VanishedOne

Decorative shadow-casting. They're a bit big for any other use in a bedroom. :-P

Mansion. :-P (The lord's and lady's bedrooms, in fact.)

When I've had mysterious vanishing surfaces, selecting the entire map, selecting the smallest grid size and doing 'Align to grid' has sometimes fixed it. Last night I had sparkles on brush surfaces adjacent to some moderately complex patches; r_showTris 1 showed that dmap had got a bit carried away in subdividing the brushes to match the patches' verts. The solution was to convert the brushes to a func_static. I don't know whether either of those will help in this case, though.

Grayman made this, but it isn't animated. The closest thing I can think of otherwise is Bikerdude's orrery (packaged with TDM's prefabs, although I had to remove all the "x_axis" "1" spawnargs from the prefab to get the rotation to look right). You can see it in The Caduceus of St. Alban, I think.

I think the complication with that TDM wiki entry might have something to do with how texgen reflect works, since the example is a pseudo-reflective pool of water. In the example image of TDM's output, _pz appears to be the ceiling, which makes sense ('positive z-axis'). I recently ended up altering water01 for my w.i.p. to make it look right as a reflection of skybox_darkland_ne. (The 'reflected' moon was opposite the one in the sky in X and Y as well as Z, though if you open water_01_pz.tga and darkland_NE_up.tga in an image editor they don't look flipped relative to each other.) What I had to do was along the lines of the instructions like 'Flip it horizontally and rotate it 90° counter clock wise'.

In at least one case they think it's a lingerie shop. Of course, really lazy people would just adapt a bunch of existing maps, and who'd look forward to a thing like that? :-P

Is this the one you had in mind?

A mansion mission author can put time and effort into a city section, or put the same resources into augmenting the mansion around which the mission is designed, or build a larger mission but take longer to do it. None of those options strikes me as inherently 'lazy'.

That's exactly what struct is useful for. If you need to save, say, three doubles and a signed 8-bit int, you can feed struct a format string that tells it to convert your Python variables to the corresponding C types and output them as binary data, optionally with defined endianness and padding.

struct isn't a replacement for file() IO; it's for converting Python types to and from packed binary data. Here's what happens if I take the bytearray() example and naively try to plug signed integers into it: Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Feb 27 2014, 19:44:14) [GCC 4.4.3] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> data = [127, -3, 64, 63, 0, 1, -6] >>> f = file('binfile.bin', 'w+b') >>> f.write( bytearray(data) ) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ValueError: byte must be in range(0, 256)

It's a long time since I used it, but isn't struct the standard way of handling binary data?

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/9082-newbie-darkradiant-questions/page-216?do=findComment&comment=360279 suggests a means of making an AI do something special when alerted, but it's a bit of a workaround.

I remember the trap-type alarm in KM, but does it have AI-triggered alarms like the OP describes, or are we still in the http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/13671-call-script-on-enemy-alerted/?p=282976 situation?

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!

TDS had this, although I only once saw it trigger an alert. I don't know how it dealt with guards who had left their position to investigate something suspicious.

Ooh, I want to explore that... Just one little thing: in the first shot, there are a couple of orange/lit windows over on the right, but one of them appears to be ajar, and the room behind seems too dark to match the orange glass panes.

I think the ghoul from T2G is the closest I've seen to a goblin in a Thiefy setting.

What happens if the player dumps an AI in a waist-high pit, so it can't pathfind its way out?

That's some beautifully opulent architecture in the bathhouse. I especially liked the lighting in the room with the and the trip up in the lift. My only substantial concern about the design is that it felt like two maps, of which one had several guards to sneak past but felt like a corridor between places of interest rather than a living place, whereas the other had interesting things to discover but relied on an elite guard to provide most of its danger.

There's a knockout stim; could a custom weapon use that? Or would it then have to act like a gas arrow rather than sharing the blackjack's target zones on AI heads?

Fair point, and maybe I should have written 'not just tell'. I just had the feeling that any expectations that were being built up ended up fizzling out, because the game simply doesn't have any real means of demonstrating that the Cradle has agency. You get told 'The Cradle remembers us', 'The Cradle remembers you now', etc. but it's all a substitute for the Cradle ever actually doing something.

The Cradle made me feel miserable and want to be somewhere else, but it didn't make me scared. (Unless you count the time I took the lift up from the morgue and was surprised by a puppet right in front of me - usually it lurks on the other side of a nearby door - but that kind of jump scare would work in any undead level.) Mostly I remember it as a reprisal of RttC's worst fetch-quest elements, compounded by too much time spent staring at doors in extreme close-up when doing that lockpick mini-game in the quest for the hidden nightgown. The problem is, the developers clearly wanted to cultivate a sense that the entire building has a malveolent sentience, but they lacked the effective means to do any such thing. (The only reason I know the 'puppets' aren't supposed to be just a zombie variant is that I read it on The Dark Wiki.) Their first method is to have a character tell you about it, but for effective atmosphere you need to show, not tell. Their second was the sections inside the Cradle's memories: an interesting idea, but it seems the Cradle doesn't actually remember very much, so basically you get to watch some sillhouettes wander around. Add to all this perhaps the least subtle soundtrack and colour scheme in the entire series, and I just found the whole thing desperately overdone. Apparently I'm in a minority, but such were my experiences.

This is one of the cases where I seem to differ from practically everyone else (Robbing the Cradle being another). SS2 gives me the impression of a game in tension with itself: it wants to be a horror game, but it also wants to have RPG and survival game elements, which mean it has to keep spawning enemies to let you grind for resources, so that Hybrids, especially, quickly turn into wrench-fodder. For me, the randomness contributes to the atmosphere about as much as random battles in a JRPG do. Turning down the spawn rate helps restore a bit of isolation, but I found the best existential dread was to be had after turning on god mode so the game would stop bothering me.

There is if you use the console: the `spawn` command. I find that TDM in general encourages a conservative/risk-averse style of play compared to T1/T2: it seems to be geared more towards offering a challenge for Thief veterans than towards room to experiment with risky stunts. Though it does let you turn the AI acuity down.