grayman

I have a slow computer, so everything will be slow for me regardless of what you do.

Is this why I don't see any text next to icons when loading a saved game? Or is there some other aspect of the game that's missing a font that my newbieness doesn't recognize.

A comment regarding the white flasks ...

Well, so far it looks like I didn't blow the thing up at the last minute. Today will be the first day since early February that I will not open DR and work on a map. Nope, not today. Taking today off. Yup, need a rest. Wait a minute. I hear something calling me ...

I took care of the TTLG notice. But someone ought to double-check it to make sure I did it correctly. Thanks.

Woo-hoo! Done! A new version is now available, v1.1. Thanks to all who commented on the first version. Thanks to my beta testers: Bikerdude HappyCheeze Xarg The Story: The Builders have "lost" a lightning-attracting artifact. And they want you to find it. In a thunderstorm, no less. But there's more to this theft than meets the eye. Enjoy!

I'll do that. But I may have jumped the gun. I went back and checked, and though my intent had been to make the diamond not appear on EASY, I neglected to do so. So the problem might be mine, and not the engine's. But I'll double-check.

I thought I was facing some big visportal/architecture glitch, but it turned out to be simple. My map is so tall that I outran the default ambient light size. I'm moving it to the center of the map vertically and that should solve the shadow problem. I don't know why it didn't show up until I re-DL'ed TDM. Jeesh. Back on track to try to deliver tonight.

It looks like loot reported on the statistics screen doesn't care about Easy/Medium/Hard. I have a piece of loot that doesn't show up on Easy (on purpose), but it appears in the loot total. This will make a player think that he missed something, when it was never in the game. Bug?

Well, Murphy's Law hit me hard tonight. I was doing my final runthrough, and encountered a problem that 2 of my 3 beta testers saw, but which didn't show up on either of my 2 computers, so I couldn't fix it. I had to grab a fresh DL of TDM for one of the computers, and lo and behold, there's the problem. The clock area (which I posted a screenshot of a few weeks back) has incurred a blackness in its upper half that is unacceptable. I now have to take the time to try and fix this, and I don't know how long it will take, since there are no visportals in sync with the blackness, and I don't have any manually-resized models in this room. It shows up on only one of my computers. Maybe I'll DL a fresh TDM onto the other one and see if it turns up. Sorry. I'm disappointed about this; I wanted to submit on time and couldn't do it, and now this crap happens at the last minute. I'll submit when I can.

I thought about it a bit more, and--though it's misleading--I think it only applies to NEGATIVE objectives. Don't kill, don't alert, etc. At the start, you haven't killed anybody, and you haven't alerted anybody, so those kinds of objectives should be marked "Satisfied at start". The more general interpretation--an objective is satisfied (which is how I read it)--is ignored for POSITIVE objectives. I was trying to use this for forcing satisfied objectives near the end of a map w/o having to start at the beginning each test run. What I decided to do instead was to create a temporary entity (I forget what it's called) to mark objectives "satisfied", and trigger it at the start of the test run. Remove it for the final release.

I assume that any visible objectives marked "Satisfied at start" would show up as checked on the objectives screen when starting a map. Is this not the case? I'm not seeing checkmarks. Thanks.

I'll need an extra day. All the beta feedback is dealt with, but I'm trying to polish the final cutscene. I don't think that will be done tonight. I'll finish that tomorrow early, do final run-throughs, and submit later in the day.

Mimics.

Jeesh, I hope you're not disappointed ... So far so good, though, from the esteemed beta testers.

Thanks to Xarg, Bikerdude, and HappyCheeze. I've PM'ed you with the link.

Okay, I'm more than finished with my vert contest entry. Complete. Zip left to do. (Well, not really. I'm planning a wrap-up cutscene, but that won't affect testing.) How's about a couple beta testers to guide me through the remaining days? This is a bit under 10M. Anyone have a place I can park it for download? Otherwise I can email it. Thanks.

I searched and the *.cm was nowhere to be found. The *.proc and *.aas32 files were correctly timestamped. This was on my laptop. I copied everything back to my desktop and a subsequent delete and dmap created all the necessary files, including *.cm. Not sure what happened.

I'm working on packaging my vert map. I noticed that if I delete my *.cm file, it's not recreated when I execute dmap. Since this makes no sense (I've got tons of *.cm files from previous builds), is there something I need to do to force the creation of a *.cm file? Thanks.

Working on the briefing now, and that's the last bit to go in. A couple last rounds of testing, and I should be ready to enter beta Sunday night. If beta testing doesn't reveal anything nasty, I should be ready by Thursday.

The Readables Editor crashes on my desktop computer (WinXP), but works just fine on my laptop (x64 Vista) w/o me having to tweak anything. With Greebo's help, I debugged the desktop problem to a crash in the OpenGL libraries. I didn't research beyond that point, since I can still create readables by hand or on the laptop.

Sometimes mapping can be tedious and frustrating for me, but I thought I'd note something that got me laughing yesterday. I'm trying to make a cutscene for the end of my vert map, and in order to hear the actors' dialogue, the player needs to be close enough to hear. So I'm teleporting him in from somewhere else and placing him right behind the actors. Now, one of the actors walks into the scene from behind the player to join the first actor before the dialogue begins. I've been putting these actors on team 0 just out of habit during development. The player becomes invisible when the camera takes over, so even though he's in the frame, you can't see him. So I'm fiddling with the walk-on actor's model, and on one take I forgot to put him on team 0. Scene starts, camera focused on the actor who's already in the scene, and I can hear the footsteps of the walk-on actor. All of a sudden, the walk-on actor comes into frame and starts beating the crap out of the invisible player, shouting all sorts of things. Completely unexpected, and it got me laughing for a while.

Okay, I'm done with searching. How do you record a TDM demo and convert it to an avi? I've tried the recorddemo/aviDemo route and my attempts at aviDemo abort quickly with no results. I'm missing some key piece of information. Thanks. -------------------------------------- Nevermind. I wasn't doing the recorddemo side of things correctly.

That works. However, if you select the Nodraw box that's drawn around the spline origin, DR shows the entity size as larger numbers that appear to be related to the spline point locations. I'll bet that if you have a spline near the origin, these numbers are small, and that they get larger the farther away you get from the origin. Looks like a minor DR bug. Thanks! Now I can scrap Plan B.

The origin of my splines includes a nice black box in game, about 16x16x16. Is it just my computer, or do others see these as well? I can see these in NHAT 1 (Politics), which starts out with two cameras following splines. The boxes are up off the ground, and it's not so easy to see them against the night sky. But they're a royal pain indoors. Before I move the splines offstage to their own blue rooms, is there some reason this is occurring? Thanks.