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Hey guys, You might remember me for a pair of FMs I put out a few years back (Requiem, A House of Locked Secrets). While I've never been a prolific poster, I've been a pretty consistent lurker and am still helping out a few mission makers with readables/briefings. In turn, a few members of the community have helped beta test an an indie game I've been working on that's influenced by the Thief series. It's a 2D stealth game called Shade, where you play as a ghost who has to uncover his killer. I've finished up a free playable demo that will be in Steam's upcoming demo festival. Just to make sure everything is working properly, I've quietly made the demo public today. I think if you liked my previous work, you'll like this too, so I wanted to drop a little heads-up here :-). Just to reiterate, this is a free demo, not the full game, which is still a while off. Here's a link to the page in case you're interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1461150/Shade/ Thanks, and I hope you like it! -Gelo

Thanks ZergRush and Roygato! It's got the same top-down perspective as Darkwood but it's not horror, more of a mystery. If you got through A House of Locked Secrets, you'll be fine here - much less scary :-). -Gelo

I think there are more interesting ways for the player to interact with the environment than going up to everything and fiddling with it to see if its loot. One of the wonderful things about the old Thief games is pickups, loot or otherwise, really stood out because the environments where so simple. That's just not the case with TDM and modern games, unfortunately. However, I do agree the loot models could be freshened up for sure, but that's a good chunk of work and as Orbweaver mentioned, probably not the best solution given the circumstances.

Players frequently critisized that they could not properly distinguish loot from junk, which is partly due to inconsistent design of models. Pretty much everybody in the team is against a general loot glint (as in TDS), but another proposed option was to change the frob highlight for loot to something more gold-like. Of course, this should remain an optional feature, but I personally like it a lot. It is like, the thief visually inspects the object when close enough and the game tells you whether the object has any value or not.

No, we're trying to explore solutions to an issue that's have been raised among the community (not being able to tell loot apart from other objects). Its a pretty reasonable choice to try doing this with a the frob system, since we already planned on revamping it. If you're argument is that we should *teach* mappers to make better considerations with object placement, why don't you make a separate thread in the Editors Guild and you can discuss there. Definitely. "Missing the highlight" is something we'd like to avoid all together. Yeah I think this is a good analogy. It still forces to the player to explore the level and objects in it (which is the interesting part of any mission IMO), but isn't telegraphing "go here pick up THIS loot". Distant shimmers are definitely not something we'd do

And what would your solution be to fix this bad design, given that neither redoing all the loot models or redesigning all the existing maps is practical?

This is probably a little too subtle but a slightly yellowish glow would look nice for loot objects IMO.

There is one very good reason for wanting different frob appearances for loot and regular objects: "Hmm... is this copper goblet loot or not? Let's pick it up to find out. Oh, it isn't loot, it's just a carriable goblet. Guess I'll just quietly put it down somewhere..." BANG CLATTER THUMP RATTLE ALL THE GUARDS ARE ALERTED I think the thief himself would know before grabbing whether he would want to keep it as loot or not, and I have no issue for that to be communicated to the player.

+1 to making the transparency a menu setting. As for the color I'm not sure about that default: I believe it should be pure white, or if anything a slightly blue tint (eg: RGB 0.6 0.8 1.0). I wonder though if maybe the color should depend on the type of entity being frobbed. Like green for doors, gold for loot, blue for in-world decorations you can move around, etc. Obviously as a spawnarg on the definitions of items, root defs can customize it then so every derivative can inherit it without leaving existing FM's out.

We had a lengthy discussion about it in the internal forums. You cannot expect us to hold back on any decisions until even those members that log in like twice a year commented on it. If we did that, this project would not have progressed as it did over its 15 years of existance.

Yes, you can. Players will hate you for it, 'though, myself included! :-D The settings are not going to be restored afterwards and I even think at some point we planned to add an automatic suppression of an autoexec.cfg shipped with an FM. (I think Bikerdude had one of those) Some people get dizzy from motion blur, some people get headaches from bloom and bright colors, some people are color blind, some people simply have a bad monitory or bad lighting conditions in their room so that they have to significantly increase brightness/gamma. For the sake of accessibility, basic UI and graphical features have to be player configurable and not be decided by a mapper. And who is to say that we are not going to offer a proper configuration menu for the frob highlight? In my initial proposal, I suggested to implement the GLSL-frobhighlight in such a way, that the actual GLSL-shaders can be swapped. This is not (yet?) the case, as that much flexibility is usually costly, but this would actually allow mappers to ship their own implementation with their map while the player could still chose to disable that and use one of the base implementations.

In games there is nothing that can scare me, this is already taken care of by the electricity company bills

Sure, gameplay rules. I would argue the junk has some gameplay implications, as we all know how loud it is when misplaced. I can't say I've used it that often, but I think it's the kind of realism that is pretty fun when successful. Rewards thinking on your feet. As opposed to say, Thi4f, where the Distraction Objects (glass bottles) were the only throwable items. Not that I play these games for the literal garbage, but I always accepted them as one of these amusing things that exists. Thief 2 wasn't hampered by it at all in my opinion, and I don't find this new frob shader to be that big of a concession either. Especially in my case of missing paintings fairly often. If I have to turn my light off to better see which paintings are cash money, something has gone horribly wrong.

Right on. Well we're headed down this route for the time being. Unless a better or more practical solution comes along.

I mean, I like visual novels and walking simulators as much as the next guy, but I'd imagine generally people want to do "stuff" in games like this. Probably a lot of them enjoy manual jumping more than hyper-realistic object inspection. So you would just hope for a better future? But the issue already exists and there are a lot of missions.

