boissiere

Another plausible scenario is where the player has a number of tasks/missions to complete but they can choose to do them in any order - giving the player a bit more agency, Tied with this, you might want to be able to re-enter a mission - e,g, it's some sort of hub (memories of the 'Pocket Plane' in Baldur's Gate 2 come to mind).

I managed to do it a different way

@uyvie are you using Linux? If so, there's a known problem with the peek function. See bug 6477.

I have added some notes to 6436 relating to the 'shot from afar' problem. For your main point (1 in your original report) I think that the main aspect of it is that you are (code-wise) literally invisible to the guards. It's as though if there was a real-life invisible man who whacks you on the shoulder from behind, you'd whirl round and there would be no-one there. What would you do?

@MirceaKitsune - have you raised a bug report for this particular problem (searching in the wrong place if shot by an arrow)? I think I have found the cause of it and can write it up in the bug tracker. In short, I believe the intended behaviour is that the victim is supposed to search halfway between him and the shooter (presumably chosen because he shouldn't really know where the shooter really is) but the code that sets this point gets overridden shortly afterwards by code that sets the search point to his current location. It's quite instructive (if you like that sort of thing) to read up the various bugs reports on AI behaviour that have been raised down the years. In particular, bug 3331 contains a number of fixes to problems similar to those reported in this thread.

I believe that 2 can in fact take place from time to time. I've just been playing the revamped 'Sir Talbot's Collateral' where I alerted Sir Talbot in his library. After running around the room trying to get out (another gripe) he was able to escape because the guard that normally patrols the room turned up. A few minutes later another guard arrived who must have been alerted by Sir Talbot. That doesn't take away from your argument though. Another oddity is that all alerts seem to be treated as 'There's a thief in the area' - I've seen a guard attacked by a spider, run off, and the other guards whip out their swords crying 'You're going to the gallows thief!'.

I'd like to chip in and say I think basing the script name on the archive/file name is not a good idea. Filenames are extrinsic to the mod and something you have no direct control over. Someone may unwittingly change the filename and wonder why the mod stops working. You'd be better off having a fixed script name for all mods which is, I think, what dragofer says is being considered.

So which type of recording is done by the "recordDemo" command? I just tried it, following Daft Mugi's instructions and it worked reasonably well but The replay had no sound I had some entity guis (signs) in my test map and the text wasn't shown on the replay - the signs were just blank The saved file was nearly 2MB for ~20 secs of recording (and wasn't particularly compressable either) I'm guessing (from the file size) that this was an 'avi' recording.

There's a global script function called sessionCommand which you can use to load a new map (even the one you're currently 'in'), and it does start you from the beginning. You can call from a script thus sys.sessionCommand("map m2"); I'm not sure about saving info though. Maybe the campaign mechanism already mentioned.

I've toyed with the idea of having an in-game lootlist that is added to every time you pick up an item of loot. It would show the loot type and value and the location you found it. You could browse it and potentially save it to a text file. Something like this could easily include picking up keys etc.

It's funny you should ask that because I've been thinking about this a bit and am now wondering if my use cases 2 and 3 (more dynamic in-game readables) are actually possible with the existing system. I'm not sure you would want to actually override the existing scripts but more likely add in new scripts into the existing system. I might have a go at at this weekend.

These are my initial thoughts for possible use cases (copied from the linked bug tracker entry). 1) In the recent thread @datiswous asked if it was possible to develop a template for an enhanced type of briefing where people could specify a different background for each page of text (possibly by having different xdata items for each page) 2) It would also make it easier to develop a in-game journal type of readable which is added to when the player does certain actions. A current example of this is done in the first mission (Monastery) of a House of Locked Secrets but the implementation is quite cumbersome because a) Each xdata item contains the whole contents of the 'previous' xdata item plus the added text. b) The in-game actions have to be performed in a pre-determined order. 3) Readables could be made more sophisticated e.g. having tabbed pages (e.g. in a paper address book). 4) You could have dynamic entity guis (e.g. destination displays at railway stations which change when the train has left). I'm willing to expand on these if needed

I think this is the crux of the problem in that there's no linkage from a .gui to an xdata item. What you need to be able to do is call a script from inside the gui and the script will read the xdata and populate the gui variables. Now theoretically there is a "runScript" command that is callable from inside guis but it doesn't currently seem to work in TDM. There's actually a feature request, 6164, to fix this. Maybe we should agitate to get this fixed.

It might be possible, but the thing to realise is that for readables the text that is displayed in the readable's gui is set by the script tdm_readables.script. This, amongst other things. extracts each page from the xdata item and sets the corresponding items in the gui. The briefing text is similar but in this case the xdata item is read by the C++ code which then sets the BriefingText item. In other words, guis know nothing about xdata.

How about a "Public Holiday" theme - but a holiday that is celebrated in Bridgeport. It would be interesting to see different takes on what holidays might be celebrated there - and possibly weird traditions associated with them. Is a PH good for our protagonist (businesses closed, lax or drunk guards) or is it bad (revellers in the streets, commitments to friends or family)? This seems to me to make more sense that basing it on a RL public holiday that wouldn't be celebrated in Bridgeport anyway.