Ricebug on 31/3/2015 at 22:45
Off the top of my head, shaders, stims, and vis portals. With shaders you have displacement mapping and other texture FX to deal with if you really want to exploit the eye candy. And, you definitely have to plan your maps for TDM. No more than two vis portals or you'll be asking for trouble.
The Dark engine is a lot more forgiving when it comes to sloppy maps. Not so with TDM.
nbohr1more on 1/4/2015 at 01:29
Quote Posted by Ricebug
Off the top of my head, shaders, stims, and vis portals. With shaders you have displacement mapping and other texture FX to deal with if you really want to exploit the eye candy. And, you definitely have to plan your maps for TDM. No more than two vis portals or you'll be asking for trouble.
The Dark engine is a lot more forgiving when it comes to sloppy maps. Not so with TDM.
(not trying to be argumentative, just clarifying our current status on these)
Shaders: I presume you are referring to Normal Maps, we do not yet support POM or Parallax mapping. It's true that making these can be a pain
compared to just drawing textures or taking photos but new programs like njob do a good job of taking photo sources (etc) and automatically infer from the shading the angles and depth to make in the normal map. Of course, for custom models you've gotta do high poly to low poly bakes. Neither of these are required to make missions unless you insist on having custom assets in your mission though. Our asset and prefab collection has probably grown quite large since you last perused it.
Stims: We have a number of pre-made examples now and triggers and new path entities have made some of this work obsolete. Plus, the AI are smarter now
so there's less need to coax them to do human type stuff like noticing lights going out or ropes hanging (etc).
Visportals: You've got us here. Visportals are just about as much of a pain as you remember.
Bikerdude has pretty much been the go-to guy to help our mapping community with this aspect.
We are hoping to add occlusion culling to an upcoming release so that outdoor areas won't need so much mental gymnastics to get right.
That and there are plans to optimize the engine in general to move more work off the CPU onto the GPU so the game will run better out of the box before any mapper intervention.
That said, we now have far better tools to diagnose broken portals so the days of fruitless leak hunting are pretty much over.
Ricebug on 1/4/2015 at 10:16
Quote Posted by nbohr1more
(not trying to be argumentative, just clarifying our current status on these).
A well-written response. I didn't take it as argumentative at all.
Quote Posted by nbohr1more
...we now have far better tools to diagnose broken portals so the days of fruitless leak hunting are pretty much over.
I remember the days of chasing that red line all over my 15" monitor, trying to plug a tiny pin hole that was screwing up the BSP.
Sounds like a lot of love has gone into TDM. Mayhaps I'll take another look...
nbohr1more on 1/4/2015 at 13:40
Oh. I forgot to mention that we now have Object LOD for both static and animated meshes.
Also, the new lod_bias spawnarg can be used to let level designers add extra detail that can be removed by sliding
the object detail slider rather than abusing the difficulty system the way that Heart of Lone Salvation had to.
Finally, we now have HL2 style portalsky so you can more easily merge skyboxes with the real map geometry to produce
the illusion of depth and grandeur.
So it's definitely easier to "build bigger" now than it once was.
Apiai on 30/4/2015 at 20:33
Quote Posted by Ricebug
Since I've written walkthroughs on every T2 FM ever released, I'll insert foot into mouth and guess that probably 1% of said missions are what you'd consider non-standard.
I would say more than 1%, I've an excel list of all FMs and here's approximately the number of FMs i've tagged "atypical" :
T2 : 44 atypical Fms / 535 tagged Fms : 8%
T1 : 9 atypical Fms / 90 tagged Fms : 10%
TDM : 3 atypical Fms / 89 tagged Fms : 3,4%
By the way, what is the TDM flying ship mission ?
downwinder on 30/4/2015 at 20:42
2 words "wonky blackjack"
fortuni on 30/4/2015 at 20:55
Apiai.....a quick look at cheapmissions and i suspect a number of your atypical T1/T2 mission (esp T1) would be classed as demo's, yes there are a lot of Thief demo's that are beyond atypical, are there any TDM demo's ? and if you excluded the demo's from your stats would there be similar percentages between the 3 games ?
Kerrle on 30/4/2015 at 22:12
Quote Posted by downwinder
2 words "wonky blackjack"
That's what does it for me. I've enjoyed quite a few Dark Mod missions, but it's to the point where I quicksave every time I'm going to try blackjacking someone because the success is completely unpredictable.
Apiai on 1/5/2015 at 07:11
I don't count demos as Fm.
I've updated my list with "Fm List by type" thread,
now I have more missions consider as atypical :
T2 : 79 atypical Fms / 804 tagged Fms : 9,8%
T1 : 13 atypical Fms / 193 tagged Fms : 6,7%
TDM : 3 atypical Fms / 91 tagged Fms : 3,3%
Does somebody knows what is the tdm flying ship mission ?
Jaime Lannister on 1/5/2015 at 21:36
Quote Posted by Apiai
Does somebody knows what is the tdm flying ship mission ?
"Pandora's Box," by jesps.
