peter_spy

Or, you could design assets around player standing / crouching height, so the lean forward key is obsolete, like in all other video games.

I meant this as an exercise in mirrored UVs technique. Both version of the fence and the door are unwrapped in one texture space. By creatively cloning and rotating faces that player will never see at the same time, I managed to save a lot of space on the texture and get better pixel density. The biggest downside of this technique is that it can require a lot of planning, and it's best suited towards inorganic props. While the unique faces that were used to build the above look like this:

But the shadow map size is already 1024, shouldn't that be enough?

A few artifacts you say: This is default maps with softening set to low and 1. The same setup with stencil:

IIRC, in 2.08 the rope arrow disappeared along with the piece of wood model with hide_distance set. Moveables "pre-fall" at the map start, so if something is invisible, whether via hide or hide_distance, the objects will fall on the next available geometry. By the way, just want to confirm that image_useNormalCompression "0" no longer disables lights in maps in beta 6

Yup, exactly. In order to avoid confusion, just let volumetric lights use shadow mapping, maybe give players On/Off option for these lights in the UI to improve performance, and when the time will come to phase out stencil shadows, you'll remove the stencil/maps switch.

I agree that some of the points are kinda not relevant anymore. The quad window view for example; I don't know about you, but I used the quad layout when I started 3d modelling, as I had to get used to the concept of working in 3d space. But for the long time now, I've been using either 1 or 2 views (perspective + ortho) and using hotkeys to switch between the xyz planes or rendering modes. Hotkeys ergonomics was interesting IMO, because I had a similar experience. I changed a lot of the default ones for the most frequently used actions to single-key shortcuts, because a lot of them used Ctrl, Alt or Shift modifiers, which is painful for the wrists in the long run (Ctrl+Tab for example).

Been using 2.10 beta 5 along with Hazard Pay for a bit, and I think I would be awesome if volumetric lights were decoupled from shadow maps for all other lights as a requirement. They still seem unoptimized and eat up GPU resources really fast, while stencil + soft shadows seem to have much less severe impact on a CPU.

This is a pretty good video showing how good UI/UX is vital to making better maps in less time, and how sometimes even things like mapper health are depending on it:

Kind of a tangent, but modern developers also use this approach, where they ditch the whole concept of difficulty levels and relegate it to level design; players can choose the difficulty by taking or not taking a certain path in the game: https://youtu.be/iNEe3KhMvXM?t=1515 Perhaps such approach could move the focus away from difficulty levels to something like gameplay types or challenge modes, to experiment further with interesting concepts.

And that's okay, I bet most authors won't care, as they will be busy engaging with players that do want to play such missions. It's you who are making it sound like as it was one of the most serious things in the world for some reason. Also, since you've been repeating the same stuff over and over again, and now you're parroting my sentences, it means you've run out of arguments. I'm out too, no point in wasting the forum space.

Hell no, I like games doing weird and experimental stuff, and I don't mind plenty of challenge modes for all the different groups of players. I play most games on easy because my time for playing is limited, but I don't mind all the crazy options in hardcore survival modes, Ironman or time modes for speed-runners. I love diversity and I respect tradition, but I have no problems with questioning it, if it takes me somewhere interesting.

You are still playing the same broken record. Authors will add features because they'd like to, not because they have to. They will sacrifice whatever they deem unimportant for it. That's not your concern, it's their personal decision. It's funny that one of the arguments for altering the saving system was that authors get too controlling – again, do you realize how controlling your post sounds like?

No, not anymore, since multiple people were trying to explain the same thing with different wording, and most of the responses were like: "IM NOT LISTENING TO YOU, COVERING MY EARS, LALALA, STOP TAKING MY FREEDOM!" Sorry, but this is just begging to poke fun at. And your response shows that you either still don't understand the topic, or don't really want to understand it. All you seem to be interested in is your particular needs only. To the point that you are, again, protesting against an optional, experimental mode that was inspired by other games. Something that you probably won't play, but for some reason can't stand the thought that author might include in their mission. This is how your response looks like. Do you realize how silly it looks?

I must say that the lack of open mind and imagination here is rather disappointing, not to mention the 'muh freedom' reaction. Meanwhile "This is how we've always been doing things here" stance is the most commonly known factor for stagnation or killing any innovation. And the continued ignorance of the fact that this is/wil be an optional mode or difficulty seems more like a "live and let live" problem. The fact that there might be a difficulty mode you won't master, perhaps even called 'Expert', does that hurt anybody's ego or something?

I don't think save rooms or any means to limit or disable saves has to be coupled with traditional difficulty levels. It's more like a different type of gameplay and pacing. It's not hard to imagine that people playing rogue likes/lites, Resident Evil or Dark Souls games might want to try this mode on without having to beat the mission on expert difficulty.

