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RPGista

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Everything posted by RPGista

  1. The admins are probably the team members, you guys are the ones keeping the lights on after all, plus maybe some regular forum member people saw fit to act as moderator? I havent looked into it (who is a moderator and who isnt). But its pretty widespread that online communities have different rules (depending on what they are for) and that breaking them will get you a warning, or even an outright ban, a lot of times this is done by people with the right to do it, with no need for further discussion (if its a clear case) - something like insulting people, or stealing work, things like that. The process in Bikerdudes case has been vastly covered, by a lot of different people, including himself a few weeks prior to the ban, so I guess theres very little controversy at this point... Though I do agree, if thats what you are wondering, that some cases might be blurry and a democratic way of deciding would be preferable to someone arbitrarily exercising power. But I have never once seen moderator abuse here in the forum. On the contrary. I remember this one guy that kept coming and going, he was always pissed and would eventually insult people, get banned and come back some months later under a new name. I think he did it like 3 or 4 times. I dont think people ever minded him coming back. Untill he would go psycho again. Well, at least I got the impression it was always the same guy.
  2. I guess any moderator can ban an user if he identifies a bannable offense. At least thats how I assume it goes in most forums?
  3. Would definitely be useful as a core asset. We can wait to see if a better modeler (Epifire, Im looking at you) has time to work on this. If not, I have a few things on my hands but I will look into it for you.
  4. Yeah, cool to know, its probably the material that counts, not the mesh/brush.
  5. Yeah, I was mentioning this a few days ago. Im not a tech guy at all, and I have no actual understanding of the real work that went into the engine these past few versions, though I did follow the tackling of the big issues here in the forums with interest. I decided to catch up when my new laptop arrived and I was blown away by the culmination of the graphic improvements, the optimizations, the renderer overhauls... Those soft shadows are really sexy, the whole thing feels better. I know that there some other features being worked on that are also exciting, like volumetric lights for example. And above everything, it feels good to know that the game is being updated and is very much alive in the technical department. That to me seems very important, to be able to meet the expectations of newer generations of players and contributors. Terrific work by the guys, for sure.
  6. Freyk - Although it is interesting to see how the animations play out from the players POV, artistically it is lacking compared to a fully detailed and animated HUD model, that is meant to be seen from up close. Even if not as "realistic". So the best solution would be to keep the HUD models, and have the players body visible from the chest down. Again, it would be a lot of work to make something like this work in tdm, from a modeler and animator point of view. You have swimming, you have mantling, climbing ladders. You have frobbed moveables. One that could be interesting however would be shouldered AI, gameplay wise... How it occludes your vision, etc. Most of the others cases would be mainly for continuity. Another good use of it would be to have the compass be actually held by the players hand. The lantern too.
  7. Congrats on the release. Im sure the community will use these a lot. You have to appreciate the methodical approach taken on planning and creating the assets, the attempt to use the engine to its full capacity in terms of shader design. The result is very expressive. I also noticed that your textures have a slightly stylised look to them, it appears that they are made in a procedural way, instead of based on real life photos. This gives the scenes a unique feel. Great work.
  8. Yes, in a natural, unregulated environment, animals like us will do what they have to do to survive. And they wont survive for long. Power structures have depended upon this very behaviour to exist. People will do whatever it is that is asked of them by what they feel is an inescapable state of affairs. Some, if not most, to avoid going insane, will even incorporate those values in their own beliefs, live by them, as in a case of collective stockholm syndrome. You'll see this throughout history, you can see it today with working class people defending the right of politicians to take away say their labour rights (earned by previous generations by the way, not without a fight), or environmental legislation, so that it benefits big business and "drive the economy", which is supposed to be their duty to sacrifice for. The whole point of leftist political theory (and in this case, a concept like UBI) is to try and find alternatives where human societies can trascend this historical tradition, by thinking of ways for a more equal and humane society to function. Its not based on a "natural selection" philosophy. So any move in that direction, however misguided, should have value for future generations, and is thus a positive thing whichever way you look at it, IMO. Still, UBI is destined to fail, not because it is wrong, but because a system like this needs, in order to function, a whole cultural environment that goes in sync with what strategies like these are supposed to promote. We are going in the wrong direction right now, late capitalism is becoming louder and more agressive to an extreme point (see the rush back to coal and oil as temperatures rise, militarism and increasing talks of global conflicts), inequality is increasing (has reached cartoonish levels here in brazil) and the rise of far right movements indicate that hatred and fear are becoming the prevalent feelings in most societies. In this context, welfare initiatives become extremely frail and tend to become extinct. LIke Anderson said, what good does it do to take care of a few million people in a couple of well governed countries and leave billions subjected to extreme poverty, violence and exploitation, ruled by corrupt elites. It cannot last and avoid "abuse" (people desperately trying to move there and be a part and crashing the system). PS: Does it mean that the fins are wrong in trying? Obviously not. Only that the best way would be to start implementing this in the poorer countries first, each country helping each other, untill this absurd inequality is gone. It would be like it was in the EU in a decade or two ago, countries with a mostly equal standard of living side by side, open borders and relative harmony, you would go to spain for holidays, or study in italy, then live in germany for a while, etc.
