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About the main argument of the thread, I actually liked the City in TDS in the beginning. But after a while it becomes only a tedious menu: something to run through in order to go in the real mission. So as many other said I think it is not a good idea, at least it is not as TDS did: overall I found stupid the continuous fight between factions, the city was not a dark gloomy place it was a battle field; with a such number of deaths per day the Hammerites would disappear in few weeks! Moreover I also never understand why everyone attacks you on sight (in the City I mean) I am just a bystrander! You can (and should) attack me if I picklock something or even if I have a weapon drawn; but attacking without reason sounds strange. As I mentioned it could be interesting to put a large map with many small sub-quest you can get or decline when you go in some places.

I think you are overestimating the amount of skill that is out there. I would glady make textures if I had the time (hell I even applied at one point), but unfortunately I am just not that good at making textures. OK, but not that good. The problem is that once you learn a couple of simple techniques in modelling, texturing or whatever, you are immediately seized by the notion that you absolutely rock at modelling or texturing, just because you can produce stuff that you wouldn't have thought possible before you started (I've been there myself). Unfortunately, this applies to everybody else as well, which means that your own work is in fact pretty average. The result of this is that there is a big discrepancy between the number of "modellers" and "texture artists" who drop into the forums, and the number of actual talented individuals who can make a real contribution.

There are some misunderstandings here. It is already technically possible to make a hub FM with some limitations. It is similar to a campaign but whereas a campaign is a sequence of FMs played in order, a hub has a central FM (hub) and the other FMs (spokes) can theoretically be played at any time from the hub. In practice their access is normally restricted for story/gameplay reason so you finish up playing most of them in sequence anyway. The main difference is returning to the same central hub FM. As said, the hub helps to integrate and focus all the other FMs from one centre but many might find replaying the same area boring. It probably doesn't need to be. If the hub is made tiny and easy to pass through with perhaps a few items of use and interest such as a store where you could buy tools and weapons then it need be no more boring than going to a menu and selecting 'continue to the next FM in the campaign' then selecting what weapons/tools you want at the menu shop. Another idea might be to open up different areas of the hub as you progress back from different spokes. What TDM does not support at present is: 1. The transfer of player weapons/inventory to each FM. 2. The restoring of game situations when you re-visit any particular 'area' of the FM. 3. The management of sequential campaigns at the menus. (Mission Complete then leading automatically to the start of the next campaign briefing etc.) The hub method does not need 3 above because Mission Complete can be simulated within an FM (I did it in Thief's Den originally before the Mission Complete proper was created.) Also you might not necessarily want it in that form but just leave the player to make his way back to the hub when all objectives are completed in that spoke FM. I believe 3 can be accomplished with a script running a console command to save and restore game saves. #1 might be achieved. This was discussed in another thread recently. An alternative is that each spoke you begin with new weapons/inventory. Apart from the above technical problems, a hub FM is like any other campaign - a lot of work depending on quality and size. Footnote: There is a third form that is neither hub nor campaign: net or web. With these there are just many FMs all interlinked so you can freely move from any one of them to any other either directly or via another depending on what connections the mapper chooses to include.

This has probably already been discussed on the internal forums, but what the heck... I think it would be great if, when entering a poison-gas area, you would get a breath-meter like when you're underwater instead of just automatically taking damage. I figure a master thief should be capable of holding his breath whether he's swimming or not. It's not like there aren't other ways to automatically hurt the player, and this would provide mappers a way to hurry players through areas without being forced to damage them (thus avoiding the "here's a convenient health potion, you'll need it" syndrome).

For the one year I've been contributor, I can recall seeing that twice. One of them was me (I just had bad attitude due to family problems). And I was immediately reprimanded. And I've never done it again. If the team dared to act this childish, they'd bicker weeks on end and not have gotten this far with the mod. Now lets put our egos aside for one minute, stop hyperanalyzing one thread, and look at the Mona Lisa as a whole.

Uh, did you not read the one about five posts up? The one where I posted quotes from two people in this very thread commenting that arrows are too fast? And the quote from the person who also remembers a large number of complaints to that effect in the past? You act like we're trying to pull one over on you or something.

