grayman

Just an observation. Rats are attracted to noisemaker arrows. I had 3 guards and a rat in an area, and was firing noisemaker arrows all over the place to test monster_clip. The rat was right in there with the guards, chasing down the noise. Sometimes the rat was the first to arrive at the arrow, and was better than the guards at pinpointing exactly where the arrow was. It was funny watching three cautious guards inch their way across the room, swords drawn, with the rat scurrying around and through them, breaking away from the pack and making a quick beeline for the arrow.

Well, we've had a vertical contest, limiting the XY sizes. Perhaps a horizontal mission along the X axis? Limit Z and Y to 512 each.

Twelve years ago I tried my hand at UnrealEd. It was in the pre-release time of The Wheel of Time, and I was trying to put together a demo map for a job on that game. What a mess. I'd done a lot of additive map building with Doom/Doom2 and was comfortable with it. The paradigm matched what an architect did: put stuff together. It took a while to get used to the Unreal subtractive method. The main objects in the world didn't really exist, they just took away from things that did. Odd way of thinking about construction. I carved out a few dozen rooms, but was always fighting with the editor. The author of the editor was kind enough to respond to the first 20 bugs I sent him, but never responded to the second 20. It seemed every time I turned around the editor was crashing or whisking architecture into the ether or doing something that was just wrong. I remember wondering how the Unreal folks had had enough patience to create such wonderful maps. After UnrealEd finally tired of me and wiped out my map (backups didn't help because the editor would just wipe the map out again) I gave up. I still have the map, though I can't read it. I'm sure folks who can think in a subtractive way have a ball in that world.

Not quite the same. Normal fuses burn at much faster rates than slowmatch.

A slowmatch is a slow-burning fuse, typically a cord soaked in potassium nitrate. Burned about a foot an hour. They were used on ships of the line to fire cannon when in battle because they were safer than having an open flame around, and could be dropped and picked up without going out. As fraten mentioned, Fidcal created some for TDM and used it in Heart. Yes, the helmeted guards can't be blackjacked. I set the music volumes so they could be heard, but not be intrusive. Especially the cutscene music. Glad you enjoyed it!

Great! I was planning to do a voice-over for the briefing, but ran out of time. Hopefully you'll find the time to go back through the mission to see the other changes. The opening monologue is different, there are more AI, the flasks are now labeled bottles, and the objectives satisfied in the lab and on the roof are less confusing (I think).

They're actually pretty nice in the water. They hop and scoot around and make ripples when the water's 3 units deep. Any deeper and you don't get the ripples. If TDM had a cat, I could put cats on the stairs to keep the rats off.

I think the water situation is okay now, but they still get stuck on ramps or stairs, and sometimes up against a wall or monster_clip. Can't block them off, because there's no rat_clip. But I'm willing to put up with that, since they're in a sewer. Sewer = rats and water. If they get stuck too often, I might try some script trick to nudge them into moving again.

Checked a zombie and he has "can_drown" "0". Didn't know this existed. I put it on the rats and now they don't drown. This is a good workaround as long as they don't wander into water deeper than 4, where it'll look like they're supposed to drown. Thanks.

This is a question for a coder or a modeller. A rat's mouth is about 4 units above the ground when they're running around. Their origin is on the ground. But a rat can drown in 3 units of water. I looked at the code and it uses the spawnarg "mouth_offset" when it determines whether an AI is drowning. That's supposed to be a vector offset from the head's origin, but it's not set anywhere, as far as I can tell. It's not in the def file for the rat, which is where I would expect to see it. I think it's supposed to be defined there by the modeller. I bumped 6 rats' health to 1,000 hoping that would help, but after about 10 minutes, 2 of them were dead in the water. They seemed to spend half their time in the water and half their time up on the floor surrounding the water. But the amount of air time they were getting didn't seem to help. As a workaround, I'll give them atrociously high health, but maybe someone can say why this is happening. Thanks

Filed. http://bugs.angua.at/view.php?id=2353

Ok. i'll file a bug report.

In DR, Preferences has a page for the Clipper. On it, there's a checkbox to select "Clipper tool uses caulk texture". I assume this means that when I clip something, the clipped faces get caulked. If that's what it means, it's not working. Have I got it wrong? Thanks.

Easy for you to say.

Since we have snow, it would be nice to have a few dead plants. Brown, stringy, exhausted. I've been using green shrubs in my map w/snow, on the premise that some plants stay green regardless of the weather. But I'm sure there have to be dead winter plants somewhere in Bridgeport.

My own math, done prior to the announcement, gave the same answers. [Must work on gameplay, must work on gameplay, must ...]

Congratulations, Sotha! Great contest.

If your confirming person can't do so in a timely manner, I have a spreadsheet all set up. Fifteen minutes to gather the votes, and voila! [i know the final order, la la la! um - ahem! - assuming I'm using the correct math.]

You've already got a ton of "suspension of disbelief" when dealing with rope arrows. TDM's rope connects back at the feathers, which means the arrow shaft is supporting a couple hundred pounds when in use. Should just snap right off. But they are cool. I was watching an episode of Robin Hood (BBC production from a few years ago), and Robin used a rope arrow to scale a castle wall once. Normal arrow with a rope tied just behind the arrowhead. Don't know how it didn't slip back down the shaft and off when he started climbing.

Going out on a limb here, but I would guess that some of the clomps are left out because the channel playing them is still playing the previous clomp. If you play a sound, then ask it to play again before the first one's finished, the second one won't get played. A third request will probably play, because by then the first one's finished.

I was using start_on = 0. Maybe you can describe exactly what entities are involved, i.e. how are you triggering the trigger_timer? The way a trigger_timer works, when start_on = 0, is: 1. Trigger it somehow (run through a trigger_once brush or push a button or activate it from a script function). 2. It fires its targets. 3. It waits for a random time between (wait - random) and (wait + random). 4. Go back to step 2. It will continue to do 2 and 3 until you trigger it again to turn it off (if you need to turn it off). If start_on = 1, then it goes right to step 2 when the map starts.

I'm using a trigger_timer for my cutscene Wiki work. I have one set to go off every 5 seconds, with no random variation: wait = 5 random = 0 For debugging, the trigger_timer also triggers a target_callscriptfunction that calls a script function to print the time (in seconds, from when the game began). The printouts say the trigger_timer is triggering every 5 seconds, as advertised. The trigger_timer has another property, start_on, which defaults to 0. If you've accidentally set this to 1, it will start triggering when the map starts. Depending on what you're having it do, it might not work correctly at the point you're trying to use it.

Glad you liked it!

And another thing you have to worry about with thick trigger_multiple brushes is if you stay too long inside them, and they're toggling something. The engine will find you there, toggle something on, find you there a second later, and toggle it off. Just another factor to add to the problem of time vs. size.

I'd be happy to test the opening of what you have now to see how it is for low-end systems. I was unable to get off the start spot in the original.