DescentBB

Sirius

Going up shortly. Will probably keep at it for an hour or two, still need to wake up tomorrow

I also have a Beam/Mixer account if Twitch is a problem.

Sirius

OK, guess I'll look at that then. I might be able to start tonight but it will likely be late if so. Probably also Saturday afternoon sometime. I can post here and on Discord if I do that (although, there are two Descent Discord servers...

)

Sirius

Structure done for 27, next up texturing and maybe some sample item placement... that usually goes a little quicker for me since I already have an idea of what I wanted to do with each place. So I'll probably start that over the weekend... hell, I could livestream it if someone's bored and/or really...

Sirius

Yeah the games I'm talking about you don't need to be a member of anything. If the game is open, it's probably free to join (unless someone left something open by mistake. But the title will usually tell you if it's a Rangers or DCL game... if it doesn't, it's the host's fault for neither locking it...

Sirius

So, as far as I can tell, you haven't mandated which levels should have secret exits... it's probably going to be more restrictive in D1 since the mapping was one-to-one there, but most D2 secret levels had two. I'm not sure what your plan is for this one, but let me know if I need to add one...

Sirius

Yes. You can't guarantee when people will be on-line, but pick-up games do still happen.

Sirius

You mean the guy at the wheel isn't him?

Sirius

It times out and explodes if it runs out of fuel, basically.

Sirius

Well, yeah, but if you have it running at Pentium 3 speeds it's going to be breaking 200 fps on a regular basis, which the D2 game loop isn't designed to handle properly. Unfortunately there isn't really any reason a Win98 VM wouldn't do the same thing. You can try to aim for a "sweet spot"...

Sirius

The slowdowns in cube-heavy areas are basically emulating a fact of life on old 486s that weren't too fast to run the game without breaking it. They didn't have a framecap until the 3dfx versions came out. If DOSBox could emulate a Voodoo 2 you'd be pretty much sorted, but I have a feeling that isn'...

Sirius

A (very) brief description of how it works: // Create list of segments boss is allowed to teleport to at segptr. // Set *num_segs. // Boss is allowed to teleport to segments he fits in (calls object_intersects_wall) and // he can reach from his initial position (calls find_connected_distance). // If...

Sirius

Regarding AF levels, Sirius: 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 DH: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15 (yeah he did most of the building) Only reason AF didn't have music was because we didn't have anything appropriate on hand, neither of us had any songwriting ability, we didn't want to just copy stuff and no-one was a...

Sirius

The "built-in spyware" is telemetry collection, which is not supposed to be personally identifiable, but it's not my place to lecture anyone over whether or not they should be OK with it. I will say that telemetry apparently also exists in Windows 7, though, even if it isn't used anywhere ...

Sirius

Umm... it was either no/insufficient co-op player starts (a very common mistake) or that there was a crash somewhere. Might have been a crash - I forget. I got that info from a report from Whoskyd rather than first-hand - I haven't played them myself. Edit: Looked it up. Ironblade apparently has onl...

Sirius

Yeah I think you're right on all of that, the animation frame count and framerate are defined in the HAM file, and probably also the blown/reactor state clip numbers. Descent 3 was a lot more flexible on all of that - but making levels for it was so much work...

Sirius

Oh... I think you might be running into a limitation of the Descent texture system. Stacking two transparent textures on top of each other doesn't work properly, unless the secondary texture has "see-through" pixels like misc037 does. I'm not sure why that happens but I remember seeing tha...

Sirius

Black transparency on what display - the texture view (which one?) or mine view? Are the textures involved metl146 (primary) and misc037 (secondary)? What palette are you using?

Sirius

Regarding bosses and walls - from what I recall seeing, if a boss is behind a wall or door that opens up, there needs to be only one cube (the one that the boss is in) behind that wall or door, or it won't move into the rest of the boss room when it teleports. It's an exception case in the way D2 fi...

Sirius

I investigated further and there are three problems with that feature currently. 1) It's only available in first-person mode (due to it being somewhat of a "make DLE work like Devil" mode rather than merely a perspective switch). 2) Due to a design problem with the input handler (this one ...