I would also recommend adding a duplicate thread to the ttlg.com forum's fan mission forum as a release announcement for each mission as its posted here - I know there are a ton of folks over there waiting with very high anticipation of new Dark Mod missions that may not even know this forum exists quite yet. Its already been done for the missions released thus far (I think) but for those of you who are making your first mission - this is a great chunk of audience you don't want to miss out on

I have looked at the C++ code and the script call does not get the entity that is damaged (e.g. the script is called with only one parameter, namely the entity that is the one colliding). So if your script hurts the player, that would only work if the ball collides with the player, if it collides with anything else, it would still hurt the player - oops. Need to revise that code. As for the damage stim, the code says: if ( canDamage && damage.Length() && gameLocal.time > nextDamageTime ) { if ( ent && v > minDamageVelocity ) { float f = v > maxDamageVelocity ? 1.0f : idMath::Sqrt( v - minDamageVelocity ) * ( 1.0f / idMath::Sqrt( maxDamageVelocity - minDamageVelocity ) ); idVec3 dir = velocity; dir.NormalizeFast(); ent->Damage( this, GetPhysics()->GetClipModel()->GetOwner(), dir, damage, f, CLIPMODEL_ID_TO_JOINT_HANDLE(collision.c.id), const_cast<trace_t *>(&collision) ); nextDamageTime = gameLocal.time + 1000; } } So have you tried simply a "damage" spawnarg on the ball, not using a stim at all? The code above means that damage is applied once a second, so unless the player is touching the ball longer, it would only hurt him once. (Sorry if you already tried that, I didn't read the entire thread)

Where have you looked? There are TWO POSTS to that effect in this very thread.

Quoth the Upright Citizens Brigade "Everyone here needs to coooooooooooooooooooooool out." Reasonable people can and will disagree. In particular, we spend alot of time arguing about things that really come down to opinion, and alot of people on these forums don't know how to write with tact. I don't know if they do it out of ignorance, or because it amuses them, but there is no reason to take it personally whatever the cause. Ultimately there are an infinite number of games we could make and everyone here, if given their druthers would likely make a different one.

From our multipage discussion in January: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=3244&st=0 Virtually everyone thought the hieght difference between the thief and guards was too high. In fact the only people arguing the heights were ok were you and Oddity.

First of Demagogue, loved it. Just got round to reading this thread and got something to say on the linear thing. Oh, big grin when the guard in Bensons saw me and told me he was gonna piss on my corpse!

Ok I have some information for you guys. The circumstances that trigger the crash are described as issue #1 in the first post of this thread. To trigger the crash I quickloaded. I used VC9. The game crashes in thedarkmod\win32\include\boost\detail\sp_counted_base_w32.hpp, line 100: void release() // nothrow { if( BOOST_INTERLOCKED_DECREMENT( &use_count_ ) == 0 ) //<--- crashes here { dispose(); weak_release(); } } The stack trace is: gamex86.dll!boost::detail::sp_counted_base::release() Line 100 + 0x9 bytes C++ gamex86.dll!boost::detail::shared_count::~shared_count() Line 208 C++ gamex86.dll!boost::shared_ptr<ai::Mind>::~shared_ptr<ai::Mind>() + 0x19 bytes C++ gamex86.dll!_CallSettingFrame(unsigned long funclet=0x02feee9c, unsigned long pRN=0x00000103, unsigned long dwInCode=0xd4153d4c) Line 73 Asm gamex86.dll!__FrameUnwindToState(EHRegistrationNode * pRN=0x02feee9c, void * pDC=0x02fecfd0, const _s_FuncInfo * pFuncInfo=0x0a9cb6e0, int targetState=0xffffffff) Line 1151 C++ gamex86.dll!__InternalCxxFrameHandler(EHExceptionRecord * pExcept=0x02fed490, EHRegistrationNode * pRN=0x02feee9c, _CONTEXT * pContext=0x02fecfdc, void * pDC=0x02fecfd0, const _s_FuncInfo * pFuncInfo=0x0a9cb6e0, int CatchDepth=0x00000000, EHRegistrationNode * pMarkerRN=0x00000000, unsigned char recursive=0x00) Line 479 + 0x13 bytes C++ gamex86.dll!__CxxFrameHandler3(EHExceptionRecord * pExcept=0x02feee9c, EHRegistrationNode * pRN=0x02fecfdc, void * pContext=0x02fecfd0, void * pDC=0x02feee9c) Line 365 + 0x1f bytes C++ ntdll.dll!7c9032a8() And the disassembly: if( BOOST_INTERLOCKED_DECREMENT( &use_count_ ) == 0 ) 0A494C7F mov eax,dword ptr [this] 0A494C82 add eax,4 0A494C85 or ecx,0FFFFFFFFh 0A494C88 lock xadd dword ptr [eax],ecx ; <---------- crashes here 0A494C8C dec ecx 0A494C8D jne boost::detail::sp_counted_base::release+3Dh (0A494CADh) The crash reports says "Access violation writing location 0x0e41ce04". That is the value of EAX (the value of ECX is 0xFFFFFFFF just in case). Basically 'this' is junk for some reason. Attempting to look at 'this' in the watch window shows: this 0x0e41ce00 {use_count_=??? weak_count_=??? } boost::detail::sp_counted_base * const __vfptr CXX0030: Error: expression cannot be evaluated use_count_ CXX0030: Error: expression cannot be evaluated weak_count_ CXX0030: Error: expression cannot be evaluated I have limited knowledge of Dark Mod source code, but I am a member of openDarkEngine team and we have had similar problems before. My guess is that for loading a new game, or getting to the stats window, or just quitting the game the current session has to terminate. In the termination process a class instance gets destroyed, but one of its member functions gets called afterwards. There is probably a mistake in the order of things getting destroyed in the code that ends the session.

