Someone on the forums had a question for me! I figure I should answer it here since I have such uber ultimate truthiness. Here goes.
Do shroud accessory guards of the same type stack? That depends. Are we talking about the orange ones with the blue stripes? Or the ones that smell like peanut-butter? Because the ones that smell like peanut butter tend to stick together, so you wouldn’t want to stack them, unless you don’t intend to ever get them apart again. No, wait a sec, I believe we cut the peanut butter ones because they were too powerful. The orange ones with the blue stripes, however, can technically be stacked, but you may end up with a whole nest of little guardlings as a result. Since they are an invasive species, I really can’t advise propagating them in this manner.
Stacking a guard with a weapon. . . no no, don’t try it. Bad Things Will Happen.
And now back to our regularly scheduled bacon!

I have “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” stuck in my head, and it’s driving me batty!  And this is directly related to the new dungeon I’m building.  Start your guessing. . .  now!

Among the many games out there that I have either enjoyed playing, or admired as being a game of top-notch quality, I have noticed one consistent thing: bathrooms.  Awesome games have bathrooms.

Sometimes the toilets can be flushed.  Or drunk out of.  Usually these restrooms are in dire need of a cleaning.  But the fact remains that even if the restrooms must first be cleared of zombie infestations, they are there when those poor NPCs need them.

DDO’s first restroom appeared in the revamp Three Barrel Cove.  And just in time, because that poor drunk NPC with a mug in his hand was about to wet himself.

But our game deserved more than just an obscure latrine door.  It needed a toilet!  So I cobbled together a humble flusher for Delirium.  Nothing fancy, mind you.  It’s put together from a few odds and ends that I found lying around.  The “toilet paper” for instance is a candle, turned sideways.  This is design-by-duct-tape.  We simply don’t have the art budget to order up every minor new pieces of deco on a whim.  So if I want a toilet, I have to hack it together myself.

Now I have a reputation on the team for being the go-to person for toilets.  Purple Fooz asked nicely today if I would build him a restroom.  What can I say - I jumped at the chance!

This next restroom will be a bit more upscale.  It has stalls, and some girly pink lighting.  It is scrupulously clean, and smells like lilacs.  And unlike the smelly pit in Three Barrel, the employees are required to wash their hands before returning to work.

And the flush handle on each toilet is made out of a mug.  Shhh!  It’s our secret.

Today’s task: pave paradise, and put up a parking lot.

Okay, not really; it’s more like “rearrange an existing area to make room for a caravan,” but I couldn’t help but laugh at the request.

It’ll be a pretty parking lot, I promise.

Man oh man. . . you guys are going to hate me for being such a tease, but I can’t believe the stuff that we have in the works for you.  We did an internal review earlier this week, and I thought my work was hot stuff, but mine was blown out of the water by what everyone else has been doing.  We’ve come such a long way from “Sewers and Kobolds”!

This is one of those frustrating times when I really want to give you some details but just can’t, except for obscure tangential stuff that you likely don’t care about.  Like grass.  I abused our frill system this week.   “Frills” are certain small deco objects that are drawn through some different mechanism than the rest of the deco.  They can be dialed up and down along with other graphics settings on your end, and are all-around more efficient to render than other deco objects.  Generally frills are things like knee-high plants, but the system can also be used to randomly place larger things such as trees.

Random placement is interesting.  You know that lake around Meridia?  The one that’s full of ruins?  (I think it’s still full of ruins. . . though maybe I took them out.  I’ve forgotten, and I can’t pop over to check because my computer is busy doing other things.)  Someone used our frill system to fill that lake full of ruins at one point.  It sure did a good job of making a random jumble.   But there were some difficulties.  Specifically, the ruins pieces didn’t have any visible geometry on their bottoms.  When placed randomly, that meant there were places where you could see right through the objects!  Oops. 

Worse than that were all the stuck-spots created around the edge of the lake.   With regular entities, I could fix a stuck-spot by moving the offending deco object, or by plugging the spot with an invisible cube.  Not with frills, though!  A frill can’t be selected and moved.  They are entirely hands-off.  Plus, they detect the presence of non-frill deco, and reposition themselves in reaction to it.  Which means if a tree is placed via the frill system, and a tire-swing is hung from the tree, then the tree will move itself elsewhere in order to give the tire-swing room!  What a considerate tree.

