VanishedOne

Any chance of a tweak to the colour scheme for code snippets set to use no syntax highlighting? Using the forum's Dark theme, I keep coming across blocks of white text on a white background.

Necroing the thread to add that the book is now free (though a Scribd account seems to be required in order to download an actual file instead of reading in the embed): http://www.hourences.com/product/the-hows-and-whys-of-level-design-2/ The e.t.a. for the 3rd Ed. seems to have slipped a bit though.

A bit more progress. It turns out AF files have 'contents' and 'clipMask' settings which https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/afs.html fails to document. In both D3 and TDM, your typical human body ragdoll has something like this: contents corpse clipMask solid, corpse However, while looking at D3's env_swinglight_round.af, I noticed: contents corpse, playerclip clipMask solid, body, corpse Armed with this knowledge, I've managed to make a tree, a ragdoll and an idling human func_animate solid to the player. (Though the tree's solidity is dodgy; I suspect its AF just doesn't fit the visual model well, but af_showBodies and its relatives aren't working on my idAnimated entities, so I can't see.) I'm still having trouble with solidity when I try to make a func_animate play a walk anim instead of standing in place.

That reminds me of the concept art Melan sometimes includes with his mission files.

It looks as though I misremembered I'm afraid: atdm:animated_tree_01 isn't actually solid. I was mixing it up with something like atdm:nature_tree_01, which uses texture scrolling to appear animated. Sorry about that. Edit: I'm currently trying to get af_posed_by_anim to work; according to the description, it and af_push_moveables should provide some sort of collision... Edit 2: after it occurred to me to set "solid" "1" I'm having some luck getting moveables to collide, though with the tree it's pretty glitchy: it seems to work at first, then stop working after a bit. I haven't found a way to enable player collision on an idAnimated. Edit 3: a bit more progress. Initially I assumed the "ragdoll" spawnarg for a func_animate ought to point to an AF decl, as the description implied and as it seems to be set up for AI, so I used a human body as the model and copied "ragdoll" "guard_base_newskel" from an AI. That got me an entity that was solid to moveables when I pushed or threw them at him, but when I had him walk through some he literally did walk right through them. Then I thought, what if it wants an actual ragdoll entity class (with the articulatedFigure defined inside that class)? This gets me an entity that does push moveables away... but they go right through him while I'm holding them. Edit 4: TDM's idAnimated::LoadAF has been modified from D3's, including a conditional call to af.GetPhysics()->EnableClip(); that isn't in id's code. I wonder what difference that makes.

How did this (the material stage GLSL support) turn out? I see it made it into 2.07 but I don't remember any fanfare for the new feature. (Hence also no documentation I know of, though glsl.h seems to provide clues about available uniforms.) Is it considered available for mapper use, or is it unstable?

I don't think this is handled entirely consistently even now, otherwise I'd see e.g. Shadowcursed 1: Requiem, TP7: The Lich Queen's Demise and maybe even In a Time of Need 1: In a Time of Need. Personally I like having some indication that missions form a series, but dislike the potential for installed missions' names to become different from what's on the downloader if an author decides Stealing the Pineapple is now Fruits of Crime 1: Stealing the Pineapple. (On a related note, I just noticed that in my installed FM list, Shadows of Northdale ACT 2 comes before ACT I because of the shift from Roman numerals.)

It seems to be a handily solved problem now, but I was talking about the dimensions of TDM's standard painting models. If you look at e.g. dds/models/darkmod/props/textures/painting01_d.dds, what you see is a 512x512 texture with the painting (~400x512) and frame (the rest). Your painting is 799x1200, so it would have taken some vertical cropping to reduce it to the same ratio (~800x1024).

It might, although I've a hunch it might be a bit narrow for the existing models.

I remembered we had an MD5 animated tree that's solid, and on checking atdm:animated_tree_01 it looks as though the interesting difference from a basic func_animate is "articulatedFigure" "tree_01". (Edit: also, it inherits from atdm:af_entity_base, even though it overrides the spawnclass with idAnimated.) So I'd guess you've no collision because there's no AF set up.

I think it's Penny Dreadful 3 that has an inconveniently placed guard outside a mansion, a place where the player can look down on him, and some moveable crates nearby... One thing with rope arrows is how easily you can get back down without leaving the arrow behind: for example, if you can open a building from the inside, or use scenery to break your fall.

For collision it's hard to say without knowing what kind of entity you're using the model for (AI, ragdoll, func_animate...), but is there meant to be a collision model set up? See http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=An_AI_consists_of_6_Models For func_animate nonsolidity is normal (there's a spawnarg to let articulated figures push moveables, though I haven't tried it).

