[Idea: Electricity Arrows]

You can use them in T2X if you want to see how they play.

[The Dark Mod Mission Stats for 2020]

Well, 4 or 5 photos per room, or corner of a room, or piece of furniture, or whatever thing you're building right at that moment, or basically what you have open on the side of the screen at a time while you have the editor running (i.e., laying down the concrete stage), out of a collection of 100s. In the inspiration (laying down the fertilizer) stage, you should definitely collect as many reference photos as you can find for each scene or object you have.

[The Dark Mod Mission Stats for 2020]

Yes it's often a good idea to line up like 4 or 5 inspiration photos and basically copy the ideas from different parts of each one.

The other thing that helped me with my FM was making each room part of the story ... like "this family is rich, and the father is obsessive, so he should have x, y, and z furniture laid out in this particular style, and he'd hoard things like this.... He'd be reading through a bunch of books researching, so he'd have his chair like this, and all these books laid around it like this, with a pen and lots of notes strewn around them like this..." Or, this is where the meeting or a murder happened that was sort of cleaned up, but not so well, so there should be these things laid out that hint to that history...

When you think about designing rooms as part of visual story telling, then that can give you a lot of ideas. Even if it's not explicitly made clear to the player, just thinking about designing areas like that will make them visually more interesting. They may not know exactly who these people are or what happened here, but they'll get a sense that they're somebody, and something interesting happened here.

Speaking of a image like that, I've been noticing that there are a ton of 3D architectural models, and different knickknacks, little decorative things, that people are releasing for free at different places like on cgtrader, turbosquid, etc., especially a lot if it's for non-commercial purposes. Like if you filter objects on cgtrader to "free" at 20 a page, there's something like 7000 pages which is like, what, 140,000 free models.... And a lot of them are entire rooms (I mean "1 free object" can be an entire living room-bed room set) which contain 20 or 50 objects by themselves, any one object of which you can also use. You have to check the license for using them, but when they're free, then the license isn't usually an issue, just simple things like giving credit, which we should always do anyway. There's nothing really stopping us from dropping them into our FMs.

[Chris-Chan Controversy Discussion Thread]

Would it kill you to post about normal things that normal people are into once in a while, like football games, graphics cards, the latest trends in movies and music, or funny things that cats do?

[NoClip Thief Retrospective Documentary]

NoClip has put out a fantastic retrospective of the Thief games that interviews a lot of the creators on how the game was designed.
 

Edit: New things I learned (or had forgotten & learned again)...

- The whole magic system was geared around the 4 elements, which they later played down as such, but they also made up the original arrows, air/gas, water, earth/moss, fire... But noise & rope arrows were too useful to leave out.

- A major design idea was "active stealth", one idea of which was creating distractions and negotiating "safe spaces", and a major inspiration was Ken Levine's experience with sub sims, where you can release noise makers and use thermal layers to slip past, both of which had natural extensions in Thief gameplay.

- The other game LGS was making right at the same time as TDP was a Golf game. For that game, they had to fill a lot of dead space with commentator patter, which fed directly into using guard patter to fill time since the player was avoiding most things.

- I also respected Randy's postmortem of TDS. It was pretty clear he was just as crushed by the design flaws that the rest of the community was (the body awareness supreme backfire, the heartbreaking necessity to break up the levels to meet the XBox memory limits, the render woes & being stuck with a wonky engine, etc.), and I think he did a good job of explained how and why they happened. More or less, he made design decisions before getting all the relevant information that affected what they could do, and some decisions (like body awareness) just didn't work in practice like they may have looked on paper. I can't be too upset. Some good levels and moments still came out of that game, I still love Randy's levels & design thinking (generally), I can understand and very much sympathize with his position and (ultimately mistaken) thinking and intuitions, which I might well have gone along with myself if I were a team member, and above all ... if TDS hadn't been what it was, we probably wouldn't have Darkmod now, and I'm really, really happy we have Darkmod.

[The Dark Mod Mission Stats for 2020]

People had already started making missions in 2009 after the demos came out but couldn't finish them until the game was complete, and it was just the first year, so I think a lot of people had a lot of ideas they had been building up and could finally work on. We did have a good number of contests that first year too, I think.

This is an empirical question though. If one really wanted to know, they could actually look at the 2010 FMs one by one and think about why they came out that year but not others like it in later years.

