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Bikerdude - Xmas FM


Bikerdude

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Well Ive got the gears working perfectly now, I just have to figure how to program the Damage flag, ie if the player is fool hardy enough to deliberately try getting into certain areas I want to reward them with pain or death!

Check the machine room in the trainer.
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Sound to the player from any source are blocked by closed visportals but once opened then the sound passes directly from source to the player in a straight line even through solid brushes.

 

I would be tempted to test that out. We had some discussion a while ago about exactly what was happening with sound and the wiki had a few things wrong. Don't know if that was one of them or not.

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I would be tempted to test that out. We had some discussion a while ago about exactly what was happening with sound and the wiki had a few things wrong. Don't know if that was one of them or not.

 

Yep, the information seems to be wrong.

I built one room in another one, put a wooden door in it and a visportal. In the middle of the small room I put a speaker with a high s_maxdistance and s_volume of 50 (don't try this at home :D). I made sure the portal worked properly and then made the following observations:

  • When the door (and thus the portal) is closed, no sound comes out of the room unless I lean into the door.
  • When I open the door, it blasts me away ie I hear something.
  • If the door is open, there's no noticable change in volume no matter wheter the portal is open or closed (I leaned around the corner to test this)
  • Sound seems to travel through portals. Although I was still in the radius of the speaker I didn't hear anything on the other side of the room, on the opposite of the portal
  • I'm not sure if the volume actually decreased as I walked away from the portal, but once I walked away a certain distance (s_maxdistance to be precise), the sound quickly died down.
  • From what I observed it seems that the door does not damper the volume of a speaker when it's closed, but rather decreases s_maxdistance.

I haven't tested this with multiple portals, so if you're still looking for a good reason to dedust your labcoat here you go :D.

Edited by lostbuthappy
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When I wrote that I definitely tested it and could clearly hear the sound of an AI coming directly through the brush walls from the direction of the sound not through the visportal doorway. I've often heard this in FMs anyway. I remember way back in Thief's Den I could hear the thief through the kitchen wall not via the doorway.

 

Bikerdude now states that this is his experience too.

 

Seems to me there is a good case for believing there is something in this claim so be wary of simply changing the wiki without good testing. It may well be an error in a visportal setup or some other factor (for example two visportals and the sound is coming through both) but I'd be cautious about assuming sound always comes through visportals.

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When I wrote that I definitely tested it and could clearly hear the sound of an AI coming directly through the brush walls from the direction of the sound not through the visportal doorway. I've often heard this in FMs anyway. I remember way back in Thief's Den I could hear the thief through the kitchen wall not via the doorway.

 

Bikerdude now states that this is his experience too.

 

Seems to me there is a good case for believing there is something in this claim so be wary of simply changing the wiki without good testing. It may well be an error in a visportal setup or some other factor (for example two visportals and the sound is coming through both) but I'd be cautious about assuming sound always comes through visportals.

 

Sorry. I didn't mean to imply your observations were wrong. The whole reason why I did this "experiement" in the first place was that an admin stated that he wasn't sure if the information in the wiki was absolutely correct. Furthermore you wrote this part of the article two and a half years ago so I thought "hey, I've got the time and I'm curious so let's bring it to the test".

When I wrote that sound travels through visportals I meant that it apparently travels through closed visportals :), sorry about the inaccuracy. I also didn't test if the origin of the sound itself was influenced by portals as I don't have stereo speakers ;). I'm not going to change the article as this are only some minor observations of a DR noob who barely made it through your A-Z tutorial, so don't worry.

 

Btw: r_showPortals was set to 2 the whole time and there was only one visportal in the map.

 

(my test setup, please excuse the crudity of this model...)

Edited by lostbuthappy
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No stereo speakers? You're missing out because they can give a clue as to which direction a guard is coming and enhance gaming atmosphere generally. The last pair I got were quite cheap but sound pretty good to me. :) Put them on your Christmas wish list and maybe someone will treat you!

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No stereo speakers? You're missing out because they can give a clue as to which direction a guard is coming and enhance gaming atmosphere generally. The last pair I got were quite cheap but sound pretty good to me. :) Put them on your Christmas wish list and maybe someone will treat you!