The outline would only show up if you're close enough to frob it, in which case you already know it's loot because it lights up and it's a painting. There's no other reason for a painting to be frobbable, unlike say a goblet which might light up because it's loot or because you can carry it and throw it at things. The yellow outline would help in the case of the goblet. Imagine an art gallery level where just one painting among dozens is valuable. The yellow loot indicator won't help you find it because you need to get up close to light it up anyway. In this situation only a long distance shimmer will help you, and that's something I would NOT like introduced. Sorry if that wasn't clear; I can be overly terse sometimes.

We don't have full control over asset design (even if all core assets were made consistent, mappers can produce their own custom loot, and frequently do). We do have almost full control over the UI. Therefore, "compensating for [inconsistent] asset design with the UI" is exactly what is needed to solve this problem. This actually adds even more weight to the idea that the frob highlight should not vary on a map-by-map basis.

While I don't have a particular opinion on this topic at large, this is true. I think in Lord Edgar's Bathhouse, one piece of loot was a plain old green wine bottle. I recently replayed the mission, and it took me an ungodly amount of time to stumble upon it to meet the quota. And as mentioned, paintings are the worst when it comes to this, no real way of figuring out which ones are loot and which aren't. I especially like it when I forget to frob all of them from the get-go and later realize some of them are in fact loot, so now I have to hunt all of them down again.

Exactly! That's the main reason why I like the idea of different colors. Although it is quite likely that another change will diminish this problem. I was thinking about candles, which are moveable depending on author's preference. UPDATE: Also, I have seen some maps where bottles and plates were loot, while they did not look like that. Having different highlight color will help with it. As for customization of frob effect, I think anything beyond "change color" or "occlude or not" would require additional code and complexity in the engine.

It would be, but that's not the situation we have. Our models come from a dozen different sources with different styles, and people have added loot entities to the core mod throughout history without any concern for consistency--loot paintings (that are worth as much as 10 other pieces of loot) that look exactly the same as non-loot paintings are an obvious example.

Edit: Actually in hindsight, I disagree with my own idea.

You can actually just grab the latest developer build and punch in the cvars in the console https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20824-public-access-to-development-versions/

I would prefer such an information better somewhere else than in the briefing video. For me the video helps to "get in the mood" of immersing myself and such a disclaimer at the end would disturb that. Even at the beginning, I would either immediately or after the video have to check my settings, which also disturbs the mood. A seperate info (e.g. in the level description) would be better, although I am aware that it is easily missed that way.

In the upcoming "Stolen Heart" FM, there is a character, Coach, who is patiently, and with encouragement, guiding an acolyte in how to be a better singer and a better person. I will be renaming him "Coach grayman", and dedicating this FM to grayman's memory.

I would recommend a briefing video with a short disclaimer at the end: "This mission is best enjoyed with bloom and 64-bit color". Something like that is very common in video games "best played with controller", "best played with headphones", etc.

Same here. I've only visited the forums fleetingly of late, but I'm sorry I missed this bit of sad news. Grayman's missions, specifically the early William Steele missions were so amazing to me when I first played them, that it inspired me to try my hand at mapping. Without that experience my own catalogue of missions might never have existed either, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Additionally, I echo the sentiment that he was always a kind and helpful fellow, truly a great asset to the Dark Mod community. R.I.P. Grayman, you absolute legend!

I guess we can agree on that. and I don't think it is very helpful to boil my comment down to morality play. I haven't had any morality in mind when posting my comment. It is a simple fact that disallowing certain modifications per se restrict the mappers. There might be good reasons to do so, but those should then be brought up to the mapper once necessary, and the mapper should have the choice to decide. That's what beta tests are intented for. That might be true. But players can only modify the game to the degree that they are allowed to via the settings menu, unless you expect the average player to fiddle with the files shipped with TDM or a fm. And in the latter case the player would not be able to modify it more then the mapper can. So I don't really see the point here. We are not talking about player versus mapper modifications.

You can set r_frobIgnoreDepth to 0. Note, however, that hiding parts of the outline is technically quite difficult to accomplish, and the solution that I've implemented is not perfect (and can, under certain circumstances, eat up quite a bit of performance).

It's not as simple as that. Players' preferences matter too. Should a player with colour blindness be forced to have a frob highlight they can barely see because a mapper thought that a particular colour looked better? And if the frob UI can be configured by the mapper, why not other UI settings too? Perhaps a mapper thinks that their map looks better with bloom enabled, and all players should be forced to have bloom (after all, this is clearly an artistic element of the map)? What about gamma? Can a mapper insist on a super-low brightness setting because they think their map looks artistically better in almost complete darkness? Clearly there is a line to be drawn between UI elements which should be under the mapper's control and those which should be left to the player. We can disagree about exactly where that line should be, but I don't think it's very helpful to boil it down to some simplistic morality play about mappers' "artistic choices" being "restricted". I meant the majority of the people who had expressed an opinion in the internal discussion thread. Others are of course free to speak up if that is not an accurate assessment of the situation. There's also the implementation to consider — even if everybody were to agree that some frob highlight customisation should be possible by the mapper, this should not derail the plans to remove the material stage based implementation which is a horrific hack designed for the closed-source engine and no longer makes sense with a fully open-source codebase.

@peter_spy The plan is to do something more subtle for the final release. More of a soft glow, but that isn’t represented in the latest build. Making everything modifiable is a double edge sword sometimes. On one hand it offers creative freedom but on the other it makes it difficult to fix bugs and change features later. That being said I don’t see the harm in allowing authors to set custom frob highlights, perhaps per object. We’ll see how it all plays out though as this is still in the testing phase, but thats good feedback.

Wrong forum to say STFU, except when there's an i in the middle. In all seriousness 'though, please refrain from using such language.

Witcher 2 and 3 actually had quite convincing erotic / love scenes, but I agree that this is not very common.