Quake MOD - In The Shadows

[taniwha]

sock, well, I've found the bug that caused the weird text replacement in book text. The trigger wasn't getting the amulet, it was saving the game and reloading. QF has a different format for saved game data. The important bit here is non-ascii chars are printed in octal. The loader is broken when it reads the octal .

Well, thanks for the confirmation that it was very likely to be a QF bug. It looks like it's time to write some unit tests for pstrings.

[sock]

@rook, love the pixels, screenshot looking good. Did you setup the global fog?

@Dr. Shadowborg, thanks for the feedback, it is always difficult to get feedback from a small update after a big release. What was your gripes with the stealth tutorial? maybe I can change it to be better? What were the spelling mistakes? I certainly want to fix those.

I do agree there certainly needs to be a few more gadget/weapons for stealth and most people have mentioned about an escape style weapon (flash, concussion) which would make sense. I will see if I can make a flash bomb that stuns any enemies for a couple of seconds giving the player a chance to regain stealth and escape. I am not much of a fan of grapple mechanics because they are really designed for players vs players. Without a good amount of flying enemies (quake as 1) the player would just abuse it all the time. The Air fist is a cool idea but I think this could be built into a trap, so around areas that could produce instant death for AI (close to lava/slime etc)

Yeah I like the idea of extra poison infighting, the poison system certainly needs to have some extra features.

The poison fatality might make killing mobs too easy because two poison bolts would pretty much be an instant kill. The poison system lowers the enemies health by 80%, if they sustain 20% of damage beforehand they will be killed by the poison (they usually explode) I actually have an onscreen message about trying to poison an enemy a second time. I will have to think about this one, it certainly an interesting idea but the mechanic has got to be rewarding and not too easy.

A couple of people have mentioned the keyboard layout being frustrating, 1= Axe/crossbow 2= poison. What keyboard layout would you prefer?

Oh the fight with the big shield knight, Lord Aramis is coming along well, I just need to finish his code and build a good arena to fight him in!

[sock]

The trigger wasn't getting the amulet, it was saving the game and reloading. QF has a different format for saved game data.

I tried to save as much as could in the serverflag, so important stuff will be remembered across map loads. There is no real easy way of detecting a quickload so I setup variables (via the compiler, top of defsplus.qc file) that never save so every time the game loads it detects the unsaved variables and re-initializes the amulet config each time.

[taniwha]

It turned out there were two problems in all. First, QF's save files are pure ascii. any non-ascii chars are printed as octal escapes (\333 == \xdd = bolded "]"), but QF's octal parser was borked (it assumed the escape always started as \0 (thus \0333, but that's \033 followed by a 3. oops). Second, despite the new format, QF was still using id's PR_UglyValueString pretty much untouched (except using snprintf instead of sprintf). The strings were getting chopped off at 255 chars.

While I was at it, I fixed things so QF's save files won't let floats drift (exactly enough digits are written (up to 9) to restore any float).

Unless I'm mistaken, you can't tell the difference between a normal load and a quick load: it's just a matter of load sN.sav vs load quick.sav.

BTW, QF does 5 backups of quick.sav. I got fed up with accidentally hitting F6 just after dieing. The load menu has a quicksave backup sub-menu.

Code: Select all

[bill@taniwha ~/.quakeforge/shadows]
$ ls quick*
quick1.sav  quick2.sav  quick3.sav  quick4.sav  quick5.sav  quick.sav


[Baker]

While I was at it, I fixed things so QF's save files won't let floats drift (exactly enough digits are written (up to 9) to restore any float).

In a super bare minimum of detail so this doesn't derail sock's thread can you tell me what this is or define the issue and what this fixes? I read that and was like "must know". I assume you are saying that usually fprintfing floats to file can cause a slight loss of precision somehow (probably most likely with non-whole number values)? And you have a sneaky method to evade problem?

[taniwha]

Yup, ultra simple 9 digits is enough. He uses %1.8e, I used %.8e (why bother with the 1?), divVerent suggested %.9g (%.17g for double) which gives a much nicer output. %f's default of 6 digits is horribly lacking, that's all.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

@Dr. Shadowborg, thanks for the feedback, it is always difficult to get feedback from a small update after a big release. What was your gripes with the stealth tutorial? maybe I can change it to be better? What were the spelling mistakes? I certainly want to fix those.

Tutorial is almost perfect, biggest complaint is the poison infighting tutorial seems to be a little unbalanced. (scrag vs. death knight isn't really a proper contest, maybe put the death knight on the pedestal and put two scrags in the background? Or just change the death knight to a regular knight?

Found a bug in S1M2, the first spike trap isn't firing.

Did a quick run through the start map looking for spelling mistakes, etc. (didn't check S1M1 and S1M2, don't think they have any storyline books yet)

From my notes:

Part 8
'im free at last!' should read
'I'm free at last!'

