STiFU

Hmn, I didn't notice any rough edges... It was all perfect for me, especially because of the advanced movement techniques like the initial momentum trick, the three-step-rule and quick-mantling with one foot on the edge resulting from a perfectly timed jump, instead of pulling you up with both hands (Check 'em out on youtube if you don't know them). The game is not frustrating if you avoid fighting completely and concentrate on fast movement, even on hardest difficulty. There are only a couple of scenes where you actually have to kill some enemies. But well, I played the game so much that I can't really remember whether it was frustrating in the beginning. Maybe to me it wasn't because I spent so much time in the timetrials...

Ghost-mode actually gives you a lot of freedom. It's the supreme ghost mode in which you are not allowed to use anything of your equipment and have to leave everything in place besides the loot of course.

Uhhh sweet. I'll second that. There's really not much anyone could destroy about that game since it's just about running fast anyway...

Why don't you play the remake? It's nice and good looking... I hope they'll redo Monkey Island 2 too! But I must say, I liked the visual style of the new Tales of Monkey Island™, as well as the gameplay. It's of way better quality then the recent Sam 'n Max series, which instantly got me bored (I only finished the first chapter, although I am a huge fan of all the classic Lucas Arts Adventures)... Judging from the trailer that Sparhawk posted, I'd even say that - aside from the character-polycount - Tales of Monkey Island™ looks better. But then again, that trailer didn't show a lot. I only saw that disgusting water...

I nearly started to cry when I saw the reviews of Splinter Cell Conviction1 and reading that the developers of hitman 5 will go into a different direction this time really gave me the rest. All big franchises are turned into money-making unambitious consumables, so I guess I'll keep on saying nay, sorry!! _____________________________________ 1The HUD actually points out good hiding places with bright arrows and it marks the spot where the enemy has lost line of sight with a full-sized bright model of the agent. Also you can kill all enemies in a room with one button click, which they call a "feature".

So THAT's how you do the frob highlight. I've been searching quite some time in the source code for the frob highlight... I played around a little with the material definitions. You can alter the color of the highlight by defining the brightness of red, green and blue instead of a total rgb-brightness. But this method is not really applicable. Sure you could change the definition in that material file, but there will sure be many FMs with custom lootobjects and you'd have to edit it again and again. But now I understand why you wanted to use frob.vfp for the highlighting. All materials would then just link to that file and frob-highlight of all models could be altered by editing it. It's a shame it didn't work, because the step from one frob.vfp to a second one for loot-highlight would be very easy...

Not intentionally... That I can assure you!!

Hey Fellas. In another thread the old discussion about distinguishing loot from junk was briefly mentioned and I would like to discuss it a little further without derailing the thread. So here we go! In conclusion, It's been said, there is a general agreement that we are not going to see any silver loot because of this problem, which is a shame, because everyone loves variety. I then thought of an easy way of how to communicate the value of an object to the player: Another solution would be to fade a very faint loot-glint in, when the object is highlighted and fade out, when it's not. This would be a compromise between TDS-glint and colored-loot-highlight, but I'd vastly prefer the other method, because this one would make small things like rings easier to find. At least if the fade- (and activate-)timespan is not set to a high value. Anyway, I don't want to force a new feature into TDM here, I'd just like to discuss it.

Evil Hat: Chair hanging on torch: Too much time, too many arrows: And another two Minutes of your time successfully wasted... ;-D

Sounds to me like a blacklisted key... :-P

I often have problems deciding what's loot and what's not as well. I mean by now, I know the models, but at first it was weird sometimes. And now that I read this, I thought "Hey, why not make a different colored frob-highlight for loot objects?". I am thinkig of a yellowish one. It's not as intrusive as Lootglint, but it still gives the player feedback.

Since you asked for a complete idiots-guide: The best thing to do would be to replace your Browser by Firefox or Opera or simply any other Browser, besides Google Chrome maybe, because IE sucks massively and not only because of that renaming issue. If you download the FMs again with one of those Browser, everything should work fine. But if you don't want a different browser, you either have to make sure IE saves the files as pk4 or you have to rename the file-extensions manually. If you don't know how to do that: You have to enable showing known fileextensions first in the folderoptions dialog and can rename them afterwards. Or you can use the run-dialog to start a commandline-window by typing "cmd" and perform this command in the new window: "rename c:\games\doom3\darkmod\fms\*.zip *.pk4". The Folder in this command has to be changed to your actual Doom 3 location of course.

Don't mean to be offensive here, but the good thief explores every corner of a map anyway, because there might be some loot hidden, doesn't he? A special doorknob would be an acceptable compromise for me, but in general, I'd rather go for consistency in Design and gameplay. Like I said earlier: For that reason, I don't think the immersion would be broken by discovering a non-openable door, but it is broken per definition by conventions, declaring that certain things are communicated to the player ingame. I myself am not too picky about immersion actually, but you guys brought it up. I could very well life with the compromise...

I should mention that I rescued him, then killed him with an arrow to the head and then rescued him again. (No I am no weird gunman, I was just bored ) But the point is, that you can complete the objective multiple times by carrying him out of and into the bed zone, no matter whether the subject is alive or not. This is not really an issue though. I just found it funny enough to be reported!!

