Dragofer

This is actually exactly what I was looking for. Funny, you'd think I'd take just a moment over the years to check out the parts of the interface I hadn't used so much yet. Thank you, I was hoping this had been left out just because it hadn't been considered rather than technical hurdles. I can use this right away for a big batch of nautical prefabs. And thank you for taking care of most of my mapping peeves on the bugtracker so swiftly. I've been sitting on them for quite a while and your choice of words was apt, they were indeed like little stings during mapping.

Thank you greebo, this is great to read for any mission maker, in particular when taken together with the engine devs' openness to feedback. This would be a good time to bring up a few things I've had on my mental backburner for a while: 1) rotating while staying on grid. Say you have a lamp whose backplate is perfectly aligned with the wall. You now want to clone & rotate it to put it on another wall. However, in this example, neither the model's origin nor midpoint are aligned with the grid, so when it's rotated it'll lose its grid alignment. A useful trick I found is to draw a large on-grid brush around the lamp. For instance a 64x64 brush if the lamp should stay on an 8-unit grid. This works by ensuring the centre of rotation is on an 8-unit grid. I'd be very happy if there were an extra toggle button that, when enabled, snaps the centre of rotation to the grid. Something similar would also be great for the mirror function. 2) I've for sure gotten a lot of bang out of the grouping function, but it'd be great if grouping information were preserved i) in prefabs and ii) when ctrl-c/v copy-pasting between multiple windows of DarkRadiant. I think the current approach of grouping the whole prefab upon import is good, but I'd like if one could then hit ungroup once and find the grouping that the author had prepared.

Delving into Google Images I came upon these Greek monasteries: Rosanou Monastery - my first thought was what a great mission it'd make. It's also something a new mapper could do: a simple, but interesting building and a manageable, clearly defined space within which to build (unlike a city). Various cliffside monasteries - imagine the mountain view from these, as well as the potential for interesting vertical gameplay to get past guards and into places. @NeonsStyle fantastic gate! Wish I had that reference image when I made Down by the Riverside. Maybe I'll model it anyway and include it with an update.

TDM is quite well suited to capturing a Lovecraftian theme, owed to its light & shadows, cautious gameplay and relative ease of implementing custom effects and scripts. My Down by the Riverside was consciously inspired by a Lovecraft story, and there are most likely a few other missions too that share this theme. Where I'd like to make a distinction, though, is between recreating the theme and actually putting his tentacle monsters into a mission. Those monsters belong to a different universe, and to me would feel as out of place in a TDM mission as i.e. a Catholic priest or an Alien. The approach I'd endorse, therefore, would be to take the unique atmosphere of his settings and come up with something original and suited for TDM with which to populate the mission. That 'something' doesn't necessarily need to be a monster, it can also be a certain kind of human or a malevolent ghost, for instance.

@JackFarmer Nice! I've been wanting to see an underground cathedral amid natural rock formations. Your screens actually remind me of Ruins of Origina from Thief2... it was quite the adventure, bewildering in many ways. Thanks for asking this ?

@JackFarmer Yes. Well, maybe? I want to make it look like he's been dead for a while in that chair, and I could imagine it'd help if the hands and feet were also positioned in certain ways. @ERH+ yeah a temporary table in front of the chair seems like a pragmatic solution in the absence of other tools. Still very tricky - I remember spending ages dropping the shopkeeper's wife in Perilous Refuge trying to get her to land sideways on the bed for a more fetal position. Had to do it several times even before I figured out the modified map file gets written to the base darkmod/maps folder, instead of fms/*mission*/maps. Fortunately I found an article about this on the forums, after remembering I only searched the wiki. It looks like it has everything needed, including console commands, to make this task manageable. Will have to try this out and probs update the wiki: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/6677-guide-to-ingame-moveable-and-ragdoll-editing/

Has anyone got an effective method for getting ragdolls into certain poses? The key example, the one I'm looking for, would be to have them sitting in a chair in a certain way. By default you're not able to drag them into a chair because there's an invisible force preventing you from lifting them higher than 20cm or so. I have a dim recollection that you can disable the above dragging limitation via a console command, giving much more freedom to move the body. Or at least some kind of command that makes life positioning ragdolls easier. Something that temporarily disables physics, gravity? The most powerful option for getting specific poses would probably be to use Blender and export as a new model, but I think that'd only be usable for func_static bodies.

