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Obsttorte

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Everything posted by Obsttorte

  1. If you are right behind the guard his body should actually block his vision. If that's not the case then I would consider it a bug. But you really would have to stand behind him, not somewhere to the left or right of his back. If I find the time this weekend I'll take a look. Regarding rng: If the player is aware of the head turning, then all it does is to increase the ai's fov, with the difference that there is an area in front of the ai where you are always visible and the area to the sides where you are only occasionally visible. And as the ai doesn't tend to turn their head like a lighthouse tower there should be an area in their back where you cannot be seen. From my experience this is the case, but as stated above, there might be occassions where something goes wrong. However, I wouldn't consider such a setup random. If you stand at the ai's side you know you will get spotted. The only thing you don't know exactly is how long it takes.
  2. That's good. I haven't touched the rules. AI without helmet can be knocked out from behind even if alerted (as long as they don't see you, at least). Yeah, that's another discussion. I have objections to the current ruleset, too. But as said before: first get this thing here done before moving to the next issue.
  3. That's not a big deal. I'll can change that in the next iteration.
  4. I've meant the indication animation can be turned off. The blackjacking system is not affected by the cvar. My question was whether you are comfortable with the new blackjacking system without the indication?! The old system doesn't has this either and seasoned players will turn it off most probably anyway, so it should work reliable then, too (especially more reliable than the old system).
  5. Yup, there is a delay between the indicator and the moment when the blackjack kicks in It's roughly half a second. I wasn't sure whether player consider this an issue or not, but am fully aware of it. You can try turning it off (tdm_blackjack_indicate 0 in the console) and see how it goes from there. The indicator is more a trainer for newbies, as it is hopefully more convenient with this implementation to understand when a blackjack attempt will succeed and when not. (At least that's the plan ) You are welcome.
  6. And you don't trust us to get this by bringing up arguments instead? Good for you. But seriously, if you encounter an issue present it in a way that we can clearly see what the issue is, so we have something we can work with. Otherwise you will most likely be ignored. I mean, what do you mean by THOSE BUFFERS???
  7. I rarely have any issues with the head turning. Surely it can happen that you get spotted, but shouldn't approaching a heavy armed guy be somewhat risky!? If you encounter this to be troublesome for you, why don't you try another approach first. You have the means to take out the guard in most missions and you are with some exceptions not forced to pickpocket every ai in a mission. The argument with the training mission is valid, though, and that section probably needs rethinking. On the other hand it already informs new players that they may get spotted by ai even if the consider to be in a relatively save spot. So maybe it isn't such an issue after all.
  8. Obsttorte

    Monomyth

    It is. It's a common method to stress the point made. (e.g. This chili burns like hell!) I don't expect a AAA game, and haven't claimed to do so. If the dev decides to create a project that is out of the expectable scope of what can normally be achieved with the manpower and budget at hand then it is his decision. But I am not this dudes mummy. I am a paying customer and judge on what I eventually pay for. Why shouldn't I criticise a product just because it is lacking a proper dev team and reasonable financiation? I have, otherwise I wouldn't make such statements. As said, I don't expect super high quality. But some points that annoyed me (obviously subjective) are that you cannot drag and drop items in your inventory, for example, making it clumsy to interact with. Another point is that you start with a character creation screen to spend points on attributes and skills, whose explanations are so standarized that they provide no info on how those things affect gameplay at all. Considering the sheer amount of them that is a bad approach. I don't want to start a game with unfounded assumptions just to have to start over again later on because I noticed those assumptions on how the skills and attributes affect gameplay are wrong. The "story" is mainly communicated through readables thus far. This is so common that I doubt this changes later on. But games are an audiovisual medium. If I want to read, I grab a book, not a game. I simply don't get what would be the reason to play this game. You have pretty much no story to begin with mainly communicated through readables, a skillsystem like in almost any rpg decades ago and an art design with no surprises at all. The "I have seen this before, and it was a loooooooong time ago" feeling is pretty strong for me. This is subjective to some extent, of course. Some might find the game entertaining, some might be able to ignore some shortcomings because it is a one man team and some of the points that bother me might be completely irrelevant to others while they find enjoyment in aspects of the game that I don't care about. We don't have to agree on something that is subjective per definition.
  9. @snatcherThe point of this thread and what I am currently working on is a different implementation of the blackjack attack, replacing the animation based one with a more straight forward approach, in this case a trace. The rules, under which a blackjack is considered successful as well as any other gameplay aspects are untouched. In addition, the indication animation does neither affect the execution of the attack nor the ruleset. And it is not intented as a "solution" as you call it. It is intented as a help for new players and is currently still work in progress. Before making suggestions you should really read more carefully what the scope of the work discussed in a thread is, as you tend to bring up things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand (not for the first time). And you still haven't brought up an actual argument for the point you made about the indication animation. Just repeating that it is "too much" doesn't make it true.
  10. Obsttorte

