Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

SuaveSteve

Member
  • Posts

    96
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by SuaveSteve

  1. It would be nice if the game did not pass the lockpick sounds through the EFX. You can learn to accept that the guards can't hear the lockpicking, but when you hear it echoing across an entire courtyard, you are asking the player to learn an additional level of handwaving.

    Have you considered a non-diegetic light for these doors (see attachment)? Even at 1.3 gamma, they are extremely dark and hard to spot.

    nhat3_2021-09-22_22.36.54.jpg

    • Like 1
  2. Two things jumped out at me when bikerdude's Dragon's Claw was recently updated.

    The in-game downloader really needs to show the 'last updated' date for a mission, gives the user better confidence if they've heard there's been an update.

    This thing with versions seems to clash with authors. Some authors use their own scheme. Some defer to the numbers the system uses. Okay, why don't we relabel "version" in the downloader to 'release #'. Authors may provide their own custom version string if they want and that can be shown if added.

    • Like 2
  3. Played this last night. Fun little mission.

    None of your beta testers corrected the English? "But one must not let such a tiny fallback hinder one’s progress." fallback -> setback ?

    I felt like a kid in a candy store just taking all this stuff, it was a bit too easy. Maybe an alarm system that I needed to disable for some of the items on display would have made it more believable. The owner seemed to be relying on "security through obscurity" but you can only take that so far.

    I look forward to more missions from you!

    • Like 1
  4. Seeing 16-bit colour in the 2.08 beta made think of the retro aesthetic some games are going for, like Gloomwood. What would Darkmod with a retro aesthetic look like?

     

    stlucia_2020-06-29_02_31.33_low.thumb.jpg.3baf9ba942d9b69bc4a1f02a8649b00d.jpg

     

    Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/jqt2trc

    I used these settings (and one shot with low res for comparison,😞

    seta image_downSize "1"
    seta image_downSizeLimit "64"
    
    seta image_downSizeBump "1"
    seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "64"
    
    seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"
    seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "64"
    
    seta image_filter "GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST"
    
    seta r_fboColorBits "16"


    These don't look half-bad and I wonder how much work taking this to fruition would entail? It seems the textures just need to be rescaled consistently and objects and models need to be made more low-poly. Could r_fboColorBits support 8?

    Maybe I got rose-tinted glasses on but I just think it would be cool :D

     

     

    • Like 1
  5. I think there's two sounds that always seem to be much louder than the rest, the pause menu music (pressing esc while in mission) and the new objective sound.

    Now, you may argue that they've been normalised (which I doubt) but regardless of that, dark mod is a very quite game. That means that any sudden sound is louder from a psychological point of view. You are tiptoeing quietly in a mansion, you pickup the royal sponge then you hear DUNG! DUNG! DUNNNNNG! It reminds of that time I put my volume up to hear Raoul's performance in Song Of The Caverns only to get blown away by the objective sound 😆

    As for the pause menu music, I've never heard ambient music in a mission louder than it, it's always louder.

    I know some are going to disagree and say I'm nitpicking. But CVARs for these would be nice :)

    • Like 1
  6. I feel like Thief got away with not having to worry about this cause the guards are much more blind than in TDM. So the ambient light can be much higher.

     

    On 4/26/2020 at 1:04 AM, SuaveSteve said:

    Surprised this hasn't been talked about before.

    ...but it's just something to make the dark insufferable.

     

     

    Also, I meant sufferable 😁

     

    Now that I think about it, is it possible to have the lightgem ignore certain light sources? I suppose that would require rendering two of you and would be much slower.

  7. Surprised this hasn't been talked about before.

    Some mission authors attach a weak blue light to the player to help them see in dark and not have to make the ambient light too bright.

    But, why not experiment with changing the exposure depending on the level of light on the screen? You should have difficulty in being able to see what's in a dark spot if you're in a well lit room. But in the dark, your eyes should be better at seeing what's in the dark.

    We don't have to go nuts with adjusting exposure in large amounts like modern AAA games do, but it's just something to make the dark insufferable.

     

    • Like 1
  8. This was an enjoyable and great mission. I can see how much attention to detail you poured in. Great lighting.

    That secret area behind the book shelf was awesome!

    The guard walking in the water but still hearing me if I made a noise by the loud machines made me wish DM had a sound masking feature that mappers could easily make use of.

     

    Spoiler

     

    It's not obvious what is happening as you press the Door Ctrl. button in the waterworks, there is no feedback. If the player doesn't see something when they press a button, they'll probably assume nothing happened.

    Lots of frobbale but useless scrolls.

    Some useless doors still have door handles.

     

     

     

  9. This is great! I had a lot of fun.

    Expert, 1624 / 1886.

    Did all objectives, I hope :)

    Issues

    Spoiler

    Very obvious pop-in with the trees by the snowman.

    I went immediately over the fence on exiting my place, missing the snowballs right there and picking up others later. Maybe the "use key" hint shouldn't be tied to those particular snowballs and "dousing lights and distraction" hints can follow after.

    Surprised you didn't add the "flying loot on pickup," Goldwell.

    Where's the's Pat's black and white cat :)

    This looks wrong: image

     

     

  10. It's going to take a bit of work, but I'll explain how I would approach and solve this.

    First, you are going to need to know some basic Windows command line knowledge and batch scripting. This is so that you are able to mix and match the various command line tools out there to do what you want and automate it at the same time.

    Google is your friend, but here's some jumping off points:

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-prompt-introduction/

    https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~r92092/ref/win32/win32scripting.html

    You can reuse the knowledge elsewhere, it's very powerful. You do not have to achieve expert status, just be comfortable enough to execute commands and manipulate their output. Think "I want to convert all the PNGs in this folder to jpeg, but also crop and sharpen them".

    Once you're comfortable with that. There's a number of tools to solve your problem.

    You are basically wanting to identify text on the page, so that you can see where it is not (the margins). Tesseract is an open source solution for OCR.

    https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/FAQ

    Once you you identify the bounds of the text, you can thing use another tool to do the cropping.

    https://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php

    Oh, and I suppose your PDFs are full of just images, you can use another tool (like Apache's PDFBox) to extract them (to do the above mentioned) and perhaps make a new PDF if you want.

    https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/commandline.html#extractimages

    It might not be clear how you can connect these, but learning the basic scripting knowledge will make it clear.

    Good luck.

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...