demagogue

There's always two relevant versions of the source code, the version for the latest release and the WIP version. If you're in it for learning early on, if you want to do small little experiments where you just swap new source code in and out without changing assets, or if you have space issues or want to keep things compact, or if it's on some really niche or independent part of the game that updates probably won't touch it, etc., then the release version may be fine for your purposes. But if you want to get into it seriously, at some point you'll want the WIP version as an independent install, anyway, because it's kind of self-defeating to work on code that's already been made incompatible, and once you do it, it frees you up to do lots of different things without worrying about what it's doing to the game you also want to play sometimes. As an aside, I really encourage people to play with the source code. You learn a lot about coding generally, since it's always best to learn by doing, and by doing something you're interested in instead of boring textbook problems. And the kinds of experiments you can run on TDM tend to be fun because, as an immersive sim, there are just a lot of fun things you can do with the game and the world. I think a good way to start, after reading through the code a bit to get a feel for where things are, is to give yourself some random small assignments, like putting in little features or gimmicks, and then search the code for the elements that seem like they'd be most relevant for that thing. And then as you start tweaking things, the problems you run into are going to be teaching you how things fit together. It's a fun way to learn though.

I've been using Stable Diffusion a lot recently. Something you have to note is the current way to use it, you should expect to make 20~30 versions. One of them is going to be awesome. The other thing is that you often have to re-do wonky parts, which most of these systems are starting to do. I mean maybe 60% of it will be right on, so you keep that and fix up the wonky bits until they fit. So you're not getting perfection on the first run. You're iterating the same image in bits in pieces, each block taking 20 iterations or so. Someone was saying it before .... hands, feet, legs, eyes, will look a little wonky. So you just drag a box over it and start iterating, and eventually it will get it right. By the end of that you're going to start getting close to perfection. We have the tech for that already now. It may take a little time, but you can get perfection with what we have now if you block iterate it enough. And the final thing is, look at what Dall-E was making just 1~2 years ago. It was trash, and what we have now is lightyears already beyond it. In another 3~5 years I think it'll meet the hype, and every thing churning out of it will be photo real or whatever you're looking for, and then some. I don't think it'll take that long to get there just looking at the differential slope of the progress we're seeing right where we are now. I think of it like chess engines. There was that period where people were wondering if it'd beat humans, and then it did, and then it just kept going without looking backwards until at this point the entire chess world looks like it's going to run into a crisis of conscience because the game is out of human hands now. There's every reason to expect imaging software is going to do the same thing in short order. For gaming, e.g., I'm making a card game, and this is helping me make the background and card images. Again it's taking like 20~30 iterations, and then I have to fix a few things by hand, but I can churn out a half dozen really good looking cards in a day where I wouldn't have been able to make a single one before. But like I said, I expect in 5 years I won't even need many iterations or the hand-fixing... I think the fixing will be automated well enough. Oh another thing is, because it's still diffusion over a data set, the big limits are users not understanding the ontology embedded in the set. If you figure out good search terms, you can get what you want much better. Another thing I think will improve in the future isn't only the tech, but the search terms and other UI elements will work much better to make the system give you quality work that you want, by improving the data set, but also you can have a second-order of AI that parses text inputs into a form that works with the data set. I think that's part of the next generation of AI that's going to make it start much better delivering to us on a human level. I mean I think the tech is already there now in principle. Now it's a matter of making the tech work for humans, and that'll be the next big revolution coming soon.

I was busy before and missed this (the Seeking Lady Leicester WIP screenshots), so I guess it's good this thread was bumped. It looks really great! I'm excited to play it! I'm really happy there is this outlet for us to see part of grayman's great legacy still emerging in a way that respects and even fulfills his wishes. And I'm happy we have reached this approach with Biker for him to contribute to the community in a way that's safe, controlled, and ultimately healthier for Biker & the forum. It's working great. Don't change a thing. Above all I'm happy we have great FMs still being worked on and coming out. They really are the best medicine when everything else in the world seems to be falling apart. The SEED system was created exactly for this purpose, it looks great when it's used, very realistic, and it should be used more often!

Edit: Oh, I guess I thought I was on the last page when I posted this and I wasn't. Well anyway, since we can't delete posts, here's a reply to a probably year's old post now... For my FM I mentioned a key window being openable in a readable, and I put a loading screen message that some windows were openable. I think I also put a slight light in front of the openable windows, or some of them, so they popped out. I wasn't such a fan at the time of the meta-diegetic route (some with knobs and some without), and leaving one open seemed counter-productive for performance reasons, but performance was a much bigger deal when I made it than it is now.

