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Destined

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Posts posted by Destined

  1. This is exactly why I asked. I undesrstand the hesitation of changing existing entities, especially if you may have more than one of them in your map and the changed properties may not be suitable for all. For this, you have spawnargs that can be changed in DR (which I assume is what you meant with "but I feel mission authors should have to modify builtin stuff as little as possible. Thankfully this is usually the case already"). The player entity is a special case, because (as far as I know) it cannot be changed in DR. However, there is only one instance on the map, so any changes can only affect this one entity. And as you pointed out, on important advantage of changing the def-file in this case is, that creating a new entity may require you to change other references.

    Regarding your suggestion of overriding defs. The way you suggested cannot work, because you create a loop in the definition, in which the definition targets itself. And if you want to change the definition and keep the name, anyway, why use this intermediate step and not simply change the original definition in your map? I cannot see, why your way is norably different from it. Also, the way TDM handles def files is exactly designed in a way to support modification by map authors, with def-files in FM folders taking precedent over core def-files. This way you can change anything you want without affecting/compromising the core files. If you notice a crash or have any unwanted effects, you can simply delete the def-file in the FM folder and revert any definitions to their original form.

    • Like 1
  2. On 7/12/2021 at 7:06 PM, joebarnin said:

    Never mind, I figured out a better way. In a .def file, define a custom 'player' that inherits from the default and includes the custom responses. Something like:

    entityDef my_player_thief
    {
        "inherit"                            "atdm:player_thief"
        // add custom responses
        "sr_class_5"                    "R"
        "sr_type_5"                        "1000"
    	...

    Then, on any worldspawn, define a spawnarg, "player_classname", with a value of your custom player entity (in this case, "my_player_thief"). When TDM starts it looks for that spawnarg on the worldspawn, and spawns that entity instead of the default one. Since my_player_thief inherits from atdm:player_thief, it behaves just like the default player, except for the changes you add/override.

    Why are you opposed to changing the player's definition? As long as you have your def-file in the FM-folder it will not affect anything other than the FM itself. If I understand your workaround correctly, you are also creating a player entitiy that inherits its properties from the original. I cannot really see any benefit. You only have an additional step.

  3. 5 hours ago, Springheel said:

    How was it established that the increased aggression was "caused by speeches" as opposed to other factors?

    I've already pointed out how that exact same argument is used all the time to ban things:  "Violent video games may not directly incite school shootings.  But the bloodlust created by these violent, murderous games leads to increased aggression and violence in our youth, and school shootings have gone up ever since these violent games were released.  Therefore violent video games should be illegal."  If you're going to accept that argument for hate speech laws, you'd have to accept it for violent video games/movies, role-playing games, most forms of music, comic books, etc. 

    In the video, a politician was speaking out against immigrants and soon after people that had a clear connection to his party were acting out against immigrants, even naming the politician while doing so. I would say that there is a clear correlation, which cannot be made between violence and video games. Sure there are other factors that contribute to these situations. Maybe the person in question was beaten up by an immigrant one time, maybe he was stolen from and blames them or had other resentments to begin with. Still, the speeches of said politician incited him to act violently against immigrants. It may be that he would have done that at some point anyway, but the speech seems to have given him confirmation that what he is doing was right. I agree that the speech in itself was not the sole reason, but it contributed and may have given the final impulse he needed.

    What I am trying to say is that the right rhetoric can create an atmosphere in which violence against a singled out group is perceived as "not bad" or "acceptable" and humans tend to target their aggression, frustration etc. somewhere. So the aggression against these singled out groups is a welcome target for them to vent. It is very likely that this would have been targeted at someone else (their wife, a competing sports club, maybe even themselves), but being given a pointer they choose the singeld out group.

    The main problem I see in this discussion is exactly what you already pointed out: we are missing a clear definition of what "hate speech" entails. Is using the wrong preferred pronoun hate speech? Is insulting people? Is blaming the economic collapse on immigrants? Without a clear definition, I believe that this discussion is rather pointless, because people might simply talk past one another. And of course without a clear definition of "hate speech", we cannot define what the effect a law against them should have.

    • Like 1
  4. 10 hours ago, peter_spy said:

    I meant an Ignore function on a thread level, not just single posts. I check forums using the Activity tab, because that's the fastest way to see all the recent posts. Right now all posts are from the taliban thread which I'm really not interested in but have to navigate through, to see TDM related stuff.

    Ah, ok. I do not use this function and can see why this is annoying.

