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VanishedOne

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Everything posted by VanishedOne

  1. The thing with the water arrow idea is, sitting in place watching areas is what a security camera does, so there isn't that big a difference between temporarily and permanently disabling one unless you need to traverse an area repeatedly. T2 Watchers are sometimes used like Bafford gate guards, to direct the flow of gameplay by making an ingress point impossible to stealth through. If they can be disabled with fairly common tools, that isn't really viable. Camera looking straight down a well lit corridor? Water arrow. Camera pointed directly at a valuable object? Water arrow. I'm not against the idea as such - I think carefully timing your water arrow hit and grabbing of the loot could be fun too - but I think there are definite reasons why a mapper might want to deploy waterproof cameras.
  2. It might be worth starting to think about turrets as well. I'm coming to think there just isn't a single optimum approach to camera vulnerabilities: making them vulnerable to various projectiles adds gameplay options but could mean nobody with a quiver of broadheads or water arrows will ever bother to hunt down the power switch, especially in areas where AI can't easily see a broken one. Fortunately, this is a problem with an established mapping solution:
  3. This is going to be configurable for different camera types that might exist in future, yes? Given that the Wiki mentions necromancers' guardian skulls, and eyeball plants have been mentioned on the tracker... (Edit: also, the water arrow feature especially would be a nontrivial change to existing maps that use the cylindrical camera model.) Re. damage types: yes, we're hitting the limits of the Doom 3 way of handling damage again. You could try distinguishing projectile collisions from melee ones via clipmodel contents, perhaps.
  4. This is from 2018 but as far as I know not posted previously. Since there's some crossover in Thief/TDM and Dishonored playerbases, and since it's another exercise in recreating/expanding an immersive sim, I thought it might be of interest: https://calvinatorr.wordpress.com/ Edit: also, by the same artist: https://www.artstation.com/calvinatorr/albums/565423
  5. Yes, what that keyword does is let you put blend stages in the light material instead of regular light interaction stages. E.g. blend add in glare lights, blend filter in shadow lights. (And no shadowcasting; id's docs say forceshadows should override that like it does for ambient lights, but in my tests it didn't.) As far as I know the point of nodiffuse/nospecular is to disable things the light does when illuminating surfaces in the world. Nothing to do with SFX.
  6. That one won't even work, will it? (And possibly "nospecular" didn't either when the light was added, if it predates TDM 2.05.) I wonder what the mapper's intention was in trying to disable diffuse and specular.
  7. You might find this of interest. (The shader it talks about can't be dropped into newer TDM versions since the ARB backend is gone.)
  8. On Mint Cinnamon, I don't see key shortcuts in DR either, but if I open Xed (which seems to use GTK, from a glance at its Github) I see them there.
  9. Actually doors don't have to move at constant speed, although I imagine they won't produce as nice a motion as a dedicated pendulum.
  10. Materials could be made to change dynamically between wet and dry versions by reading a parm set by the mapper, though that would mean making a lot of custom material decls. Also, regular shaderparms are set per-entity, but I'm now wondering: are all the global parms still used, after changes to bloom/ambient rendering?
  11. My guess was that someone added them on the grounds that a pendulum is effectively a sort of binary mover (like the way levers and buttons have snd_open). But there doesn't seem to be any actual support. Yes, I'll have to fall back to having a loop playing. Edit: or this.
  12. My func_pendulum is silent. Am I overlooking something, or are these spawnargs from the entityDef not actually implemented? "editor_snd snd_open" "sound to play when opening." "editor_snd snd_close" "sound to play when closing." "editor_snd snd_opened" "looping sound for it's opened state."
  13. According to https://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/95 ET:QW has alpha-to-coverage. Maybe that's what makes the grass look nice?
  14. Oh Builder, the old order-dependency problem. I'd been hoping that, since the engine can perform light interaction on surfaces that are meant to be drawn over other surfaces, we might dare to hope for actual alpha blending on lit materials someday (instead of e.g. using alpha testing for grass edges, as seen in some maps).