Oh nosound may be a sound shader too. I was working with "silence" the sound file & associated sound shader for my own project, and the function nosound in the code itself (where it means what I said). But if you saw nosound as a soundshader, then I'm sure you were right in what you saw, and if you want to know the difference, you could open up the soundshaders and see. Also note that I worked on this stuff ages ago, so you don't have to trust everything I'm saying too much. I just get a kick when people talk about code I worked on and I want to talk about it. Yeah the stereo issue came up later, and I'm glad somebody took care of it!

To be technical about it, "nosound" is a script function to stop a speaker. "Silence" is an actual sound .wav file that plays nothing, so you can still have the speaker "play" an arbitrary .wav file, e.g., for the ambient system, then use that to easily not get a sound, as you might do in the popping case as mentioned... Or that was the theory. (The popping problem was fixed after I added that, but I was never 100% sure that was the fix that did it.) But the issue in any event now is that now countless maps already use "silence" references in their location_settings spawnargs, and it's dicey changing things that mappers add themselves because they won't update with TDM changes, e.g, as opposed to using stock resources that automatically carry TDM changes with them into new versions.

If you'll allow me to take a bird's eye view of this ... remember back in 2016, when they nutcakes were campaigning for Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US? The joke back then was, no matter how crazy one side got, the other had to outdo it. And I was wondering which flavor of crazy was going to be more permanently damaging to their respective country. At the time I thought it was going to be Brexit, since that's "forever" and Trump was only 4 or 8 years, but I underestimated how deeply Trump's admin could undermine all of our institutions., even after he's left. But then I also underestimated the wreckage that was going to be left in Brexit's wake. ------- Fast forward 6 years later and I'm still not sure who has the worse deal. Even if this law doesn't pass, it seems like it's putting on display how dysfunctional UK politics is now, like the ultimate exercise in dissociation -- trying so hard to ignore how shambolic the post-Brexit political & economic situation is by hyperfixating on problems that aren't problems with truly batshit legislation. (You can correct me if my reading of it is off.) But if you've been paying attention to the Jan 6 hearings in the US, you know the US still won't be outdone. The problem isn't that the hearings are bad. The problem is that they're a slam dunk case against the previous administration and GOP, but it's only (apparently) making the whole GOP circle the wagons and double down on their insanity. Not to mention the SCOTUS decision that's going to allow the criminalization of abortions, the arguments behind it could just as easily apply to criminalize birth control, or gay or transgender behavior, and I have to imagine in some states there's a sizeable part of the population chomping on the bit to do just that. ------- On the topic of this law itself, of course it's a mess. It's weirdly chauvinistic. UK-legal-compliant browsers & the extraterritorial bit? Didn't the UK just go to a lot of effort to tell everybody it was done with multilateralism and would be much happier as a fading second rate power? It's a tall order to follow that up with this. But the big problem is the part about net neutrality. The more control the state wrangles the Internet into, the more it's just going to whip it into some propaganda mouthpiece for megalomaniac & tyrannical demagogues (& not the benevolent kind like me). I'm all for strict measures to protect children from child pornography, get it off the net, and punish anybody uploading it or any server or site hosting it. But forcing people to maintain their identity for sites is asking for people to be targeted, tracked, and coerced, or putting in the architecture to do that when the bad guys get into power. The problem is even if this law fails, I think they may keep trying until they make it work. This is all a stupid road to dystopia we're on.

My memory may be failing me, but I thought there was a key you could press so that frob helper turned on while it was pressed. It may have been that somebody gave instructions to bind a key to do that job through the console. But anyway I really liked that system. It would stay off, but when I needed it, I could press that button and have it when I needed and wanted it. (And IIRC this is what I've done, but it was already a few years ago now(?), so I don't remember all that well. I did try it with it always on for a while, reflected on it, and still didn't like it, XD or didn't like it popping up when I wasn't asking for it. But I liked being able to easily turn it on & off. But this is just me; I don't presume to speak for a whole demographic or anything.) And like I said before, the team can do whatever it feels is best as long as I or anyone can still set that up, or set it up however they like.

I was using the term more metaphorically. There was a design philosophy. Whatever the literal doc itself said wasn't really the point. Well I shouldn't have referred to it as such since it wouldn't be on point anyway. Most things got pounded out in the dev forum across countless threads, but that's harder to explain. I was using the term "design doc" as a cheaty shorthand so I wouldn't have to explain. XD Anyway, long story short, if there's a vote among the devs to change a thing, I trust everyone on the team has the best interest of the game in mind, so of course it's proper they can change something like this that way. I wouldn't vote for it, but I'd respect the vote and be fine as long as I could turn it off. I think one characteristic of this as opposed to the light gem or inventory widget is that at the end of the day this is reticle, and reticles carry a lot of baggage with them in games. Somehow they change the relationship of the player to the game space, at least with my feeling of them. I always turn off reticles in any game I play for that reason (although like I said before, I'll cheat sometimes and turn them on in rare cases; but I don't like them in any game as a rule). So that's one part of this.

