Springheel

I had a couple thoughts. The nearly blind/deaf options were called that because they seemed accurately descriptive. At the time (though perhaps not any more) if you set the AI to those levels you really didn't have to worry about hiding at all. Relaxed AI would not hear you unless you were on the noisiest surfaces, and you could stand right in front of them while evoking only a, "Did I see something?" response. I remember testing the settings and I could run right down a wooden hallway all the way up to a standing guard and KO him without him being alerted enough to even turn around. To me that's "Nearly deaf". Could casual players find those titles insulting? I suppose they could. I'm not sure TDM has ever been a game for casual players, to be honest. But if people want to change the names, I'm fine with it. I wouldn't reuse the same names to mean different things though. If "Forgiving" is moved to the lowest difficulty, then it's confusing for people who were currently playing on "Forgiving". As for the actual times, I find it hard to judge what is acceptable in the abstract. I can't imagine how much faster 3 seconds feels than 4 or 5. In general, I think the differences between the 4 difficulty levels should be significant, and not just 1 second's worth of difference between them, but without being able to test in-game it's hard to say what's best. I was pretty happy with what we had before when the system was working as intended.

People under 20 don't use forums.

I think the behaviour that makes the most sense would be for the AI to stare at the player, turning his head to track but not stopping if he is patrolling out of view. If the player remains in the AI's POV, the AI's alert counter will tick up until he starts walking towards the player, and then eventually running once he realizes you are an enemy (which would be when he hits alert level 3, I image) Depending on how complicated we want to make it, an AI who is already alerted to an intruder should perhaps act to keep the player in his POV, which would mean stopping if he was otherwise going to walk out of view.

The amount of slowdown depends a lot on the quality settings of the soft shadows as well.

Yes, alert 5 means the AI can currently see you, which means they are attacking or attempting to close on you.

It makes the sword pretty pointless if you can just hit an AI in the face with your blackjack and knock them out in one hit even during combat. That was written before TDM was even released, and well before grayman's work, so I highly doubt it's still accurate.

In the first video, your lightgem is brightly lit by 0:17. The guard doesn't draw his weapon until 0:20, and it's another second or so before he begins running in your direction. So that's at least 4 seconds of grace time. That seems perfectly reasonable for a guard who is alert. Now, since that guard isn't alert, you might have an argument for increasing the delay; how many seconds would you want to see? Neither guard becomes "blackjack immune" in those videos.

Based on the video, I'm not sure anything is broken. The AI in both cases don't go directly to full alert when they spot you. There is a second or two grace period where you can see them ramping up, particularly the guard that's further away.

Yes, I was pretty sure something like this had already been implemented.

While throwing objects at AI can do some small amounts of damage, the code is not supposed to let it kill AI. And I've never heard of simply bumping held objects into AI doing damage. How much control do we have over the damage movable objects do to other movable entities? If we could make some kind of threshold value that has to be done in one shot to activate the powderkeg, we could avoid the issue of small damage building up.

1. I don't think so. They will react automatically to the sound of it exploding. Having them run before that happens would require extra coding work, and reduces the point of setting them off in the first place (presumably players will want to use them to try to kill AI). 2. AI don't kick movables, they just walk into them, which shouldn't cause any damage. Presumably the kegs will be too heavy to go flying after contact with an AI. Given that there will be considerable noise and damage from a keg exploding, I think we should make sure they are designed in a way that makes them not likely to go off accidentally. We don't want AI setting them off when the player isn't around, potentially alerting half the map or failing no-kill objectives.

Sure. I can check to see if it's the same problem. Can't really tell from screeshots.

Given that this scam has been around for a while and there aren't lots of people from the forum reporting this, it probably isn't coming from here.

I got an email last night with my real name and the forum password in the subject header. It was a blackmail email claiming to have compromising videos that would be released if I didn't pay bitcoin. I checked where the message came from and it traveled through the thedarkmod.com domain. I have heard from at least one other person with a forum account that they got a similar email. That, and the fact that I don't use my forum password in very many other places leads me to believe that Wordpress or the forum may have been hacked somehow. Obviously, if you receive an email like this, don't respond to it. I suspect it's automated, but if you use the same login info here that you do on important sites, you may want to change it on those sites. I'm not sure whether changing your password on the forums is a good idea yet or not. I've contacted taaaki about it. If you did or do get such an email, please let us know here.

I don't think a blackjack should do it...that's meant to be a cushioned blow. Hmm, that might be reasonable, though it could affect crushing damage.

If it's going to be exploding and causing damage, we don't want it to be too sensitive. Just throwing a bottle or loaf of bread shouldn't do it. Hitting it with an arrow or sword, setting it on fire, or dropping or throwing it should set it off.

There's no reason for there to be a hammer in the inventor's guild logo, and including one just makes it more difficult to tell them apart. Otherwise they're quite good.

Wait a minute. Doesn't Kingsal have working powder kegs in Volta 2?

"idDebris" used the following spawnargs related to movement: "velocity" "100 100 00" // how fast the projectile leaves the gun (or distance if fuse is 0) "random_velocity" "1" "angular_velocity" "1 -1 1" // how the projectile is rotating when it leaves the gun "thrust" "50" // the rate of acceleration (always in the direction of the projectiles model) "thrust_start" "50" // when to start accelerating "thrust_end" "0" // when to stop accelerating "linear_friction" "0.8" // "air" friction "angular_friction" "1.1" "contact_friction" "0.9" "bounce" "0.1" // how much speed a projectile retains when it bounces off of objects (coefficient of restitution). 0 means no bounce. "mass" "4" "gravity" "266" // how much gravity affects the trajectory. gravity direction is same as the entity that fired it. However, broken arrow pieces do not use any of those spwanargs...I can't tell what's giving them any impulse. They're just regular movable entities. edit: Ah, maybe it's this line on atdm:result_arrow_broadhead: "velocity_xfer_dud" "0.8" // fraction of velocity to transfer to spawned object/s We already have a bottle model and two broken pieces. I don't think you'd want any other actual models, but a glass fragment particle effect would be nice.

That would be how I'd try it, with a debris entitydef that has a S/R attached. Do they have impulses set? I've never looked into it. It's possible the required id spawnclasses didn't make the move over when we went standalone.

If anyone wants to play around more with this idea, this is as far as I got a while ago: I don't remember how much was working. Doesn't look like any damage def was attached yet.

The ability to span flinders and particle effects when objects break is already coded, presumably you could spawn S/R effects as well. It's an area I've only glanced at a few times.

Reaching deep into the dark recesses of memory, I think this is related to dropping frames...the card is supposed to be destroyed on a specific frame, and if that frame is skipped then it can cause a backup. I don't know what's causing the frames to drop in this case though.

I haven't seen it, but as a shot in the dark, do you have uncapped FPS on?

Love it!