Dragofer

I took a screenshot of Wrecker's Reach in its current state, fullsize here. (To get the map to run in 2.06 I temporarily deleted 2 custom moveables and had to use the 64-bit client, as the 32-bit client shut down during loading without any error message.) It's got a retro look, reminding me of missions as they were in 2010, so it'd be easier for a newer mapper to continue in the same style than if it were laden with particles, decals, detail models etc. like some of the other campaign maps. What's looking quite far along is over half the city and the galleon with its 4 decks, while the remainder of the city and a church area in the north are waiting for interiors. As for my question in the previous message, it might be better to put it differently: how much liberty does a mapper have in making a campaign map? Is there anything else beyond the Story Editing document in the campaign repo?

[deleted] If this map is part of the campaign there are no doubt going to be some specifications on what it should have (story, locations, characters, other things), do you have something to share on that? Btw I recognised part of the dock area from some concept art that MrLemonyFresh created a long time ago, that was interesting to see. Also makes me wonder who else worked on it so far?

That is indeed the correct ending. I did have a couple drafts for the ending, one of them being finding a way into the tunnel again and leading you elsewhere, but I ended up choosing the one with the banister. Alternative endings or scenarios are actually quite a neat feature, I'll be keeping that in mind. Spoilers can be done by putting (spoiler) before and (/spoiler) after your text, but use square brackets.

At first glance it might seem like we hold opposite views, but I can agree with this statement. A good horror mission can take place in a warehouse, a mansion, a city section, a ship etc. And I can imagine the same can be said for basically all other mission types as well, whether it's a curious evening stroll, a revenge, sabotage, detective etc. mission. It could be said it's a matter of creativity on the part of the author to be able to carve his setting into something which can achieve his desired effects. Authors are diverse, and I don't doubt each has his own set of talents, meaning they will excel at making particular mission types. In that sense it'd make sense to encourage diversity (i.e. by providing inspiration), as this might produce more engaging results than if the majority tried their luck at creating missions in the image of Life of a Party.

What has barely been explored in TDM so far is the setting of the New World. This can be interpreted in a variety of ways: my own preference is the barren north with its rugged settlements, but untamed wilds, whaling ports and newly founded towns on the fringes of survival also options. My experience with the theme, both in my released missions and my WIPs, has been that it brims with potential for making experiences that feel raw and bleak. You're very far from home, the struggle against nature can be felt everywhere and the people who live here are inured to their constant hardship. Once you've established this, you're most of the way towards creating the psychological horror, the chill down the spine, that Petike was speaking of. So far I've sought to put this into practice in One Step Too Far's second part, and RJFerret's Window of Opportunity has some of these elements. So this is certainly something that can be done more of.

Update: The ship's exterior is fairly mature by now, and I've lifted the piers from Wrecker's Reach and made a modular set out of them. (Technically this screenshot is a little worse off because I used a different hardware setup... just imagine the sky and water as it was in the old shot if you will) Original message: What started as a cog for Petike has received its stern: There's a much bigger fish out there for me to fry, however, and I've been doing a lot of frying on that one lately...

Wonderful mission, I can say many good things about this. Overall I liked the cozy mood, from being a retired master thief living in a posh apartment to only being driven by one's curiosity to not being treated as a dangerous criminal. I agree that this is much like Life of a Party: authentic Thief vibes and always enjoyable to explore down to the last nook, thanks in part to the humour strewn in here and there. The polish of your missions has reached a high level. This starts of course with the briefing and voice acting, but also extends to the visual side: in the style of Thief yet in the framework of more modern technology. And I have to say, I found the idea of making a lamp shop out of my assets quite amusing Now, I wonder if Act 2 will be the one that features the sloop... In terms of feedback, I appreciate the idea of adding side stories as you've done with the contracts, but I'd have preferred to have performed such tasks out of my own initiative rather than being assigned them from a mission hub and then instantly receiving the money. I think this would've added another layer of authenticity to the Thief-like experience.

As this mission is well into my Top 5 and I'd like it to be presented in the best possible light by Vman, I've fixed the 4 bugs mentioned by him, no more no less, in doing so making sure pathfinding and visportalling would remain intact. I did notice that my setup compresses the mission files to 1-2mb less than the original, even before I made any changes. Full Moon Fever (Edit: on the mission downloader now)

Now the water is always working for me. 64bit, 32bit, lantern on/off, post-processing on/off. Maybe my problem was map-related? It might be useful to make a thread calling for people to test whether/when the water works on their end so we could track down if it's a specific card or setting that causes it. Because this water is worth it. This I can work with. But I've noticed there's no existing .md3 in stock TDM... maybe the format isn't reliable anymore since Doom?

