Frost_Salamander

I wanted to internationalise The Hare in the Snare before I released it but I couldn't get the scripts to work and had some other questions as well. I posted about it Newbie Dark Radiant Questions and nobody replied, so I gave up. It being my first FM I didn't feel confident digging into it and just wanted to release the FM. I just got the impression that it wasn't a big deal and nobody cared about it. From memory, the script worked once but I needed to re-run it and just couldn't get it to work. It's also Perl which nobody really uses anymore. I think I recommended to a 'I want to help' person to convert it to Python, but that didn't go anywhere. I don't think you need the script though if you internationalise from the very beginning (i.e. create your own dictionaries). At the end of the day it's extra work for the mapper and if it adds too much overhead (i.e. is broken or is a PITA) then nobody is going to use it. https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Internationalization

A couple of things you can try (yes .ase files should work): I'm no expert with models, but do you have a field in the .ase file that looks something like this: *MATERIAL_NAME "textures\darkmod\plaster\plaster01" ? If the material name there isn't exactly as you specify in the skin it won't get replaced Check the console log in DarkRadiant to see if you have any errors when loading the skin. It's there in the 'console' tab.

Thanks for the feedback @Rio_Walker As mentioned in other comments in this thread, the optional objective was meant to be for players who enjoy exploring every inch of the map. If all you want to do is complete the mission via the primary objective it's pretty straightforward. It was also meant to be sort of 'open world' in that if you explore everywhere you pick up little hints and bits and pieces and put them together at the end to solve that objective with. It wasn't meant to spoon feed the player. But again maybe not everyone enjoyed that approach. It was also kind of a knee-jerk reaction to players not liking 'linear' missions. But it seems some people still do like that And yeah, some players don't like big maps. I get that. I don't like playing them myself a lot of the time The issue with the bow crash is a known issue (not just with this mission) which we haven't got to the bottom of unfortunately:

So the widow's diary literally says: and the panic thing:

HI @Rio_Walker thanks for playing!

Of course not AFAIK you can't have multiple values for a key, it would just overwrite the last value if you tried adding a new one.

Also don't forget if you use the location system it makes it easy to add EAX as well (especially using the presets): https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Setting_Reverb_Data_of_Rooms_(EAX)#Locations

Cool. Either way I've raised an issue for it: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6516

Darn - I was hoping you had somehow figured it out :-(. It's a bit weird that it doesn't work. The entity description even says: Think I'll raise a bug report - there doesn't seem to be anything in there about it now.

I think what @grodenglaive meant was it doesn't work if the 'lead AI' is the player. At least that's my experience as well. Have you managed to make that work?

If you can do this, I don't know how. But it's something I want as well and was actually going to raise it as a feature request. I think speakers are spherical so they model real sound which radiates from a source outwards. I find this doesn't work so well with some scenarios though: water. For example you want to hear the sound of waves lapping a shoreline or a running water sound for a stream, river or canal. If the shoreline or stream is on the longer side, you have to have a speaker with a huge radius to cover it and the sounds extends too far along perpendicular to the body of water. Or alternatively multiple speakers but then you have to manage overlap and it becomes a pain. wind. Same idea but vertical - if you have a long edge or balcony then you need a large radius speaker to cover it and it might extend too low so you hear wind noises on the ground. @Petike the Taffer If all you want is for a sound to fill a room, just use the location system ambients instead. But you can only have one sound I think, so you couldn't have say your ambient music and also a weather sound at the same time without using a speaker for one of them.

I'm not aware of DMAP caring about atdm:mover_multistate_positions. If it does that would be good to know about though, where did you see that? If you're not sure just try it maybe? I thought DMAP only cared about stuff created with worldspawn, materials changing, pathfinding and maybe location entities?

I wouldn't have thought it was a big deal to just use a script using atdm:target_callscriptfunction. You can change the spawnarg (using setKey()) with the script or you can make entities visible/invisible by calling Show() / Hide() on the entity. You could try this thing: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Atdm:target_postscriptevent to call Show/Hide. I tried it the other day because I didn't know about func_remove and it didn't work (see the note I left on that wiki page), but you could give it a try and see if it works.

