Wellingtoncrab

Certainly:

@Oleronif it’s any consolation I have never really been able to reliably pull this one off either - the “secrets of the void” quest is driven by players. There are a couple of ways up there, and they all involve some very tricky and unintuitive mantling/platforming. The best documented example is still Klatremus’s video imo, but I understand that wasn’t that helpful the first time you saw it:

@Arcturuswow that awesome and opens up a whole lot of potential!

@ArcturusNot sure what sort of feedback you’d like, but personally I don’t see an issue with you committing things which amount to animation bug fixes, such as the turning one form the dev thread (which I understand is not a perfect fix) or like the walking one above, to the game. It’s just nice to have someone working on them frankly. And I think them going into dev builds is the only way we will get any kind of scale testing on them.

@chakkmanAgain if you think I am "angry" you're not reading my posts. I said I am happy you are happy and meant it. I will stop responding now, though.

It doesn't surprise me you aren't reading anything actually being said, but there is no argument. I am happy you are happy with your purchase. You just seem to want to make some broader point about people unfairly rushing to judgment, which is strange to me when we are all discussing the same "30 seconds" of promotional material which led you to instantly purchase the game before it was ever even released. That is at least as much a rush to judgement as anyone who is skeptical of what they saw. And that is fine. It is actually ok to be be judgmental of promotional material a corporation releases specifically in an attempt to sell you something. Clearly it wasn't a slam dunk in this case.

Hard not to have a very subjective opinion on that:

@chakkmanYou can’t really pull off the “shame on you all for judging a book by its cover” thing when we’ve all already read the book. If you’re right and there is a lot more that we aren’t seeing to this remaster than what looks like just a very gaudy new cover on an old book, well that’s an even bigger problem. Because they aren’t advertising a remake, so they sure as hell shouldn’t be changing the text. Good for you that you are already happy with your purchase. Being skeptical about alterations made to a beloved game is imo at least as reasonable a position as yours, which was to be so confident as to purchase the game off the same 30 seconds of available context you are now saying is an unfair way to represent or judge the game. Ok then - I think most people will just wait and see.

I guess who are we to criticize the concept of taking a game from 1999 and making it look like it was made in 2004? I mean obviously we all love stencil shadows and bump mapping and the whole shebang, but frankly it looks very unfavorable next to the original and is completely unnecessary.

That would presume the only way past an obstacle is to unlock it. Sometimes this is the obviously the case if the key has been placed specifically to gate progress the mission. Even then people find creative was sequence break these types of games all the time. See crate stacking, or LEM climbing in Deus Ex, etc. But a lot of time an area is going to have multiple exits. Some may be reachable in ways the designer never really intended. I am merely drawing a distinction between the supreme ghosting ethos and the desire to drop every key because ghosting comes up in the thread. My understanding is if you are supreme ghosting, the philosophy is you make your attempt with a mission as it is designed. But boilerdunce does not explicitly say that is what he is even doing. So as I mentioned at the end of my post if it’s really hampering his enjoyment of the game then I guess modding it is the way to go. It’s a separate topic but I frankly caution blanket modding the entire game, as I think it’s not widely understood that FMs themselves are basically already mods. You’re modding mods. You should not take the assurances of game mod authors regarding mission compatibility, and frankly you are getting a lot more than just QOL improvements if you install something like Wesp’s ”patch”. Imo the missions I release will never be compatible with mod packs, and will always come with an advisory against using them and to use them at your own risk. It’s a pain but you’re better off making changes at the fm archive level imo.

I think mappers in general are a lot more aware of the supreme ghosting playstyle now. I see things like objects not being droppable come up in beta testing for example. When I released my first mission I was obviously aware of the concept of "ghosting" in that it meant beating a mission undetected, but I had no idea how mature the ruleset was until @Klatremushelped me a lot with understanding it. My first reaction was like "whoa I better go back and change a bunch of stuff", and he actually said you need be careful about going too far with that. Because supreme ghosters don't actually want mappers to completely alter the design of their finished missions to enable supreme ghosting or to make it easier. Because part of the fun and challenge is coming up with creative solutions around that design, and then sharing these methods with others. Which leads to some very interesting stuff which is really in the imsim spirit, like carrying a note around in your inventory for the entire mission to use it as a makeshift cushion: Which is just to say, if the design of the mission enforces that keys are not droppable, and you really don't want to leave a trace, then I got the sense the supreme ghoster thing to do is to first see if there is another way. Probably a lot of the times there isn't, but I imagine there are some pretty interesting solutions you won't really see if just blanket mod the game. But it's your time and your dime, brother. You gotta do what you gotta do if it is really hampering your enjoyment.

@BikerdudeThere are open source options like MakeHuman/MPFB. If you stick to the core assets the output will be CC0. https://static.makehumancommunity.org/about.html Not as fancy as metahuman, but some of the results were pretty okay looking to me. I ran into a wall when it came to adapting the rig for the animations to TDMs though.

