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[Fidcal]

Yes, if someone can move this debate to a new thread that would be good. The title might draw in more debate.

 

I'm not sure the lowest mutterings should be counted at all. Over at Eidos, the 'official' ghosting rules are defined: http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.ph...highlight=ghost

 

These rules are extreme: no damage, doors re-shut, etc. Yet is states: "If a human grumbles, shifts in place and goes back to "relaxed", you are clean." - they don't count low levels because they are mere unconfirmed suspicions 'must have been rats' and the player is not detected. I agree these are not actually alerts (although technically they might be 'Alert 1') but warnings to the player they are at the borderline of being noticed.

 

The next level up where AI go to investigate an extinguished torch should count but very low say 1%. This is again because the player is never detected. The AI are simply investigating a torch that has blown out unnaturally. In Thief 2 they usually say something like 'Oh, not again. It's so draughty in here."

 

Where AI go to investigate a noise arrow or thrown object then this is more unnatural and even though they might not detect the player I would deduct 2 or 3 or even 5 points. But I'm finding if I release a noise arrow upstairs I'm getting 2 upstairs AI investigating and shouting and 5 more come running up from downstairs. (not sure if this was because I had not properly visportalled my lift shaft until last night.) So I would like say 2 points for each AI. If several are there then it is quite a commotion. But I don't feel so strongly on this point. Maybe 2 or 3 points is enough no matter how many. Firing off 10 noise arrows throughout a mission is not stealthy so deducting 20 or 30 points seems reasonable. Incidentally, I accidentally found it useful when extinguishing a torch in the hall that a sentry went to investigate so leaving a room unguarded and I took the opportunity to slip in there! Two birds with one stone. Later I could explore the hall in the dark. So by my values that would only deduct say 1%.

 

And as said before, a major alert is surely 25 to 50% deduction. I personally count the mission failed when I get such an alert and reload my last game save just the same as if I had been killed.

 

There may also be a case for deducting 1% for each KO? For a player to clean out a city leaving it a ghost town I don't see why they should get the same stealth score as someone who slips through undetected.

 

I have to confess I detect in myself a kind of gratification at the thought of many players realizing they are not as stealthy as they thought when they start getting regular scores of 60 to 80% even without a major alert. At the same time, they are not compelled to play differently.

[Fidcal]

I'm getting two things that may or may not be related. My mission has crashed to desktop three times at the same place - crouching under the spiral stair with lantern on. The other thing is the main menus are sometimes disappearing again. I have about 4 gamesaves and each one of them - right back to a very early one near the start - if I press Esc then no menus just the background. While scrolling through the console warning for 2 or 3 minutes to see if I could spot anything, the main menu suddenly appeared and worked normally. I've never waited that long before. This is recent in the last couple of days. I've been accessing the menus fine for the past few weeks with this menu. So I don't know if the problem is in the map or some code change or what.

[Fidcal]

Well, the spiral stair crash seemed to be due to a moveable clipping into the patch wall. I moved it and that fixed. The menu seems OK today too. I don't see how it could be connected but see how it goes.

[Mortem Desino]

What sort of debug logging do you have turned on in your darkmod.ini?

[Fidcal]

I think its turned off - nothing logged since 2007.

[SneaksieDave]

I have what (to my memory, but I could be wrong(?)) seems like a new problem: the user can't cancel out of a mission start up once they begin.

 

I was checking something else, and installed Outpost to test it. Start mission.

A briefing played (what! I had no briefing when I played it... is this new?). I don't want to go all the way into the mission though, as it's not what I'm testing. So I try to cancel:

 

- Difficulty menu: ESC does nothing, and there's no link to cancel/Main menu

- Purchase menu: ESC does nothing, and there's no link to cancel/Main menu

 

So I hit back (actually, Difficulty), back, and get back to:

 

-Briefing: ESC does nothing, left click goes forward to Difficulty

 

So the user is stuck, unable to get back to main, once they start a mission. Only choice is to load the mission or use the console to exit.

[Fidcal]

I believe the back button on the current briefings (made via startpack) is built into the gui. So there is one on all the contest FMs. But outpost was created earlier before all the standards were set up so no doubt its briefing gui is custom made. So not a menu bug as such.

[SneaksieDave]

Ah ok. If that's the case, then I guess it's more "outdated usage" than "bug". Especially if it's a limitation to the menu we can't do anything about. Of course that makes me wonder even more why I had no briefing when I played, but now I do. If it was updated to include a fix, it doesn't include the menu fix. If it wasn't, then for some reason I get no briefing on my game system. Hmm.