Well, unless you changed something Spar, I don't think I can adjust the values without affecting the players eye height. Aside from that, you told me NOT to change the values, becuase you were going to find a way to 'scale' the light gem while the player crouches. The lightgem is tied to the player view height, and I already made the adjustments to put the tip of the gem in the players head months ago, but the problem happens when the player crouches. Upon crouching, the eye height drops to the player models chest. Here is where you discussed scaling the model. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2890&hl=

Shouldn't happen if that's what your settings are. Greebo posted a console command that let you see exactly which sound files were playing, but I forget which thread it was in at the moment.

Well, two things: I was flicking throught the the nVidia website where it (somewhere) claimed that the 7900 supports a realtime global illumination solution (photon mapping or radiosity, it didn't eleborate on what kind of model they used or anything - the implication was that it rendered radiosity lightmaps in realtime in hardware though). Two, the tech demo from Crytec showed an editor view where a light was being moved around in real time, with shadows and diffuse ambient light consistent with some kind of real time global illumination model, and there has been numerous reports of next gen engines supporting real time global illumination of some sort on the horizon. Whether or not all of this is true or not I can't say, but the Crysis demo videos didn't look like any lighting model I've seen in a game yet, it looked like much higher quality lighting than in Doom 3 or any other currently available game engine. OpenGL 2.0 supports realtime radiosity in hardware BTW. Here are some links for you to consider: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article918.asp http://www.cs.unc.edu/~coombe/research/radiosity/ http://dee.cz/rri/ http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/to...topic_id=381120

Lol, this thread made my day! Thanks robert, or whoever, you made my day. *love* *hugs!* *ps, yeah I hope you get TDM working, even trolls can have fun with it

I thought it was Oddity becasue of the D OD. Guess I'm not very good at sleuthing myself. Deffinately the Troll of the Year thread. I'd give a hug but I heard trolls eat people.

I am building a low-end/mid-range PC with a target price of $550. My goal is to build something that will be satisfactory for the time being, but substantially upgradable in the future. So far, I think I've done pretty well (much more credit to those on the steam forums and hardware IRC channels that have assisted me), but I'm trying to get as much input as possible. Therefore, if my fellow DarkModders would be so kind as to analyze the configuration I have below, your criticisms would be very welcome . MB: ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail $77 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16813131569 CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 1GHz HT 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor - Retail $120 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16819103537 PSU: Antec TRUEPOWERII TPII-550 550W Power Supply - Retail $90 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817103931 RAM: pqi TURBO 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail $66.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16820141152 GFX: GIGABYTE GV-NX66T128D-SP Geforce 6600GT 128MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail $114.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814125015 CASE: CHENMING 301KEB-0-0 Black Computer Case - Retail $35.50 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16811125450 HD: Western Digital Caviar SE WD400JD 40GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM $49.00 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144173 (I know I don't have a CD/DVD drive selected...I'm hoping one might just "pop up" at one time or another...it could happen...) Total: $553 In addition, what are your opinions on cheap vs. expensive Power Supply Units? Do I really need to spend >70 to get a quality PSU? I'm seeing the same stats of $90 units on $50 units, but I'm warned that the $50 units are prone to die and kill your whole system. And then there are others that say the $50 units are perfectly fine--even for a person who plans on making a substantial upgrade in the future. One part of me wants to go for a $50 unit--in place of a $90, and spend the difference on a higher quality video card, and the other part of me wants to ensure stability and upgradability for the future. I'm torn to say the least.. Also, how much of a difference is there between CAS2 and CAS2.5 DDR ram? Thanks

