kingsal

You can actually just grab the latest developer build and punch in the cvars in the console https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20824-public-access-to-development-versions/

Mine is a slight blue tint at 0.67 0.55 0.6 . Your value is more green than anything with a green value of 0.8 We've discussed having it based on entity type, but its not the focus at the moment.

Btw these are the settings I purposed for the outer glow if anyone is interested. Its fairly subtle. However, this is using the old frob highlight. r_frobOutlineColorA = ".8" (could be controlled in settings to players liking) r_frobOutlineColorB = "0.67" r_frobOutlineColorG = "0.55" r_frobOutlineColorR = "0.6"

Just FYI, the plan isn't to lock down the entire GUI system and honestly, there aren't many authors who wholesale replace GUIs to begin with. However, We're working to find some middle ground here. All in all, when it comes to messing with cores parts of the mod the teams motto has always been "do so at your own risk". Which to my knowledge hasn't dramatically changed. @OrbWeaver @peter_spy As far as allowing authors to control player settings and preferences, I did purpose a way for authors to package a "preferred settings" file with their missions. I believe its on the road map somewhere. Its unclear exactly how it would work, but once again its a do so at your own risk on the part of the author and player

@peter_spy The plan is to do something more subtle for the final release. More of a soft glow, but that isn’t represented in the latest build. Making everything modifiable is a double edge sword sometimes. On one hand it offers creative freedom but on the other it makes it difficult to fix bugs and change features later. That being said I don’t see the harm in allowing authors to set custom frob highlights, perhaps per object. We’ll see how it all plays out though as this is still in the testing phase, but thats good feedback.

Very sad news. RIP Grayman, you've been a huge source of inspiration and key part of the community. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

I'll take a look at the spider problem, they might contribute to stealth score which we can fix. Unfortunately, we don't have custom vocals lines for specific enemies like spiders and other monsters. Guards will call out the player/ thief, but not monsters. TDM has pretty long AI search and alert times compared to Thief. They rack up quickly as destined mentioned and there's a lot of under the hood variables. I've experimented with reducing alter times in my own missions and some people like that. It's a tricky thing to balance and a fairly complicated system to explain easily. We could try though! Thanks for the feedback!

@OrbWeaver @datiswousThe bell is from this ambient track ,fyi : mansion_tense02.ogg

If you're referring to the little bell ringing in the background, that's part of the ambient track and cannot be removed by players. The only option would be to turn the ambient volume down all the way, unfortunately.

Here is a modified version of the fresnel :frob.fs - Tighten the fresnel up a bit - Reduced the overall brightness of the object but increased the fresnel brightness. There's still a lot of problems with normals blowing out and alpha textures, but we might be able to fix that. The fresnel with a subtle outline could work really well (assuming someone has the time to make the outline shader)

Looping back on this, if the frob code gets booted we need to find something that works in a variety of lighting situations and material values (dark - light). I am against color coding anything simply because it could be a nightmare to manage what objects do what . I think keeping in line with classic thief is the way to go with some solution for darker materials (which dont show up very well in the current scheme). EDIT: The current prototype highlight looks nice IMO but is a bit too strong. We shouldn't go full white but maybe 25-50 percent. Another option would be to add a custom setting that allows players to pick how strong of a highlight they want.

I dig the idea of "mod-wide" tool tip pop ups in game. We don't want to do it with everything, as its fun when player's discover some things on their own, but we should cover the basics and a couple lesser-known useful hints ex: "Learn forward..." . The distinction there is a little muddy so we'll have to test the system out and get feedback. Visually, we should try to make these as elegant and unobtrusive as possible and the beginner/ intermediate/ off is a great idea. (dig that SS solution, totally forgot about that!) My suggestion would be to try this out in the tutorial mission and take it from there. If dynamic tooltips work well enough, we might not necessarily need message pop ups in the tutorial. We'll just have to see. We need to be very careful about changing conventions as they can have downstream effects, but we can take a look at this stuff on per case basis. @Obsttorte Springheel and I discussed the idea of actually showing the key bound to that specific impulse in the tutorial pop ups. For example: " Press RMB to frob" Is there a way to grab the current bound key and display it?

For what its worth, Springheel and I discussed building a new training mission that covers the basics in a more structured way. Im glad this got brought up, I'll add extinguishable light sources to the list of features. We don't have any concrete plans yet, but the idea is to make a shorter, more linear section that introduces the core mechanics followed a practice area for more complex stuff, shooting arrows, lockpicking, stealth, ect. This will lead right to A New Job where you put these things into practice. Stay tuned.

These are great! I'll have a look through them and see which ones would be nice additions to the core mod. Some more variety is always welcomed. Thanks for putting these together!

@greebo Very excited about this.! If I can get it set up I can start playing with it as soon as its ready and hit you with some feedback. Very cool.

