demagogue

So a priority rule? Makes sense to me to some extent. The thing is when you're texturing a lot of surfaces with the same texture at the same time, some brushes you may want to texture the whole brush (select) and some you want to texture only one surface. How about that situation? (...if I understand your proposal and what DR is doing correctly.) I don't remember this being a problem for me because I instinctively clear all selections in situations like this.

The gameplay appeal of restricted saves is the same type of appeal of permadeath in rogue-likes. The stakes are ramped up much higher between save rooms, and you just feel the flow of a game differently when the stakes are high.... There's a much bigger adrenaline rush taking on a challenge, and a much bigger wave of relief when you pass a part. And if you want to think about it from the other direction, compared to permadeath, save rooms are pretty forgiving. You don't have to start completely over. Where it looks like there is general agreement is that there's definite player types. Some players get off on high stakes & big adrenaline rushes, and restricted saves gives them that. Other people get off on the pure flow of making steady and sure progress, and restricted saves are like a punch to the gut because it takes away the one thing of value they get out of a game, the progress they've already achieved and now are asked to do again. And I think a lot of people can be in one or another state depending on their mood. It's really easy to see how different types like that are going to have polar opposite feelings about this mechanic. It's not really rocket science, and it's kind of funny to even "argue" about it, when it's a pretty transparent matter of taste.

I like this kind of system occasionally. I think the beauty of the FM system is some system-level things can be different across FMs, so you get a different experience, and I think as with most things, the best judge is the mapper for their own map (granting that it needs to be beta-tested to make sure it works as intended). I don't like design by committee, I mean after the basics are settled. I like design by an author with a specific vision, where all the parts fit their vision. Better it having some things I don't like but part of a strong unified vision than a lot of things I like but thrown together wishy-washy. So all that said, generally I like open saving and just personally committing to dealing with the consequences of my actions and only having the save game there for if I die, or there's such insane guard frenzy after 5 minutes it breaks the game. But save restrictions do make a different experience that I can appreciate when it happens. I'm on board that it should be only one difficulty level that isn't different from "Normal' though. I think it'd be interesting for there to be a general save restriction option anybody can turn on for any FM. But we already have the stat screen record how many times you've reloaded, so if you do Ironman it, it is registered. I always thought that was sufficient for people wanting to scratch that itch before some complicated system that literally shuts off your save button.

Yes, by "we" I meant with grayman. It was really a pleasure working with him on this. Well the tasks themselves got frustrating, but it was great working through them with him. I learned a lot about coding from him, and he did so much for us under the hood. Another reason he's really missed. I believe the original code might have been set up by Greebo, then iirc Fidcal did the first version (when the score was subtractive, so almost everybody got "0" almost every time), then I edited that to make it additive, then grayman fixed up a lot of the bugs like the cascades, and I just chat with him about how a few things might best be done. It's gone through a lot of hands. But grayman could have probably followed what it does best. The way you're describing it now sounds like it's not a problem with the score per se (I don't think it's been changed in a while anyway) but the way the alert system itself works though. But I don't really know offhand what it could be.

Wow, this is a lot more ambitious than a little contest mission. Congratulations on releasing a new classic. It looks & plays great!

Yes, level 1 alerts don't count to the score.* If other people are being alerted by his barks, I don't know how attribution works. But I believe it's not going to be counted to the score even if it's attributed because we got rid of alert cascades, where 1 alert can cascade into stealth scores that go into the 100s. I haven't looked into the details recently, but if it turns out to be a trade off between these two bugs, stealth scores where a tiny alert cascades the score into the 100s vs. transmitted alerts triggered by a tiny alert only counting that tiny alert (and in the case of an level-1 alert, not counting at all), I think I still think we're on the right side of that dilemma with stopping the cascade. That's just my initial guess that that's what's happening, though. --- Re: your last question... At the bottom of the stat screen should be a down arrow. When you click it, it takes you to a new screen that shows you the exact break down of the Stealth Score. There are 5 alert levels. The first two are "suspicion", the first of which is not counted to the score (but is counted in the "Suspicions" count). So only 2nd level suspicions are counted to the score (x1). The next two are "search" (x2 and x3 I think). And the last one is a sighting (x5 I think it was?). I don't know what you mean by "the fifth number" because I don't have a screenshot of the stat screen on-hand and don't feel like playing a whole mission to completion to get one. If you post one and circle the number that you mean then I can let you know more specifically, if what I said doesn't already answer your question. * Footnote on that: A substantial number of FMs have the player putting AI on level 1 alerts even when they just spawn! Or in places it's impossible to pass without a level-1 alert. So there's a good case to drop it, at least from the stealth score, because it's ridiculously sensitive. And we still do count it in the Alert list! So it's not like you're completely "getting away with it". But we thought the score should be as fair-play as we could make it.