    • Like 1
  5. 6 hours ago, Springheel said:

    I don't want to get into the specifics of any particular politician or political party, as that video does, since I'm not familiar enough with the politics of Italy.

    As for directly inciting violence, I've already pointed out that this is already illegal in North America.  So is actual violence.

    So again, I'm still left without an answer to the question "What does it protect against that isn't already covered by other laws?"

    The point is that the violence was not directly incited. The fearmongering and badmouthing led to increased aggression and violence against certain groups (in this case immigrants). That this violence was tolerated is, of course, another point, but the aggression itself was caused by speeches that were allowed.

    • Like 1
  6. Not sure what you mean. I ignore a lot of threads (e.g. any that deal with Linux problems). When I check the forum, I open the threads I am interested in and afterwards hit "Mark forum as read". It is no "ignore these topics in general", but it also does not require much effort...

  7. 22 minutes ago, Springheel said:
     

     

    The original question was " What does it protect against that isn't already covered by other laws?"

    This response still doesn't provide an answer.  Protection from the majority doing what??

     

    I think this question was answered with Zerg Rush's post/video: Violently persecuting minorities after being incited by politicians or toher people through scaremongering. As discussed largely in this thread, the definition of "hate speech" is very vague, but it cannot be denied that there is rheotric that can encite the masses to violence against (mainly minority) people.

  8. While I do not really disagree with your notion, I have to give Kurshok that this is the Off-topic part of the forum, so it does not really matter if the forum in general is dedicated to Thief/TDM/gaming. It is his choice to bring up this stuff on this forum and it is the choice of anyone else to engage in these topics. If they don't interest you, you are free to ignore them. Or to use a more "common" term (not meant as an attack against Kurshok): "Don't feed the troll." If noone will answer to the topic, it will simply die without any answer. If this happens often enough, he will most likely see that noone will engage in these topics and finally stop posting. If people do care about the same topics, he will have a conversation about it. In both cases, it does not really matter for you, if you ignore the post.

    • Like 1
  9.  

    1 hour ago, Kurshok said:

    Criticism of religion isn't hate speech. If I were calling for the extermination of all Muslims, that would count as hate speech. All I'm saying is that Islam is fundamentally flawed and that organized Islam is a plague on the human race in regards to human rights abuses and the silencing of dissent and human rights via acts of organized murder and terrorism, and that non-Islamic countries of the world need to reject the endless excuses the Islamic communities of the world vomit forth, take a critical look at Islam and Muhammad, and set to work dismantling the power of Islam in the political world. No more setting up "community within a community" where daughters and wives are beaten and murdered for apostasy or refusal of wearing a veil, no more endlessly demonizing people who speak out against the hateful beliefs of Islam. Islam needs to be bitch-slapped into the 21st century and forced to endure the same criticisms and reforms other religions have been made to go through. If Islam is unable to survive being held to the same standards as other religions, such as not being allowed to execute apostates, then that's tough titty.

    If you say it like that, I would agree that it is rather critisism and not hate speech. As I said before for these topics it is a fine line between the two. And while I agree that the atrocities you brought up are definitely backwards and not tolerable from western, liberal standards, the main problem in this case is that you cannot simply "make religions go through" reforms. In my opinion, the only way Islam could be more tempered would be, if you were able to convince their authority figures to accept human rights and tell their followers to do so as well. As you said, this would require a (re-)education of at least a couple of generations and will not be possible for a long while, if at all. At the same time, an intervention from outside would only strengthen the resolve of extremists and create martyrs for them. So a "proper American intervention" as you put it, would not only be useless, but rather counterproductive. Invasions have never helped to crush beliefs. Rather it forced believers to practice their belief in secret and fight against the oppressors.

     

    • Like 1
  10. 7 hours ago, Kurshok said:

    I didn't say all muslims are pigshit. I said their belief systems are. Its primitive nonsense that makes people who would otherwise be good and compassionate into brainwashed stooges of a long-dead warlord, willing to disown their own daughters for refusing to dress in a body bag or kill their own children for being an apostate in a so-called honour killing. Yes, not every muslim is an extremist, but society's current "live and let live" attitude towards letting Muslims deal with their own society-within-a-society is resulting in people being harassed and even worse. Lest we forget the child grooming gangs of the UK, where the police were afraid to stop the rape of actual children for fear of angry Muslims starting a race riot.

    Your exact words were "Sunni or Shiite, they're all a load of pigshit for praising a child-molesting, mass murdering, borderline retarded warlord like Muhammad." This is targeted at muslims, not their belief system. You give their belief system as a reason, why you target them, but the statement stands. As I said, around these topics, it is very important to be precise with your statements.