  15. I'd be cautious about introducing automated bits of visual language as a gameplay/mapping feature, as opposed to an aesthetic adjustment to taste. It's now easier than it used to be (in the days of selectable simple/enhanced light interaction shaders, one of which almost-but-not-quite disabled specular RGB scaling) for a mapper to understand and control what materials are doing by comparing how things look in TDM to the material decls. Having surface types like water or noisy floors given special treatment outside the explicit material decls would make things more, not less, enigmatic for mappers. (There's actually an open bug relating to floor tiles that don't have the tint the material decl indicates they should because RGB scaling in cubemap stages doesn't work unless there are no light-interactive stages.) On bright glass, I think my first ever question on this forum was about why my glass block in an alabaster room could be plainly seen without any light. Other people have mentioned additive blends and alpha blended cubemaps, but another (not mutually exclusive) possibility is the 'translucent' keyword. Back then, the state of understanding was that it just made materials not interact with light. We now know that translucent materials can interact with light (someone found you can use 'diffusemap _black' in glass), but precisely what's going on isn't well documented; what I think happens is that light interaction is performed as for opaque materials but the pixels aren't cleared to black first, so the effect is like an additive blend but with light interaction.
  16. To add to that, even 'PBR' texture types aren't an assurance that you're actually getting something created with numbers based on physics. On Sketchfab I've seen models with 'metallic' window glass (for reflectivity, I suppose) and even metallic meat. (Well, we do have a quasi-mediaeval setting; maybe we could say it's adulterated...) I think it's just in the nature of the beast that TDM will never have as consistent an art style as projects with dedicated art teams.
  17. Is AmbientRimColor here related to the ambientRimColor material keyword? I'm not aware of that having been used yet except in experiments.
  18. idDevNet has been either giving me 'can't find the server' errors or redirecting to Bethesda.net. Here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200613234848/https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/
  19. Re. Sketchfab, free assets there are typically CC-BY, occasionally with additional NC and/or SA. (Edit: having checked my downloads, I did find at least one ND.) If you've bought anything then yes, check the licence terms. Re. dubiously sourced textures, here's an earlier thread: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20311-external-art-assets-licensing/
  20. I've used FX before: the priest in ITB has a melee attack involving a hammer of holy fire, which briefly spawns a dynamic light. I agree the system is surprisingly little used. One of my ideas (inspired by the footprints in Down By the Riverside) was for an invisible monster that would leave decal footprints via frame commands for FX bound to the foot joints. I ran into a minor drawback when I discovered the decal command applies a random rotation, so it would have to be a generic blob instead of a footprint shape. But with a big blob, and some sparks, and maybe a screen shake, I think it could still be effective.
  21. Yes, my impression is that Thief's flashbombs were intended partly as escape tools (indicated e.g. by the 'ace up my sleeve'), which doesn't go well with the time needed to draw the bow. The flash arrow idea probably does go better with a player-versus-undead scenario, like the holy swords that occasionally turn up in Thief FMs.
  22. Yes, I was about to post something similar. Not everywhere suits glowing crystals or bioluminescent fungi, which are the other usual nonextinguishable options. Still, like the choice of whether to include rope arrows or vine arrows or lots of stackable crates, it's something a mapper could work with if s/he so chose. Possibly more interesting if it had other uses like disabling bots or cameras. Shouldn't be hard to set up with S/R: give the electric lights a response that changes the light shader (I should think a slight flicker would be best for conveying that the light is broken, not off). Maybe release some spark particles. It's simpler than the 'smashing the bulb' idea, where engine support for breaking lights exists but you'd need 'broken' models to switch to and would have to explain to players that this nonstandard feature is available in the mission. However, you'd still have either to design the mission with the expectation that every electric light could be disabled, or somehow convey to the player which ones are vulnerable. I have a test map that replicates the 'lights flicker when a specific entity is near' effect from TDS's Cradle. (In my unfinished mission, it's intended to be for a section where a pagan shaman is up to something in the little-visited depths of an industrial area, and his proximity is making the machines go haywire.) Basically it relies on the lights' being set up to flicker with their sound, then S/R is used to play an extra buzzing sound on them.
  23. It sounds like https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5256 apart from the problems reproducing it.
  24. The most id-like way is probably via the FX system. You can access it via func_fx. However, the decal splat range will be limited to < 8 units and the decal will only splat directly downwards. (The usual story: id set it up for the demon-spawning effects in D3 and didn't make it a conveniently general system because they didn't need to.) The other way would involve some sort of synchronised particle emitter and func_splat. However, I have a vague recollection that in my tests func_splat didn't splat all entity classes; splatting $world should work, anything else needs testing. (Also it seemed to ignore decalInfo and impose its own decal fade time.) After that you're in the territory of esoteric work-arounds like launching a custom projectile from an atdm:func_shooter.
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