demagogue

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.

If melee combat is our weakest point, I'll take it. It's functional and not obviously broken, and for our typical gameplay or plots, it does the job just fine. I mean it's not meant as a fighting game, and the most memorable fights are usually for story reasons or, e.g., if you're boxed in and have to fight your way out, where you remember the fact you fought the guy at all more than the mechanics of the actual fight. And on those grounds, what we have works well for the game. It's focused on a boiled-down big picture than memorizing little details.

Yes, the .pk4 is just a zip file with the assets already set up to drop into a mission and you get the bonus of seeing them in-game. It's not really meant as a mission at all. As for a separate one for each modeler, the idea I mentioned before on that is just to release successive asset pk4s for all of the asset sets that were either made, discovered, or anyway got packaged since the last set. So it'd be like Asset_Pack1, Asset_Pack2, etc., and each one could be like maybe a few 100MB. I didn't think it was good idea to break them up by author because they'd be so lopsided, some of them would be like 2GB and some like 30MB. So I thought it'd be good to package them as commensurable units, like I said some mix that adds up to 100 or 500MB or whatever, and maybe within those boundaries they could be thematic, like a time period or a particular style or, yes, still featuring an author if it works out that way. My original idea was to just have them in the in-game downloader, but I can see how that'd be trouble since players might think they were normal FMs, and they're not. The more natural place for them would be on the wiki and maybe the Downloads page, and then there can just be one thread for them in the Mappers forum so mappers are periodically reminded that they exist.

These are great, but it's kind of a problem for customs assets to be spread out among links buried in threads. I don't need these now, but maybe I will in 6 months, and then I worry it's going to be hard to find what I saw before again. One solution I mentioned before is that an FM be made that basically collects all the custom assets from every source into one place, where the player can just go in and it can be basically laid out like an Ikea store, lol. But you can look around and see what you might want, and it should have a title plate with the author & name of the asset, so you can just grab it out of the pk4 ready to drop in an FM and use right away. And then being able to download it from inside the game would probably be the best way for people to find it. The only issue is, somebody would have to volunteer to make it. I might be able to do it if no one else volunteers. I think it might even encourage players to think about being mappers. And it might be fun to throw in a little gameplay (like a scavenger hunt) for good measure, and if it's made for mappers, it would be good to go ahead and throw in mapping tutorials and example areas (e.g., complex systems like elevators, or that great tutorial about visportaling converted to actual map area, etc.) that people can grab and throw in their FM. What do people think?

I guess people have already stated the main punchline. This is really the job of the mapper. So it's good to inform mappers that packaging campaigns when they're finished would be appreciated. The issue about the lag in releasing individual missions just means that it's probably good for mappers to release the FMs individually over time, and then at the very end have an independent release of all of them packaged together as a campaign, while the individual levels are still available individually. It's a little more work for the mapper (e.g., they might want to change the loadout screen for the campaign version so it makes sense either way, like we've been talking about), but it'd be worth it. And there's a risk a player downloads the same missions twice, but that should be rare because the title and relative file sizes should cue them, and other things like the relevant thread on the FM (which people often visit for hints) or the fact that the first mission is identical, etc, will all cue them as well.

Legitimate good idea. There have been a lot of times I'll want to know if I have rope arrows and not be 100% sure which number it is, so I just start pushing all of them. I'll second that motion.

I remember I made two long shelves in the lab in my FM that were chock full of alchemist junk, bottles and skulls and glassware and gizmos, and there were quite a few people that were disappointed that they couldn't pick anything up from it. People like intractability. For that matter, my alchemist lab for my (our) T2 FM had a little easter egg where if you found some lead and mixed the right stuff with it in a cauldron in the right way, it would transform it into gold with a flash and a bang. (The alchemist was hover sleeping nearby, so the bang was a funny, scary moment, but fortunately the guy is a heavy sleeper.) My point is, in that level (not only in the lab, e.g., the lead you got from elsewhere) there was stuff you could grab because it encouraged playing around with making potions to see if something worked. So I even understood that sentiment. Interaction brings a world alive. But I'll grant it's good if the interactable elements sometimes "do something", even just as an easter egg to the FM.

I like the look and feel of it. Good luck with your project! We're not ones to tell anyone they can't do what they like. TDM actually got a lot of hate from the original Thief crowd at TTLG for being inauthentic, kind of bewildering to some of us at the time, but in the end most people realize there's room for different projects and visions and life is too short not to do what you want. It seems like every year or two, someone is presenting their own vision of this genre and will post a video here, which is cool. They often have new ideas or cool takes on different things, and this one is better than a lot of others. And if you're making a game the way you like it, chances are there will be others that like those things too.