I was thinking about things like frobbing coins and doors, but you're right about containers being an innovation, and more generally that realism and era don't match up all that well when you get down to details. But that wasn't really part of my point, so it's best to rephrase it. The point is there is a category of player that hates screen bling, or will say they hate it (we're really talking about a whole philosophy towards games & immersive sims), and that type would view TDM is the kind of game where you can get relief from it (etc.). I don't know the best way to summarize that in bumper sticker form for a button. Any way you try there are going to be problems, like you're saying. But it's still a real category. I'm open to suggestions for the best way to succinctly describe what it is. I was trying to throw a bone to people that don't like the default and wanted another option that worked for the other player type that says frob-hassle is a pointless frustration, but I agree with this. Having some big-scale option setting moment is a bad idea, so I'd even retract the suggestion. But that would just lead me back to: ideally we keep it the way it is because it's consistent with the design doc from the very beginning. You can't micromanage or tweak a design philosophy forever; it's a kind of endless feature creep. Now that I think about it, that's probably closer to the root issue. There are always pros and cons with different features. And here if you're talking about two different types of attitude, which the same person can even go back & forth on, you can't win. But at a certain point a feature becomes part of the character of the game, so it's best to stick with it. That's only my view though. (And I like that frob help is an option out there I can use sometimes.) Of course another option is what Springheel likes to do with his loading screens, which is having hint texts on the Main Menu screen that inform players they can do stuff like this that they might never notice otherwise. That's a good idea for other reasons because there are quite a few things that would be hard for players to know but which they may find really useful.

The options I think might be good are, 1, if they made it default at the start for, or it's explained in the tutorial mission, which a lot of people play their first time. Then people know how to turn it on & off when they want it either way. The other option would be a setting-setting that comes on with a first install with a prompt like "what kind of experience [or UI] do you want: 1. An authentic or more realistic experience closest to the classics in this genre, 2. a UI designed to make game play more accessible and fun with less hassle, and then the system picks different sets of options based on one's answer to that. It's obvious or anyway intuitive to me that people in the "1" camp are going to be alienated by these features and people in the "2" camp would find it hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want them. Part of our entire MO in our design doc from the start was to make the experience as pared down and closest to reality as reasonable, with UI features putting things in the world just to the extent the medium was limited in giving world-feedback to the player. More to the point, it didn't like the turn to screen bling that started happening after 2004, so made an intentional point of limiting the bling to what was necessary.

One of the first maps I made for TDM I think back in mid-2009 when it was still and development and not even released yet, was (meant to be) a straight up remake of Magnetic Scroll's Guild of Thieves. You start on the lake in the boat with the Master Thief facing you, jump to the jetty, and then you're on the path to the crossroads. At that early time there were a lot of things I didn't know how to do ... how to make a realistic road, how to make an open world & nature areas, how to make the caves, etc. In the map you can see me giving my best effort at it, but it's kind of a mess and it didn't get far. Also it's a big undertaking, so I ended up going with a small contest-like FM, which is the FM I released. As for the original game, I got close to finishing it. I don't think I actually completely finished it. At some point I just read the final story, so I know how it ends. It's such a good fit for TDM. I might even come back to it someday, although probably not in a way that overlaps with this FM.

I have my FM I started around 2003 I still tell myself I want to finish someday. It's great to see mappers coming back to projects. I like that this game will always be around. Whatever else happens you can always come back to it.

The tribute video I posted on my own social media was also Never Let Me Down. It just feels like the right pick. It was a bit surprising. Depeche Mode doesn't feel like a particularly old band to me. Like Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones feel like old bands now. But not DM. RIP Fletch.

The best FM I can think of for only pure sneaking is the T2 FM Midday Escape. (If you don't have Thief 2, you can watch a video of it.) You just have to escape a town with guards every 20 feet or so. I thought it was great. It pared the whole game down to the most bare essentials. I'd like to see more FMs like that in different settings. This was a contest FM too. Because the player weaves in and out, it's actually all laid out in a pretty small space. You don't need much for this kind of gameplay, and I think someone could make the core of the whole thing within 2 weeks. It's a good idea for a first FM because it won't take long to make if you keep it small and tight like this one.

I don't even really remember, since I didn't hear it in its own time. It just has that kind of wistful sound that brings you to a place.

I'm listening to this while I'm opening up this thread, so I guess I may as well as post it here. It's nostalgia incarnate.

