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thebigh

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Everything posted by thebigh

  1. When you pick up an inventory object it will display a message like "Acquired MacGuffin". Is there a way to turn that message off for specific items? I'd like to handle it with my own scripts and UI.
  2. I agree. It's possible to use scripting to do all that anyway.
  3. It's not very likely that this sort of thing would even be perceptible to most players outside a few niche situations. If you want to set up a puzzle to, say, have the thief time his runs across a noisy floor while a loud machine is running so that the sound will obscure his footsteps you'd be better off just scripting it up for that one puzzle.
  4. It seems like that could be easily fixed by making the traveledPrev cutoff some fraction of the AI's walking speed rather than a hard-coded "magic number".
  5. I'm absolutely going to do a few more detail passes before I release it. This is probably only about 60% done, and it's definitely still too clean-looking
  6. Well, here's some teasers for a haunted house mission I'm hoping to get done by Halloween. For the second screenshot I increased the gamma just so you can see what's going on- I'm really trying to avoid that milky grey look you get with high gamma and ambient. This is also a self-imposed challenge: the whole mission fits inside a 1024x1280x1024 box, including the skybox and playertools. Lights and speakers can have radii that protrude outside but all the geometry has to fit inside the box. It's amazing how much you can squeeze into such a tiny area. Showing any more screenshots would unfortunately spoiler the mission.
  7. How do I get the spider_child to patrol? It just wanders around aimlessly. I've made sure the Patrol spawnarg is on and the Animal_Patrol spawnarg is off, and it can chase me all along the path I've set for it if I let it spot me. A human, which also uses the AAS32, can manage the patrol route, so I cannot understand why the spider is having trouble. And, weirdly, if I use the console to set the timescale to anything higher than 1 [i]then[/i] the spider will start walking to the path_corners. How do I fix this?
  8. You're right; changing the s_volume key during play seems to do nothing. You can fake it by using multiple speakers though. Place one speaker for each beef link in the same place on the stove. Give one the volume you want when all the beef links are present, another the volume you want when one has been taken, and so on. Have only the loudest one playing on map start. Then when you take a chunk of meat, turn that speaker off and the next loudest one on, cycling through until all the meat is gone and the quietest speaker is off. You should be able to accomplish this fairly easily with two trigger_sequencers.
  9. The .activate() function requires some entity as its argument- I guess some applications of triggering something may need it. For this application it seems not to matter, so I just give it the name of an entity that I know definitely exists.
  10. Yeah, I guess physically moving the foglight away is more efficient. It might still be worth remembering the scripting methods as it does allow finer control over the fog than just turning it on and off.
  11. For me: * A mixture of well-hidden and obvious loot. Give me a reward for exploring, but don't make me turn over every leaf to meet a heinous loot goal. * Guard patrols that reward careful observation. Solving a well-made guard patrol route puzzle is satisfying, so long as it's not just a bunch of watchmen constantly parading up and down in front of you.
  12. On the other hand, I can imagine lots of scenarios where the guards wouldn't need to remain extra vigilant. Maybe they're used to turning away beggars, drunks, and nonviolent grifters and therefore don't dwell on it every time they have to chase someone off.
  13. That turns out to be not completely trivial. You can use the start_off spawnarg on the foglight to have the fog be turned off at map start, but this just turns the grey fog into black fog. I doubt if that's what you want, so don't use that spawnarg. With a little bit of scripting to hack the foglight radius, you can fake it pretty convincingly though. Suppose your foglight has a radius of 1024, that is, shaderParm3 = 1024 on your foglight. Then put the following in your script file: float foglightradius = 1024; void toggle_fog() { foglightradius = 10000000 - foglightradius; $foglight.setLightParm( 3, foglightradius ); $foglight.activate($player1); return; } We'll turn the fog off at map start; make an atdm:target_callscriptfunction entity that calls the toggle_fog() function, go to any worldspawn brush and target that entity from it. That'll call the script once the moment the level starts and switch off the fog. Crucially, it will also set the fog radius to 9998976, which is huge and will make the fog almost completely transparent so the fact that it's now black fog instead of grey will be almost imperceptible. When you want to turn the fog back on, call the script again from trigger_once or whatever you're using, and it'll switch the light on and restore the fogradius to 10000000-9998976 = 1024.
