FishFace

(Sidenote: please try to add some capital letters in your posts... It's harder to read without them) Even as a non-dev, I can say that's highly unlikely, unfortunately. If you start playing with fire, then what happens in real life if you drop a burning torch on a carpet? The carpet burns, the wallpaper goes up, the curtains go woomph, ceiling paper goes, the floorboards catch light, ceiling timbers split and the whole house is destroyed unless it is made substantially of stone. If it were possible, I'm sure we'd all like it, but it would probably be awful for gameplay and impossible graphically. On that note, though, the burning oil patches in TDS looked CRAP, and the fire arrow explosions were less than spectacular. You mean "going prone?" From discussions, I think the devs already have this on the agenda.

Closer to home, though, is the preloading text thing. screenreaders are all very well, but you're not going to come across them very often. It still makes sense to use ALT tags, however, and not just to satisfy the validator.

Eclipsing would also be amazing, but would run perhaps a higher risk than sillhouetting of throwing us off. At least at first, no player would consider the fact that he's eclipsing a light source while moving, although it would be fun to have to adapt to, perhaps. Still, even this would be handled by the proposed system to an extent if, as I proposed, you induce heavy penalties for moving (almost all eyes are very perceptive of movement) therefore, as you sillhouetted the corona, you would have a very high contrast at that point. As you move, you would gain a penalty for movement, which would boost your visibility even higher. @Isht again: I'm not quite sure that's what I mean. What's necessary, (ideally) I think, is a system whereby it is the outline, rather than a point on the foot you are talking about... Actually having typed that I'm not sure that is what I'm talking about. Start again. ~ Yes, I agree, an averaged background would probably solve this problem, I guess it would be up to the devs to tune it for speed and quality... What would be advantageous to the camera solution is that if you take an equal-res capture for an AI further away, it's less detailed and therefore accurately reflects the degradation of sight quality as everything gets further away (individual light sensitive cells being triggered, etc.)

Yeah, in addition, if you're using a zoomed in virtual camera, you'd capture the light shaft anyway. But... Point still applies

@Isht: that sounds like it would work, although you might need an additional couple of points, perhaps at the midriff. The only reservation I have is that if, at the points you described, there's a splodge of white, and then outside that, there is darkness, we have a problem. Basically, it wouldn't take into account the thickness of the body, which would also have an impact when calculating the size of the sillhouette. I dunno :/

I got it all thought out, ya see. The advantage being you have to spend a good few weeks before you get to level 81 on that thing, so until then, you'll never know

I'll give you an advantage for open-source: You can get the little people to fix all the little bugs, and in general do the grunt work Out of interest, when you've released will you be opening the source in the hope that people will contribute any modifications back to you? That would be doubleplusgood, IMHO. But that's just me being a bit of a hippy.

To introduce you to an actual example, I remember a few times when this type of thing actually entered into playing TMA. Usually, you could just wander around wherever the floor is dark, but in actuality, if the light is oblique, not perpendicular to the floor, then just standing on a shadow will not suffice. You have to imagine the cross section of the shadow in mid-air, and this is very difficult, real life or in-game. What you'd actually do is, when you're approaching the dodgy area (e.g. underneath a window) look up at the light source, and your mind automatically works out whether the light will go past your head or intersect your body - you can't really work this out from a way off; you have to be practically looking back at the light in the same direction the light is hitting the floor. I hope you understood - this situation requires you either to trial-and-error where you are, looking at your lightgem until it goes dark, or to drag the mouse around as you get there, requiring you to stop moving. These situations would be FAR more frequent, unfortunately, which as why, as Springheel says, it must be approached with caution. There's no point in having sillhouetting taking virtually no effect, just to save gameplay from it. Might as well not have it in the firstplace. (Although it could probably be mitigated with features like wall flattening, prone and so on)

If I recall, grappling hooks weren't going to be done at least for the first release. I'm not sure whether they're on the cards for later on - they're certainly not in the classic thief vein, although for a more ninja-style thief mod, perhaps they'd fit. I think, though, that one of the things TDM is going to have to replicate is the incredibly fluid feel of clambering around in TDP/MA. When you're running around the rooftops, leaping with abandon, knowing instinctively when to hit jump again to grap onto the next surface, needing only to stop for a second to shoot a rope arrow at a wooden window box... Again, it's immersion epitomised, because it's so natural. Anything new that is introduced will have to live up to this - and it's where climbing gloves didn't cut it, and TDS' general lack of clambering didn't cut it.

Ever heard of the game notpron? Complete the positive levels and you will understand Alternatively, you could look at a spoiler site, I expect they will include the reason for it

Not only that, it's highly difficult to implement without requiring the user to control something with their mouth or third arm. There's no other way that I see if having decent control (or at least, control such that we have it in computer games at the moment) over both body/arms and head.

