balanced targeting timing and active items processing
plazas with threes and fountains in a city (enabled old code)
fixed alarm noise being overwritten with smashing noise
fixed noise volume vs. monster anger accumulation
no more corpses/items floating in the air
MGSmod rev.41b
kick action, push monsters thru windows or in hole
kick action, push furniture which can push monsters
secret bell tower room, may contain laser, plasma, railgun…
sound effects for lasers and other fusion & plutonium firearm
sound effects for jackhammer, flamethrower & fire extinguisher
included game sound and actual sound effect for silencers
vehicle parts not blocking view anymore
railings prevent monsters to stupidly fall into holes
three row of “Kill Count” monsters
MGSmod rev.44b
chain-kill morale boost, combo multiplier up to x10
kick & shoot: ability to kick/push while targeting
with skilfull kick/push possible to stun monster
kill count for zombies killed by explosions or fire
extra action to discourage walking on top of furniture
equilized animation timing for close and far away targets
no more eternally burning fires outside of player’s view
MGSmod rev.48b
new animation code, 40% speed-up
double binary, old MFC and new SDL
large viewport support, up to 35x35
Triffid heartbeat and handbrake sound
kill count for driving over monsters
combo boost for explosion & car kills
player info for “Drunken Master” trait
new keys for Kick ‘z’, and Jump ‘Z’
balanced temperature effects
starting items: bandana and cigs
still time targeting while driving
UPX-ed binary shrink from 12MB to 2MB
MGSmod rev.49b
feed pets, train them, love them
feeding restores your pet’s HP
pet’s kills increase their skills
feed pets with dog or cat food
wild animals are harder to tame
vehicle spped up/down sound effects
fixed extra kills by car flinging
fixed NPC hints messages to show up
no music interupts on z-level change
MGSmod rev.54b
explosive & fire arrows: set monsters on fire
reworked line of sight for sneaking and peeking
mods to NPC dialogue and hints, show NPC health
balanced pet training skills and pet food spawning
shortcut yes/no confirmation key ‘5’, SPACE to cancel
SDL mouse support to test touch-screen mechanics
more temperature balancing, nicer healing menu
fixed window focus and not responding issues
some sound effects improvements
chain combos for overkill shots
MGSmod rev.57-59b:
slot machines in bars & player cash info
NPC reloading & chat dialogue fix-ups
proper NPC mission endings & info screen
NPCs visible in infra-red, extended hints
drive pets in vehicles, seats and trunks too
longer turn for more delicate driving movement
adjusted NPC heal, pickup & drop items
sniper scope & time-targeting improvements
[font=courier]
Chapter Seven - “Ground Zeros”
It’s not over yet. Your main objective is to find and rescue
BIOCORP president Dr. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he might be the
only one able to find the cure for this unworldly outbreak.
Snake, his safety is your priority, bring him here alive.
First, you will need to ensure successful escape route. Find
one of the remaining Metal Gears, make repairs and re-arm if
necessary. Until Metal Gear is operational best rely on your
sneaking and survival skills to retrieve required parts and
information. As usual, this is one-man infiltration mission,
weapons and equipment OSP. Hope age hasn’t slowed you down.[/font]
That’s the idea, merging would also make it easier for me to keep up to date with other changes and bugfixes. The hardest part however is to find or make good sound effects and background music loops. And also subtle audio clues to paint some atmosphere like suspense, mystery, horror and such. Try going down stairs to see (hear) what I mean. That kind of little things can greatly add to the game experience immersion.
In any case it’s up to fans and players to produce the media, and the good thing is anyone can start working on it right now. You don’t need to be a programmer to replace sound files. I’m calling everyone to find, or even better, make good sound effects, appropriate for Dark Days Ahead, or Metal Gear Solid mod. I’m looking forward to see what the community can come up with.
For MGS mod I also welcome people to make custom profiles for other characters from Metal Gear games. Like Revolver Ocelot, Cyber Ninja, Vulcan Raven, Meryl, Vamp, Fortune, Volgin, Big Boss… and tell me what is missing to make those character more complete and authentic. Then, there should of course be some Metal Gear in this mod, so I’m calling people to thinker about it and tell me what’s missing in the game right now to build some kind of Metal Gear. Basically it could be just a variant of some weird looking truck with mounted turrets for the start, and then we can go from there. Beside that let me know what other things are missing from MGS lore, like camouflage suit, exoskeleton armour… what else? There is a lot already in the game so this mod can see its final release rather quickly, now mostly depending on how much the community can contribute.
