Mission Failed Concept

[Springheel]

Btw, does anyone feel like putting together a placeholder GUI for objective succeede and failed?

 

Here's an image for the mission failed screen.

 

Ideally it would have the same swirly black fog as the main menu, and the skull would start out small and grow onto the screen. Still needs some tweaks in spots.

 

[Gildoran]

I think I can construct that fairly well and quickly. Can you give the psd file for it?

[Springheel]

I've uploaded it to the GUIS folder on the ftp. "failurescreen.psd"

[Domarius]

There's something about a real skull that looks way more freaky than the symbolic kind of one in the T2 mission failure screen.

[Springheel]

Yeah, I think late at night that skull would be something I would want to avoid.

[Ishtvan]

Looks good.

 

@Gildoran: Do you have any suggestions on how to actually call this mission failed GUI? Can we use your GUI overlay code and also have the GUI pause the game? Because that's essentially all we'd have to do, pause the game (obviously without any menu option to go back), and then transition to the load/restart/new game menu.

[Gildoran]

Yeah, it'd be possible to use my gui overlay code and there's even script functions that can be called to do it. However, perhaps it would be a good idea to study how player death works?

[kfmccall]

That looks awesome springheel, I'd only suggest having the skull look directly on to the player. It looks kind of funny/mocking when its cocked to the side like that. I think it takes away from the seriousness a bit.

 

just my opinion though...

[Gildoran]

Ok, I've made a first prototype, guis/mission_failure.gui, though it still needs a lot of editing. (both with regards to appearance and behavior) I haven't yet put much effort into decreasing file-sizes. I'm pretty sure we could reduce the background_shading.tga to a quarter size without anybody noticing.

 

I wanted to test some animations. First off, I tried having the skull fade in and rotate, similarly to the Thief movie. Also, I wanted to try out having the hanging chains sway just to see how it looked. (however, I'm thinking they distract from the skull too much)

 

Also, I wasn't able to load the text properly, so it's not included in the gui. If somebody could rasterize and save it as a tga, that would be much appreciated.

[Springheel]

I'll do that tomorrow if no-one beats me to it.

 

edit: found a moment--it's called failtext.tga in the GUI folder.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, I have been looking at the player death (idPlayer::Killed and some things in gameLocal) but some things still aren't clear to me. I think part of it may be handled outside the SDK source. When the player dies in vanilla D3, the player falls down and the screen fades to black, but you can still hear sounds for a while.

 

For the mission failed sequence, I guess we're going to show that when the player dies, but it also gets called without death as well. I could just kill the player when a mandatory mission objective fails and we could put the switch to the GUI in player death, but I don't think that looks as professional. When you fail the mission but are still alive, IMO you should remain standing but just have the game fade to black and then show the mission failed GUI (while pausing the actual game I guess). Once we have this sequence down (fade to black, switch to Mission Failed GUI and pause/stop the game), we can put it in the current death sequence and call it a few seconds after the player dies.

[Domarius]

It looks kind of funny/mocking when its cocked to the side like that. I think it takes away from the seriousness a bit.

Hey yeah kfmccall, I do think I agree Straightening the skull should be more intimidating.

[Ishtvan]

@Gildoran: Do you know how the death menu code works?

 

As far as I can tell, it's handled externally like the main menu, so I can't find the place where it switches to the "death menu" anywhere in the SDK. It calls playerview::FadeView, maybe it is implicitly calling it in there? Or it could be that the external code we don't have just checks for AI_DEAD on the player object.

 

It's probably not a disaster for us though, we just have to switch to our own GUI that's like the death menu, pausing the game and disallowing the player to escape back out to the game. Although, I'm not sure how you disable the escape key without access to the main menu code... hmm.

 

I guess we might have to replace D3's death menu GUI with our own, and find out how to make the death menu be called in our mission failure function (that gets called both on mission failure and on actual player death).

[Ishtvan]

Okay got it. [EDIT: Info I said was wrong. The way you enter the "death menu" is either setting player->forceRespawn to true, or:

gameLocal.sessioncommand("died")

Unfortunately the inner code to switch to the menu is a console command that's not in the SDK, just like "map" But, we should be able to do a nice fade to black and call that menu, assuming we can replace the GUI in that menu with our own "mission failed" GUI sequence.

 

People who know GUIs, how easy is it to replace the D3 "death menu" with our own mission failed GUI that first plays a video and then transitions to a replay/load/quit/main menu?

[Ishtvan]

Btw, the GUI we want to replace is /guis/restart.gui . Ideally it should play the mission failure movie first, then bring up the options (same as in vanilla restart.gui for now?) with whatever background we want for the restart menu.