Edit: I wrote a lot trying to speculate about what your root problem was. I think I've boiled it down to the solution that's just written at the bottom in Edit3, if you want to cut to the chase. --- Replacing a spawnarg does the same thing as changing the inheritance. Okay, to literally answer your question, you could make a duplicate of the class entity from which it's inheriting "snd_closed", and then delete or replace that "snd_closed" with "nosound", "0", or "-", then have the inheritance call that modified duplicate version. But then it's just going to cut off again after snd_move ends like you just said you don't want. So that doesn't really solve your problem. So don't do that. It appears that the problem isn't snd_closed per se. It's that you don't have a transition sound from snd_move to silence. What I think you should do is use a sound editor like Audacity, take the end of the snd_move file, and then make a new & clean cut off sound at the end, like a quick fade off or play with the manipulations until it sounds like a drawer stopping would actually sound. Be sure to crop it so your fade off sound seamlessly fits the end of the snd_move. Then package your new sound in the sound folder for your mission and make a new sound shader for it, and then fill "snd_close" with the address to that sound. Read the wiki page on custom sounds for the details. Edit: Unless I don't understand your situation. ------ Edit2: It sounds like a timing issue, like snd_close is happening (and cutting off snd_move) before you want it to. In fact, you don't want snd_close at all. Is that right? Okay, here's the issue. The way the system is designed is to allow for closing sounds of any arbitrary length. So it plays snd_move as long as its moving, sometimes long, sometimes short, then snd_close plays at the moment it's finished. So you'd want to always break up your sound into two parts, one for the "still moving part" that can play on repeat for any length of time, and one for the bang of the closed part that plays only at the end it, that would fit just as well if snd_move only played 1/2 way through or if it played 3 times. So then you always get a seamless move and close sequence for any arbitrary duration from half a second to 5 seconds or whatever. Would that fix your issue? It kind of looks like you want a combined move & closed part in one sound file. But the system is not really designed for that. It's designed to play while_moving -> snd_move, at_end -> snd_closed in sequence, so you make your sounds fit that template. If you want to change that template itself, so it only plays snd_move to its end every time no matter what, now (I think) you're talking sourcecode changes, which is not something you can just fix for your FM. (But I'm not 100% sure about that. There may be a way to do that, but I don't know about it.) ------ Edit3: Oh, well if it's that last part that you want, then there's another really simple thing you can do, which is completely cut out the snd_move and snd_close altogether, use "nosound" for both, but when somebody frobs the drawer, have it like a button that calls a speaker attached to the drawer that just plays your close sound as a one-shot independent sound. It will get rid of your cut-off problem. But the catch is, you'll need to set up a script or trigger system so it only plays every other time (when closing, not when opening; unless you want it when it's opening too, in which case just trigger it every time).

Right. I was talking off the cuff and should probably have said something like "at least" 2 scripts (edit: I almost edited my last post to add "at least" too; but then I guess I forgot to) or 2 relevant to the discussion at hand. I think there probably are other algorithms--I haven't looked at it in such a very long time--but they didn't occur to me. I remember the rat one of course because if you spend any time with DR, when you run a map after changing the geometry without dmapping it, you'll I think always get an error that the rat pathfinding is broken. So it's easy to recall

Looks cool. I always thought DR was a great editor to build with. I mean I was originally coming from Dromed, which is a nightmare to build in in every way. So I was never sure if I liked DR just because it was so much better than that (a low bar) or if it was legit an objectively good editor. But then I see other people from other backgrounds liking it, and that lets me know it's not just me.

There are actually two pathfinding scripts, one for human-sized AI and one for rats. So rat sized AI are okay.

T2X did that trick I think. It's a bit non-diegetic for my taste, although people have different opinions on it. (I wouldn't like it if there were only a few keys, but when there are more than 6 or so it starts sounding better.) I think it's another good example of an alt mechanic people should be able to add in themselves. Someone may have done it somewhere already as a mod, if you search the forum for it, because I know we've talked about it before. You can at least press "k" to cycle through keys very quickly, click, click, click...

I think the design is established now for the core game just as a matter of legacy. But I think it would be a good idea to make ones with the other design and make them available for individual FMs to use if a mapper wants. Any asset can be changed for an FM, so the answer to your first question is yes. I say go ahead and make them and let's see how they look in game. We're an open source game. Make what you want to see. That's always been the TDM way!

The editor is a tool in the service of a mapper getting their vision into the map. I think having brushes more accurately reflecting their final state, or what's most useful for the mapper to have it reflected as, can be fairly seen as contributing to that task. At the end of the day, mapping has as much to do with the attention and motivation of the mapper than the technical aspects by themselves. And the benchmark is what mappers find useful. I'd think of it as in the neighborhood of grouping; it's a mapper added tweak for mapping purposes. So I think it's a worthwhile feature to have. That said, it'd call for a feature request, and I don't know how high the relative priority would be for it, which is another issue.