    Regarding the "is this hate speech" question: you can dislike and criticise the religion and acts done in its name all you want. That is, in my opinion, even very welcome. However, a statement like "I'd support sending troops in to slit their throats like the fucking Islamofascist pigs they are." is an invitation for violence and thus is hate speech. As I said: I would not shut this thread down (and in contrast to peter_spy find stuff like that worth discussing, this being the "off-topic" section, which explicitly states "You can post almost anything in here"), given that it actually stays an objective discussion (as far as this is possible) and not turns into another platform for hate speech and persecution.

    • Like 3
  11. 27 minutes ago, Kurshok said:

    For what reason? Because I am critical of Muhammad? None of what I said about the man is a lie. I have the freedom of speech to criticize a man who commits such atrocities as he did, no matter if he uses the excuse of being handpicked by "Allah" to do so. The silencing and censoring of those who criticize Muhammad and Islam is no different than the silencing and censoring of those who spoke against the cruel actions of the Catholic Church in the years of the Inquisition, when stating basic facts like "The world is round" and "The Earth orbits the sun" could get you marked as a heretic.

    I would say calling all muslims "a load of pigshit" is a form of hate speech. I agree that you should be able to critice Muhammad as a person and the things you mentioned that he did, but you should watch how you do it. Unfortunately, the border between hate speech and critisism can be very slim, especially in discussions about religion. In general, you can assume that any swear words or insults will not furhter your argument and will not fall under "freedom of speech", but will also lead to accusations of hate speech.

     

  12. 11 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

    Street lamps aren't visible from too far away, I've kept the area cramped enough to have efficient portaling. I was just thinking that if I could turn lights off based on distance I could improve performance even further, without too much detail being lost and becoming visually annoying. If this isn't possible yet I can skip that optimization, though I could have sworn I once read about LOD for lights being implemented or someone told me they were very long ago.

    This could be achieved with location settings. You could use a script that turns off lights, when you leave the location and turn it back on, when entering. However, this requires a lot to set up (if you don't use the location system already) and planning to get set the locations in a way that the player does not see the lights go out and back on. But it would at least be an option.

  13. If the contents of the ending text file are created during the mission, it might be possible to achieve, what you want. You could take a look at the expanding journal/diary that @Obsttorte made. Maybe this can be transferred to gradually create the contents of your ending file. This way the gui always accesses the same file, but the content is modified according to your needs, which would at least circumvent the requirement of the GUI accessing different files.

  14. 4 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

    In the meantime I have another question, also related to objectives. How do you make an objective become visible after the player reads the last page of a note? The problem here is that to make an objective visible you must trigger an atdm:target_setobjective_visibility entity... how do you make a readable trigger a target once the player finished reading it?

    According to the objectives wiki, there is the option that the player has to reach a certain page in a readable for the obective to be fulfilled (see "readable_page_reached"). If you use the "Completion Target" line in a hidden objective to target a "atdm:target_setobjective_visibility"-entitiy you should be able to activeate the entity as soon as the page in question is reached.

  15. You could also try to set the "type" spawnarg manually. If it is already usable, but the type spawnarg is missing, then this might work. However, as joebarnin noticed, with the "Specifier Argument Type Expected: int" it seems to require an integer, which contradicts the use of different AI types. You could also try to set the "type" spawnarg to "1" and see if this lets you mark AI that count towards this objective.

  16. 2 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

    Screenshot_20210614_153904.thumb.jpg.01bfd4b6b23d58639200a286d84fa44b.jpg

    I was thinking of creating a horizontal portal covering the entire area who's face touches against the top of the bottom-most brush, then portaling multiple small areas against the sides of the same brush: This way the top half would be one portal while lower zones would be divided. I might be able to find a better way though... if not I'll just limit the detail I have outside in a worst case scenario.

    Ah, the T-shape comes from a horizontal portal laying on top of vertical ones. In this case, it can actually make sense. E.g. when the player steps on one of the balconies, a horizontal portal above would cull the statues above it and one below could cull stuff on the ground from certain views. Here it would make sense to have a couple of smaller ones, so they open subsequently, when you also have other sealing geometry on the ground. This way at least some of the stuff is culled, depending on how far onto the balcony the player steps. I am not sure, if the oval towers are a problem for horizintal portals, however. On the other hand (at least from the balconies) a large vertical portal would be sufficient, as they are not in view at that time, anyway.