The thing is, the same map can be played in different moods, or put the other way around, maps cater to different moods more or less. I personally think it's important the first time I play a map that I play it both the intended way of the mapper, and basically following the philosophy of our genre -- slower, more methodical, thinking through your approach, anti-shooter, anti-hand holding, minimal, clean & functional UI, immersive sim, air of mystery to the world, non-linear, legitimate challenge, etc., and the game doesn't compromise with these things, even if it may be annoying for a moment, holding the line is more important in the grander scheme. But as for once one has finished a map, I also take the open source ethos of Dark Mod (which we picked up from Thief modding), which is to say a kind of irreverence to the game. That's when you can go in and toy around with it, break the game, find all the loot and secrets, toy with the AI, and I don' t know if anyone else has ever done this, but I've been known on occasion to actually mod other people's maps to change a few things to my style, or more often to experiment with some crazy idea I have, make AI fight, or making some contraption, or some new function, etc. I would never really advertise it, for one thing because it could be seen as kind of disrespectful to the author to talk about how you've changed their map. That said, I haven't done that in probably over a decade by now. Now I'll just do my experimenting in my own maps made for the purpose. But the beauty of the open source ethos is that, at the end of the day, I feel free to do what I want with the game, and that can be a really empowering feeling sometimes. The whole point of an open source game is to really make the game one's own on one's hard drive, I think. That's why I very often distinguish what's interesting for someone to do on their local version versus what's good to do for the core mod. For the core mod, I'm on board with keeping a strict line with our basic ethos, and I don't want just anything thrown in that could water it down. But then I often think the sky's the limit for what you do to it locally, and you even learn the most about coding the game by experimenting in the craziest ways, so a little irreverence is actually encouraged then. Anyway, long story short (too late), loot glint is a perfect example of something that would straddle that line for me, bad for the core mod, but interesting for one's local game when one is in the mood for it.

That would be Baba is You. Great puzzle game! Edit: Aha, should have read the further posts. Still a great puzzle game.

Seems somehow overly narrow with only a few nominees, and a few games keep getting repeated in a lot of categories.

Loot glint gets a lot of hate. It's basically antithetical to the whole ethos of our design philosophy going back to the TDS days. But honestly, I bet it wouldn't be hard to set up a system where, when you push a button, loot in the visible screen will show an outline or glint or whatever, in a visually pleasing way. There's lots of reasons a player may want it. BTW, to back up a second, in the console you can already set up a keybind to a console command, so you could have a key that toggles the console command to show loot. That would solve your issue right away. The only thing is that's not very stylish. If you want it as part of the game, it should be done properly to look good and fit the game's aesthetic. If someone were to look into it, they could start by looking at how frobbable objects highlight by proximity, and then just build off that kind of system where you swap frobbable with loot and swap the proximity check with a key-press check. Like I said, I don't think it fits our game's ethos, so might not make a great standard feature, but it'd be a great patch feature for fans that want it.

Lol, "only different". From the point of view of making a conversion script, that's a pretty big thing! But there are other differences too. In D3's case, the engine doesn't know what's "inside" or "outside" until you place an object on one side, and D3 also has a system for arbitrary portal placement, and the way portal areas work for culling (leafs), that anyway works differently than the Dark Engine's portalization method. It's also different from a mapper's perspective. Well this is the best way to visualize how they're different in terms of how the engine is understanding the geometry. In Dromed, you can have an order of operations that add & subtract geometry in succession (solid and air brushes), so you could make a cube, then cut out a cylinder hole (i.e., add a cylinder air brush), then put another solid cylinder inside that, then cut a box out of that, etc. That's more the style of subtractive geometry. If you wanted to do that in Dark Radiant, you really have to model out the final shape. Okay, there is a "cut out" tool, but believe me when I say it's the most evil tool in DR!! It's like an engraved invitation for the engine to choke on all the triangle slivers and give you the black walls of death. You're better off using the cut tool, but even that's a pain. You see it most dramatically making door and window holes. In dromed, you just cut out the rectangle with one air brush and it's done. In DR, you have to have four brushes and literally "part the curtains" to open a hole among them. That's really the important difference between the two, practically speaking at least, in my mind.

My campaign's protagonist was an analog of exiled medieval Persian which is basically like what ended up becoming Indian Parsis. There's an analog for any group you like, as long as you go to some effort to make it fit the world and don't just jam it in unaltered.