  9. Sounds like fun. Like I said before you already have achieved a lot of interesting things and those videos with the archer character are amazing. It should be great to see what you come up with in terms of map design that takes into account enough challenge and path routes for more than one player, perhaps even AI enhancements for this situation. I like the idea of an action game where stealth still applies. Looking foward to it.
  10. Hey oneofthe8, glad to see you are around and that your vision for your projects remains strong. Im sure therell be opportunities for sharing between both your project and tdm eventually. Will your project be purely a muliplayer experience? Will you open it for mappers to create the content, or do you plan on making the map desgining yourself? Will there be stealth mechanics, but with an emphasis on action? It would be nice to know more about it.
  11. Yeah, but even before the Bourne movies there was a lot of experimenting with this technique. Look at this glorious scene from Snatch (by far and away the best Guy Ritchie film): Like nbohr1more said, its a great technique that is sadly overused nowadays. I think it has to do with a lot of things: much easier to describe a sequence with a series of shots instead of longer ones, you can do stuff on the fly and then give it a body in the editting stage. Its also has a "coolness" factor to it, all those fast images are supposed to excite the senses and give you a lot of different perspectives. It also relates to the DIY aesthetics, of guerrilla documentaries and how everyone nowadays can shoot things from their own points of view using a portable camera. But obviously, as soon as a language becomes popular, a lot of people who dont necessarily understand it or master it start to use it for all sorts of purposes. Recently the opposite technique has also become more and more popular, you can check out the stairs fight scene in Atomic Blonde for a recent example, the knife fight in Saving Private Ryan (so disturbing), or my personal favourite, Children of Men (though I wouldnt watch this before checking out the whole thing, its a brilliant film): There are some concealed cuts here and there but the scenes are designed as a single experience, and its very powerful and authentic this way. But it can also be overused, like in some scenes in Gravity or the Revenant, where it becomes way too choreographed and you can feel how it all happens in a convenient way to give the observer the maximun amount of cool POVs. BTW, this technique has become a staple in cutscene-heavy action games, which are very influenced by the films Im mentioning here.
  12. I believe he is (one of?) the authors of that Thievous doom3 mod. It seems hes pretty much a one man team, he refers a few times to using community assets and code to speed things up. The reason he uses doom3's engine is because his project is aiming for a multiplayer, coop experience. What least thats what I gathered. I can probably send him a hello, but Im pretty sure he knows about tdm and other doom mods/tcs, I mean, its a small community.
  13. Since its all been about crazy requests lately (at least from my part), Im gonna throw a bit more fuel into the flames - have any of you guys seen this: Yeah, good old first person body awereness, in an idtech4 project, using the thief 3 model, no less. Now, we can admit that, once you have a fully animated character to work with, this looks really cool, and this guys done an incredible job. By the way, how come he is not around and working with us here in TDM? He was able to get so much stuff going for his mod, would be a crime to see it all going to waste... You can check his channel for more. But anyway, for people that like this feature and got excited, lets consider a few things first: - You need a fully animated player character for this to work. We dont have that. Detailed character modeling and animating is one of the hardest things to do in 3d art; - You reintroduce the problem of another unwanted change in gameplay: projected shadows coming from the player that the AI should be able to notice (you cant have body awereness without it) - this has been discussed to death before and the consensus is that its not a good gameplay feature; - Its basicly just an aesthetic change - it adds to the immersion, but doesnt really contribute much to the gameplay experience (apart fom the aforementioned problem of player shadow). So its a lot of work for little to no pay. It is cool to see it working, though. BTW, I should take a moment to praise the team here for the amazing work put into the TDM engine lately... I skipped a few updates and was blown away by how good the soft shadows look, how it all feels more... efficient and steamlined. You can totally tell that a lot of thought went into making the core game more modernized and more powerful. Kudos to you boys, stgatilov, duzenko, cabalistic, everybody, you know who you are.