[Ghosting the Dark Mod]

Incidentally, I tried design the Stealth Score & Alert stats (their presentation, I mean) to be most useful for ghosters. So the thing is a lot of level 1 alerts are literally impossible to avoid (it's when a guard mumbles about a sound, but they don't know anything is there yet & they keep walking on as normal), and they wouldn't count under the classic Ghosting rules. So I purposefully didn't count them towards the Stealth Score. So the idea is, if you get a zero stealth score, then you've ghosted under the traditional rules.

The reason to still add the alerts is that, if the FM actually allows it, you could try to even avoid level 1 alerts, and the stats page would let you know if you were successful.

So to summarize, if you get a zero Stealth Score, you've ghosted under the traditional rules.

If you get zero alerts period, then you've hardcore ghosted under rules even stricter than the traditional rules.

And of course the number of saves and loads check if you've Ironman'd it.

If anything is still missing, it's tracking if you used any tools or potions. If you don't, then that's part of the hardcore ghost rules. (And if you do, then that's chemical ghosting iirc.) There's not really room to add that, but perhaps, we could add a simple "P" or "T", or maybe "No Potions" and "No Tools", after the word "Alert" to signify that have not used Potions or Tools. (It's also something that could go on Page 2 of the stats screen.) There hasn't really been demand for it because ghosters are good at giving their own self reports, but it's something we might do to give them that signifier for the record.

[Ghosting the Dark Mod]

6 hours ago, duzenko said:

I would suggest breaking the damage stats into two lines

 

The issue is there aren't lines to spare.

The first thing we could do is get rid of the "and", and that might be enough for most all cases.

[Are aspiring Doom 3 mappers welcome here?]

We're pretty easy going, so I don't think there will be any problem.

Note that the Dark Mod engine has changed quite a bit from the Doom3 engine. Like if you looked at the source code, it's about quadruple the size of the Doom3 sourcecode. So that means some of the questions you ask might have different answers for Dark Mod than there would be for vanilla Doom3. Well, some core engine things like scripting, visportals, rendering errors, and the like I think may be similar enough. But other things like AI or any system unique to TDM will be completely different.

So you might have to take that into account. But it still might be better for you to ask your question here than anywhere, I suppose.

[Ghosting the Dark Mod]

I think it'd be easy to do, although it's mixing categories a bit.

Looking at that list, I'm always reminded that I picked the word "suspicious" (an adjective) instead of "suspicions" (a noun), when the other two elements are nouns (searches & sightings). I think New Horizon was the one that recommended that the word "suspicions" would fit better, but we never did get around to changing it. But I have to admit, it is more consistent to the form, so it's still worth changing.

["Grayman Avatar" painting (done)]

I wouldn't use that iStock image. It literally comes from an image farm. Their entire business model is to trick people into infringements, find them, and ask people to pay for it. But I think nobody here was ever arguing that we should.

I think Zerg is right in that last post. Someone can model the image in DR and take a screenshot and either paint from it or put a filter on it. It'd be fitting even aside from the copyright issue.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

On 6/22/2021 at 9:36 PM, AluminumHaste said:

So when you say, why does he not follow me onto those bridges, or down to the cave floor? It's because it's not there for him.
 

I know this was already solved, but for the record the standard solution to this, the standard practice period, is that you need to always put down invisible clip brush (with the right material to get the step-sounds correct) for all non-brush walkable surfaces, bridges, uneven patch-made floors in caves and natural terrain, even uneven brush work if it's disjointed enough, etc.

Just get into the habit of laying down clip brushes for anything like that every time, then AI will always be able to traverse it.

[Fan Mission: Patently Dangerous (2009/10/31)]

The green smocked one is the female pagan. She was one of the bodies in the warehouse and one of those rough draft characters that I don't think made it into the release version. Evidently one of the last few updates (or possibly nbohr's EAX fix, which seems odd, but it's in the cards) changed or deleted some property that made her fall through the floor onto that roof and lose her head, which, if you know how AI models work is the kind of thing you might expect. There's already a good number of comments on it and anyone can see it's pretty immersion breaking. So I suppose it calls for an updated version to fix it.

[Wherein thebigh sets himself a 24 hour building challenge]

We used to have contests more often.

