DopeFishhh

While yes anyone can do the tweaking, I think it would be silly to suggest that people do this to 'fix' TDM. For mod authors you want to be giving them the most stable platform you can, and during the beta testing you want people to have near identical settings (with the exception of graphics/controls etc...). This keeps your bug finding focused on getting the core of the product perfect. I did find the run speed to be a bit slow, and the audio feed back on your footsteps is a little off, I can't tell whether it matches what the AI would be hearing.

It would be quite fitting for the setting, the moss arrow is a pagan based/associated item AFAIK. And movies featuring them frequently showed similar effects happening. Oh and in deadly shadows when you hit people with moss arrows they were temporarily stunned and made sounds like they had been gagged.

The particle effect for the spawning of the moss looks a little fast compared to the rate of moss growth. But really I never liked the moss growth animation in thief, I always thought the best growth effect would be where moss slowly expands out from the impact site along the surface. Taking a bit of inspiration from thief cut scenes it'd be cool if little flowers or similar grew as well as moss.

The Total Annihilation fanbase is similarly long lived and also produces a fair bit of content even today. Units and maps are the most common but there's easily 50+ total modifications (of varying quality) too. Supreme commander sucked the TA fans away though. One thing I've noticed is that there was a resistance to 3rd party content in the multiplayer community, people got good at the original game and didn't want to play anything else

How are you guys planning on implementing vine arrows anyway? I know this is probably already done but it would be interesting to see them act a little more like vines that grow outwards and down from the impact location rather than a green rope that hangs off the end of the arrow. Vines that stick to the wall like how the moss arrows grow moss around the impact site. Could get some pretty awesome looking growth animations going as it spreads along the surface. Heck could even have them entangle ai when you hit them with it giving you 10-20 seconds to do something about them or run away before they break loose and try to smash you. Kinda reminds me about T1 where garret hands over the eye only to be similarly entangled by victoria (also happens to be my favourite FMV from all of them).

In the current day we have huge vineyards covering hectares. But thats because we have the technology to do so. Back then the largest would have been an acre or so. Walling in the vineyard wouldn't have been such a bad idea, trying to keep pests/people out. and would give an interesting setting for the mission, obviously this person has a bit of capitol behind him to build a wall around his vineyard, it would be a good method of getting into the property.

Dark messiah has plenty of open freeform areas to deal with things but then you get choked off into the next section, and there are some bits where it's linear all the way. though there are bits that make you wish you hadn't spent all your experience on stealth and instead beefed up on your tanking abilities. But all play types get a fair whack, for most of the game you can choose either to stealth it or tank it, and then there are some bits where magery and archery come out on top. You can't play without steam unless you've acquired it in an underhanded means. Ohh yeah you get points for completing objectives and not for kills, so you could just as easily run past those 10 orcs as kill them and win, unless of course killing those 10 orcs is the actual objective in the first place. That 6.7 score could not have been thought through (or arkane didn't pay up for a good review), it does get repetitive in some bits, but i noticed that it was because i kept focusing on one particular way of dealing with a challenge and trying until i succeeded, i'm sure the moron reviewer did the same but had no clue to his own failings. The story is fine, nothing spectacularly thief like but good all the same. I have noticed only a very few technical glitches. back to oblivion, yes the design team are complete boneheads. "hmmm they hated cliff racers. so we won't put them in, instead we will make wolves and spawn them in everywhere and then make them attack the player and the player only when it sees him." yeah that sounds so much better than cliff racers... Seriously, a lone wolf wouldn't go near the player, a pack sure, and then they'd run for their lives when they get hurt, or they see some spectacular glowy / fire / loud effect. later on it's lions, then bears, then minotaurs. and NONE of them see fit to engage each other in combat despite there being no obvious reason why they wouldn't and plenty of reason why they should, and again none of them have any sort of life preservation instinct, no ai in oblivion does. instant kill spell for any creature under or equal to 100 health: drain health 100 for 1 second Whats its cost? at 100 destruction 9 mana and it only requires destruction 25 to cast, your extensive play testing is for naught bethesda, ohh wait you didn't do any. </rant>

The sneaking in dark messiah puts oblivion's to shame, it actually comes very close to thief itself. If there was a toolset for it making FM's would be possible. the only difference is that the game usually throws you into combat heavy situations, for instance you have to take out cyclops's and you don't get much choice in the matter. Because it uses steam is absolutely no excuse for avoiding it. Oblivion was a huge disapointment for me and alot of my friends, we all thought morrowind was much better than oblivion for many different reasons. We spent alot of time with different morrowind mods but just simply didn't have the patients with oblivion mods.

Just finished Dark Messiah of might and magic, very nice game based on the source engine. anyway you can max out skills on thievery/sneaking and the game plays alot like thief, you can even snipe with bows and there is a rope bow at some point (yes rope arrows ala thief). Near the end there is a suit of stealthy armor with the letter 'G' in the collar. The game has alot more combat than you would normally see in thief though. Ohh yeah remember that discussion about re-animating ragdoll bodies we had a bit back, seems they've done it in this and it's pretty good quality. Just somethign to look out for.

