Wellingtoncrab
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Days Won
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Posts posted by Wellingtoncrab
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My impression playing through is that there never was “total darkness” really - the ambient world light is bright enough there is always some response from the light gem. Could be wrong there, as I haven’t looked in DR, but I don’t recall ever feeling like I could navigate to a spot where I was truly concealed. This in effect made line of sight to the ai always as important as the light gem value. While it was tricky I could at least pull it off on the easiest difficulty.
Since a lot of attention was given to the atmosphere and lighting, if there would be a change to consider in a future patch instead of doing something like lowering the ambient light level, I would personally set ai_see on the ambient world light to 0 if it isn’t already - while not “realistic” I think it is preferable to giving the already well advantaged AI even more of a chance to spot the player and it would allow the player to safely conceal themselves in the darkest portions of the missions.
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@Jedi_Wannabe Thanks for taking the time to play and sticking with it! Always means a lot, but it means “a lotter” coming from a fellow FM author!
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15 hours ago, Teekay said:
It feels a lot like the frighteningly freeing nonlinearity of The Life of the Party and the weird, spooky, paranormal topsy-turvy atmosphere of The Sword had a really cool baby.
Wow, that is one pretty cool baby!
Thank you so much for taking the time to play and write me a thoughtful response. TDM has so many great missions I think you have an awful lot to look forward to as you continue your TDM journey.
Reading your thoughts about the overall narrative I think you may have absorbed more of the story than you might expect, or at least you came away what is really important.
Though my hope was always there would be enough in the mission to sustain multiple play throughs and that each time through the player would forge new connections and revelations, so if you ever do get a chance to go back through I hope this ends up being your experience.
God Speed.
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This is a great mission! It’s so dynamic changing course and adding new ideas up until the very end. I was quite struck by the impressive attention to detail with so many interactive objects, some very fine brushwork and an impressive eye for lighting and particles.
After starting a few times I did admittedly eventually switch to the easiest difficulty as the ambient light level and quantity of AI was tough in many areas for a clumsy taffer like myself and this felt the most balanced to me - so hopefully I didn’t miss out on too much!
Great job on this one, it clearly was a lot of work!
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They day of ascension has arrived! This mission was well on it’s way in it’s earliest form and I am looking forward to going through it again now that it has at last achieved enlightenment.
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@A_Big_GuyI think the criticism is fair - as @ChronA points out there is the mechanical objective of the mission and there is the ”point” of it so to speak - while that is not something completely disconnected from the required objectives, it is something the player is not required to engage in at all and I would not even say I am someone who is skilled enough to be fully successful in pulling something like that off. I do possess enough pretense to try.
I did hope it would work on both levels - in fact it was quite important to me that it work at it lowest level as a thief style level instead of a “walking simulator” type experience or other sort of format that typically has that kind of narrative structure (or lack thereof) - so if this in itself does not feel satisfying it is indeed a weakness of the mission.
Again thanks for taking the time to play and I appreciate your thoughts. I hope if I get another one out you’re still willing to give it a try!
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@A_Big_GuyI didn't expect it would be for everyone, though thanks for playing and taking the time to leave your leave your thoughts.
I admittedly not sure what constitutes the "main mission" - do you mean the non-optional objectives?
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This is a unique and fantastic mission - already looking forward to the next one!
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@ChronAthanks for playing and your generous praise! Sorry about the bug - I added it to my tracker and I will look into it when I get around to the next patch.
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I started Iris with startmap.pk4 myself - as I think it is a nice clean package. Though you often have to peak at other missions to understand how things work, opening even a basic mission can be overwhelming at first and I actually find you need have your bearings in the editor to be able to really understand what is going on.
If you are truly starting new - less is better imo. Startmap.pk4 is a good launching point to start following along with video tutorials as you have a functioning safety net under you with a lot of the house keeping done but nothing more.
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/801851353072795719/936987945603309608/startmap.pk4
Here is a link to start map.pk4 from the discord server - which if you are getting into mapping I encourage you to join us over there as well!
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@Tarhielthank you for generous words and your time spent playing the mission. I am very glad to read you had a meaningful time with it.
I am especially glad to hear you enjoyed the readables as I worked as hard (if not harder) on those as any other element of mission. My eternal gratitude to @Amadeus as editor who helped immensely in making them bearable to read.
When it comes to how I learned to make the mission it’s really the same stuff involved in trying to accomplish anything really: you just keep accepting failure and frustration willingly well past the point your body and spirit are telling you to stop. It will seem like everything is an endless and impossible mess until suddenly it isn’t: and you and the thing you are trying to do are in finally sync. You also learn to accept a thing is “finished” (or perhaps you are “finished” with a thing) well before it is ever perfect.
Since the deeper meaning of anything exists as an undercurrent below the surface, expressing it plainly poses some risk it may lose that very meaning for which it was created, so I will endeavor to answer your questions about the story up to the point I can:
Spoiler- was that all a dream, or a product of aging thief, not knowing what is reality and happens in his head (all the writing about dream throughout the level)?
I won’t answer that one, but I will say it it is the right type of question.
