Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here.

Crispy on 7/5/2005 at 10:29

Quote Posted by Maximius

Crispy, are you saying that the AIs are only aware of the first weapon they have attached to them? They dont even know they have the other, its just "glued" to their hips? In other words, each AI only has one memory "slot" for a weapon? If so, yikes.

That's more or less my theory, yes. (Except it's not so much that they don't know about the weapon; just that they're not programmed to consider the possibility of using other weapons besides their "first" one.) I guess I should actually test it sometime though. :)

Quote:

BUT I still want to know how the AIs know how far away Garrett is, why they dont start swinging swords and hammers and firing arrows even if hes only just in sight, not range. I if we can identify the coding that governs how the AIs "know" Garretts range, maybe some kind of loop could be coded that even after the AI has unsheathed a particular weapon, it will continue to check for Garretts range even as it attacks.(e.g. firing bow) When the AI receive a particular new value from its "scan" it fires a command to sheath weapon, then somehow make the thing "forget" its bow and trigger unsheath sword. If the AI only has one "slot" for memory, somehow we have to find a way to trigger a sequence that will actively pop different values in and out of that "slot."

Rather than thinking of it as a single "weapon slot", I think it's more that each AI has a variable ("slot" is an equivalent but less technical term, I guess) indicating which weapon it is currently wielding (or would wield if it was alerted). The value of this variable is set to the first item with the "bIsWeapon" property set to true that is RigidAttachment-attached to the AI. (Or the first one in the AI's Weapons Loadout, if they have a weapon in that loadout.)

I doubt that we have access to this variable from scripts. None of the trigger actions explicitly refer to weapons. Unless AICombatModels can control weapon selection, but I don't think they can.

Quote:

I know the swords/hammers have animations for sheathing, I could not remember about the bowmen though.

I'm pretty sure they sling their bows across their backs normally. And looking in the Skeleton Browser seems to confirm this.

Quote:

BTW how would one access these animations? I would like to try to tweak a hammerite to see if I can increase the frequency of the overhead swing attack, to try to deal with the crouching defense.

Open the Skeleton Browser in the editor. (Click Yes or OK to any dialogs that come up... unless they're Viktoria errors - I got a few - in which case Continue or Ignore.)

You can then view all the animations in the game, and their names. Expand some trees on the right. Right-click on an animation name and choose "Play" to play it. Work out which animation is the one you want, note down its name, and use that as the String in the script action "Start my animation [String] with rate [Float]". You should probably set the rate to 1.0, at least to start with.

I don't know how much this would help - it depends whether attacks are purely initiated through animations or not. Worth a try though.

Maximius on 7/5/2005 at 15:47

Thanks for the primer Crispy, Ill mess with that this afternoon.. And there is a crouch animation, at least for the Kurshok. I wonder what else is in there, Ill let you know what I find.

Update: Not a crouch animation, they used the scrub floor animation. But it looks like a crouch.......

Ok, there are a couple of animations that would SEEM to successfully target a crouching Garrett. M1_ST_ATK_jab_LOW_CTR , M1_SR_ATK_finishing_move_1 under "cityguard", the second finishing move will also target a crouched Garrett but its a kick, dont know if it does damage.

Under cityguard2, nothing really seems to work

under hammer, HR_jab , HR_swing_rage_jump, and UA_to_HR_attack all seem like they would collide with a crouching Garrett. Now Im off totry them.

thestemmer on 8/5/2005 at 19:12

I'm sure this question has already been asked, but where is the best place to start learning T3ed for a total newbie? I don't have any experience with UnrealEd, Dromed, or level editors in general. I checked the wiki, but it looks like the only tutorials available are for those who have at least some familiarity with UnrealEd and know the lingo. Should I just start with an UnrealEd tutorial? And if so, at what point should I switch over to a basic T3ed tutorial?

Bardic on 8/5/2005 at 23:52

thestemmer,

Have you tried Komag's T3 Tutorial at (http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/) http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/ ? It should be pretty good to get you right into the basics. And Komag has a good sense of humor so it's fun to go through.

thestemmer on 9/5/2005 at 00:51

Thanks a bunch, I'll try it out.

thestemmer on 11/5/2005 at 00:13

Hey Bardic, that really helped me, thanks again. I have another question now though, is it possible to resize subtracted brushes without using vertex editing? Like if I just wanted to shrink a room to 50% of its original size?

Eye on 11/5/2005 at 00:53

... but after downloading the T3 editor, i thought better of starting there and downloaded DromEd instead.

I based this on two things: first, that DromEd itself would be easier to learn and use than T3, and second, that any problems i would have had probably been discovered and solved many times before, rather than the T3 experience that is still evolving.

Basically, what I want to know is, did i make the right move? it's not that i'm afraid my assumptions about Dromed are wrong, but that i could have overlooked something because i don't know jack about either of them.

thanks for any and all help

Ziemanskye on 11/5/2005 at 10:16

Eye: A couple of people round here seem to have done that. Seems realy odd behaviour to me, but then I never managed to get DromEd to run for more than about 2 minutes before crashing, so never got anywhere with it. I hear others have the same issue with ThiefEd though.

However, the only real piece of advice I can give on this is: Install them both, play a little, then stick with which ever you can get to do more of what you want first.

My choice was HL2/Hammer or Thief:DS/ThiefEd, and while I used to do AHL maps, I had trouble going back to hammer with it all it's awkward little ways, so stuck with the unreal variant.

bukary on 11/5/2005 at 11:54

Eye, DromEd is much easier to master now, because you have tons of information about it... And I've never experienced any SUDDEN crashes. I always knew what I did wrong when DromEd crashed...

After releasing some FMs with DromEd and playing with T3Ed for few weeks (months?) I must say that I like DromEd better (and no, it's not easier to learn than T3Ed). Perhaps I'll change my mind after releasing my first TDS mission... ;)

But if I were you, I would start learning T3Ed. By the time you'll learn how to use it, we'll probably know as much (or almost as much) about it as we know about DromEd... It really depends on what you like better: TDS or TDP? If you like TDS, go for T3Ed!

angrypenguin on 14/5/2005 at 17:26

I am just starting to mess around with making my own textures and i want to know when i export them into dds files what size do they have to be?

Is there a certain size or will it adapt to whatever you give it?