STiFU

I finished all Splinter Cell Games multiple times, except for Conviction of course, which I only finished once because it's horrible. It did have excellent coop, 'though. If someone were to ask me if Splinter Cell or Thief/TDM are my favorite games, I'd have a hard time answering. Considering there is a shipload of content available for Thief/TDM, the longing for new Splinter Cell content is definitely a lot stronger! Maybe I should seek another hobby game dev community called PooBeeSoft for developing a game called "Separated Agent Group" featuring Cam Wisher...

Glad you enjoy it. And I can assure you, it will stay free forever.

That changeset reads quite decent, actually. Not sure about your naming, 'though. "Ring helper"? Which bell is it going to help me ring? ;-D Jokes aside, here are some comments: Do these bugfixes also apply to the core mod, or are they exclusive to your mod-pack? That's a great idea and very consistent with your design approach. I can see the value of this feature. Something like this was frequently discussed when developing various features for the core mod. However, we always dropped that idea because the light-gem does not reflect how bright the object you are looking at is. It only shows how bright the player is. So, utilizing the light-gem here will lead to incorrect brightness of the helper GUI. I would suggest to better leave it at a constant value. Would you mind elaborating what you mean by these?

So, you essentially replaced the dot by a ring and changed some cvars in addition to that bugfix you mentioned earlier?

Not sure if you confused tdm_frobhelper_fadein_duration with tdm_frobhelper_fadein_delay here, but if anything, I would discard the delay. The fadein_duration is supposed to smoothen the appearance of the frobhelper, thereby making it a bit more subtle. Why would you want to delay displaying the frob helper and then have it pop in instantly? If a player wants it to be intrusive, the hover option is the way to go. Subtlety was a key requirement in the design of this feature. Thats probably something we should fix.

I'd hardly call it a mod, if the functionality is already there and it's merely about presenting the settings in a different way. Anyway, I already said that I basically concur and that I would ideally like to see an extra accessibility settings GUI for all related features: frob helper, head bob, more subtle mantle animations, you name it... Still, your reasoning is kind of wrong because the intention of the frob helper was not to detect frobably objects, but to help the player aim on small frobable objects. The "Always On" feature unconditionally helps the player aim, so this does not conflict with the intention of the frob helper at all.

I always tweak the tdm_frobhelper_ignore_size such that it is enabled for all object sizes as well because I prefer it that way. However, back when I implemented this feature, it was common feedback that it shouldn't be enabled for big objects like doors etc. because it was intended to help frobbing small objects, i.e., it was not supposed to be an interaction indicator, which we already had in the frob-highlight. The reasoning for this feature still stands today, so I don't see how this qualifies as madness. The "Always On" feature has indeed been added as an accessibility feature as it supposedly helps some people with motion sickness, and since there were now already multiple options, I also added the "fade-in fast"-option because I felt the delay of the usual fade-in was so long that the frob helper wasn't really that helpfull in more hectic situations. Accessibility features should by definition never be hidden, so I would not remove the "Always On"-option. In fact, I would actually like to see an extra options page only listing accessibility options. On that page, we could then of course also add a checkmark-option to enable frob helper only for small objects.

Sorry, I didn't mean to step on your toes and to dictate the title change on you. I was merely raising concerns, as the title and beginning of this thread reads an awful lot like one of these here... Full disclosure: I haven't played your FM, yet, so maybe I didn't get the full picture. But then again, there are probably more people as clueless as me that don't get it at first either. Futhermore, you had some avatar come in and tell us about the loss of a beloved community member, wheras in myhouse.wad, it was the opposite, i.e., some random dude nobody in the community knew was gone.

@Wellingtoncrab would you mind editing the main post by either removing those parts about you being lost or at least put an "april fools" disclaimer on it. I might be over sensitive, but given the actual losses of some beloved community members, I kind of feel like this is something not to joke about. And honestly, I completely fell for it at first and was really sad and shocked for a minute or two, and frequently checked your profile if you finally came back online. By the way: Did you steal the idea from myhouse.wad?

Forum search is king!

I always loved the "connections" theme and I think it is very fitting to celebrate TDM. It's a shame we can't have 4 polls per thread because then my proposal would be to have free-for-all with a "connections"-rating added that evaluates how well the mission integrates into or expands upon the existing lore.

That was exactly the intention of "A New Job". When you play, you will notice that there are pop-ups every now and then, explaining some mechanics. But honestly, there are so many mechanics in TDM that it is hard to introduce everything in an entertaining way.

In the beta phase, we usually only address regressions since the respective previous version or bugs with newly introduced features, in order not to unnecessarily lengthen the beta-phase. And we are already in release candidate territory, as stgatilov already said.

