MirceaKitsune

On the menu setting I kinda retain my previous opinion: I'd make it a slider with multiple options above the frob helper checkbox, especially now for the time being. Different players may want to set it to either "off", "on", "on with occlusion". Apart from performance considerations, different players seem to like the appearance of those three modes selectively, which makes me think it should be easily accessible for everyone to decide.

Fair enough. Most movables are usually not that high-poly but if you hold them up at the right angle the impact could become noticeable I take it. Also if anyone needs a way to test this scenario, consider using the little script I made which allows frobbing friendly AI to make them salute you or express if they were alerted: I made it before the highlight was a thing and didn't get to see how it looks on AI, the results might be interesting including visually

On performance loss I need to ask one obvious question: How relevant is it when the highlight can only show for one item at a time (the one being highlighted) which itself only happens when standing up close to the item which usually faces against a wall thus you're derendering most other geometry from that position and angle (viewport culling + portal culling)?

I didn't know that actually. It's not an item I use frequently, when I did I remember it dropping at the player's feet. Thanks for the info on that! I'd still like to salvage this arrow in some form: A new arrow for light / electricity sounds like a really fun idea honestly. I'm happy with the idea of making it a flare arrow, as I did in the last version. It could also be made into an electrical arrow to temporarily take down electric lights, though that would require more advanced scripting and I'm not putting more effort into it till I receive some feedback to know it's worth it.

Might be a good alternative to getting TDM on Steam, which as discussed isn't possible for the time being. I'd put it on itch.io first though, if that doesn't have any licensing issues either, given that's the second most popular platform after Steam.

The new highlight should definitely only trigger then the old one does IMO. I thought this was already the case.

The frob highlight is very complete as far as I can tell. There might be little issues here and there but it works just as intended for me. Not sure why it could seem otherwise, we have a great new feature for the next release which deserves to be cerished.

I don't mind either way as long as the effect is on by default from here on. But as I said this will cause the highlight to be covered, affecting doors sitting in door frames and so on: It needs to be carefully verified which option looks better.

I think the annoyance he's talking about is savegames breaking between every version update. I'm not too affected as I usually play each FM in one go, rarely update in between. I do wonder if it would be possible to allow older savegames somehow, if something significant didn't change to completely break the state of an ongoing FM, with only a warning on load informing the player things might be broken if they continue that run.

Gotta say: I do find it a bit funny that some are thinking of kicking loud doors into AI's noses as being more immersive, yet ideas like implementing microphone support precisely for more unique immersion seem to be regarded as a useless idea.

IIRC items aren't persistent between campaign levels, so yes it would be per FM. If they were though the crafted result or component items would be retained. The reason it could make sense in a simple form is encouraging the player to go to different locations to gain an item: You can just give them an arrow, but it might be more fun to have the player need to loot a bunch of arrow bodies from a guard's tower then find different arrow heads in homes and choose which to use with them for instance.

Kicking doors isn't an idea that would have come to my mind, and I suggested quite a few things recently. I'm neither for or against it, but IMO it would introduce more complexity than is perhaps justified. As far as doors go, I'd spend the effort on fixing the peek feature and adding it in existing FM's (looking through keyholes).

It seems most likely that if I do this I'll make it an addon first, FM's that want it can include its pk4. Maybe implement a Minecraft style pattern then... it's my addon so why not be crazy about it and make this even more fun

@JackFarmer Just looking to make things even better and more fun. Been working on a new FM and it got me paying attention to all the nice new things happening and wanting to further them. I offer to implement some features where I can, testing them in the process to the extent that I can at the surface. One idea with combining items is giving the player certain tools if they found the right components in different locations, which among other things would encourage exploration. Players could also choose to create different items out of different mixtures made available in the world, thus it lets the player choose what to give themselves when they have multiple components and options. It's also a little satisfying to know you make your own stuff. As with other things I can do it as an addon first if I decide to give this a go. Though if I do I'd likely implement it via an item, such as a crafting kit: Using it opens the GUI for crafting and stuff can be done there. Can try it sometime if anyone else finds this suggestion interesting, would rather spend time on other ideas too if not.

Can it be first implemented as an overlay for testing then into the engine if accepted? Or do overlay and engine shaders use different and incompatible structures?

I was thinking about the differences between modern AAA titles and ones like TDM. One of the games I watched playthroughs of on Youtube but never really liked was the Resident Evil series. Despite being a boring consumer game for the most part, it had one modern mechanic I did consider interesting for a 1st / 3rd person shooter: Crafting. Obviously nothing complex like Minecraft where you form patterns out of items: You're just given special items which can be dragged on top of one another in the inventory, causing them to be combined into a new item. I was wondering if we should have a vanilla implementation for this sort of thing in some form. I'm thinking of an equally simplistic system which doesn't waste the player's time: You drag items on top of one another in the grid inventory menu, in which case they're combined into one new item. Items meant to be used as ingredients in crafting would only require two new sets of spawnargs, determining what you can combine that item with and what the result will be. For example: inv_name "herb" crafting_1_item "atdm:water_bottle" crafting_1_result "atdm:health_potion" That's for one item I'd think of implementing with this: Red herbs which on their own offer little healing to the player, but if combined with a water bottle produces a health potion. I was also thinking of arrow heads for all arrow types being available as separate items, which combined with a common arrow body produce ammo for that type of arrow. This sounds simple enough for me to be able to implement. Granted someone tells me how I can make the inventory GUI call a script function when you connect two items together, and where I should write the script for this in the first place. Do others think this is a nice thing to have in a basic form?

