MirceaKitsune
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Posts posted by MirceaKitsune
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It's a good idea. I'll share mine here as well if there's any hope for the team considering it:
On 12/3/2024 at 7:23 AM, MirceaKitsune said:I'd like to suggest a feature that's common in most map editors such as Tiled: The ability to have multiple maps open at once as tabs. Just like browser tabs, you have a bar with several maps and can click on them to select which one you want to work on, all maps are loaded in memory at once so the transition should be seamless. This would especially help with campaigns as you jump between maps, copy-pasting groups between multiple FM's you're working on, etc.
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No worries, figured there might have been some confusion. And that's interesting: Does it also work on Linux / KDE Plasma / Wayland? I usually open a map, copy from it, open the other map, paste to it... it is however slower and not as clear, plus you face the loading times of each map when you open it. The other problem is when I have multiple DarkRadiant instances open, not only are they slower but one of them used to freeze and stop responding so its process had to be killed.
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Finished it. This was so much more incredible than anything I expected! Especially the last level, that was something else.
SpoilerI see Jonus was using a keypad for some of his doors. Happy to say I'm... honored to have helped him a little with inventing that one. Didn't know he was such a cool guy till meeting him up close, even if just a bit greedy and maybe not looking out for his employees as well as he could.
The last map felt like DeusEx - Area 51 on steroids. Like really... when I removed the white crystals and climbed the stair to destroy the brain, it felt I was going there to merge with the AI not to destroy it... almost wish that was a secret option to make Jonus roll his eyes at
The facility was so large and complex, nothing done before in TDM. It could almost get boring, if not for the conversations between Jonus and the AI. AI, then gray aliens... finally we get to ride the monorail out of Jonus's personal Black Mesa. Wonder what the ending dialogue is if you leave Desmond behind, not gonna replay just to check that especially since it seems sad, but having that as an optional outcome was another interesting touch.
As a final idea: Think we could put that radio model in vanilla TDM? It fits perfectly and could definitely be used in other FM's. Maybe have some fitting ambient songs that can be looped with it?
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Is it possible to define a custom lantern that activates an overlay GUI when on then turns it off when no longer active? Zoom is optional, but if it's possible without needing a custom script just for that, I was thinking to combine the lantern and spyglass into a special item that does both functionalities. Is that much doable with the builtin script objects and just a custom player tool entity?
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Different thing, though a better way to find and focus on entities would be good too. The annoyance I'm hoping tabs would solve is that it's hard to edit multiple maps at once, you can only open one at a time which needs to load and you lose your undo history and selection and more, this would make working on some things in parallel easier.
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2 hours ago, datiswous said:
Is it normal that you don't see distorsion underwater?
I think it's because I was using noclip so water collisions weren't being detected. Though I just learned I should make water a liquid entity as not doing so causes other issues like candles not going out underwater.
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5 hours ago, Zerush said:
Yes, it's not very logical that jumping on a guard do nothing, but throwing a box from above on his head will knock him out.
Another logical gap: When you alert a guard who isn't an archer then climb to a place they can't reach but they still see you, the guard pulls stones out of their pocket and starts throwing them at you which deals a small amount of damage. Now if the player picks up a movable goblet and throws it right in a helmetless guard's face, it deals no damage at all... metal goblet that's larger and heavier than the stones guards use and is thrown with the same velocity.
3 hours ago, datiswous said:Maybe add damage to tdm_player_thief.def ?
Sounds like that should work. I'd also add it to metal movables for the reasons laid out above, which I think should only deal a tiny amount of damage but enough to have some realism. I'd make sure movable chairs have it too, throwing a chair at an AI's head should hurt similarly to crates. Add any other movables where the effect was forgotten to the list.
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I'd like to suggest a feature that's common in most map editors such as Tiled: The ability to have multiple maps open at once as tabs. Just like browser tabs, you have a bar with several maps and can click on them to select which one you want to work on, all maps are loaded in memory at once so the transition should be seamless. This would especially help with campaigns as you jump between maps, copy-pasting groups between multiple FM's you're working on, etc.
