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Betrayal by Fieldmedic (2010/08/17) Summer FM Vertical Contest Entry


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Betrayal by Fieldmedic (2010/08/17) Summer FM Vertical Contest Entry  

58 members have voted

  1. 1. 1. Gameplay: Enjoyment. Fun duration. Smooth flow, ect. Versus Bugs. Frustration, Boredom, framelag

  2. 2. 2. Appearance: Vertical use, Visual pleasure, lighting, visual style, deduct bad texturing etc.

  3. 3. 3. Story & Text: Story. Text. Briefing. Graphic storytelling



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I don´t think the mapper can do sth against these, could he?

 

 

 

monster clip could probably have helped. It's good to put it around all objects that an AI can possibly get stuck on. I even like to 'thicken' walls with it so AI don't scrape against them, stick their heads/torches in them when searching.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Yeah. I haven't tried killmonsters yet. I just saw Tels statements about the lights and took it as cursory proof... (Could be both lights and lack of monsterclip though... and leaks, and the need for more visportals, etc...). I'm not sure any place is specifically worse. I just know that as soon as I got up one level I really had laggy play and it was 6FPS at most. I will try killing some options and get you better feedback.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

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(...) Here I will explain my weird thinking/planning process through the building of this mission, along with the

authors explanation of the strange story. (...)

 

Thank you Fieldmedic! I liked to hear about the background.Gives it all more... background. Ahem. Well, you know what I mean. :rolleyes:

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I believe you are in the elevator shaft with the broken elevator at the bottom? It is only possible to climb up one floor to the haunt walking about a fire. To the left there is a wheel barrows and a chasm. But to the right (there is also a chasm), but if you move to the chasm you will see stones on the right hand. Jump onto them and follow them around the wall

 

 

 

Thanks, will give it a go.

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Staying spoiler free... so I've not read a word elsewhere in this thread.

 

 

But I've got some of the most bizarre stuff ever happening in this one:

 

 

 

On the first level of the tower above the zombified lower ones I went pretty quickly about getting the stairs open and teasing a zombie ('twere Franz!) up to attack the builders. They didn't interact (well maybe the zombie ran at one point but otherwise the priest and one of the guards didn't even acknowledge the zombie. So, anyway I got the guard to go down to the zombies instead and locked him down there...

 

He was the one that would patrol to the end of the hall where the guards rooms are and open the window for a bit...

 

So now he is locked down stairs...BUT THE WINDOW KEEPS OPENING AND CLOSING AND I THINK I EVEN HEAR HIM SAYING HIS SAYINGS. :ph34r::laugh:

 

 

So, there's that; and now I'm pretty sure I've broken things even more by getting too high ( ;) ) above all of that... too quick.

 

But we'll see about that, that's just a linearity test; the real weirdness is the ghost window opener...

 

 

"A Rhapsody Of Feigned And Ill-Invented Nonsense" - Thomas Aikenhead, On Theology, ca. 1696

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Staying spoiler free... so I've not read a word elsewhere in this thread.

 

 

But I've got some of the most bizarre stuff ever happening in this one:

 

 

 

On the first level of the tower above the zombified lower ones I went pretty quickly about getting the stairs open and teasing a zombie ('twere Franz!) up to attack the builders. They didn't interact (well maybe the zombie ran at one point but otherwise the priest and one of the guards didn't even acknowledge the zombie. So, anyway I got the guard to go down to the zombies instead and locked him down there...

 

He was the one that would patrol to the end of the hall where the guards rooms are and open the window for a bit...

 

So now he is locked down stairs...BUT THE WINDOW KEEPS OPENING AND CLOSING AND I THINK I EVEN HEAR HIM SAYING HIS SAYINGS. :ph34r::laugh:

 

 

So, there's that; and now I'm pretty sure I've broken things even more by getting too high ( ;) ) above all of that... too quick.

 

But we'll see about that, that's just a linearity test; the real weirdness is the ghost window opener...

