VanishedOne

A while back I was contemplating a little scurry bot that would resemble a roomba: I was thinking of binding it to a rat scurrying around on a hidden storey, though for really simple wandering scripting should also be an option. func_securitycamera can spot the player... but even when nothing else can.

"movetype" "FLY", I'm guessing? (Zombies being a rare case of a humanoid that won't suffer the detaching head bug.)

This reminds me of a discussion a while back, when I was asking whether an entity could detect how it was hit, e.g. for tapestries that could be slashed with the sword but not react the same way to the blackjack or broadheads (since we don't have Thief's SlashStim, BashStim and PokeStim).

If I read this right, sk/the_hammer_small_highlight is your new replacement material. In that case, try reversing the order of items in the last non-brace line of the skin def. so it's <material to replace> <with this one>. Also, you want the material name, not an image and certainly not an editor image, which is what models/darkmod/props/textures/thehammer_small_bronze_d_ed looks like. DR's choose model dialogue says the_hammer_small1.lwo uses only one material, tdm_hammer_medium_stone. So try making the last line: tdm_hammer_medium_stone sk/the_hammer_small_highlight

Maybe disarming could be linked to pain instead...? AI have a "pain_threshold" spawnarg, described as 'How much damage monster has to receive in one blow for it to play a pain animation', though a quick glance suggests that it tends to be "1": apparently even Revenants feel pain. So it might be thought undesirable to start making changes to those settings. Hmmm.

I wonder whether the same would work in reverse, like in TDS where you could steal spellcasters' wands from their belts while they were still unalerted. "Taste my dagg-- oh ****, where did that go?"

I just got it to work with an oil lamp, not with a basic light entity. Reading http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/14130-windows-with-switchable-skins-done-in-a-fashion/?do=findComment&comment=296126 made me think it should work with any extinguishable light, but if it's failing with a flame then maybe not... Does your flame have the usual scriptobject for extinguishable lights?

When I saw what was at the top of the tower, I wondered whether I was in for something out of folklore. I liked the suggestive use of the (pagan?) symbols; I think I even found one under a flowerpot or similar. A definite sense of lurking and intrusion all round...

For the purposes of http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod does this series have a particular name, or shall I just enter it as the One Step Too Far series?

Ah, I can see something with cubesheen if I switch from omni to projected mode. Edit: also with cubelightCube. cubelightCube projected onto a wall looks like this: The edges of the projection are clipped in a way that changes abruptly as I move around.

I like the sound of zone-based control. My impression of the non-ambient cubicLight examples in the demo: grate6 - works. cubelightCube - nothing visible. Alpha channel problem? cubesheen - nothing visible. In an image editor it does appear to have an alpha channel that's neither wholly black nor wholly white, as per Spooks's post above.

Ah good, cubedome displays properly now.

If I click in the centre of the box itself, that checks or unchecks it and flips the spawnarg value between 0 and 1 (provided DR recognises it as a boolean spawnarg, otherwise the box is greyed out). I'm doing that with "noshadows" on a light entity right now. If you're seeing different behaviour then we'll just have to wait for greebo. Edit: on inspection there's at least one bug/limitation: it seems not to work with the list of inherited spawnargs.

Just putting another idea on record: sets that can cover a prisoner/suffering/victim case (e.g. for Cragscleft-like scenarios, cells in the Watch house, hostages or slaves held by crime lords...).

The boxes to the left of spawnargs appear to be quick toggles for boolean ones, e.g. a one click change between "noshadows" "1" and "noshadows" "0".

Like I said, lights/cubesheen is failing to illuminate anything on my machine (I played with the ambient in the starting room too and that changed nothing unless I changed the light texture). The geometry shows up normally in lantern light. Edit: lights/sheen* files show up normally in Irfanview. Edit2: okay, the mismatched desert lighting arises because lights/cubedesert doesn't actually correspond closely to skybox_afternoon_02. Edit3: here's lights/cubedome projected by a light in the centre of a cube of marble_white_001: I can see the cubemap perfectly in the sides, including its top and bottom faces, but the top and bottom faces of the marble cube look outright glitched. I tried a couple of other lights from the demo and they didn't produce similar effects.

If demos count then http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/12985-animated-grass-test-map/ might still be.

A quick test indicates that binding stops the steps even appearing.

There isn't a ping stim in stock TDM, but mappers can add custom stims. I don't know how/whether STIM_SOUND does work, not having got around to trying it; if it's like STIM_LIGHT it might need to be specially set on stimming entities. Good luck testing it.

This is the script I'm using: void escalator_step(entity spline) { entity step = sys.spawn("escalator_step"); step.time(20); step.accelTime(0); step.decelTime(0); step.disableSplineAngles(); while (1) { step.startSpline(spline); sys.waitFor(step); } } void main () { sys.waitFrame(); float i; for ( i = 0; i < 20; i++ ) { thread escalator_step($escalator_splinemover_up); thread escalator_step($escalator_splinemover_down); sys.wait(1); } } Edit: to clarify the problem with pushing, it's not that you can push steps right off the spline, but that you can create gaps in the sequence and steps that overlap one another (the last bit is especially awkward since there's no way to explain it within the fiction as mechanical breakage). They still move on the spline, but ahead of or behind their proper timing.

There actually is a 'ping' stim in Thief, but it's for proximity. Offhand I don't know of a way to detect sounds made by the player, other than using an AI. (I wonder whether STIM_SOUND was intended to allow Responses to propogated sounds...)

I remember getting really odd results when trying to feed ragdolled AI to my crafting script: it's meant to detect the classes of entities that enter the trigger volume, and in this case the entity was detected as multiple instances of classes from (if I recall correctly) darkmod/AI/Internal/. So much for my Punch and Judy show.

Here's something I realised I hadn't made available yet: You can use this for e.g. the kind of alarm system seen in Calendra's Cistern and one or two other Thief FMs, where a guard presses a button as part of his patrol route, and an alarm goes off if a certain length of time passes without the button being pressed. I made it when setting up Lost City-style lights that are on for as long as the player or an AI is in the room. They don't work quite as intended: the player will activate a trigger_multiple just by being within its volume, but my experiments with setting "anyTouch" "1" on the trigger brush suggested that this lets AI activate it... but not while standing still. (There's probably a way to make a comprehensive motion detector using trigger_touch and a script, but whether it would be good for performance is another matter.)

Most of the demo rooms look great. Just a couple of things, based on a quick play with the demo map: 1) As far as I can tell lights/cubesheen isn't illuminating anything. Are these rooms supposed to look like this? 2) I have no sense of what HL2 lighting is supposed to be like (I haven't played that game since it came out), so I'm trying to infer from looking around the map what the rationale is supposed to be: rooms like the mountain sunet one make me think, okay, the sunset in the skybox is presumably to the West, and the red glow on the surfaces is therefore on the Westward-facing ones, so the appearance is as though the surfaces are reflecting the sky. But then you have this room... ...where there are big white centres on the top and bottom skybox faces, but upward- and downward-facing surfaces in the room show up black. The desert room is another case in point (blue sky above, sun off to one side, but the geometry is all golden and looks as though lit from above), but without a clearer sense of what I'm supposed to be seeing I can't tell whether something is wrong.