I like to use the frill system to place clumps of small trees, because it saves me hours of tedium.  But the big trees are all hand-placed.

Oh, so about the grass I abused. . .  I don’t think the grass was meant to be quite so large, but it looks so lush and beautiful!  I’m afraid the time of year has really got to me.  I want to be gardening.  The snow has melted, and my garden is one giant squishy mess.  I want greenery!  Is anyone else here a gardener?  If so, we can commiserate.   Or you can tell me all about your lush tropical garden that is currently bloom and go “neener neener!”

. . .that having such godlike powers of world creation could be so tedious?  Place rock.  Place rock.  Place rock.  Place rock. . .

(And in case you are wondering, no, this isn’t something that could be automated.   It needs to be pretty, and it needs to be free of stuck-spots, and for that, it needs a human at the wheel.)

This has saved my sanity today.  Lectures, on nifty subjects!

If you played on the Risian ice rink this past weekend, you may have encountered a denizen of the invisible realm.  If you went down the small ice slide and found yourself inexplicably teleported over to the base of the lighthouse, then you brushed up against a teleport volume.

That’s one of the bugs I am fixing today.  In this case, I stuffed the inside of the ice rink and the other ice structures with teleport volumes in the event that you were taking a swim in the Harbor waters at the exact moment that the event was turned on.  Instead of banging on the walls of the ice yelling for someone to come rescue you, you would be harmlessly booted out.  (Well, in most cases.  There are still corners you could get stuck in due to the square-peg-in-round-hole dilemma.)

But I learned something else new this time around: even if the teleport volumes are sunk deep beneath the surface of an object’s physics, a player can still be teleported by it.  I had thought that keeping a player’s physics out of the volume would do the trick, but it appears that there is some other invisible aura around players that interacts with teleport volumes.  And apparently when skating around on the ice to test my teleport volumes, I neglected to go down the littlest slide, or I would have noticed the problem.

Our game is full of invisible objects.  There is the physics that you bump off of.  There are various “applied property” volumes that do things like tell weeds not to generate on the ground near certain objects.  There are “trigger volumes” that cause DM text to play, or spring traps, or the like.  And there are “occlude volumes” that cause objects behind them not to render.  I have the ability to toggle various visibility modes on and off in order to work with this stuff.  Most of it is as ugly as sin, but it’s invisible, so that doesn’t mean much.

I learned something new about occlude volumes when I decorated Delerium: even when an entity is turned invisible, the occlude object inside of it still partially works.  In this instance, the big creepy deco objects on the ceiling were disappearing and reappearing properly, but if your camera happened to fly inside of the invisible deco, then suddenly that occlude volume would tell everything in the room to stop rendering.  What that leaves you with is a view of the “dayfile”, i.e. the view of Shavarath that is typically only visible from Amrath.

After feedback from Lamannia I used invisible physics to restrain the camera where I could, but it looks like there are still enough trouble spots in the level to warrant another look at the problem.  The next step might be to strip out the occlude objects entirely from the offending entities.  We’ll see. . .

*is giddy with excitement*

Have fun everyone! I hope you like the new stuff!

Some of my recent pick-up group experiences.  Character details have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Kid. . . “look at my uber sword!”  “I’m so awesome, watch what I can do!”  I have to admit that the Kid charmed me.  He told me all sorts of stuff about his class and about the dungeon we were playing  that as a “new player” I found to be very helpful.  His chatter made me realize what a grownup I’ve turned into.  I tried not to sound intimidating.  We rocked a couple of dungeons that had kicked my booty when playing solo.

Herding Cats.  I don’t know who invited me to this group, and he or she was trying to lead without leading.  I’m still not confident enough to step up and lead, and neither, it seems, was anybody else in the party.  We didn’t wipe, but the kitties went here, and the kitties went there, and as the cleric in the middle I was hardly able to help anyone.  I threw in the towel early that night.

The Veteran.   This fellow obviously knew the game inside out and upside down - which is a far cry more than I know.  :D  He led a full party of perfect strangers through various quests on elite.  Every last person in that group was patient and listened well.  Nobody griped when I made some noobish errors, and I got a lot of pointers on how to play my cleric.  My only complaint: as the cleric, I didn’t have much to do, even on elite!  Mister Veteran, please know that such leadership doesn’t go unnoticed.  Tolero has your name now.