All the talk so far was about risk-reward situations where people have to deal with the consequences of their choices, plans or mistakes. You're kinda trying to dumb down this idea by focusing on possible design mistakes, like chasms being deceptive so players might try to jump over them and fail. The talk is still about this being an optional mode and implementing that in future missions, even though the thread started on retroactively fitting save rooms in existing missions, (which is not possible without major map design changes IMO).

And this also applies to stealth games: you gauge the situation, think of a plan, execute and... quickload if it fails But you could try to deal with the situation at hand. Well designed maps allow for this, you can look at OG Thief maps for example. And I don't think TDM needs to have leveling system. Again, OG Thief maps are usually designed the way that you can "expand your territory" by either buying and finding water arrows to douse lights and set the scales more in your favor. You can expand that idea to other player tools, it doesn't have to be water arrow. Mooncrash doesn't have randomized world, and it's still plenty of fun because items, events and monsters are randomized. You could do a similar thing in TDM. That plus all the systemic reactions between different stim impulses and receivers make unique and not 100% predictable situations. It's a brilliant tough-but-mostly-fair series of games, that attract the curiosity of many different players with all backgrounds. I absolutely adore this playthrough, it's brilliant to see how Ellen has grown throughout it:

You can tune the AI, lighting and the level layout in general to accommodate for the high-risk reward situations. There are plenty of games with automatic / restricted saves that give tons of fun for thousands of players. Metal Gear Solid 5 has automatic checkpoints when you get near or leave a mission area, so you have to own up to your mistakes or run away and reset the mission. Dark Souls have automatic saves every few seconds and in bonfires. Prey Mooncrash has a time limit, and a game world state and abilities saved between level runs (that and a few other things you discover on your own). None of that discourages exploration. It only limits you from seeing everything during one play-through. And none of that makes a game boring. On the contrary, encounters have higher stakes, your choices have consequences, and there are funny emergent accidents. I had plenty of great playthrough stories from Mooncrash, because of how unpredictable and suprising the events could get. A lot of near-death experiences, dumb mistakes that were reverted later by finding proper equipment, or near-wins destroyed by me not making to the rescue pod, because I made a mistake and got detected by that one nasty monster. It was awesome

@AluminumHaste again, first off, it's/can be an optional game mode or difficulty level, not something you have to do. And you're wrong about getting your skills too. The only difference between the way you got them, and the way you can get them in a game without saves is time. Nothing else. How do you think people master games like Dark Souls?

I guess it would feel less controversial and more clear if there was a system that would allow to choose a gameplay type and then choose a difficulty level for it? Like playing Quake with bots and first choosing between deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.and then the difficulty level. But I'm not sure how much of a gui nightmare would that be, plus how much additional work for mission authors to set the whole thing up.

Because it changes your approach to gameplay and levels are/can be designed in a different way. You have to take risks, make guesses, and go with the consequences. It makes for sudden and interesting development of events, player panicking and thinking on their feet. It makes players forget about their stealth score 0 and just having fun, even if being clumsy at that. You can already play games like MGS5 or Prey Mooncrash to see how letting go of your inner perfectionist can lead to much funnier and more interesting experiences. And again, so far it's a C O M P L E T E L Y O P T I O N A L mode/difficulty level that you can try. The standard gameplay is still there, on other difficulty levels.

IMO it's not the same thing as other cheats. Different approach to saving is more like having a different gameplay type, and it's okay if you don't like it or don't want to play it. Why trying so hard to alter that mode then? And, e.g. you don't complain about RE typewriter saves or roguelike games, insisting that authors should change it to your needs. You either make time for these games, if the gameplay is appealing to you, or you avoid them. Same thing here so far, you can always just choose different difficulty/game mode. And raging about that is IMO just not listening what the other side is trying to communicate here, not to mention that it sounds super entitled. Authors can design missions however they want and they do not owe players anything.

And that's what mission authors want, more longevity to their missions. If you reload a save every time you make mistake, your story is basically: "I moved carefully through the shadows and completed all objectives". And you can still have that on "standard" difficulties. But you're not really seeing the full potential of emergent systems working, if you reload the game every time you don't like the outcome. These experimental difficulties, or rather new game modes, try to do something different, get more interesting emergent stories for (and from) the players, even if it means moving them out of a comfort zone a little. The first step to understand this would be to trust that mission authors are trying to show you something new and possibly awesome, and just try it

It's actually kind of funny, given how stealth games' community members like to think of themselves, as more intelligent, progressive, or sophisticated, than fans of other genres. And then you get situations like this one, where people would go out of their way to create a mod to alter an optional gameplay mode, so it plays just like those standard ones that are already available to them