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The City From Thief In Tdm.


Dunedain

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No, the respawning is immediate, not after load zone.

 

Perhaps a sort of cop-out if talking about the black-jack wake up thing, but having waking up AI alerting everyone would put a big damper on gameplay and force too much ghosting I think. Sometimes realism isn't the way to go

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Sometimes realism isn't the way to go

 

couldn't agree more, but I think that all games are so far from realism, that in general strides towards realism are welcome (maybe only if the realism could be turned on at higher difficulty. naturally, there should be a setting for beginners, or people who have been playing for awhile but aren't exactly 'hard-core' about it.)

 

but, certainly, a perfectly realistic game would suck. Just imagine; perfect graphics, perfect physics, but you can't load or save, and you hardly stand a chance against any bad guy. wouldn't b a whole lot of fun....

Milestones approaching:

Recital: 3-24-12

ToughMudder: 4-15-12

Release first FM: ?-?-20??

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Here is an idea for the KOing in the city and having AIs respawn:

 

Imagine that the city is roughly divided up into blocks. Each block has an AI respawn room somewhere inconspicuous. This room cannot be entered by the Thief, the door is always locked and cannot be picked. So I KO an AI at block 3. I dump his body in an alley. Now, a short time later, a clone of that AI is generated in the respawn room, while the body of the KO'd original disappears. The clone enters the map from the room.

 

Now here is the clincher, Im not sure if its possible or not. The KOd body will NOT disappear for around 10 minutes, and it will not disappear if the Thief is within eyesight of the body. Perhaps the map could be divided up into invisible zones, when you KO an AI in zone 12, as long as you are in zone 12 and up until you leave that zone for at least 5 minutes, the body stays put. Leave zone 12 for five minutes and the body disappears and a clone appears from the local respawn room. The clones could even respawn in a state of alert, running around screaming about being attacked or something.

 

I realize this is far from perfect. It would take careful placement by mappers to make it work well, you wouldnt want to be able to simply walk out of a zone but continue to watch until the body disappears. You would not want to sit and watch the AI you just conked on the other side of a building suddenly walk out of a room on the FAR side of the building. This idea assumes that the average player is going to keep moving for the most part, at least around the corner to lose visual contact with the body for a bit.

 

Perhaps the respawn rooms could have multiple doors and the clones could reenter the map as close as possible to the zone they were KOed in. This would lessen the appearance of "teleporting" across a sector of the map.

 

I liked the fact that AI respawned in TDS, because I used to clean out T1/2 levels by KOing everything that moved or couldnt be killed. The map is then empty of AI threats and the play craps out. What I didnt like about TDS respawning is that you could walk down an empty street, turn a corner, turn back, and suddenly there are 3 people wandering in from nowhere. It was a little jarring.

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  • 11 months later...

Maximius: Those are some good ideas on how to handle the simulation of guards waking up after being knocked out without it looking odd. The problem is that if you've gone to great lengths to quietly knock a guard out so no one will notice and now are trying to sneak through an area with other guards and the first guard wakes back up, then all of that effort is for nothing. As he'll alert the other guards and the place will erupt into chaos with guards running all over the place looking for you. So much for your stealthy thieving operation. :)

 

So, I think Komag is right on this one, it would just cause too many problems. You'd, in effect, be forced to ghost every mission, or even normal street encounters with guards in the same City district, no matter how much more difficult that might make things.

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I still remember entering a city section in TDS (it was in the endgame I think) and having about 10 people suddenly appear right in front of me, all in the same spot (offset slightly so they didn't clip into each other). It was like... la de da... loading screen... okay, the level's loaded... and two seconds later, hello spontaneous crowd!

 

The time gap between when the level loaded and when they appeared was very noticeable. Utterly immersion-shattering.

 

Moral: Don't spawn NPCs in the view (or, better, not even in the same general area) of the player. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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Name one person besides yourself who would think, let alone say, such a retarded thing.

 

 

Oeh oeh!!!! Me :P j/k it would however be cool to have a holodeck simulation of thief :D besides progress is being made towards some sort of holodeck, especially when looking at fancy flight simulators in use by the air force. So it isn't hard to imagine, considering that PDA's are some sort a devolution of the tricorder in star trek. Or what to think of the mobile phone? In the first star trek (60's) there was already a "mobile phone" in use.

 

Anyhow ... I seem to be getting very off topic, and before Zylon Bane gets on my back, I'm not really a trekkie :D and no I don't have the star trek pj's :D.