    Monomyth

    Albeit claiming to revive the virtues of the dungeon crawling genre it is not a dungeon crawler. Besides that it feels and looks as clumsy as games did 20 to 30 years ago. Whether this is something good idk. Definetely not for me, though.
  11. That is solved now. An issue with the weapons scriptobject. You gave me a tough one here It appears to be an issue with the mages. If I place one in my test map I can reproduce it and even more, if the mage is looking in the wrong direction, it cannot be knocked out at all. This is also the case with the female and the moor mage. The odd thing is that as long as they are unalerted they should be knockoutable from any direction and that all other ai I've tested worked flawlessly, independent from whether they were helmets or not. I'll have to see what differentiates the mages from the other ai that could possibly interfer with the setup, but currently I have no clue what is going on Making claims without even bothering to bring up some arguments for them is the best type of support any developer can hope for. Thanks a lot, sir.
  12. Actually the settings were not solely introduced due to the varying sensivity over different missions. In some they were super sensitive, in others they were almost deaf. This is due to mission authors sticking to the default acuity settings despite the fact that different level architecture leads to different average distances between player and ai. The majority of the team members back then however decided it should be up the players to make those adjustments. It might be used for other purposes now, but that was not the intention. That is indeed a bug then. Will look into it. That's odd. The calculations performed to determine whether the indication animation should be played and the ones performed when actually performing the blackjack are the same. I'll look into it. You misunderstood the point I was trying to make. Knocking out ai is a fundamental gameplay aspect. It might be true that performing this is more challenging in TDM than it was in Thief, but it should still be possible. That you have to alter gameplay settings for this to work is not desireable. (I'll see if I can dig up the discussion, as it's been a few years.) EDIT: I've corrected my statement regarding the acuity sliders. I couldn't find the discussion regarding the ai too sensitive vs. ai too dumb, but I know we had it once (caused by a review of TDM). Another thread was about that it is too easy to kill ai, another that the ai could be more challenging. It all boils down to that TDM was designed as a more challenging experience, but as this caused the game to take more time for unexperienced players to get into it, the idea arose that it would be great to have dozens of different difficulty sliders. The major issue with blackjacking though was that players have problems with properly hitting the enemy, not necessarely with them beeing to sensitive. So although those settings obviously affect blackjacking, too, that's not the main reason for them to be introduced. None of this is relevant here, though, as the changes made do not affect the acuity. So whether or not you are able to approach the ai is untouched by this, but what happens once you try to take them out is what should have changed. If you perform a blackjack attack said attack should succeed if all conditions are met (as far as judgeable by the player). It shouldn't fail because you hit a part of the body you wasn't even aiming for. The blackjack should not get hung up on level geometry that isn't even in you field of view during your attack or only at the edge of the screen (the typical ceiling beam issue). The indication is for new players to help them get a feeling on when a blackjack attempt should work. I guess experienced players would turn it of either way. We have to see whether we get it to work in a relyable way. If it is causing more confusion then aid it can be removed (it's only an extra, nothing that needs to be added).
  13. Corrected the link in the op, the upload was unnecessary. Sorry for theinconvenience. If you have to ask a player what settings he use as they may cause basic gameplay mechanics to not work properly, those settings are probably rubbish. I told ya.
  14. Ah, curse it. It's custom_builds, not common_builds. Sorry, typo.
  15. I may humbly note that the intention of this thread was a replacement of the current animation based knockout system, not the discussion of the rules under which a knockout should succeed. This is a different matter (and should therefore probably be discussed in a different thread). But as you are all around now why don't you grab yourself a copy of the current build (see op) so you can give me feedback on whether you are ok with the system or suggesting improvements. And yes, you can easely approach stationary guards from behing and even (not so easely) patroling ones, although the latter not necessarely on loud surfaces. But that's the point of loud surfaces, they are loud.
  16. Obsttorte

    Monomyth

    Not really considering that you spend sometimes almost two hours setting the game up. And to be honest I don't want to run a timer just to make sure I don't accidently buy a game I just wanted to test. I guess it goes more in the direction of it's less relevant when there is a steam sale every couple of weeks. If I don't have to pay ful price for most games I play I may not care if there are a few that turned out to be not good. But whether this is in the interest of the game devs is questionable at least.
  17. Obsttorte

