What are you working on RIGHT NOW - T1/2 Dromed Edition

[ataricom]

Turning this into this.

[R Soul]

Oh bugger I've gone over the light limit again.

And now I know what the problem was. I had 719 lights, and added 9, which should be below the limit (736). But these were all animated (which I'd converted from static). I set the Light property to 0, rather than removing it. But the property only needs to remain if the lights are being cloned, otherwise it'll be re-added to the clone, getting its values from the archetype.
So for each light I had Light and AnimLight, meaning each was counted twice.

After removing it, the light count is now 721, on account that I'd also converted existing static lights to animated.

[sterlino]

Oh bugger I've gone over the light limit again.

damn... it is always a bad thing..

good luck my friend...

Turning this into this.

damn 2.... this is a really hard work... all to do.. O_O

good luck you 2 !!

[ataricom]

Fortunately for me, I have these.

[Sensut]

Wow! You will not be many of work with the maps at least. It's not easy, but it's not impossible. Good luck!

[R Soul]

So for each light I had Light and AnimLight, meaning each was counted twice.

I just went through the rest of my animated lights and removed any redundant Light properties, and now the count is down to 659 \o/

[qolelis]

The last few days I've been fitting in new barriers and buildings to avoid HOMs, but right now I'm taking a break from DromEd to listen through the TDP briefing movies...

[Yandros]

Been playing a bit with an interesting tool that Telliamed made. Whether or not to use it in DP2 is what I'm focused on now; as a break from Dromed I've been replaying Calendra's Legacy, which I don't think I've loaded up since 02 or 03. Purah was way ahead of his time.

[ZylonBane]

Oddly enough, I just re-fired up Calendra's Legacy a couple weeks ago myself. Gorgeous, gorgeous level design. Too bad about the f**k-you gameplay.

"Here you go, it's a big ol' city just waiting to be looted but-- tee-hee, you don't get a blackjack! Oh okay, here's your blackjack... but now the city is full of monsters-- and you don't get a sword! Tee-hee again!"

@#$?%!

[Digital Nightfall]

He does it to us again in Dark Messiah. Beautiful level he designs - rooftop cityscape - but what do you have to do? RUN THROUGH IT AS FAST AS POSSIBLE OR YOU FAIL.

Still one of the best levels in the game.

I also had a run-in with a Telli-tool. Following his advice, I removed my obj file from view (renamed it) and ran chkmiss missname.mis >output.txt on my mission (the last bit was NV's advice!) and had it generate a list of all missing media; which gave me a list of all custom bins my mission uses. Now I can begin the slow but important job of removing about 75% of the bin file from my obj folder in an attempt to get the file's zip size down by a hopefully a few dozen megs. There's about 2,200 bin files in my obj folder. Right now I've isolated about 200 bins that the mission actually uses, and I'm only up to the Gs. Next step will be to isolate the graphics files...

[ataricom]

I'm taking a break for a few days until I can figure out how to print full-sized blueprints. Then it's time to throw away half my mission and do it to scale! The correct scale, might I add.

I've been thinking to myself, throughout the entire time I've spent making this FM, "Broad Strokes." Too bad I didn't notice that "big" kept on getting smaller and smaller as time went on.

[Digital Nightfall]

Be careful with that, Ataricom. Making things to true scale can break your mission's gameplay. The AIs and player need much, much more space to properly move around than a human being would.

[Eshaktaar]

According to info_window I've been working on this for 14 full days. Considering it took me almost 4 years to get this far 14 days don't really sound like much.

[ataricom]

Be careful with that, Ataricom. Making things to true scale can break your mission's gameplay. The AIs and player need much, much more space to properly move around than a human being would.

Oh I know. My problem was, at the beginning, everything was a little larger than life, which is what I'm going for. As I progressed, things started getting smaller and smaller, to the point where I could barely move around on my own. At full scale then actually means "consistent" scale.

[Yandros]

Esh, 14 days is surely inaccurate - I logged 20 days just making the original contest version of Burrick's Head Inn. Assuming that's mission 1 of BT, I remembering checking that mission when I looked at it in Dromed about a year ago (first round of Beta testing) and it was negative. When you go beyond the size of the variable allocated to the value, it becomes negative and will eventually wrap back around to positive. If you're seeing +14 days now, it must have wrapped and so the actual time is much larger than that.

[Eshaktaar]

So it's a double wrap! It's BT's second mission, which I started when I realized I needed to split the thing in two.

[SlyFoxx]

Goodness Esh, that's a scary large amount of blue thingies spread out over a scary large area!

for those who don't work with dromed I apologies for the technical nature of this post

[Eshaktaar]

And it's full of spoilers! You see that red thingy in the middle? It's used to open the red thingy 63 pixels to the left which in turn gives you access to the red thingy 18 pixels below the other red thingy.

[SlyFoxx]

Aww man! I might as well not even play it now!

[BrokenArts]

Oddly enough, I just re-fired up Calendra's Legacy a couple weeks ago myself. Gorgeous, gorgeous level design. Too bad about the f**k-you gameplay.

"Here you go, it's a big ol' city just waiting to be looted but-- tee-hee, you don't get a blackjack! Oh okay, here's your blackjack... but now the city is full of monsters-- and you don't get a sword! Tee-hee again!"

@#$?%!

You nailed that, for years, CL bugged the crap out of me. I could never put my finger on it. Thats it, right there, and thats what broke it for me, just a bit. That love hate immersion going on.

[john9818a]

There is a sword in CL. You have to find it.

Now that I got Thief 2 / Dromed 2 / EAX running on Vista I am able to continue my dromeding. The only problem I have now is the nVidia card shadow rendering.

[Melan]

You nailed that, for years, CL bugged the crap out of me. I could never put my finger on it. Thats it, right there, and thats what broke it for me, just a bit. That love hate immersion going on.

The magical thing about Purah's missions is that he can get away with it (not-to-the-rules gameplay, that is).

I am currently working on this room (a seedy pub):

A bit bare, no AI yet and the lights are temporary (have to add some subtle colour and reshuffle them to make the scene less flat), but still.

Dromed just eats free brush count like there is no tomorrow.

[Melan]

Come to think of it: with so many great resources for Dromeders, is there by any chance a handy light hue comparison chart somewhere? I have one for particles, and it's very cool. Something to two decimals or so, maybe.

[Nameless Voice]

There's one on my site somewhere.
Light colour chart (Needs Flash)
(HTML-only version (less accurate))

[Melan]

That's very cool. Is there a downloadable version? I don't have a home net connection, but that chart would be very handy while building.