I find the thief leaning to be adequate. Though you could implement something like the tds wall hug system as when you go to lean you usually are at the corner, so a button to hug the wall and then use the move keys to indicate direction. Other games have had methods of tackling the way the player stands, in heavy gear 2 there were two buttons to change your operating height. One made you go lower and another heigher, but it was through fixed stages (stand, kneel, crawl).

FFS guys I make a post and you turn it into a tornado of stupidity... Getting back on topic. My question was mostly directed at how as good those games were they are still very old and at the moment I can't seem to run them on my system. A remake in TDM would have ALOT going for it, everyone who missed out on the originals could play it now in much greater detail (I know alot of people who would dismiss a game based on graphics).

Has anyone attempted to do a remake of the old games? and is anyone thinking about doing a remake in the dark mod?

And because we can assume garrets better at it than gildoran he could jump a little further. Perhaps tying the lean forward action in with the jump action to do a standing long jump could work. The latest hitman you don't even have a jump button, he really has no need to jump on the players whim, only at certain places where a jump is necessary and to trigger that you have to walk upto the spot and push forward. This of course does equate to level designers needing to specifically implement it (and potentially unique animations need to be made to cover unique situations).

I'd hate to interupt this new line of discussion, but tying a guards hands and legs and gagging them is pretty much a given if there is the potential they will wake up again. Didn't happen in thief because they didn't wake up again, but imo the point of a blackjack is not about a particularly silent kill, it's fufilling the no killing objective on a map and getting a better rating. I think you could just as easily stab someone and be as quiet, obviously it would have to be a surprise attack. Murder is obvious, there tends to be alot of blood, if a guard finds a murdered body as opposed to someone who got knocked out, the reaction should be immense. If a guard finds someone who is KO'ed the reaction should be similar but not as intense (perhaps taking longer to kick off a search or something). Also in appropriate missions extra guards should be called in (perhaps town guards) in order to search for the murderer. Though i'm not too familiar with D3 i was just thinking about how you would reanimate someone (if this wouldn't work then just ignore me ). I would do a few tests to determine what state the body is in, if on it's back apply a force to make them roll over onto their front. If on their front apply a force to get the arms and legs into the standard get up animation start position (which would be arms beside the body, legs out straight). From there it's just animation, it's not going to be that dynamic, infact you are only creating 1 standard animation sequence and some physics manipulations to perform a standup. If you wanted to start on this, start with the physics, if you can get that working, then it's just an animation after that. Also oblivion has a reanimation feature, though from memory they do some magical transitions to get the body doing that. and it's literately a reanimation feature. It's part of a quest and after defeating this guy you can reanimate dead bodies (necromancy) with his staff under your control.

Well what ever looks best, I just don't like how for the longest time in fps games the player was always perfectly upright up until their death or they pull some special move. In gothic 2 you could do a jump roll but the camera would always point forwards like as though you could see through your skull...

Well considering that most of the time you won't be around to see a guard wake his buddy up, or someone waking up normally you don't necessarily need to have auto animations for it. I mean sure the player could hover around the body waiting for them to regain consciousness but you could just put some code in to prevent the guard from doing the wake up action until the player is out of sight. Should a guard see a body odds are they'd be looking for the player rather than trying to wake the dude up, again you could make it so that if the player has line of sight the body wont wake up. It's a cop out sure but it's going to be a hard one for a player to notice.

Flails and morning stars would be awesome to see. And concerning the pushing thread is it possible to dynamically alter the properties of a ragdoll's joints? ie can you stiffen them to simulate someone trying to resist the movement? If the player does get hit by something heavy (that doesn't kill) it would be cool if you could ragdoll them but stiffen the joints to simulate them trying to stablise themselves (infact if anything gets hit but is still alive...)

So far you've been arguing whether it's possible, well it is even if it ends up looking kinda crappy. What you really need to think about is how it's going to effect the gameplay. I wouldn't implement the whole reanimation from ragdoll ability to push a guy off an edge just so in that rare few circumstances you can push them off an edge. It's certainly not worth it and i think the reason why the reanimation challenge hasn't been tackled is because that there have been few games that have ragdolls and have called for the need of a body to reanimate. However I don't quite think the ability to push someone around will require a system for reanimation. Even if they are caught unawares and are pushed off a ledge they do have some ability to control their rotation during the fall, they don't go ragdoll the moment they are airborn. Also considering how they land is an important part of determining death (on your head vs both feet and roll to absorb some of the impact), or injury of anyone, you will need some sort of stair dismount/truck dismount like system for determining physical damage sustained (minus the total ragdoll nature of the dismount games). As far as it being worth it goes, if you implement pushing you might as well implement other physical combat brawling like actions along with it. For instance being able to do trip attacks, or just trip a guard over would be awesome for a trip and backstab combo (wouldn't work on 4+ legged creatures) you don't even need to trip them yourself, you could use a rope or a pole as a trap. Also you could do a knockdown charge to just get past a guard (charge at them, knock them over with a chance of falling over yourself, then you can either keep attacking or run for it while they try to get up). All these actions will need to have considerations for aware guards and unaware guards (unaware tending to have a greater chance of success). It would be a whole new melee system. Either way it's scope creep, so unless you can do something fantastic with it...