Only downside I see is persisting too many open maps, in which case DarkRadiant may be slow when it starts up and use more resources, but since DR loads all assets in memory once I don't foresee this being slower than just opening one huge map that loads a ton of models and textures. I imagine standardizing undo / redo / autosave / other systems to recognize the map that's currently selected and be unique to it may be a little tricky but hopefully it's doable.
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Every now and then I notice a silly circumstance TDM never seems to have covered; The player is standing on a balcony, sees an AI as they look down, decides to climb over the rail and jump on top of their head. The result? Nothing: The player just bounces or glides off as if through magic... if the guard is hostile they will react and attack, if not they act as if nothing happened a guy jumping on their head was something ordinary. Don't try this at home obviously... but if you jumped from a first story window on top of someone's head, they'll be dead or in a pretty bad state in the hospital if they survive, you're likely breaking your legs too, and even if somehow no one gets hurt that person will be asking you what the heck just happened
So I think the answer is that jumping on an AI should deal damage, apart from the fall damage the player himself takes. If the player's velocity is high enough, the AI he lands should die on the spot... or maybe a knockout is better? Smaller AI would be more sensitive velocity, such as rats which take damage even faster if you land on them from a lower height. Even if no damage is dealt, the AI you fall on top of should have a basic alert even if friendly, just like what happens if you pick up a movable and throw it at them.
Speaking of which: If you threw a metal goblet at someone's face in reality, they may survive by can still be hurt pretty badly. How come throwing small but heavy objects at AI doesn't deal any damage? There was a demo way back on how you can knock out guards by dropping crates on them, yet taking a goblet and throwing it right into their nose doesn't deal even 1 HP of damage, it just bounces off and leaves them scratching their heads at what happened. Seems like impact with high velocity objects could generally be handled more realistically.
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8 hours ago, I.C.H.I. said:
I always loved indoor lighting in Metro: Last Light, absolutely nothing better comes to my mind of all I games I've ever played. Can we reverse-engineer it somehow?
That's indeed something a better color space will help with. In my opinion at least, the contrast being off by default is one of the things making TDM less realistic: Everything feels hazy right now, maximum darkness doesn't feel black enough while the way light universally falls off (light textures aside) doesn't always represent what the eye expects.
Our lack of automated bounce lighting is also an issue. I once tried to solve this by giving all normal lights an additional ambient light with noshadows (lamps, torches, candles, etc). Sadly apart from being a performance nightmare and even producing crashes, it caused lights to shine through walls so I dropped that approach, even if it looked amazing and increased realism quite a bit.
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2 hours ago, Arcturus said:
Same material with increasingly blurrier cubemaps. At the end it's pure white color.
The second half looks like what I imagine the current material being upgraded to, I don't think one can truly say it alters the original too much. The first half is indeed very shiny, I'd go with making it part of a whole new outfit like for royal knight maybe!
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That's good. The monitor is fine: I was referring to storing color information outside the visible range. Conventionally renderers would output directly to a 0 - 255 range per channel, for things like Filmic or AgX it needs to work with the concept of interpreting higher color values which are then translated into that visible range.
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3 hours ago, Ralle321 said:
A loss of information is obviously bad and i have no solution for that.
I guess this implementation is a dead end then, but it was worth trying out.
I hope we don't have to give up especially when the shader seems so close to finished. I don't know how the color space works internally, but it will likely require expanding the size of the color buffer and how the brightness range is calculated by the engine. Like a lot of new things it will likely take more work but I don't see it as impossible... other things took and will require more effort, such as realtime reflections when we get those too eventually.
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Reaching the last map: Now I'm sad it's going to be over soon. But at least I'll surely enjoy something unexpected
SpoilerEnded up riding Jonas elevator without disabling the camera and turret guarding it. Apparently I needed two printed circuit boards to turn it off: I had 4 or 5, but for some reason none matched the upper socket and I couldn't find any more of them. Had to press one digit, run and hide from the camera till it lost track of me, repeat.
Obviously I'm betting Jonas screwed something up and I'm going to find everyone (un)dead and stuff. That seems most likely, of course I expect to be surprised by something I haven't thought of once I get to the 5th level.
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Thanks. For what I wanted to do I settled for something simpler which was ultimately good enough.
