Fan Mission : Moongate Ruckus🎻 (4/1/24)

[kingsal]

Sorry, Ive been sparse with replies in here but thanks for playing this tiny mission everyone + giving your feedback. 

Edited August 14 by kingsal

[Arcturus]

It's a fun premise. I played version 2 in Darkmod 2.12:

• there's a missing door / window model in two places:

• Guards loose me very quickly. The radius of that light doesn't seem to match the visuals. Something doesn't seem right.

 

[MirceaKitsune]

6 hours ago, Arcturus said:

Guards loose me very quickly. The radius of that light doesn't seem to match the visuals. Something doesn't seem right.

That's usually caused by a negative lightgem offset configured by the map. I noticed this FM is easier than the average in terms of light detection. Likely since I played it on the Easy difficulty, it might not do this so much on Normal or Hard. The AI in general has detection issues of this sort, you can find my own observations about that here:

 

Edited September 13 by MirceaKitsune

[Arcturus]

@MirceaKitsuneI suspected that since the mission has a lighter tone the author decreased the difficulty level. The video was shot on medium difficulty I believe.

[MirceaKitsune]

3 minutes ago, Arcturus said:

@MirceaKitsuneI suspected that since the mission has a lighter tone the author decreased the difficulty level. The video was shot on medium difficulty I believe.

I see. I played it on Easy and it was the same. It might be an universal map setting in that case... at least for the lightgem level: The AI behaving that way is a known issue I reported months ago, just added that video to the list of analysis on how the AI ignores the direction of alerts as well as quickly forgetting them once the player is out of reach to the pathfinder.

[Wellingtoncrab]

There is a lightgem_adjust of -1.75 in this mission. Additionally the spawnargs for guards are adjusted to give the player more time between them being spotted and guards being fully alerted.

Really I see nothing wrong in the video or when I play the mission. 

In fact I think the changes are good. When you are in a direct light source you become more visible, when you move into the ambient light level you are not. When you are spotted you are given a reasonable chance to correct for it.

In my missions you will see similar stacks of spawnargs on ai, and I set the ambient_world light to ai_see "0" so the baseline for the player is always they are fully concealed outside of a direct light source, which achieves something very similar. That imo has a benefit over lightgem_adjust, as it does not impact every light in the game.

Balancing guard acuity is a very common point of discussion amongst mappers. 

[thebigh]

I agree; I prefer ambient light to not contribute to visibility most of the time.

[Arcturus]

I am in the open in the direct light of the street lamp, not ambient light, yet the light gem is black. I was wondering whether it's supposed to be like that.

Plus the NPCs have sudden urge to run down the stairs where they get stuck by wonky path finding.

 

[MirceaKitsune]

I think the lightgem level itself is alright as a choice: My concern is how AI react to it at times, particularly losing sight of the player and having no sense of direction by searching in random areas where the player couldn't have been. The second video also describes what I noticed several months ago, which can be seen in my own video on AI randomly ignoring alerts or getting stuck:

 

[kingsal]

@ArcturusIts probably a combination of things that contribute to gaps in the lightgem read out and the visual perception of how bright you are.  I use light gem adjustments and a lot of ambient lights set to "ai_see" "0"

I have my reasons for lighting missions this way, but its it a lot of manual work and prone to error. Its a trade off between light gem accuracy and cool lighting

@WellingtoncrabNever though to set ambient_world to ai_see 0. Thats a great little trick. 

Edited September 16 by kingsal

[Sotha]

Played this tonight. Great little mission and ingenious plot. Everyone has been in that situation, I guess.

Spoiler

I straightforward proceeded to the house and cut the power and shot a gas arrow through the window to underline my point.

Excellent mission and a lot of fun sneaking.

[thebigh]

17 hours ago, Sotha said:

Everyone has been in that situation, I guess.

 

Honestly, I'd prefer distorted and off-key Beethoven to the hip-hop crap my neighbours across the street blare out.

[chakkman]

12 minutes ago, thebigh said:

 

Honestly, I'd prefer distorted and off-key Beethoven to the hip-hop crap my neighbours across the street blare out.

It's everywhere these days... accompanied by the bad manners.

Edited yesterday at 11:17 AM by chakkman

[MirceaKitsune]

3 hours ago, thebigh said:

 

Honestly, I'd prefer distorted and off-key Beethoven to the hip-hop crap my neighbours across the street blare out.

Yeah, we don't live in the TDM universe. This does come with a few perks such as no undead or giant spiders, but also the inventors guild replaced with a not always better kind of technological culture.

In my country the kind of music that would get blasted is worse than hip-hop, think something like Indian party music but often far more annoying. If only we had fire arrows