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Ansome

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Ansome last won the day on July 30

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  1. Congratulations on the release, it looks astounding!
  2. That's very high praise, thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed my first FM! Regarding the ending:
  3. Well drat, I'm unfortunately going to have to pull out of the contest. The next teaching gig I have coming up just shuffled my schedule around all of a sudden and I've got way more work to do before the new school year begins! I'll keep chipping away at my TDM mission but there's no way it'll be done in time for the contest, so I'll just release it when it's finished. Best of luck to the other contest entrants though, I'm excited to see what everyone cooks up for TDM's anniversary!
  4. Taking a break to alleviate burnout. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have jumped into a map-making contest so quickly after just finishing another project and especially with my busy schedule, but I do believe I have something that the community will enjoy. No clue if I'll be able to finish it on time for the competition if I factor in a break, but I'd rather take my time and deliver something of quality rather than engage in development crunch or lose part of the map's soul to burnout.

    1. The Black Arrow

      The Black Arrow

      Yeah, I absolutely agree about the last part, to quote a good movie: "You can't rush art"

      If you want some time for yourself, and even if it takes 1 month, I say...To hell with it, go and take it! It's always nice to relax and then comeback feeling fresh and ready to continue your own hardship into creativity.

  5. JackFarmer fortunately resolved it for me pretty quickly. At some point, likely when rotating some of my prefabs made of a few different entity types, I had accidentally applied the rotation value to some worldspawn.
  6. I seem to have run into a wall. I'm consistently getting the same error when compiling AAS as part of the dmap process: "WARNING: reached outside from entity..." followed by the entity number and name. The issue is that the pointfile generated is going through solid brushwork and the origin of the entity in question isn't in the void. It's always my NPCs and if I delete that one, another random guard will cause it to fail. I'm really not sure what the issue is, these guards were perfectly fine when I dmapped previous versions of this map, only now am I getting this behavior. I checked around the forums to see if anyone had encountered this before but haven't really seen any mention of it. Any thoughts?
  7. Welcome to the community, RedEmber! I don't usually modify my TDM client, but this is a rather interesting mod you've cooked up here. I'll admit that although I hate saving and loading frequently upon mistakes, I still find myself guilty of it due to the temptation. I've always found that games like Amnesia: The Bunker that force the player's hand with save rooms generate excellent tension and create a greater sense of weight upon the player's choices, so I'll certainly be trying this out with some FMs I've already completed. Keep up the good work!
  8. I sleep well at night knowing the player will never see the absolute nightmare that is my sealing brushwork outside the playable area. Only the pointfile can judge me now.

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. datiswous

      datiswous

      It can be a defense mechanism against noclip/DR peekers.

    3. nbohr1more

      nbohr1more

      As I recall, the engine just optimizes away the non-sealing parts of the caulk brushwork anyway. The place to be more careful is monsterclip

    4. datiswous

      datiswous

      Quote

      You should see mine -_-

      You mean: LOL

  9. I was having trouble deciding how I wanted to balance and portray the zombies in my upcoming FM and many pointed me towards towards Hazard Pay as the gold example. I must say, it did not disappoint! I especially loved the atmosphere, the resource management and item scarcity, the safe rooms, it all made for a rather refreshing mission and a great source of inspiration for my own project. Keep up the great work, Kingsal!
  10. Yes, that's intentional. The warnings don't mean anything, that's just a quirk of the materials applied to them. You may also notice they are slightly transparent near glass materials, which is another strange aspect of them that I decided to keep for aesthetic reasons. This is not intentional, no. This is actually the first time I'm seeing this, but I can confirm that it appears messed up in DR. It appeared normally to testers and doesn't show up in any of the Let's Plays of my FM except for the latest one about a month ago, so I'll have to investigate if an update of some sort may have caused this. Thanks for letting me know! Thanks for playing my first FM, I hope you enjoyed it!
  11. Yep, sorry about that! I know that figuring out using space effectively in a new engine/editor comes with experience, I just wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts that could put me on the right path for my anniversary mission. I'll play through those levels you mentioned again and take some notes. Thank you as usual, Nbohr1more!
  12. Query: when was the last time a zombie in a video game was unnerving or scary to you? I'm chipping away at my anniversary submission and I've been trying to gather opinions on the subject. I'm perfectly capable of lighting them well, changing their sfx, and creating effective ambience, but I'm worried that zombies at their core are just too overdone to be an effective payoff to the tension I'm creating.

