VanishedOne

It would let you clip on a plane not parallel to one of the axes, e.g. to slice one corner off a cube. A little experimentation suggests that moving points in one axis may cause them to become collinear with the map origin in another, which I imagine is a bug.

...and be hard to convey to the player.

Right: the question isn't whether you'd try, but how often you'd be successful. Presumably even alerted civilians try to dodge a frontal blackjacking; they just aren't any good at it, whereas alerted guards have the training to succeed reliably under normal circumstances.

Unfortunately, this is a corner case where it's no longer a simple disjunctive list: blinded guards quite probably are tensing their muscles, but they're not going to be dodging or weaving very effectively with heavily reduced sensory awareness.

Although that reaction might merely be an addition to http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Created_Modifications

Yes, but then they let you accomplish a knockout from a distance. Flash bombs let you briefly blind guards within a decent radius, but anyone not 'dealt with' after a few seconds will be searching for you.

I wonder how big and populous the 'typical' TDM map is compared to the 'typical' Thief mission. I sometimes use the flash-and-blackjack gambit in Thief when lighting/surfaces/groups make stealth blackjacking hard or impossible, and usually patrols are spaced out sufficiently, and flashbombs sufficiently uncommon, that I still knock out almost all the AI in the usual way. Edit: of course, sometimes an AI comes along just as I'm swinging my blackjack around on the well lit, noisy floor. Usually when that was my last flashbomb.

If you have a gas arrow knockouts are even easier. Equipment is meant to make things easy that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

I'm afraid not. Anyone...?

The difficulty of blackjacking is a recurring topic, but since not everyone reports having so much trouble it's hard to diagnose what's going on. I have trouble with it myself, sometimes - most recently on a staircase, where I ended up blackjacking from a crouching position as the AI walked away down it - but all I can suggest is turning on tdm_ai_showko in the console to get a sense of where the knockout cones are.

Maybe it's a case of one man's exploit being another's risky gambit that feels good when it works. If players are happy to create mayhem, they can even do things like kiting pursuers over explosive mines. This thread was split from the one about pushing AIs, where the problem was that if you were cornered you could blind them but then you'd still be cornered. Even assuming you could isolate suitable barks in all the existing voice sets, I doubt it's going to convey 'transition between knockout vulnerability states' unless that's added to the list of things players are expected to learn explicitly from the wiki, like differential helmet-related vulnerability.

Helmeted (non-elite) guards can be knocked out only from behind, and only when unalert. However, the 'only from behind' rule no longer applies to sleepers, so there is a circumstance in which guards' knockout immunity is removed because of a vulnerable state. I believe dropping flashbombs, if viable, is the recommended way of avoiding being blinded oneself. Two-phase blindness would be hard to communicate to players. http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=The_Dark_Mod_Gameplay#Inventory_Object:_Flashbomb actually recommends 'stunning an enemy before an attack': presumably a sword attack is meant.

It's usually not that hard to adjust the size of existing particle definitions to make a new one. http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4280 has a resized tdm_arclight_2 (but note the bug in the report).

Levers work somewhat like doors, so I imagine http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Doors#Open.2C_Partially_Open.2C_or_Closed_Door_at_Game_Start might work on them. If you're just toggling a target (e.g. a light) then moving the switch in DR and changing its rotate/translate spawnargs would work, since the on/off state will be handled by the target.

Brush->Prism can give more than nine faces, though I'm not sure quite what the cap is.

The post I linked above says it needs to be nodrawsolid; if you had plain nodraw working in the gaps then we have inconsistent results emerging somehow.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/15740-need-help-with-light-switches/?p=330051 is what's used to stop players frobbing light switches through solid walls.

Brush->prism gets you a cylinder dialogue through the menus; there are also cone and sphere dialogues. The ctrl+num method is faster, though. If Springheel's talking about http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/12438-damaging-traps/ then the idea is that a damage trap is triggerable multiple times and hurts the player once when triggered, or at least not continuously. (http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=2689 is still open.) Presumably that's not a problem for Nico A.'s case, though.

In my experience, Biker's right about it being a problem noselfshadow materials don't have. I've run into it on mutiple occasions when working with curved patches, sometimes when moving around them with the lantern on.

textures/darkmod/decals/gauge_indicator_short has this line: rotate fol1Table [ time * 2 ] Tables, or at least some expression involving time, can also be used for pulsing/flickering--see e.g. textures/darkmod/decals/symbols/pagan_pulsating_symbols01 (use it on a func_static with "shaderParm7" "1" set to see it in action). There's also this from id's documentation, on using sound instead of time (I've only seen it on flickering light shaders but it might be worth trying on regular materials if your model is set up to be used by an entity that makes a sound): As for 'generic material for an unused plane', maybe textures/common/nodraw or textures/common/nodrawsolid is what you want.

There's a small/simple demo map: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Light_Textures_and_Falloff_Images&redirect=no#Example_from_Rich_is_Bored I don't know of any full-scale missions using Strombine lights. Some use grime corner decals, and Arcturus's Christmas map appears to have baked-in shadows applied as textured models.

I did wonder about a global Strombine ambient, but I'm not sure how it should work around arches and tunnels and so forth. (The opposite problem to lights/ambientlightnfo_clouds, which looks good over open terrain but creates cloud patterns under overhangs where there shouldn't be any.) In the above screenshot, there's a shadow light inside the arch and the roof above is unshadowed.

Changing the ambient light colour just needs tables (though results may vary depending on the player's ambient rendering setting), and a skybox background can blend gradually between two cubemaps: see the links via my first link above. The flat look is unfortunate, though. You can use tricks like blend lights (the shadow effect inside the arch) to make things less visually monotonous, but that's only a partial solution.

It looks as though the heat haze is below the lamps: is that an intentional detail? (Torches, etc. tend to have it above, presumably representing hot air rising.)

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/17606-what-kind-of-fan-missions-would-you-like-to-see/?p=383280 Though in actual protoyping I've decided not to try lengthening shadows; partly for gameplay/design reasons, partly because I've already had to fix a parallel-light-not-passing-through-visportal glitch.