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Things that could be improved


Berny

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2 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

Not just a cosmetic issue in fact — it would be better gameplay for a guard to stop and enter a "Huh?" state for a couple of seconds, giving the player a cue that he had been spotted and giving time to run away, rather than have the guard act as if nothing was wrong and then suddenly enter a combat state.

Perhaps this could be solved fairly straightforwardly by setting different delays for the various levels of state transitions. I.e. transition from 0 (unalerted) to 1 (huh?) could be instant, but the further transition from 1 to 2 or more (actual attack) could be significantly longer.

I hate the most when I save thinking that the NPC didn't see me, but when I load that save it's exactly at the moment when he has already spotted me but hasn't acted up on this.

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"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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19 hours ago, vozka said:

 

 

I will have to focus on it next time I'm playing because this is just something that I realized now after reading this thread, not something that I focused on recently. I have not changed any of the AI settings and I think it happens when I'm partly lit and the guard is pretty close. 

Ok, it would need to be thoroughly tested and verified before anything is changed because the functionality should already be there for a delay to scale with distance.

There should already be voice cues for suspicion...or at least I thought there were.  My original vocal set scripts included everything from the original Thief series.  Perhaps they're not being used for some reason?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Would it be possible to darken the objective texture? Pulling this up repeatedly in a game where 90% of it is spent in darkness causes eye strain after a while. It's like flashing a bright torch in your face.

Maybe something similar to Oblivion's Dark UI

stlucia_2022-05-09_16.53.02.jpg

Edited by Wallace
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Well, you can make a darker version of parchment_ingame.dds . I think you can unzip the dds folder inside tdm_gui01.pk4 and inside that there is /guis/assets/objectives inside that there is that file. If you make that file darker (or completelly change it), TDM uses that instead of the one in the tdm_gui01.pk4 .

Edited by datiswous
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Nice, so if I darkened it, where would I put the edited asset? Would I need to repack it into a pk4 and just overwrite the original?

parchment_ingame

parchment_untitled

Which one would be the objectives texture?

Edited by Wallace
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5 hours ago, Wallace said:

Would it be possible to darken the objective texture? Pulling this up repeatedly in a game where 90% of it is spent in darkness causes eye strain after a while. It's like flashing a bright torch in your face.

Maybe something similar to Oblivion's Dark UI

stlucia_2022-05-09_16.53.02.jpg

Wouldn't that make it out of line with the other readables?

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Putting the dds folder in the root tdm folder does it, so you have the same folder structure as in the pk4, you don't need the other extracted files and folders though. You don't have to repack it. Be aware that if tdm updates the file in a future update, you won't notice it because you're overruling it. Therefore it's important to remove all the files and folders that you don't want to override from the dds folder.

To sum it up:

  1. extract the dds folder from tdm_gui01.pk4 and put that folder in the tdm-root
  2. remove everything that you don't want to override from that folder.
    So in this case keep /guis/assets/objectives/parchment_ingame.dds (including that folder structure)

I'm not an expert and there might be a better way, but this seems to work.

Might be something for a plugin, to darken all readable assets in all missions.

 

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These are all bugfixes, but I consider those to be improvements:

  • Many stock models (like the city watch model) use materials which are missing. The engine will encounter these and flood the log in warnings, to the point where I'm hesitant to even use them. Please fix these models - there are likely a lot of them.
  • In fact, there are a lot of various warnings in general, which seem avoidable. Ideally there should be no warning that will leave the user wondering if he's doing something wrong, when it's actually just the fault of the dev team, which he can do nothing about.
  • When you set a mover_door entity to be pickable, it requests a "snd_lockpick_lock_picked" sound, which is not an inherited sound, resulting in a warning. I don't want to have to manually add this to every pickable door. (The stock sound for this property exists, but is fairly inappropriate, so it should probably just default to a "nosound" value.)
  • Every ambient sound for a location, when first played, starts off at max volume, before fading to the appropriate location "volume" property setting. The wiki mentions a "pop" which can occur, because of how the Doom 3 engine handles sounds, but this seems larger than a pop - it's a full second of sound, and adding "_z" to the files, does not help at all. Can you add a "fivolume" property, which sets at what volume the fade in starts (possibly defaulting to "-60", as opposed to "0")?
  • When you start up Dark Radiant, the bottom bar doesn't actually say which size the grid is, until you select a new one. (It just displays the grid icon.)
  • Some models lack a list of matching skins. (The "models/darkmod/architecture/modules/interior_set01_corner.lwo" model has a set of matching skins presented in the skin selector, while the almost indentical "models/darkmod/architecture/modules/interior_set01_corner_door_right_empty.lwo" model, doesn't present such a list (despite skins being available for it).)

Here is even more, based on the console warnings I got from the last time I ran my map:

  • The images "sleeve_frill" and "sleeve" on "wench/green_dress" in "skins/tdm_ai_townsfolk_wench.skin" (or at least removing the calls to them if they're not supposed to be there).
  • The image "models/md5/chars/nobles/noblewoman/noblelegs" on the female mages and archmages.
  • ...and all the idle animations for the female mages and archmages, because at this point it's getting hard to read the console because all the missing animation warnings.