Before merging we should first organise and categorise everything, come up with a list of all the sounds and give them appropriate names, that will make the rest much easier. Then I should rewrite it, make it cleaner and see to reduce redundancy to make merging easier. Everything is all over the place now, although I’m afraid that’s how the whole program is, but still I should be able to make some simplifications and improvements compared to how it is now. On the other hand, regarding functionality, that’s pretty much it, so basically it just needs to be organised better. And one more thing, program should compile without any warnings. I would like, and highly recommend, you sort out all the compilation warnings before doing anything else with the code in the main branch.
More screenshots, “hit by lightning”:
(without and with night vision goggles)
Nice stuff. Some feedback after playing it for a bit:
Sounds:
I particularly appreciate the sound of zombies breaking doors, windows, etc.
Maybe footstep sound should be added, particularly for zombies (those your character should be able to hear due to proximity). It’d give you more situational awareness and add to the creepiness at night. But maybe you are using the moans for that purpose already. My impression was that the moans were played randomly, but who knows.
I’m not sure about the UI and object interaction sounds. Probably some should be removed, such as opening and closing the map. They can become quite annoying fast.
Music:
Volume in general should be lowered, or given an option to set your own volume levels.
Ambient music: It’d be better if indoor music plays with random pauses and not as soon as you get into a building or underground area.
Combat music: no problem here. It helps to remind you of your combat status. The MGS “spotted” music is particularly hilarious in this context. Nice touch with the variable volume based on the distance to enemies.
Bugs:
When looking around (X) the view doesn’t center again on the player’s character, it stays where you left it. You’re forced to X again to fix it.
It crashed after running away from a shocker zombie that just fired a bolt of electricity. Actually, it got stuck (window locked with hourglass cursor). “Not responding”.
Overall it’s a quite fun and original mod. I’ve enjoyed my brief time with it.
Thanks for the feedback. I should definitely put exclamation mark over player’s character when alert is triggered. Yes, sound needs to be “designed” properly, triggers adjusted, volume balanced, variety increased. This is a technical demonstration, to show things like volume fade-in or fade-out, triggers of little audio clues or changes in background music depending on location, situation, weather, action being performed… it’s all possible, like in commercial games. But I’m not the one to do the rest of the job. Original developers can now take it from here and actually “design” the sound, that is decide when/where and how loud should each sound effect, audio clue, or background music play. Most importantly however, and first of all, there need to be some audio files to play. These are the best sounds I could find, and they suck, all except those I took from MGS1 demo for Windows. I think it’s up to community now to find or make good music and sound effects.
The way “looking around” works I did on purpose. It’s to substitute “SHIFT+h,j,k,l” to shift view. It’s because the only time I look around is when I actually want to shift view to see more terrain in some particular direction, when approaching turrets for example. You can also notice targeting will shift the view as well, works similar to what I did with auto-shift view when driving, so the camera tries to keep both you and your target in the view-port window, and it stay “locked-on” after you fire so the screen doesn’t jump back and then animation looks better. It perhaps needs some gradual auto-centring once you start running away and some other tweaks, but I like the way it works here better than the original. Maybe it’s just about getting used to, but in any case you can centre the view by pressing “x” once more, or “SHIFT+g”.
[size=12pt]If you think program crashed, try pressing SPACEBAR or holding it down for a while.[/size]
Where to find that info? It’s the one you merged (11. March) with my original collection of bug-fixes, I took it from there. So what does it take now for stuff to be merged? If I were you I would first merge rendering and animation changes, for Windows users that’s huge difference for better, much better. Second, I would merge all the other bug-fixes. Then I would merge changes and additions to how light, shadows, and darkness works, that is rounded lights, night vision goggles and auto-shift view when driving. I would not merge music and sound effects until I actually have good collection to substitute, and for that you can experiment and work with this binary. Once you have decent replacements, only then I would merge audio to the main build, as with poor or unsuitable sound/music you could make it more annoying than contributing to the game experience. Besides, audio addition is one of the simplest mods of all these, I can do it in about 30 minutes just by following my “//CAT:” comments and copy/pasting the changes by hand. But of course I would prefer everything to be merged as soon as possible so I don’t have to do any of that yet again.
What formats does the mod support? Those of us with copies of the various MGS games might just do a soundtrack rip.
(Don’t do anything illegal, please–I’d hate for the RIAA to close Cata down.)
I’d recommend that UI actions not have sound, at least not ones that wouldn’t make noise (reloading a gun might, for instance). Same idea as the Marathon motion tracker: if you don’t hear it, it’s safe to assume nobody else did. Footsteps may or may not be a good exception; thoughts?
