Gloria Creep on 7/1/2007 at 01:25
Quote Posted by Dia
Entertaining FM, to say the least. Never did get the
'find the girl objective'; guess I must have missed Dewdrop somewhere along the way.Dia, you can find Dewdrop [SPOILER]in the caves, right in front of the ladder that takes you up in the hollow tree. Did you find the girl then? If not, she's in the building in one of the jails.[/SPOILER]
Gloria Creep :angel:
dyald on 7/1/2007 at 01:52
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate all the good comments, as well as the criticisms, and that I am glad the fm was well recieved.
And to show my appreciation, maybe I'll get started on the next chapter.
Thank you all.
Sticky Fingers on 7/1/2007 at 10:50
Just wanted to add my thanks & congrats on a terrific mission, Dyald - really enjoyed it! :thumb: :thumb: :thumb:
Actually, I had somehow missed "Damsel In Distress" :wot: until you stated it was the prequel to this one in the readme, so I d/l & played that first. Whilst I enjoyed DiD almost as much as this one, I too thought it had a few 'not-so-good' aspects (some oversizing, some unnecessary areas & a bit low on detail) as several people posted.
But you seem to have eliminated these little flaws as part of making an even better 2nd mission, without losing any of the best aspects of DiD -- e.g. the many different types of area logically strung together, excellent & evolving plot & really interesting gameplay.
So, whilst this has probably been said before, Dyald's work seems a very good example of why others should post both positive & (nicely-worded) 'not-so-positive' comments on a designer's first mission, rather than trying to tip-toe around his / her feelings &, thus, neglecting to give constructive feedback.
Just my 2 cents worth...
Unless I'm wrong, & Dyald broke down in tears after reading the DiD thread... :cheeky:
Again, thanks for a great mission !!!
Dia on 7/1/2007 at 14:38
Quote Posted by dyald
And to show my appreciation, maybe I'll get started on the next chapter.
Is it done yet?
*an hour later*Still waiting .....
not trying to rush you or anything.
*tries to control involuntary reflex action of foot-tapping*;)
dyald on 7/1/2007 at 17:57
Sticky Fingers:
You are right, I kept in mind all the comments (+&-) while putting this one together and was paranoid that I would make the same mistakes. What took so long is that my stupid computer craped out on me when the Fm was around 80% and I had to get a new hard drive, twice. so it took awhile before I wanted to mess with it again.
Quote:
Unless I'm wrong, & Dyald broke down in tears after reading the DiD thread...
Bawled like a baby:( :joke:
For those who are thinking they might want to tackle building their first fm:
There has never been a better time, pretty much any problem you will have has already been addressed in the editors guild, you can do a search or ask a question. The guys and gals in there are great and seem to enjoy helping newbies. Your first fm may not come out as great as you hope but you WILL find out where you need to improve. Myself, I want to hear constructive criticism. Then I can make the next one more up to standard. in the DID thread I may have sounded a bit frustrated, but that was with myself not the people who posted. The biggest lesson I learned was to have patience, I purposely didn't set a release date for SGC until I was sure it was ready.
Yep it should be released tonight. it is a whole one room fm that has a full complement of two ai's and three textures, the good thing is the automaps were a breeze.:cheeky:
baeuchlein on 8/1/2007 at 15:00
MrMunkeepants, the music used in the briefing movie was "O Fortunata", from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana". Certainly not Mozart, as The Fire Eater suggested.
A small bug appears in the loadout (=shopping) screen: The price tag for the gas arrow says it's price is 500 gold, but it's really 600 gold. In the original game, the real price was 500 gold, however.
I have had problems with the zip files as well and have investigated the case. Here are the results, but be prepared for a long read. If you don't like it, search for "Conclusion" in boldface letters below.
At first, I used DarkLoader 4.3, and although there was no error message, the results were bad. The game crashed instantly. Both sgc_wv_1.zip (version with briefing movie) and sgc_nv_1.zip (no briefing) were affected. After that, Thief 2 would not start again, even if I selected another mission. I found out that the cam.cfg file was altered; the game was now set to run without a 3D graphics card, which Thief 2 can't do. After replacing cam.cfg with the original file, Thief 2 was back to normal, but every attempt to start "The Skygem Connection" resulted in the same problem.
I checked the three zip files (sgc_wv_1.zip, sgc_nv_1.zip, sgc_vid.zip) with unzip32 (Windows) and unzip (Debian Linux 3.1), and all reported "50 extra bytes" somewhere in the first two zip files. sgc_vid.zip (Xvid movie only, no mission) was processed without any errors or warnings.