Yeah, I know - you keep posting news items about them It was more a plea to other people around here. To Obscurus + his camp - I don't think there'll be anything to stop you or others making a realistic world, which is the beauty of TDM being a toolkit... We're not talking a one-size-fits all game, here. In the end, TDM could end up with its own worlds being spawned, each with its own backstory, FMs and gameplay mechanics. I, too, would like to try out the realistic side of thief (with the lockpicking, etc) but something as amazing as rope arrows cannot be left out entirely.

In real life, it's very easy to get a good idea of how well hidden you are. You can glance down at your body to see whether it's dark, you can glance at the wall behind you to see what colour it is in relation to yourself, and you know, having espied a patch of shadow on the wall from down the corridor, that you will fit into it, because you know how big you are. In-game, you have no such method of glancing - there's no way of knowing how shadowed your whole body is, without flicking the mouse downward - a movement that is FAR more cumbersome than looking down, and makes movement more difficult, too. Likewise it is impossible to glance to either side to check the wall you're hiding against is a similar colour to yourself, and if you see a spot of shadow you have no way of knowing whether it's big enough because you have no feedback from your muscles telling you where your limbs are. This is the one big reason in favour of third person for games - because in real life, other than the fact that you can't see the back of your head, you have a very similar view of the world - a view to the side more like 180°, the ability to look around you without impeding movement, peripheral vision (and being able to swiftly look in the direction of movement detected,) sense of your own body and so on. Hopefully I've conveyed why things like the lightgem are useful - your hands after all are not the only bits of you that are illuminated, and with a straight-ahead view you need to take for spying enemies and loot, you can't see anything else of you. While I'm an advocate of trying out sillhouetting, I wouldn't tout it as something huge... It could be a massive flop, making hiding too difficult and gameplay near impossible. Of course, it could heighten realism and make for a far better experience, but that remains to be seen. One thing that would be necessary to make it work is, as you say, sillhouette-minimising features, such as going prone to crawl across open spaces... I can imagine that being SO immersive - if you try it standing up you're spotted immediately, but going in on belly... bam! Wall flattening, too - it would be far better if more realistic.

I think the saying is "simple things amuse simple minds" Anyways, yeah - that's what ALT tags are good for. Woo. Any idea what's going on with those gaps? They're there in mozilla, too.

Yeah, like I said - alt tags are kind of a minor issue. Nonetheless, they're handy in certain situations... I think they are, anyway! I dunno, properties page for the image or something like that. Personally, if it wasn't much hassle, I'd fill out the alt tags anyway, even if it was just with the filename of the image That's what I do with my own gallery script, although in the future I may decide to do something fancier, using a database or some such nonsense. At the moment, there's no provision for image titles or descriptions, though. By the way, oDD, I'm not sure it does come out correctly in firefox. Look at this screenshot I took after hitting Ctrl-A: http://www.fishface.g.la/gallery.php?img=pixelwerks.png (taken in Firefox 1.0.2, Gecko/20050524) The gap in the menu is visible, too... Oh, you also get dithering artifacts when you hover... Not sure that that was intentional.

(have read most but not all) One thing I'd like to see in the way of lighting, as well as portable torches, would be some kind of tinderbox. I know a lighter has been mentioned, but a tinderbox is a nicer idea, or something suitably anachronistic - just not something plastic or shiny metal. I was most dissatisfied with the method of lighting torches with a fire arrow - it's just too noisy for such little gain. If a tinderbox is too normal, then how about something similar to the "firemetal" sold on thinkgeek? It's a rod of what looks like carbon, but when you move a metal blade, key or something down it, 3,000° sparks fly off it, so it's somewhat more high-tech. Setting people on fire would be useful, too. I hated in TDS where you could set the oil on fire, but when people walked into it they tended to go "uhhh" and fall over - they didn't scream, or dance around or anything similar, and it was altogether crappy. Fires as distractions... That's very tricky. Obviously a fire arrow let off inside an old building would ignite at the very least the carpet, any curtains and if given half a chance, the entire structure. This would not be good for gameplay AT ALL, except in the freedoms sense. The only way I can envisage this being successful is if some sort of fire service were available wherever it were possible, whereby anyone doing this carelessly would find the mission overrun with servicemen and extra guards to catch you.... Probably wouldn't work. Vine arrows... DON'T TAKE MAH VINE ARROWS! People complained so bitterly when they were removed from thief, and with good reason. Nothing was like being able to espy a route up a wall because there was a wooden ledge - freedom abound, and it wasn't as stilted as the "secrets" in Thief 3. Which didn't feel like freedom - they felt like easter eggs. I don't support the one-shot job, either... They felt like tools more then expendables. Like a grappling hook. As for climbing gloves... I'm not sure about slowing them down. What I do favour is ceasing this ludicrous four-directional movement. The obvious (to me) and cool (to me) way of handling it would be for the camera to rotate to look upwards. You should then be able to look in the direction you wish to go, and move similarly to on the ground, except you'd have to do the slow-turning movements, because insta-rotate wouldn't work whilst on the wall. Might need to constrain turning to pointing mostly up, but I think the lack of control you had in TDS was ridiculous. EDIT: (after back from work!) Hmms, other things on lighting... (This has sort of turned into another requests thread... you poor guys) I'd like to see candles more easily put out. Just for kicks, for example, shooting them with enough force to make them move quickly should snuff 'em. This would be especially useful with those big chandeliers - the discerning thief need only knock the frame with enough force, and there we have it. One fewer water arrow wasted Eh, I was sure I was going to say something else. Can't have been important, though.

