demagogue

I used to make these in my youth. Well, I have one of those mini-sets you can buy sitting right next to me now of a music room. So obviously I still do. But when I was younger I was more ambitious. I remember making a village from a book. But a few I made from scratch by hand. The one I remember, probably late-80s, was the mansion from the interactive fiction Deadline, with the roof off and the rooms modeled. See I was mapping long before game editors were around. So it's apparent why I picked up dromeding right at the start. Me & my brother used to have epic wars in our house where each side had a castle in one room, but those weren't made by papercraft. SeriousToni's fan-made wallpapers is a good reference. I can see how they were kind of promotion oriented, but they were fantastic just as fan art on their own merits. I remember using them as desktop backgrounds or something like that at times. Well whatever you want to call it, it'll be fun to see. The other cool projects I've really liked are when people made costumes or props or wearable props inspired by Thief. That'd be cool to see for TDM. And speaking of the game Deadline, games used to have what they call "feelies" (I believe Deadline was the first game that did that), gizmos they'd package with the game. That would be really cool to see too, like an old parchment map of Bridgeport, or a water arrowhead, or a lockpick set, things like that.

I really love papercraft projects, so I love the idea. Like any fan project, you'll usually get a better reaction just doing it because you want to, and then posting images or videos of your work that people will react to and give you a motivation boost, as opposed to having people weigh in on whether the project is worth doing in advance, much less recruiting people without having done any work yourself on it or any indication that you're committed to the project. I think a general rule of thumb is, if it's really interesting to you, there are bound to be other like-minded people that will also think it's interesting. So if you stay true to your instinct, other people will be into it for the same reason. I don't think promotion is the right framing though. If you do it at all, I think you should do it as its own stand-alone project you share with people, like fan fic or fan art, which I'm surprised we don't have more of. While we're at it, someone really needs to write an official history of the Empire and a lot of associated fanfic to give our world backstory. And someone ought to make an art book with screenshots across all our FMs and some story, as if it were like one of those travel photo books. Something people put on their coffee table for discussion and just to flip through for fun, or in your case actually make the things. I see the idea you're talking about as something along those lines. "Promotion" by itself is kind of a narrow view of the point of doing something like this I think. If it's really honestly only promotion that you care about, you don't personally care if it's papercraft or fridge magnets or whatever, then I think things like Twitch streams, podcasts and gaming music videos are better for actual promotion. I'd like you or someone to do the papercraft project because they want to do a cool art project on its own terms.

As a community mod, I think one of the jobs of FMs is to help develop the lore. So make something up, and if it's good enough it will become part of the canon.

Looking at that image, that wall is the 4th element hit by the light after the first func_stat that creates the shadow. That makes it sound like the render engine isn't backtracking far enough to the shadowcasting element. You could test that by moving or temporarily getting rid of some of the middle brushwork and see if the shadow casts then. But one way you could at least fix the problem if it's a rendering hiccup is to reduce the light radius so it doesn't reach that wall, and then maybe have some invisible lights in the other directions if you want the light to spread in other directions.

There's a spawnarg on lights that turn off shadowcasting (for optimization reasons), and these lights will go through all objects and brushes. So the first thing I'd check is that that shadowcasting spawnarg is turned so that it casts shadows.

I'm of a mind that controversial features should always (to the extent possible) be map-specific. And if an author is going to have the feature in at all, then they should do it without compromise. It's better to have a generally unliked feature that's at least done the right way (that some people like), without compromise, than to compromise it and have more generally liked but wishy-washy gameplay. Be an author: Have a vision, go all out, don't compromise, don't ask for permission*, be loved or hated and nothing in between! * But you still gotta betatest. People might not like your feature, but you should know the consequences and player reaction, it should still work for everybody as intended.

