[Beta testers wanted: The House of deLisle (by thebigh)]

Hello taffers!

I'm looking for three or four people to help test my latest mission, a scary little (early) Halloween mission. Once I have a few volunteers I'll put up a thread in the beta testers' forum.

Content warning:

Spoiler

Spiders, undead, body horror

I'm also looking for a voice actor to do the thief's briefing info lines. (otherwise I'll have to do it and I'm rubbish!)

Thanks everyone!

[Recomendations: Open source or Free video editor.]

I had been using v3.1.1, but I've stopped using openshot altogether. Now I'm using the python PIL library to create each frame individually and then ffmpeg to stitch them together into a video. It's a lot more difficult and time-consuming, but it gives me better control and fewer bugs, and the mp4 that comes out is also much smaller.

[Recomendations: Open source or Free video editor.]

Yeah, so this bug still isn't fixed and it's completely messing up my slide transitions. None of the suggested "fixes" work for me. I won't be bothering with it anymore.

[Random Article of the Day...]

Tell me about it. I recently had to buy an external DVD drive that plugs into a USB port just so I can watch my DVD collection and install my old games.

[Random Article of the Day...]

Remember the old dot matrix printer paper? With the perforated strips on either side for feeding the paper through on those spiked wheels on either side. Good times.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

Aha! Not sure how I missed that...

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

OK, I'm tearing my hair out over an end-mission conversation cutscene. I'm activating a script along these lines

 

void gameover() {
    $badguy_atdm_teleport.activate($player1);
    sys.fadeTo('0 0 0', 1, 2);
    sys.wait(2);
    $gameover_cam.activate($player1);
    sys.fadeTo('0 0 0', 0, 2);
    sys.wait(2);
    $start_gloatconvo.activate($player1);

    sys.wait(7);
    $player1.missionFailed();
    return;
}

Basically I teleport the badguy into position, fade to black, transfer the view to the camera, fade back in, and begin his conversation. Unfortunately, he just stands there and won't do his monologue. Sometimes he even freezes completely, not even doing his idle movements. If I comment out the $gameover_cam.activate and noclip there, the conversation does work correctly.

What am I doing wrong?

 

camera_suppress.mapcamera_suppress.script

Here's a minimal example of the problem. Press the red button, the camera activates but the guy's conversation won't play. The green button triggers a script that's identical except that the camera is commented out- and his conversation does trigger.

[Recomendations: Open source or Free video editor.]

I'll be using OpenShot to make the briefing for my current mission. So far it seems slick and intuitive, which is good. I kind of want the creation of the sound and movie elements to be the trickier part, not splicing them together at the end.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

Just thought I'd drop in an oddity about the trigger_sequencer entity:

Its targets are evaluated in lexicographical, rather than numerical, order. That is, target10 will fire before target2.

[Hidden Hands: The Lost Citadel (23/07/2020)]

I finally got around to finishing this. It took me almost five hours but I managed to get all the loot and alert nobody. Some of the treasure I had to find on my way back because I'd missed it on the first try, but it did at least give me something to do on the return trip.

Really nice mission, with lots of varied environments and (mostly) logical puzzles. The whole thing looked great too. St Wilbert's tomb was a highlight, as was the underwater base.

Battlestar Galactica reference!

I thought the tile floor spam in the Citadel itself made moving around more tedious than dangerous.

Super cool mission. I'm looking forward to playing Anomaly, and then seeing what more you have in store for the HH series.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

Finally got it working. It turns out that all the used_by stuff is a bust. There doesn't seem to be any way to stop it frobbing multiple times in rapid succession.

 

A better way is to make the receptacle an atdm:frobable_base and target it to a callscript that runs the following:

float objects_in_receptacle = 0;

void receptacle_script() {
    string curinv = $player1.getCurInvCategory();
    if(curinv!="Marbles") {return;}    //check to make sure you've selected the things that will
                                      //go into the receptacle. If not, go back
    $player1.changeInvItemCount("Glass Marble", "Marbles", -1);   //remove a marble from inventory
    $objects_in_receptacle+=1;                                    //increment count in bucket
    // DO ANYTHING ELSE THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DROP A MARBLE IN THE BUCKET
    return;
}

 

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

The issue is that the frob gets activated once per frame and not once per mouse click. How do doors and keys do this? Using a key on a door doesn't unlock and lock it sixty times a second. I can find nothing useful in the defs that would help me.

