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]

[taniwha]

[Baker]

[taniwha]

Yup, ultra simple . 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]

[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.

[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]

[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]

[taniwha]

Indeed there is: . I haven't released anything since August or so, but . 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)