You people all seem to love snow!! Anyway, screens are looking good. Only the proportions of the building look a little weird to me, especially on the last screen. I guess the second floor should be a little higher above the windows of the first floor, which are hanging pretty low as well, but I guess it just seems like that because of the snow, right?

Hehe funny. I actually tried it right now and you can even get him up the stairs without shouldering. You drag a body by the bodypart you frobed, e.g. the hand or a leg. Furthermore you can build up a lot more power by pushing than by pulling, since you don't lose the target out of reach so often. Pushing the body up the stairs by his *uhum* "private/belt area" worked splendidly... And Demagogue, I also noticed that you can "rescue" the guy, when he is already dead...

Press "use" while dragging someone and you will shoulder him. FAQ FTW!

So this FM is completely supreme-ghostable, as well as all other TDM maps so far...

Haha nice! I couldn't have said it any better... It is just a question of consistency. If there are unpickable doors, for whom you need a key, there also gotta be unpickable doors, for whom there is no key. And making them unfrobable is already a big help for the player, because he knows at once, that he cannot directly interact with that door. It'd be only possible via a switch. The times of sprites as substitutes for actual meshes are over. Most of the T2 FMs also use doormeshes instead of those uggly lowres textures, because today we can afford a few extra polys for a doorhandle! And I guess I would actually start crying if anyone used a door texture for a dummy door in TDM. But that window in this FM is a totally different topic. There should have been at least one indicator that it can be opened. Such an indicator could have been a slightly opened window, some sort of readable or a big ass red arrow, like Fidcal suggested... :-P I prefer the 2nd over all others, because I like to be rewarded for gathering information from readables and it is also better for the performance, like it's already been said. I only overcame this obstacle by randomly climbing up everywhere and wild frobing, so this is not optimal. I must admit though, that I felt pretty satisfied after finally finding the actual entrypoint to this mission.

So that everyone can play a big amount of FMs over the holidays... NICE! ;-) Fidcal said, there is no size-limit, but in that little amount of time, you cannot build too big. But when was there another contest?

I understand and have downloaded them just now. I don't mean to bother anyone here with the frob-highlighting-issue and since no one reacted to it anyway, I and a friend looked into that ourselves. He has altered the frob.vfp, but it didn't change anything in the game. Is the frobhighlight color and brightness hardcoded?

Ah, good for him. Let's hope for the best... Thanks for the info.

Interesting. There is no wiki article explaining how you do all the lightgem calculations, is there? (Search didn't turn up anything useful) Not that I wanted to change anything, I am just interested how it's done.

Thanks for the heads-up MD, but I always restore original values after testing, so that's not going to be a problem. There was a command similar to something like "tdm_lg_show", which led to a grey transparent rectangle appearing on the lower-left corner of the screen, so I thought that this was a command for an old lightgem, which was not supported anymore. Hence my assumption about the rest of the tdm_lg_* cvars not working. Ah ok, I forgot about the built in command description. That answers the complete showfov-paragraph.

Hey, I was checking out the tdm specific console commands today and I found some things that I wanted to discuss. So here we go... The reason why I had a closer look at those was, that I wanted to alter the frob-highlight in color and amplitude, because sometimes, I simply can't tell whether an object is highlighted or not. For instance the (lootobject) of the FM Patently Dangerous. Apparently, there was no such command and I'd be happy if you'd include something like that (if possible at all): tdm_frob_color in HEX and maybe also tdm_frob_brightness, but depending on how the frob-highlight is implemented, the latter variable could be unnecessary. I don't mean to turn it into an TDS-frob-highlight-orgy, but it's really hard to distinguish sometimes as it currently is. But there were also a couple of other things tdm_show_loot: Sometimes, after I finished a map, I feel like I want to at least see where all the other loot is hidden in an FM and checkout a lootlist for that reason. This beautiful command makes lootlists redundant, by showing how many items are missing and highlighting their wireframe (or something) for a couple of seconds. I love it. Thanks Dark mod... (I couldn't find the mentioned item in Patently Dangerous without this command by the way, although I stood multiple times on it beforehand and looked next to its side faces for loot, so frob-highlight-customization would be highly appreciated) tdm_show_gameplaytime: This is nothing important, but I found that once enabling the gameplaytime overlay, it cannot be hidden again. The timer just stops counting up (no refresh), the moment you set this variable to false. tdm_ai_showfov: Now this is interesting. When activated, you see two cylinders showing the field of view of the ai. But why are there two? I assume one for them is for relaxed and one for alerted state. Anyway, what confused me a little was, that the guards appear to have a circular fov. Shouldn't that cylinder rather be formed like an ellipse to simulate peripheral vision? I understand that these cylinders don't necessarily represent the "stim-sensivity" of the NPCs, which could then be "zero'd" on the vertical borders, but if they do, this should be changed on the long term I guess. When the player is located above or below eye-level, he should be harder to notice. tdm_showko: This variable seems to be a rudiment from earlier TDM-versions, which appears to have no functionality anymore and was replaced by tdm_ai_showko. I guess it could be removed. tdm_lg_*: I played a little with these variables presumably responsible for the lightgem, but it didn't change anything noticeable on it. Is this one a rudiment as well? Lastly I wanted to suggest to include a "Restart Mission"-Menubutton. This is only a minor tweak and by any means not mandatory, but I was a little afraid to click "Quit mission" in order to start a new game, because of the loading time. Luckily, loading the level all over was not necessary. Thanks for reading...