Dragofer

They store the actual skyboxes in the prefabs/nature folder for some reason, the skyboxes folder just has some miniature scenery models.

@gnartsch, prjames, it looks like I'm being overly adventurous with my newfound scripting abilities In any case, it's all experience towards the next map, which counts 90 bed spots so far for the denizens. Not a tiny map I'll say

It's good to see people are getting something out of this, thanks for the reviews

... I didn't know there were any earrings in my map Also, added a poll.

The surprising thing is that on one level scripting can be very simple, as simple as $Door1.Close();, or sys.trigger($Something);. When combined with stim responses, which can be set to do a great variety of things when triggered, you can come very far with minimal knowledge. What's probably intimidating is when one sees someone like Obsttorte creating surveillance cameras, which can make people think they need to read their way up to that level before their scripts can have a meaningful impact on their mission. When I finally cracked scripting I was eager to try its potential for myself in visual storytelling, new kinds of objectives and such, and that no doubt shifted my mission more to the interactive story side compared to if I had used the time to make more rooms and patrol routes. But to me that was very important, both in terms of learning the system for the future and also trying something different. T2 is full of exotic missions such as Ruins of Originia, Eclipsed, Incubus, Daytime Eclipse, which all use intricate scripting to make radical departures from the playstyle we have come to know so thoroughly in heists and city missions. For me, all of these make the Thief fan works that much more engaging, creative and unique. In the DarkMod I only really see horror missions, Inn Business and maybe the assassination missions that significantly deviate from the conventional formula for a Thief mission. I find this surprising, because the platform seems much easier to customize than the antiquated DarkEngine. Even if the gameplay is good, after 80 missions I start to look for something else. A submarine maybe, or a mission in faraway foreign lands. Something that can make the mind dream. Maybe this has to do with people hesitating to come to terms with scripts, to make real their own vision of how a Thief mission should be.

Fraten Thanks for all those comments, and Forgive me for asking, but where do you need that? Virtually everything in the hold was swapped out with nodrawsolid and then tweaked until I could run everywhere without finding unpassable minislopes or places to get stuck. All I can see still is headwobbling when you move between objects of different heights.

What I found good: On the other hand In the end I had a good time exploring here and I even loaded it twice in a short time simply to have another look at the city part.

Just wondering because I've seen people say this in a lot of places - why would you not want to use a script? Is it just to avoid having a clunky big text file, or maybe something to do with performance?

Yeah that's right, I just put those lines there in case Bikerdude was looking for a more lowtech scenario where the AI starts patrolling after calming down from the alert. Inn Business seems to have sleeping guests that if alerted start walking around the inn.

There are very few things that would drive a man of the streets like myself to the high seas. Before I even thought there were none at all. Yet when one of the nobles whom I had paid a visit to decided to make it his personal objective to end me, promising a mound of gold to the first cutthroat who brings him my head, it became clear no one could be trusted anymore. It was time for change. The most recent version (v2, June 2023) is available from the ingame downloader. Special thanks to: *Betatesters Oldjim, Bikerdude, Airship Ballet, Goldwell, Nbohr1more, JackFarmer, joebarnin, The Black Arrow, datiswous and Acolytesix - for their truly diligent efforts in getting this mission polished in all aspects *The DarkRadiant wiki, which is excellent and covers as good as everything *Bikerdude - for allowing me to repurpose his architecture models to improve the ending of the mission *Grayman - for allowing me to repurpose a mission of his for my briefing *Sotha - for his excellent briefing Format Update v2.0 (18/June/2023) Update v1.5 (02/March/2015)

If I understand the desired situation right, you could also make an objective "this AI gets alerted to level x" which could trigger something on completion (possibly the AI itself for a waitfortrigger node, or target changers for a RIT node)

Adding on some practical lines to what is already said on the stim/response wiki, because it took me some testing before I properly understood how you actually set up a stim/response: If you want the bot to react to water, you need to select the bot and go to the stim/response editor, then go to the responses tab - not the stim tab. Then under those tabs, on the left you add a new entry 'water' and on the right you can right-click choose what the effects should be. The responses tab can do a lot of other things in this way. For example you can set up a 'frob' response on a candleholder, that will extinguish its light if frobbed - like in Sotha's missions. As far as I understand it the stims tab is only used if you want to create a custom type of stimulus, such as the audio sticks in William Steele 2 or the example in the wiki.

