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March 25th Update


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I wonder if it would be possible to use an alpha texture on the spiders in conjunction with a modified Doom3 HeatwithHaze program to make the spiders look like ghosts and add a sort of vorpal effect.

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It's a good idea about guard seeing arrows, but possibly it would be tedious to always have to pick up the pieces.

 

Yes that could be a pain in some instances, I can see that. You may be in a situation too where yu have to use an arrow but its unrecoverable and it will definitely trigger a game fucking up experience if you use it. Catch 22

 

 

Maybe it could be an intelligence dependent, in that low level guards and such would not question it as much while captains would call for searches. It would limit the number of instances like I described above a bit.

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This could be done by setting up a visual stim on the arrows and a response on the guards so that they react to it. Not yet implemented, but feasible without fiddling in the SDK, I think.

 

Yes, but it might be better to add this stim to arrows automatically. Otherwise it would be quite cumbersome.

Gerhard

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I dont know why so many talk about the spiders, they look very good to me, well instead of gray i prefer a black one with some spot lights eyes looking at you hidden in the shadows, hahaha..... LOL

 

Yes, they look cool. :)

 

And the belcher seems nice. Eyes are strange on the screenshot, maybe they look better in game, but I like it's amphibian burrick's look anyway.

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Maybe it could be an intelligence dependent, in that low level guards and such would not question it as much while captains would call for searches.

 

It would probably be better to make it work within the "Security Level" designation. The plan is that areas can be designated as high, low or average security. AI pay much more attention to minor things like moss patches or moved items in high areas. Perhaps arrows could be noticed there but not in average or low areas. I'm not sure about the gameplay ramifications though.

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It definately tweaks the cost/benefit thinking a player does when deciding how to approach a problem. If you punish a player too much for using tools, then they're just going to stop use those tools much. And maybe that's ok for some tools, but it's a trickier question for the basic ones.

 

I think it's ok for obvious things, like a rope arrow rope hanging from a rafter, or *hearing* a broadhead hit the wall, but the idea that a guard would go on alert for an arrow that was dropped over an hour in the past, and the thief returns to the room to find it in an uproar ... well, just be sure you know what you're getting into before you do something like that, and have play tested it to see if it works or not.

 

My thinking is, aside from changing his environment, there aren't many opportunities for the player to leave his own mark that he was in a place; so mostly a player is thinking about how to leave a place just as he left it. And that seems ok; sort of encourages ghosting. But the more chances he has to leave something behind that (1) he pretty much can't help leaving behind to do his job and (2) there's no easy way to fix (unlike being careful not to change the enviornment) -- e.g., arrows, footprints, a smell -- then it just becomes more and more tedious to deal with just to do the most basic things. Guards seeing misfired arrows also sucks because, their very nature, they end up far away from the player (this is not counting rope arrows or noise arrows); so now he has to stop everything and go to an out-of-the way part of the map just to handle a tedious job. My intuition is leaning against it as a general matter. But anyway, the answer is really in playtesting it and seeing if gameplay is balanced properly and feels better with or without it.

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Well, let's face it, the guards in the Thief world are generally the dumbest, deafest and blindest of any universe, so I doubt they'd be able to spot a noise arrow if you got them through the eye with it.

They don't seem to notice all the moss that's suddenly grown on the ballroom tiles, they don't seem to notice the huge puddle of water underneath the torch that just spluttered out, or heard the huge hissing noise and arrow shaft hit, if they find a dead colleague, they look about within a 10 foot radius for a few minutes and then just go back to their patrol, leaving their buddy lying there to rot, and they don't seem to notice how the rest of their fellow guards are going missing one by one...

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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Do you mean "target audience"? (The target Thief player wouldn't care about such subtleties).

Or do you mean the computers at the time just weren't good at making so many checks in real time?

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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He means the machines themselves. What they managed to do in TDP was positively amazing, considering how well it ran.