Good grief ERH+ ? I'm pretty glad I beefed up the lighthouse recently so it can adequately accommodate this fine piece of engineering

@JackFarmerthat looks to me like the visportals might be having problems with the sealing geometry in that area. What I'd try would be to simplify the caulk tunnel so that you only need 4 brushes, and also make sure the visportal faces aren't partly covered by sealing geometry.

That bug - losing the ability to frob after frobbing specific readables - is typical for when a readable hasn't been given any valid text. It happens easily, and is just as easy to fix for the author: either disable frob on that readable or fix the text definition.

In that case I'd like to encourage you to hit the 'continue' button, as this is a 2-part campaign. In this particular scenario there should really be a different text there than 'Mission Complete' to show without a shadow of a doubt that the story continues, but as far as I could find out it's not possible to specify texts for individual missions, so it's just the brief cutscene and the altered completion sound. I can probably come up with a more indicative solution for this.

Thanks chakkman for your views, I've been hoping to hear feedback like this from the community. (in my view): I get your point that pagans should be distinct from other factions as well as believable. The Thief franchise succeeded on the first front, but Thief 3 only did so by making caricatures of them. In my recollection Thief 1-2's pagans were more subtle by comparison, but they too had a peculiar way of speaking (my copy of the game was French so I missed the finer points of what they said). It does make them stand out, but it may still be too out of place for TDM's low-fantasy universe. My way of balancing the 2 needs - character & believability - was to imagine a superstitious man who believes in beings out of folklore tales and who lives by more primitive ideals. Thus I've written lines like: The way I see it, most of those living in a pagan society would live fairly ordinary lives, albeit within the ruleset imposed by their pagan beliefs, while a subset of the society's members deals more intensely with the mystical side: the shamans. As a result, a good deal of this pagan's lines could've been said by someone else as well, though overall it should be apparent that more gruff formulations are used, in keeping with a rough way of life. That's my understanding of what a TDM pagan is. Everyone is welcome to suggest changes to this concept, or point out if they think current lines don't capture the desired concept. @chakkmanresponding to your suggestion to include more references to nature and mystical beings, my original 2010 draft featured numerous lines referencing trolls, a dark lady, deities, a spirit wolf etc. Some years later they seemed to me to be too high fantasy and intrusive for what should be a believable human in TDM's setting, so I toned them down/cut them/gave them to the shaman subset, but I'm flexible in this decision. If the community considers these a good addition I can bring them back.

@Hagatha the clue is in

And here's the consolidated Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10b4A9_YBGqdB9ZpN_YVWhWgu92L9pRrZrxsrQVQyAOI/edit?usp=sharing At present everyone is able to edit and comment it, with a backup to be on the safe side. If you have Gmail or a Google account (register here) and send me the name I could reserve the full edit rights for us while still allowing comments by anyone who's interested, which may be the most sensible approach. Commenting is either done by selecting a phrase and clicking the speech bubble with a + icon at the top of the screen, or you can switch to suggestion mode by clicking on the pen at the top right. Indeed, we actually have the luxury of choosing the best lines for each situation as the script is now at a total of 330 lines - the only section we're still short on is conversations (the old master script had far fewer such situations), and I already quite liked the ones you've made. Something we could do is allocate some lines to subsets: your mouse & rat lines to an urban pagan, while something like "This is your death, outsider!" could be more suited to a rural pagan living in an isolated society. Practically speaking, I'd imagine separating the lines by putting a blank space (enter) inbetween the 'keepers' and the rest. I've also separated out some shaman lines by putting 'Shaman' on a new line and his dialogue below it. Also, I've taken the liberty of moving all the multipliers (x2, x4 etc...) from individual lines next to the name of the situation, as they're meant to denote how many lines to have for that situation. This is the same for me, and surely most people around here this time of year. Let's just see what we can do for now.

Still would be nice if we could drag bodies up a little higher than knee height. The number of times I've struggled with pulling a ragdoll up on a chair to pose them for a mission. Well, that's probably the way it is for a reason, and IIRC there's actually a console command to loosen the physics limitations when dragging a body.