Sirius

Yeah this time that will not be an issue since you won't be fighting a boss in the area. Tell you what though, Xfing; once it's done I'll make a couple of copies, one with the cloaked wall and one with the contingency plan, and you can let me know which you like better

Sirius

Actually that one is a question for DH; I didn't design level 3. Though I have no problem with optional parts of a level either.

Sirius

Umm... one other thing...

Are cloaked walls off-limits? (The thought I had was kind of a decorative glass-like thing, not an integral part of the level.) Parallax never used them which might be a problem, although we are doing a certain number of things they didn't do but mostly with textures...

Sirius

I think single-player was more or less - "it should be possible, but you might have to drop the difficulty level below what you normally play at, in order to still have fun". There was a briefing so it was part of the consideration, but we took it as a given that a mission targeted at expe...

Sirius

That was about the only level I actually recorded a video of. The keys were to get the Gauss in the start room and don't give the missile robots a chance to shoot back.

Sirius

@Sirius How are you supposed to handle Level 2 cold start no death? I can't even come close, even on Hotshot. Can't even reliably clear way to the energy center. Basically, you're not. Cold start, sure; no deaths wasn't part of the plan though. It's probably possible even on Insane if you're very g...

Sirius

Oh boy. Apologies in advance for the quote spaghetti. :) I want to ask Sirius, is there any better way to beat the L2 boss than I did? No significant change in tactics, that was more or less what I'd do. Although the trick to draw a few of the robots to the red door is interesting, haven't seen that...

Sirius

It's kind of a safety thing for a puzzle... it would also be possible to use a guided missile, but I don't think everyone is going to be able to make the shot with that. Phoenix gives a second option.

Sirius

I kind of feel like if you're going to install a weapons mod on a mission that wasn't designed for it, you might as well just use cheat codes.

Sirius

The built-in D2 levels largely weren't as big as I thought they were. They got a lot of space out of their cube count, but even so, the level in that screenshot might actually be comparable to level 9. I'm not totally sure since I can't see the whole level but nonetheless... Xfing - roughly what lev...

Sirius

I've played a preview of this one, right? The size of the rooms probably best suits it to D2 play. We kind of did need another good shaker level though.

Sirius

More precisely, "use 1st", but that would be my guess as well. Those two checkboxes control how DLE decides what the edge of the "touching" region is for purposes of pasting and aligning textures. If "use 1st" is checked, it compares base textures; if "use 2nd"...

Sirius

To be honest, regarding multiplayer: don't try to design levels for that until you've played a lot of the game mode you're building for. I learned that the hard way - lots of early levels that aren't really fun. Free-for-all levels can be at least somewhat forgiving, but one-on-one levels are very v...

Sirius

Hmm... OK, those are the selection "mode" controls I think. They control what is manipulated by the geometry edit commands. The default is side mode; in this case it will move the currently selected side. Point mode moves the selected point. Line mode moves the selected line. Cube mode mov...

Sirius

Probably not then. Anyone else have any ideas?

Sirius

Unfortunately the link on descent2.de currently is wrong... until it's fixed this seems to work:
http://www.descent2.de/files/dle-1.12.28.7z

Sirius

No... though there is the question of whether the place you got the mission from, well, did something to the files for you.

Sirius

Swarthy made a video series that is probably the best resource we have at the moment. There are a few things I'd do differently, but I'm not the one who took the time to make videos.

Sirius

Only thing I can think of is that they don't show up in multiplayer...

Sirius

It depends what method you use to add walls. If you use the "add" button in the wall tool before doing anything else, it looks like it defaults to 50% transparency (though this is probably using some space in the structure that only D2X-XL actually looks at). If you use the menus or "...

Sirius

Quickest way is probably C (cube mode) -> M (mark current selection, in this case the whole cube) -> "reset marked sides" button on the texture alignment panel. If you tend to build levels in "passes" - i.e. you do all the geometry before the texturing - then you can just reset t...

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