DeTeEff

Then I have no clue to why it doesn't work. The script works like this:

Wow! A completionist! To be frank, I have not logged all loot because there is so much. But I can mention stuff from the top of my head:

Glad you liked it! Praise from a talanted mapper as yourself goes straight to the heart I'm glad I took your advise to rework parts of the mission.

Let's do it like this: I'll PM you a link to a version where the card playing bug is removed so we can see if it's that bug that causes your crash. What do you say?

I have had the mission active now for several minutes with timescale 10 activated (10 times clock speed) and haven't seen any card removing bugs. So it seems I have squashed this bug...I removed my own card playing animation path loop and copied the spawnargs from the prefab and have managed to get the same behaviour as I wanted One has to add the spawnarg idle_animations_interval (12 is chosen in the prefab), to the AIs to make them play cards. I have no idea how that works. As i mentioned, I built my own using path_anims, but that seems to have caused those errors. I don't know if we should upload the update just yet, perhaps more bugs will emerge from the wood work (even after my betatesters sweeping eyes )

Very strange that it didn't finished off then...*sigh* perhaps one of those bugs that just randomly happen some of the time... EDIT It may have been because:

When the AI is making the drawing animation, a card is automatically spawned in his hand as he moves it towards his cards in hand, then it disappears (destroys) but it's baked in the animation... But don't kill any devs yet. I have found a prefab with card players (problably created by someone smarter than me), and they have a different setup than mine. I'll have to see if I can integrate their version into mine...

Regarding the card players; there are two AI who play cards. They are setup like this: Each AI is first targeted to sit in their chair, then targeted to an path_anim "playcards_idle" and then to a path_anim "playcards_idle_draw" via a path_wait with randomizing seconds to wait to offset any sync between the two players. These two animations keep repeating until anything disturbs them.

I hear you and I know there's errors with the card players, but as there is tons of varnings and small errors in vanilla TDM and it hasn't caused any problems, neither for me or the betatesters, I have not put any effort into fixing that bug.

Thanks for playing! I'm no programmer so sadly I don't know how to help you in this matter. Which difficultiy are you playing? It's a quite crowded place, especially on Bustling and perhaps it's the amount of AI that kills your setup?

Hehe, no shame in some violence, though Regarding Hedda: Very good;

Glad you liked it! Yes, I know the start sections are a bit bare; loot vise, but there is There could be more, yes, but I think there are other sections with lots more loot so yes, there may be some discrepancies towards the rest of the level. Yes, the AI may be brutal if they suspect anything and they may end up as a collective mob that search high and low for the player. But I believe it's not impossible to escape or sneak away, should you upset anyone. Perhaps I should've added flash bombs to the starting equipment... Regarding the mentioned readables: In this mission you may KO/kill as many AI you like, but it will have consequences: Regarding the loot: But what are they for, then?

So the purpose becomes creating an open world without any set goals, just for exploring? It may be a nice steak to put in your mouth, but I think it will sorely be missing in flavour if one leaves out the story/loot/purpose. This whole idea makes me think about the movie Gummo...

I didn't mean to sound like a nice environment is created in a handwave, it takes time, of course. But it ought to be less work to create a mission without story/briefing etc than an ordinary one. My newly released Who Watches The Watcher took almost 2000 hours all in all, but that doesn't count all those hours I sat and plotted out the story and wrote readables and voice lines. I remember sitting in a gas mask in our covid unit during the pandemic, plotting on story elements (Yes, there were times when we could sit and take breaks.)

Your ideas boil down to basically not having any purposeful objectives at all (other than the Do not get spotted). And as you don't have any story, your mission ought to be more quick to build than any ordinary mission. Yes, you may have to put even more emphasis on visual storytelling but as I said, there is no big deal to add any Do-not-get-spotted-objectives.

It's an easy feat to add an objective that fails if you get spotted. And if you make it OPTIONAL the player gets alerted that they're spotted and may restart if they want, but as it isn't forced, every player can decide for themself if they should continue playing or restart. I would argue that the community as a whole are generally against forced ghosting, but with the aformentioned setup you can get both.

Every contribution counts. I would like to object and say you were one of the more vocal testers, and found...

