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demagogue

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Posts posted by demagogue

  1. 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.

    • Like 1
  2. 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.

  3. 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.

    • Like 1
  4. 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.

  5. I can only hope with Vampire Bloodlines apparently getting canned that Paradox turns to one of my most anticipated games since forever, Victoria 3. (Yes, I understand VB2 was actually being made by another studio; but I think it's still part of the equation in terms of financing, and I'm just speaking rhetorically off the cuff anyway.)

    Vicky 2 came out in 2010, and the series has been noticeably skipped over as Paradox has made sequels to other games that came out after that one like Crusader Kings & Magicka. But asking them about when Vicky 3 is coming out has been a running joke for years now.

    It's probably my favorite game in the entire genre, but I can understand that it's a detail-oriented game in a period most people don't really get, and that's why they haven't come back to it. But they have said they'll get to it eventually.

    • Like 1
  6. My first advice is, it might be good to open up another FM and see how it set up a custom speaker and double check every element with the tutorial in case you misinterpreted something. It could be something like a typo in a spawnarg in the speaker, or in the soundshader, or not have the shader in the right folder, or it not referring to the proper folder where the sound file is, etc.

    Worst case, if you still can't figure it out, then you can just flat out copy and paste a custom speaker & all the relevant stuff from another FM into your map and change it from there.

  7. I can't recall a zoo-themed FM in Thief or TDM off hand, so it'd be original fare that's for sure. Animating quadrapeds is a serious challenge. But it would be admittedly amazing if someone pulled it off. You know you could use some of your apparently boundless imagination & creative energy to actually make an FM one of these days... ;)

  8. Since Arkane already made a spiritual successor to Thief (Dishonored) and System Shock (Prey), they should be due for one for Deus Ex to complete the gaming golden age's Gaming Trinity hat trick.

    Recently I've been playing Hades, among some other games. It's slick. Cool kind of aesthectic, quick gameplay loop for each room (what was sorely lacking in, e.g, Void Bastards trying the same model). Story is cool. The tone is a bit overbearing, but it's easy to get caught up in the gameplay and trying to make it a few more rooms in each round. I don't think it's an all time masterpiece, but I think it's a great game, one of the best of 2020.

    • Like 1
  9. They're probably fishing for support, so want to keep it up as long as they think there's an offside chance. The fiasco with Underworld Ascendant unfortunately probably did compound their difficulties.

    My general view is there's a time and a place for a certain game with a certain team to come together with a certain design philosophy where it all comes together and a great game emerges. And if it doesn't have that alignment of pieces, then the gates to development hell are always open and never far away.

    • Like 2
  10. @Dragofer That's a great public service you're doing! I was always meaning to make a scripting tutorial, but I just managed to make a simple page because it's practically a mini-course in coding by itself. So I recognize how much work goes into it, and what you've made so far is great.

    I think it will get more mappers to get into scripting, as I think a lot stay away not because they couldn't get it, but just because the step-by-step instructions weren't there. Then that means we'll have better FMs, which is a win for everybody. Thanks!

  11. @Kin, the subtract tool is bad because it very often leads to shattering a brush into countless triangle shards, which is almost always going to be bad news no matter how the engine is optimized. It definitely (okay, probably) shouldn't be used if the surface or wall is separating leafs, i.e., standing between two visportal-separated areas, and it's best used, if at all, basically in contained places where you'd feel okay putting a 10,000 triangle model or the like.

    Or you just do it in a way that doesn't make so many small triangles; but if you could do that, then you can probably do that in other ways too. To wit: the thing is, most of the things you could do with the subtract tool you could also do with the cut tool, and it doesn't take even that much longer to use the cut tool for much less potential for headaches later on.

    But they kept the subtract tool in because sometimes it really is handy, like if you wanted to make a star-shaped hole in a pillar, there's not much better way to do it. That kind of thing.

    -------

    The impulse discussion reminded me of a Halloween themed FM I was working on once where the player started off inside a closed coffin, along with a lantern and pesky rat that's scurrying around inside there with you; and the first part of it was finding a way to escape. Anyway, to make it believable, I had the player crouched in a false bottom with the head exactly placed at the head of a headless player model, so you're looking across at your body. So I had the game start with a crouch impulse. It kind of worked, but IIRC something was always a little off so I never did finish it off. I still think it was a cool idea though. Maybe I'll get back to it someday.

  12. This whole situation is looking like No Man's Sky, which has probably been noticed a lot before. Overhyped, pushed to release too early, massive backlash, but people can still see some of its potential, and in a year or two or three they'll probably come out with enough patches, or some great overhaul patch, to make it the game it was meant to be, not necessarily perfect, but as good as Witcher III for better & worse. It apparently already looks great (for the people that have the rig for it) anyway.

    But anyway, this is the reason I'll hold off on buying this until those future patches, if the reviews have turned around. I also expect it'll be greatly discounted by then, again like the last No Man's Sky release that got a lot of buzz for making it into a good game.

    • Like 1
  13. Yes you can put looping on the soundshader to have it loop, omni makes it sound from anywhere so you don't have to literally have it near the player, and some other spawnarg makes it environmental (coming from the direction of its source, e.g., if you wanted distant thunder), but I think you're not doing that here. And just by triggering a speaker, e.g., from a trigger brush, button, or activating it from inside a script, you turn it on and off, so no need to spawn it in.

    Also note that I added a feature to the location sound system where you can override an ambient and trigger a sound directly, and that's already set up to be looping, omni, and all you have to do is put in the soundshader name on the entity. I made it for things like "action music" when a guard was alerted or music that plays when some other state is entered (like reading, or frobbing a thing, etc.) or some special zing music that triggers for story or gameplay reasons. So you can use that system too if you read up on it in the location system wiki entry, down a ways in the sound part.

    The speaker route is probably simpler though if what you want to do is simple. Well they're just different tools that can do similar jobs, and you pick the one that does your job best or that you have a preference for.

  14. 12 minutes ago, Destined said:

    The object being frobbed can be read out with $player1.getFrobbed(). If you use this instead of an entity name, this can also be used in more general scripts.

    That would be do the trick if that's how it works. All the objects call one script, then you get the frobbed object from that & put a conditional up front that routes the script based on what object was frobbed that called the script.

    I mean if it gets the very object the player frobbed that called that script, as opposed to the last object the player frobbed or the object they happen to be frobbing right at that moment, which may well be a different object. That's what I'd want to double check.

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