They're great because they kind of naturally temper your ambitions. You have a limited time like 1 or 3 months. A few for Dromed had build-time limits (because the Dark Engine actually tracks the build time; I don't recall DR doing that though), and it'd be like 24 or 72 hours or the like, which of course you can spread out over a week or few weeks. Often there's a size limit, and it's sometimes really small. There's usually a theme so you have something to spark an idea. And the fact it's a competition can add a little motivation, for people that are competitive by nature anyway.

The thing is: You don't even need a contest to set yourself those kinds of limitations. And the other thing is that contests missions are a kind of genre in themselves, and we could always use more of them. A lot of the most memorable FMs I've ever played were contest FMs.

[We have lost a member of the TDM development team]

Maybe we have a vote and try to decide democratically? Unless he expressed his wishes at some point somewhere.

If they're quite close to being finished, then it makes sense to have a community group everyone is comfortable with finish them off for release, with the goal of being as true & respectful to his vision as possible, so that his final work can see the light of day. And also that the situation is explained in the readme and release threads, so people will understand why they got special treatment. But it's an exceptional case so people may have different opinions about it, and it's important to be respectful whatever is decided.

[The Late 80s through Late 90s/Early 2000's: Best Time for Culture in Recent History?]

My eye muscles never worked for this, so I always had to do it the crosseyed route (which as you all probably know reverses the effect, innies become outies and vice versa).

I remember going through a whole book of them over like an hour or whatever, and after I'd finished, I realized my eyes just stayed crossed and I couldn't flex them back straight; even after applying some effort to it, they'd just push back crossed. It  stayed like that for at least a good minute or two, and I recall a few moments panicking and thinking, "Well shit. I guess this is it. They're stuck like this for good now."

Fortunately they did finally ease their way back into place, and I've made sure to practice moderation in my eyecrossing antics ever since.

[We have lost a member of the TDM development team]

This is a sad day for our community. He was a great inspiration for me and he'll definitely be missed.

I got to work with him a little when I was helping out with some parts of the code. I really valued our discussions, and I actually learned a lot about coding from him. I think I learned even more about design from him. He was one of those rare kinds of people that has a lot of technical know-how but is also really creative & has a great artistic and design sensibility and knows how to tell a good story.

I was somehow thinking he would be able to rejoin us soon, but now I just think that we were very fortunate to have had him as part of our community for as long as we did. Thank you for everything & clear skies, grayman.

[ATTN ALL, question about Dark Radiant & professional use]

On 5/7/2021 at 4:57 PM, OrbWeaver said:

What you could do is use the Dark Mod GPL code as your game engine, then release a commercial game using 100% original assets that you create yourselves, and require people to pay for the game which includes your assets (while they could still download the engine source code under the terms of the GPL).

I suppose I don't need to belabor this anymore, but this is the core answer for this thread. But I did want to say, there are actually good reasons to use our engine beyond the things you already mentioned. It's right at that level (2005 base) where an individual or small team could get traction on developing it. But even aside from that, not to pat ourselves on the back too hard, but IMO our engine is pretty awesome and would be a great base for a lot of kinds of games, especially of the immersive sim / semi-open world type and complex AI. It has a lot of pretty sophisticated systems, advanced AI alert states, the S&R simulation system, the location system, the systems for objectives, readables, scripting, soft shadows, AO & the like....

People could argue that the Unity or Unreal engines are better for general purpose, and it's true they do have big communities with lots of modules that do lots of things, but working with our engine in DR is also really pleasant to build with. And if your game is of a certain type (the immersive sim type), I think you've got a headstart with our systems than starting from scratch with those other engines. Also it's not like you'd be alone. You could probably ask questions in this forum too, since many of us know this engine really well by now and might help answer some questions. (That said, our community doesn't mix well with commercialization, so probably not good to mix us too much into the project, but you know, within reason.)

I've always thought it'd be a good base for aspiring devs to use for all sorts of games. So I'd actually be excited to see what someone could do with it. Not, of course, just a blatant copy of our game, but if someone could stretch the legs of our engine, I think it could be a good base for some really cool and original games.

Anyway, you can take that for encouragement. Good luck for whatever you decide to do anyway.

[ATTN ALL, question about Dark Radiant & professional use]

To clarify, you can sell code under a GPL license, but the license requires you to release all of the sourcecode in a form people can compile it, and it retains the license. So practically you can't stop people from just taking the sourcecode, possibly changing some things, compiling it, and independently releasing it for free. Also, outlets like Steam really don't like GPL licensed code because it puts them at risk. And they already mentioned that all of the game assets are strictly non-commercial. So idTech4 derived things aren't the best platform for a commercial game.

