[RELEASED] Teh tentative TIK thread (WTF series A/ISV Dragoncow ;P)

[TheIronKnuckle]

Will update with a non-descriptive description and suspicious stolen screenshots soon.

Update 1:
after 3 hours and 30 minutes of mapping... I give you Pictures! Behold the starting area of my entry!

Ignore the floating, unsourced flame. Lighting may also be reduxxed. If you think you recognise something in this map from somewhere else, well.... you're right Don't you just love the details?


I'm open to any suggestions that would make this more "Cozy". Rocking chair? Carpet/rug? whatever Tell me what you think would improve the feel of this place and I'll see if I can accomodate I've already got dice, books, knife, plantpot, candles, bed, bookshelf, stool, and if you look carefully, you might notice a na pali style "teddy bear"


Alone in the dark.


As regards these shots, there's still a todo list: Need to add a water sheet to the nalifruit crack-in-the-wall. Need to litter that cracked area with bits of rubble. Need to add a glass of water to the table. Need to get a decent mirror in there somewhere. Maybe a wardrobe.
Need to Redo the lighting. Seriously, that floating flame is pissing me off, I need to find a way to keep it sourced that goes with the established theme (that is, no big gold candlesticks or something, as it would be out of place, and somehow a nali-lantern jars badly with what I've already got. I'll be looking for some sort of simple, wooden torch)
Need to add translator and messages. You're not going to be able to shoot your way out of this corridor, you'll have to use your head, and read my damn translator messages (tbh I haven't worked out how you're going to get out of here myself but I'm aiming to make it a real brain teaser.)

The story of my entry is one which I don't want to say anything about; partly because on a certain level there wont be a story, but on another level there's going to be a certain "shallow" depth to the plot, which would be ruined if I decided to stop being cryptic about the whole thing

What I will say, is that currently I have plans to keep the background ambiguous. You wont immediately know whether you just woke up in this strange place, or whether you've been living there for a long period of time. I'll try to leave hints that go both ways. Maybe someone else was living there before you turned up? Who knows. Of course I may scrap this later and reduce ambiguity, but for now I'm enjoying the flexibility it offers.

Inspiration for this opening part comes from the mines of moria chapters of Lord of the Rings. It's been a long time since I read the books, but I remember one particular description JRR Tolkien provided of the Fellowship sleeping in a line with their backs to the wall of the seemingly endless halls of Moria. Frodo couldn't sleep easily and was all "omg this place is massive" and iirc was struck by the absolute silence and darkness. The images brought about by that description have stuck with me for a long time, and they have partly provided the inspiration for this part of my entry. That corridor stretches seemingly infinitely in both directions.

I attribute indirect inspiration for the "Cozy Home in a bizzare unsettling setting" to Shinigami, for being so damn weird in his maps

[TheIronKnuckle]

Updated with pics and commentary

Questions:
1. How do you make irregular shaped sheets? I need to fit a sheet to something I made in the 2d shape editor
2. How do you make it so that nalifruits are immediately fully grown when the game starts? I found some setting "bGrownWhenSeen", set it to True, and it didn't do anything :S

[ebd]

How do you make irregular shaped sheets? I need to fit a sheet to something I made in the 2d shape editor

Either vertex edit (and/or intersect) sheets or use the 2d shape editor. I'm not sure about the fruits though.

The map seems like an interesting premise.

[Jet v4.3.5]

If it's a hole in a surface, you can always just use a square sheet, but if it's an object where using a square would cause the sheet to stick out wrong, use the 2D shaper and use the sheet tool up at the top (where extrude/rotate/etc. are).

[TheIronKnuckle]

Being able to use a square saves me a lot of shit I always thought it resulted in BSP mayhem though. I'll give it a go.

[Semfry]

A square sheet that goes into the walls a little will probably be much better for the BSP than a irregular one that doesn't. Heavily modifying flat brushes like sheets can make all kinds of weird shit happen even if it remains flat (that's generally worse than a few extra BSP cuts).

[TheIronKnuckle]

Good point. The square sheet method worked nicely. I had to set it to nonsolid though, the first time I left it on default settings and the level started collapsing immediately XD.

More pics.

Can't resist another table shot, glass of water has been added.


I wacked in the rug, wardrobe and mirror. On the other side of the wardrobe is a set of shelves, with various vases, books, candles and mini monk statues.


This is a place where the player sometimes sits up at night, and with sword at the ready keeps watch over the darkness while reading poetry. Note the footrest If that sword is looking overscaled in all the wrong ways, it's because of the angle at which I took the shot.
Oh yeah, you can also see that I've added a simple, 10 polygon semisolid torch to act as a source for that flame.


I've started adding in translator messages. I've changed the sound effects (nothing custom) and I'm treating them as "Thoughts" similar to how HellScrag did it in VVV. I'm liking how it's coming along.

[TheIronKnuckle]

More questions:
1. How do you make nalifruits grow instantly?
2. How do you disable the stock teleportation sound effect?
3. How do you change the specialevent message sound?
4. Is it possible to alter the time a message is displayed on screen when using special events?

[integration]

1. Not without coding (assuming you want to use seeds).
2. This is not changeable, in SinglePlayer you won't hear a teleport sound, but in VRikersGame you will.
3. You can't change the message beep (assuming bBroadcast is true).
4. Not without coding.

[TheIronKnuckle]

well, that sucks I was looking forward to some uscript hacks, but rules prevent me

Although, I'm not using seeds.

[Semfry]

1. How do you make nalifruits grow instantly?

If it's at the start of the level you could confine/incapacitate the player in some way for a little to give them some time to grow.

[integration]

1. You could make a Pseudo NaliFruit, but this would be very inconvenient:
take a health pack and set its healing amount, collision size, mesh, anim sequence, pickup message, etc. to that of a NaliFruit.

[Buff Skeleton]

1. You could make a Pseudo NaliFruit, but this would be very inconvenient:
take a health pack and set its healing amount, collision size, mesh, anim sequence, pickup message, etc. to that of a NaliFruit.

Don't forget PickupViewMesh and PickupViewScale. Those are the visual properties that actually get used ingame.

[TheIronKnuckle]

Ahh of course! It's totally worth it. Will do that. Thanks guys (My map is small enough that I don't mind going to such lengths with these pedantic things)

Rough outline of my entry:
Currently I have four 6 hour speedmaps planned, which will link into each other. The fourth one I'm a bit fuzzy about how to stage it. I'm tempted to do it in a volcano/volcanic cavern, which will allow me to get in there with some ice texture practice, but the tess cubes required might prevent it from being a "6 hour" speedmap. Oh well.

Due to the expected small scale of these maps, I will probably merge them together into one if I have time and don't run into technical difficulties.

[TheIronKnuckle]

Unreal does not have vacuum zones. This is crap

Then again, I only need it for the "view flash fade in" effect. I was going to set the kill time and other stuff to 99999 anyway. Is there any way to emulate the effect using normal zone infos? I've messed around with various fog settings and all I can get is an instant "screen turns white" effect. I want to get a gradual fade in over 5 to 10 seconds.

edit: I feel like I've done a heap of work, but there's nothing to screenshot for you guys cause it's all translator messages and stuff that happens in the darkness. maybe I'll make some more geometries now.

edit2: Hey there, how do you make a sound play once only? Currently i've got all my sounds on a loop. It isn't pleasant on the ears