Could you stack that skyportal idea in order to create multiple levels of detail? and do objects (like people/furniture) placed in the skyportal area show up? it would be nice to look down a long street and have a seemless transition of the detail levels and not have things suddenly appear as you get closer to them.

I never said it was the dev's role, infact it would be better that they didn't have much if anything to do with it so they can spend their time on TDM and be considered a wholely seperate entity incase the shit hits the fan. The whole idea of that system is to centralise and assess items, so a module author could either just browse the highly rated ones, or search by category and arrange by rating.

Well, for anyone who wants to put something into action they would need to look at these problems. The selection of content to add is one, how do you categorise the content to the differing standards? You guys want a specific theme, but others might try / want something weirder. I guess thats simply a matter of the people running the system categorising content appropriately, but it shouldn't mean that content should be excluded or ignored or marginalised because it's unusual. Censoring is another issue but thats pretty simple. Content quality is another, the panel members would need to assess if the content meets basic standards in quality (like resolution for textures). but if the content doesn't meet standards what do they do with it? if it's an awesome piece of artwork but has some minor resolution issues do THEY do the legwork to bring it up to standard? do they ask the creator? do they simply reject it and mourn the loss? i don't think you could have any hard and fast rules about this but you really want to maximise the amount of official quality content. How do you acquire content? do you have people roaming about searching for new things to add? do you allow people to submit content? will you only look at submitted content? if you search about thats more work but it could foster a sort of standard, eventually people will be submitting on a frequent basis (almost like a gallery or something). Ideally you want people's default behaviour to be submitting content to you so you can build up a big gallery. However now you hit a big problem, plagiarism could screw the managing group over, they obviously can't search the internet to find out where texture x came from, theres no guarantee it will be on the internet. Obviously the consequences for distributing playgarised work could be brutal. Fortunately i think there could be a simple way to weed out most cases of this. If you make every piece of content have a public preview for a certain length of time before it is allowed to even be panel reviewed you can rely on the people to be your eyes and ears on the matter. not 100% reliable but again if this system is big then you will have alot of people checking for you. Once a piece of plagiarised work has been identified then the user who posted the work should be banned and publicly humiliated. if however it manages to pass all reviews then gets outed as plagiarised once it made it into a distributed pack then thats a tricky problem. you will need to update the pack that it got released in so it's no longer in there, in which case packs themselves will have different versions and could cause compatibility problems, especially for those FM's that use the plagiarised content. I dont think the risk of plagiarism would outweigh the benefits of the community having a huge content base to work off, but all it takes is some litigous asshole out there to rain on everyones parade. I guess legal advice here would be handy. Arrangement of the content is another issue, obviously piling it into one big file makes things awkward for everyone involved so thats a no go. monthly updates that people can grab can make things alot easier for people BUT if an FM author needs to wait a month before the shiny piece of content they made makes it into a pack and they've basically finished their FM they will be pissed. Making FM's bundle the content they used can also have problems, it would eventually bloat the FM's as content builds up and authors decide to use heaps of it and it's a problem for distribution too. I think a monthly + individual distribution method would be best, an author can bundle items not yet packaged within the FM, but once the object has made it into a pack you cannot bundle it individually (well you can't force them, i guess it all depends on how you let people view the content). Finally who makes up the panel? you will need a large number of people who are level headed enough and have a few spare hours every few days to review items alot of time is involved. Also hosting it online is another tricky issue, a public review system would be difficult to run (think deviant art but smaller). So what are the benefits? well FM authors will have a HUGE base for things to add to their missions, all high quality pieces of work, eventually quality of work is a self reinforcing cultural thing among the FM authors/players leading to more enjoyment for all. The cons however are, hard work, potential for assholes to ruin a good thing, costs for distribution. Well i rambled again, but this time i think it was worth it

looks a tad hunched over dont you think? but nah thats a great model

Are you planning on some sort of offical system / policy for adding new content to TDM from 3rd parties? ie someone makes a new texture for their map (or a new texture in general), a group reviews it asks the author if they can add it to the stock resources and then standardises it (naming and the like).

Well, if an ai sees a shadow it should be far less likely to set them off on the "have i seen the player" line, than seeing the player themselves. A stationary shadow should really be of no interest to a guard, they have to watch out for people, not shadows. Moving shadows like moving players should attract more suspicion but the guard would either need to have been previously alerted, or they would need to be some elite guard. As far as gameplay goes it's one of those hard to master bits of the game, but either way i wouldn't bother until doom3 was GPL'ed before trying.

Well that would still depend on the layout of the map. Anyway if you are using the rendering engine to check the players visibility wouldn't it already do the culling? And how big can doom 3 maps get? is it a hard limit or a limitation of the hardware? and could you through clever design exceed what would normally be very taxing on a system?