That's separate from what our team thinks. I don't think you'll get much objection from us for trying. The whole point of GPL is to give people the most freedom to do what they want with the code under it without past devs standing in their way. Even that said, it probably wouldn't go over well if you just blatantly copied massive chunks of the game straight. One guy that had been on the team was doing something like that for a commercial project and got some pushback and grumbles. But that would have been different if he had been an outsider doing a completely different project with a very different look and feel and they just needed the base to build from. That would be more respected. But, again, that's aside from the issues above.

[Any plans to get the game on Steam ?]

In principle it'd be great. I think at the root of it ... well the Steam people themselves really don't like GPL-based code, because they worry about integrated Steam-related code (GPL3 would require that to be released and covered by itself); so to begin with they weren't very welcoming and IIRC said something like it's rare that we ever clear any game under GPL3 (but technically not impossible; I think there were like a handful of games that have done it). The accounting for all of our IP is also a pain, and that's before you even get to the authorship issue.

Those are still issues that might be resolved possibly, but even if they could be, I think the root of the issue is more simple ... Going on Steam would require us to incorporate in some form and take on some formalization and to boil it down, that's not really our ethos ... because while we have a Darkmod Team, Darkmod doesn't belong to any set of people. It belongs to the community; it belongs to anyone contributing to it in any way. It's your game too. That and I don't think anybody on the team wants to be filing tax forms and yearly reports and claiming the mantle of legally speaking for the game for basically their hobby.

I don't know. That's been my take, but I've always recognized different people have different takes & I respect that. There's a lot to be said in favor of it going on Steam too. I don't want to dismiss it. Anymore, people really distrust downloading anything from a source they don't know anything about. There's multiple balls in the air one has to juggle, and this is how they seem to be aligned right now.

[So, what are you working on right now?]

That looks pretty respectable actually. It's a challenge for everybody anyway.

For the border work, I was speaking about the facade of the barn. It's a big wall of a brush (/set of brushes) with one unbroken texture for the bulk of the surface, and I tend to think big stretches of an unbroken single texture are like dead space when they get too big. Breaking it up with borders or windows or anything that's contrasting makes the space come alive. It's a minor observation just IMO though.

[Things that could be improved]

They would do that if their teams were set (or able to be set) to be mutually hostile.

Long story short--if that's the issue--that's not really a problem the code base, but a problem with the mapper botching something in the map design. It's also technically possible that they did it intentionally and you just don't agree that it made sense, which I think can happen and wouldn't really be technically a "mistake", just a strong dissenting opinion. It's hard to know for certain without knowing which example you're referring to though.

Edit: I think one of the team settings was neutral unless attacked, and it could happen that a guard accidentally hits another one, switching them to a hostile setting. If it's that, then it means the author probably didn't foresee that happening and/or didn't know that would happen if it did. It's good for mappers to understand team relations and how things like that might happen so they can plan against it at least, and the team could make that potential issue more well known. That's not a matter of changing the code (since it's still "properly working as intended") so much as better communicating how it works to avoid unintentional & unexpected problems like this.

I can't even remember all the details off hand thinking about it now to know if this is a real possibility though, or if I'm just making it up and something else was happening.

[So, what are you working on right now?]

Cool scene.

My constructive comment is that all walls should basically always have border work & interlacing planks to break up the space. It should be drilled in by habit, any time that you make a wall you make it with that. And then they should be combined into a func stat since they aren't separating geometry.

There are some tricks to hide the path/dirt seam. It's not a big deal to have it, but I like to lay down an n-shaped patch over the seam so it looks like a mound of dirt or rocks over the seam. Another trick is to glue a bunch of rocks together in long rows, and you only need a few that you can lay down over the seam or that you can quickly alter to follow the curve. Another way is to use a prefab surface with an alpha blend texture, but I never got into that method, basically because you're stuck with the pre-drawn curves (I think) instead of the arbitrary curves you want.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

Does it work if you have a small layer of air between the glass and the water?

[2016+ Games news]

I've been playing Control recently, and it definitely has System Shock 2 in its DNA. It has the most immsim vibes I've had playing a game since I guess Prey. And it looks great. It's kind of light on the sim part, but it has very diverse environments, and the action varies by that, so that keeps the action pretty fresh. The story is also weird & interesting. Fun game.