The time has finally come for me to release my 5th mission for The Dark Mod. This project started sometime around 2015-2016 (couldn't find any old files to confirm) with me starting poking on a city mission and for some time I built quite randomly without a plan. I expected I could plot a story later; You can never go wrong with a city section, eh? I had a hiatus and did other projects in my life with model painting and skydiving and mapping became more and more scarce. Now and then I felt an itch to map and some kind of responsibility towards the mod team to produce something, to provide and give something back, if you will. At the start of the pandemic I started building more focused on this misson, but still no exact goal on what I wanted to achieve. Finally I decided I wanted a mission where you follow a person and the mission continued to grow in a linear fashion. I am not the quickest mapper and have severe problems on how to imagine a scene without building it first. This means that I often have to redo scenes and lots of stuff gets unnecessarily built just to be removed later, hence the almost absurd build time (about 1900 hours all in all). Betatesting came about and I got very good tips and feedback and decided to redo a lot of the mission. This need for a rework could have killed my motivation but fortunately, as the map was designed, it only required a modest amount of work and the mission became so much better for it! Sometimes I believe I'm somewhat of the uncrowned king of missions with a bit more unusual and experimental playstyles and this mission also have some elements that isn't used that much. In contrast to some of my other missions though, this one isn't depending on any quirky meter or sun shining down on the player (Reap as you sow *cough*). As mentioned, it is a sprawling city mission with lots of exploring that I hope will satisfy you! So DeTeEff gives to you: Who Watches The Watcher? ver 1.0 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YYoJJnxr2UbGxemTR-WoWmH64fbazusH/view?usp=sharing The night is creeping over Bridgeport. You squint in the street lights as you trot down the small alley to where you're about to meet your contact. As a man who straddles the line between lawful and outlaw, it's not often you have peaceful interactions with the City watch but as you're about to learn, this time they have more problems on their hands than to deal with petty thieves like yourself. You see the trademark silhouette of a City watch helmet approaching and you make a last take of your immediate surroundings, should you have to flee if things get awry. The guard presents himself as Albert and you listen carefully to his story and you quickly realise that you don't have much to fear from this man; The Citywatch has wrestled with some internal problems lately with missing reports and evidence that disappear. Albert strongly believes they have a mole on the inside that works for the Greynard RoughBoys; a band of ruthless thugs that doesn't hesitate to maim anyone who oppose them. You learn that he thinks the mole is no other than a Sergeant named Clerwick. Your mission will be to find this man, and collect intelligence on his doings for the night. And as it is payday, you should of course also help the inhabitants to carry some of their heavy purses. Mission type: Creepy elements? Undead? Spiders? Thanks to: My wonderful girlfriend who endures my constant talking about mapping and for helping me with readables and story design and some voice lines. Dragofer - Scripting help Springheel - All those modules Sotha - Hangman model Henrik Swenson for providing some ambients Digiffects Sound Library for some custom sound bites Betatesters: Acolytesix Datiswous Duzenko Jaxa Mezla Nort Prjames Shadow Thebigh Wellingtoncrab Wesp5 And a big thank you to the community for keeping the mod alive! I hope I haven't forgotten anyone... Known bugs: -The AI in TDM is inaccurate in some ways. They will sometimes behave strangely when returning to their original routes after being alerted, like sitting on chairs in weird ways or turning in places, especially if they meet another AI in narrow places. I have done my best to adjust these weird behaviours but with the complexity of everything that's going on and the player making different desicions/noise, it's probably impossible to adjust for everything. I believe I have ironed out the last wrinkles I can, with respect to my knowledge/skills. -Frobbing out of boxes/chests/drawers has always been a pain but I think this is largely an error within the code and how frobing works as the frob highlight wants to lock onto the box itself and not its contents. -There seems to be some kind of bug with the skybox, especially in places where there is water reflections present; The Sky/water volume switch between an opaque variant to a more translucent one. Neither is straight up ugly, but it's jarring to see the sky switch (as it seems randomly). I don't know what is causing this, and I have decided to let this one pass (if any players knows what is causing this, please let me know so can I squash this annoying bug. PLEASE POST ANY QUESTIONS/SPOILERS IN SPOILER BRACKETS

Version 1.01 is up in the beta forum

Thread created in the Beta test forums!

Haha, is somebody still playing this? Humbling Updating this should be like polishing a rubble with the finest sandpaper But yeah, perhaps updating it so it at least runs/doesn't crasch/glitch may not be a bad thing...

Hello! The days draws near. I've finally come to the point that I can send this project to the testers! It's been about ten years since I released a mission so it's about time! @thebigh has already showed intererst, but do we have any more interrested?

Yeah, I remembered they had a meter that measured your noise, and a bar went up if the ambience sound was loud and you could create noise, as long as you stayed under that bar. Nice game, too bad they stopped making more Splinter Cells in that vein.

This must have been discussed before, but I have no exact wording for it, but I will try to do it via this scenario: The player is sneaking around in a room with lots of humming machinery and loud sounds. It's very annoying that the AI has super hearing and can distinguish that THAT sound came from the player and thus, he is alerted to your positon. Would it be possible to add some kind of sound mask when designing a mission so you need to produce more noise to be detected? I feel bad for posting this, as I believe this has been discussed before, but as I don't have any wording for the "issue" it's hard to do a search...

I'm creeping closer to starting the real alpha testing stage of my VIP. Meaning I will play the mission from the beginning as if it was a real mission. I still have some graphical stuff that needs tending to, but gameplay wise, I'm getting closer... I guess it's fair game to send the mission to beta while still working on visual stuff to save time. Or what do you say? Is it too risky? Forgetting some important stuff and releasing a non tested version as finished?