ungoliant

ohhhh yeah. I'm thinking about entering, and if I do, its going to be some sort of big (albeit thin) ruin, and I'm going to "Uncharted" the evah living crap out of it.

I would like to participate in this contest, except that I don't know if I'll have internet access in 2 months, and more importantly, I'd have to learn the mysteries of building a skybox for the ideas floating in my head. put me down as a 'maybe'.

yeah, I'm seeing how this could work. Put a billboarded tree decal/particle/whatever and a model tree on top of eachother, one set to hide at xxxxx distance, and the other set to show at xxxxx distance. With a trick like that, either you could get more performance out of a mission like nhat 3/3, or you could set the portals further apart and/or set them to shut off at a farther distance.

aha!!! had problems with that one before. thats good to know. Also related, it should still show up on the entity list in the .map file, so you could delete it from there, right? you can do that?! what about adding more worldspawn to an existing func_static? is that possible too? for the longest time i have been converting / reverting everything to and from func_static to edit / add pieces. /derail

I'm guessing that this means that mappers will need to be careful of not grossly oversizing their visportals, because if a sound propagates from one of the edges thats like 10 feet inside a wall, the sound will still seem to be coming straight through the wall, instead of the doorway/window/etc. has anyone confirmed this??? I'm thinking especially in very tall areas with tall visportals, say 20 feet high, if the sound propagates from the center of the portal, then if you are on one side and a guard is right next to you on the other side of the portal, the sound will have to travel 10 feet straight up to the center of the portal, then 10 feet back down to get to you, even though you are standing 1 foot away from him. Similarly if the visportals are very wide.

that would be me, minus #6. as biker said, there have been some problems irl, but hopefully I can get situated, and see this FM through to the glorious end. I will be continuing to work on this FM as I can.

As I found out recently, it seems our own TDM crew sideskirted this problem simply by making objects that are picked up as transparent to AI, so they can see right through it. If its that simple to fix here in TDM, i very much doubt that it would be a big problem in dx3.

I thought the hard and fast rule was that you don't rotate light sources, as it makes a total mess of things, but instead just drag the center point and move it around. Does this not apply to spotlights then?

i definately prefer the leaktest method. extreme simpleness once you get the technique down. put entity #1 on one side of the visportal in question, and put a leak to the void on the other side, and let the pointfile do the work for you. edit: actually thinking about it, you probably need a door or window touching that visportal so that it is closed by default, otherwise the leak will go straight through. can someone confirm that?

I had this trouble too on my very first visportal until someone was kind enough to teach me how to check for leaks with entity #1. I guess if you put a visportal inside of a single visleaf (like if the 2 areas you are trying to separate are joined together by another spot other than your visportal), and that visportal doesn't actually divide the visleaf in 2, it gets... optimized out..? or something? i dunno, when my area leaked, my visportal would not show up with r_showportals 1 either, until i fixed the leak, and finally had 2 distinct areas that the visportal would separate, and then suddenly the visportal showed up and worked.

if the spotlight is at almost any sort of weird angle at all, aggravation will surely ensue. It took me 45 minutes to set up 2 spotlights looking up at an angle and look fairly decent.

/agree with sherlock holmes. At some point in the movie I stopped paying attention to the story, and just concentrated on visualizing the scenery in TDM FM's.

this has nothing to do with tdm 1.02, all it means is that your computer was unable to reach the ID server that does keychecks. Usually this happens when your internet connection isn't working.

regarding voice acting: Would it be possible that we could wikify a list of the current TDM voice actors with contact information (with their permission) so that mappers could PM/email them about creating custom conversations for the voice acting sets they have already done?

yeah I was going to suggest this when i read the thread name. I think I remember this being known as static casting from my computer science student days.

well around here, orders don't exactly come "from the top" when it comes to new TDM resources. You can make what you like and submit it to the TDM team, or you can take suggestions from mappers on what they need (there is a Community Requests thread in the TDM Editors Guild, you might post there that you are looking to take requests), and hand it over to them for direct use in their map (this does not guarantee that the model will be accepted and put into a new TDM release). Mappers like myself tend to take whatever they can get, but to get something put in an official TDM release, it does have to be run by the team. I'll get you started. IMHO, and I'm not on the TDM team, we are lacking in official TDM released gargoyle models. Theres basically like, 2. Make a really sweet gothic style gargoyle (try to keep the poly count down or it'll probably get rejected no matter how gorgeous it is) and submit it to the team, and see what they have to say. If you want to get real fancy, you might try to dazzle our team by creating a female AI model which we are in SEVERE lack of, (I noticed you have a custom created NPC of some kind in your video). You'd likely want to consult the wiki for more information on that one.

so i finally booted up Awaiting the Storm to play it, (first time playing an FM since 1.02) and made a strange discovery. My mousewheel is now dysfunctional. Very odd behavior. Both mwheel up and down are set to scroll up and down weapons. When I have no weapons equipped, neither button works. If I manually select a weapon, I can scroll DOWN through weapons with mwheel down until i get to blackjack, and then the next click will deselect all weapons, and won't recycle from the top. If I manually select any weapon and then use mwheel up, my weapon is unequipped, no matter which one i'm equipped with. When using the TDM main menu to set bindings, both buttons will assign bindings perfectly. I thought maybe this might be an FM specific bug, so I reinstalled Return To The City, and ran it. Exact same behavior. Any clues on this???? (Outside of TDM the mousewheel functions perfectly)

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html now THAT is a dragon.

The last SS fits TDM styling very nicely, minus the lights on the ceiling. And everything else looks really good in that video. This is cool. Hope you stay with us. The more the merrier!

I'd support this idea for beginning mappers who just need to get something accomplished, and learn the more difficult aspects of FM creation. But generally I want to see TDM FM's really shine with amazing plots and storytelling, intriguing secrets and puzzles, and of course beautiful architecture, with long playtimes. I don't think the TDM team should have put in 5 years of work so that experienced mappers can be lazy and put out mediocre FM's because 'anything in TDM looks good'. I want epicness!!

there are more cool surprises than just the cathedral

very niiice. From a TDM universe standpoint, I think there may not be enough metal surfaces for a cathedral. I might suggest some of the more round tubish parts of the pillars and trim be converted to a dark solid metal surface for structural support as opposed to the lighter colored blocks, and it also would add some contrast to the majestic view. Overall this looks gorgeous. I think if I was playing through this FM, I'd get caught by the builder guards if for no other reason than that I stopped to gawk at the view for 5 minutes.