In terms of feasibility, it would perhaps be possible to have a ring around the gem, and the lightness at each point determines how easy it would be to spot you from that direction. Realistically you'd only need 4 to 8 values on the ring to get a good idea, but nonetheless it'd likely be expensive.. hmm. Obviously, it would be utterly impossible to compute for every possible facing angle... But I wonder whether it would even be necessary to compute an individual map for each AI... Would it not be enough to just have 8 maps and use the nearest one? Anyway, returning to the lightgem part, the real problem is whether it would be good for gameplay. IRL, you'd glance behind you to determine whether you were sillhouetted. In game, would this be possible, or as "good?"

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&ur...lwerks.l2p.net/ So, invalid - most of it is actually missing ALT tags for your images, which aren't so critical but should be included anyway. The biggies are "topmargin" and "leftmargin" and so on, I don't know enough HTML to know what's going on there.

Mmm, purdy site, oDD. Only thing I'd say is that I'm not too fond of JS menus... They feel kind of uncontrollable, and not as tactile as other ways of navigating. Nonetheless, I like the rollovers. By the way, whoever complained about rollovers - you can disable them, at least in Firefox. Go to preferences, web features and under the javascript, "Advanced" menu, you can disable certain annoying things. Personally, I leave that option on, as buttons that use the rollover feature can be helpful as a GUI feature. Anyways, anyone who think that IE is as good as or better than Firefox/Opera, needs to rescrew their head on. First off, I personally find tabbed browsing essential. Cluttering up the UI? How about cluttering the desktop and taskbar? I currently have open 9 tabs. Tabs allow me to open a bunch of links at the same time, then read them all at my leisure. I can keep other stuff open without having to clutter things up, and better yet, with an extension or two, I can control exactly what happens when I load tabs and so on. I don't get things obscuring what I'm reading unless I ask them to, for example. Customisability is better than IE with extensions - most things you might not like can be fixed. Google search bar makes searching a tad quicker, and keyword bookmarks are fantastic. For example, I have one set for wikipedia: "wiki %s" translates to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s." Other obvious choices are for dictionary.com, image search and suchlike. I don't know whether IE has a bookmark toolbar, but that's handy, too - you can set folders for bookmarks to appear below the addressbar. Web developer extension is VERY useful to web developers (surprise) shortcuts to W3C validators, a CSS editor, window resizer, and all sorts. Well, whatever. Firefox/Opera - they rock. IE sucks, with all its rendering issues and insecurities included, as well as its inexcusable lack of features. Like PNG support. I'll cease my advert here.

Gack... No booleans/lathes/sweeps? They're part of a staple modeller diet! Blender has them, though, and I can't imagine the first two being incredibly difficult to implement. The trick with the second is implementing it for curves with different resolutions, which blender doesn't handle.

Yes, they were quite basic. For example, they'd always flop off you IIRC, you couldn't hold them out, as if they had 0 friction.

That's true. If you need a curtain to waft, just give it a wafty animation in the correct direction... Would actually be quite atmospheric if you pulled it off well. That said, wafty curtains in Splinter Cell were one of the grooviest pieces of eye candy ever...

After all this raving about Wings, I guess I shall have to give it a bash...

In the end, you're not going to need much in the way of dynamic cloth - the only time it could be useful would be for ragdoll and such. Since everything else (?) will be in animations, as long as the cloth movement is in the animation, it'll look fine. That's unless you want to add wind effects and so on!

Logic does not always follow, though, does it? I'm not particularly uptodate with vB/IPD dispute, but IIRC, vB has always been slower for me than IPD. I'd also like to know what's wrong with phpBB? I'm by no means an expert, but it's seemed pretty good, and user extensible...