Clicking 'more...' leads to the mission's summary text and preview screenshots, and I do check it before downloading unless I already know from the website what the mission's about. I didn't have the impression the 'spiders and undead' column was ever meant to be strongly indicative of combat/non-blackjackability. Unavoidable combat is rare in TDM (The Transaction is the only example that springs to my mind, unless you count assassinations as combat), and élite guards also can't be blackjacked (ditto for the recently added fire elemental). It's true though that 'monster levels' have been a point of differing tastes ever since TDP.

I think TDM's mission type conventions were inherited from TTLG's, but I remember adding one of Dragofer's missions to the wiki under 'pirate' because that was the nearest existing category then, and he later edited it to 'ship' presumably for greater accuracy. So now of course we have two missions marked both Pirate and Ship (one of which is also Experimental). Yan's Test doesn't even have a category. I was on a slow-ish connection until recently, and while I don't think I was ever put off downloading a mission, larger ones certainly had me downloading them in the background while I did something else. Given that the UI allows multiple queued mission downloads at once, the total download size can also be of interest. (In fact, it would be nice if a calculated total were displayed; I don't notice one.) I'd go for release date as the least interesting field. But I'm inclined to think the only reason we don't have more missions listed with multiple types is that people haven't felt motivated to define missions in detail on the wiki page (why isn't Marsh of Rahenna marked Outdoor, for example?). I don't think it's a yes/no thing, even if the 'Horror FMs' category might imply that. The 'spiders and undead' column on the wiki has ended up with entries including 'Horror theme?' and 'Extra-natural entities' (me neither...). Meanwhile Patently Dangerous is simply marked as a city mission. And my own mission gets a listing for undead (non-hostile, seen for only two seconds) but not for implications about live(?) burial.

They remind me of a set of Russian dolls. (Have 'like' reactions been turned off? I don't see a button to add one any more.)

There's also SteveL's keyword/regex search script. Within DR, you can search listings of models, materials, etc. by just typing while you have a list item selected, then use the up and down keys to move between results. How well it works depends on how many results you end up dealing with.

Generally I think fireflies are just particle emitters (tdm_wisp or similar), but Alberic's Curse may be a special case: I can see MD5 files for fireflies in the /models/ hierarchy, apparently from the unreleased Blackheart Manor. Also to my surprise, the falling leaf particles in Alberic's ocn_leaves.prt appear to have been made using blood materials instead of leaf materials. (Edit: but I'm unsure to what extent those were used, since there are also bkd_falling_leaves_*.prt files in there.) The Creeps also has falling leaves I think, using a custom material/texture. Moving fireflies are probably spline movers: like this but with something other than a camera following the spline.

Occasionally yes (e.g. in tdm_pageboy_light), but as far as I know it's still the case that the only thing the game does with them is convert them to normal maps via the heightmap() image program. You can also use a scaling parameter in heightmap(). (Incidentally, something's been changed at idDevNet recently: pages that show up in my browser history with the .php extension are now 404s, needing .html instead - maybe someone decided generating pages dynamically was pointless for what's now a static archive - and embedded images in the linked page are missing. On the other hand, I think some 404s were fixed in the Q4 section.)

SEED operates when the map runs, actually, or at least some of it does. (You can see its messages in the game console; and heavy use can slow your map load.) That's why http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=SEED#Introduction talks about avoiding the entity limit and having fewer entities doing their own LOD thinking. But I think combining entities in SEED has become less useful now that DR can easily export combined models.

Changing node 1's target might also work.

Maybe lowering move_to_position_tolerance on the path_corner nodes would make him stick closer to the exact patrol route?

AI have a stopMove() script event: it lacks a description on the wiki and the one here is a bit opaque, but it might be what you want.

I think this has code support already: I haven't confirmed it works but you can see a shaderparm being updated in idSecurityCamera::SetAlertMode(). It needs a material on the camera model to use that shaderparm though, and as far as I know neither the current (Biker's?) model nor Epifire's new one has that, probably because it isn't a documented feature.

That might be a case for a multistate mover? http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Elevators,_multi-floor describes the set-up for a lift, but you could get rid of the AAS-related bits (or keep them if AI can reach the area) and make it respond to trigger brushes instead of buttons.

If you save the prefab text I posted as a text file in your /prefabs/ folder with a .pfb extension, you should be able to add it to a map in DR with File -> Import prefab... It should look like some blue pulsating light rays in-game. If you save this to /skins/ as a text file with a .skin extension it should override TDM's built-ins for the security camera: skin security_camera_on { * textures/common/nodrawsolid } skin security_camera_on_spotlight_off { * textures/common/nodrawsolid } @stumpy You can give a generic entity a _BEAM model and skin it, true, but then you have to use shaderparms to direct the beam.