VanishedOne

I've found that as well. Also, playing on weak hardware I've come to suspect it's less reliable if the framerate is unsmooth. It probably is also partly an interface design/feedback question too though: besides the difficulty in judging distance as others mentioned (flat screen, invisible body besides the right arm, needing to adjust your bodily position because your thief can't modify the arc of the swing like in real life) there's the fact that the weapon viewmodel isn't exactly 'there' in the world, even though id Tech 4 lighting does a good job with the illusion.

Right, test results: You can't 'backstab' a lanternbot; steambots have a sneak_attack_mult of 1.0. However, it doesn't immediately blow the whistle on being damaged (I'm not quite sure why it doesn't react more: its only senses are auditory, but according to the console it enters a pain state on taking damage), so you can probably get in the second blow right away, though it may have time to turn around and light you up. The sword is louder than the blackjack: with a human AI about 340 units away, knocking out the lanternbot provoked no barks, 'killing' it provoked a bark and on higher auditory acuity settings he became more likely to turn around. Lanternbots shed blood and sometimes make fleshy noises when slain. Not as drastic as I feared, but not a trivial change from when maps with it were designed, tested and released either. The last point makes me wonder how extensively attacking lanternbots has been tested by anybody.

According to the descriptions given in the game console, image_usePrecompressedTextures is the cvar to 'use .dds files if present'. If your only TGAs are things like light textures (which tend to have forceHighQuality set in the material) and cubemaps, image_useCompression shouldn't make much difference, but working with TGA assets I haven't compressed to DDS yet, I found they had horrible colour banding on my system and only looked decent with image_useCompression turned off.

The language of 'overpowered' and 'balance' does seem to me to be curiously placed here. If you're making a shooter, and one weapon is so much more effective than others that they don't even see situational use; or if you're making an RPG with selectable abilities, and nobody wants to invest in +1 damage against mud elementals when +10% evasion against everything has the same cost, then okay, you have a balance problem. That the feature to make moving ragdolls over distance more practical is chosen by players intending to move ragdolls over distance doesn't strike me as the same kind of thing. Edit: to add a more positive note, I think this perceived problem may relate to the fact that players are most often dealing with human bodies. In Thief a dead/blackjacked crayman just can't be moved from its spot, which means you choose your spot carefully if others are around. In TDM, if anything is like that it's... the horse? But in TDM you also have AI you can drag but not shoulder: so, the lanternbot. Also spiders but you're unlikely to want to hide a spider corpse. I see the new werebeast is also set not to be shoulderable but it remains to be seen what effect that has in gameplay.

Ah, the old 'grass edge' problem. Are you using patches for the grass? Your best bet is vertex blending but it requires using a model; DR has an export script that's supposed to help with this. Failing that, there's this.

Thanks, but I wasn't asking as a question of law, I was asking because I wanted to know the answer.

Is the assets SVN public now? I knew the glprogs had been made part of the public source code at https://svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk/ but hadn't heard of any opening of the assets SVN.

Were signals of no use? That looks to be how you're 'expected' to find out whether a mover has arrived or been blocked.

The fog of memory having cleared a bit, I think what specifically got me an error was making an entity target itself, before anything could get as far as actually triggering anything.

One of the mysteries of Doom 3's development is the shadowDraw keyword. In D3 it exists in shaderdemos/shadowDrawLight in shaderDemo.mtr but the code to recognise it seems to have been stripped out at some point. shaderdemos/shadowDrawLight { // this would default the same if not specified lightFalloffImage makeintensity( lights/squarelight1a.tga ) { // this stage will be drawn normally map lights/squarelight1.tga colored zeroClamp } { // this stage will be drawn on the shadows, still modulated by the lightFalloffImage shadowDraw map lights/squarelight1.tga rgb 0.5 blend GL_ZERO, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_COLOR } } The leaked Doom 3 E3 demo comes with a variant of this material and will accept the keyword, but doesn't do anything with it that my eyes could discover. My guess is that id was experimenting with it as a way of reducing the black shadow effect on some lights. I've only played through D3BFG, which apparently brightened some scenes, and when I played the leaked E3 demo I was struck by how oppressive its darkness was atmospherically. There is no flashlight in the demo; instead you can spawn light grenades from the console that work similarly to T2's flares. Constantine would have approved.

You could try putting a path_flee_point_rats in your map, but it seems fish have to be pretty close to the blast to want to flee it. Edit: setting is_civilian seems to make them keener to flee, but I don't know whether that's all the spawnarg controls or whether it's also involved in 'Don't kill innocents' objectives. I notice rats don't have it. Disabling unarmed_melee also seemed to help. Despite having been able to injure one with the blackjack before, I'm now finding them remarkably resistant to melee weapons... Edit: ... which is an unexpected result of having af_push_moveables turned off. The rat and tiny spider have it disabled too, so arguably it's the default setting for ambient AI even on land, but if you want to slice up fish you should re-enable it.

