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Showing results for tags 'level design'.
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I have a small room that I split almost completely in half using a "wall" (brush). I cloned a wall of the sealing brush and dragged it to the small opening, cut a hole into it, and turned it into a visportal. Yet for some reason, the portal gets dropped at runtime. It's puzzled me for the past couple hours, and I can't quite understand why it won't work. Here is a rough picture of what I am trying to make. The red lines are entryways, while the pink is the portal I am trying to make.
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Hello! I am pretty new to Dark Radiant, and as the title suggests, I am having issues with stairs. The player is capable of vaulting over large walls, but no matter what model of stairs I use, they struggle to ascend even the smallest staircase. Is there an explanation for this, or even a tutorial on how to implement them?
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One of basic rules of level design is that a map has to be fun to navigate. And yet even the most seasoned authors seem to struggle with that, to the point that some players are led to believe that player movement in TDM is clunky, which couldn't be further from the truth. So I thought it would be good to have a reference test map to check player abilities and blockout your geometry accordingly. This is by no means final, but hopefully it will give you some idea about when the player movement shines, and what should be avoided. For the sake of simplicity I tested the most common measurements and indicated when things start to be trial and error. Feel free to extend the map with your own ideas, more granular measurements, etc. mantle_ref.pk4
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You might not agree with me, but in fan missions, for both Thief series and Darkmod, level design is often the weakest part. We mostly want to tell a story, build cool or "realistic" locations, and we think about populating these locations as we go. Not that I'm a good level designer, but all these years I've been collecting tutorials, books, and GDC PowerPoint presentations about level design, and I want to share a few of those with you. I paid for the books, so that would be illegal to share, but stuff from GDC is publicly available. Let's start with something absolutely essential. I believe every Thief/Darkmod level designer should be familiar with this: Randy Smith - Level building and stealth gameplay Now, this is a good piece on environmental storytelling. If you want to cut back on lengthy readables in your levels and leave more to players' interpretation, this is a must-read too: Harvey Smith & Mattias Worch – What Happened Here This is more like an annex to the first presentation, a bit more theory on how Thief systems work: Randy Smith - Design fundamentals of stealth gameplay in Thief I have more of those, but they're more about systems, or they focus on other games and level design in general. IMO those three documents are a solid piece of knowledge that should help you think more consciously about your levels and the whole design phase. Also, if you have any documents like that, especially on stealth games, and you can share it, it would be great
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So here's a neat trick I would really like to be able to take advantage of in my Venice map. Take a look at the first part of this video by SimCity, then if you want to learn how it's done, check the 2nd link, where the scientist who invented the idea explains how to do it, and links you to his paper on the top to show you how to do it. [forgot how to embed video in here lmao] hint please https://youtu.be/_x88tvkAGuo?t=64 https://80.lv/articles/interior-mapping-rendering-real-rooms-without-geometry/ Here is the PDF of his Scientific Paper he wrote explaining in detail how to do this. http://www.proun-game.com/Oogst3D/CODING/InteriorMapping/InteriorMapping.pdf
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In the vein of a few other threads, I've decided to start a thread that will cover the current progress of my FM mapping and serves for troubleshooting the issues I run into. While the newbie questions thread is a good place to seek advice, I often get the impression that it's not adequate to solve the perennial mistakes I seem to run into while trying to learn certain aspects of mapping. I'll gladly welcome any advice in this thread. Screenshots of what I'm currently working on coming soon.
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- mapping
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Since I like TDM movement model quite much, I've spent some time on figuring out relationships between player abilities (running, jumping, crouching, mantling) and object placement. In short, you can design pathways in your map to feel more dynamic and pleasant to traverse. This short section shows that player movement model is smooth and snappy enough to allow for speedrun or time trial sections. It looks a bit abstract, as most of the environment pieces weren't replaced by models, but that was the plan. Let's pretend most of the white ledges are pipes Also feel free to use this video if anyone at TTLG starts talking things like "TDM is too clunky", "Thief movement is superior", etc.
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http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/9082-newbie-darkradiant-questions/page-323 // the discussion is sliding way out of newbie questions, so figured it'd be good to make a new thread regarding this. This first stuff is not really related - a preamble. Modular design with assets and perhaps explanation to help learn, allowing increase in creativity and mission diversity or achieving vision. or Here, catch. or Go figure it out. First is more work, but helps people a lot. Second is less work, simply provide a solution. Third is no work, ship without a rudder. In short, it'd be really nice to get more hands on deck with updating the wiki. As and when required/prompted by newbie questions, so it's easier for people to find and understand the answers to the questions they need to ask and take the time to go figure it out: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges No-one's born a brain surgeon, but everyone can pick someone's brains. People CAN learn to be a brain surgeon, if they have access to the edu-material on how to become one, know where to search and find - and can understand it. ---- I've included a case study, using the current documentation, trying to discard as much pre-existing knowledge of DR and rely solely on the wiki and forum for answers - not asking any questions. A simple challenge for the player: Entering a corridor, the door slams shut behind. A series of scythes swing across the path to safety, as an ornate door slowly opens to reveal a zombie shambler. There is no way back - the player is under pressure to run from the zombie (potentially lethal damage if caught), while timing their sprints along the corridor between the scythe traps (potentially lethal damage, increasing in speed/damage given). Ultimately, to escape, they must leap across a dangerously deep pit (potentially lethal fall damage - fake, safe drop into water, where there is some hidden loot and escape via ladder). The player is placed into peril and must react - if they fail the traps or get caught by zombie, damage or death. If they fail the jump - believe might die, but actually safe and can grab hidden reward. Succeed the jump - zombie is held up by scythes (and clip), so has time to notice ladder and perhaps explore the pit if they're uber-cool and pass the challenge 100%. The only danger is "inside" the trap. Once past - there's uncertain safety. Except I've revealed it now, so it's not uncertain, heh. So - Here's a route I might take to go about achieving this, knowing nothing about DR and relying purely on existing documentation. Hopefully it will remind the veterans just how much there is to figure out in order to something basic such as this, and greens just how difficult it can be to realise a simple gameplay concept. Big challenge for new mapper: So this leads to the case study of how I would have to go about figuring something out, using the available documentation to me on Dark Radiant and in the forum, and just how frustrating and warren-like it can be to use, in its current state..: This makes it very difficult to simply walk into Mordor and figure out what is not working and why. But... that's an example of the run-around behind being able to figure out how to do something only one simple thing from a simple scenario, without having to nag about it and hope someone tosses a ball that contains the solution without an explanation. If it was painful to read - that's good. Because it was painful having to go through the whole process to find out, "that'll have to do, 'cos can't figure how to do it 'cos there's some missing reading available atm for tdm". Also having to type it all... ouch.
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Not sure where else to write since TheDarkMod forums is the only remaining outpost for Doom 3 modding. I need to make a mover to move along a spline, when triggered. How do I set it up? Can a mover tilt, following spline's curvature ? Is there a way to attach player to that mover and drop player if he presses a key ? Thanks!
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My partner in nerd-crime, "Deathblade2014" (God I hate that name so much...), linked me a blog he thought to be an interesting read. He was right and a lot of good wisdom to pick in this presentation/article/blog, so I'm gonna pass it on to you guys: http://www.gdcvault....Design-in-a-Day "Huge, open world games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 demand a great deal of development talent, and can be daunting to plan and create - especially when subject to the constant and often unpredictable flux of a game in development. This level design oriented talk will share insights into the iterative approach used at Bethesda Game Studios to help their level design team plan, implement, test and polish massive amounts of content. The talk will also discuss how this approach allows the team to maintain their staff without having to hire and fire at the whims of the project cycle."
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