demagogue

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

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.

Nice to see this limit go so that the size of an FM is defined by an author's ambition and not some technical limitation.

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.

You know you can change their team in the .map file if you really have your heart set on it.... This is one of those cases where a little DIY tweaking can be fun (just for your own personal local version).

Not bad, about a mission every 1~1.5 months for 11 years straight. As time goes on, we get more very ambitious ones too.

Which is to say, even in "retirement" greebo (who codes DR) is still one of our most prolific workhorses.

Cobalt blue, uranium green, and amber glassware sets would be really cool to see. I think Victorian style glassware might fit our world.

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.

I bet you could still make a 1- or 2-room FM in 30 minutes. But anyway alright, we can consider these threads as your creative contributions then.

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...

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.

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.

Thanks, it sounds good, and I didn't notice any broken locations. If anyone needs it from me, I'm fine with this being uploaded on the official mirrors as the official release version as it fixes the efx to be basically as originally intended (if I had been able to hear efx when I first set it up).

DoomScript is weird to begin with (to me, an amateur at coding) because it's using C++ forms (made for compiling) as a script language (running real time on an interpreter). I don't mind too much because I basically learned C++ just by learning to code for TDM anyway.

@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!

@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.

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.

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.

I'm looking forward to this too! I think you've got a good set of panelists from this thread.

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.

I remember those states in the sourcecode but wouldn't be able to remember how to get them from a script in-game. I just wanted to post to make a side rant (sorry)... It's an old issue that all or most actions like frobbing pass the player object and not the frobbed object, when obviously the key piece of info is the thing being frobbed not that the player is frobbing it (since unless/until we get multiplayer, it's always going to be the player1). Tels actually fixed it, but I think because it would break one puzzle in one FM, we didn't go with it... So now we have to make a new script for literally every object we could frob. Imagine 100 scripts when you could just have one with one conditional up front checking the passed object. And then around the same time a lot of FMs needed to be re-released anyway because of 2.0. Now I just wish we had Tel's fix.

Cool. Just so I understand that, does that mean you can have one big snow emitter across the level, and put in some buildings, and the particles will not pass through the roof so it snows inside? If it's that, that'll be really handy!

Somewhere there's a good tutorial on visportal placement, which had top-down drawings of examples. You don't want long lines of sight where where you can ever look through three visportals in a row, or at least not until you right next to the first, and at least when we're talking about open outside areas with lots of triangles. One way to do that is make hubs where the streets/hallways go off in T-like or Y-like intersections, where each opening is about 60 degrees offset. And then you can make the entrances have a quick horizontal displacement like a Z-shape, and you can put a second visportal at the other side of that, so it's unlikely the two ends will be in a line of sight, but definitely not from looking through a third visportal. Tricks like that. I've been looking into doing that for forest like areas, which I think we have some good FM examples of. I think once you get an idea of the basic principle, don't allow lines of sight through more than 2 visportals, you can naturally start to plan areas around the idea.

Isn't there an option in the settings to make the blackjacking more forgiving? I don't have that much trouble with it since in the end it's just muscle memory, or the eye-hand coordination analog of that.