You can download the build tools independently of VS: Buildtools for Visual Studio 2022. If you can still install those on Win7, you can maybe build DR with the command @stgatilov posted above. You might need to navigate to the directory where msbuild.exe is located first or even launch a developer console (which should be available in the start menu after you installed the build tools).

If there ever was a common code-style, it is definitely lost forever in the TDM-codebase. It's a huge mess in this regard!

Of course, identifying struct via HN is useless. At work, we use HN when there are reasons for caution: u for unsigned to prevent unintentional implicit unsigned promotion (and overflow) Yes, I know, the compiler will issue a warning, but in some legacy projects, there are tons of warnings, so devs are going to miss that one new one. We are slowly working toward warning-free builds, but as long as we are not there yet, the u-prefix helps a lot. p for pointers to make the reader / dev aware that that variable could be NULL. m_ for members, obviously useful. Similarily, g_ and s_ for globals and statics respectively, although it is obviously discouraged to use those. Various prefixes for the different coordinate systems we use. I for interface, just for convenience b for boolean, this is basically just for convenience so you can directly see that this is the most basic type. This one, one could defintely argue against, but I personally like it.

That's because all those guides apparently did not reach the age of web-page-based Code-Reviews via Github, Azure Devops, and the likes... All the people arguing against Hungarian say that you simply don't need it anymore, because your compiler / IDE will tell you what type a variable has (your Pull-Request web-gui will not show you that information) and that Hungarian only makes it harder to read variables (which is not really accurate, as our brain is perfectly capable to read any camel-case variable or function, so why shouldn't it be able to parse the prefix?).

By the way, give Graven some more time to mature. In it's current state, I can only recommend it to true Hexen-fans. Want to know more? https://steamcommunity.com/id/stiffsen/recommended/1371690/

I agree, and you might become happy in 2.13. My thinking was that you could select "Thief-Style" (new Daft-Mugi control scheme) or "TDM-Style" (old control scheme, but with long-frob shortcut for frob + use). No promises, however. The proposed change has to be accepted by more than one team member after all.

This is an intereting discussion. So, could one of the mods please move this to a separate thread as to not derail the beta testing thread. As a developer, you spend about 80% of your time just reading code. So, optimizing for readability is very important. The more information you can gather just by reading without cluttering up the code (by needless comments) the better. Hungarian notation helps immensely to quickly prase the displayed code in your brain. Yes, your IDE will show the desired information as well, but a mechanical interaction with the code is required to show it (mouse over or similar). Also, often you are tasked to do code review on webpages that don't offer these nice crossreferencing features of your IDE. Some things are objectively bad, 'though, so the respective rules preventing those things should universally be followed. For instance, much legacy code is nested extremely because at some point in time, it must have been a rule that you only have one return-point in your function (probably a c-residual). Such code is exhausting to read ("what was the else-if-condition some 1000 lines ago leading to this else-case again?") and very likely contains tons of code duplication. Today, we have the rule to only use little nesting and short if-else-clauses, to make the code easy to read and debug. If I come accross such a nested legacy function, I refactor the shit out of that function while trying to understand it, just so the next person after me doesn't have to deal with that horrible mess again.

After we were green-lit in just a couple of days, we were informed that we would have to form a legal entity, so that somebody can be held liable for potential copyright claims, and that we'd have to guarantee that there is no copyright infringement in the game. Since we are not 100% able to guarantee the latter, the prior poses quite a risk to the legal representative of the mod. So, we decided to drop this endeavor.

Honestly, I wouldn't be so quick to judge here, as noone knows the history of this code-snippet. It might just have been that there were floating-point-quantization errors in dmap and that they wanted to get rid of those by rounding at the desired precision, i.e., 0.001. Also, floating point comparisons with fixed precision like this are not uncommon at all. Some applications simply don't require more accuracy so you skip the very complex "regular" floating point comparison.

That's one way to not spoil what this game is actually about! Absolutely excellent game and so meta.

TDM is already a niche genre. If we release it to a niche platform, it will be niche²! Since we would have to strip TDM off all its assets, recreate some and build a demo FM around it, it wouldn't be more than a tech-demo, i.e., there is no game, which would be niche³. It's just not worth it! We even did not release on Steam due to licensing issues and on that platform, we actually could have gained a huge player-base. No TDM dev has ever showed interest in doing such a thing and that also goes for most of our community. It's not going to happen unless you do it yourself. Be prepared to put at least 2 years of full-time work into this project.

Hm, I am not sure I follow. Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity. Reshade is awesome. I use it all the time to improve the visuals of old classics. The Post-Lightmaps-Era games just look so much better with some SSAO...