mike mayday

Uh, yeah sorry, it's way too late in the night here. Corrected the terrible mistakes... I believe it was Springheel who brought up the idea that this problem could be alleviated by creating lights that have a much larger range and a quick falloff. In that case lighting up many lights would eventually make the whole room noticeably brighter- which is the natural thing to happen. But that would consume too much GPU-power. To summarize: The problem is that 1 candle has the same light radius as ten candles standing next to each other. Ten candles should be enough to light the entire room slightly. But hey, I've got an idea. Let's stop this discussion- I'll try to make a demonstration in DR to show my point better.

I did, but does it matter? Here's the same situation (from the training mission) without bloom: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/4.gif No matter if there's only one lit candle or seven, only an area as small as one candle would light is lit. Which makes the bright spot look unnaturally small. I understand that summing the force of all nearby candles is too calculate a new "avarage" light radius value is too difficult, that's why I'm proposing a trade-off in the form of increasing the room's ambient value (which should happen anyway to simulate light bouncing off surfaces and filling the whole room). EDIT: And here I lit almost all the light sources in this room: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/3.jpg I believe this is the equivalent of placing 40W lightbulbs all around. Yet there are still places as pitch-black as if there was no light in the room.

Well, TBH, I agree that it is both an aesthetical and gameplay problem, but I strongly believe the game would benefit in both cases, it's more of a "fixing a problem" than "changing a design decision". I mean just take a look at this picture again: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/~mayday/upload/darkmod/3.gif I understand that there may be cases when an author wants this kind of thing to happen, but it's extremely jarring that a light so strong doesn't light up a larger area and seeing it happen every time (unless an author actually takes the time to implement dynamic ambient) is just disappointing for me. That's why I assume that it should happen only when a mapper consciously decides to do it. And well, editing every room of a mission in DR before I play it kinda takes away the fun, doesn't it?

I've tried it many times, yes. Perhaps I'm not expressing myself correctly: the problem isn't that the falloff is generally inappropriate, the problem is that one candle is pretty well simulated, but six candles should light up the entire room slightly. Well, at this point I imagine the player base is so used to standard Thief rules that adding anything new could only be done as an option anyway. Ah, I thought the zone info (distinguishing a room as a separate place, is that what you mean) already has to be there anyway.

Wait, now I'm confused- I thought it already IS implemented, just not on by default. So why are you asking this? Just in case, I'll answer- take the summary brightness of all the lights in the room, divide by the room's size, multiply by a factor that needs to be determined with a short experiment and increase the room's ambient brightness by the resulting value. I'm new to TDM so I don't know if every room is logically distinguished by the mapper as a separate room... but then again, it's only a matter of drawing a box around it, isn't it? Oh, I myself am okay with it when it comes to my maps. But what about the other creators' maps? After all, I also want to play the game so what I'm doing is simply suggesting what would make the game better. I'm not griping or anything, I really do appreciate the buttload of magnificent work that TDM is.

Fair enough, thanks for the answers, guys

Well, I was thinking those are so obvious that they should happen automatically and only be DISABLED by the mapper if he thinks them inappropriate in a given situation. I'm appalled that such a fantastic function as ambient_light_dynamic is already there but it's not getting used because mappers would have to set it individually for every room!

2x3.2 GHz 2GB DDR3 (I guess I could turn one of them off?) GeForce7900GS Is this low enough?

I don't propose that a single extinguished torch would alert the guard. A single extinguished torch is ok, but five extinguished torches is IMHO enough to assume that there's an intruder in the building. Since the torches are there exactly to light up the guard's patrol route, I don't see why anyone in the house would want to douse them- the only reasonable assumption is that it has spent or a gust of wind extinguished it. So I propose this- make the guard's alert level only increase by a fraction when he notices an extinguished torch (unless you do it with a water arrow right when he's standing next to the torch!) but if the player douses too many lights on a single guard's patrol, he should definitely move on to investigate. This amount could even be optional (chosen at the start of the mission?). Additionally, if you douse all the torches in a room that is being patrolled by a guard, he should light at least one back up anyway (even if he doesn't become alerted) because there's no point in guarding a room if there could be a guy standing one foot in front of you and you wouldn't notice him because it's pitch black.

Okay, this is gonna be a dumb question... where can I do that? Or is it maybe possible to just turn it down a bit? Wouldn't it be possible to make them simply increase the ambient brightness of the whole room (no shadow calculation and stuff). Would that drain performance as well? Well, shouldn't they be? I don't see a reason why a light would NOT be considered suspicious EVER. Sorry

More thoughts (I hope you guys don't mind me spamming these, it's just so much close to perfection that I can't help brining up these details 1. The lightsources are too bright in their nearest vicinity, leading to an "overexposed" look: 2. Lights do not properly light up a room. No matter how many candles you light up, they only light a very small area around them: Ideally, the more candles you light up, the brighter should the whole room get (only slightly of course). 3. Guards do not act naturally if you put out lights on their route. I can understand a guard ignoring a single extinguished light, but even if I extinguish ALL the lights on his patrol route, he will happily continue in complete darkness. First of all, he should switch to full alert (because either there's a thief or someone's playing tricks on him), second- he should start lighting them back. 4. Is it just me or is the light radius around torches much too small? I understand that it's a gameplay issue (affects difficulty) so maybe it could be regulated by an option? 5. The sound of pinching a candle should be muuuuuuuch more quiet. 6. Would it be possible to create an opposite of mantling? In which you approach a ledge, turn around and CLIMB down, silently planting your feet on the ground below (provided it's not lower than your body height of course 7. If you pick up a small object and drag it against a surface, it makes a "banging" sound- it sounds ok for an object falling from a height and hitting the surface, but not rubbing against it. Not to mention- it should also be much quieter.

That's great to hear On a side note, now that I've gotten sound to work properly, I also think that the guard footsteps are too quiet- sometimes they mange to surprise me with their sudden arrival just next to me!

Ah, some more clues: further testing with surround speakers: WITH EAX ON: -turning surround on or off doesn't seem to make a difference- the game is indeed stuck in surround. -looking straight at a sound source causes the sound to almost mute, only if the sound source is on my side or back does the sound play correctly (so it appears as if the center speaker was extremely quiet, works fine in my speaker setup app though). WITH EAX OFF: testing... mostly works fine! So the main thing to work on would be sound propagation I guess. Things like walls blocking sound etc.

Now that I'm playing with headphones and surround off, I seem to be having another problem. The game behaves as if I was still using surround- when I turn away from a source of sound, it gets silent. This also causes extremely weird fluctuations of NPC voice volume. EDIT: This was caused by EAX HD, it doesn't seem to work very well

Greetings! I was looking around the various missions already created and checking out what models could/should be added when a terrifying thought hit me- if players wanted to benefit from the new models in the already created missions, mappers would have to remake and update the missions! The obvious solution would be to implement some object oriented categories: -let the mapper place a token object on the map (like token_zombie or token_small_shelf_object or token_epic_loot) and make TDM place a specific item/creature from a list of definitions. So if some mapper places a token_zombie on his map and a few days later I create a clothed zombie model, those players who update their model database will see the model in-game, alongside the already existing ones. Thoughts on this? If you think it's okay then the sooner it's implemented the better- (the sooner mappers will be able to start placing token objects, the more maps will get varied props in time, with no further effort on the mappers' side).