 

The noise arrows shouldn't work on the elite guards at all. They'd say "Ah, that sounded like the old NoiseMaker 3000, didn't know they still made those. I ain't movin', thief." :)

Or they could immediately look to see where the arrow went and try to establish a reasonable point of origin. So long as it's based on a reasonable heuristic (rather than the guard instantly and inexplicably knowing where the player is), noisemakers might still be useful, by fooling elite guards into thinking you're somewhere where you're not. Of course, they should still be on the lookout for the player, rather than investigating some random noise. As for the heuristic, if the guard can see where the arrow landed (or has a good idea where it struck), he should be able to figure out the direction it came from (vertical can only be determined if the arrow is stuck in something); if the guard cannot see the arrow but knows it is not behind a wall, he should probably look in the direction opposite of the arrow (including around any relevant corners); finally, if and only if the guard doesn't know where the arrow landed at all (direction of noise, but not within the room), he should search for the noisemaker itself.

 

As for the idiocy of the guards, I remember in the T:DS demo, they had you shoot a noisemaker right across a guard's nose. They should have bloody well figured that one out. No guard should be dumb enough to follow the source of some strange noise when they just saw an arrow fly past them!

 

Are arrows set to trigger an AI response while flying (if the AI sees it, that is)? It'd be pretty cool if ordinary guards could notice an arrow fly past them, setting them to a very high alert (e.g., going in to a combat mode) even if they don't hear the arrow land or if it's supposed to distract them. Of course, elite guards might see the arrow coming before it hits them, giving them a chance to block it!

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Do you mean "target audience"? (The target Thief player wouldn't care about such subtleties).

Or do you mean the computers at the time just weren't good at making so many checks in real time?

 

Since I wrote target machines, I guess I meant the computers. ;) Thief was developed with about a 200-266MHz speed in mind. Of course it has to cut the line left and right. More CPU power means more features.

Gerhard

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Don't be ridiculous, as if adding an AI check for moss on the floor, or a torch being attacked with a water arrow was going to add anything to the CPU load.

These were all dumbed down gameplay decisions, nothing to do with processing power.

Don't think LGS was entirely innocent in the matter of dumbing down.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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Are arrows set to trigger an AI response while flying (if the AI sees it, that is)?

 

You wouldn't really see an arrow going past you in most situations, unless you were expecting it. Arrows are FAST. You might hear a slight noise, but if anything it's really the impact that will draw attention.

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The exception would have to be the TDS firework "arrows" though. I think you would notice a bloody great firework streaking past your nostrils. :P

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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Well, let's face it, the guards in the Thief world are generally the dumbest, deafest and blindest of any universe

They may not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but compared to games before and after, I enjoyed Thief's AI much more than any other game's. In practically every other game in existence, enemies are alerted immediately by either the player (1) opening a door, (2) reaching a certain spot in a level, (3) being within line-of-sight or (4) for some lame arbitrary/random reason. Thief was the first 1st-person game I played where this was not or didn't seem to be the case. All the sudden I was playing a game where the AI reacted more realistically to what I was doing. If I entered a room, it wouldn't spot me unless I made a noise and was heard or entered the light and was spotted. What other first person game did this, let alone did this to the extent Thief did? To this day, I'm fascinated by the sheer number of first-person games that STILL don't do this. Enemies still do not react realistically to what I'm doing and it sucks. Thief was also probably the first game I played where enemies realistically (relatively speaking) searched around and then went back to what they were doing if they were unsuccessful in finding me; and actually made witty comments while doing so to aid in the realism factor. Other games seemed to pale in comparison.

 

It's bad enough an enemy spots me from 200 yards away, but then they also have perfect aim when they shoot? I'd much rather Thief guards acted the way they did then to have them react like every other game out there.

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It would probably be better to make it work within the "Security Level" designation. The plan is that areas can be designated as high, low or average security. AI pay much more attention to minor things like moss patches or moved items in high areas. Perhaps arrows could be noticed there but not in average or low areas. I'm not sure about the gameplay ramifications though.

Doesn't the community want some secrets kept with regards to how the behavior works or other gameplay things? If I'm a casual player and not an FM author, I think I'd prefer not knowing exactly what triggers there are and how much enemies will be alerted by various triggers. Seems like knowing every in and out would spoil the experience of exploration and experimentation somewhat when it launches.

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TDM won't be a black box since it'll be open source eventually. So if someone wants to find out those details, they'll be able to. And if they don't, why are they trawling the forums looking for every available tidbit of information? ;)

 

Anyway, I'm sure veteran Thief players have already figured out exactly how the AI in Thief works, and the community still seems to thrive...

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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