Petike the Taffer
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Posts posted by Petike the Taffer
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An interview on a Hungarian site where I talk at length about modding, and TDM in particular.
You have an interesting surname, Melan. And thank you for the article. I'm going to give it a read.
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I'm slowly working on the concept and plot of my first FM. As it would be my debut, I'd prefer to make it a simple and small enough mission, just to learn the ropes. However, I do want to liven it up a bit by some of the smaller-scale design choices.
The downside is that it would require certain NPC/AI behaviour in order to be convincing. I know of the wiki articles on setting the alignment of NPCs to the player, but my question is for a subset of that topic.
Specifically, I want to ask if it is possible to set a single NPC's behaviour to not only be neutral/allied with the player character, but be able to follow/wait for the player character when he gives the command ?
By command, I mean maybe the player carrying some item in the inventory that, when pressed, activates a script that toggles the allied NPC's behaviour betweem "wait: and "follow". Also, the NPC should start to follow the player only after they meet.
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Haven't finished this yet, but this is a wonderfully atmospheric mission with some excellent level design. I've liked it so far, very well crafted. Hard to believe this is your debut mission, Dragofer !
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Good news, people.
I've advanced a lot with the translation. There are still many things I need to finish, but now that I can review my work regularly, the whole process has been sped up considerably.
I have some minor issues with one or two types of letters, but I'll cover that later. -
Anderson, I have to agree with the contents of your spoiler. That particular section of the level was artistically very creative and immersive. Caught me off guard as well, in the best way possible. Shame for all the other flaws I've mentioned. They're small, but they ruin the good bits of the mission for me.
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No idea about the others, but that link always gives me an Internal Server Error.
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Well, OP, I personally don't have arachnophobia (even if I dislike some of the bigger, creepier spiders), but all my compassion to you.
I know phobias can be hard to fight and some might not be possible to overcome, but you might indeed try to do something about your's. At least to send it on the defensive, so to speak.While shock therapies mentioned by some in this thread (jumping into a DR map filled with spiders) might be a bit too much, some sort of milder therapy that helps you diminish your fear of creepy-crawlies could work. Until then, I concur that we could use some easy method of switching off the spiders' presence (or at least them being a threat) for any player who might find them too scary or off-putting.
Not that long ago, I played a smaller FM called Mad's Mountain, where (IIRC) in order to meet the loot limits for the expert difficulty level, the player had to go down into a small spider cave to collect a few trinkets. Unfortunately, there was a whole small family of TDM spiders there, and since I had low health at that point, they made even me nervous. I went through the whole FM without barely a problem, but it was in this cave that I messed up and died repeatedly (it didn't help that it was rather well lit...). Bummer.
Oh yeah, that's the one. It's a bit outdated though. The upright bowaimer has been integrated into the core mod, wasn't it?
Yes, it has. It's available in one of the Options menus.
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Currently, I'm finishing up work on the Slovak localisation of the GUI. (I'll do a translation for the Training Mission and The Tears of Saint Lucia as well, once I'm sure the GUI works.) Unfortunately, I could really use some help with a certain script that enables the changes done in all.lang for the particular language's .lang file. At the moment, I'm stuck and I really don't know how to carry on.
Some advice would be appreciated, though I'm waiting for a potential reply to a message I sent to Tels.Hon hon hon!
I'm getting interested already.
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Please guys, could you advise me on that script ? I'm nearly finished with my translation in all.lang and I'd like to test out whether it works or not. Just to get an idea of which diacritics and titles will show up fine and which won't. If I can't even test my translation, then my whole effort is quite pointless at the moment.
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Now I have a problem with the "gen_lang.pl" script. I'm not sure how to use it and the game almost completely ignores the translated text I've put into the all.lang file. It still has the same badly auto-translated text from before, despite it being gone from both all.lang and slovak.lang.
I made sure the scripting is arranged in the way it should be, so I don't think the problem's there. 
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We could use some ice footstep sounds.
I might record some, if you like. Plenty of ice outside at the moment. I might need some help from others to clean up the audio a bit, but I'll try my best with the recording.
Other things we could use are more ambient city noises--distant yells, creaks and groans from buildings, the clatter of cart wheels, leaves or papers stirring in the wind, etc. Metal stress sounds are also lacking at the moment.
Good idea. Do you think it could work if I tried to create a collage of some of my own recorded sounds with a few free sound effects off the Internet ? I'd go for subtlety, obviously, given the night time nature of most of the missions that would need that kind of muffled city ambience.
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If you're interested I recommend you to download a free cat / dog model provided with a set of animations and you can test out, how and if it works in TDM. I don't know anything about the coding section though.
Well, I think this one looks fairly good for basic cat model coding and playtesting. Not bad looking mouser, but also low poly enough to not be too demanding on the engine. Once someone does enough testing to see if relatively realistic cat behaviour can be replicated in DarkRadiant, we'll get someone to work on our own model.
Obviously, all of this presumes there will be enough people interested in adding cats to their missions. I'll second Springheel a bit on the notion that cats are mostly just for window dressing. Then again, so are the rats - even if they were easier to work on due to their smaller size and less demanding behaviour patterns.