Can't believe I haven't found this thread earlier. Been interested in seeing people mess with the shaders to further improve the already great graphics we have. This will be fun to keep track of. I should actually ask whether there's a guide on the basics of implementing your own shader. Asking as I really want Depth of Field as a feature, possibly even motion blur later on... since no one wanted to pick those up I was somewhat considering trying to integrate DoF myself to gain some coder experience in this area. I assume it will require editing the engine of course, and that we have no way of automatically loading shaders from a directory or with a script function.

And that's one reason why I love TDM: It's based on what games used to be in the late 90's, in the days of the first DeusEx or Unreal Tournament. We have modern graphics and quality assets unlike those times, but with the same raw gameplay based on feel and immersion rather than hand-holding and falsely trying to look cool. Players of AAA games nowadays are used to expecting boring coolness, games controlled and tailored to what gaming culture of the day wants, and told what they need to do every step of the way. I feel modern games are just poisonous consumer products which strayed 180* from what I once hoped virtual worlds would become... TDM doesn't do that thankfully, it stays true to what we should be using modern engines for

One thing people need to understand is that practically speaking, TDM isn't so much a standalone game as it is a game development engine. I was thinking whether we should do more to label TheDarkMod as an engine, to make it clear it's a system designed for creators to make and run worlds built as single-player FPS missions. On graphics I see little reason for anyone to complain: We have a realtime lighting system with shadows not boring old lightmaps, with beautiful normal maps for gorgeous lighting details on the little cracks and bumps. Some textures are a bit low-rest by today's standards, and fortunately there's already a HD pk4 maintained by some devs to fix that if your machine can handle it. Only thing I think needs to be added in that regard is Depth of Field, potentially also Motion Blur... wonder if I could ever attempt that one just for personal experience since I never did GLSL shaders before. As far as people being warned about missions being crap: All I can see being improved there is a rating / review system for FM's so people can see how many stars they have... prolly not worth the effort to implement though, plus authors might feel bad when their mission gets a low rating. I admit I found a few missions that were pretty bad, I simply uninstalled them upon noticing that... the problem there is I can't hide them in the downloader when looking for new ones so I have to remember and tell myself "that's that FM I didn't want cuz it was simplistic or ugly, don't install it again".

FOSS games in general are tragically underrated. Sometimes understandably so as only a handful are good, TDM being pretty much at the top in many ways. That's the one reason why Steam support would have been important in my book, to get even more players and attention.

Just remembered something: Wasn't TDM officially developed under the team name Broken Glass Studios? I know that's not a registered company or anything, but I was wondering if there's more meaning to it beyond just a simple word the devs decided to use, in a way that could be relevant to this in some form.

To draw them there from their original guarding spot so you can sneak past them. I've actually seen this strategy from another player... they were doing it by jumping in place. You don't want to alert them too much though: Just enough to make them go where you were standing and investigate, but without drawing weapons and running around or attacking you.

Hah, I was thinking about this too! A whistle or shouting key: You hold it down to charge aiming toward the middle... release too early you don't get enough of an alert, release too late you alert the guards too much. It could be used for people who don't have or don't want to use a mic. I could in fact do this as the initial implementation of the system: People could use it with a key, then if microphone support is added later the volume would be used in the same calculation. One issue is requiring a new keybind, I don't believe the script system allowed me to extract individual key presses last I checked. Noisemaker arrow is used to cause alerts at a distance, not at the player's location. It's also not as effective, often times it fails to make guards move at all... should probably be buffed just a little bit at that.

Yeah, it's not a feature people should HAVE to use, I'd see it getting annoying then. If this were to happen it should be a purely optional addition. At most I was thinking we could let some FM's unlock bonus areas when you speak in your mic close to a secret door. But then people will need to use the mic to get all the loot / secrets so even that would likely be too much. We could have generic sound-based triggers of course, which for non-mic users could be activated by throwing an object nearby... different feature for a different thread though.

Here's an edited screenshot depicting how I see the setting for this. Would be stylized differently of course but work the same way. The lower dial on the slider represents the volume at which noise is taken into account, anything beyond can start producing an alert level of 1+... the higher dial is the volume at which the microphone is considered as loud as possible, anything beyond will produce the alert level of 5. The entire mic effect is scaled in between these two settings, simple math I can implement in my script... no promises on the main menu Gui, though if I get support on the engine part I can consider trying that too. The black line over the colored bar is the current mic volume, used so the player sees where to set each slider as they make different noises to test the range.