peter_spy

If the whole thing is in the early stage, then I'd be even more reluctant to ask people for money. I know how long making assets takes, but people are more inclined to pay for what they see, not for what you think you might make someday.

Forgive me for being harsh, but what you've shown so far isn't great, at least judging from the screenshots, and in terms of graphics. And, if I understand correctly, you've spent most of your time importing and managing other people's content. And you already want to ask for regular monthly donations (not to mention that your life depends on it). There are more than a few things messed up here, but only from a mod perspective, I'd use UE4 or Unity to avoid complications when it comes to liceses / terms of use, and also I'd use only things I made to avoid problems. And if I were to ask for donations, I'd show a polished proof of concept first: one level, location or environment, or gameplay piece, something to make players excited and informed, so they can have a vague idea what they pay for. I see none of that here.

You can easily get Unreal 4 or Unity and do the same. Although I'd probably make some quality content and media first, so people can get excited about the stuff I make. Then I'd think about a Donate button.

The default frob is far from perfect; it works well in the dark, but as I said above, finding what is frobable or extinguishing candles, in rooms which are better lit, can be a pain. This fake-fresnel frob is more pronounced and can be tweaked per material, so it's not so in your face, and it works more consistently.

I think I might be playing it wrong, i.e. I always start with no-killing ghost playthrough in mind, which makes learning the environment almost impossible. It's a "no mistakes or a quickload" situation. In the end I only got ghost playthrough because one dude in Addermire got scared of me making a sound and accidently jumped off a cliff. That counted as my fault, and I missed it. But, on the second playthrough, I'm trying a "no powers, no kills" run, which is actually really fun way to play. I am trying to be stealthy as usual, but when I fail, I either run or knock people out. It has its own nice flow and I don't have to reload unless I accidentally kill someone.

Generally I don't like ghosting in Dishonored, there are too many things that can happen by accident, and quicksave / quickload fest sucks out a lot of fun. I really like what MGS V did with it, as it made me stop worrying about the perfect score, and just let me improvise when something goes wrong, and improve my playstyle in the process.

That's why I'm wondering how useful can it can actually be. I've never seen such approach in any other engine.

Something like aural counterpart of Garrett's mechanical eye? Sounds (!) interesting, although I wonder whether players would find such tool actually useful. If it was something like a planted/hidden microphone, it's also easier to fake it by just making and playing a recording in player's head, audiolog style. Maybe the ear function would be useful to FM designers who don't have much experience with audio editing, and don't want to spend additional time preparing such tracks?

I think most cameras in other engines, when used for in-game cutscenes, act like player's floating head, or like a noclip mode, so that would be useful. Not sure the ear would be used that often by itself, but it's always nice to have that option. If we're talking about film set, those should rather be microphones, but that approach gets complicated fast: can we have stereo/mono/dicrectional/omni/mid-side microphones, how many of them can we use simultaneously, etc., etc. I don’t think most people see it in those terms, and you need to know how to mic a film set to use these tools right.

So, you have to use another entity along with the camera to make it receive sound: either attached or moving along the same path as camera? I'm not sold on the player ear idea, but that's what I'd take on first: having an option of such ear attached to the cinematic camera would simplify things a bit.

But with the conversation going on, I think you don't want other distracting sounds to be put in the foreground, especially if there can be some AIs walking around or any emergent stuff happening, not to mention glitches. At least when it comes to important story cinematics, I'd rather have a full control over that via separate audio track played in 2d, sync'd with what is going on on-screen. It would take more work, sure, but it will also feel more seamless to the player. Btw. doesn't the cinematic camera use itself as point of hearing sound by default?

From my perspective this is kind of overcomplicating things. If you need to make the conversation hearable, why not play the sound in 2d (player's head) or in a sound marker with large enough radius and volume?

So, you have some kind of social pressure related to editing / real-life balance problems. I don't have such pressure, and tend to lose myself in such work completely, but I also recognize this isn't exactly healthy kind of passion. You can always have a design doc and a dev schedule / diary, if you have less time for editing. This should keep you more focused on your milestones and your goal, even with long breaks between editing.

I think we should not distract Greebo with problems with other idtech4 titles, he already has his hands full, spending his free time improving DR functionality and our TDM editing experience.

I remember having high hopes for first Assassin's Creed. What I basically wanted was a TPP equivalent of Thief/Dishonored during the Third Crusade. What I got was an open-world Prince of Persia 3d with simple mechanics, boring metagame story, and tons of busywork. And people loooved it. If anything, the series' commercial success proved that there isn't enough boredom in the world, and people like to work in games just like they work in real life (i.e. for most people it's familiar repetitive time-killing). That's why I don't use massive sales as an argument in discussion. A huge mass of people will have, if only out of statistical necessity, very average tastes

Well, there's a difference between critical and commercial success, that's one thing. The other thing is, that talking only in terms of "it's good because I like it / it's bad because i don't like it" is shallow and boring. This is why I try to provide examples, and specify what I don't like and provide some kind of reasoning behind that. But that won't make an interesting, substantive discussion against arguments like statistic numbers or sales figures. And no, people who talk like that don't have to make games, movies, and whatnot, (even though sometimes critics become creators and put their knowledge to practical use).