    1. Show previous comments  11 more
    2. ChronA

      ChronA

      Bonehoard is my favorite from Thief Gold too. It's such a cool, alien environment to explore: a world built not for the living but for the dead! That said, I do not find the zombies in Bonehoard especially scary, which is not how I feel about most of their other appearances in Thief 1. It comes back to the approach Bonehoard's level design and equipment incentivize against the undead threat.

      The generous amount of darkness, mostly clear sight lines, open space, and verticality in Bonehoard all encourage ghosting and evasion. Meanwhile the scarcity of good weapons against the undead and the seemingly endless nature of the threat-filled catacombs encourages hoarding the ammo you do get. That paradoxically means you always have the security blanket of your arsenal to fall back on, and never have to face the true dread of your resources running out. (At least that's been how I've always felt.) TDM's perennial favorite, Requiem, also works out that way, IMO (unlike its sequel).

      That said, I do find Bonehoard a very scary level, but it's not because of the undead. Rather it's because the labyrinth is so confusing to navigate and the exits are so far away, making it very claustrophobic to me. It feels like a place one could get trapped in forever--maliciously so even, and that's chilling. In contrast its undead encounters actually feel to me like power fantasies, and that might be intentional, if you consider that Bonehoard is like a rehearsal for the more taxing survival horror of the cathedral missions.

      Hope this is helpful to you Ansome. I was delighted by your adaptation of The Terrible Old Man and I'm excited to see what you do next.

    3. chakkman

      chakkman

      Bonehoard is definitely a "survival" type of mission. My point is that it gives you enough option do deal with the undead. The zombies I couldn't kill with holy water arrows (I definitely try to save those as well, as you can never know what awaits you), I lured into the fireball traps. Or, I destroyed several of them with a fire arrow.

      The unkillable guys like the fire shadow are a different matter, of course. You're best to do your job, and then get the hell out of the area they patrol. But, for the rest of the enemies, the game gave you enough options, which is all I'm asking for as a player, because I like to clear areas I want to explore. It's a lot of fun to explore levels like the Bonehoard, that's why I like to explore them fully, and, that's just not possible with unkillable or hard to kill A.I. everywhere, and no options to defeat them.

      The "supreme" ghosters, and other "supreme" people can play the way they want anyway. ;) 

    4. Ansome

      Ansome

      Goodness, I just realized how many replies this status update got. I thought I'd get only only or two responses so I didn't make this a proper post, but I ought to next time as I severely underestimated how helpful the TDM community can be!

      Quote

      I'd like to add that, this is fine, in my opinion, IF we do not know the threat itself.

      Like my first FM, the undead element is indeed a surprise curve ball in my current project, so factoring that into the resources given to the player has always been a consideration. Although "Hazard Pay" was set in a rather specific scenario, it did make it clearer to me how I could give the player resources while still keeping them from being too powerful under such circumstances. The trick will just be implementing that into the smaller scale I usually operate on, but I'm feeling more confident on the matter.

      Quote

      Hope this is helpful to you Ansome. I was delighted by your adaptation of The Terrible Old Man and I'm excited to see what you do next.

      Thank you so much, ChronA, I appreciate it! It's the positive feedback and kind words I received regarding The Terrible Old Man that make burning the midnight oil for this project feel worth it.

  13. Any tips for managing space efficiently when mapping? Although I'm proud of my first FM, its interior spaces were admittedly too open for their own good. I'm working on my submission for the 15th anniversary contest and making extensive use of AI models and measuring tools for scale, but I'm still uncertain as to what the ideal, comfortable amount of open floor space is in a room.
  14. For free ambience tracks it's as Freky said: you look around on the internet for tracks with the appropriate license to be included in your FM. Fortunately, you likely don't even need to bother doing this as a beginner as there's an entire "Music & SFX" section of the forums full of good ambient tracks for you to use if the stock tracks do not meet your fancy. You might also be interested in Orbweaver's "Dark Ambients", which come with a sndshd file already written for you.
  15. @WellingtoncrabThe download link is no longer functional: "This content is no longer available". Think you can shoot me a new download link for the asset pack?
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