Part 12
buried deep with the temple of swords = buried deep within the temple of swords (makes more sense as the latter)

Upper Chapel 1 - amulet
Maintenance have been called = Maintenance has been called

Uppper Chapel 2 - amulet
Maintenance have not = Maintenance has not

Central Elevator - amulet
use at anytime = use at any time

Library (slime) - amulet
are suppose to go = are supposed to go

There might be one more grammar / spelling error in the text IIRC, but I couldn't find it this second time around.

A couple of people have mentioned the keyboard layout being frustrating, 1= Axe/crossbow 2= poison. What keyboard layout would you prefer?

1=Axe, 2=Crossbow, 3=Poison, etc.

[sock]

@Dr. Shadowborg, thanks for the feedback on the books, I have updated all the changes you have found. I am still confused about how little feedback I have got on the books, not sure why. The spike shooter in S1M2 you mentioned not working, it is linked to hard skill only. In the original map it is removed when spawning but I use dynamic skill spawning so it is awkward to add/remove. I might just convert it to all skill levels because it can be enabled/disabled with buttons.

The tutorial is certainly a lot easier for people completely new to the mod and once someone has played it once they will ignore all the messages anyway. The infighting part is to show one possible way to kill wizards using poison but you can shoot the hell knight instead. Also I wanted something left alive for the player to play with after the tutorial, it is a way to blend the tutorial back into the actual game again. There is certainly a few bugs which I still need to fix.

I am still amazed from watching demo's of people playing that hardly anyone is getting the idea of shoot bolt and duck behind wall before it hits. I still see people firing bolts at enemies that are facing them and even when the help message comes up on screen I get the impression they don't connect it with their actions. So I decided to produce a couple of game play video's showing the tricks to playing the MOD. Maybe it might inspire people to try a different approach to the MOD.

S1m1 - Shadow gate
S1m2 - Castle of Shadows

[Spike]

I suspect you should reduce the chances of pain animations, or at least not allow them to interrupt melee attacks.
right now you can do the shambler-dance with many of the monsters and avoid getting hurt from it.
hellknight projectiles are rather dodgable as always too. reduce the spread?
these are nice features for quake, but I suspect they're not ideal for stealth-type gameplay.

[taniwha]

Sock: heh. I figured that out fairly quickly (with the help of the screen text). My problem has been sneaking up behind the enemy only to bump and wind up in a fight :/.

[sock]

I suspect you should reduce the chances of pain animations, or at least not allow them to interrupt melee attacks.
right now you can do the shambler-dance with many of the monsters and avoid getting hurt from it.
hellknight projectiles are rather dodgable as always too. reduce the spread?
these are nice features for quake, but I suspect they're not ideal for stealth-type gameplay.

The above list is not something that should affect Stealth, if the player is in combat and the above stuff is happening they should be trying to hide to enable the amulet again.

I certainly like the list for vanilla quake and a lot of it could be linked to skill levels, I don't think it is fair to make these changes for all skill levels. Out of curiosity has anyone done QC to get around the shambler dance? I assume it is a problem with the animations blocks being so long and the actual shambler attack being half way through the block? It might be cool to make this happen less on hard/nightmare skill level. I do like the idea of shambler dancing because it is an advanced trick that is something you learn after playing the game for a while. It would be a shame to completely remove it.

@Taniwha, did you see anything useful in the videos? Would it give you an incentive to go back and try stealth again but using the stuff from the video?

[taniwha]

sock: I haven't watched any video but the very first one you posted several months ago.

If I can run away and hide, I do. I then return to the scene to try again. I just suck, especially with the axe (I generally used it only for smacking walls looking for secrets). Doesn't mean I'll give up. Your mod is great incentive for getting good with the axe.

One suggestion I have is that if you duck into a shadow-alcove (er, what are they called?) and the enemy chasing you didn't actually see you go in, the amulet should turn on right away. If the enemy did see you go in, maybe he should become a little more aggressive

Actually, I sometimes think that your messages say too much rather than too little.

[sock]

Actually, I sometimes think that your messages say too much rather than too little.

Yeah it can feel like too much if you have played it a lot, but they are gone if you move up to the hard skill level. On easy skill you receive twice as many messages as normal and none on hard! I am assuming that people will want to eventually try the mod at the higher skill level because i think it is more rewarding game play.

BTW, is there somewhere I can download your engine updates from? Is there an engine exe I can test so that I can add it to my list of recommended engines for people to play the mod with?

[taniwha]

Indeed there is: main page. I haven't released anything since August or so, but downloads here. Note that the windows binaries have not been tested (or if they have, nobody's told me). Since there were some fixes for your mod, I'd better roll out a release soon.

Even the first time I read the messages, I felt they were a little too much as they removed the fun of figuring things out. Maybe reduce in-game text to hints with more explanation in a document.

Now, the comment about "old faithful" was nice .

[revelator]

Consider it told it runs ok but im having some trouble getting the menus to work (win7 64)