  14. The command to get out of noclip mode is the same as to get in, "noclip", and walking afterwards is fine. You just have to make sure you're not still embedded in geometry, which shouldn't be a surprise. Leaning can be a bit funny if you tried to lean while in noclip mode, but it's no big deal and you can always lean back the other way to go back to normal. I'm not sure why you're getting so worked up about it.
  15. The lit-up light gem isn't caused by the nightvision light directly (I put ai_see 0 on it) but by its interaction with the dynamic ambient lighting. The dynamic ambient lighting adds a bit of extra ambient to a room depending on the brightness of the light sources that are in it, so that a flickering fireplace will also cause subtle variations in the brightness of shadowed corners, not just the areas that are directly illuminated. If you set ambient_light_falloff to something other than zero, the strength of this dynamic effect also depends on your proximity to the light sources. The wiki says this looks better than the default, and I agree. I've really been working hard on lighting in my latest level. Specifically I want deep shadows punctuated by smallish light sources and generally low ambient to avoid that milky, washed-out look you get with high ambient. In the darkest areas I want to use the nightvision to stop the player getting lost in pitch blackness. Obviously if I have a faint light strapped to my head, an ambient_light_falloff that brightens the ambient for nearby lights is going to defeat the purpose. What I really need is a spawnarg that tells the nightvision light not to contribute anything to the dynamic ambient. Is there anything like that? I also think ambient_light_falloff is a bit bugged. There's supposed to be a cap, by default rgb(0.1, 0.1, 0.1), on the absolute brightest the dynamic ambient can get. However, I'm routinely exceeding that for my setup.
  16. Yeah, that's one of those things you don't notice when they're done right but would be glaringly obvious if they were done wrong.
  17. Is there a way to make a specific light not contribute to the dynamic ambient lighting? I'm using Sotha's old technique of binding a very dim light to the player's head so you can faintly see a little way ahead of you in darkness, but obviously this should not affect the real ambient in any way. More importantly, if I use any ambient_light_falloff other than zero alongside the nightvision light, the results are completely insane and psychedelic- no doubt caused by divide-by-zero errors due to the nightvision light being at zero distance from the camera. Ew yuck.
  18. I remember once getting irrationally upset because I tried to blackjack one of the Lady van Vernon guards in Life of the Party and accidentally killing him and failing the no kill objective because after the bow and arrow fight he must have had only one HP left.
  19. Instead of remakes of excellent old games, why not remake bad games? Surely there must be stealth games that had an interesting premise or a cool setting but, for whatever reason, fell flat. They might be worth taking a second shot at.
  20. What I'd like to see is being able to review the objectives when the mission is over, as extra pages on the Mission Statistics screen.
  21. Nice work! I'm getting ~10% performance improvements even on my most potato computer, which is a very significant playability boost.
  22. One of my missions has a door that patrolling guards will freak out about if they see it open. But it leads to a sewer infested with undead, and the mission briefing mentions it, so I think that's fair. The trouble is when the whole mission has been full of doors that guards don't care about and then towards the end they decide to lose their minds about one particular door. Same with suspicious missing loot.
  23. I'm just aware of my limitations as a mapper, and also aware that the rage these days is for enormous sprawling missions that take hours, where I prefer smaller maps. I might be able to make a few missions that are fun to play, but I haven't got a Volta or an Iris in me.
  24. I suppose it depends on mission goals. If the primary mission objective is to steal a certain item, an additional loot goal on top of that could be a bit superfluous. If it's a more open-ended exploration mission, where the point is just to break into houses and burgle everything, it's a lot better. I don't think I've seen anyone make use of the difference between loot types. When was the last time you saw a mission that wanted you to steal 500 in gems? The new "secrets" functionality effectively adds an objective to missions without being official or mandatory, which is nice. When I put a loot goal in, I don't decide how much it should be until I've finished building it. Then I think something like, "On Easy mode, the player should be able to find half the loot excluding the secrets" and round that off to the nearest nice number. For Expert it might be 70 or 75%.
  25. Yeah, seeing work that quality just makes mine look crummy and inadequate. Well, I mean, it is garbage but you don't need to rub it in.
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