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Proper Campaigns/Missionpacks


Darkpixel

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A simple skip mission button may not be enough. How would you determine loot gathered? And maybe you have optional objectives that are transferred into later missions (not sure if the currently existing campaigns have any of these, but I know that it is possible). You could randomise these or give them set values when skipping, of course, but if a player would like to play "his" version, he would still have to repeat the mission. This is why I said, it would be best, if the Mission Statistics would get stored and could be read out, even if a mission is added later on.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Darkpixel I might have a look into that, since that's a feature I'd like to see in TDM. My programming experience is medium at best, but I can give it a try. I'd give it 20% that there'll be a useful end result, my time and concentration levels is also not super high. It could help with motivation if we could team up and chat about some milestones.

In my opinion, that would also be something for newcomers who want to have a better overview and want more immersion in the sense of a completed game. Nevertheless there should still be an option to download the missions individually, as demagogue said.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/6/2020 at 1:09 PM, Nico A. said:

@Darkpixel I might have a look into that, since that's a feature I'd like to see in TDM. My programming experience is medium at best, but I can give it a try. I'd give it 20% that there'll be a useful end result, my time and concentration levels is also not super high. It could help with motivation if we could team up and chat about some milestones.

In my opinion, that would also be something for newcomers who want to have a better overview and want more immersion in the sense of a completed game. Nevertheless there should still be an option to download the missions individually, as demagogue said.

Sure, that sounds great, I'm not great at concentrating either but I'd be willing to help however I could.

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  • 2 months later...

How time flies...

I just spent an hour looking a bit into things to get a rough overview. Here's the "progress":

- read the thread again to re-aquaint myself with the state of affairs

- downloaded No Honor Among Thieves and compared the files with the campaign tutorial

I think the tutorial is rather straightforward and seems to include most of the functionality discussed here. Next I will try to set up some dummy missions myself and play with the values. Also I'd like to get an overview over campaigns that are completed and could be bundled together retrospectively.

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On 11/24/2020 at 5:07 PM, Destined said:

A simple skip mission button may not be enough. How would you determine loot gathered? And maybe you have optional objectives that are transferred into later missions (not sure if the currently existing campaigns have any of these, but I know that it is possible). You could randomise these or give them set values when skipping, of course, but if a player would like to play "his" version, he would still have to repeat the mission. This is why I said, it would be best, if the Mission Statistics would get stored and could be read out, even if a mission is added later on.

I actually thought about this problem and came up with a solution.
If the player uses a skip he instantly reverts his right on his own version of events anyways, why would he skip else?
So just make a playable "save" for every mission that has just the right equipment/starting money for shops, to finish the mission.

The action of skipping a mission or selecting one out of context always comes with this issue.

Can we have more scary Zombie Horror maps?

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31 minutes ago, Filizitas said:

If the player uses a skip he instantly reverts his right on his own version of events anyways, why would he skip else?

The skip button was suggested for the case that a campaign gets updated with additional missions later on. In that case, it would be necessary to start the whole campaign from the start each time a mission that gets added. Consequently, the first level(s) would have to be played several times, which may become cumbersome/boring, even more so for several missions added after the first. In this case, I would suppose a player would like to keep his own version of events, but still like a skip option in order not to be required to play already finsished missions over and over again.

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Just out of curiousity: What if a mapper doesn't want this feature for his missions? Maybe he doesn't like the idea of loot etc. getting carried over from one to another mission if said missions weren't designed with that in mind or vice versa designed with a fixed set of equipment available. And how do you handle missions without a job to buy equipment? Your suggestions basically change the missions, and the general approach has always been to avoid changes that do so with already existing fms.

So if mappers don't want this or are not available we would basically need a way to disable this feature for those missions.

 

On another note: What is the benefit of all of this? I understand that gathering loot to buy equipment for the upcoming mission can be a great motivator and enhance the gameplay, but only if those missions are designed with that in mind. Just take a look at the amount of loot you can normally acquire in a mission (often several thousands) versus the costs of the equipment (a few bucks). Even without such a difference the amount of loot that can be found and the price of the equipment need to be carefully balanced to gain desired effect, even more if you want equipment to be carried over additionally.

One just has to take a look at Deadly Shadows to see how such a simple sounding thing can fail. And this game was designed with that feature in mind. From professional and experienced game designers.

P.S.: Old Habits 1 & 2 are no successive missions. The second one is a rebuild of the first one (the naming wasn't my idea). So there should definetely be no carryover from one to another.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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I agree. My comments were not meant as a suggestion to pack existing missions into campaigns retroactively. It was rather meant for map authors that want to create a campaign, but still be able to release each mission as soon as it's ready. I would assume that map authors would choose the available loot accordingly or (as mentioned before) multiply it by a factor that sets the range into what they imagined for the next mission. In this case the actual value would not match, but it would still mean that more loot acquired before relates to more equipment that can be bought. Regarding balancing this would "merely" change a set value of money into a range of available money. Still, I do not doubt that the balancing gets way more difficult that way.

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I don't quite follow regarding the balancing difficulty. Wouldn't this be solved by following the below suggestions?

- offer a separate Core Mission Pack ("CMP") (for new players mostly, if there are any RN), which include ready-mapped campaigns, .pk4-zipped together retrospectively.