This came from the global average which includes developed & developing countries. There's such a large difference in the mortality rates that it's really unfair to aggregate the two into one statistic, and they should be disaggregated. In my day job though, I'm mostly thinking about developing countries because that's where the real needs are. (I bet they also count differently, so in developing countries they're counting mostly just hospitalized cases as "cases", etc.) You also have to disaggregate for age and I think a few other categories for the number to be useful too. [quote]What is the source for the claim that 40% of cases will develop long covid?[/quote] That came from an article posted in a forum that I can't track down now. But there's lots of numbers saying lots of things in lots of different contexts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I mean it's going to depend on one's criteria for continuing or "long covid" symptoms, so could be more like between 10% to 30% to take two other rates tossed around. (IIRC the 40% was for literally anything, but that could include chronic fatigue, and also matches the number for SARS.) For the sake of the point, it's a much higher number than the fatality rate. The core of the point isn't actually the number (it's a higher number for I think all viruses), but the fact it's higher than usual for long covid, the long covid symptoms are more debilitating for a longer time, and just by a variation of the law of large numbers (even a smaller % is a lot of people as the pool gets larger). I guess my personal perspective is the post-covid Facebook groups are growing by the thousands to 10s of thousands per week, and it has thousands of posts a day all posting the same debilitating problems, which is of course anecdotal, but it's like looking at the shadow of something bigger than people think.

Re: coronavirus, to put things into perspective, the mortality rate is about 2% (in a developed country; in a developing country it can be as high as 5%), and that's including acute and aggravated cases. There's not that much difference between them, so I think debating about that difference is making too much of it. And anyway, from a public health policy perspective, your job is saving lives, and aggravated circumstances are just an inherent part of that job. So you have to take them into account in the policy one way or another. But, and this is my main point, I think in the big scheme of things, the arguably more (or anyway as) important number is going to be that ~40% of cases develop long-term complications, so-called long covid. This is what I had for three months from April to July, and now it's November and I'm still getting complications from it, 7.5 months out. So I can vouch that the complications can be debilitating, at least over the first few months. So there's been 55 million cases globally. (There's reasons to think that count is vastly under-counted because most cases don't display symptoms; testing is sporadic; etc. But it's a very conservative figure to work with, which is good for making points about it.) 40% of that is 22 million people that are having their life sidetracked for weeks to months after the illness. I think that's going to have a staggering effect on society & the economy around the world down the road that won't even be widely recognized for a while, because we're still in the middle of it we can't even get perspective on what's happening.

That's right, the problem wouldn't be the script itself, but distributing the .map files that they create. But you could make it so that people could run it on their legally owned copy of TDP or TMA and then you could legally play the .pk4 it makes. But then you'd have to do even more work to make sure the script really faithfully re-creates the mission from the .mis file, which would be a tough challenge. It's not just converting the .mis to .map, but all the other things like readables, scripting, objectives, etc. The other thing to keep in mind is that NewDark has already improved the game quite a bit. I'm not too interested in recreating the missions from scratch, since they already exist, and we already have streched resources. So I'd rather that energy go into new missions. That said, I'd personally love to see "inspired by" FMs where we get to re-visit some Thief OM sites and it has a new story that plays off the old one, within the boundaries of IP allowance (i.e., not using Thief characters or names, etc.).

The quick answer is no. TDM runs Doom3 .map files and Thief2 runs .mis files. It's imaginable somebody could make a script that converts .mis files to .map files, but it's unlikely because it might be considered violating IP, and nobody wanted TDM to be threatened with a cease & desist letter that had shut down fan remakes in the past. All that said, there was a guy that made a few T2 maps in TDM, at least the shells of them, I believe by hand. He never released it, but he released some videos of them. Go to http://www.shadowdarkkeep.com/videos.htm and find "runspeedwide", then watch that. Oh, there were some people that made some TDM FMs that used parts of T2 OM maps. One of them was of the Bonehoard, but it was never publicly released (this is all I can find on it now), another was Assassins, and recently somebody posted a screenshot of their work in progress FM, and I don't know what OM it's from. I'm sure there are other examples of OM areas that are in FMs, but I can't think of them just now. I think that's as close as you're going to get to what you're asking.

Kingsal can probably help you, but FYI my FM Patently Dangerous uses a simple script to do exactly what you asked about the elevator for the warehouse elevator (i.e., you have to flip a circuit break switch first to use it). You can open up the .pk4 and just take that script, and then search for that script name in the .map file to see what spawnarg to put on the button. Basically, you use the function on a button that calls a script when you push it. I believe you can use the same model for the lights too. To explain it really simply, you just put a simple conditional at the top. When you flip the circuit breaker, it sets some global variable to "electricity : on" (when you flip it again it goes back to off), and then at the top of the button script you have a simple check, if electricity = on then activate the elevator, else end. I think the same kind of logic will work for the light situation, depending how you want to set it up, e.g., is the master switch like the circuit breaker case above, or does it turn on all switches no matter what, how do the local switches override it, etc. Work out the logic first, and then use a simple conditional (or set of conditionals) like the above to implement it.

We had the idea once to have a rating system inside the game ,and it could have number of times downloaded/played. The votes would be collected on this server, and I suppose it could have mirrors, just like the other downloads. But it's not such a big thing since you can usually get an idea about it just by searching the forum.