  14. This way of thinking takes for granted that there should always be a great mass of subservient people, basicly slaves, that will be forced (by the threat of starvation) to do all the manual, heavy and dangerous labor while others are freed from it and are allowed to pursue their own interests (to some extent), because they happen to live in privilege. A good system should be balanced and humane, so a place where noone has to do anything was never considered. There will always be the need for impersonal work, and that sould be shared by everyone in a rational, intelligent manner, and not just fall upon a class of people that has been forced to do it because of "economic forces". For this to work, many changes would have to come about, governments would have to be very different and the society as well. For example, machines would need to be employed to create products and aliviate work for the whole of humanity, and not be captive to captalists who buy them in order to get rid of workers, to build whatever stupid thing they think the market wants. Its a very different goal for a society, which Im not really educated enough to even conceive right now. But it is telling how lacking our imagination is, that we cant really think of a society where people are equal and resources are used to benefit everyone, instead of the wasteful and utterly irrational system we have now. Cookie - if people are leaving their countries to go live under a different system, then that system is not broken, the other places around it are. Even inside the same economic system (again, to some extent because the relations are not equal between countries), today you see how people are moving by the millions in order to try and lead a better life in one of the privileged places that arent as devastated as their own.
  15. In anarchism theory, from where I believe the UBI system historically comes from, the idea of securing the basic needs of individuals is meant to free the person from having no choice but to enslave themselves for a living wage, in order to avoid starving and falling into extreme poverty. This comes from a world view where human beings are seen as having considerable potential in each of them, which has been stumped throughout the ages by lack of freedom, education and having to dedicate most of their waking hours working for those that hold the money and power. If you dont need to work in order to survive, you are free to go after whatever it is that actually inspires you as a human being - you can devote years to study and science, you can go into a medical or law university (something that is impossible for the great majority of people, who have to drop from school to work and never even apply for higher education), you can choose to become an artisan, creating things that benefit your community, you can work with ONGs, you can devote your life to music or art, you can actually afford to work for normal people instead of only the nobility (if you are an architect, designer, etc)... Still, what you said is mostly true. Some foward thinking societies are recognizing the threat of mass unemployment that awaits us in the near future, and some governments are seeing the need to experiment with these concepts in order to basicly avoid future social unrest and degradation. This could indeed be seen as an effort to preserve business-as-usual for a few more centuries to come. But its still cultural progress, even if the intention is not necessarily pure. It will be engraved into peoples minds that something like this could happen, and that in itself is very interesting. We have had things like that in the past, like our own social security systems today attest to (in some areas of the world). They have been gradually diminished for decades now, but they were once implemented when there was nothing like that before, and its now recorded that it is possible to achieve (a kind of society that looks out for people in need), even if our own socities are evolving in the opposite direction. Smart countries are going to do what the fins are doing. Less intelligent ones (like mine (brazil) and others (Im looking at you US)) are going the neoliberal way - electing ignorant and morally bankrupt demagogues; less and less public spending (so that governments are freed from the burden and exist solely for paying debt interests and supporting the industrial and financial classes with socialism for the rich), ever growing inequality and investment in a police state, gates and walls and punishment and supervision in order to mantain the privilege of the upper classes.
  16. Working perfectly now, my friend! Thank you guys for this. 2.8 is a lot better to work with and its great (and important) to have scripts that keep tdm up to date with whats going on. PS: Orb I had a typo in the material file for that model, I also had to get rid of the shadow mesh as it was sticking out visibly in several places, but its fixed and looking good here on my side now. Will be checking lwo next.
  17. Biernie - I dont remember if you can manipulate the origin inside dr, but if you cant, a simple solution would be to select the model, find the origin point wherever it is and create a brush block around it. Another solution would be to open it in blender and change the origin placement there, then re export it. But Im not sure if that would break the uvs and force you to work on that as well...
  18. The thing about KOed or killed characters is that they become ragdolls, subjected to physics, and thus all manner of things can happen to them - they can be carried around, proped on top of things, fold all weird upon themselves, characters could end up on top of each other, etc. I dont know how other games deal with this but its not trivial to transition from a random body position to a fixed animation of someone getting up from the floor, for example, without it being a really strange process. Maybe Im just ignorant, but I dont actually know how that would work in an easy way. Carrying unconscious people around is a staple of Thief and one of the mechanics that gave it its uniqueness, so having the ability of freely moving ragdolls is not gonna change, and that would probably be needed to allow for characters to be able to be reanimated - in Stalker, sometimes an npc falls down, badly hurt, and cant get up but isnt dead. You can cure him and he'll get up, but the lying down dying animation is a fixed animation from which you can transition to a dead state or a getting up animation with no problems. Once dead they become ragdolls and are subjected to physics (bullets, impacts, etc), but that is irreversible.