Personally, I can't stand what's now referred to as steampunk. The way in which the Looking Glass games came across to me - instead of tame - was very original and aesthetically anachronistic more than anything. I've never read The Difference Engine, or any other fiction that's considered to be steampunk, so I guess I'm not one to judge the genre, but what I see most of linked to the word is just fashion with no substance. Really negative opinion there. I don't mean to mess your thread up, and I won't bite anyone's head off for liking something that I don't.

Oops! Make that *Don* Ross ... I didn't have the book in front of me when I wrote the post and just did it by (bad) memory. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026218246...glance&n=283155 Thanks for your suggestions Max. The Ross book starts of distinguishing just what economics is the study of ... utility-optimization in the face of scarcity. I don't think it ever claimed to cover *all* behavioral patterns, but then again it also took pains to say that no particular behavioral patter could be a priori left out of the "machine" either, e.g., religious, artistic, political behavior, etc. So there you go. But I haven't got to the really interesting chapters at the end that talk about the actually links between econ and cogsci, so I'm anxious to know where he's going in that regard. I know right now he's focusing on just what "utility" really amounts to, what it is to "want" something that prompts you to action, and how the maximizing of satisfying that desire lets you choose among options, theoretical stuff like that. The Glumcher book "Neuroeconomics" looks at it in the reverse direction, how evolution actually "designed" neural-areas to be optimizing-machines, so the lessons of economics could actually be used to understanding the wiring, and uses the example of the (LIP) system which directs your eye muscles, that is, visual focus, what you want to look at, how you want to look at it, when, for how long, etc ... and the case is really pounded home that it uses a simple method of relative expected utility to weigh various "look at me!" options and choose among them, at least in part. And then it goes on to suggest that this sort of thing is a general feature in a lot of behavioral decisionmaking and should color how we look at these sorts of brain areas, at least for low level, more "reflex" like behaviors. The higher-level/more reflective decisionmaking you go, maybe the more things get complicated. This has got to be one of the more meandering threads ... anyway, I like it; sort of a grab-bag of what's interesting in the world right now. And it's not like you guys police OT so much in these "undisciplined" forums to stave off the overly-curious masses...

Easily a candidate for thread of the year. Congrats boringDMOD45 on making a post that is so borderline ridiculous that it's impossible to tell if it is real or a complete farce!

If you don't mind me jumping in on this thread and asking a question too, is there any way to get a nice rope fence? - the kind that you would see beside canals, docks, etc. Would it be best to just model it as something static?

@AluminumHaste I think I had a PEBKAC error... I applied the setting (The Base\DoomConfig was the only one where it wasn't -1) and it didn't make a difference to what I was seeing, so I set the game to windowed mode and played with the resolution, the window size changed... I was seeing jaggies on the flaming torch poles on either side of the lecturn in the training mission and assumed it was because the reolution was low. One less problem on my list at least. @Tels Because of the above I haven't bothered with your resolution resolutions. But I have done the condump. There were a lot of "WARNING: Couldn't load image: textures/darkmod/" So I contacted my good friend google and the gist of the posts I found was that the textures are missing or corrupted. (I only found 4 posts specifically about TDM, the other posts I found were more about other MODs and how to package the textures) I used the TDM updater to install the mod so I'm raising an eyebrow at the suggestion they're corrupt or missing. But in the spirit of leaving no turn un-stoned I'm busy re-installing the MOD as I post this. The condump: console.txt Those reading this thread just for the argument need look no further: Our understanding is that you weren't being sarcastic which is why I apologised to you, but in defending myself to Greebo I explained that I flamed you because I felt you were being sarcastic, young me and old me are two different people after all. I have moved on, I've received more suggestions, I've thanked more people and I've replied back with more results. But so long as others persist I will reply. Even if it reveals me to be a small minded individual.

Oh, I'm surprised I didn't catch the review of my FM until now! I usually check that thread pretty regularly. I appreciate the kind things you had to say about PD, SJ, and it makes me happy that some of my dark visions were appreciated.