@JackFarmer I really like how you've packed those screens full of interesting things to look at - I'd be keen to take a look at that bank in the midst of a lush forest! And you're definitely a representative of the Inventor's Guild with that hoverboat, and all your other inventions that came before it. Together with ERH+, but he's usually away and busy on the very bottom off the ocean or in the swamps. Regarding the paths, I'd add that I was quite happy with using a dirt path decal on a path-shaped patch that's simply laid on top of the grass terrain. Its sides gradually faded out to blend with the grass. You can see it in action in Alberic's Curse, for instance.

Alright, we're getting closer here. I've been thinking in the past days on what'd be the most sensible way of proceeding from here and came up with the idea of merging both scripts into a Google Document. This would pool all available ideas for lines and allow to separate out the strongest lines and then to reflect on what could be done with the remaining ones, i.e. rephrase them or assign to a subset (urban/rural/shaman). It'll also easily allow for multiple people to work on the lines, and anyone would be able to post comments on any lines along the sides of the document. I've made a start on fusing the scripts (taking some time because mine is based on a different master script with different defs and formatting), and if you also think we should proceed like this, I'd then go on to post the merged script when I'm finished. I'd also appreciate if you sent me your Google username.

Very nice, it's great to see more effort being put into this longstanding project. What I particularly like about your approach is to keep supernatural references subtle, at least when compared to T3's overblown take on it. I've written a fair share of lines of my own over the years, that I'll include within the spoilers below (you'll have to teach me how to have multiple spoilers within a post without them all getting nested into each other in these new forums). What I personally had in mind, especially when I most recently worked on the alerts and searching barks, was something like a Celtic tribesman - rough, superstitious and not afraid to enter hand-to-hand combat with the intruder. Another archetype of Pagan may be the secret worshippers you'd find in the city living in attics and mostly staying among their own. Some lines may be more suitable for one than the other (or possibly neither), plus I've demarcated some lines for a possible shaman. I imagine we could be choosing, refining and merging the best lines from each script to come to a final product.

I use only prefabs for chests and all the ones I use have both frobable lids and bodies. It may be worth considering to modify all the prefabs to have only frobable lids, if there's a consensus for that. As for controlling frobability of items in the chest, it can be handled by putting a target_setfrobable monsterclip brush within the chest that toggles frobability of all entities it touches that don't have immunity to the setfrobable effect. I actually wasn't aware it can be done in other ways too. Modifying the base class of froblock entities by changing a 1 to 0 would be easiest, but froblock may be used for other things than chests too? Maybe padlocks, custom setups etc.? I wonder why it's called froblock: a frobable lock, or it blocks frobbing? Would be most realistic if stuff inside the chest could only be frobbed if you have a clear line of sight to it. On the other hand there'd be a lot of quality of life to gained if we didn't have to worry about the chest body getting in the way.

Thanks Darkness_Falls for the headsup, and @MirceaKitsune and @wesp5 for your generous reviews. No idea how the </br>'s got in there as I don't use them, but that'd be a good opportunity to bring in some fixes for other issues that cropped up after release. As for the unfrobbable container bodies, they're all atdm:froblock entities so it should be possible to overwrite them with a modified version that changes 'frobable' from '1' to '0'. It's entirely possible, however, that this entity class is used in other ways as well, potentially breaking missions, but looking at i.e. St. Alban's Cathedral it looks like it's used exclusively for container bodies. I've attached that file to this post: remove .txt from the ending, then unzip to your darkmod folder. modified_lootboxes.zip.txt

Speaking of nautical themed missions, here's some from On Silent Waters:

Thanks grayman, you're not the only one who has wanted this kind of functionality.

Ah, then a color fade script should work on that. Thanks Destined for sharing that, though what I actually meant was how to point to a def_attached entity in a script command or S/R window. Something like $guard(key).trigger(); for example?

@STRUNK the tile trap's mechanism is that the tile starts the map slightly above the ground with its physics disabled (nodrop is set to 1). As soon as anything touches the tile, its physics get enabled and it drops to the ground, where it comes close enough to an invisible entity to trigger a stim/response effect. Setting the colour on a lamp model should only affect the model, but not any lights that have been attached to it via def_attach. The model should only be affected if it has a colorme texture on it (recolourable), though IIRC the only actually working way to change the colour of a model is to use a colorFade script command (see Down by the Riverside for examples). Btw, I've always wondered how to target a def_attached entity in this game - anyone know the syntax for this? For the fire arrow effect you described you'd have to add a response to fire stims on the target that gets hit by the arrow, with an effect to turn the light off.