thebigh

I have a ceiling hatch that flips down in my mission. To avoid all my map being on a nice NS grid and looking boxy, I want to rotate the building a bit once I've finished it. When I do this, I find the rotate spawnarg doesn't update right and the hatch flips down at a skewy angle. Is there a way to bind it to something, or to calculate what the new rotate spwanarg has to be?

I agree. This is one of the early mansion heist missions I admire a lot. Mapping techniques and available tools have advanced since then but good design is lasting.

The warning sign and two skulls on a spike are surely a polite suggestion not to go in there.

Interesting problem. I thought about using a trigger_timer to just detect twenty times a second whether you've got the blackjack out and then using $player1.selectWeapon("unarmed") to instantly put it away again. This kinda works. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to interrupt the animations for getting the weapon out and putting it away.

Yes, that wiki example was pretty opaque to me. Now I can see how getting a button's spawnargs works.

Hmm... this isn't quite as versatile as I'd hoped. If all it can do is detect which entity triggered it I'll have to think of another way to do what I need. Basically my setup is I have a bunch of buttons that will increment a counter by an amount specific to each button. I'd like for them to all call the same script and pass their unique increment value to the script, eg, declare the script as follows void increment_counter( float increment_amount ) { counter = counter + increment_amount; } and then give my atdm:target_callscriptfunction spawnargs of "call increment_counter" and "arg1 13" or whatever that second one would have had to be. What a pity this cannot be done. I was hoping to avoid having to stuff a bunch of if statements into my script: if (ent_button == button_13) counter = counter + 13; if (ent_button == button_17) counter = counter + 17; if (ent_button == button_19) counter = counter + 19; //yuck! because that's gross.

It looks like that to me as well.

It does seem like the scoring is going to be from 21 to 33 instead of from 3 to 15.

Is it possible to pass arguments to a script called by an atdm:target_callscriptfunction?

I ran into this too. I've been working around it by fitting to 1x1, seeing what the actual texture scalings become, and then manually multiplying by whatever factor I need.

Oooo! A new contest. Count me in. I'll put my current mission on hold for a while and get started on this. I already have a few ideas... Regarding the bonus points for using new stuff, is it possible to earn all 23 points or do you intend to cap it somehow?

Did your file restore bring back anything useful? The .map files themselves are just text files so opening them with a text editor might be useful. If you're really lucky they might have come back intact but with random garble at the beginning or end that prevented them from being opened by DR.

Possibly a silly question, but how come "create player start here" and "move player start here" are two different menu options? It seems you could reduce menu clutter by combining them into one single function that moves the player start or creates one if there wasn't already one in the map.

If you're just mucking around with tutorials you can attach your map here. I'll take a look at it and see if I can figure out what's wrong.

This another mission from the early days of Dark Mod that I've been meaning to play for a while. The goal is basically the same as Thief's Den 1- break into Sebastian Creep's place, steal a valuable item from him, and leave some incriminating evidence in his chest- which suggests it started life as working through one of the DarkRadiant tutorials. From there it gets pretty weird. The architecture seems haphazardly put together, which gives the level a unique feel, and I always think it's nice when mappers develop a signature style all their own. The map itself is fairly small, just a few buildings and an adjoining cave-sewer, and there's few guards, but it's so tightly put together it was a constant challenge to avoid getting caught. Making it more difficult is that sound seems to propagate everywhere in the level, making it very hard to avoid tipping off all the guards just by moving around. Loot is generally placed well, with some pieces very fiendishly hidden. There's secrets too- also fiendishly concealed, and one of those is necessary to finish the level. Figuring out how to open it took me quite a bit of time. I finished with a stealth score of 4 and $1,749 in loot, easily meeting the goal of $1,500. This is a mission that becomes more than the sum of its (very jumbled) parts and is good, challenging fun for 45 minutes or so. Definitely worth checking out!

Heh, yeah, that kind of texture alignment stops registering with me after too long staring at the same scene. Odds are I'll have to do a careful inspection of the whole level's textures at the end just to make sure there's no ugly seams.

More bragging! This is the entry hall to the mansion. I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far. Even on my potato computer and with multiple light sources the frame rate is still acceptable. Now I've just got to build the second storey and then I can populate the level with people, and get the objectives done. With luck I might have something beta testable in a month or so. Maybe I'll get that 2021 release done after all!

The Sword was well designed. Yes, it got freaky but there was still a sense of progression to it. The first floor is a standard mansion, more or less, with the usual layout and decor. You get to the 2nd floor and, OK it's a bit weird looking with all the pagan stuff lying around, odd traps, and occasional physics-defying areas but it's still more or less comprehensible. The third floor is just batshit insane. The higher you go, the freakier it gets but it's still a coherent whole. LGS had a plan for this level from the outset which is why it works. Now, Thieves' guild is very obviously not planned. It's clearly a bunch of map fragments LGS came up with, glued together haphazardly, and the connecting areas created in a hurry and without much care. Which is why it's confusing and the textures are repetitive. You can't tell me that the casino, the mansion at the end, and the underground castle spire with broken planks and weird swimming pools outside were created to fit together. Nope.

Best of luck and happy mapping!

What is the console command to reload the mapname.efx file? Quitting, going back in, and dmapping again is becoming time consuming.

If you do bring them back, I wonder if they could be more customised, with thiefy labels.

Best of luck with your mission, and we'd love to see how it's turning out! We can never get enough FMs.

This is one of the reasons I dislike bright ambients; they can make the level look washed out. I've always preferred dark shadows with smaller, well-placed lights to break up the darkness. Even a few hacky volume lights with low luminosity and small radius can help draw attention to interesting areas.

I suppose it's a mistake everyone has to make once. Getting told "back up your work! back up your work!" might sound like nagging and a chore if you've never experienced a hard drive failure or accidentally deleted a directory.