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Cyberwolf

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Well I'm always thinking of ways to make the game harder, which brought me to having an idea about city watch escorted by dogs (which would have more acute hearing and smelling, but worse eyesight).

 

While I'm sure it's SO MUCH FUN to come up with all kinds of animations just to make an animal look realistic, I can see where it would throw a lot of fun into a mansion where important item x is in the noble's study, where his favourite bloodhound is peacefully sleeping by the fireplace. Dogs would pick up on blood spilled on the ground much better than human guards, forcing the thief to have to stop and clean up blood after a kill, as well as remove the body. Also this would introduce the thief having to bribe a lone dog with poisoned meat and wait for it to die, or any number of other possibilities.

 

I am wondering if something like this will be easy to implement into the game AFTER the dm tools are released, even if this sort of thing isn't added into the set that you release? I wonder if the stim/response system is going to be intuitive enough to where an NPC will be able to be added and as an individual have its S/R defined?

Expectations are future resentments, let tomorrow worry about itself.

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Well I'm always thinking of ways to make the game harder, which brought me to having an idea about city watch escorted by dogs (which would have more acute hearing and smelling, but worse eyesight).

 

While I'm sure it's SO MUCH FUN to come up with all kinds of animations just to make an animal look realistic, I can see where it would throw a lot of fun into a mansion where important item x is in the noble's study, where his favourite bloodhound is peacefully sleeping by the fireplace. Dogs would pick up on blood spilled on the ground much better than human guards, forcing the thief to have to stop and clean up blood after a kill, as well as remove the body. Also this would introduce the thief having to bribe a lone dog with poisoned meat and wait for it to die, or any number of other possibilities.

 

I am wondering if something like this will be easy to implement into the game AFTER the dm tools are released, even if this sort of thing isn't added into the set that you release? I wonder if the stim/response system is going to be intuitive enough to where an NPC will be able to be added and as an individual have its S/R defined?

 

I love the idea of adding a couple of animal AIs, especially dogs. But I think this was discussed somewhere else and one of the team members pointed out it would be a lot of extra work.

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Animals, such like watchdogs were already considered by us, but the problem is, that we have to limit the scope. :)

 

Just an idea, probably not do-able, but could the animals from another game be "imported" into the Mod through some programming sorcery? I know the game Gun has neet looking wolves...

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I love the idea of adding a couple of animal AIs

 

What I'm really concerned about is the flexibility of the tools that are going to get released. I am wondering if the Stim/Response system is going to be able to be tweaked, in case someone ever did want to add something like dogs or even any npc other than what is included. The reason that I wonder about dogs is because they would rely much more on objects giving off some sort of "Smell_Alarm" stim rather than by line of sight.

 

The way I imagine the S/R system working is something like in the diagram i posted here. The blue lines represent a room with a hallway extending from either end. In the middle of the room on one side is a window, through which light emanates represented by the green lines. The pink plus sign represents a pool of blood. Two circles originate from the pool of blood, the gray circle representing the strength of the blood's smell, the pink representing the amount that the pool is visible (which changes dynamically as the room's light level does).

 

If the box in the corner of the room is a human guard, his personal sight radius (the large pink circle) overlaps the pink circle of the pool of blood, and he SEES the blood! His gray circle, however, is very small (maybe this guard has a stuffy nose), therefore he does not SMELL it yet.

 

A dog, on the other hand, would have a SMELL ability equal to or greater than the radius of the guard's seeing ability, and would be easily smelling the pool of blood being that close, even if it wasn't able to see it yet.

 

Customizable S/R like this would allow customization of each and every NPC placed on the map, even somewhat allow for different personalities (like a sick guard). Mainly what I'm curious about is if it would be possible for the end-user to ADD a Stim like "Blood_smell" to the actual ENTITY of a blood spill, and create NPC's with the ability to recognize the stim, without the stim having been originally included.

Expectations are future resentments, let tomorrow worry about itself.

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Not only are animations quite tricky to do for animals (and they have no resuse value), but coding them to behave in even a slightly believable way is very difficult.

 

We had talked about perhaps including some animals for scripted events (like a cat that bolts into the darkness on a city street), but not for interaction.

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post-399-1138821589_thumb.jpg

 

What I'm really concerned about is the flexibility of the tools that are going to get released. I am wondering if the Stim/Response system is going to be able to be tweaked, in case someone ever did want to add something like dogs or even any npc other than what is included.