I'm having troubles with the 'Enabling Objectives' line not working anymore. For example, I have 2 hidden objectives that make sure you first read a book to the end, then close it before calling a script: Objective 1: Reach page 3 of readable Book1. Objective 2: Close readable Book 1. Enabling Objective: 1. Calls a script. I've made both of them visible and can see Objective 2 doesn't tick off. When I remove the enabling objective line both of them tick off. The same also happens with any others that used enabling objectives - they don't work except when I remove the enabling objectives line. It's strange because I've seen these work countless times before, but now no longer. It looks like Penny Dreadful 2 might have a similar issue with its 'exit the premises' objective (or it's a different problem with the loot objective), so... I don't know. Could it be from 2.02? It sounds unlikely.

Great, that looks like there are enough betatesters - when I'm home soon I can send out the messages. My guess is that pm's will be fine for this one, rather than going to the testing forums.

At last One Step Too Far is completed, and I'd welcome a handful of betatesters now. The mission is on the small side and I've squashed more bugs than I can count, so with some luck this won't take all that long at all.

There was the problem with the stim/response lights, the response had to be on the candleholder and not the light or particle. Thanks for that tip! Also, I found out that I had put my rats back then into monsterclip in order to stop them from moving, which I can see from here is the wrong approach. Moved them a handful units and now everything is working as intended. Making the floor door nonsolid - hm, that results in me falling through it. It's an iron grate door in the weatherdeck that gives access to the hold. I'll just have a playerclip patch over it, non-mantle. Shame about the clock fingers not showing up, but that's what readables are good for explaining. Ah, I didn't realise that those md5meshes are text files. Now I've got the red and white flag of the captain up there; and I feel like I can reskin anything now. For example I made a boat out of carpets when I was working this out. What's next, maybe a man made entirely of straw for a horror mission. Now to give the readables another pass, remove the black boxes and fix some more bugs, then there we go. Thrilling

One thing I forgot to mention was all those bugs and tweaks. I’ve gotten lots of things out of the way and now the only things still on my to do list are those I couldn’t solve by looking at the wiki, other people’s maps or doing my own testing. All help with getting these out of the way is appreciated Once those are done the map can go into beta. High priority: Downscaling models via the rotation spawnarg causes some of them to have huge black boxes as shadows that always face you. Is this normal with rescaled models? Low priority: I’d like to make a moving light with better performance by using a static light and a moving flame particle emitter, but I can’t work out how to set up the stim/response so they get extinguished by water arrows and would like some pointers on that Is there a function to set the alert state of an AI to 0? Horizontal doors in the floor push me up even though they have push_player 0, notPushable etc. Is there a more elegant solution than putting a patch of playerclip over the door? The fancy clock finger decal models don’t show up for me. I need to create AAS for rats and I have an AASFlood rat entity in my map but I can’t find documentation on how to use that entity or how other maps did it. Reskinning that pirate flag – would it work differently because it’s an animated model? It seems to use an md5mesh instead of an .ase

There is a start to a thread like that from January with a couple of ideas - I think that's a great idea that would be nice to see being added to (although maybe the best ideas are still your own? In terms of how far you'd end up going with putting them into action). http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/15833-plot-and-subplot-ideas/

This scripting stuff is great - the description on the wiki was just enough to get things rolling and the first thing I did was to make that self-repeating sea on a spline (thanks Stumpy, although I used 'thread' at the end to make it loop because it wasn't clear to me how to use while(1) ) Then straight after that I went on to make an ending cutscene (I try to be dramatic - and it has only one rather... unusual actor) with what I see as not so short a script to play it from. However, the func_cameraview and the func_teleport don't seem to like each other a lot and have a habit of dealing 5,000,000 damage to me. I've managed to solve most of these by putting in a short delay between them, or putting them in different threads. But when I was about to call the cutscene fully finished, I made a patch that you get teleported on to larger and then the problem came back there. I made sure the teleporter isn't inside the patch. Strange. I was wondering, are there some rules with using teleporters/cameras together, such as that they need to be in the same leaf? Other than that, there are only small things left. I need to put some loot around the place and in the chests. I'd like to reskin that animated pirate flag (I don't want this to be a pirate ship after all). Make sure the objectives work properly. That sort of stuff.