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

I have a stackable inventory item and an object these collectables are supposed to be deposited into. I'm using used_action_script to call a script that decrements the size of the stack in my inventory to simulate dropping the items into the bucket. This works fine so long as I collect and deposit the things one at a time. If I have a stack of more than one object, they all get dropped in at once. That isn't what I want. If I have a stack of three items I want the player to need to use the objects on the bucket three times. How can I do that?

[Newbie DarkRadiant Questions]

It would also be possible to use a script to move a speaker.

Say your river is running straight west-east. Put the river noise speaker in the river somewhere. Then set up a trigger-timer to fire every 0.1 of a second and target it to a callscript. The script will then get the player's X-coordinate and set the speaker's X-coordinate to that value. In this way the speaker will always be level with the player and it should sound as though the river noise is coming directly from the river.

[in script, $player1.getHealth() always shows no change when damage has been done]

I'm not 100% sure how your script works, but I suspect it might just be too short a time interval between running sys.trigger($dynomite_hurts); and checking your health.

[Feature idea: Able to disable difficulty selection and skip difficulty screen entirelly]

I can definitely see this being useful for campaigns. In that case the difficulty from the previous mission should carry over to the current one.

[What makes mission fun to play?]

7 hours ago, chakkman said:

3 A.I.'s in the same room at the same time, even though they all have their general patrol route.

That's bound to happen occasionally in areas where different patrol routes intersect.

[What makes mission fun to play?]

There's a good middle ground as well. You can have consistent patrol routes with minor variations. Say a watchman walks into a large courtyard. Maybe on the way through he stops to warm his hands by the fire cage; on the next pass he detours to have a brief word with another watchman; on the next he just carries on without dawdling. It just adds some interest and variety to a patrol route without making it too unpredictable.

And part of planning involves deducing how guards will behave even when you can't observe their whole patrol route, or watch him go through it enough times to discover all the variations in it. You've got to be able to say things like:

That's a watchman, he's likely to have a long, fixed patrol route with few if any deviations. She's a servant, she'll be bustling around randomly in a handful of rooms. That's a zombie, it'll be wandering around the whole crypt slowly along a few familiar well-trodden paths that it selects randomly.

It's up to the mapper to respect common sense this way but I don't think it's correct to say that only fixed and unvarying patrol routes are fair.

[OMFG System Shock "remake"?!?]

Yeah, System Shock 2 is something really special and what I saw of the SS1 remake was not really on that sort of level. Played the free demo for half an hour and just couldn't get into it.

[So, what are you working on right now?]

Yeah... so I have a lot of effects going on in my mission. My blue room is getting quite busy XD

 

[Parallel lights usage]

The nice thing about the parallel lights is that they're easy and quick to set up. For decorative windows that the player won't approach too closely, they look a lot better than point lights and are almost as fast to place, and the illusion doesn't have to be perfect. Mucking about with shader definitions is still a bit arcane for me.

[TDM Hangout! Chill with fellow TDM gamers]

I prefer the forum because it's more permanent. If I get an answer to a mapping question here I can still refer to it in six months or three years when whatever issue I had comes up again. On Discord it vanishes pretty quick.

[Parallel lights usage]

I've also been using parallel lights as a way of illuminating windows so they look closer to self-lit than you get just by putting a regular point or projected light nearby. I make them window-shaped and thin so that the only surface they touch is the windowpane. This is probably awful practice but so far it hasn't broken anything or tanked the framerate. If the new and improved parallelSky can do something similar I will swap them out but I would not want to have to go back to point or projected lights for this.

 

Here's two windows lit by two lights with the same dimensions, colours, and relative positions. Specular is turned off. The left one is just a pointlight and the right one is a parallel light. I think it's clear which one looks more like there's a lit room behind it. The illusion's not perfect, but it's significantly better.

 

[Parallel lights usage]

2 hours ago, HMart said:

And how many daylight missions exist in TDM anyway? Honest question.

There's Reap as you Sow, which is mostly bright daylight.

[The Adventures of Thomas: Lucy's Quest]

When I first tried to play this mission I got frustrated and gave up on it because it is very computationally demanding and my computer was a potato- the mission became a slide show. Now I have a better gaming machine and when I can set aside a few uninterrupted hours to give it a proper playthrough I'm sure I'll have a much better time.