Digi

Spring, though you may be aware of it already, check this link out: http://www.tafferspa...f1missions.html It seems to be fairly up-to-date, and answers your questions about recent releases. I counted TDM missions at 85 from that list, and yes, there are more TDM FMs than T3. But T2 is lapping the field by a wide margin. But it's not all rate of release. They have about an 8-year head start on TDM. Even at TDM's modest pace, that's over 100 missions. There are T2 windows where they'll have 30+ FMs in six months, and others where it's in single digits.

82 is still a lot. Anyone jumping into TDM has tons of material to occupy them. Even with conservative estimates, that amount of content is equivalent to 4-5 full-length games. This might not be consolation to longtime vets who have played everything, but the lower number actually helped me settle on playing TDM. Where do you begin when there are hundreds of FMs? But like, an hour of reading this forum, and I had a list of 10-12 of the best TDM missions. I could dive into excellent content, feel like I had experienced TDM at its finest, and not feel overwhelmed. Still, I understand the desire for a more steady stream of FMs. Spring's numbers and timeline indicate an average of roughly 16 FMs a year, which seems decent.

http://imgur.com/jO5oS2J I'm not ready to post screenshots just yet, but this is a top-down view from DR of my first FM. I've got the basic architecture done, and have started filling in some areas with larger details that will grab the player's attention. There's still a lot of small stuff I'll need to add to make the world believable, and I've not plotted out my lighting yet either. My biggest task at this point is the main house/yard (at the top of the image, with the spiral staircase inside). While I've done a lot of work on the bottom half of the map, I've barely touched the upper part. I'm also foreseeing an issue with my sky and map borders. When I didn't use prefab houses, I cheated and just made a wall enclosure around the neighborhood that the FM takes place in. But there are places where, logically, the player should be able to jump out despite the height. Or they can look down from a high-up vantage point and see sky where there should be ground. I need to tool around with Fidcal's Startpack to see if I can incorporate the "distant city" texture from it. I don't want to completely surround the area with prefab buildings, but that's a worst-case scenario solution if needed. Working title is "Best Served Cold", though that seems fairly cliche to me. It will likely change.

I figured out readables; thanks everyone. And yes, it's intuitive and fairly easy once I wrapped my head around them. So I've got a letter to a distant lover, two notes, and two poems written for my first FM (yes, poems!). The whole thing is still only maybe 40% complete, but I can see an end in sight. Yeah, it just makes me laugh.

I love the range of questions that appear here in the "Newbie" thread... Me: "I have a leak, HALP!" Others: "I want to make my diving helmet an inexhaustible breathing potion." We need an Intermediate/Advanced Questions Thread...it would do wonders for my self esteem. :-p

Lol, good to know. Maybe it'll be more intuitive than what I'm doing now. I did manage to get my first working line in a readable in-game, so that was exciting. But the tutorials for readables haven't been a straightforward as many of the others, so it's good to have options. In any case, thanks. Makes sense, thanks. Like you said, it's more about the documentation than the understanding. I can grasp the concept, but when it isn't spelled out or immediately obvious, I've had a couple instances like this where there's a lot of trial & error with folder and file placement before I get it right.

Ah, a simple fix for the file type problem. Thanks. There's a readable editor in DR? .... I'm still worried I don't have all my folders in the right place. Some of the tuts assume, for example, that I have a darkmod/xdata folder, which I don't. I'm not sure whether to create it, use the one inside the prefabs folder, or make my own in my map's folder, and how any of those will affect the "pointing to" functions that are required to read the .xd file itself. I'm sure this will be easy eventually, but it's like wading through molasses currently, much more so than basic architecture has been.

I'm having a helluva time with readables. What do you guys use for reading/writing .xd files? I have Notepad++ currently, which seems to read them fine, but won't save as that file type. I could manually change the file type, but worry about compatibility issues at that point. Every tutorial I've read (and there are several) just starts with "create your .xd file" which doesn't really address my question. The whole readable creation process is somewhat confusing, but I hope that the tutorials start making sense soon.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

Slow but steady progress on my first mission. Something that's come up: Some textures (brushes?) don't render properly in-game (they look fine in DR), and I'm able to see right through them. It's most apparent in a particular prefab building (which isn't a func_static) but I've seen it crop up on a couple other small brushes, or rather parts of brushes. It hasn't really hindered my building, but I know I'll have to deal with it eventually. Are there common reasons that this happens? Otherwise, I'm pleased with my progress so far. I'm not going to win any awards, and I'm aware of at least a couple crucial shortcomings that I'll have to learn eventually (for example, everything I've done is flat, which I know is a no-no for higher-level design...I may try to rectify that toward the end), but it's starting to come together into something coherent.

I'll play around with it, thanks. And if I can't manage Obsttorte's trick, this brute-force method will stand in nicely. Gracias.

Ok, real question (that I couldn't solve with a couple minutes of common sense tinkering, or browsing through the wiki): How do I center text on an "Entity GUI" sign? Is it a specific script in the "gui_parm1" property? Or something else? Because I managed to get the text, and place it just in front of a generic empty sign texture so that it shows up (maybe not the best way to handle such things, but I'm taking a "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid" approach currently). And I'd rather not create an entity for each word, which would be too inefficient and clearly wrong even for me.

