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Fiasco at Fauchard Street


Melan

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More progress: I have assembled the mission package (not final yet, and I still have to take a stab at the briefing) but the bulk of work is done. What is scary is that the PK4 weighs in at 61 MB with all the custom textures - and I have not even been overindulgent there, or included the TGA originals. :unsure: Well, there is some time left for more work tonight, so...

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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The briefing and title screen are complete: I can rest in peace tonight. Tomorrow evening, I will send this off to beta. :rolleyes:

 

[edit]Also, I have been neglecting editor images a bit. Here is the full mission layout, with its complete areas and zigzag of patrol routes. Enlarging it may count as a spoiler, so be warned, but it might be interesting to check it side by side with my ten-minute concept sketch:

post-2023-130316585524_thumb.jpg post-2023-130316598075_thumb.jpg

I will talk about this when I am really finished, but it is always interesting how raw ideas translate to reality. The mission covers maybe 30% more area than anticipated, which is also why this mapping process has lasted more than my initial projection. On the other hand, more area also meant more content; this is probably more of a small medium mission than a large small one... plus I have managed to keep a decent level of detail throughout without using any really complicated or time-consuming building techniques. It is, at its core, combinations of simple elements, and appearances of high building complexity are misleading.

 

Also, the final shot before I really go to sleep:

post-2023-130316634267_thumb.jpg

Five minutes in GIMP from the basic screenshot. Not all that bad.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Excellent Melan ... thank you for this awesome mapping diary!! :)

 

looking forward to jump my taffers feed into the Fauchard Street ...

"To rush is without doubt the most important enemy of joy" ~ Thieves Saying

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Good evening! Time to get working - test the map, fix a few more issues, and then create the beta package. :ph34r:

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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And I ran into a weird bug right at the start. I copied the PK4 into the fms folder, ran tdmlauncher, and told it to install the mission. Results: when the game is restarted, the TDM logo appears, but then, nothing but a black screen. Alt-Tabbing through applications, I can return to Doom 3, and it now shows the menu image, but not the menu itself - nor is there any music. Is there any idea what could be causing this? :ph34r: The PK4 is intact and all.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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And I ran into a weird bug right at the start. I copied the PK4 into the fms folder, ran tdmlauncher, and told it to install the mission. Results: when the game is restarted, the TDM logo appears, but then, nothing but a black screen. Alt-Tabbing through applications, I can return to Doom 3, and it now shows the menu image, but not the menu itself - nor is there any music. Is there any idea what could be causing this? :ph34r: The PK4 is intact and all.

 

Check your console.

 

If you made a mistake in the briefing gui file, TDM will go nuts. The result is exactly that black screen. You will find a gui error in your console. Press esc and the black screen should recover into the normal tdm menu.

 

You probably have some kind of mistake in the briefing gui file. Maybe a missing " or ; or something. Check the lines you edited.

 

Note that if you have the FM installed, you could extract the files into the doom3/yourmap -folder. Then you can edit the gui and restart tdm and test your gui without the need of packing your mission each time.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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Sotha: And, sure enough, a " was missing. How much depends on one character! :D

 

Okay, will try now. B)

 

[edit]And get better, you!

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Progress report: the pack works as a mission (although the major bugs I have found are still in there). I will now upload the file to Mediafire (unless my home net connection has other ideas), then send the URL to Bikerdude, Premier and Sotha to test it. I cannot guarantee you will be able to play it by the weekend unless everything is 100%, and I am spending Easter, including Monday with family in offline mode, but you will soon have the mission in your hands. :)

 

[edit]Actually, is there a good, easy file host I could use that isn't Megaupload or Mediafire? My upload gets stalled again and again due to the connection timing out. :angry: Wouldn't be good if I had to wait until tomorrow.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Progress report: the pack works as a mission (although the major bugs I have found are still in there). I will now upload the file to Mediafire (unless my home net connection has other ideas), then send the URL to Bikerdude, Premier and Sotha to test it. I cannot guarantee you will be able to play it by the weekend unless everything is 100%, and I am spending Easter, including Monday with family in offline mode, but you will soon have the mission in your hands. :)

 

[edit]Actually, is there a good, easy file host I could use that isn't Megaupload or Mediafire? My upload gets stalled again and again due to the connection timing out. :angry: Wouldn't be good if I had to wait until tomorrow.

 

if it isn't too late, please ask greebo or Fidcal for the credentials to the FTP at bloodgate.com (or maybe dramthethief or fidcal.com can help?).

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I am spending Easter, including Monday with family in offline mode, but you will soon have the mission in your hands. :)

 

[edit]Actually, is there a good, easy file host I could use that isn't Megaupload or Mediafire? My upload gets stalled again and again due to the connection timing out. :angry: Wouldn't be good if I had to wait until tomorrow.

 

Melan, like last time I can take over the final check and rap-up of the mission, and a good file host www.filefront.com (its what I have been using when i send files to people on here.