 

 

 

 

Hehe, are you completely positive that the windowopenings are because of him? Because the priest also opens some windows while he walks about...Or could it be that he continues his patrol rout on the lower floor with the zombie and open the windows through the floor? :wacko:

 

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This is a large full size FM with a lot going for it. Probably only needs a little polishing up here and there and also too much flat lighting. It was spoilt for me by two causes really. One is that accidentally I was playing the wrong version originally so had to start again. This meant if anything went wrong again I wasn't prepared to start a third time. The main problem was not being able to see the lockpicks and they are crucial to the FM. That is partly a Dark Mod issue but also the FM should have a strong clue that they were somewhere in the lower levels (no spoiler is deliberate here) and a clue, maybe even an objective "I'm going need my confiscated equipment before I get out of... etc"

 

After finishing I loaded the map into DR to see where they were. I had scanned there when playing but couldn't see anything. This is the same problem as for keys. My eyesight is not 20/20. I use my big TV as monitor which means it is further away so some fine detail is lost. I have gamma calibrated according to the trainer so fairly dark. (I suspect some players have it higher.) The lighting was very low there. Items like keys and lockpicks are important so for gameplay reasons I think they should be brighter. I never even saw these lockpicks even though looking near them so even the frob highlight is not enough. And finally, there was no reason to suppose they were there in the story. Leastways, I never found a clue. In the FM you would never know there were any. I only saw a reference to them in a forum but no idea where so I just continued. By the time I was in the upper levels and finding locked doors I started to think they were probably way below but I wasn't going all that way down again.

 

I resorted to noclipping and in the end my immersion was so totally broken I switched on notarget and just whizzed around to at least assess the rest of the FM for voting. Well, there was a lot more than I thought and I never did complete the main objective plus loot. But still my overall impression was very favourable. I'm going to vote as if I 'accidentally' found the lockpicks which would have transformed the experience.

 

If nobody else had any problem finding the lockpicks then it's just me and I must find some way to boost the brightness of them and keys for me. This is spoiling missions for me more and more. But if any others failed to find them then I think it would be a good idea to re-release the FM with 'find lockpicks' as a new objective with some indication they are in the lower levels, eg, being examined by ...

 

Tons of other good stuff and I think everything worked well. I never found anything to break glass apart from broadheads so I'm not sure why that info is there in the readme. Maybe I missed a sword. I tried throwing a stone bust but could not get any forward momentum.

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If nobody else had any problem finding the lockpicks then it's just me and I must find some way to boost the brightness of them and keys for me. This is spoiling missions for me more and more. But if any others failed to find them then I think it would be a good idea to re-release the FM with 'find lockpicks' as a new objective with some indication they are in the lower levels, eg, being examined by ...

 

Fidcal, it is not just you. When betamapping, I found the lockpicks only accidentally because I have the habit of blind-frobbing suspicious objects just to be on the safe side. This way I found the lockpicks. My betamapper recommendations was to put a light on the lockpicks, but FM chose to put a light in the room.

 

Thoughts:

  • Putting a small light on the toolbox would point to the player that there is something useful in the toolbox, if the toolbox was glowing a bit. Frobbing the lockpicks would shut this light down.
  • Putting a hint that the lockpicks are in the mint. But I generally think that objective-system should not be used for hints. It's for objectives.
  • Preventing the player from leaving the lower mines without the picks.

Mappers and players should not rely on habitual blind-frobbing!

If mappers would put simple small lights shining on mission critical objects which are easy to miss, a lot of frustration could be avoided. I'll add some insight on this to the mission design tips wiki article when I have time.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Well, I got a little more testing in this morning...

 

I started with a regular run for a reality check (control). I was dreading things seeing the 6FP hovering in the upper-right. As soon as I escaped the first cell things smoothed out to 18FPS or so. When I got to the 2nd level it was hovering around 12FPS. So it was much more playable. Could be all the mission reloads from my previous session had bogged things down.

 

I thought I would set the record straight after my whining... (but I still hope a revision might squeeze a little more juice out.) You can't blame the Low-Enders for whining when they miss out on missions that the community raves about ;)

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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This one I didn't so much get into :( but the mine was almost perfect.

 

The chest with the gold nuggets in it was a bother to get, you probably shouldn't have relied on the dark mod's less than practical way of retrieving stuff from a chest. There were 2 nuggets i had to noclip to get in order to avoid being killed.

 

As soon as i stepped up up out of the mine things seemed to go down hill a bit, which is ironic aye :)

 

The following will break the mission if you haven't played it yet

 

 

Getting up the the bottom of the tower was alright, then I unleashed the bottom of the floor and tried to climb up the board but could not no matter how fast i ran up it, and even when i came close to getting in, the zombie saw me. I tried arrow ropping up the side above the lift but to no avail...

So i no-clipped. 2nd time... :(

 

 

 

I explored this part of the tower and it was alright. The hallways were a little bit monotonous but I kept wanting to play. I decided based on a few sweeps that i felt like making, I climbed out the window and managed to rope arrow up the tower, although it was a little difficult to know where to get up, but not too bad.