It's clearly not ever going to be a standard feature, but I think you weren't asking for it to be. I think there are two ways this could happen in a more limited form that would get more sympathy. 1. An individual mapper could use the mechanic for only their map, and... 2. Someone could rig a patch that players that like this idea could drop into their game folder and it would create this mechanic for all maps just for those players. I think the first idea, if it works like what Bienie said, I think all of that could be scripted for an FM... The inventory limits, the slowing movement, using the shouldering mechanic, etc. As for the 2nd, whether that same script or something derived from it could be applied to all FMs is something I think might work but I don't know. But it's worth somebody trying if there's a lot of interest in it. I've always thought the best way to learn the code for this game is to have a personal project like this that motivates you to figure out how the code works so you can do it. And the great thing about that is then you can help out fixing other things or have other ideas for features that can benefit all of us. So while I don't really like this idea myself (except seeing it in an individual FM might be interesting), I encourage people interested in it to try their hand at implementing it.

I don't think the devs are going to consider something like this. But I don't think it's as difficult to code as you might think. This is one of those projects that's well within a fan's ability to mod in for themselves. I'd search the forums and the source code for anything to do with head movement, and I think it wouldn't take long before the key code you'd have to change pops up.

This isn't really the best place to ask this, but I can't think of anywhere better to ask. Where is the screenshot used for the 2.08 release post (below) taken from? It looks great, and I'd love to visit that scene. I was going to guess The Painter's Wife, but after playing a good amount of it I doubt that's where it's from.

Some features I think it'd be cool to see are collective stealth score stats on the score screen and a fully animated werebeast. I'd like to see an ambitious campaign that presents something like a canon story for the mod, like introducing the major areas and factions and backstory. My pipedreams are multiplayer and maybe a physics rehaul. I'd also love to see a cyberpunk fork, but you can't really call that a feature. I think every single thing I mentioned, sans the werebeast, is more appropriate for people outside the core team to work on. So my expectations aren't that high. But it'd be great to see them if they come.

There's probably a script command that works, but the easiest failsafe thing I'd try is just make a key that unlocks the door, put it in a blue room, and then script the key to frob the door.

I just picked it up and played about 2 hours. It's a special game.

They just have to hear the alert bark for the alert state to pass, and the bark can spread through portals as far as the volume attenuates by distance, which for a yell could actually be pretty far, I think. I don't know if this changed, or if it was a design flub by the mapper, or maybe the alert-passing part of alert barks should have a smaller radius than the barks themselves, since one wouldn't expect to go on alert by a faint muffled sound they can't tell is actually a comrade barking an alert. You could test it by playing the same part of the FM in an older version of the game and see if it reproduces the problem (a map design issue, or a problem that's always been there) or not (a change in the mod). If you want a quick fix for the time being, you could turn down the AI's hearing acuity.

When I mentioned histogram, I was thinking of the system Opus Magnum uses. It may be easier to just show a screenshot. In our case, the x-axis would be the stealth score, each unit being a 5 or 10 point range. The y-axis would just be the raw number of players that fell within that range, with the scale normalized to the max value. And the player's score would be a vertical line. I'm imagining that as an FM gets larger, the peak in the curve is going to be pushed further higher (to the right), so when the player's line appears, it's immediately apparent if they're doing better or worse than average, and how much better or worse.

It brings up interesting things to think about. I think financial incentives will always be a factor, but I think our assumptions and expectations about which way they'll cut may become increasingly inaccurate over time, so 10 or 20 years from now one shouldn't be too sure. It reminds me, there's a scene in the show Halt and Catch Fire, and the year was around 1985, when a dialup modem game service was switching to ethernet cables, which for the time for what they were doing was way ahead of the curve, and one of the characters was speculating about where the tech was heading, and later they bought up a private intranet grid. Granted it's written from the perspective of knowing how the internet was going to play out and then backtracking to what people could have already expected from it from what they knew in 1985~88, so it had a bit more confidence than people could have really had at the time, but it's still an interesting scene and story arc because of what they could and couldn't predict 15-20 years into the future. For some really nuanced points they already knew how it would probably play out then, and for some other really obvious stuff now, they would have been completely blind to just because there was nothing to give them any indication which way it would play out. That's how I tend to think about speculation on future tech culture now.