Thanks very much RPGista, it's much appreciated. Now, there are already missions that fit your description: One Step Too Far, as well as mission 2 of Down by the Riverside by some counts, both by myself. But what would really capture my imagination now would be a full-size nautical mission combining atmospheric elements of One Step Too Far and Full Moon Fever. And, sometimes dreams come true, they say... With having the files set up I only meant having the assets in my TDM. There are a couple barriers to "shipping" them: - the first water type starts to tear up when the surface is split up to fit around the ship (more specifically, when several surfaces are adjacent to each other). There's also some kind of distance limit, after which you get graphical artefacts similar to those you get with the shadows of models which have been downsized via the rotation spawnarg. - the second water type is a tiling animated mesh. Making some parts fit around the ship is going to take updating the skeleton and animations, so I'll have to finally sit down and learn how to handle animated meshes. LOD stages for the models have been added to the download link: - Brig: 9000 -> 6000 -> 2500 tris - Yacht: 7000 - 4800 -> 2000 tris - Shadowmeshes decay to half their original tris. The transitions happen at 120 and 250 units (reference: humans are 84 units tall). That said, Down by the Riverside used minimally processed ship models with up to 25000 tris without noticeably dragging down performance compared to similar areas. But it doesn't hurt to have LOD

My only issue was that the animated water was invisible from almost all angles when postprocessing was active, otherwise it worked flawlessly.

I can confirm this bug, I was looking to provide 2 different seat textures with different uv-maps on my stagecoach by making 1 start visible and the other 1 start as nodraw, then swap them around by skin. It worked ok in the editor but the faces which started nodraw never showed up ingame. I've simplified the setup by making a nodraw box model and skinning it with a regular wall texture. Same result: works in editor, invisible ingame. Making a small test package of this for the bugtracker was on my todo list.

Sure, I did actually try it out some time ago so I already had all the files set up and could just drop in the now finished ship. Here are the results: Arcturus' water from the animated grass test map Arcturus' water from his animated water test map Misty ocean The downside to Arcturus' water is that it's made up of animated meshes, so it'll need some adaptation in Blender to fit around the ship. The second water works by using a normalmap for each of the 50 frames, so that one's something of a bulky asset of 40+ mb. And both were unfortunately left behind by the recent fix to stop objects over the water from being blurred.

Edit: both ship models were trimmed down and given LOD stages down to 2000 tris.

Hi Petike, thanks for your appreciations and your suggestion. I'm all for making small and reusable ships to populate TDM's docks and canals with, and my old statement still holds true: It's been a while since my last ship, and a lot more work goes into them since I make them fully game-ready, with variants and scale models now, so this one took some time to bring to completion. So here's TDM's next ship, the yacht. As a one-master it's the smallest ship I've made so far, featuring a cabin and a small hold for supplies. This is a ship you'd mainly see in coastal waters or in canals, but I reckon it'd be sturdy enough to make a longer voyage across an ocean. Overall it's geared more towards personal transport than carrying large amounts of cargo. It's made in the same weathered style and to the same specifications as my previous ship, so again there's a moored, sailing, accessible and closed variant as well as an example interior furnishing for a total of 5 prefabs, as well as a 1:30 model. This goes together with a rework of the previously released ketch, which I've renamed to brig as it's a more suitable name for a ship of this size. Most notable is that I took advantage of DR's new exporter to recreate the scale model with more details, while at the same time trimming down to fewer tris than before, far fewer materials and making a better shadowmesh as well as a model stand. The lifesize version has also seen some improvements, such as new hull ladders and the use of shadowcaulk. Specs: I did actually block out several different ship hulls. The cog wasn't easy to get to look proportionate because of the blackjack's ceiling height requirement, so I ended up turning that into an indiaman with 2+1 decks (80% the size of a galleon). In the end I felt most inspired to carry this one-master to completion, which is another niche that hasn't been filled yet in TDM's fleet. Download Weathered Ships - with test map Weathered Ships - Both ships, the brig (formerly ketch) and yacht, are now in the same download. - The test map can be started like a normal mission. - The prefabs do not need to be included in your mission.