[Fidcal]

No, it's not unfixable for the future - it's simply that the outpost briefing gui wasn't given a back button (I believe.) No doubt it can be re-edited for when it is issued to the public and it can be given a back button. The Saint Lucia one might be the same. Maybe Den 1 too. Remember those earlier missions were specially built. Now we are defining the format and the code for how all FMs will be in the future. So those earlier missions might need adjusting.

 

As far as the briefing not appearing at all - that sometimes happened due to a bug in the install method but that has now been fixed.

[greebo]

The outpost.pk4 can be outdated in your fs_game folder, could that be possible?

 

As for the issue: I can add a main menu button to the screens later in the process.

[greebo]

Though unrelated to the above posted, I fixed the shop being briefly displayed even with "shop_skip" set to "1". The map is loaded directly now, but I still have to change the button text to display "Start Mission" instead of "Buy Equipment". edit: fixed as well.

[Fidcal]

That's good. Did we ever define the issues with ammo and shop? This is what I vaguely know:

 

When the player runs out of arrows he may see zero arrows in the hud instead of nothing. I suspect this relates to using the difficulty hack.

 

At least one FM maker included the player def with the FM to set ammo which I'm not keen on.

 

There is a problem with the player def ammo conflicting with the shop I think. If ammo is set to zero in the player def it overrides the shop I think.

 

So we need to define exactly what we plan for Release 1 and get it on tracker:

 

There was talk of an ammo entity

Some way to remove ammo completely from player def without conflict

Retest above all integrates smoothly with shop/noshop

[greebo]

To have starting ammo, one could either add arrow entities in a blue room with inv_map_start set to 1, or let the shop spawnargs on the worldspawn entity handle this. Both should work.

 

The player def ought not to conflict with the shop, this sounds like a bug. Any scenario available for me to test this?

 

Shipping a modified player_thief.def is another way, although I agree that it is not ideal - hard to prevent, advanced FM authors will do this regularly in the future, I reckon. It's a documentation issue, I think.

 

What would the ammo entity do (opposed to placing arrows directly in the map)?

 

It's also possible to move the shop definitions away from worldspawn, to make them "prefabricable".

[Fidcal]

To have starting ammo, one could either add arrow entities in a blue room with inv_map_start set to 1, or let the shop spawnargs on the worldspawn entity handle this. Both should work.

So the shop start args would work even if skipshop were used? So that's good, that's two more options. I thought inv_map_start didn't work with ammo though.

 

The player def ought not to conflict with the shop, this sounds like a bug. Any scenario available for me to test this?

I have to check what I posted before and try to set this up as a test.

 

What would the ammo entity do (opposed to placing arrows directly in the map)?

I'm less concerned about this so long as we can just place arrows in the map. Dromeders are used to that and hopefully the majority will use my startpack where all the ammo will be set up and they just delete what they don't want. An entity with a gui might have been possibly more convenient - just select how many you want - actually that difficulty entity is not bad - just go through and easily decide exactly what ammo you want in each level. I'm not clear why it is a 'hack' actually. I have never really understood the difficulty editor. What do people use it for apart from this hack?

 

It's also possible to move the shop definitions away from worldspawn, to make them "prefabricable".

This would be desirable. At the moment I include a text file template in the startpack. It is far easier to read than the map. The mapper has to make a copy and edit it then paste it in a text editor into the map. I previously tried importing a prefab but it didn't work. It lost all worldspawn spawnargs. That is probably correct. I can only imagine the problems of saving prefabs from maps and merging them into others without risk of conflict. A separate shop entity could be included in the start pack. The shop works from day 1. The mapper need only edit the entity or delete it if not using the shop.

[greebo]

I'm not clear why it is a 'hack' actually. I have never really understood the difficulty editor. What do people use it for apart from this hack?

Well, it is a "hack" in that sense that it only works with "behind the scenes" knowledge, more specifically: the name of the exact def, the name of the spawnargs of the internal player def. Ordinarily, mappers shouldn't have to mess with the player def file, it's an internal one, in principle, but the boundaries are blurry.

 

The difficulty editor allows to specifically edit all spawnargs of all entities for certain difficulty levels, both setting absolute values, deleting values and changing them relative to their default value.

 

Examples:

- Setting "is_mantleabe" spawnarg to "0" on the fence entity on Hard difficulty and above.

- Increasing visual AI acuity by 60% on highest difficulty.

- Decreasing player health to "30" on Hard.