Crows or ravens would be really nice indeed. Having a murder of crows lift off at a specific place in a map would be very immersive!
Yeah, I'd welcome birds and bats too.
Aside from corvids, some smaller, mundane songbirds (preferrably night time species) or some smaller owl species would be fine too, though those would be more of a "window dressing" thing. -
Erm, nevermind, I just downloaded a Doom 3 zip-to-pk4/pk4-to-zip converter and it works like a charm.
I've copied the English section text in all.lang under the Slovak section and translated the bits I already had prepared (and had previously added erroneously to the slovak.lang file). I've repacked tdm_base01, copied it into the game folder and the translation seems to be working fine.
Unfortunately, most of the diacritics in the smaller menu texts don't seem to show up for some reason. And some longer lines for the menu texts didn't seem to register, or I've confused them with their doubles, or some of the letters don't register (possibly Ž, Ď, Ľ, I dunno... I'll have to keep checking.).
I do have one problem, though: Once I replaced the slovak.lang file I've tampered with with its original version, much of my translation disappeared. I still have my translation in all.lang, but it isn't registering. Do I need to add something for it to work ? Because right now, almost all I'm getting is the overwriting by that auto-translate script. I can't see my progress due to that.
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Well, the thing is, I have the game's original tdm_base01.pk4 zip backed up elsewhere on the disk. I want to test the translation I've done so far by repackaging a different copy of tdm_base01 (the one I've been using for the work), in order to then copy it into the TDM folder, overwrite the original zip and have a look at how the translation came out. Do I really just need to rename my test zip to .pk4 once I repackage it for testing ?
I particularly want to test which diacritics might be potentially causing problems. I've read about the various letter and diacritic sets TDM can handle in its current version, but I still want to check to be sure.
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I've gotten back to this and as I'd like to test how my translated text looks like, I need to ask: Is there some handy .pk4 packing utility lying around somewhere, or do I need to install DarkRadiant to do that kind of thing ?
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I seem to be having the same problem as Elentarien.
And frankly, something tells me that you've underestimated the amount of readables we can find, buck, as the story pretty much ground to a halt once I went down into the catacombs and maintenance areas.
At least I couldn't find anything, and I've searched dilligently.
I know there must be some bigger mystery going on, given the enemy types I've encountered, but it just doesn't click together for me on a narrative level. I've read every single text above ground, found virtually none underground and it has left me baffled. Very little is explained and even some interesting and spooky parts of the mission end up as key hunts and item hunts.
Plus, one more, rather major criticism:
Exiting via the well is physically impossible. I've tried 20 different ways of climbing out of it once I've reached the surface, but no amount of rope climbing, mantling and jumping did the trick. There is just no way I can exit the well and I find it completely immersion breaking. It could have been such a cool ending to the whole mission, but being forced to retread through the interior instead, and all the way back to the front gates, really ruins the otherwise good impression I've had of the mission for 80 % of its duration so far.Oh, and... Does my tampering with the machinery in the basement amount to anything mission-wise, or is that just for the player to fool around with switches ? I just don't get it... I really hope I don't sound dense, but barely anything is explained in the second half of this mission. There aren't even enough visual connections for the player to figure out things on his own.
Sorry that I sound this disappointed, but I found the flow of the mission simply uneven, especially in its final stages.
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I still need to finish this mission, but I've enjoyed it so far.
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As far as me finally buying a classic again, definitely Arcanum.
As far as new titles are concerned, Frictional's upcoming SOMA and Hinterland's The Long Dark have certainly captured my interest.
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In TDM, I have already played a few scary missions, but the one I'm currently trying to finish is Briarwood Cathedral. Emphasis on "trying to finish". I always disliked going down into creepy crypts in Thief, particularly in fan missions. The crypt from that FM is not doing me any favours.
Since Amnesia has been mentioned, I'll also mention Penumbra. There is one particular section in the game where there is almost a labyrinth of corridors (and you're starting to lose your mind by that point and experience some of your first major halucinations, like the infamous disappearing-and-reappearing entrance to another part of the base). Well, in this labyrinth of corridors, there's a locked door, presumably of a storeroom. When you pass it for the first time, even when you're stealthy, someone will start beating on the door viciously, from the other side. Later, often much later, you are passing by that place again and can't entirely avoid going through that otherwise unremarkable corridor. When I played that part of the game for the first time ever, on my second passing of the door, I was actually expecting a jump scare. And I wasn't that scared of it coming. I thought: Fine, it'll happen, I won't get scared, it's predictable... But once I passed the door, and once it flew out of its hinges and broke to pieces in a flurry of beatings, I literally jumped up in place. I think it's a testament to good survival horror game design if even an otherwise seen-it-a-million-times type of jump scare can really startle you, even when you see it coming and think "Meh, I've got this..." (Mind you, that game, just like its younger sister Amnesia, is anything but jump scares most of the time.)