Certainly, a lot can be done with proportions and style. Still, a rework like Springheel suggested would, for one solve the gameplay issue where players accidentally hit other objects, for the other, while I agree it's possible to make cramped-looking spaces already now, it can be argued there's more potential in dimensions smaller than the current limit. I get where you're coming from with this, but objectively speaking the AIs are a bit over 80 units and look like they might be 1.7-1.8m (thanks to innovations in agriculture by the Inventor's Guild?), so 120 units would have to be in the area of 2.7m I was thinking of making a bugtracker entry for this, though #4289 might already be covering this? It refers to this thread in the devs forum in its description.

Something of a hindrance I ran into again recently while making new ship designs is TDM's stiff requirement for ceiling height to avoid that the blackjack is deflected. I've tested the absolute minimum to be 104 units, with the safe minimum being 120 units in case the player is looking up a little. Every 1.1 units is an inch, so the blackjack needs 9 feet or 2.7m of clear space to work. In terms of ship design it'd be a godsend if this were less stringent, because at the moment I'm, for example, only getting 2 decks out of ships that realistically should have 3 decks. Other situations are also affected, such as blackjacking under hanging lamps or doorframes, or making other cramped spaces. Four ideas for possible ways to solve this 1) let weapons ignore worldspawn like they did in Thief. Ideally this would be accompanied by a new spawnarg for entities that they shouldn't collide with weapons. 2) make the blackjack less aggressive to surfaces that aren't AI heads. Maybe it's possible to use a second smaller collision box for non-head surfaces? 3) reduce the blackjack's vertical arc. 4) make the blackjack's collision box move in a straight line rather than arcing.

It occurred to me that removing dupes isn't always a good thing. Sometimes mappers cover their creations in decals which overlap with the mesh of the original piece, so if overlapping verts are removed here you'd get a mix of decal and solid texture triangles. It'd be ideal if the exporter could be amended.

I get what you mean, but in this case each face literally has its own set of vertices, which it doesn't share with its neighbours. So the 'remove duplicate verts' tool finds huge numbers of verts.

The models do have smoothing enabled, but the problem is that each face has its own vertices so that you end up with duplicate verts wherever one face meets another. The mesh splits at each face, so smoothing stops. This affects everything I turn into an .lwo, whether it was a brush, a patch, an .lwo or an .ase originally. Removing duplicate verts in Blender is enough to get smoothing to show.

Yes, this would make more sense than what we have at the moment because: 1) Currently when making a new map there's no way to avoid making a 'no shader found' brush as the texture browser starts empty. 2) New mappers should find it more intuitive when their selection in the media browser is what shows up on their new brushes. The thread title actually made me think of being able to set up your own default texture that new brushes receive if you haven't selected anything in the browsers yet, similar to what we have with new faces created by the clipper. This would also be a feature I'd like. Maybe caulk would be a better default than a 'no shader found' brush? Thanks for your ongoing development work, I much appreciate it. Most recently, the exporter revisions have been a great asset in turning some of my mapped ships into models. I don't think this would work: the texture browser seems to exist to display the textures that are used in the map currently, while the media browser shows all available textures. What would you do if you selected a texture that doesn't exist in your map yet?

Multiple materials result in one DC each on an .ase model as well as mesh splits, producing duplicate verts which put a strain on our shadowcasting system, while it's been my understanding that .lwo models aren't subject to these drawbacks. Then again it seems unlikely that a huge .lwo model with 30 different materials still only makes one drawcall, so there's probably more to this?

Sure, I had no preference for 2.07 so 2.06 is fine. Though I'd first like to sort out the prefabs (i.e. include a moving setup) and see what can be done with the shadowmesh.

Alright, most of it makes sense now. I'd say the way forward would be to replace the old models with these so that any other SVN mappers can keep working with them until 2.07 launches. Currently some pieces have escaped the exclusion: - prefab: carts_vehicles/carriages/stagecoach.pfb - prefab: carts_vehicles/carriages/stagecoach_closed.pfb - prefab: stagecoach.pfb (by Bikerdude) - model: misc/carriages/stagecoach_closed_nowheels.ase The 3rd prefab should be renamed to stagecoach_scene and moved to the carts_vehicles/carriages folder. On a related note, there's quite a number of other prefabs outside of any folder at the moment.