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I was wondering if there's a way to chain sounds in a sound shader, including randomized sounds. What I want is when a speaker is triggered, it plays a fixed sound, plays another random sound, then plays another fixed sound: I'm only aware of "leadin", but that's intended as a prefix to a single looped sound plus there's no "leadout" equivalent. I can use fixed delays to chain 3 speakers, but those wouldn't respect the length of the individual sounds and rely on me defining a fixed delay that won't line up with every possible choice... unless the speaker entity knows to trigger its targets when its audio finishes playing?
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Strange: When there's an AAS error like guards placed in walls, it will usually just say "AAS out of date" when spawning for that specific AAS type. Never seen that error before and wouldn't have known what it meant: Must be a rare circumstance.
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1 hour ago, grodenglaive said:
Nifty decoder action. I like the analogue gauge - glad it doesn't have an LCD screen:P
Little spoiler alert, but I'm planning to toy with the idea of screens and electronic readables next, not to worry as they will be within the theme too. I thought the gauge would be interesting, especially as I plan on sticking exclusively to existing assets for this FM and wanted to see how much I can get done with smart usage of the models, it was the perfect way to integrate my idea with the default lockpicking / doorhandle system so you still see something moving as you pick the lock.
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That is the type of armor / reflection I think would look good on existing materials: Subtle reflection but it's there, the armor still looks white-ish and worn out enough to feel like it's been used for some time.
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Yes. I'm not familiar with how the TDM engine handles color internally, but when it comes to color spaces like Filmic or AgX I remember one important component to how they work: Color is meant to be in a range above the conventional 0 - 255, meaning bright spots surpass the 1.0 or 256 mark.
To my knowledge TDM never had the concept of over-brightening: To our engine the brightest spot is pure white in visible range, treated either as 1 in a 0 - 1 range or 255 in a 0 - 255 range. It doesn't understand a pixel having a brightness of 5 when 1 is pure white on the screen, 1234 out of 255, etc.
That's likely why some colors appear washed out, it makes sense now that I think about it. I believe bloom is also supposed to use pixel brightness outside of the visible range for more accurate results.
I imagine this is possible to do by tweaking the color range internally, but requires changing the way all light sources brighten their surroundings. It should also necessitate a larger color buffer since we're then storing more than 256 colors per channel... which may further impact performance, I still disable the 64-bit color setting in the main menu and live with color dithering as using it reduces FPS considerably (even if not as much as MSAA).
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I can concede that the polished armor definitely looks too new: Most of those guards are presented as being old timers, not an army that just bought new armor straight from the factory and is wearing it for the first time that night. Hence why I'd tone down the effect, and use the specular channel as a mask to further reduce it and ensure the reflection isn't applied to areas that are rusted.
If the super shiny armor is to be turned into a new skin, I'm in favor of making a whole new outfit for polished armor guards: I don't think it's a good idea to create custom skins merely to enable an effect, rather they should be different enough to justify a new skin. I still think even for existing armor a very subtle cubemap should be applied, but agree the ultra-shiny one should be a new suit we could feature in the next release.
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Experimental door with electronic lock, intended for more important doors in rich areas. A decoder tool can be used to pick the lock, magnetic keycards act as standard keys to open them normally. Might reuse in future projects if this goes well.
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4 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:
Yeah this is really getting out of hand:
The improvement isn't just for one type of guard: It's for all metals, including other armored guards such as city watch and builder armor as seen in a previous video... also loot, weapons such as the swords, etc. If we create a custom skin and entity for all of those just for a basic reflection effect, I think that would be out of hand if anything.
Some graphical improvements are meant to be universal; We didn't need to patch old missions when ambient occlusions or shadow maps were implemented just because there's a tiny difference to the way things used to look. If such a change could bother anyone, maybe we can have a cvar to toggle cubemap reflections universally, I'd find it comparatively cleaner and easier to manage.
Newbie DarkRadiant Questions
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted
Can still use an answer on my previous question: Is there any way to make a custom player lantern that adds a GUI overlay when active, possibly combine the functionality of both the Lantern and Spyglass so there's a bit of zoom while using it? I know it's possible with a script at worst, but I was wondering if a custom definition alone can do it too.