Great, I've got them sitting in just the right positions now every time. It took some trial and error with the tolerance spawnarg and corner position, and sit_down_slide_dist helped too. Thanks for that. About the stims - I don't see why the stim stops working when I put a max fire count or activation timer on top of the radius. Does anyone know of someplace that describes how all those settings work? I'm only seeing the example in Fidcal's tutorial and a rather advanced and more general page on the wiki.

So I've moved on from all the decoration, geometry and the story+readables (the mission even has a name now, 'The Madman's Tome', aboard the Erkenbrandt!) and began with the AI pathing and stim/responses as 2 of the last steps with the end in sight but hit several roadblocks... Pathing - I just can't get anyone to sit down squarely on a chair. I've imported Grayman's sit path from the 1st guard in the North and it seems what's needed is 3 entities: a path corner next to the chair, a path turn angle 90° away from the sit direction, and a path sit with sit_direction_angle set. On a blank test map the prefab works fine but when I manually copy it the AI sits half to the side or the back, or on thin air behind it. Is more needed? With S/R the only stim that works for me is radius. When I change it to or add an activation timer, or add max fire count, it stops working. I think I'm misunderstanding this system entirely. One thing I'm trying to do with S/R is have the sea entity translate past, then get teleported back and start again - another issue there, the sea is bound to a sliding door. I've tried adding a translate spawnarg to a func_mover and a func_static but they won't move. A func_riser that moves horizontally would be great. My map has been great fun, but now I just have all these technicalities that I don't understand why they don't work... Some explanation would be really nice.

Back again, this time mostly after trying out different things for the interiors. It's not so easy, so I've gone back and replayed some of those castle/city type missions, which was nice I'd really appreciate listening in on other people's views on this. Weatherdeck - with a view to the moon Captain's - The captain lives here, furnished with my homemade desk, bookshelf and wardrobe (not shown). He will get more things to showcase once I know what kind of places he's been to - maybe some small pots of spices, or chinaware, or strange instruments. Probably the whole lot. The lighting doesn't really seem to work very well though, especially the right one Hold - I wonder how much cargo is going to fit in here Gundeck/Hold - the cannons take so much space away... and there's only 4 of them Magazine - it's completely encased in copper to keep the humidity away Galley - This one I'm really happy with, the decals made a huge difference. It seems the way to go from now on is to bombard everything everywhere with these decals Navigator's room - everything seems to float in space here... making the lantern light bigger didn't really solve it. He also really needs some handmade furniture too, if only for the colour

I've set to work on my own project recently, which starts with a ship. I tried something like this a number of years ago, where I've made plenty of experiences with everything, including bending patches into all sorts of shapes. Back then I didn't get much further than a basic hull and putting some bunks in the one cabin because I didn't really have control over a lot of things, but this time around it was much easier. The ship itself is done, beams, rigging and all, now it's just to furnish the cabins and the 2 decks of cargo hold, which is going slower than expected. In my mind making a mess on the table with a dozen cups, bowls and bottles isn't much less painstaking than bending patches. So there isn't any finished interior to show yet, but making the framework was great fun. In terms of story, you aren't a stowaway this time (though there's still sneaking) on a voyage to... somewhere, far away. Caracks were real ocean-going vessels at the time. Floating high above the sea in one of the two pictures is an early version of the crude brush hull that I've held on to The framerate in that picture was 25 by the way on my integrated graphics - the skybox took it down from 45 fps, but it's worth it. http://imgur.com/4pzCjVJ - exterior http://imgur.com/EgHfedH - crew accomodation & mess

I believe there's a medieval ambient music mod for Oblivion called Medieval Instrumental Collection, which is 250Mb large, on Tesnexus (http://tesnexus.com/...le.php?id=22085). The description reads: "This pack of music contains only intrumental pieces with no electronic/sintetizer sounds, all this music is pure instrumental, wich makes the walkthrough and explore moments full of delightful!" Furthermore: "NOTE: This music is just a compilation of songs I made,the authors are underground since a long time ago (Medieval Era) after 70 years the songs are Public Domain, so since I am not selling them, making a profit and just sharing this, its all legal. Besides most of this songs are from Anonymous composers. Not under copyright laws. In any case you can ask by sending a PM." If you do want to look into it, the "public" category would be likeliest to be what you're looking for.