I installed DR 3.0.0 (portable version) and I see what you see now, so it's something to do with DR: The change seems to have been introduced in 3.1.0 which I also tried: There were a bunch of sound shader-related fixes done in the 3.1.0 release: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/changelog_page.php?version_id=101 perhaps this one? https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/commit/541f2638c810588ada12e9a28360f16df6143d45#diff-104c4215e1bcd3ef19a7c943fec728649b1b0ba3bccf30600084b28dc1a8e67d @greebo

and it's not defined in the prefabs. I'm not sure how those spawnargs are getting there. It's not from inherited properties either. // entity 6 { "classname" "speaker" "name" "speaker_machine_stop2" "origin" "-17.25 22.75 66.25" "s_shader" "machine_noise08_loop" "s_waitfortrigger" "1" } <entity number="17"> <primitives/> <keyValues> <keyValue key="classname" value="speaker"/> <keyValue key="name" value="ernst_clock_ticking2"/> <keyValue key="origin" value="36.5 -41 76"/> <keyValue key="s_looping" value="1"/> <keyValue key="s_shader" value="clock_tick01_loop"/> <keyValue key="s_volume" value="-5"/> </keyValues>

Strange, they are definitely there for me. What version of DR do you have? I'm on 3.9.0 now but this was the same in 3.8.0...

The settings are on the speaker entities contained in the prefabs. Is that not what you meant? If not, could you change your auto-replace tool you showed in this post to print the name of the entity where the replace is happening? I forgot to say which speaker in the desk, but it's in the one for the clock ('ernst_clock_ticking2') I mentioned the speaker for the printing press, it's called speaker_machine_stop (or speaker_machine_stop2) Just open up DR, add those prefabs, click the speaker entities and look at the spawargs, they should be as I describe.

I just had a quick look at the usage in my missions: s_mindistance = 0 is set on some speakers used for weather sounds (e.g. wind), probably because it didn't make sense for that sound to fade. But I think setting both s_mindistance and s_maxdistance to the same value and also setting s_omni to '1' would probably have been a better way to do it. The prefab furniture/tables/desk3.pfbx (and desk3_old) has both s_mindistance and s_maxdistance set to 0 by default. I guess it is meant to be tweaked by the mapper and I didn't notice it. the prefab mechanical/machines/printing_press.pfb has a speaker called 'speaker_machine_stop' and both s_mindistance and s_maxdistance are set to 0 by default. Looks like I missed that one too.

Is it possible for the mapper to choose which comes first?

Yes I've noticed this as well - there is definitely a bug somewhere. It happened to me several times on my last FM and I had to keep fixing it.

Will DM you...

I feel I should add - due to my blunder with the volumetric lights shadows I didn't realize I that I was looking at soft shadows for maps instead of stencil when I was comparing them. After some more playing around I definitely see that soft shadows with stencil looks better. So I get what all the fuss is about now.

Sorry - my response was a long way of saying I'd be fine with going to maps only as a strategy. I voted option 1. But this is without understanding some things in your top post. What is an 'Alpha-tested shadow occluder' and how does it affect me as a mapper? What is an example of a translucent object that won't cast shadows?

Apologies, this is where I went wrong. It happened to be a volumetric light shadow I was looking at

I'm no graphics nerd, but I can barely tell the difference between the two. What I can tell from messing around a bit: soft shadows of low quality look like garbage with both maps and stencils (EDIT: wrong, I didn't realize I was looking at shadow maps for a volumetric light shadow. Stencil definitely looks better). increasing soft shadow quality decreases performance in both implementations. I think the CPU/GPU of the end user would influence which is gives better performance both maps and stencils can produce a pixelated shadow if you look close enough. (EDIT: wrong. Again, was looking at a volumetric light shadow). I tend to use maps, because for whatever reason I seem to get a few more FPS out of them. As a mapper, I am certainly NOT interested in endlessly tweaking a scene to make the shadows look perfect. I just don't care enough. If they look shockingly bad I will put some effort into it though (which will probably mean just disabling them for the offending entity). It's rare that I feel this is necessary though. So I guess I don't really get the argument that stencils are amazing and maps are crap. I just don't see it or am too dense to notice. (EDIT: indeed I was being dense. I was comparing shadow maps with shadow maps because I was looking at a volumetric light shadow). Also, in my last couple of missions I had graphical bugs that only showed up with stencil shadows enabled. It would be nice to not have to deal with that all the time.