Geep

I tried downloading the original bobbing.pk4, but couldn't then open it up as a zip. Oh well, not so important at the moment. @Dragofer, when it becomes stable, please send me a copy to play around with in the floating context. I'm thinking, possibly it could be packaged up with the triggers as a on/off bobbing prefab?

@Dragofer. Hmmm, too complicated to recommend for general use. Will think about this a bit, scriptwise.

@Dragofer, not sure whether you are proposing that you use target_setkeyval - - repeatedly within the trigger_timer loop to keep halving the translate range until it reaches zero, or - once when the object is at an extreme, to bring it back to the former-midpoint, but now the new end-of-range (but then you'd have to detect which extreme it's at first)

@VanishedOne Interesting, HMart was also referencing work done in Unity.

Great to see a better fish model being brought to TDM. I once played around with a Unity-store lagoon model that had several articulated fish models, plus schooling fish behavior in C#. The latter involved each fish using per-frame nearest-neighbor detection of its closest schoolmates, then averaging their motion vectors and applying it, while striving to maintain an optimal distance from each other. I have no idea if schooling would be possible in TDM, and how one might do that.

@STRUNK@JackFarmer @Dragofer Just thinking about whether func_mover_dragofer should be added (as an experimental/advanced method) to the "Objects Floating On Water" wiki page. A drawback I see for the floating use case is that (looking at the video) the stoppage occurs at either of the 2 extremes, when what is desirable for floating is that stoppage always occurs at the midpoint of the range.

Just freshened these wiki pages: Model Scaling Triggering events when looking at something Attaching Props to AI I had a year's worth of notes about wiki work, that I've been working through this last month. Getting near the end now, then back to mapping.

Possible setting for another Netflix episode of "Ugly Delicious"

Regarding STRUNK's comment about non-full screen video... If anyone has access to circa-2006 3D Realms, it reportedly features a roadhouse with a TV showing several short videos, that loops overall. This mod forum post talks about editing the .gui and video .mtr to add additional video segments (called "channels" in the TV context), but is not self-explanatory without the original files: http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20597 Idea might be adaptable to TDM

@HMart, fun video. Clearly getting a portal working in TDM would be its own project

The "Movie Theatre Method" could I think be adapted to non-fullscreen video. And see the other topic about "Playing ROQ Video Files" . Really, there needs to be some current R&D using modern codec, and separate wiki writeup, by someone actively working that angle, and maybe covering magic mirrors, dioramas, portals. Not going there me-self.

Not sure I've got it ALL figured out, STRUNK, or ever will, but I beat on it with a stick for a while, so here's my findings on the wiki. Enjoy: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Full-Screen_Video_Cutscenes That probably does it for what I'm adding to the wiki about video in the current cycle. Got some bits & pieces to add to other topics.

STRUNK, credit/blame for the idea of using the laptop is due to Dremple, who strictly speaking was just suggesting it as a way of testing your video in-game... probably found it amusingly anachronistic in the Doom3/TDM context. Maybe could use it in a Dr. Who/Time Lord episode? All: As I build out wiki pages about in-game videos, I'll mention some of the ideas here: inventors guild, magic screens, windows, Prey-like portals. @Amadeus, I haven't done Prey, could you post a portal pix?

I've just posted a full rewrite of this stylistically-challenged wiki page: Playing ROQ Video Files While use of RoQ is deprecated for new FMs, the article's general approach is still of some interest. I plan to eventually situate it within a set of examples that (on a separate page) include more modern video formats. I've kept the historical aspect of the article, while adding pointers to newer treatments of RoQ files, for anyone who needs to maintain them.

@demilich666, all true, and I bet pretty much like it would be if you were in that situation IRL. Early on, there was even more floating junk, that I had to scale back. Yeah, welcome to the weird, wonderful world of the physics engine with water. When you first bump into and/or frob a "moveable" like the crates floating in the galley, it activates the physics engine on that object. And, depending on object location relative to the surface, object density, wave action, and player force, the object can get a pretty fierce initial force vector. If an object explodes out of the water, then relands in the water and is still moving, you should be able to frob it okay if you need to move it further. (Outside the ship, most of the floating debris are "bobbers", not "moveables". BTW, I just posted a TDM wiki article about that difference: Objects Floating in Water It's mainly for the benefit of FM creators, of course.) Underwater viewing is diminished by the murk, and cabin lighting - as befits the circumstances - is limited, but the only time I couldn't see things close at hand is when I forgot to turn on my lantern. I haven't seen the 4x zoom experience (maybe a specific video driver issue?) but for sure the mess is a close and quite disorienting space. I find it helps to look for the two yellow light sources at opposite ends of the mess, to tell you which way is up. Even so, it's easy to think you're heading for one door and end up at the other. Sounds like good progress.