When i got up i was greeted by a square panel of metal, with no visable keyhole wanting a key. Well after the climb I was pretty annoyed to find i needed a key and couldn't lock pick... not good :(

So again i no-clipped...

 

 

 

And i found myself insides a giant stone fortress... Physics anyone? Guess I missed the book that told me about the magic behind the tower.

This is when i lost interest, I couldn't find my club (sorry guys can't retrive the right word cos I'm tired) and I found myself have to repetitively run backwards and forwards to avoid the guard without any motivation for my destination. The last thing i did was climb down into the courtyard and go for the double doors which i couldn't open. So I quit the mission. Not as much through lack of skill or trying, just lack of interest. Could be because i have a short attention spam, but so do many people :)

 

 

btw fidcal, I found the lockpicks, but there are 2 things I'd like to say about that;

 

 

 

-They were in a strange place, would have expected to find them near the cells.

-I had to duck to avoid being seen, so it was partly by luck that i saw them, but that hunk of gold sure got my attention to what was on the table.

 

18588.png
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Okay, lession learned; More aggressive clues onto how to regain essential equipment...

 

Back to my ordinary map and try to make that one more playable...

 

@nbohr1more: I wasn't blaming the low-enders for whining, I just meant that if someone makes a place really cool and it requires much lightning, I don't think they should cut down too much on the niceness just to make low-enders have full FPS :rolleyes:

 

But my map is a disaster in the aspect of flow and FPS it seems, so back to school for me :ph34r:

 

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Okay, lession learned; More aggressive clues onto how to regain essential equipment...

 

Back to my ordinary map and try to make that one more playable...

 

@nbohr1more: I wasn't blaming the low-enders for whining, I just meant that if someone makes a place really cool and it requires much lightning, I don't think they should cut down too much on the niceness just to make low-enders have full FPS :rolleyes:

 

But my map is a disaster in the aspect of flow and FPS it seems, so back to school for me :ph34r:

 

 

I agree. If your look or idea is great but it wont run on a low-end system don't hold back. The low-enders will eventually upgrade anyway. I'm just glad things have smoothed out. I am looking forward to completing this one. :D

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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@Sotha: Well I'm kinda glad it's not just me. I've done a fix for all keys and lockpicks for me locally to give them a little boost. I'll experiment for a few days to see which numbers are best. If anyone is interested I'll post the method or even just upload the file. I don't like to mess with these things but when it comes to the stage of not properly being able to enjoy a mission then enough is enough.

 

It seems to me that what is ideal is that players see keys and lockpicks reasonably easily. I would hope to see something shiny on a guard's belt 10 or 20 paces away. But I don't want super loot glint. I never had any problem in Thief seeing keys that I recall so I just want to get back to that visibility. Anything more is a kind of cheat. If others can see keys OK then fine, I'll just increase their visibility for me up to the same level as everyone else because I see almost nothing.

 

I've tolerated it so far but now it's seriously spoiling games for me.

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Non-Pickable Doors, Keys and Mission Critical Objects

 

Non-pickable locked doors are very dangerous elements. You can ruin your mission with these. Use them sparingly! This kind of door is a plot/mapper imposed obstacle, which requires the player to do things in the order the mapper wants. It may be vital for the plot, but remember that the player *will* be frustrated if he misses the key. Put in clues to lead the player to the key. Put the key in an obvious place so the player will not miss it. Put some kind of light to make the object more visible. Put the key in a logical place!

The same advise applies to any kind of Mission Critical Object the player must possess to make progress. Do not have the player walk all the way to Mordor only to realize he left the hidden One Ring back in the Shire.

 

 

 

http://modetwo.net/d...ion_Design_Tips

 

Fids, could it be possible to have a link to this wikiarticle from the first page of your A-Z guide? Might be useful.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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This one I didn't so much get into :( but the mine was almost perfect.

 

The chest with the gold nuggets in it was a bother to get, you probably shouldn't have relied on the dark mod's less than practical way of retrieving stuff from a chest. There were 2 nuggets i had to noclip to get in order to avoid being killed.

 

As soon as i stepped up up out of the mine things seemed to go down hill a bit, which is ironic aye :)

 

The following will break the mission if you haven't played it yet

 

 

Getting up the the bottom of the tower was alright, then I unleashed the bottom of the floor and tried to climb up the board but could not no matter how fast i ran up it, and even when i came close to getting in, the zombie saw me. I tried arrow ropping up the side above the lift but to no avail...

So i no-clipped. 2nd time... :(

 

 

 

I explored this part of the tower and it was alright. The hallways were a little bit monotonous but I kept wanting to play. I decided based on a few sweeps that i felt like making, I climbed out the window and managed to rope arrow up the tower, although it was a little difficult to know where to get up, but not too bad.