    In general, keep in mind, what OrbWeaver said: consider lines of sight and how portals would affect them.

  17. I assumed as much, but as HMart pointed out, this will make the purple portal completely useless. It makes mor sense to create two portals instead, each one touching one of the brushes left and right of the blue portal. That way, either the right part or the left part is culled, depending on where you stand. With the T-shaped setup neither is. Do you have a more precise scheme of what you want to portal? This could help to understand, why you would try this setup.

  18. 8 hours ago, joebarnin said:

    Is there a script call that will tell me if an entity is in the player's inventory? Or, a call that enumerates all of the items in the inventory? getNextInvItem() isn't appropriate, as it actually modifies which inventory item is active to the player.

    Not sure if this is possible directly, but you could use a hidden objective to change state or a script with a variable, when the player picks up the item, and have a script check the state of the objective or the variable. If the item is droppable, it would have to be reversible, of course.

    • Thanks 1
  19. 10 hours ago, Dragofer said:

    You can quickly isolate your current selection by pressing I to invert the selection and H to hide.

     

    You can click the middle mouse button in Orthoview to take the camera view to that position. (Problem though: 3rd axis is often way off for me)

    The first can also be achieved with Ctrl+Shift+H, so there is not need to invert the selection.

    Refarding the second: In my case middle mouse button lets you rotate the camera. Moving is Ctrl+MMB. But I am still on version 2.6.0 (maybe I should update 😅), so the standard setting might have changed. Anyway, you can fix the 3rd axis on another Orthoview window that contains this axis.

  20. 11 hours ago, peter_spy said:

    IMO it's kinda like trying to have a cake and eat it too. By analogy, are there any tools for writers that would like "just to tell a story" without becoming good writers? Even phrasing a question this way feels weird to me (maybe because I belong to the first of the aforementioned camps). I mean sure, there's spellchecker and thesaurus, but none of that will make you a good writer by default. Same goes for level design, you got debugging tools for technical stuff, but that's it. There's no magic trick, this stuff is hard. And perhaps, if you just want to tell a story, why not focus on writing something instead of creating a map?

    To keep with your analogy: If you want to become a good writer, you have to practice writing. The same goes for mapping. Only by doing it, can you improve. Consequently, the first works will be worse than later ones, but they might still be worthwhile. And if some tools help to improve it and make a bad to mediocre experience mediocre to good, I see no reason, why it should not be done.

    11 hours ago, peter_spy said:

    As a player, sure, I can just switch it off. As a designer, I know how to make objects so they look valuable or more interesting than the background, and I can teach players to recognize them. So instead of adding yet another item to the list of things players would have to change for the "intended experience", I might as well "fork" the 2.08 and distribute the whole thing as standalone package.

    In general, I agree. However (as you know from experience) creating new objects is very time consuming and maybe a good mapper is bad at 3D modelling and does not have the time to learn this as well. And as you also know there are very few people on this board that can help out with creating new assets and they usually already have several requests. Consequenty, the mapper would have to rely on existing assets, which (as mentioned before) come from several different sources and styles and may be difficult to distinguish. If you have the time and ability to create new assets, you are welcome to do so and I am sure the mod would benefit from you making them accessible and maybe even may make this shader superfluous in the long run, but from a "right now" perspective, it would help players to more easily recognise loot, when they are in range to frob it. I don't really understand how this can destroy the "intended experience" in a way that is severe enought to create a fork that excludes this feature.

    • Like 1
  21. 10 hours ago, peter_spy said:

    That's a good question.

    I think that on one end, there are people who are naturally curious and research their hobby as much as they can, because it's what makes them tick. On the other, there are those who just want to have fun, and talk with friends who are interested in the same subject. No group is really better than the other; there's no obligation to "git gud" at level design. It's your hobby, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can post tutorials, point out to knowledge bases, something like we have here for example:

    But otherwise I don't think you can force anything.

    That is exaclty the point here. If a mapper just wanted to realise a story, they had in mind and have not taught themselves the intricacies of level design, bad design may be alleviated by this new frob shader.

    And why would this feature being on by default be a reason to stick with 2.08? You could just turn it off, if it does not suit you.

  22. I would prefer such an information better somewhere else than in the briefing video. For me the video helps to "get in the mood" of immersing myself and such a disclaimer at the end would disturb that. Even at the beginning, I would either immediately or after the video have to check my settings, which also disturbs the mood. A seperate info (e.g. in the level description) would be better, although I am aware that it is easily missed that way.

    • Like 2
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