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Radiatoryang

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  1. Huh? I don't... Okay, I enjoy Thief when I understand the level layout / patrol paths / obstacles and use them to my advantage. Are you trolling me, or do you really play Thief without thinking? In contrast, something like Serious Sam is a lot about reactions and reflex with not as much deep meditative thought. I want more people to like Thief, so I always err on the easier side of things and make levels more intuitive / accessible. That's my thinking.
  2. But don't you think this will be too hard for new (or average) players to perceive and understand? Or would you have a static fallback? And if so, isn't that a lot of content and balancing to do, considering most players play missions just once? It seems like dynamic patrols assume the player has habits they may not have yet. (And for the record, Randy Smith's GDC 2006 presentation comes out specifically against long static patrols and branching patrols, so there's one privileged perspective.)
  3. Serpentine: I agree that my use of affordance could use improvement, but I think "natural" is a problematic word. What is "natural" to a person? Norman wrote a 2010 essay ("Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural") that I interpret as a "reversal" of his position, it seems like he dislikes the word too or at least how most people understand the word. You should read it and see if you come to the same conclusion. Instead, I'd rather push the idea that levels are functions of culture, not nature. (e.g. if you had never seen a European castle before, you might have a more difficult time playing Thief... same goes for Soviet floorplans and buildings in Stalker.)
  4. Dynamic patrols might not be entirely random, but I argue the average player (i.e. one who rarely ghosts if ever, and they think Thief 3 on expert is pretty hard, etc.) doesn't know that. They don't see, "the guard must be hungry" -- instead, they show up in the kitchen they just scouted a few minutes ago and suddenly there's a guard there for some reason, despite no guards ever having been there for the past hour. There's no witnessed "cause" so it's random to the player, which is just as bad as technically random. And Komag's right, static is actually more "realistic"... though any quest for realism in a game with steampunk robots and magic seems a little misdirected to me. Realism isn't the goal. It's about how the guards are stupid and you are clever.
  5. OrbWeaver: Yeah, I'm that same person, though now I disagree with everything in that article... online dating is just a search engine / private message system, NOT even a game system, and certainly not representative of any form of actual dating. Heh. Sotha: a "zero-failure path" is simply one that prevents the player from getting detected. It can go across metal plates, it can traverse bright areas, etc. It doesn't have to be safe by any means, just possible to execute without getting caught. And certainly equipment stabilizes players, but I think that's a well-explored idea. The idea that a level layout itself can stabilize players, though, I think is less familiar to people. I still side with Randy Smith on the success / failure definitions. Health is much less important in stealth games. 99% of the time you're not in any danger of losing health. I think it's necessary in Thief only to emphasize how vulnerable you are, and to give you semi-permanent feedback that you're not doing very well at sneaking.
  6. Static. - The player usually won't be there when they deviate from a patrol path. It'll seem random to the player. It's only "realistic" if the player is there to witness it, and the guard says loudly, "I gotta pee"... otherwise it's the game being unfairly difficult. - It makes tracking guards much more difficult. As a map author you might be able to ghost your entire level, but put yourself in the player's shoes. They might creep around a bank vault, only to find out you didn't place any guards there -- except for 2 that randomly deviate towards the vault. - Dynamic patrols can work, but only if you clearly announce it so that the player knows to look for those changes. Maybe a loud bell to signal changing of the guard, or to summon a priest away from a chamber. - There's only so much a player can remember. Irrational is calling it "player RAM" in their interviews. For this reason I'm against re-lighting torches too.