If I recall this issue correctly, the alert has to be attributable to the player. Of course if a separate AI puts a guard on alert, that shouldn't add to the player's score. If there's a weapon on the ground or a door open / torch unlit (with the "door shouldn't be open" / "torch should be lit" boxes checked), the guard will go on alert, but nothing is attributable to the player yet (I think), since anything can cause those events. If they find a noise arrow, then it gets more debatable as it still follows the general unattributable weapon rule, but as a game, only the player is using noise arrows. (That may have been updated though.) So the issue here may be that it's a touch stim, not a sight or hearing stim. That's what I'd look into. Does the touch stim creating an alert carry an "attributable to player" property which is properly being registered by the part of the code that counts up the score? Or something like that. It could be a completely different issue, but it sounds like something to do with the touch stim.

Yeah, good idea ... for a robot.

I'm late to the party, but that volumetric lighting looks really cool! I can imagine it adding a lot of atmosphere to levels in a lot of different ways. Good work, team!

I don't feel like reading that thread, but I think a mapper might be able to hack this on their own. The idea that comes to me is spawning in a series of simple horizontal walkable objects from destination to origin, and then just have it render as a rope-looking object. It'd probably be much easier done as a pre-set-up system (like a prearranged place where it spawns) than an open system you can do anywhere, since there are so many variables involved you'd have to control for in the latter. But never say never.

I missed it by literally 4 minutes.

That was exactly my reaction. Looks like we're in a steady state since 2016. Not a bad place to be if we can expect a new FM on a semi-regular basis.

This is a great mission so far, maybe an hour in. It's been too long since I've played some FMs, and this is a great one to return to the fold for. Really classic, gives me the old Thief feeling, & I've already had some crazy & fun moments with it. I got a laugh out of one moment where I put guards on alert outside, made my way to the 2nd floor, and prayed the alert didn't make its way inside. And I thought I pulled it off after four guards or so happily whistled by, until one guard calmly walked outside, closed the door, then half a beat later he comes back in and all hell breaks loose. XD

There should be an underground necromancer movement patronized by some nobles that also serve as its leaders. In my version, necromancy knowledge is also attached to the Inventors as one of their secret ingredients, but they'd never admit to it or discuss it outside a very small circle at the top. I don't think that's the official line, but it's in the margin of wiggle room I think mappers have to play with them in their own FMs though.

Merry Christmas, all!

I've been getting a lot of assets for a project recently. A lot of it is free, but during the Black Friday sale I did grab a good number of paid ones. I like the massive & kitbash kind of sets (like the Kitbash 3D ones) that give you basically an entire ecosystem, where you can drop entire city blocks in whole, but you can also take the modular parts and do your own thing with them. And once you have some big pieces laid out, it's much easier to do detail work around that than trying to do detail work from the ground up. That's the main lesson from the "stepwise refinement" method that's always been my go-to ever since I read it in Dromed's first tutorial that came on the Thief2 CD. I recommend that method to everyone, BTW. The thing with paid assets though is sometimes you do get a dud, something that just doesn't look good except in the one precise context the seller made a screenshot of, or at a distance but not up close. Sometimes you don't know the value of an asset until you're actually playing with it in a map, especially if you're mapping kitbash style (mixing & matching modular pieces). So that's the risk of paid assets. But like I said, sometimes they're just so good & you get so much that it's worth it.

I made the no-kill objective in my FM optional on my hard difficulty. There's a bad guy (or two) in it that a lot of people would like to kill if given the chance, so who am I to say no? The whole ethos of the game is player freedom. But I did want to have a way to recognize being a good sneak. I also change up other people's FMs to my liking, well I wouldn't say all the time, but sometimes. But I've learned not to advertise it because sometimes the author can actually get a little upset for seeing their baby get messed with.* I personally think it's important to let players do what they want with their local copy. Messing with other people's maps is even one of the best ways to learn good map-making skills. But of course they definitely shouldn't be redistributed, like AH was saying. That part, honoring the author's final word on their own FM going out to the public, is still important too. ------ * Edit: Although the one case it happened most significantly was kind of a special case. Can I remember it? It was the FM Beauty Contest. I know because I submitted an entry; I was also the only person that voted for my entry. XD Anyway, it was the Clocktower by, uh, right ... Ottoj55. He put a portrait of his girlfriend in a key place at the final location, and I thought to replace it with a period appropriate image. XD And I guess the egregious part was letting other people that wanted to know how to do it how to do it. (I think someone else did that part though IIRC. But I did it independently myself too, and then watched the other person get chewed out for it.) I mean, it was nothing against her. It was just really anachronistic & jarring in its setting. But he was not happy that people would think to do that haha. I mean he won the contest & I came in dead last with only me voting for me, so he can't complain too much, I figure. That was like 16 years ago now. I still find it kind of funny. And IIRC it sparked a whole debate about the ethics of messing with FMs. I think it was okay because it was local, and giving instructions would be okay because it's just an extension of that. But I wouldn't dream of thinking it would be okay to distribute.

