TDM in The News

[grayman]

Wrt the video, a couple things:

 

1. His complaint seemed to be that the Thief AI made more noise than ours: whistling, coughs, ahems, idle barks. So it was easier to hear them coming.

 

2. Our AI can hear the player a lot easier than the Thief AI. W/o knowing whether he used the Hearing slider (or even knew about the Hearing slider), it's tough to react to that type of comment. The slider is there because people said "It's too hard" or "It's too easy" and we decided to accommodate both.

[rich_is_bored]

Just to clarify when I said 'angle of turns' I was referring to sharp changes in direction. The less straight the path, the more bounces would be required for a sound to reach the player.

[grayman]

And when you use the term 'bounce' are you referring to sound bouncing off of things before it reaches the player, as in "this material absorbs sound" and "this material doesn't"?

[esme]

1. What is roombrushing? I never built anything for the old Thief games, and am unfamiliar with Dromed.

 

2. TDM sound indeed travels the single shortest path, like stretching a string through the portals and pulling it tight. It doesn't care about portal size or 'angle of turns'. I wasn't aware that either could affect sound. Will research.

 

As I remember a roombrush is a 3D envelope around a section of the game, it's used for sound propogation, within the roombrush sound propogatesfrom it's source via the most direct path, if two roombrushes overlap sound will propogate from one to the other at the overlap so if theres a wall with an AI patrolling behind it, you can have a roombrush coverine the AI, another for the player and two small overlapping ones connecting them together at either end of the wall so as the AI goes left to right the sound from either end of the wall increases & diminishes but doesn't appear to come through the wall

 

I've got a graphic somewhere that explains how they work I'll see if I can find it

[grayman]

Okay, thanks. Sounds like the end result is identical to what we get with visportals.

[SteveL]

Going back to the feedback on that video, what do our difficulty settings default to? I think there's a case for defaulting to the easiest "nearly blind" etc settings, so that newcomers get a chance to explore. People wanting a tougher time will find the option later but people who can't get started might put it down like the reviewer.

[grayman]

Going back to the feedback on that video, what do our difficulty settings default to? I think there's a case for defaulting to the easiest "nearly blind" etc settings, so that newcomers get a chance to explore. People wanting a tougher time will find the option later but people who can't get started might put it down like the reviewer.

 

Vision defaults to 'nearly blind', the second of four settings.

 

Hearing defaults to 'challenging', the third of four settings.

[esme]

Finally found what I was looking for, it's a PDF of a powerpoint presentation by Chris Carollo

 

chris_carollo.pdf

 

Thought I'd lost that for a bit there, hope it's useful

[Springheel]

Vision defaults to 'nearly blind', the second of four settings.

 

 

Nearly Blind is the lowest setting, isn't it? I don't think we intended to have that as the default. IIRC, it goes: Nearly Blind, Forgiving, Challenging, Hardcore

 

If Hearing defaults to Challenging then it was probably our intention to do the same for Vision, though I can't completely remember.

[SeriousToni]

Finally found what I was looking for, it's a PDF of a powerpoint presentation by Chris Carollo

 

chris_carollo.pdf

 

Thought I'd lost that for a bit there, hope it's useful

 

WHY... Why do people make presentations like this?! I would simply die right at looking at the first screen.

[esme]

I don't think it was meant for public consumption more a quick team briefing on how they were going to or had solved the sound propogation issue so the level builders had a better idea of how to design levels and bear in mind this is really old, I believe it's a design doc from the Dark Project, possibly even Dark Camelot

Edited September 17, 2015 by esme

[VanishedOne]

I don't think it was meant for public consumption more a quick team briefing on how they were going to or had solved the sound propogation issue so the level builders had a better idea of how to design levels and bear in mind this is really old, I believe it's a design doc from the Dark Project, possibly even Dark Camelot

It can't be quite that old; page 17 has:

 

 

Used in shipping games

– Dark Engine: Thief 1 & 2 and System Shock 2

[esme]

Ah never noticed that, ta

[grayman]

 

Nearly Blind is the lowest setting, isn't it? I don't think we intended to have that as the default. IIRC, it goes: Nearly Blind, Forgiving, Challenging, Hardcore

 

If Hearing defaults to Challenging then it was probably our intention to do the same for Vision, though I can't completely remember.