And I've discovered why my initial attempt to disable searching had no effect: the spawnarg is canSearch, not can_search as in can_drown or can_unlock. And I put the wrong one in the updated def, so I'll need to change the download again. Coming momentarily. Edit: done.

I once tried to make an entity trigger itself via S/R and got an error message saying entities aren't supposed to trigger themselves; so I had it trigger another entity, which had a Response to trigger it right back.

Thanks for the help. I imagine they might be missing something that the search internals expect; I didn't give them an AIUse value, for example, but they inherit visual and communication S/R so maybe they ought to have one.

Maybe turning af_push_moveables off has just made my mine better at killing them all because they're no longer so good at pushing each other out of the way. With enough survivors I get a crash too, and assigning a search anim in the model decl doesn't prevent it. Edit: updated download is live.

On its own? I'd already tried that but thought it hadn't worked. Anyway, I'll update the download shortly with both spawnargs set in the def.

Well, that was a short honeymoon. I can reproduce the crash. Does setting "af_push_moveables" "0" on them help? (If not, try "mass" "6" as well.)

As promised, here is the Arx: End of Sun fish set up as a wandering 'ambient' AI in TDM. Download link Remember to credit the EoS team if you use it (their asset licence is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported). It should work as randomly moving scenery. Anything else might work - I hit one with the blackjack and it bit back - or might not. EoS stopped its fish flying out of water with some custom code to allow a maximum flying height. In the absence of that, if you want to put one in open water all I can suggest is seeing whether a monsterclip 'ceiling' works. The AAS and scriptobject are from the Elemental, but the dimensions are taken straight from EoS; you may find the swim animation occasionally clips into the floor (presumably preventable with monsterclip if it's not sand/mud/etc.). This is the first AF/ragdoll I've made. I think I generally got rid of the bad behaviour, but fish are slippery creatures. Textures are in TGA format straight from EoS; you may want to convert non-normals to DDS before FM release. (Normal maps are actually unused by default; see .mtr for details.)

https://www.textures.com/faq-license.html#anchor-games says 'you need to release content that has been created using our materials under a closed source license'. I tried googling for "textures.com" site:thedarkmod.com and out of the results I got, the only one that clearly seemed to identify a texture as coming from textures.com was in R Soul's red button. That attribution is also in the readme packaged with it, which doesn't otherwise identify any licence, open or closed.

Well, credit goes to the person who actually made the model; I just did the format conversion to get it working in TDM. I wasn't planning to have a wholly Lovecraftian mission, just one of those moments when you swing through an open window on your way through town and stumble upon something sinister. Of course, anyone else could use it too.

Well, speaking of Lovecraft... (Asset source)

@Geep HMart made a tracker entry along those lines once: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5045 Arcturus made an MD5 animated fish for his 'animated grass test' map; I imported the EoS one because it already had an AI def to build on. @STRUNK I'll supply a download link once I've cleaned up the 'testbed' set-up (currently it's using a partial version of the Arx scriptobject, which it probably doesn't need just to swim around, but I need to check swapping in a generic TDM AI scriptobject doesn't break the animations).

@Goldwell I think lionhead_amulet.lwo has always been like that; it is on my 2.07 installation. The broken material is called tdm_blackheart_amulet so I suspect it's a Blackheart Manor asset that was only halfway added to core. You're right about the shroom flinder problem being an old one; does https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=2559#c9479 help?

Yes, I know about that. Since it changes long established (albeit unintended) behaviour, I'm noting that if it stays and isn't in release notes it's going to perplex anyone who was used to being able to blackjack lanternbots. On the other hand, some of the discussion above seems to favour introducing a KO zone, so I'm asking whether the question was ever resolved. (At some point I need to check whether a one-hit 'backstab' on a lanternbot is possible; if it has time to whistle before it can be killed, that'll increase the difficulty of dealing with one over and above whatever noise the sword makes.)

Since TDM was invited to use Arx: End of Sun assets, I decided to try adding the fish AI to TDM (as wandering ambient AI, though it would be possible to make them dangerous again if desired). Whereupon I ran into the same experience Obsttorte had with the werebeast: there's something about TDM's handling of AI that makes going near them trigger a crash if they lack an AF. So: The fish is now usable in an aquarium - or a kitchen - but I'm not sure whether it'll be possible to put it in open water without scripting its behaviour. It's possible to tell AAS to calculate 'swim reachabilities' but I don't know whether they can actually be used for anything; EoS calculated both swim and fly reachabilities, had the fish use MOVETYPE_FLY and added some code to let a maximum fly height be set in a spawnarg.