- Decreasing the amount of arrows the player gets in the armory, by setting the "inv_ammo_count" spawnarg.

- Changing an entity's "name" on easy difficulty.

- etc.

 

Almost everything in D3 is handled by spawnargs, and the difficulty editor allows for precise control over every single spawnarg available. The settings are applied before each entity is spawned, imo it's an extremely powerful tool. The only thing it doesn't affect is entityDefs which are not actually spawned, like vocal sets.

 

This would be desirable. At the moment I include a text file template in the startpack. It is far easier to read than the map. The mapper has to make a copy and edit it then paste it in a text editor into the map. I previously tried importing a prefab but it didn't work. It lost all worldspawn spawnargs. That is probably correct. I can only imagine the problems of saving prefabs from maps and merging them into others without risk of conflict. A separate shop entity could be included in the start pack. The shop works from day 1. The mapper need only edit the entity or delete it if not using the shop.

Please track that, hopefully I get around to implement it.

[Fidcal]

OK, tracked and new Difficulty Editor wiki article started. I just pasted in your stuff above which is probably sufficient with minor re-editing which I'll do later.

[SneaksieDave]

Examples:

- Setting "is_mantleabe" spawnarg to "0" on the fence entity on Hard difficulty and above.

This got me curious so I started poking around. Does the difficulty editor only provide these changes to all instances in that game mode, or can it also do individual ones? For instance, you can set is_mantleable to 0 on func_statics. But can you set it on func_static_1? (an instance of a func_static) Sure, you can set that one the entity itself, but how to modify that with difficulty? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, as I haven't worked with this aspect yet. The thing that comes to mind is controlling whether that instance (or other stand-in ones) are swapped in/out by difficulty, instead; but that's not controlled by the difficulty editor.

[greebo]

This got me curious so I started poking around. Does the difficulty editor only provide these changes to all instances in that game mode, or can it also do individual ones? For instance, you can set is_mantleable to 0 on func_statics. But can you set it on func_static_1? (an instance of a func_static) Sure, you can set that one the entity itself, but how to modify that with difficulty? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, as I haven't worked with this aspect yet. The thing that comes to mind is controlling whether that instance (or other stand-in ones) are swapped in/out by difficulty, instead; but that's not controlled by the difficulty editor.

Yes, this is possible as well. The same spawnargs apply for entities, just add them in the EntityInspector.

 

...crap, wait. I just checked - I obviously haven't implemented this behaviour yet - just the nospawn stuff. I need to add this, please report this on the tracker ("entity-specific difficulties").

 

edit: But wait, didn't we apply difficulty-dependend origins to the relic in Saint Lucia? I'm sure we did this, so I must have done it. Crud, I obvioulsy can't remember what I already coded and what is left...

[greebo]

There it is, I knew we did this once.

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&am...st&p=154397

[SneaksieDave]

Nor I. Hm, well I'll get it up on the tracker and we can just close it out if not needed.

 

Edit: ninja'd! Nevermind. I think?

 

Edit: Ok, trying to work out how to squeeze it in here: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Difficulty_Levels

[SneaksieDave]

Looking through the SL map, I only find (other than worldspawn) a couple of nospawns:

 

"diff_2_nospawn" "1"

 

No other diff_* mentions.

 

Edit: IOW, the stuff mentioned in that post above is not in the map.

[SneaksieDave]

Ah I see how it works now. I think I can test this out, but isn't there some issue about setting difficulty at the console? Something like, it affects certain things but can't be trusted for others ... or something, maybe I'm mis-remembering. If anyone remembers, let me know, otherwise I'm braving it into unknown (to me) territory.

 

Edit: nevermind, it's confirmed and wiki'd.

[Fidcal]

Don't recall that but I do remember the relic and yes the difficulty origins worked fine but in that case in the end the two alternate places caused more problems with no advantage so I kept in the cupboard on all levels.

 

[EDIT] the 'problems' were nothing to do with the difficulty spawnargs.

[Fidcal]

Looking at the wiki I see I put in a TODO about the difficulty origin spawnargs but never got to do it. I'll paste something in now.

[SneaksieDave]

I have one request about the menus but it's not about textures, so if anyone agrees I could make a tracker entry. On the Install and Start pages, the font of the mission is too small to stand out compared to the "Currently..." and "Start..." text. There's little to no emphasis on the mission name. Reading it doesn't 'flow' comfortably. Or maybe I'm just being fussy, but that same thought comes whenever I see it.

 

Brings to mind, what happens when a mission title doesn't fit that parchment? Hmm...