 

Back to the city :D and its respawning points ... I reckon it would be cool as long as its different from thief 3 ... whereas NPC's magically appear from nowhere.

 

Greetzzz

"Curiouser and Curiouser" cried Alice!"
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Chances are, that if the map is gonna be all 30 maps from TG, and T2 combined, interspersed with quadrants of T3, it will be a level where a significant amount of time is spent. Probably a single level that would be equivalent to a short game, say 7-12 hours? could b more, or it could be less....

 

Pertinent to this: could night-day transition/daytime changes be implemented?

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Pertinent to this: could night-day transition/daytime changes be implemented?

 

Yes, but then that again takes the Thiefness out of it and we're heading into RPG land again. Might be fun for a standalone mission...beat the sunrise, but it's not something we're going to implement as a default setting.

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  • 1 month later...

Dunedain idea of a city with alleys leading to dead-end to be missions is very novel, but not too practical.

 

I agree that 'the city' could have some kind of expansion based on user content, but overlapping mission in same areas would lead to computability and continuity errors between the missions.

 

however, i had another idea: instead of loading user-missions through a loader, each mission could spawn a scroll in garret's mailbox, asking him to do something.

SO the player could start pick what mod/mission he wants to do from in-game mail-box like thing.

 

This could be further detailed with implementation of 'the city'

for example: Garret opens mailbox, sees scroll named 'Help a stranger', if picks up to read,

FM starts

the mysterious letter states: 'Meet me by fountain in 20 minutes'

and an NPC would spawn in the city by the fountain

and the quest/FM goes on from there.

 

or another FM letter would say: 'Dirty deads' and upon accepting/confirming the request, the FM levle would load

 

 

 

but multiple alleys leading to FMs - awesome but not realistic.

althoguh the whole city should be expandable by sections/induviduals through the use of loadpoints (hidden load points!, like a river, double-sided gate, indoor hallway, etc)

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That's a cool idea but that'd easily be up to someone else after we release this basic kit.

 

As a mission creator, you could choose to have your mission loaded from the menu/loader, or you could make it compatible with some "official city hub" so that you could load it in the way you described.

 

From memory though, most FMs are so far off in their own time and place, that I think it'd be more immersive to just start at the start of the mission in most cases.

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OK, so, forget about the horrific number of man-hours it would take to create this map, and consider only the logistical elements;

 

it seems to me that putting all of the T1,Gold and 2 missions together in one city wouldn't be too tricky to figure out. it would be a daunting task, but conceptually, not to hard to fit the pieces together. b/c new content can always be created linking the maps.

 

but... i have much more difficulty seeing how T3 would fit in with it. T3 came with a complete city, that was very dense. certainly no room for just casually adding the dayport bank here, and angelwatch there, etc... without altering the T3 city (which might not be a bad thing, but i'd prefer not to have to) the only way i can see to combine all of these maps is either by making all of the T1,G and 2 maps suburbs surrounding the city, or simply adding a 5th (and possibly more) quandrant(s). Old Quarter, South Quarter, The Docks, Auldale, and of course the T1,G+2 quarter (with a more creative name of course). however, although this might work... it would be far from satisfactory. it would seem contrived at the very best, and probably seem poorly organized and be a complete dissapointment.

 

what are peoples thoughts on this? i will admit, i have hardly spent hours examining this issue from all angles. this is just my initial misgivings. there is quite likely an eloquent solution, and maybe someone has already conceived of it, in which case, i'd love to hear, b/c i certainly can't think of a solution that truly leaves me satisfied. in the little time i have spent thinking about it, i always feel that all my ideas are lame cop-out ideas that would leave the player feeling bored, and disenchanted.

Milestones approaching:

Recital: 3-24-12

ToughMudder: 4-15-12

Release first FM: ?-?-20??

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Ahem. Point of information: TDM is not set in the Thief universe, so there's no need to make such a "mission hub" follow the layout of Thief's City. In fact, please don't. Vague layouts are probably not copyrightable, but once you start putting very specific place names* in your map, you start getting dangerously close to copyright infringement. Don't do it.

 

Also, the less similar the layout is to Thief's City, the fresher it will be. Why clone familiar areas when you could come up with new ones?

 

*Like Angelwatch, Dayport Bank, or Auldale - these are all quite Thief-specific, so must be avoided. But "The Docks", for example, would be okay since that's quite generic. Lots of places have a Docks district.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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