Not sure about combat music; though the alert-music from MGS would certainly liven things up (shift to boss-fight music for Hulks, with Hind/Rex/etc for the really nasty areas).
One thing that I’d throw out is that if the light-amp goggles are anything like conventional NVGs, a shocker zombie discharging would white-out the view entirely–and probably for a while if the shot actually hit the PC. Might be worth adding some fluff about flash-compensation circuits or somesuch.
expanded weather effects: lightnings, rain puddles and snow piles (ice and oil unused)
losing control when driving depends on what are you driving over instead just driving skill
loosing control when driving can happen easier when driving over rain and snow puddles
NEW MODIFICATIONS:
driving without even one tire will make a trail of rubbled dirt/road behind vehicle
monsters shorter senses, to make possible to sneak around and between them
there are less monsters in both dynamic and static spawning, game’s a bit easier
improved and simplified targeting auto-shit view, and also re-centring
improved some old and added some new sound effects
Rain drops and snow flakes effects are added in the DDA version 0.3. Extended feature in this mod are rain puddles, light blue ‘5’, and snow piles represented white ‘5’ symbols. Oil and ice are also defined but are not used/created by the game yet. These are actual new fields in the games, as opposed to rain drops and snow flakes which are only cosmetic. When driving over these puddles it is easier to loose control. That’s how new driving module works, it takes into account your speed, skill, terrain your driving over and fields you are driving through, like smoke, acid, rain, snow… while before it was just random number dependant only on skill. Lightning effect (bottom picture) looks much better when animated, and is particularly nice together with sound effects.
This is the only Windows binary with proper animations. It’s at least 20% faster, it plays smoother. Not to mention music and sound effects. It also does not crash every few minutes, actually I couldn’t get it to crash once, even enabled random NPCs spawn and it still wouldn’t. I have no idea what are developers waiting for, to merge at least those crucial bug-fixes. It was much harder to adopt my changes to this new release after everything got shuffled around in the main build. This needs to be merged now. Darkling Wolf, have you looked at it yet? Why are you still not merging?
I would appreciate it if there was a build where you’re not forced to play as “Old Snake” and even if you remove stats/skills to default, you get an overpowered 10 points…
Nice coding man, but to be a little blunt, you’ve got to stop banging rocks together in a cave and join us folks in the 21st century by learning to use version control! Seriously, man, big code dumps on a filesharing site? I’m sorry, but that’s just amateur hour stuff.
There’s no good reason to not use version control. Eschewing a VCS not only makes more work for you as a programmer (even if you don’t know it does), it makes a heck of a lot more work for anyone else who wants to merge your code. It makes debugging harder, and synchronizing two seperate code paths harder, and reverting changes that you don’t want harder, and reviewing code harder, and most all of the work it saves you is occasionally typing “git commit” (or pushing a button if you’ve got a GUI-based git tool) and wrting a short title describing what you just did. I’ve met programmers who don’t use VC, but I’ve never met someone who’s used it for a while and then wanted to go back again.
You seem to be a pretty good coder, so how have you gotten this far without learning how to work with a team? You should put a bit more effort into making your code usable to others, it’s just common courtesy, and it benefits you in the long run as well.
(Of course by now I gather that you’ve painted yourself into a corner by reformatting all the code and making numerous changes entirely outside of git, so you may have to redo your changes one at a time onto a clean branch, or reformat everything to get the patches to work cleanly. This is a large bit of work that you’ve made for either yourself, or whoever wants to merge your code. It’ll be much easier for you, though, since only you know what you did, where, and why. If you were using VCS that would all be tracked, and all these changes could be picked up at once by the other devs.)
[quote=“LazyCat, post:13, topic:528”]Cataclysm DDA version 0.3
MGSmod rev.11
NEW BUG FIXES:
no more constant crashes (DDA ver 0.3)
dynamic spawning working (DDA ver 0.3)
missing help windows visible (DDA ver 0.2)
fixed invisible debug messages (DDA ver 0.2)
various windows refreshing properly (ver 0.2)
more rendering optimisation (DDA ver 0.2 & 0.3)
NEW FEATURES:
expanded weather effects: lightnings, rain puddles and snow piles (ice and oil unused)
losing control when driving depends on what are you driving over instead just driving skill
loosing control when driving can happen easier when driving over rain and snow puddles
NEW MODIFICATIONS:
driving without even one tire will make a trail of rubbled dirt/road behind vehicle
monsters shorter senses, to make possible to sneak around and between them
there are less monsters in both dynamic and static spawning, game’s a bit easier
improved and simplified targeting auto-shit view, and also re-centring
improved some old and added some new sound effects
Rain drops and snow flakes effects are added in the DDA version 0.3. Extended feature in this mod are rain puddles, light blue ‘5’, and snow piles represented white ‘5’ symbols. Oil and ice are also defined but are not used/created by the game yet. These are actual new fields in the games, as opposed to rain drops and snow flakes which are only cosmetic. When driving over these puddles it is easier to loose control. That’s how new driving module works, it takes into account your speed, skill, terrain your driving over and fields you are driving through, like smoke, acid, rain, snow… while before it was just random number dependant only on skill. Lightning effect (bottom picture) looks much better when animated, and is particularly nice together with sound effects.