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Lessons from the speedbuilding process

In setting out to build a small, fast mission from scratch, I tried to intentionally limit myself. First, I tried to impose a narrow time limit to accomplish my preset objectives; and second, I also tried to use only building methods which would come easily to someone new to Darkradiant, and not interested in building really elaborate setups.

 

Both objectives have been partial successes. On the first count, I ran over my projected time of "a weekend and a few more days", but the project has been brought to the beta-testing phase in 11 days, of which most were actually weekdays with limited time to contribute. Altogether, tallying up the time I used comes out at 78 hours (or 3.25 days). Prowler of the Dark (which was a smaller and lot less detailed mission made in Dromed 1, but with a similar frame of mind) required about 56 hours. Neither amounts are prohibitive, although obviously, any mission requires time and effort. The main reasons I ran over time were the following:

  • Getting the basic level footprint about 30% wrong (as discussed here), increasing the workload down the line in each building phase. For some reason, I always underestimate actual dimensions in DarkRadiant, which may actually have something to do with the editing interface -- differently sized than Dromed?
  • Bugs: these can always be temporal showstoppers; actually, I am trusting my beta-testers to find the cause of two later ones.
  • Overreach: guilty of this all the time. I like to go that extra 5%, and it was a constant fight with temptation not to add more, more, more stuff. I can very easily get lost in minor details like "will this patch of grass/wooden spoon look better here or there, and should I rotate it 10 or 15 degrees?" No helping it. Actually, this is a useful method to generate inspiration and let your level grow via the building process itself (in both the architectural and conceptual sense); I just did not want to go down that route now, and, well, to an extent, still did.

On the second front, I mostly stuck to my guns: the terrain was created with basic brush operations, as well as models and prefabs; I only created something like three or four patches, and very simple ones at that. There were inevitably little details someone totally new would not make (like in the printers' shop, I had to add extra brushes below some support pillars, and carved them with a few simple cuts to be less cubical), but this is not at all rocket science, just a question of combining simple techniques.

Tip: Better yet, you can do the work once, and then clone it any times they want to, combine brushes into func_statics, then save those as prefabs and so on. You can gradually build a small arsenal of "mini-content" which, in standard form or modified (readjusted/retextured) to fit, can be reused for a lot of variety. This was always a problem if you tried to do it in Dromed - and here, it is fast, reliable and easy.

 

There are things that could not be fit into the timeframe. I kinda wanted to learn SEED now, but with other time commitments, it will remain for another time (probably the large mission I will return to). But at least I am now familiar with ambient sound zones, a part of the location settings system. And it was not hard at all.

 

Last but not least, I promised in the beginning I would share the custom prefabs used in the project with you. That time is now, so find attached a collection of 43 prefabs in a PK4 file (add it to your TDM install folder or unzip them into the ./prefabs/melan subfolder. Not all the prefabs in the archive have been used in this mission, and not all that were, were used without modifications (some were retextured). Also, not all of them are examples of perfect construction. The pack includes two windows that are from the TDM training mission (window_gothic_dual and window_gothic_dual_dark), and I think were created by Flanders (please correct me if it was someone else); also, another, window_gothic_rose, that is based on a test window someone whipped up for me when I first started experimenting with Dark Radiant and asked pesky questions. ;) Two more prefabs used in the mission come from other prefab packs, and are not included: the large flophouse to the south of the level consists of two prefabs created by Siyah_Parsomen; another towering building, used purely for background, was created by Jesps. I think Serpentine is still working on a prefab repository that will make sharing them a lot, lot easier.

 

So, grab it below (it is saved as a text file to allow upload on the boards; rename as PK4 when you get it):

melan_prefabs_20110419.txt

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Also: all, I could finally get the file up on Rapidshare. Wonder of wonders, they seem to have greatly improved their service. :blink: I will contact testers shortly.

 

[edit]

Melan, like last time I can take over the final check and rap-up of the mission, and a good file host www.filefront.com (its what I have been using when i send files to people on here.

As I wrote before, this time I would like to do that work myself. Having access to advice and help is one thing, but this is partly about proving the point that someone - anyone - can do a simple TDM mission on their own. So thanks, but can't take that way out.

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Thanks for gram good grammar. :)

 

I'm looking forward to this mission! Do you authors ever put hidden notes in your FMs? Something like if player takes the second bottle from the left into the bathroom and sets it on the counter, a message appears on the mirror? I think if I were an author, I would do something like that.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Fascinating! Thanks for sharing the process blow by blow - DR is still intimidating to a newbie but this is a good demonstration of how something can be pulled together very quickly with a bit of discipline and familiarity with the system.

 

I eagerly await playing it. =-)

"No proposition Euclid wrote,

No formulae the text-books know,

Will turn the bullet from your coat,

Or ward the tulwar's downward blow

Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—

The odds are on the cheaper man."

 

From 'Arithmetic on the Frontier' by Rudyard Kipling

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