When i got up i was greeted by a square panel of metal, with no visable keyhole wanting a key. Well after the climb I was pretty annoyed to find i needed a key and couldn't lock pick... not good :(

So again i no-clipped...

 

 

 

And i found myself insides a giant stone fortress... Physics anyone? Guess I missed the book that told me about the magic behind the tower.

This is when i lost interest, I couldn't find my club (sorry guys can't retrive the right word cos I'm tired) and I found myself have to repetitively run backwards and forwards to avoid the guard without any motivation for my destination. The last thing i did was climb down into the courtyard and go for the double doors which i couldn't open. So I quit the mission. Not as much through lack of skill or trying, just lack of interest. Could be because i have a short attention spam, but so do many people :)

 

 

btw fidcal, I found the lockpicks, but there are 2 things I'd like to say about that;

 

 

 

-They were in a strange place, would have expected to find them near the cells.

-I had to duck to avoid being seen, so it was partly by luck that i saw them, but that hunk of gold sure got my attention to what was on the table.

 

 

 

 

1. If you were so keen with the ropearrows, why didn't you continue your climb? Just above the locked hatch there is an open window!

 

2. The fortress, yes, it's a bit silly thing I know. I thought of removing it, but it would have resulted in much work in the end and after all, the whole tower/story is quite strange.

 

3. I believe you were a bit to eager for action and a smooth ride and didn't take time to search from the start. There certainly are maps with more frustrating key hunts than this one. The one thing I can accept as an annoyance is the missing lockpicks that really has no motivation for laying in the mint. Other than that I believe the balance between flow and tricky searching is quite good. There actually is only three keys that is essential for success. You should have seen the mission before betatesting! :blink:

 

 

Edited by Fieldmedic
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This is a large full size FM with a lot going for it. Probably only needs a little polishing up here and there and also too much flat lighting.

 

Nooooooo, no more talk about the lighting :o Please tell me how I can make it better. Do you mean I should have more intricate geometry around the lightsources to produce more shadows? Should I remove shadows? I believe the lightning is one thing in my map that cripples the Low-end gang :mellow:

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Good lighting is a big subject but briefly, in this case, it needed more contrast of dark and bright in many places. You only have to look at one room that is only lit by flat ambient light and then place lights around to produce lots of contrast of bright areas and shadows plus the angle of the light brings up the relief contour of textures and suddenly the room is transformed; more beautiful, more interesting, better gameplay for dodging in and out of shadows. The same applies to steady bright light that covers the whole area with little contrast. It has no character. Try test lights in different places before finalising their position. I even put lights in 'bad' places, eg, in an alcove, or low down, rather than high and on a jutting beam where it would be sensible (in RL) if that gives a better effect.) Paint with light and shadow to enhance the scene. Maybe I should post some before and after pictures in the editing tips thread.

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( Reducing your light radius (falloff) will actually reduce the chance of light overlaps and thus improve low-end performance. )

 

(Edit: The above was me praying to the performance gods that something easy may have been overlooked... )

(More Prayer: Even if no other lights are visibly overlapping your light radius is still affected by the ambient. Smaller radius = better performance. But this is probably a negligible improvement idea at most... So: Smaller radius = maybe better looking lighting and that's it? ...)

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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( Reducing your light radius (falloff) will actually reduce the chance of light overlaps and thus improve low-end performance. )

 

Yes, but I don't think there is many places besides the archery range that has overlapping lighting...Whatever...I just want to forget that mission by now <_<

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Yes, but I don't think there is many places besides the archery range that has overlapping lighting...Whatever...I just want to forget that mission by now <_<

 

My apologies Fieldmedic.

 

Performance benefits are what they are.

 

The Archery range in the Training Mission would perform better if the lights did not overlap.

 

( Edit: Ah... your Archery range... :blush: ... Bikerdude worked with you and he's been obsessed about that map so I lost context :laugh: )

 

It just happens to perform well overall.

 

I have not done a deep-dive in the Pk4 but the use of custom Light Textures in that area might be part of the magic. As there are no AI in that area, I am pretty sure that all the lights are set to noshadow as well.

 

It would be cool if the authors of the Training Mission would comment...

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Am enjoying the challange of not having a

blackjack (not much use right now anyways) and have made it to the first floor of the tower. Does anyone know where I might look for a key for the chest in the room full of blood and books?

Thanks

 

 

Keep a low profile in that room and thy shalt find ^_^

 

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