This is the only Windows binary with proper animations. It’s at least 20% faster, it plays smoother. Not to mention music and sound effects. It also does not crash every few minutes, actually I couldn’t get it to crash once, even enabled random NPCs spawn and it still wouldn’t. I have no idea what are developers waiting for, to merge at least those crucial bug-fixes. It was much harder to adopt my changes to this new release after everything got shuffled around in the main build. This needs to be merged now. Darkling Wolf, have you looked at it yet? Why are you still not merging?[/quote]
Make a thread for this. Add stuff to it. I love you. Please
Can you not use whatever software you want with the source code yourself?
There's no good reason to not use version control. Eschewing a VCS not only makes [i]more work for you[/i] as a programmer (even if you don't know it does), it makes a [i]heck of a lot[/i] more work for anyone else who wants to merge your code. It makes debugging harder, and synchronizing two seperate code paths harder, and reverting changes that you don't want harder, and reviewing code harder, and most all of the work it saves you is occasionally typing "git commit" (or pushing a button if you've got a GUI-based git tool) and wrting a short title describing what you just did. I've met programmers who don't use VC, but I've never met someone who's used it for a while and then wanted to go back again.
They would first need to give me access to the main branch if I was to synchronise and merge the changes myself, isn’t that so? Of course merging would make everything easier and better for everyone, which is why I asked developers how to go about it, and why I keep asking to get on with it already. The longer the wait the harder it becomes, especially when everything is being shuffled around and new stuff added relying on old mistakes. Actually, the reason DDA 0.3 crashes far more often than version 0.2 is because some of the new code is relaying on the code I fixed in relation to some other bugs previously, and so to synchronise those new features they had to be re-written as well.
I documented and explained all the previous changes and bug-fixes. Most important parts did in fact get merged several weeks ago by one of the devs, he put it in a side branch of their github, it’s “lazycat” branch. However, even those most critical and important changes and bug-fixes still didn’t make it to the main branch. Instead, a new version was released with even more bugs. What in the world was I supposed to do about it, what more? I already ended up wasting far more time than necessary just to keep the code synchronised on my end, it’s up to them to synchronise it with the main branch, or let me do it.
You seem to be a pretty good coder, so how have you gotten this far without learning how to work with a team? You should put a bit more effort into making your code usable to others, it's just common courtesy, and it benefits you in the long run as well.
(Of course by now I gather that you’ve painted yourself into a corner by reformatting all the code and making numerous changes entirely outside of git, so you may have to redo your changes one at a time onto a clean branch, or reformat everything to get the patches to work cleanly. This is a large bit of work that you’ve made for either yourself, or whoever wants to merge your code. It’ll be much easier for you, though, since only you know what you did, where, and why. If you were using VCS that would all be tracked, and all these changes could be picked up at once by the other devs.)
I’ve given the source code and explanations for the changes. All the changes are also marked in the source code. How is that not usable? What more, what else do you want me to do, exactly? How could have I made my changes “inside of git”? Besides, it’s them who said it would be fine if just keep uploading on Mediafire. What “reformatting” are you talking about, what’s the problem? In any case, is there anything preventing you or anyone to use VCS now? You think it would make something easier, can you show me?
What do you mean? It’s already in a thread, this thread.
I’ve made pretty much all the changes I wanted. I don’t mean to put anything else in this mod except Metal Gear vehicle and two special missions related to MGS in particular, plus whatever else is necessary to make that work. I’ll add missing sound effects, perhaps some new items, weapons, more bug-fixes, and that would be it. This was originally meant only as a collection of bug-bug-fixes and light/shadows related modifications for the Dark Days Ahead. I didn’t mean to make this a mod, it turned that way because MGS was the only good music I had, and it’s only when I saw that actually works well I decide to expand on MGS theme a little bit.