@stgatilov Well that's discouraging. I think you are making assumptions on the part of mappers. Yes its their responsibility to teach players if they deviate from the standard camera, but we have tons and tons of things in the mod they can already do this with. That's the point of being a mod and we've seen some awesome things in missions because of it. Im pretty confident we can get this camera to mimic the ones in thief 2. Plain and simple. If an author wants to get creative and make whacky design choices. That's their choice. Edit: Also I should note that we haven't really started testing this thing out. A lot of these questions will be answered once we start testing and playing with it. Pretty standard process. So we can debate up front all day about this and that, but in the end we just need to test them to see whats working and what isn't.

@DragoferThat sounds like a good plan. We wont know really until we do some testing to see what works and whats fun. It might prove extremely difficult or super easy to cheese them with flashbombs- we'll just need to test out these assumptions.

@VanishedOne Thats a good point. I think on balance the most interesting part about the cameras is avoiding them and then trying to find a switch in the level to turn them off (at least in the case of my own experiments). Outright destroying them or even disabling them should require the use of a valuable item. Maybe water arrows are too common for that and we should just stick with firearrows as the players way of immediately dealing with them if they choose to. We do run into this problem where different maps will use different conventions so maybe turning the water arrow disable thing off be default, but leaving it available to mappers is the way to go. EDIT: I also had the thought that temporarily disabling them with a flash bomb is interesting. It would be more difficult to do and usually flashbombs are more rare. Anyways- a good bit of that can be handled by the mapper and stim-responses. Maybe we just leave the code in for a "temporarily disabled" state incase a mapper finds use for it. Keep in mind the idea is to make these somewhat modular so it can turn into eyeball plants and floating skulls or whatever where a disabled state might make sense.

Sorry one more bit: I think some concept of damage threshold would be the way to go if we wanted them to be immune to everything but firearrows. Dragofer already has some concept of this in his code. So any amount of damage underneath the threshold of the firearrow gets thrown out. (assuming a direct shot from a fire arrow does a good deal more damage than anything else)

The current set-up Dragofer has is configurable for all kinds of things. The idea is to keep it as flexible as possible, while still manageable. I think we're talking about an entirely new camera definition, so these won't interfere with old maps. In the case that they do, I believe its only a small number of maps that use security cameras and we can reach out to those authors to let them know. Im not sure if clipmasks have types associated with them and some things might even use the same ones, but that sounds like a potential avenue. EDIT: Looks like there is some idea of a melee weapon in collision information, not sure about arrows. I guess those would be in the projectile code like @VanishedOne mentioned. MeleeWeapon.cpp: #include "Game_local.h" #include "Grabber.h" #include "DarkModGlobals.h" #include "MeleeWeapon.h" CLASS_DECLARATION( idMoveable, CMeleeWeapon ) END_CLASS const int CONTENTS_MELEE_WORLDCOLLIDE = MASK_SHOT_RENDERMODEL | CONTENTS_MELEEWEAP | CONTENTS_CORPSE; const int CONTENTS_MELEE_ACTCOLLIDE = CONTENTS_MELEEWEAP | CONTENTS_BODY; // parries/held items, AI

Also with regards to how they are damaged/ disabled: While playing around with them in my own mission (which has a bunch of these guys). I find its more interesting to use high value arrows to destroy/ temporarily disable OR find a switch to power them down. A couple proposals: - Water arrows to temporarily short circuit them. Maybe 10 seconds or so by default? Could be handled with a water stim - Fire arrows to blow them up. This is a bit more tricky as fire stims wont work. Maybe a damage threshold? Or simply give them a good amount of health and make their texture immune to broadheads? Im not entirely sure how to do that. We do have a concept of "armor" on AI materials which might help.

Definitely. I think in all cases its proper etiquette to ask the artist/ creator for permission to use their work. I also think its also our responsibility as creators to use our best judgment when we put our work on the internet, because inevitable not everyone is going to ask, unfortunately. Assets that come packaged with the mod (part of the core) are up for grabs for editing, modifying, ect without permission. Just not using commercially of course.

I get the sentiment here, I really do. However, if someone wants to take models (my own included) and change them for better or for worse - I consider that their problem and not mine. Thats just the nature of contributing to a free mod. We're not going to boot model exporting.

Yep there is a map in this mission:

Nope, there is no attitude of "can't be done, lets throw it away". The team is doing its best to make TDM a stable experience for everyone. Some of that yes includes changing the way stuff works and in very rare cases removing features. The best approach is to say "Hey guys, I really get a lot of use of (so and so feature) what's the reason for removing it" State your case and the team will do its best to help. Your last comment is bogus. Stgatilov, Cabalistic, Orbweaver and Greebo are doing a fantastic job of supporting mappers. Yes Grayman is awesome, but the current team is staying the course and trying to support mappers as much as possible.