 

Mea Culpa. Defaults in bold.

 

Nearly Blind

Forgiving

Challenging

Hardcore

 

Nearly Deaf

Forgiving

Challenging

Hardcore

[demagogue]

Re: grayman's question about roombrushing, I didn't see Esme's answer before writing my own, but now that I've written it, I'll keep it for the record.

 

In dromed, after you've built a series of rooms, you cover them entirely with slightly overlapping rectangular prism brushes called roombrushes. When you portalize or optimize the level (dromed's version of dmap), one of the things that gets done is sound propagation is computed to flow through the overlaps in the roombrushes. And you'd set EAX on its properties.

 

It worked well in the sense the mapper had direct control over sound prop, and properly done sound never leaked through walls.

 

But it was an annoying tedious task for mappers. It limited how you can build (circular rooms would have the roombrush poke through). If you found a gap, the sound turns completely off in game, and sometimes mappers would have roombrushes peeking into places they shouldn't, letting you/AI hear things they shouldn't.

[rich_is_bored]

And when you use the term 'bounce' are you referring to sound bouncing off of things before it reaches the player, as in "this material absorbs sound" and "this material doesn't"?

 

Yes. But we shouldn't be concerned with absorption or reflection on a per material basis. That could get really expensive to calculate. Instead we operate under the assumption that all materials have the same properties and just measure the change in direction.

[grayman]

So you're interested in achieving something like this, but w/o using EAX.

[Taquito]

About the Review. I understand the reaction of the Reviewer. I felt exactly the same when I first played TDM.. The game does have a learning curve and when you finally got it, It becomes pretty easy. So he probably played for a few minutes and jumped into conclusions. don't think the problem lies in the line of sight or sound threshold more in the seconds given to each reaction. It was much slower in thief, as well as other old games like DX or Metal Gear Solid. It can lead to some undesirable situations for the player.

[grayman]

Difficulty is an old debate, though, and we've had it many times. "Too hard!" "Too easy!" We think we've placed the game somewhere in the middle, and have even given the player the ability to increase or decrease the AI's vision and hearing, so they can fine tune it to their liking.

 

The debate will rage on, I suppose. I'm not sure what else we can do about it.

[AluminumHaste]

Difficulty is an old debate, though, and we've had it many times. "Too hard!" "Too easy!" We think we've placed the game somewhere in the middle, and have even given the player the ability to increase or decrease the AI's vision and hearing, so they can fine tune it to their liking.

 

The debate will rage on, I suppose. I'm not sure what else we can do about it.

 

As I said in an earlier post; this has been discussed ad nauseam and as a team you've come to certain conclusions and solutions and they are excellent.

Players need to re-align their expectations with the game, not the other way around.

TL:DR GitGud Scrubs, filthy casuls.

[esme]

I play it precisely because it's hard, because it's not running around with a BFG shooting everything that twitches, because I have to think & pay attention

[SeriousToni]

A Youtube reviewer I follow just summed up his thoughts on the mod:

 

 

I just wrote him a OM at youtube asking why he finds the game to be that hard and if he tried out the difficulty sliders. He even resonded which is nice

His response:

 

I wouldn't call the game too hard, it is definitely an experts stealth game, but I just found that the AI wasn't so much heightened as much as it was random. Even on the same difficulty settings there were times when they'd still detect me even if did the same thing that worked earlier.

 

You guys are doing God's work though, the mod is simply awesome, just not for people who aren't into the Thief games I think.

[the_deep]

There certainly are places in maps where sound goes where it shouldn't, but this is mostly because we don't have anything to simulate sound bouncing and being absorbed by surfaces, other than manually adding sound_loss to visportals. In my experience mappers aren't using this very often.

Good to know.

[Melan]

Wouldn't this discussion merit a thread split? This is about TDM in the news, not EAX.

[Alex-X-x]

Wouldn't this discussion merit a thread split? This is about TDM in the news, not EAX.

what about thanks giving, for all your awesome city maps? Playing them from T2.