Thanks for working on this. I’ve been meaning to take a look at it, but the current project I am working on uses kingsal’s modified footsteps and that is so over schedule it rather requires my full attention. Not sure if it’s possible as they maybe share core definition files, but out of curiosity would you be willing to split the ai sound mods and player sound mods into separate pk4s? I know it’s intended as a mod to the full game, but that’d add some nice modularity for mappers who maybe want to include one element or the other integrated directly into a mission.

No they are not a bother at all. I appreciate you taking the time to play and post any issues you encounter! I will take a look at the elevator door as yes - it seems like they got tripped up somehow. As the doors simply get triggered when they reach the target floor - so if they are already open they will close. The only way out of it would be to somehow trip it up again. This probably needs some scripting to clean up instead of relying on blind triggers. Thanks again for playing!

@Drako Yes the versioning system within in the downloader always increments by 1 where as mappers often end up using something akin to the software versioning you typically see - but this obviously makes it a bit confusing and the numbers diverge quickly. The easiest way to tell if there is an update is if you see an asterisk indicator next to a missions name in the downloader. The last patch was in March of last year so around the time you downloaded the mission.

Hey @Drako- thanks for playing! I am glad you are enjoying it so far.

If Arcturus’s original hasn’t been available in the game since it was modified back in 2011, why don’t we just add it back as a new material? blocks_mixedsize02_multicolour_clean or something.

@OnlyTaffingCowardsHideLook dude - we have next to no rules here but that doesn’t mean you get to do our act however you want “because internet”. I think you have established you don’t have much to elaborate on in terms of your feedback about the game not running as well as you would like at 4k. So it follows you do not need to argue or pick fights about it. Unless that is the actual point. There is appeal in working within the limitations of older technology that not everyone understands. The “trash” as you put it, represents an opportunity for us to express something we might otherwise not be able to. So you are free to criticize it, but you don’t need to denigrate it or our members while doing so. Even if no one stops you, it’s not welcome here.

I think a fairer comparison is something like skin deep. The game is awesome - it is very polished and smartly scoped for the engine and uses a modern idtech4 fork. The game runs very well in missions and is even steam deck rated. There are however “interstitial” missions and interludes which are much different in terms of scope and design - and on a device like the steam deck performance cannot really be sustained - even at low resolutions. Brute force only goes so far with the base technology.

I honestly don’t know any mappers who are using 4k or much in the way of MSAA as a target when considering performance. The 1660 is the card I actually built all of Iris on - and it was frankly a nightmare to keep it running at 1080p/1440p. I don’t think your expectations are as reasonable as you think. Vanilla Doom 3 is not that scaleable of a game relatively speaking. I agree that Void in D2 is a very impressive example of forward rendered dynamically lit game. It also rather obviously quite different at some pretty fundamental levels. But if your expectations are ultimately that we are going to live up to that level of resource development - the base of which is already 2 entire generations of idtech ahead as a starting point, I think we are going to continue to disappoint you. I have however seen since my time mapping, quite substantial performance improvements across versions. But we mappers are greedy and “optimization” is in the eye of the beholder- we are going to use that overhead to do more with the game. Sorry.

@Sullomethanks for taking the time to play! I am glad you had a good time @datiswousyes the speech from the shop owners is specific to the mission. If you make subtitles I would be happy to integrate them.

The "issue" with the animation at least appears to be on the script side, so even those of us who only know enough to be dangerous can still play with it. In "tdm_ai_base.script" there are blocks to specify how animations are handled when an ai is blinded. It only plays the animation once across the torso and legs channels and the ends regardless if the ai is still blind or not. The result is it that rather quickly after the animation is complete, the ai seems to snap to idle and it is imo very hard to tell what state the ai is actually in. You kind of expect them to snap out of it, but they are actually still blind and just standing there: I am a very bad scripter, but by copy pasting the torso channel animations a few times and adding some pauses in between for the leg channel you already get what is imo a not perfect but a much more legible "I'm blind" response: The ai is covering their eyes the entire time, they switch between stumbling forward and standing in place, they change direction, etc. You can also much more clearly see the difference from the randomization at the end the blind timer: Again very bad at scripting. There is probably a much better way to handle this. For example it'd probably be better to pull the blind duration spawnargs from the ai and loop the animations for that length specifically and not repeat so many lines. Maybe introduce some kind of randomization to try and break up the "synchronized swimmer" look.

Yeah I can’t imagine playing as anyone but the iconic Frank Witcher. Especially after what they already did to our boy Tony Half-life. I think this game actually looks pretty cool even if it’s only for chicks sadly.

The bomb itself is not the flash - so no it doesn't make that much sense and is rather obviously quite finicky. A simpler check would probably be more reliable - as was the case the hit detection on the blackjack.

@chumbucket91Not sure if in the code you can see anything that might cause some of the other polish issues with the flashbombs - such as the bizarre hit detection , "blinded" animation not looping properly on affected ai, and blind timer seemingly not working at all (the default duration for ai to blinded is supposed to be 8 seconds base + 1-4 of random time, but they seem to come out of it in maybe 4)