  19. It would be interesting to see some variants for current arrow types. In a particular mission, from a mapper with some coding experience. Obs himself has experimented with new arrow types and new weapons. Check his videos. You can pick up and throw obects with your hands. Right now you can use it to throw stuff around and distract guards that way. It would be very interesting for players to be able to pick up a brick or a good sized stone and knock someone out with it from a distance, with a good aim (maybe not everytime, but give it a % chance of working). Specially in one of those missions where you start with no weapons or equipment. Mappers could control the existance of these objects in their maps. I remember discussions about this back in the day... Even though damage from massive objects falling on characters has been added since, I dont think it was done for small objects you can actually throw (not so much mass but great velocity). I think they do alert them, but I dont think you can KO people like that. We should probably ask grayman. Another thing we talked about was "vector awereness". If the character didnt see the object being thrown, sure he'll wonder what the noise is about and go investigate the impact zone. But if you throw something right in front of them or hit them with it, one would expect the AI to ignore the object completely and actually investigate the direction it came from instead (even if he cant see the player).
  20. stgatilov - Really interesting to know how it could work in a technical way! Ive complined about this issue as well in the past. Like Springheel said, Ive also cringed as I followed a narrow shadow path between lit areas, right in front of guards, without being seen. I mean, the whole issue is basic common sense: Like pointed out, it "could" be done. You could have stgatilov's system, a lightgem that lets you know that you are in shadows + from which direction your profile is visible agaisnt the background. But like a lot of guys have also said, its a game. You gotta draw the line somewhere. Simplify things in order to create a certain gameplay mechanics. Mappers could also minimize this flaw with good design. Its not something that you notice often, thats very grating. I guess resources are probably better used in other aspects of the engine. I wouldnt mind seeing this working in a concept map, though.
  21. Yeah, Im not sure about the performance cost, though this scene running quite a few of the creatures seemed to do fine. Whats is very interesting is that he added support for motor drives for hinge and ball-and-socket joints, which is something that appearently wasnt supported by the engine before. This allowed for a moving character that uses actual physics to propel itself foward using the floor, which then translates to the whole IK rig, instead of the character "gliding" through the floor as it is carried by the root bone (the movement speed being set by the animation used). But the most interesting to me was the direct relation he achieved between character and world space physics, and how the monster reacts to force and gets bumped and pushed around and keeps on going organically. We have a couple of "hurt" animations which are fine but rather generic, they play whenever the characters suffer a blow or an impact of some sort, no matter where it was. It would be amazing to see characters reacting in real time to small forces, getting their heads nudged by a stone youve thrown at them, or an arm shoved back by the impact of an arrow or sword. If its doable or not, cant say. But its food for thought.
  22. Thats some brilliant use of light colors and great atmosphere. Awesome, man.
  23. Hmmm, unfortunately Im getting an error when I try to start a map using a model I exported with the ASE 2.8 script. The model shows up fine in DR, but the dmap and map commands crash with the error: MESH _NUMTVFACES != MESH _NUMFACES. Heres the model if you wanna test it on your side (just drop it in your project folder): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtiNx4pGNqbmbe32GXV7-iomjLY
  24. Hey, have you guys seen this? http://www.decarpentier.nl/armed-mine "Suppose a game character needs react to the direct impact of a bullet on its body. Trying to achieve this accurately for all possible impact positions under all possible conditions using only an animation system would require an enormous set of available animations to choose from. Only then, impacts would fit nicely with the any previous pose and activity. Alternatively, the animation system (and possibly other systems, like inverse kinematics) could be used to generate a frame-by-frame pose that acts like a target to drive an actual physically simulated character body towards. This would be a bit like having a virtual puppeteer (the animation system) control a simulated marionette (the simulated character body, or rag doll). Obviously, you could try to set the simulated pose instantly to mimic the target pose, but this would simply hamper and override the physics simulation, causing it to break in various ways. Instead of using infinitely strong marionette strings, it’s better to drive the body by relatively weak virtual springs. This way, the physics simulation always has the final say. For example, the body would normally match the animations closely. But when shot, the body would receive a physical push from the impact. This impact will push the pose away from the target pose, stretching the springs. Consequently, the stretched springs will start to push back towards their rest length, restoring the actual pose to the target pose over the course of a (fraction of a) second." Theres a full article explaining the mechanics, as well as a download link for the the source code. The result is bizarrely interesting. A thing that pushes itself pysically no matter what direction its facing, and reacts in real time to force (impact, bumps in direction). It would be brilliant to have TDM AI reacting more organically to force/damage, specially when hit by arrows, sword blows or thrown objects.
  25. That looks really neat, I like it a lot... Great work man.
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