Oh right. I got it now. I guess I'm used to the Epic store which always updates its freebies by the local time. Now the issue is that it's on Ubisoft's launcher, which I never really open because I don't have many games on it. They could take a note from Epic on that; maybe that's part of what this is. Ubisoft is also the one that will literally kick me out of a game that I didn't want to play multiplayer anyway if my wifi connection cuts out for a second, which also left a bad taste about them. But you know free is free.

This must be region locked because it still costs its usual price for me, and I got a warning about my region when I entered the page. Well too bad, I guess.

Re: "...by Doom creator John Cormac." Eh, would he be any relation to Doom creator John Carmack? You made me have to dig out my old wiki username and password for that one.

In the campaign that I scripted, the main underground necromancer school in Bridgeport is the Anatomical Society, and the head of it is Crexis. In the campaign, you visit his mansion (he's also a noble), The House of Hidden Perception, and it's a kind of throwback to The Sword.

I was going to say a similar thing. You don't have to literally make new visportaled rooms though. Breaking up that space with furniture, walls and dividers, z-axis variations (mounds and ditches, steps, platforms, etc.), lighting variations (standing lamps, desk lamps, etc.) will go a long way to making some of that dead space come alive. Think about space in terms of creating variation, directing the player's eye, and telling a kind of story about the place, and generally the wider and more empty a space is, the deader it gets. The more you break it up the more alive & interesting the pieces become. And creating spots of light is especially important for gameplay because then the player starts thinking about how they'll navigate the room, and you've just made a big dead area into an interesting puzzle to figure out.

There are a few IP, legal & security issues I have to think about for what I want to do with it. But here's a tutorial about getting a G*ogle maps scene into Blender, and once you get it into Blender it's trivial to get it into UE5. The stuff I've been doing is more or less just like this. (Except the process also gives you the real world textures, which he didn't take in this video.) The few technical points I'd add is you should just do your own clip brushing & be close-up for places the player would be, and for the background you just leave the clipping off & keeping it lower res isn't so bad for really distant stuff. Also you want to break it up in Blender into increasingly large chunks going outwards, and it'll be a little more failsafe in the import, and I imagine it helps with the framerate, but I haven't tested it. Edit: Oh what the hell... Here is a quick demo without the bells and whistles yet. This is what you can do in literally 15 or 20 minutes once you know what you're doing. And it doesn't take much to imagine what you can do from here to make it even more lifelike... Well, you'd replace the trees with UE's foliage tool. Things like cranes & utility poles should get replaced with models. Throw some procedural traffic & pedestrians in. For the nearest buildings you'd want to rip them individually right over them to get the maximum resolution. You'd also want to focus on the city center where the resolution for every building is highest, etc.

I've been playing with this, as UE5 has already been released in early access. It's really cool. You can rip an entire city off of Go*gle maps, like a 10km x 10km chunk of terrain, get it into UE5, maybe throw in a little fog and light rain, some lit windows in the shaders, make the sea a realistic sea shader, then pick a really high building and model a posh apartment in the penthouse using all the free & amazing arc-vis assets out there, give it massive windows with rain streaking down, and take in the urban landscape. For someone that started building with dromed, which originally had like 1000 poly limit after which objects would just stop being rendered, it's literally awe inspiring to look over an entire city of 1000s to 10,000s of buildings or so, chugging however many millions of tris, and it still be fluid at 40 fps or whatever. You shouldn't take that too lightly. It really feels like were at a new stage in gaming. And the quick demo I made up like that is still only about 1.5 GB. The geometry you can rip off of Go*gle maps is already optimized so it's highest poly closest to the place you take it and falls off. Then you can add higher poly geometry to some distant places by hand. If you were smart about it, you could keep a game under 10 or 20 GB and still look pretty amazing.

Yeah "volume" was just the spawnarg name I picked since it's being handled by my own code, not Doom3's, and at the time I honestly didn't know what the "s_" stood for (I'm still not entirely sure; it's not "speaker" is it?) and I didn't want to use it incorrectly. Regarding "- change the volume to your liking in the copy's sound shader declaration.", in his post he says he want to make it louder. In that case, it's probably better to find the actual sound file itself, make a copy of that (either with a new name & soundshader, or maybe even with the same name and, packed in the pk4, it just replaces the original, same shader and all) and then boost the volume of that in something like Audacity, since if you do it through the soundshader it's Doom3 boosting the volume on the fly, which might clip or not sound as good as doing it through a proper sound editor.