- a Development Mission Pack (DMP), including unzipped, uncompleted campaigns, for TDM enthusiasts (arguably >95% of all players ;) ). So this is the default one that already exists. As the name suggests, this offers the most up-to-date mission list, with unzipped and incomplete campaigns.

- this zipping-together for the CMP campaigns could be done almost automatically, except the loot balancing. For that, mission authors would first need specify an easy amount and a near-impossible amount of pre-shop gold available for successul mission completion. The more narrow this range, the easier it would be to specify. These min-max values are then transformed based on the possible min/max loot from the previous mission via variables and/or described in this section.

Watcha think?

7 hours ago, wesp5 said:

In my opinion it would be enough if campaign or series missions are at least recognizable in the mission list, but even that is not the case in the core game right now...

I had a quick look at the 146 entries and it looks like they are rather easily discernible, mostly with the syntax "[campaign name] [number] [mission name]". What did I miss and/or what do you suggest?

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8 hours ago, wesp5 said:

In my opinion it would be enough if campaign or series missions are at least recognizable in the mission list, but even that is not the case in the core game right now...

They are recognizable. As Nico stated they follow a specific naming scheme.

@Nico A.No, your suggestions would not solve the issue. It is not only about loot values, but also their respective distribution in the mission and about the values of the items to be bought in the shop and their usefulness for the next mission. This is something that needs to be carefully calculated. I did this on my first mission and it took more than five minutes. Most mappers however do not do this. They simple follow the paradigm of "a bit of loot here and there for the player to pick up", especially as they didn't expect that the loot could serve a different purpose except to be found. Bundling missions to campaign requires an update of each mission in that campaign. You will not be able to bypass this if you want a result that benefits from the missions beeing arranged as a campaign.

 

Additionally you basically suggest providing the mission twice on our servers and in the in game downloader. That could be confusing. DMP and CMP as you call them would need to be distinguishable in the downloader, so this would need to be tweaked accordingly.

 

And you would have to repack the missions into campaigns and rebalance the loot. This is not possible without the authors permission. And any issue with the "campaign" would probably be first reported to the mission author, although their are not responsible for that stuff. Still they would have to deal with that, but will only do so if it has any benefit for their work. And currently I see none. Maybe you should ask the authors who created a series of missions what they think about your proposal before continuing your work, as otherwise you may end up with no result and a lot of time wasted.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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26 minutes ago, Obsttorte said:

They are recognizable. As Nico stated they follow a specific naming scheme.

I believe wesp5 meant pre-packed campaigns are not recognisable as such. In the mission list on the darkmod-Homepage there is a distinction (S vs. C), but this is not provided in the in-game downloader.

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5 hours ago, Destined said:

I believe wesp5 meant pre-packed campaigns are not recognisable as such. In the mission list on the darkmod-Homepage there is a distinction (S vs. C), but this is not provided in the in-game downloader.

This is exactly what I mean and what I fix with my Unofficial again for each TDM release! Another is the fact that "a" and "the" are not listed the same as on the web list. In my opinion it would be great if the internal mission list would look exactly like the one on the web.

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24 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Another is the fact that "a" and "the" are not listed the same as on the web list. In my opinion it would be great if the internal mission list would look exactly like the one on the web

That is actually something that has been discussed. The problem is that working with guis is "not nice" at least.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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Yeah, you told me but I forgot to find out who is responsible for the web page. At least in that case we could do it the other way arond with the web page mirroring the internal list. With the campaigns though the web list should be the template and I already fixed all necessary files in my patch...

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11 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

also their respective distribution in the mission and about the values of the items to be bought in the shop and their usefulness for the next mission

Ok, I see. So you mean there is no linear relationship between "player aptitude" and "loot collected", but for example logarithmic, or a step function, ... (or sth more complicated). However, I think that in any case it is almost always a positively ascending function: Finding a really precious piece of loot, however nonlinearly distributed, should usually be due to player aptitude. Sure, something really valuable could be randomly placed somewhere and only 5% of players are lucky to find it by chance, but why not reward them also?

11 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

This is something that needs to be carefully calculated.

Well, not necessarily. Loot carryover could be made optional. Missions could start with the same amount of gold available irrespective of the previous' missions loot collection. In other words, this issue of loot carryover could be ignored completely (by setting the gold at the shop stage to fixed values) and there would still be a benefit IMHO regarding the thrill/immersion of playing a string of thematically associated missions (where seeing the next and progressing the story depends on the successful completion of the prior mission). So, in this case, there would be almost no change to the missions at all. (The savestate issue still remains tbh.)

So rather than considering the loot issues a showstopper, I think it doesn't need to be considered an issue at all.

11 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

DMP and CMP as you call them would need to be distinguishable in the downloader, so this would need to be tweaked accordingly

That's true. I'd consider CMP as a irregularly updated "snapshot" for new players. Something along the lines of the unoffical TDM downloader - offered on the page to make life for new players easier.

As a new player, I'd find it superweird to see the column with S and C on the mission downloads page - and C barely used even though there are clearly campaigns. I was confused at first and still am a little bit tbh.

11 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

Still they would have to deal with that, but will only do so if it has any benefit for their work. And currently I see none. Maybe you should ask the authors who created a series of missions what they think about your proposal

Definitely. I think it should be up to the campaign creators whether they want this or not.
As for the benefit I'd like to disagree. I think it makes playing the missions way more attractive for new players. Again, I don't know if there are any right now and what the overall state of TDM is.

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