 

I think Santa hates my family since we decided not to gift each other anymore, so I'll probably have to drag my lazy arse over to the store to get some. And if I pay for them they'll even wrap em up as a present! ;)

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Yep, the information seems to be wrong.

I built one room in another one, put a wooden door in it and a visportal. In the middle of the small room I put a speaker with a high .

Can you do me a favour and upload that map to rapidshare(or same such) and post the link so I can have a look...?

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Can you do me a favour and upload that map to rapidshare(or same such) and post the link so I can have a look...?

 

I wish I could, but I virtually bulldozed it last night :) twas quite a simple setup actually. I had a huge room of about 2048x2048x1024 in which I created another rectangular room from a 256x192x192 brush approx, like a house in an open area. Walls were 16u thick IIRC and of course I removed the floor brush of the small room. I put a 96x48 door from the prefabs on one side and shift-enter clipped the wall so that the door fit in perfectly. From the 96x48 brush I had left over I made a visportal by assigning the texture to one surface and nodraw to the others. I then shifted the brush so that the portal surface was directly in the door and sealed of the room. In the middle of the room I put a speaker with the properties

  • s_shader = bar_commotion01_loop
  • s_volume = 50 (turn down your speakers)
  • s_mindistance = 0
  • s_maxdistance = dunno, but so high that the sphere is bigger than the room itself.

Some lights and player_start and that's it. Shouldn't take you more than five minutes to rebuild.

Edited by lostbuthappy
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Ok got another question.....

 

1stly - Where is the best place in the wiki ti learn how do I get Ai to ignore the player, to sit and to sleep..?

 

2nd - I have added a door mover entity to a brush I have created, but it is rotating along its middle not along the edge - will changing the origin position fix this..?

Edited by Bikerdude
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1stly - Where is the best place in the wiki ti learn how do I get Ai to ignore the player, to sit and to sleep..?

 

You can set them to Team 0 if you want them to be friendly to the player.

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You can set them to Team 0 if you want them to be friendly to the player.

 

That would make the ai your ally afaik. They will share the same friends and foes as the player does and would attack every AI that hates you, including normal team 2 guards, builders, nobles, unarmed citizens, everything but rats :)

 

Check out this wiki article about team relations: http://modetwo.net/d...tions_(Editing)

I haven't used much of what's explained in there, but if I understood it correctly you'll want to create a team that's basically like team 2 (if the ai is a guard), but is also neutral to the player(?).

 

Lots of stuff about AI, including sleeping and sitting:

http://modetwo.net/d...tle=Category:AI

 

About your second question:

Yes (at least it worked with my func_rotating). Your computer won't explode when you test those kinds of things ;)

Edited by lostbuthappy
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Yes, apart from setting team 0 as Springheel says, if you don't want other AI to attack that AI team then [edit: instead of team 0] create the relation entity described in that article lostbuthappy linked to. Then say its city watch you want to be friendly or neutral to the player you would add to that relation entity (not the AI) the property and value:

 

property name: rel 2,0

value: 1 [for friendly, or 0 for neutral]

 

Yes, when making brush doors just hit V for vertices mode and drag the origin to the corner side on the side towards which it is opening. This will mean it will rotate around its forward edge and so not clip into the doorframe.

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Hmmm the Ai stuff looks mildly complicated, but I'll have a bash..

 

Another few issues which seem to be bugs with DR...

 

1. When making a roof, I started with a grid8 box then prismed it with 3 sides. The bug seems to be when resizing the end walls they never quite align correctly even at grid 0.125, what am I doinjg wrong, or is it just a "feature I will have to live with grrr...

2. DR seem to freeze now and then on both my work machine (P4 3.2ghz, 2.5gb, Xp) and my Home pc (Q9650 3.2Ghz, 4gb, W7)

3. DrR's settings gor corrupted on the work machine, eg when applying normalize for the surface inspector, DR would only apply the change the to texture once I closed SE.

4. And lastly Ive gone thew brush menu and made a cone, a prism but it wont make a sphere...

 

:-/

Edited by Bikerdude
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Hmmm the Ai stuff looks mildly complicated, but I'll have a bash..

 

Another few issues which seem to be bugs with DR...

