling an aimbot cheater in a shooter gives you: you poke your nose out of the corner and in 5 milliseconds you're dead. Considering how he only reacted as my blackjack was about 3 inches from his scalp I felt pretty much that way. Which is why it bothers me. I don't know. But if not, then it's probably what RJFerret mentioned, you need to aim for the neck. I have failed to blackjack every guards with helmets so far. I have to try what he said.

The major points to consider might be the lights that change color and flash (I'm aware of the limitations regarding lights - they were the reason for the errors I had in that map), the mechanical parts in the bowling room, such as the ball recovery system, the pin recovery system, and stuff like that.

Well, you can't blackjack guards with helmets. But that wasn't my issue. It was actually a thug in the Score to Settle FM. Yes, but I'm talking about guards that haven't yet unsheathed their swords. I'm blackjacking them as soon as I get there, I hit them as they are still going "wtf?". The one I had in mind was on a cobblestone street (Score to Settle, the street where you start), which isn't the best, but still isn't the worse. I was chasing a thug at around 1 to 2 meters distance, and I quickly ran and hit. It failed. Again, I hit while he was still going "wtf?". About the other thing, I wasn't alerting him. I could stay there all day and he wouldn't know. It wasn't even my arm movement (as far as I could tell) that gave it away, he would fail to be stunned literally at the very moment I hit him slightly sideways (a few degrees of angle). I'll see if I can record some footage of these issues if I come across them again.

I would love to do it here, just for the fun of it (I love creating interactivity and stuff), but I'm still not aware of all the potential darkradiant offers. But I'm very curious, and if anyone tells me this can be done I'll be more motivated to do some research so that I eventually get it done. Of course, this would have to be adapted to the world of thief, and strobe lights and lasers wouldn't be a thing.

So the Inventors are coming up with these contraptions these days? It's really hard to tell. It seems he did something like what I did once for HL2 where I had several sections of the map moving backwards and being teleported back to the front as they reached the back. This was really glitchy in the Source engine though, you could see gaps between the sections as they moved, among other things, so I quickly gave up the idea. Either that, or the skybox thing Sotha mentioned, and probably a script to randomly pop up trees and such. The only thing that's clear in his videos is that the terrain actually moves. And he doesn't @£§€#$% stand still! :S