Still another new topic, from 2019 work: Objects Floating in Water This covers func_bobbing and moveable methods at a tutorial level, with pointers to other methods. By tomorrow, I'll add links to it from other relevant pages.

Another wiki topic added: Your Mission - From Beta Testing to Release and Beyond with links from the endings of: A - Z Beginner Full Guide Page 6 How to pack your Mission The material here will be largely obvious to old hands, but worth stating explicitly for the benefit of newcomers. From the Introduction: This article elaborates typical steps for beta-testing a mission beyond its packaging, namely: distribution, forum presence, and testing. This process continues to Final Release and any updates. Consider this a follow-on to - * A - Z Beginner Full Guide; and * How to Pack your Mission, which fully describes the vital process of packaging and testing a .PK4 archive.

@roygato With respect to first point: One of things that attracted me to TDM was the player-controlled save system. Like you, I try to save periodically. I just assume getting killed/failing the mission is gonna happen, so no big deal when it does. But I can see if someone's playing style is to avoid saving, then mission-fail becomes a much bigger issue. (The FMs I personally give up on are ones that I can't crack no matter how many times I reload and retry. Ones that require feats of manual dexterity beyond me... running around a table in a tight loop with a demon chasing me while trying to fire 2 arrows backwards at it, for instance.) In any case, there was a bit of discussion with @Dragofer during the Air Pocket betatest about replacing the specific mission-fail with essentially what @joebarnin proposed. As joe notes, is this technically possible? At the time, I was thinking about paralyzing the player's movements, while still allowing the bar to be dropped. Best idea I could come up at that time was enclosing the player momentarily in a dynamically-placed box. Revisiting that now, other possibilities would be: just a momentarily-present playerclip ceiling; a force field as Dragofer suggested; or a script that continually repositions the player to a fixed location. But still, no matter the implementation, for that to be of any help to players at the end of their air gulp, they would have to quickly diagnose the problem, find the bar in their inventory (it may not be the last thing they picked up), put it in their hands and drop it. I dunno, still seems like a bit much to do in a great hurry, when they can just replay it and be careful not trigger the problem in the first place. Could've dropped this trap entirely, of course, but, well, then we couldn't have this fun discussion!

Added my first TDM Wiki topic, "Video Briefing".

Ah, Springheel was able to fix me up with a wiki account after all. I'm a happy camper now.

Abusimplea, my bad! I've overlooked the fairytale-gold-compulsive community. NeonsStyle, the mission fails not because of the objective to get the jewels, but because of getting something else adjoining the jewels that the player was warned against getting. I admit that's a close and perhaps narrow parsing of the objective, which may tie into Filizitas's points. Filizatas, I don't know if the objective in question - and its fail trap - is any more "artificially constructed" than those in many FMs; all I can say is that it (and the warning) made sense to me in context. It certainly is true that the game overall is thick with objectives. That, and the sense of prescriptiveness you felt, is something I regret a bit, and that I will swerve away from in the future. As you noted, the second half is much more open-ended, with less (you would say insufficient) guidance. I might add that in the first beta of the game, you could spot Emily right away once you got to the surface, so at least some of what-to-do was more immediately clear. However, testers wanted more playtime, challenges, looting. They also wanted access to the spyglass, which I thought conceptually conflicted with distance-based-triggering unless Emily was a bit secluded. Those reasonable suggestions to improve the FM led to my changes in response - for which I take full responsibility - and to where we are today. All grist for thought for the next FM. Thanks for feedback.

It does set up a tension between a thief's "inherent nature" and "what's safe for me given the circumstances". I thought my particular embodiment of that tension was interesting, but you found it aggravating. So it goes. It's still a feature for me, but my future episodes will go in other directions (though never promising not to aggravate some of the people some of the time.)

@taaaki@stgatilov I'd postponed for a year, until recently, asking again for permission to edit the TDM wiki. But though I'm now considered qualified, it's evidently a no-can-do for ANY newcomer to get a new (registered) wiki account. This is either because of a loss of "institutional" knowledge or of actual code or capability during some previous crash/recovery. Needless to say, this situation is not helpful to growing and renewing the TDM community. (I'm trying real hard here not to have hair on fire.) Could you folks, as admins, do some research, perhaps reach out to MediaWiki if necessary, and find a solution? Thanks.

@fllood, I wasn't able to PM you, due to "not receiving messages". What's the process for interest in "abandoned works" now?