 

Why not? When the toolset is released, I'm pretty sure this will include all of our altered source code as well.

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coding them to behave in even a slightly believable way is very difficult.

 

That is definitely understandable and really I'm not disappointed. My main question lies in the flexibility of the S/R system. Say I wanted to throw a (Normal, two legged humanoid type) special baddie into my map who, say had a real awareness of anything that was around it that was carrying anything made of steel. (Some sort of steam powered metal detector? I don't know, just an example :)) Anyway, I'm wondering if it's possible to add Stim values to items or objects (like to the thief's sword), that are able to be detected by NPC's who react to that stim.

Expectations are future resentments, let tomorrow worry about itself.

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Spiders and Belchers, yes. Rats too, most likely. And other animals are planned for scripted events, like birds that take flight, etc. Pretty low priority though.

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What I'm really concerned about is the flexibility of the tools that are going to get released. I am wondering if the Stim/Response system is going to be able to be tweaked, in case someone ever did want to add something like dogs or even any npc other than what is included.

 

The design of the S/R system is pretty flexible and should allow to handle all kind of interactions, even though we may not use them all ourself. Judging from your description, though, the S/R/ should aready be able to handle that, because what you describe here is basically a radius stim, which we also need for our weapons and which I'm currently implementing.

Gerhard

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Anyway, I'm wondering if it's possible to add Stim values to items or objects (like to the thief's sword), that are able to be detected by NPC's who react to that stim.

 

That can also be handled by a radius stim. Setup a stim with your id and a raidus that represents the smell. Then define a response for that id and write a script that handles whatever is appropriate for your map. You don't even need to code in the SDK for this, because we expose all this into scripts.

Gerhard

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The AI can be alerted by scripts, and we have one alert type "other" reserved for whatever new alerts some third party might want to add with D3's very flexible scripting, and our own stim/response system. It should be pretty customizable. We generally write stuff to be as customizable as possible.

 

One thing to worry about is making sure that radius stims don't go through walls. We may need to do some small amount of flooding through the portal/area system like in our soundprop system to make sure stims don't go through walls when they're not supposed to.

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One thing to worry about is making sure that radius stims don't go through walls. We may need to do some small amount of flooding through the portal/area system like in our soundprop system to make sure stims don't go through walls when they're not supposed to.

 

When I use that EntityWithinBounds() doesn't it include checks to make sure it's within geometry? Or does it ignore this?

Gerhard

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Just wondering why you said dogs should have worse eyesight than humans? I thought it was better. (Not that I'm an expert)

 

 

No, dogs have very poor eyesight in general. Dogs have a phenomenally good sense of smell and taste, very good hearing, but their eyesight is very limited compared to humans. Dogs can see movement OK, but are almost incapable interpreting static images as more than a blurry dichromatic fuzz. Cats have very good vision, but relatively poor smell compared to most carnivores. Humans have very good vison - probably the best of all mammals (well, on par with the great apes), and only birds exceed human visual accuity when it comes to static images. Humans have poor night vision, and aren't as good at picking up movement as most animals. Dogs (and cats and most nocturnal animals for that matter) have a reflective mebrane behind the retina called the tapetum, which reflects light back into the retina, aiding in low light vison (that's why the eyes of most animals 'glow' in the dark - it is light being reflected and concentrated by the tapetum, and focussed and amplified by the lens as it is reflected back out of the eye), so dogs are better at seeing movement in the dark than humans, but during the day there is probably little difference in movemnet detection.

 

 

Hope that helps...

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Humans have poor night vision, and aren't as good at picking up movement as most animals.

 

Incidently there was always the question why colour blindness didn't evolve out of humans over all this time, because one should assume that a colour blind human should have definite disadvantages, when he can't make out the colour of a predator against the background of a tree (which is really hard for people like me). A few years ago they noticed though, that colour blind people usually have a much better night vision than normal people, which at least seems to be true in my case. :)

Gerhard

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On the chance you didn't understand the word because of language barrier;

http://www.crystalinks.com/werewolves.html

 

If, in fact, you didn't get my meaning - it was because you seem to have the dog type eyesight, (better in the dark, but less colours) which is kinda cool, if you think it's like a werewolf.

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