- it was a shock to learn the final house, the one with the Iris painting, is his own (you had that key with all your equipment right from the beginning), I gathered that much - but how old is he? If I read the quarantine readables right, quarantine was the for over 100 years?Quite old. The fact that this does not seem possible may itself be relevant though the scourge is admittedly not quite so ancient history as 100 years.
- Was Iris the Lady Gray, who fell in love with a stranger (him, main protagonist)?You should trust your intuition. It is never expressly stated that Iris is the subject of the painting for example, but you can intuit this as well. The story trusts you, so trust yourself!
- did I understood it correctly that that ratbeast was the missing young lord Ember, because he underwent a transformation with that machine on the throne in a nearby room?Interesting, though off the mark a bit. Judging by your comment below regarding a certain caped crusader I think you are not completely off track on discovering the rat beast’s true identity.
On a separate note the Ember side story was inspired by the readable you discover early in TDS which is a children’s book that describes the legend of the hag. When I first played this I thought it was a very cool one off world building detail that actually blossomed throughout the game to become the inciting incident for the entire narrative.
In Iris the thief’s own story however is ending and their presence on the stage has diminished, so while it seems something big is again a foot that has ramifications for other elements of the narrative, it’s going to happen without them. The world keeps spinning after all.
- I liked the Batman jab
I liked it as well - so much so this element dates all the way back to the original TDS version of Iris - there they even had the benefit of actual ratmen in the game which made it a little easier sell admittedly.
Thanks again for playing!
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@gokudo thanks for continuing to play and I always glad when players appreciate and are curious about these elements of the setting. While this story indeed has its end - if I am ever fortunate enough to finish my next mission it will certainly carry over and expand on many of those elements.
Though I will always ultimately trust your and other players intuition and innate curiosity over laying bare these types of details about the setting which is not (at least to me) a particularly interesting way to interact with a video games story.
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Spoiler
The solution that Ursine’s vault is nearby the door. The stewards journal mentions there is something off about the lady’s portrait when viewed “in a certain light”.
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50 minutes ago, Tarhiel said:
Dammit, sorry, I was meant to put full rating, and I pressed 1 instead of 5 (facepalm).
Can somebody from admins delete my vote, so I can vote again?It’s just an example poll for the contest itself so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you are looking to score a particular mission they all have their own threads you can still vote in.
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Spoiler
@mysakbmjeez looking at the list even I forgot about the chalice!
Glad you enjoyed the mission. Thanks for taking the time to play!
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Spoiler
@mysakbmlooks like you have almost all of them! Look for that last two in the sewers up the sump
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@mysakbmsure if you shoot me what you have already in a spoiler tag I can give you some hints on the ones you are missing
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Spoiler
@Melchiorthe plaque holds another clue - it refers to the area as “three monuments hall” - perhaps some of the old statues in hollowbrook would be a good place to start
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@Araneidaethanks for playing and I am glad to hear you are enjoying the mission! I hope you make it through the second half without too much frustration. If you get into a spot where a clue or some guidance might helpful let me know!
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Not sure if it would possible to remove or extend the 144 character limit for string variables (not sure if 144 is the precise limit, but I recall it being around there)?
I ran into this limit a couple of times developing my mission so I can elaborate on some potential use cases:
- Dynamically appending text to a readable: At one point the player had a journal which would update with clues/lore/etc as they made discoveries in the mission. In this case the order in which text was appended to the file was important, as the player could uncover there clues in effectively any order so doing something like just swapping a xdata reference wouldn’t work well imo. This was relatively easy for even a weak scripter like myself to implement up until the point the variable storing the appended text filled up to the character limit (which was pretty quickly). There was a work around proposed in a bug tracker entry but it was beyond me and i could never get it working.
- When this didn’t work I pivoted to the objective system but ran into the same issue - there is a script event which allows you to dynamically update objective text with ease but of course you are also limited here. I could see a reasonable response here being “Why would you ever need more than 144 characters for objective txt” - to which I would shrug and say “sure” - but you do run into the character limit before filling the space afforded to the mapper by the objective GUI so why impose the limit?
Anyway - it may seem like a small thing really, and it likely is generally speaking, but text is such an important element of the game in my opinion I would at least appreciate and leverage the ability to do more dynamic and interesting things with it.
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- Popular Post
- Popular Post
[This is a repost from the TDM Discord - meant to post it here as well at the time but the file size limits didn’t allow for a direct upload - thus the download link directs to the discord mirror which hopefully remains up and doesn’t seem to require discord credentials to access, but let me know if anyone encounters issues]
Stop losing sleep over one of life’s most important questions with the book_sp1 skin pack, featuring six new cover variants including silver, gold and jewel treasure bound tomes with full normal/specular maps!
The archive is ready to drag and drop into your TDM project, though all images are derived from public domain sources so really they are free to use however you like without restriction or attribution required.
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This is a very cool mission! I would be also happy to give it another go around.
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Wishlist For Darkradiant
in DarkRadiant Feedback and Development
Posted
I am not sure where the “foundation” begins in TDM as far as technology - but I am pretty sure individual entity and skin definitions are not it. I am sure devs and players appreciate the help quashing minor bugs as these can be irritating but your sense of proportion and frustration threshold are absolutely not in line with what you are reporting. If you want these things addressed maybe take the multiple instances of advice you have received as far as where and how to report them.
You may need more help than is readily available on a Internet forum.