Well, it's not only me; a lot of people who played and enjoyed original games share this opinion. As a Fallout game, yeah, FO4 it's not a good game, as it slowly abandons what made these games great: role-playing, interesting takes on ethics and morality in post-apocalyptic world, which was a playground for player choice, without authoring it too much. Bethesda's work with FO3 was important, because they did translate pretty well what was 2D sprites into 3d objects and, as far as their crappy Embryo engine goes, the general gameplay mechanics. But that's the nuts-and-bolts side of things, not so much the craft of creative work. Actually, when Bethesda has the artistic freedom, they don't do very well. TES since Oblivion looks like a generic fantasy world, without much flare or character. Just compare it to something like Gothic series, which is (equally if not more buggy but) based more on actual medieval European architecture, and it has more distinctive style (The Witcher did it very well too). But getting back to FO3, it was important as a base for F:NV, as Obsidian basically took these resources and tried do make their Fallout out of it (supposedly there's quite a bit of Van Buren content in F:NV). And as original FO designers, they did much better job with it than Bethesda, trying to translate values associated with the FO name into an engine, assets, and the FPS style of play they were given. This is something Arkane did too, as Prey is basically System Shock 3; it refers to the old values from previous games and tries to make modern spin out of it, and the result is pretty great.

Best selling game doesn't mean great game. It only means a lot of people bought it (myself included). If you want more substantial discussion about that, this video is a nice place to start: For one, when I watched that video, I almost instantly recalled what the quest was about, even though I last played F:NV in like 2011. Then I tried to remember a quest in FO4 that would be half as good as this one. I couldn't. IMO Bethesda is just turning FO into a series of first person shooters with nice locations, and this is not what FO was about. There seem to be a lot of people who are okay with that, but again, that doesn't mean FO4 is great, especially in comparison to first installments, which those people probably never played.

DX:IW and Thief 3 engine uses like first, super-buggy version of Havok, which was then bought out by Nvidia, afair. Renderer is 100% custom mess, not sure about the rest. And yeah, editing was easier with UE 2.x frontend, but you couldn't do much about bugs. IdTech is more like "editing for programming geeks", but we have people here who can fix bugs and upgrade things. It's not a zero sum game, but the time you wasted in T3Ed looking for workarounds, here you'll spend it on learning scripting. You might not like it, but at least your efforts are more constructive and creative.

I think there's something inherently wrong with how Bethesda works as a game studio. For many years now, main quests in their games were subpar on every level, from writing to gameplay and technical execution. Last passable main quest was probably in Morrowind, but I'm not 100% sure about that. If there was something original and genuinely interesting, it was buried somewhere among side quests or faction quests, like assassins guild in Oblivion, Shivering Isles DLC, or thieves guild in Skyrim. Same goes for Fallout 3 & 4 (and the latter even has the same main quest, just reversed). The only reason I can find for that is that people working on main quests are either interns, or it's kind of penalty or purgatory for employees, for noone likes designing main quests, or the team responsible for that consists of studio vetrans / higher-ups who can't be fired.

To me FO4 was a big step backwards in the series, in almost every way, except for graphics and some distractions like base building stuff. Bethesda actually managed to achieve a new low with the mediocrity of the main quest and limited binary choices. It felt like quests were designed by interns. I spent a great deal of time with F:NV though, something like 200 hours. While the main game was buggy at launch, they managed to fix alt least the major ones. And the story DLCs were excellent; Honest Hearts maybe a bit less, but Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road are fantastic.

Maybe it's me having poor time-management skills, but last time I had this much time for games was during my Uni years. I binge-played through most of Prey during one rainy weekend, and on Sunday afternoon it felt like a huge gaming hangover. I'm too old for this shit.

That said, I wonder if there's a chance to get Thief 3 source code, so someone like Le Corbeau (or Snobel for that matter) could start making upgrades and improvements.

I love Darren Korb's work. Usually his music stands very well on its own, and more often than not, seems more interesting than the games it was written for. Bastion is kind of meh, but the OST is great: But my favorite OST of his would be Transistor OST. Not only it's full of great instrumentals, it's also full of fantastic songs: As for mixing chiptunes and midi era with contemporary approach, I think Danny Baranowsky did a fantastic job with Crypt of the Necrodancer:

Hey, thanks for the kind words, Bob But I'm okay here; I like the way I play games now, and I like them shorter, like 4-8 hour experience instead of 30-50. With one main job and second hobby/job, I prefer to spend more of my spare time with friends and family, and during colder months, I'd rather do some modelling and mapping for The Dark Mod. So it's more the question of priorities, where creating something is actually more fun for you than playing.