 

1. When making a roof, I started with a grid8 box then prismed it with 3 sides. The bug seems to be when resizing the end walls they never quite align correctly even at grid 0.125, what am I doinjg wrong, or is it just a "feature I will have to live with grrr...

Maybe you get better results if you use the clipping tool instead. Create a brush of about 60%-70% (for a 30% slope that is) the length/width of the ceiling, rotate it around the x/y axis to slope it (so far I wasn't able to use the freehand rotation tool for precise rotations so I use hotkeys/the rotate and scale dialog from the view menu), align it so that the ridge is directly adjacent to the middle of the building and use the clipping tool to clip off the overlapping part (so that it looks like a parallelogram, trapezoid or whatever). Then clone the brush, rotate it 180° around the z-axis and align it. Works good for me.

Edited by lostbuthappy
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Ok Ive update the map with all the fixes that were in the thread before they were removed. Any further testing has to be moved the to a private forum, so Ive email Yandros over at the weary taffer(were I helped get the hammerite imperium resurrected) Go join up and I`ll see you there.

 

The only issue on my mind atm is getting Vp to work correctly. I have a lot of transparent windows and the only way I have found to get the VP to 'close' if to change the entity class to a door. The other issue I have found is the VP Kills the eye candy benefit of having a transparent window.....grrr.

 

So what are my options here.

Edited by Bikerdude
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For semi-transparent windows, I like to use func_portals.

 

Place the func_portal so that it touches your visportal.

Make sure you set the spawnargs "distcheck_period" and "portal_dist"

 

 

In the picture, I set up this window's visportal to close if you got 400 units away. distcheck_period is set to 1 second (so it doesn't hog the CPU by checking every frame)

 

Best of luck!:)

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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You can put a vis portal in each transparent window. They won't close like a door, but if you can't see them through an area on either side they will close.

the thing is they arent closing, even if the player went underground (where he/she cant possible see the VPs... So as an experiment I added the door entity to each window and sure enough the VPs started working...

 

For semi-transparent windows, I like to use func_portals.

Ah sweet, thanks for that. My only question is where exactly do I orentate the VP texture (via CMB) does the texture touch the outside of the window facing in or touch from inside facing out..?

Edited by Bikerdude
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It doesn't matter what face the texture is on. The engine treats it as a single plane, like a sheet of paper in place of the visportal texture.

 

Either of your examples should work just fine. ("a horse apiece" for you lovers of English idioms ;) )

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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It doesn't matter what face the texture is on. The engine treats it as a single plane, like a sheet of paper in place of the visportal texture.

 

Either of your examples should work just fine. ("a horse apiece" for you lovers of English idioms ;) )

 

ok, I think Ive finally got the hang of VPs (as much as I can at this point anyway)

 

the only reason i would want to lock a Vp is to block the sound from certain rooms. I have found that an unlocked(green) will still massivly improve FPS as long as its sealed properly.

 

So I have anohter question, lets say I have a transparent window, I have a Vp attached to it, but its always open(green), can i assume that as long as other building with their own VPS arent in line of sight of the VP Im looking through the object, bushes etc wont get rendered...? And is it possible to use a VP to block sound yet still let light pass through..?

 

Lastly Im testing my Fm on a low end pc and Im getting terrible FPs rate in some places, the poblem I have its my mape is quite open, what are my options..? can I use fog(how do I do fog...) to ease the issue..?

 

.

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In those specific places the best way to try and diagnose what to do would be to use r_showtris 3 and try find areas which are redendering and are indirect, you can use this mode along with showportals 1 to diagnose a lot of bad areas. If that is just too many lines for a complex map, showtris 2 is a little cleaner but I prefer as much info as I can get. 1 will only show you directly visable things however.

 

Once you know what areas are rendering indirectly, you can add VP's a lot more tactically, however this is limited by places that are 'common' to a lot of areas, in such situations you might have to try and construct a "chokepoint" to allow the VP to be successful, just remember that you can drop some caulk or skyportal down to try and assist, if you arnt worried about seeing things behind it (this helps a lot for streets).

 

If you really are getting stuck with portals that just cant seal 100%, you can always try flooding the area with void to get a pointfile (your vp should be a solid texture for the duration of this test!)

 

And that concludes my incoherent babble for the day :)

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