 

Edited by Nort
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Suggestion: clearing the inventory (ie removing the bottom right icons from the screen) should also cancel/put away whatever item you were currently using. This helps when a guard is coming and you're fumbling through the inventory trying to switch your lantern off, having the clear current inventory item key do that for you (as well as maps + spyglass) would be helpful.

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More suggestions -

Option to prevent the lower right loot icon from appearing whenever you pick up loot. Maybe the option to disable pickup messages should also include this?

Player voice volume does not seem to have any effect in game. With 0 volume, you still making grunting sounds when mantling, and the player voice over still speaks during missions. Possible to have an option to disable the latter?

In the HUD size configuration option, setting any of the sliders to furthest left should mean 0% - i.e. complete removal / invisibility of that particular setting, rather than it simply being very small.

Ability to quit game from a mission, rather than having to quit to the main menu first.

 

Edited by Wallace
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On 5/17/2022 at 4:27 PM, Nort said:

These are all bugfixes, but I consider those to be improvements:

  • Many stock models (like the city watch model) use materials which are missing. The engine will encounter these and flood the log in warnings, to the point where I'm hesitant to even use them. Please fix these models - there are likely a lot of them.
  • In fact, there are a lot of various warnings in general, which seem avoidable. Ideally there should be no warning that will leave the user wondering if he's doing something wrong, when it's actually just the fault of the dev team, which he can do nothing about.
  • When you set a mover_door entity to be pickable, it requests a "snd_lockpick_lock_picked" sound, which is not an inherited sound, resulting in a warning. I don't want to have to manually add this to every pickable door. (The stock sound for this property exists, but is fairly inappropriate, so it should probably just default to a "nosound" value.)
  • Every ambient sound for a location, when first played, starts off at max volume, before fading to the appropriate location "volume" property setting. The wiki mentions a "pop" which can occur, because of how the Doom 3 engine handles sounds, but this seems larger than a pop - it's a full second of sound, and adding "_z" to the files, does not help at all. Can you add a "fivolume" property, which sets at what volume the fade in starts (possibly defaulting to "-60", as opposed to "0")?
  • When you start up Dark Radiant, the bottom bar doesn't actually say which size the grid is, until you select a new one. (It just displays the grid icon.)
  • Some models lack a list of matching skins. (The "models/darkmod/architecture/modules/interior_set01_corner.lwo" model has a set of matching skins presented in the skin selector, while the almost indentical "models/darkmod/architecture/modules/interior_set01_corner_door_right_empty.lwo" model, doesn't present such a list (despite skins being available for it).)

Here is even more, based on the console warnings I got from the last time I ran my map:

  • The images "sleeve_frill" and "sleeve" on "wench/green_dress" in "skins/tdm_ai_townsfolk_wench.skin" (or at least removing the calls to them if they're not supposed to be there).
  • The image "models/md5/chars/nobles/noblewoman/noblelegs" on the female mages and archmages.
  • ...and all the idle animations for the female mages and archmages, because at this point it's getting hard to read the console because all the missing animation warnings.

 

Would you consider fixing the model/material/skin/sound issues?

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7 minutes ago, duzenko said:

Would you consider fixing the model/material/skin/sound issues?

You mean myself? Only if they start appearing as console warnings in my maps again. Many of these issues were tied to entities which I only used as placeholders. I also think that the devs surely have access to tools which can automatically scan for missing skins and such things, and probably find hundreds of these little mistakes, if they just took ten minutes to look for them.

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11 hours ago, Nort said:

You mean myself? Only if they start appearing as console warnings in my maps again. Many of these issues were tied to entities which I only used as placeholders. I also think that the devs surely have access to tools which can automatically scan for missing skins and such things, and probably find hundreds of these little mistakes, if they just took ten minutes to look for them.

Virtually nobody maintains the assets and I am not aware of any automated workflow like that

This is community project and pretty much diy

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Some of these warnings, like this in Hazard Pay:

WARNING:file def/ai_volta_npc.def, line 218: entityDef 'volta_commoner_head01' previously defined at def/ai_volta_commoners.def:17

I guess this is usually due to mappers including all that stuff in their mission, but not removing it when it got included in core. I wonder if it's necessary to show a warning about it though.

 

14 hours ago, duzenko said:

Would you consider fixing the model/material/skin/sound issues?

What would be the best way to supply such fixes? A forum topic?

Edited by datiswous
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2 hours ago, datiswous said:

 

What would be the best way to supply such fixes? A forum topic?

