thebigh

I loaded up a mission I haven't worked on for a while, dmapped it, and tried to play it. As soon as I did, my frame rates zoomed to about 0.5fps and my console was filled with error messages telling me that the clip models for player1, the guards, and all the rats were outside world bounds. The map worked fine a month ago when I tested it last and I haven't modified it since. All I've done in the meantime is update to the latest 2.10 build. What is going on?

I use the wiki for this. The page https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod has I think all the features you need. I just note which one I want to play and then download it next time I run TDM.

It could be set to skip instances where one of the overlapping textures is caulk, clip, or nodraw. Or where the overlapping section also overlaps with a brush face oriented the other way, face-to-face, because this means it would be inside a solid and invisible to the player. Or if the overlapping section is exposed to the Void, though I don't know if that's easily tested in DR. Actually I think the biggest issue would be with some of the models and prefabs. For instance, the back side of the wine rack model has a sparkly triangle in a corner and there's not much the mapper can do about it.

Detecting if two triangles in 3D overlap seems not to be tremendously difficult, just a bit fiddly, so would it not be possible to have a script in DR to detect Z-fighting for you?

When I need a "dummy" texture and neither caulk nor nodraw are suitable I usually go with black_matt. I got this sorted in the end. I gave him the can_unlock1 spawnarg and he was able to unlock the door if I gave him a path_corner on the other side, and he's supposed to be able to unlock it while fleeing as well but for some reason he'll only do it half the time. The rest of the time he just runs up against the door like a fly bapping its stupid head against a pane of glass. I fixed this by putting a trigger_once_entityname in front of the door- this isn't an area he patrols- and having that open the door for him. And if he does the right thing and unlocks the door himself this does not shut it behind him, which is just what I want.

Sounds like you're making good progress. I'm about 80% of the way through making the layout as well. As for the connections, I already refer to my only released level as well as the one that was 60% complete before I shelved it to work on the Christmas contest.

Take a look at your lin file in DarkRadiant and follow the red zigzagging line. Basically, if it's possible to go through your visportal, loop back around, and pass through it again without ever having to go through another visportal, it will drop. In this schematic, black is worldspawn brushes, green is a visportal, and red is the .lin file. To avoid looping back through the visportal, I needed to put an additional portal in one, or both, of the other entranceways. Another very common cause of visportal drops is if there is a gap between your worldspawn and portal. In that case the lin file will look like a tiny red loop or splotch at the portal.

Sure, that's possible but the trouble is that the "new" ambient starts from the start while the old one fades out. As an example, imagine the ambient in question is a well known tune- let's say Bohemian Rhapsody. As I move from one location to the next what would happen is that "Is this the reeeeaall liiife" fades in as "galileo galileo galileo" from the old location fades out and for a few moments you'd hear them both jumbled up together. Currently what happens is that TDM checks if two locations have the same ambient and, if so, just doesn't change anything. What should happen is to leave the old ambient playing but fade its volume up or down.

I don't know if this is properly thought of as a bug in DR or TDM itself but, since the fix is probably easiest to implement in DR, I will put it here. Can the door prefabs be made so that their door handle component inherits the spawnarg "is_mantleable 0"? When trying to mantle on top of certain open doors, particularly the 56x128 one, sometimes you catch the door handle instead of the top of the door. When this happens you get stuck for a few seconds and then take millions of points of falling damage. This should only apply to the knobs, not to the door itself; I know of one or two missions where perching on top of an open door lets you get to hard-to-reach places. edit: I should also add that it's still possible to kill yourself with a door, sometimes you still catch the handle, but after jumping around at it from all angles for hours I'm confident it happens far less frequently after I turned off the mantleable for the handles