I'm sure you're right, but things that are expensive now get pushed lower in price over time. I'm just tempted to imagine there will be a point in 10 or 20 years where so much information can flow so fast to consumers so cheaply that the infrastructure and applications will pretty readily pop up catering to it, and (true to The Singularity thinking) it's going to launch individual and social consciousness to mind-blowing levels up the asymptotic acceleration of change that make the internet revolution up to now and all the social effects we've seen seem positively primitive and quaint. I can imagine AR being integrated into daily life where there isn't any meaningful separation between the real and virtual worlds anymore. It's hard to think that's exaggerating when we look at things we have now from the perspective of 20 or 30 years ago.

One thing we might do is have the game send the server the stealth score tagged to the mission, and then it could compute a histogram that shows on the end game screen (if they're online), i.e., a bar graph of stealth scores for all players of that FM with a vertical line where the player's stealth score is, so they can see where they rate vis-a-vis the majority. That'd be cool to see and not too hard to set up.

The score matches the rules for Ghosting, where they know something is there, which fits with the barks for level 2 but not for level 1. If you want to have a rule where just searches and busts count, then you can see that on the front page just by having zero searches and busts. If you're talking about modifying it, note that it took us weeks of work to get the counting right because of the cascade problem. It's never "one bust" or "search trigger", it's a cascade of like 20 of them in a brief period that looks like "one" to the player. But what a mapper could do is keep all of that system and just change the actual values of the points for each level though, like make them subtractive instead of additive, or make level 2 busts count for zero, etc. There's a way to get mapper scripts to talk to sourcecode, but I don't remember how to do it. The problem then is that it may be counterproductive to have a different system across maps.

Speaking of which, look at this news that came out today. Can you imagine? If this becomes standardized everywhere someday, and thinking about what Unreal is going to be like in the next generation or so, it won't be long before there's not going to be any difference between the real and online worlds anymore, not even exaggerating.

Perfectionist with the loot even after you're done with the mission, huh.

Just under a gig a second? Not bad. I'm in Japan, so my ping is always in the 100s of ms. I might make do with something like that someday.

The score was originally a positive score from 0-10, where 10 was a perfect run, and it went down from there. And it turned out that so many games were 0 that people just assumed it was broken, which made it kind of useless. (It also hid the fact that busts were getting overcounted, which is why it was almost always 0 and we didn't even realize it, much less fix it, until we switched to an additive score.) Then we debated increasing it to 0-100 (where 100 is a perfect run), but the thing you have to keep in mind there is "80" will mean something very different for a 10 minute contest sized mission (where it's a really bad score) vs. a 5 hour sprawling mission (where it's a great score). So to avoid both of those issues I had the idea to make the score positive, so it can go up indefinitely. No matter how bad you are, you always get a meaningful number. And like a golf game there's a "par value" so bigger scores are okay for bigger missions but bad for small missions. So "20" just looks (accurately) like 20 in busts instead of "80" looking (inaccurately) like "80%" stealthy. When we did that, though, we kept the name "Stealth Score" because it'd already been around for like a year or more at that point. And now it's been around for like 11 years. I understand the logic of the point. "Score" sounds like a higher value is good when it's worse. But the name has a kind of inertia at this point from being around for so long too, and most people understand what it means easily enough.

The treadmilling and circle-walking often happen when geometry has changed and the dmap hasn't been updated, so the pathfinding is out of date. It can also happen if there brushwork for paths isn't very clean. So if you dmapped and cleaned up areas where that happens that might prevent it from happening more. When areas are made well, I think it's a rare occurrence.

It seems it's some kind of dynamic LOD. You can see distant geometry morphing (or appears to be morphing) even when the player is hardly moving. Voxels (or more typically voxel geometry converted into poly geometry for the render) are one place you see that happen. That morphing looked a lot like a promo video of Voxel Farm. But I don't know that that's what they're doing here.

The first time I registered, I was surprised to discover an account had already been made for my email by someone in Thailand, and I wasn't the only person that happened to! So I can understand why they want to fill my Epic library with so many free games, but I still don't really want to give them my credit card info. It's amazing how much money they must have to do this though, from Fortnight, and I foresee them filling another bunch of Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold with their Unreal 5 engine effectively obliterating the visual difference between rendered geometry and real world video, or for those studios that take advantage of it anyway.