If you don't have access to assets svn then I'd put it into the bug tracker and post link to it on the forums

But if it's mission-specific then it should go to that FM thread or PM with mapper

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6 hours ago, duzenko said:

Virtually nobody maintains the assets and I am not aware of any automated workflow like that

This is community project and pretty much diy

I think that there should exist some quality control:

Whoever is responsible for packaging assets into new releases, should simply put all of them into a test level, and make sure that they don't generate console warnings, and if they do, just don't include them.

If possible, creators should also be told upon submitting an asset to a release, to verify that their assets are bug free.

So far the issues that I've encountered, turned out to be pretty silly mistakes which would be easily spotted and fixed, if the creator had just glanced at the qconsole log.

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On 5/17/2022 at 3:27 PM, Nort said:

Many stock models (like the city watch model) use materials which are missing. The engine will encounter these and flood the log in warnings, to the point where I'm hesitant to even use them. Please fix these models - there are likely a lot of them.

What happens ingame when the materials are missing? What do you see?

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If I see AI carrying torches I sometimes shoot them with a water arrow to douse the torch, this alerts the AI for a bit but that's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make, depends on the situation

So much as I don't like guards carrying lit torches I have a suggestion, which I'm going to regret making

Maybe if an AI has carried an unlit torch for a while, i.e. it didn't drop it when I doused it, then maybe it could go find a lit torch on a wall or even another AI with a torch or flint & relight it

Perhaps for the highest difficulty

I have to admit I would swear very loudly if this ever happened

 

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6 minutes ago, datiswous said:

What happens ingame when the materials are missing? What do you see?

Oh, you want even more console warnings? Okay, here's some:

"WARNING:Couldn't load image: models/md5/chars/guards/citywatch/citywatch_armor_poor_ed
  [map entity: atdm_ai_citywatch_lesser_1]
  [decl: atdm:ai_head_citywatch_clothcoif in def/tdm_ai_heads.def]
  [decl: heads/head_citywatch_clothcoif_lowshadows in skins/tdm_ai_heads.skin]
  [decl: models/md5/chars/guards/citywatch/citywatch_armor_poor_noshadows in materials/tdm_ai_citywatch.mtr]
  [image: models/md5/chars/guards/citywatch/citywatch_armor_poor_ed]
WARNING:Couldn't load image: textures/darkmod/metal/detailed/rivet_strip01_s
  [map entity: func_static_208]
  [model: models/darkmod/furniture/shelves/wall_shelf_rivets01.lwo]
  [decl: textures/darkmod/metal/detailed/rivet_strip01 in materials/tdm_metal_detailed.mtr]
  [image: textures/darkmod/metal/detailed/rivet_strip01_s]"

In these two cases, it's just a matter of providing correct filepaths.

Yes, I - as a mapper - could go fix these, but that would be like the entire community constantly mopping up somebody else's messes. These warnings should be found and fixed before releases.

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1 hour ago, datiswous said:

No not in the console, I mean do you see textures missing in game?

That's not something that you see. The females have all been missing their tongues for at least months. Did you "see" that? No. You just chalked them all talking like they were muppets, to the mod simply not being AAA. The modeller obviously intended better quality than that, but then he failed to check his stuff before release. I'm not settling for less, if it's over some silly mistakes.

Like, I'm going over the citywatch model error right now, and sometimes armor is spelled "armour", and sometimes citywatch is spelled "cityguard". This inconsistency is just asking for more filepath mistakes. The funniest thing, is that the missing material actually exists as a jpg, but not as a material. It's pretty chaotic.

 

Edit

...and I am fixing these issues on my end now, but I'm hesitant about uploading them to the forum, because I feel like that would actually be discouraging the modeller from shouldering that responsibility. These fixes will at the most be released with any future maps of mine, in the far future.

Edited by Nort
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4 hours ago, Nort said:

Like, I'm going over the citywatch model error right now, and sometimes armor is spelled "armour", and sometimes citywatch is spelled "cityguard". This inconsistency is just asking for more filepath mistakes. The funniest thing, is that the missing material actually exists as a jpg, but not as a material. It's pretty chaotic.

Yes, that tends to happen in a project that has spanned nearly two decades, with multiple amateur developers working casually in their spare time for free.

 

Quote

.and I am fixing these issues on my end now, but I'm hesitant about uploading them to the forum, because I feel like that would actually be discouraging the modeller from shouldering that responsibility

 

Feel free to upload them.  You won't be discouraging me from anything.

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26 minutes ago, Springheel said:

Yes, that tends to happen in a project that has spanned nearly two decades, with multiple amateur developers working casually in their spare time for free.

Feel free to upload them.  You won't be discouraging me from anything.

Yes, but if I put it this way: Order and structure to the naming syntax, is one of the things that can be improved, and it will help future development.

I believe that there is also an automatic way to quickly check certain model errors across all assets: When I choose to reload all models in the editor, I get a large list of errors regarding 2-sided vertices in the DR log. It doesn't tell me the names of those models, but at least you now know how many models you're dealing with (and can narrow the ranges down by removing half the assets and see if the count decreases, unless the modeling program can check for 2-sided verts automatically).

Edited by Nort
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