  7. In 2006, Randy Smith presented a framework for making Thief levels. He didn't have a snappy name for it though, so I've re-branded it as "valence theory" and I've posted a summary of his presentation, as well as my personal additions to the theory. http://www.blog.radi...t-or-randy.html As active players or developers of a first person stealth game, I would appreciate your comments / thoughts. .. also: hey, whaddup
  8. Not to hijack the thread or anything, but my planned Thief-alike in Unity would get made under the following design constraints: First person only. I'm a purist, but perhaps only in this respect.Web browser deployment with short load times, works on all platforms.A gameplay mechanic with "social" stealth. I like how Hitman and Assassin's Creed handle it, and it would make for interesting intersections with shadow-based stealth.Non photo-realistic, simple art style. Mostly flat colors, some occasional details. Relatively few textures. No lip-syncing, no facial morphs, no detailed conversations. I really like the concepts Viktor Antonov did for the Paris in Arkane's canceled FPS "The Crossing" so that'll likely be the basis for my version of The City. (see image above)No dynamic shadows in Unity Free. Instead, simple point lights and spotlights. Moving light sources are better than dynamic shadow projection anyway, in terms of gameplay.Light gem calculation is faked based on instanced trigger fields + a raycast to the light source to modulate for distance. Pretty cheap and good enough, I think?Simplified NPC states and AI. Complex AI != the player thinking they're complex, necessarily.Limited sound propagation using the navmesh, like how Thievery did it, right?Automatically generated navmesh (pre-placed A* pathing nodes attached to level prefabs) With the features above, I'm confident I can do all of that on Unity Free and I have the skillset to prototype it, even with my limited programming experience. It's just a matter of finding a lot of time to do all of it. As I said, check back in a year There are also some pipe dream features that I'd have to do research on, but I think they're integral to the life of the concept: At some point, 2 player modes, either cooperative or competitive.Eventually, also an integrated level editor in your browser. LittleBigPlanet-style; upload your level to a database. Everything lives in the cloud. I'm doing academic research into easier game design tools, so I could probably borrow the tech for this.Ideally, an Assassin's Creed / Brink-style "free run" button that lets you climb stuff and do parkour easily. Looks too hard to do though, and mostly an animation / IK problem that I don't have the expertise for.
  9. I'm pretty sure Brink is still using their heavily modified idTech4, so it's likely not to go GPL anytime soon. I'm thinking of making my own "Thief-like" framework for Unity... well, it's pipe dreams right now, but as I'm learning the tech it seems more and more doable. You can directly sample lightmap indices in the API! And if I do make it, I'd probably avoid this content-heavy art style... considering that most of the time you're watching guards from 30 feet away in near-darkness, it doesn't make sense for them to be modeled so realistically. Check back with me in a year... :|
  10. UDK and Unity aren't as difficult as you think. If you know your way around Radiant, you can definitely figure both those toolsets out. I urge you to try it. It's one tool out of many that you can use. Toolsets are only as powerful as the people who use them, etc. As far as players: Modders follow the players, and players follow the newest game / engine. That's the benefit of standalone formats over mod formats... instead of rummaging through your closet to look for your old Doom 3 DVD, which no one will do. Also, realize that TTLG was a very small player base to shoot for. (Or at least I consider it to be.) Comparatively, Dear Esther is a mod where you walk around and listen to a guy talk, and it has had maybe ~40,000 downloads, at the very least. Now there are a lot of reasons why we might be disappointed with how popular TDM is... They might have been great design decisions in the beginning, but I don't think it's controversial to say that (a) your engine and mod format and ( the learning curve and playstyles, are for a very specific and rare kind of player: the Thief veteran with a copy of Doom 3 and a beefy computer. It's fine if you don't want to be all things to everyone, but you'll just have to come to terms with how little recognition you'll get, unfortunately. I understand a game rules re-design / engine change will be an absurd amount of work. I just can't see any other option.
  11. Finally got around to this. Cool mission, but it seems like I wasn't the only one who got stuck...
  12. I'm in favor of adding SOMETHING to the mission downloader. Right now I download a mission based solely on the title and the author names. If I don't recognize the author, I don't bother. Or let the player sort missions by date released? It'd be great if there were a rating system and a "most downloaded" / "popular" filter, or maybe a "for beginners" list or a "recommended" list? I think some kind of content filter will eventually be necessary, if not right now, when you have a lot more missions in the database. Imagine someone playing Dark Mod for the first time and they see a list of 100 FMs. Uhhh what do they do then? They're paralyzed by choice. (I'm already kinda paralyzed by choice as it is.)
  13. Wait, I'm trying to make similar rails for my staircase -- did you do that with patches?
  14. I'll need one for my FM... in a couple months.
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