"AAS32 is out of date" {assorted details, edited out} {edit} nevermind. Apparently skipping dmap is bad, eh?

Thanks all! I'm focusing most of my effort on the primary house itself, so it's mainly interior stuff. There will be a couple streets, and 1-2 nooks & crannies besides the main house, but the plan is to provide most of the outdoor scenery via prefab buildings, so that I don't get caught up in it too much. I've successfully completed about 90% of Fidcal's tutorial (minus a few things that I don't plan on implementing, like the elevator), so I know I can do the basics. Putting it together into an attractive level will be the challenge.

So while everyone else is building submarines and sprawling epics, I started my first actual map today. I'm aiming low - it's a knockoff of Thief's Den 1 (from Fidcal's tutorial) - but I hope to change/add enough features that it can act as a standalone mission. I don't want an identical mission, I'm just using it as a guideline. But I have a save game of TD1 after I've cleared the guards so I can pop in-game and view stuff for reference. I also aim to turn the levels primary house into more of a middle-class estate, so there's a bit more design work to be done on the interior. Something this small would take most of you only a few days. But it's glacial progress for me as I try not to get ahead of myself. I'll provide screenshots as soon as I have something worth showing, and with luck I'll having something close to beta in a month or two. Or I'll flame out and will be the latest in, I assume, a long string of one-and-done wannabe devs that have poked around this forum before disappearing. Hopefully not, but my hopes are modest. Wish me luck!

Bah, I hate using my goodwill tokens on easily-answered stuff. I'd been through the Architecture folder a few times, and apparently just overlooked the appropriate "Steps/Stairs" folder. I may still take a stab at my own; I'm not sure any of the prefabs match what I want. But if making my own frustrates me too much, it's a nice fallback. Either way, thanks.

Gracias. And thanks for the extra suggestion concerning func_static status. Should make things easier. And since your response beat my edit... Second question: are there staircase prefabs? I really don't want to try to build a staircase from scratch at this point - simple stuff is hard enough - and I'm trying to avoid only using ladders, but I'm not seeing anything in the default TDM prefabs that I can insert to circumvent that extra work.

Keeping the "newb" in newbie, I've come up with my next question: I've been inserting prefab buildings to mess around with them, but quickly realized that even if I "Room" them, they're treated as a single entity. As such, what do I do if, say, I want to add doors or windows to a prefab building? The normal selection tool doesn't differentiate between walls and such, and I even tried using the Clipper tool, but with no success. I can't imagine they're meant solely as static entities, so I assume there's an easy fix here. As always, help is appreciated, and sorry for the ignorance. ... Slow but steady progress otherwise. I'm basically learning tools, without regarding to putting them together rationally at the moment. My first level, such as it is, is too haphazard to be considered anything coherent. But I'm nearing the point of starting from scratch on an earnest - if modest - effort.

@Sotha - I like the skylights in that room. @ERH - intimidatingly cool engine there.

Excellent, thanks. This is all good to know, because I'm sure it will happen again at some point, and tricks like this are handy.

That's just it, I don't know. So, all I was doing was creating an outside "room" with some starlight in the upper portions. I remade it entirely after the initial error and it's working fine in TDM. But I can still run Pointfile and it gives me the same path that I was getting when TDM was saying there was a leak. My guess is that it's stuck on that path for some reason, but the actual leak was elsewhere. Which is worrisome, because up until that point it was adept at pointing out actual leaks. I'm letting it be a worry for another day since it's back to working. Frequent dmap tests will have to suffice unless Pointfile starts working normally again.

I don't know if I just missed it before, but the giant room around everything DIDN'T fix either one. Maybe I wasn't zoomed out enough the first time I looked. But something else is afoot. I think the real lesson I'm learning here is about frequent backups and Pointfile checks. But thanks. {edit} is it possible the Pointfile is lying to me? I restarted from an earlier save, remade the room, and can run it fine with no dmap leak errors. But when I run Pointfile, I'm getting the exact same path as before. There may have been a leak it wasn't showing me. I got back to the point I wanted to be - with a working sky and functional outdoor room - so that's good. Just never figured out the original source of the leak. I'm sure it'll come back to haunt me down the line. But for now, Onward! I'm not too far from feeling comfortable with the tools and starting my own map instead of just following the tutorial.

Time for my next (hopefully easily answered) question: I was getting a leak error in my sky prefab, which was well outside the rest of my map. It persisted when I deleted it, in the position that the prefab had been in. Possible explanations? I've had another issue with leaks, on the same map minus the sky prefab. The first couple I plugged without issue. Right now I'm trying to deal with a persistent one. It maps the leak path, and I've gone so far as to create a brand new block (brush?) that plugged any conceivable holes in the path. It still persisted. Every possible combination of walls and floors along the path has been shored up. And I'm reasonably sure nothing is outside my current rooms (like ambient_world, etc.). The only way I was able to "fix" the leak was with a massive brush that I hollowed out that encompassed everything. I assume this is an inelegant solution. Help is appreciated, as always. Picture: http://i.imgur.com/QMzTsy7.jpg

I'll cosign Briar's comment about the trap. Doesn't shake my overall enjoyment, though.

Interesting. I was curious about the lack of entirely outdoor missions, but this explains it. Maybe a series of wall forts separating sections of a forest? I dunno. I'm not versed enough yet in DR's limitations to know for sure.