    Monomyth

    Wasn't aware of this, but I had quiet some fun with dungeon crawlers in the early past (Legend of Grimrock and Vaporum, both parts respectively), so I guess I should give this a shot. It's also nice to see that at least in the low budget sector demos seem to become a thing again. I really don't know why this has vanished so much (and people seem to have accepted this trend).
  18. It's already both commited to svn as well as downloadable via the tdm_installer. It's not toggleable via a cvar, though (only the indicator), as the respective code gets called via the viewmodel definitions frame commands.
  19. @OrbWeaverI've choosen the trace approach because the required code is already there. I haven't seen this for cone traces. And while it has shown that the point trace is too sensitive there is no feedback on the box trace so far. My own observation is that it works pretty relyable (the box is rather large). The hint "aim between the shoulders" is obsolate (point trace + a bug in the code I got sorted out). That would actually be a problem. Experimenting with the size of the box for the box trace has already shown that a too large box will easely "get caught" on surrounding geometry (which includes the support beam on the ceiling we want to avoid). A cone, especially a relative large angled one would probably cause similar issues, and with small angles I doubt it would make a difference to a box trace with a reasonable sized box. It's nice to get some thoughts but it would be really more helpful if you guys would actually play a mission with this feature (with and without indicator) and report on your observations. It makes minor sense to discuss this theoretically if you can try it out practically.
  20. There is a link in the video description on youtube.
  21. Well, it can already be downloaded via the installer. It a change in the source code, nothing scripted. So unless you want to ship your mod with a custom binary this won't work (and is not what I was aiming for. I don't work on this because I have an issue with the current system, it works perfectly fine to me, but because it was reported that others have an issue with it.) This would change the current system basically, too, even though if only minor. I can do this, though. I don't really need more debug information, though. The current setup works for me. What I need is feedback from others whether it works for them and were they see room for improvement. Besides that I considered it more or less finished.
  22. That's a different matter. Leaks can be found via the pointfile. In DarkRadiant goto File->Pointfile. A red line appears that starts at the entity that is pointed out in the console (in your case func_static_31, but that doesn't matter actually) and will lead you to the leak. Note that every area that contains entities needs to be sealed against the void via worldspawn brushes (that's mainly a prerequisite for the pathfinding to work).
  23. I have updated the code. The trace is now performed via a box which makes it easier (it appears I've used the constructor of the box wrong in my first attempt rtfm lol). I've uploaded the new files under this url: http://ftp.thedarkmod.com/upload/common_builds/blackjack/manifest.iniz @stgatilovThe issue with the animation switching between idle and indicated occours if the trace is in an edge case so to speak, where you are just close enough and in the right angle to hit successfully, and the slightest animation of the ai changes that. I wasn't really able to reproduce this with the box approach, but you are free to take a look and show me if it reoccours. @wesp5I have no clue. My main focus in regards to feedback lies on team or long time forum members. I can only speculate what people might want that are not in this forum or who don't give feedback and I don't like speculating. Well, the harm could be that I invest quiet some time in doing something nobody wants. In regards to the reliability of the blackjack it has been stated by several team members that it could work better and even those who generally don't have issues with it aren't opposed to the idea of changing the way how the blackjacking works. In regards to the ruleset my first impression was that there is an opposition by the majority of the members to touch it, while now this seems not so clear. I need a more precise feedback by more members to get an impression on whether it makes sense fiddling with it.
  24. For this use-case it might be more worthwhile considering to expand the select inside feature? Or you combine that with "select all of type". I mean, I am not really against it. It just never occoured to me in a way that it was dramatically enough to memorize
  25. @stgatilovI've tried using a box instead of a point trace, but it didn't really work. Will have to check again. I guess for a more consistent experience I would have to use some dirty tricks after all. I could try to alter the implementation so that once the ai was knockoutable it stays like that for a while even if it moves out of the trace (due to anim or whatever) as long as that movement isn't too strong?! Will have to experiment. @DragoferI agree and have pointed that out earlier on. The response was that the majority of players/members is fine with the implementation, but judging on your both comments I start to wonder whether that is really the case. The Thief implementation is the other extreme, though, making it far to simple and unintuitive, too. (The fact that I neither had to hit ai from behind nor on the head was something I was completely unaware of when playing those games for the first time).
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