[Darkness_Falls]

Is that a real skull? It looks kinda fake for some reason. More intimidating lighting might help it be more freaky. To me, I'm not scared by it one bit. And I don't like he dots in the middle of the eyes; reminds me of those red LEDs that you see in every Halloween skull. Just my two cents.

[Darkness_Falls]

I feel more dirt texture, cracks, stains, lighting from below, etc. would help make it creepier. I just did a quick photoshop job here to give a feel for what I'm trying to convey thru words. The original skull looks too cartoony to me. I know your intent was probably just to make a 'placeholder' image; so my apologies if I'm being to judgmental at this stage in the game.

 

[Removed pic so page loads faster. It didn't convey what I wanted to anyways and no one apparently wants a tarnished skull with more age/wear to it.]

[Ishtvan]

I'm integrating Gildoran's GUI into the D3 one with the options and hopefully adding Sax's missoin failure sound (of course our fonts for the options will have to be different eventually, but this is all I know how to do for now). Will update to CVS when done. I'll leave Gildoran's GUI intact as well, and just upload the merge as "restart.gui" to replace the D3 one.

 

[EDIT: It's on CVS. Not perfect... For some reason the skull doesn't reset if you load that GUI multiple times, but does when you go back to the main menu inbetween. I.e., the GUI pops up, you hit restart, play thru the mission again, fail again, the GUI pops up, the skull doesn't do its thing the second time. It seems like one of those registers has to be reset, but I'm not sure how. Also, the skull may be able to come in a little faster, but I didn't know how to do that. Anyway it needs tweaking, but it's there. Btw the way I'm testing the objectives right now, the first time an AI dies on any mission, you fail the mission, but after that first time that stops happening. Hopefully that doesn't interfere with anyone's work too much. If it does let me know and I'll take out that test objective]

[Domarius]

Heh, Darkness's one looks scarier.

[SneaksieDave]

Aww.

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=62289

[Springheel]

It is a real skull, actually, which I prefer over something obviously stylized. The glowy bits in the eyes I added at the last minute just to see what it looked like, but I'd take them out now.

 

To me, I'm not scared by it one bit.

 

It's supposed to be a representation of you when you're dead. Real skulls don't look 'scary', they look unsettling, or creepy, which is more what I was going for.

 

The original skull looks too cartoony to me

 

Funny, because it's real (other than the glowy bits). To me, yours looks much more 'evil cartoon' in appearance. To each their own.

[Gildoran]

@Ishtvan: I'll study restart.gui to figure out why mine behaves differently. Also, I'll speed up the skull.

 

PS, does anybody like/dislike the chains? I think I might like it if there were more moving things throughout the gui, but not by themselves...

 

Update: Ok, it looks like they're using on-activate to initialize the gui. I'll update mission_failure.gui to include a minimal set of code from restart.gui. PS, I may start work on a swirling fog window def that can easily be including in other guis.

[Ishtvan]

@Gildoran:

 

Actually if you could make your final GUI file be named restart.gui, that would be better. It kind've has to be because we don't have access to the place where the GUI is named. We only call sessionCommand("died") and code we don't have stops the gamestate and brings up restart.gui.

[Darkness_Falls]

Funny, because it's real (other than the glowy bits). To me, yours looks much more 'evil cartoon' in appearance. To each their own.

Are you saying yours is the final version? I guess to each their own, indeed. Your skull is perfect, has flawless teeth, looks somewhat happy, is freshly steam-washed and has little or no imperfections. To me, it doesn't look unsettling or creepy at all.

 

I wasn't trying to stylize mine with artistic flair. If it looks like that, it's only because I spent all but 3 minutes on it to make a mockup of what I was referring to. I was trying to add imperfections and dirt, like how oDDity adds dirt maps to everything (or whatever you call it) to make gritty realism. How or where dirt, cracks, stains get added and how the lighting hits the skull is up to interpretation. Obviously if I start with your skull, which kinda looks cartoony to me (even tho it might be real), and spend only 3 minutes Photoshopping 'dirt' in to make it creepier, it will obviously look 'evil cartoonish' in the end.

 

Your aim seems more symbolic death (like skull and crossbones on a pirate ship flag-style) which isn't very creepy to me. If that's your intent and everyone's desires, then I'll step back now.

[Springheel]

Obviously if I start with your skull, which kinda looks cartoony to me (even tho it might be real), and spend only 3 minutes Photoshopping 'dirt' in to make it creepier, it will obviously look 'evil cartoonish' in the end.

 

You're welcome to come up with your own failure screen, and see which one everyone else prefers. If people like your idea better then we'll use it.

 

We need a Mission Completed screen as well, so you could also work on that.

 

Your aim seems more symbolic death (like skull and crossbones on a pirate ship flag-style) which isn't very creepy to me

 

There's something about a real skull that looks way more freaky than the symbolic kind of one

 

As I said, to each their own...