I spent the evening wrestling with two different problems. First, I made a hideous oversight when I was planning the layout of my level. There's an area in the skyline that really needs a visportal and I'd planned it with a visp in the arch beneath it, while forgetting the area above needs sealing too to avoid frame rates plummeting and sound propagating all over the damn place. So now I have an enormously gigantic visportal, ugly, twisted, and slanted in all three dimenions but razor thin cutting through a bunch of worldspawn roofs that are now also slightly taller than I'd envisioned. And for the longest time it would seal when I was looking directly at it but finally I got it to function right. Oh well. At least I got away with it. Second, there's a little detail I'd like to draw the player's eye to, but I don't want to make it too obvious. I tried subtle little light entity highlights, slight rearrangement of the surrounding torches, but nothing really worked. The little detail was either still too unnoticeable or it stuck out like a very obvious sore thumb. So sleep-deprived me finally hit on the idea of giving the guard patrolling there a purse to steal. The longer the player spends studying his patrol route for an opportunity to rob him, the better chance they have of spotting this little feature.

Christmasy enough for the Christmas contest? The local Watch guard kicked his head off for being right on his patrol route, but it's the thought that counts right?

Hey there, I just checked some of your old threads. You left the forum before I joined but it seems like you were close to releasing some cool stuff. I hope to see you bring it up to a good standard, because the more new maps the better.

Yeah, I got it working now. I'd copied the material specifications from the Cholera Morbus decal poster, so AFAIK the alpha should have worked. I ended up asking about it on discord and nobody had any idea what was going wrong either, so in the end I just re-made my image from scratch and on the third attempt at exporting from GIMP it finally worked. Maybe the phase of the moon was right this time.

I made a new texture that I want to use as a decal. It contains some transparent sections (padding on one side because the poster is rectangular but the image file needs to be square, and torn off corners). I saved the texture as a 32 bit tga, bottom left orientation, RLE off, and it looks fine GIMP and other image viewers-- the alpha channel seems to be working right. Unfortunately, in-game the transparent sections show up as solid black. What am I doing wrong, and how do I fix it? And another simple question: how do I enable fleeing AIs to unlock doors that are in their way?

This is one reason of many why I use linux. Well, I maintain a dual-boot machine with Windoze on it as well, because I want to play games and linux isn't quite there yet for all the games I want to play. But it's getting closer.

You are probably thinking of "Thomas Porter 6: The Phrase Book".

Hmm... I hadn't considered that the "old" and "new" sounds could end up out of phase but now that you mention it the problem is obvious. Anyway, as to why someone might want to do this, it's not just theoretical. Imagine a shack on a stormy beach. Outside you have wind or thunder playing loudly as the ambient. When you go inside you should still hear the same storm soundtrack but quieter. I'm surprised this issue hasn't come up before.

Here's a minimal example that illustrates the problem. The red and blue rooms both have the same ambient soundtrack (Jorge the Rubber Duckie!) but the blue room has the volume spawnarg set to -15. It should be significantly quieter than the red room. The brick hallway has a different ambient sound. If you go from the blue room directly to the red, it stays quiet. If you go straight from the red room to the blue, it stays loud. Going into the brick hallway first and then entering one of the coloured rooms sets the squeaking to the proper volume. ambient_bug.map

Join the contest Mezla! The more the merrier.

I'm running TDM v 2.10/64 #9588 and I noticed a bug with ambient sounds. If you have two adjoining locations with the same ambient soundtrack but set to different volumes, the volume does not update if you move from one to the other.

Renaming it is probably better. You keep a backup in case something goes wrong, and if it works you have the old version to compare the new one too, to help diagnose what went wrong in the first place.

So, my mission is coming along nicely. Is anyone else participating? I'm hoping to get an honourable middle-field placing in a field of strong competitors, just so there'll be lots of cool new Christmas missions for me to play. Ho ho ho

I agree. They're as much an auditory cue for the player as a sound in the environment, so they shouldn't echo for the same reason the thief's internal monologue shouldn't echo. Unless he has a big hollow skull or something.

I'm more or less doing the second one, rotating it off the NS grid by 15 degrees, but once that's done I snap it all to a grid size of 1. A few brushes need to be fiddled with afterwards but not as many as you'd think. I did a similar thing in my previous level for the underground structure but I didn't try to put any moving objects down there.

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?