The first two times I encountered a Hunger (yes, that's what it's called) in Morrowind were rather nerve-wrecking. Oh, there are plenty of ugly, creepy or annoying creatures in that (and other) installments of The Elder Scrolls series, but... I think that monstrosity is as close as it gets to TES's own version of a xenomorph. It's unnerving to even look at. I was glad when I managed to kill it on the second occassion, since it had me cornered and I had no choice. Plus, it was night time in-game, I had near zero health and I was near some isolated Dwemer ruins. Sometimes, I just hate Morrowind. It laughs at my pain and fear...
When I played the old Operation Flashpoint for the first time, I once ended up with an enemy APC prowling around the meadow near a forest I was trying to hide on. Unfortunately, I was virtually out of bullets, my puny SMG wouldn't have helped me anyway and my one shot at concealment was a group of local thick bushes. I hid there, but the armoured vehicle just kept scouting around, without me seeing it most of the time. Not a horror game at all, but those were some of the tensest moments I've had in any game. I guess that goes to show it was ahead of its time as a mil sim, in terms of atmosphere. Not bad for a now 13 year old game with graphics barely better than TDP's...
Personally, I think a thing worth experimenting with in a game would be to "condition" the player via immersiveness into a state of paranoia where he/she can get potentially unnerved by things that are, at face value, completely mundane and not meant to be scary at all. Deceiving, mind-bending fears might hide some untapped potential in terms of horror and spookiness.
I don't know how many of you are fans of Thief 3 but the Shalebridge Cradle level was also particularly hair raising and there again, they just teased you a lot initially. The later half of the level wasn't nearly as scary as the beginning though because of the reasons everyones mentioned.
I love and hate the Cradle. Such nail-biting atmosphere, but I am always glad to help poor Garrett exit that place. And for the peace of my soul, I don't buy into that creepy fan theory that Garrett never escaped and he's trapped there forever, merely imagining the rest of the TDS storyline.
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Ah, thank you, now I get the gist of it. Personally, I would have preferred if I could have fiddled around with the specific language file, but as long as I can get it to work via the "all" file as well, I don't mind. I would have preferred to work on that specific language file for safety reasons: Even if I mess up something in "all", I won't have to keep constantly replacing it with a backup copy again, just to get things working. Either way, I'm sure I'll get the hang of it and manage.
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Oh, one more thing: Is it enough if I just edit the slovak.lang file ?
Looking at it now in Notepad++, I can clearly see where the few auto-translated lines are from, while the vast majority of the text is still in English.
As a test run of the translated file, I'll write the GUI features without diacritics at first, then eventually add them once I consult the wiki in a more in-depth way. I want to avoid more serious problems with unrecognised letters.
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Excellent, I'll try it. :-) I've already read the wiki yesterday on how to edit all.lang and what to look out for, so I might give it a (test) go in the coming days, before the holidays come.
And in the last few hours, I've translated much of the GUI and HUD (pretty much all of it by now), though I've only used screenshots and a write-up in a text document. It's better to prepare these things in advance and go through them a couple of times anyway. I might start a separate topic about the translation, if you guys would be interested in clearing up any potential misunderstandings in it that I might have overlooked. Currently, I'm beginning a translation of The Tears of St. Lucia and I'll do one for the Training Mission too, once I'm finished.
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Thankfully, as this topic was last frequented in October, I hope I won't be doing much necroing.
As I've already mentioned in a few previous posts, I'd like to help out with TDM's localisation into Slovak. Primarily with the GUI for now. Some bits of it aren't auto-translated that badly, but most of it just seems like randomly chosen gobbledygook. So I'd be glad if I could contribute to a more permanent solution.
Well, right off the bat, I have a question concerning the GUI text files:
Where can I find them and is it hard to extract them ?
Or can I open them in Notepad++ or the like ?
(I'd work with a copy of the file, of course, to avoid messing up the existing version before I test.)
Thanks in advance for any tips on this.
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I prefer to play in English as well (a matter of habit after all those years playing Thief), but there's a little voice inside my head telling me "Don't be lazy, ya taffer, and put your talents to good use, so that less language-savvy players can have fun as well without being confused.".
The script reports:
Generating slovak.lang... done, 47792 bytes, 1228 entries, 1065 ( 86.7%) not yet translated.
So I'd say the few entries we have are only a few test strings and are really likely done via an auto-translation
Help in finishing the slovak translation is really appreciated - it is one of the few languages we are missing
I see. So I was on the right track, then !
Well, as I've said, I'll certainly try to help. It's not just TDM. I've also been working on a Slovak translation of the original three games for more than a year now, though in a very on-and-off fashion. TDM at least won't take me as long to translate. And I don't have to worry about subtitle issues (especially in cutscenes) like I'd have to in TDP and TMA. I'm also kind of waiting for all the new developments around NewDark to stabilise first - it would be better if I could use those updates to the tech of the old games to my advantage, if I'm already dabbling in an undertaking of this magnitude. But for now, translating TDM will be a priority.
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Darkmod: Inspiration thread
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted · Edited by Petike the Taffer
Since Bridgeport and other TDM-verse cities and towns seem to have quite a few bridges, here are some links to real world medieval fortified bridges and toll bridges that are still standing today:
Monnow Bridge in Monmouth, Wales
Ponte Scaligero in Verona, Italy
I had no idea there's a new adaptation of that novel.