I unpacked the two mission archieves and packed them again with Linux' zip. Unfortunately, Thief 2 still crashed the same way as before. I played another mission, Thief 2 crashed while playing, and then even a complete re-install of Thief 2 and DarkLoader did not help: The game did not run anymore, and Windows itself became unstable. I do not know whether this instability was caused by Thief or Windows, or both.
I restored Windows from a backup and re-installed Thief 2 and DarkLoader 4.3. I downloaded all three zip files again. Suddenly, things were different.
unzip and unzip32 still said something about "50 extra bytes" when unzipping or testing the two zip files containing missions, while the zip containing only the video still yielded no error message. However, when I started the mission from DarkLoader 4.3, everything worked. Maybe I got two bad downloads the first time?
DarkLoader 4.1, however, was not happy yet, and said "Error in Zip structure" whenever I started it or clicked on the two mission files. It did not allow me to play the missions. DarkLoader 4.2 behaved like DarkLoader 4.3 did.
Since the zip/unzip-DLLs shipped with DarkLoader 4.2 and 4.3 were considerably more recent than the ones from DarkLoader 4.1, I copied those DLLs into the directory where DarkLoader 4.1 resided. It still complained. When I removed the DLLs, DarkLoader 4.1 did not work. Thus, 4.1 really used those DLLs and not any DLL from Windows. Now why did 4.1 complain, but 4.2/4.3 did not?
Deep within the file History.html in the DarkLoader directory, the author mentioned changes to DarkLoader since version 4.1. The last change for version 4.2 reads "Suppress some of the messages from ZipDLL". I guess that the message "Error in Zip structure" is one of the messages which are suppressed now. Apparently, DarkLoader 4.2/4.3 just says nothing when encountering an apparently damaged zip file, prays for the best, unpacks the file and starts Thief 2. DarkLoader 4.1 at least tells us there's something wrong.
Since the file contents seemed to be okay this time, I unzipped and re-zipped the sgc_wv_1.zip file with Linux' zip/unzip programs as well as with Winzip 8.1. Every resulting zip file was accepted by DarkLoader 4.1 and yielded a playable mission with the briefing movie.
I used all available compression levels in WinZip 8.1, and all resulting zip files were playable. None of them was of the same size as the original file I downloaded, so something did change when doing the unzip/re-zip trick.
I assume that dyald uses a zip program which can create zip files deviating from the zip standard (if there is any...), but does not always do so, since the zip file containing the Xvid movie is not affected.
By the way, MP3 compressed sound in a video is not a problem for any DarkLoader. MP3 sounds in videos are not handled by DarkLoader or Thief, but by the proper (Windows) codecs instead. Only files containing in-game sounds have to be converted from MP3 to WAV format because Thief handles those files. DarkLoader has to convert them before Thief will recognize them. Thus, the MP3 compressed sound in the video is completely unrelated to the problem here, regardless of whether one uses DarkLoader 4.1 or 4.2/4.3.
Conclusion: While I have no explanation for the crashes with my first download, there is some problem present with the two zip files which contain missions. Unzipping and re-zipping sometimes works, sometimes it does not. The movie inside one of the zip files obviously is not the source of the problem. Rather, the zip program used by dyald creates zip archives which are somehow "non-standard", thus creating problems with zip utilities not familiar with those types of zip files.
WinZip 8.1 (Windows) and Zip (Linux) seem to create standard zip files, but I would not be surprised if there are more zip programs which do this.
MP3 compression in videos is not handled by DarkLoader. Only conversion of in-game sounds in MP3 (or OggVorbis) format has to be done by DarkLoader and thus requires version 4.2 or above.
dyald on 8/1/2007 at 16:12
baeuchlein:
I used winzip 9 but I also split the files with a program called masterspliter into smaller files so I could upload them easily.
Every time I zip up something I always will get a different file size, I have in the past done repeated zips to get a slightly smaller zip size when every byte counts.
Thats beside the point, What I get out of that is that the problem with the file probably is a result of the spliting process. I imagine that if I just use winzip to split it, that might just take care of it.
Quote:
the music used in the briefing movie was "O Fortunata", from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana".
I was kind of wondering if ayone got that.
This info is a great boon for me if I can fix that, and I would Like to say thank you for the work you did in tracking it down. If my file in any way caused you any problems, then please accept my apology. Am I right in assuming that you have a perfect files A result?
Esme on 8/1/2007 at 16:31
Quote Posted by dyald
...Yep it should be released tonight. it is a whole one room fm that has a full complement of two ai's and three textures, the good thing is the automaps were a breeze.:cheeky:
:wot: :eek: YEEEEHAAAAAAAAA :cheeky:
