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The Wheezing Geyser

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  1. Perhaps a rating system modeled after that of the Roman Catholic Church's Legion of Decency? That's the coolest system because not even a Roman Catholic abides by it. It isn't in human nature. I think the "language and blood" in TDM is mostly humorous. Can't erase it without erasing the game. Try to imagine TDM without taverns and drunken blither. I like that TDM missions tend to have depth and there's a zillion ways to play them.
  2. There are games like "Hitman" that I will not play, and videos like "American Sniper" that I will not watch. I will not go down that rabbit hole. I recoil from the insanity. But TDM isnt like this, so I don't see the problem.
  3. Hey, Outlooker, you're just a wall of nonsense words, having nothing whatever to do to with TDM. You have to take care of your shit, man.
  4. I'd put that down to a failure in imagination. Not to say that the idea isn't breathtaking. "Humanity" seeking new outposts in the Andromeda Galaxy, having somehow already used up the Milky Way, and now building "settlements" to infinity, fighting alien bad guys. A person doesn't even have to think, it's so banal.
  5. Sotha: "Interestingly, it will work only if the player_clip brush has "hide 0" on it. Now the player_clip func_static is solid. When it is targeted, it becomes non-solid. When it is targeted, it becomes solid again. If I put "hide 1" on it, then it never works, as it never existed. Targeting it has no effect. So make sure the "hide 0" is on first, then target it so that it is in the state you want it to be initially, and then use it as desired." A general idea that could be used in many situations is where there's a textured face over an area where the texture is switched on/off, a visportal is switched on/off, and a clip brush is switched on/off. The applications are limitless. In my experiments the on/off toggling of texture visibility and func_visportal opening/closing is straightforward and the start on/off behavior is decidable in DR. But Sotha explains that the blocking action of the clip entity has to be "hide 0" at start, which means that the clipping is "on" at start, always, and this might not be in sync with how one wants the multi-entity thing to first operate. So one can override this start-on behavior by putting a trigger-once targeted at it, perhaps at player start or wherever.
  6. Neonstyle, perhaps using one or two cinematics could work, since you want to stop the player from actively interfering, sneaking thru' a door when the AI is entering and mucking everything up. Something like: the door is locked to the player throughout the game until the AI opens it, but before the AI opens it there's a cutscene where the AI walks up to it and enters, closes it and there's the start of a loud intriguing audio, after which control is given back to the player who can open the door and sneak in and see what the commotion is about. Otherwise the player can come up close and badger the AI in infinite ways, trying to sneak in and if you put blocking entities up to frustrate those attempts it might be less immersive.
  7. I wasn't complaining, people. I wasn't demanding anything.I praised a scene in King of Diamonds and explained why the scene worked so well, from an immersed player's perspective. I said what I had naively thought at the time, when playing through the scene, that it was normal, so hadn't realized that it required special intervention beyond the inbuilt capabilities of DR. I said that there was multi layered complexity in TDM editing, and that the work is daunting.
  8. Dragofer, yes, I regularly use google and there's a ton of info collected in various forum posts going back years. There's very little info I'm in a rush for and I imagine if I ever do succeed in finishing a FM it'll take at least a year. If I can't figure something out for myself, with the aid of google and the wikis, I think I'll just drop it.
  9. Obsttorte, I wasn't complaining and demanding. I was making an observation, is all.
  10. In my recent playthrough of TDM I KO'ed two guards in a crossing-streets scene in King of Diamonds, then after dragging their bodies into the dark I found myself crouched behind them while watching a city-guard type saunter down the street. I was happily amused by the breathing of my victims, showing that they were alive. It breathed life into the scene - after which I forgot all about it as I went about KO'ing everyone that got in the way of my gathering loot. In retrospect, that went down as one of the most memorable scenes. Somehow I thought that was default behavior, as in a flag to be toggled and given a value in entity inspector. So a person could hit the '?' button and be given a brief explanation. IMO the biggest hurdle in FM editing is finding information on how to do the things that are regularly discussed in the forums. It isn't all that easy to learn by deconstructing existing FM's, because so much is idiosyncratic and the maps being deconstructed have a multi-layered complexity. It's daunting.
  11. dragofer, I've been studying your "river" and have learned much, about how to make an area, use "seed", and I stole your foliage.ase because it's perfect size for... well, just about for general anything. I found out about how to use func_relays, etc., and I've hardly started learning. I hardly have a clue how you do it but you sure do keep things fun. (jeez, you even had a perfect carriage, with horses trotting along,...) I find it difficult to work with premade model "modules". Inevitably I almost instantly find that I have to make a copy of the model in DR made out of brushes and patches, and sometimes with interchangeable brushes and patches (e.g. part of a wall that's a patch, and that has a brush equivalent to replace it in certain circumstances), and which can be retextured, resized, split and decomposed, at will, so I have a fluid working space. Then I can make my own "corners" since it's part of the underlying geometry. What I learn from the premade models is about dimensions and style, and it seems to me that there's now a certain "DM Classic" style that I want my maps to belong to. Sotha's tutorial on "roads" was a demonstration of how to make a certain modular "road" out of patches and shaders, with these "edge" textures featured as transition shaders. But that isn't exactly the application I have in mind and I was trying to use the shaders inappropriately.
  12. I make my modules to fit my map, I don't make my map to fit modules. There's no way I want to work with shaders that require I turn the underlying brushes and patches into func_statics just to see them in the game, where I can't even preview what is expected in the DR editor. No way. Not just to make a path through a woods, or a cavern.
  13. Thanks dragofer. Sotha's tutorials are excellent. I think I will be making my own materials to do this kind of thing. The textures/darkmod/nature/grass/grass_edge/path/dirt/dirt_001_path isn't really an "edge". It's a whole path made of a center and two sides that fade out into alpha. I hope I don't come across as whiny. eta: oops, I see it's only got one "grass" side, and about 90% of it is "center". With no way of seeing this in DR, there's no way of controlling the placement by eye, except to dmap and play it in TDM and remember how out of whack my placement is. But there's really no way to edit it, to know wtf my changes to surface properties are doing, except by ... dmaping and playing again (I have to dmap again because I have to change it back and forth from func_static). Sure, I know it's "grass" and "dirt", somehow placed in the b&w alphamap that I see in the editor, but that doesn't amount to anything.
  14. For example, textures/darkmod/nature/grass/grass_edge/path/dirt/dirt_001_path defined in materials/tdm_nature_grass_edge.mtr. First problem, all of these 'path' textures display as the identical black and white alpha image in DR, so it's 100% guesswork as to what they might look like in game. Next, when I make a patch and apply the above shader it doesn't even display in game. There's no indication whatsoever that I placed a patch with shader in the location. At one point I copy/pasted a path from I think Bikerdude's Alberic (might be another FM) and it was actually a concatenation of two patches, a dirt_solid_nodraw texture on a patch cloned over a patch that'd been turned into a func_static (which seems to be necessary) with a shaderparm3 with value 0.9, and having a textures/darkmod/nature/grass/grass_edge/path/dirt/dirt_002_dark_path shader. Is there any wiki or whatever that explains what's happening here? eta: definitely shaderparm3 is essential to having the shader show at all. The wiki on shaderparm variables doesn't explain very well - why is it necessary on these paths and not on the decals I've applied, and transparent materials I've made? What should I keep in mind when giving it a value between 0 and 1? The dirt_001_path is totally wrong for the area. Rats. And with no easy previews, the rats triumphant. Maybe I should make my own shaders for this kind of stuff.
  15. Thank you. That worked first time, and now I have an idea of how and why it worked.
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