thestemmer

In regards to the question about the kitchen, couldn't you get the same effect as this by making it so the kitchen is associated ambient noise, similar to a generator? So some player sounds would be masked?

Just wanted to throw my support behind this idea. It would be a lot of fun, too, if you didn't start the player out with a lantern. Make them search around in the mission for a torch, and force them to set it down somewhere if they have to do something delicate (pick a lock, climb a ledge, etc). You could create some interesting puzzles about getting a lit torch from Point A to Point B to cross the room full of zombies. Does anyone know if, realistically, a torch would go out if you drop it? I imagine it wouldn't, since it's basically a rag soaked with flammable liquid.

Oh, it's certainly a balancing act. Particularly in areas with lots of guards, you want to ensure that they're behaving with some regularity. They need to know how much time they have to lockpick a door before the next guard comes around, when it's safe to dart past a well-lighted area, etc. Otherwise it becomes just a game of trial-and-error. But it's also good to throw in a few 'reflex' situations where the player is forced to think on his toes. You could have a guard in the next room declare that he's hungry and is going to grab a bite to eat from the pantry, or some kind of key event trigger an alarm that puts all the guards into alert mode. There's a few guidelines that I think it's good for mappers to follow for triggered events: -If a guard is going to behave erratically, make sure he's alone: unpredictable behavior is fine, but if there's a lot of them and you can't keep track of what any one of them are doing at any given time, keep it to a minimum. It makes sense too -- if a guard is alone he's going to slack off more, but in a group he's probably going to patrol with more vigor. -Changes to patrol routes should be non-arbitrary: it's bad form to stick a bunch of guards at your escape route if you've just grabbed St. Antonius' McGuffin off the pedestal but nobody has seen yet that it's gone. -Give the player time to react to triggered events: since this is a stealth game, the player should usually have a reasonable amount of time to be able to hide when guards change their patrols. This means tipping the player off with visual or auditory clues. -Failure to react to unexpected triggered events should not fail the mission: Many players don't like reloading saves a lot, if you put a trigger in your mission that sets off an alarm and the player fails to hide in time, don't punish the player by killing him. Always leave an escape route in case the player screws up a triggered event. -Chase situations are fun, but if you force the player to fight during a triggered event, force him to fight one enemy at a time. I'm actually a big fan of 'triggered' events in a mission, particularly ones that occur toward the end of the level. Once you've scouted out the level and know the lay of the land, it becomes much more fun to deal with an unexpected event. If you have to run you know the best routes and hiding spaces and it can lead to a very dramatic escape. Just make sure the player has had time to grab the loot they need before making him make a getaway A few of the Thief II levels had chase situations -- there was "Ambush!" and at the end of "Framed", where it's suddenly revealed that the person you were trying to blackmail was murdered and you have to make an escape. And of course there was the part of "Trail of Blood" where you're ambushed by the Treebeasts...I don't think I've ever run so fast in a video game in my life. I knew that something was up, but I had no idea what until something whacked me on the back of the head and shook my screen all over the place. Anyway, the point is I think that reflex situations can be great in stealth games like Thief as long as the mapper puts a lot of thought into them. Which, of course, demagogue did for this mission

Interesting...so once I unlocked both doors to the house, the guard might have have considered it to be the quickest way to his destination? If it isn't a bug, it's a feature for sure. More mappers should change up the patrol routes of guards after key events -- planning your approach and sneaking around is all well and good, but it's having to react quickly when something unexpected happens that really elevates the classic Thief gameplay for me. That bit with was a great example of this, I really appreciated the thought that went into it.

So is a there supposed to be

Just finished this mission yesterday. Definitely the best out of all the FMs I've played so far. Story was great, architecture was interesting and there was plenty of climbing to be done. Also, the mission was *dark*, in both senses of the word. Some FMs I play seem to turn the ambient light up too high or something, so I can never feel like I'm actually hidden when I'm in the shadows. Loot was logically placed and the patrol routes were long enough that you don't feel like the NPCs are automations going around a go-kart track. In the end, I beat Soren senseless and stuffed him in his own

I thought this was a very well-constructed little mission. The use of light and shadow, as other people have noted, is great -- in the thief's layer by the gambling table, was it intentional that you sneak by the two guards using the shadow cast by one of the guards standing in front of his torch? I thought that was really cool. At one point, there was a candle sitting in an inconvenient place, so I shot it with an arrow to knock it out of the way. Physics are fun! One of the guards got a little suspicious and started looking around where the arrow had landed, so I availed myself of the opportunity to rob the chest he had been guarding previously Only one minor criticism -- there was one guard walking endlessly around a pillar in the back room, over and over and over again. Was he supposed to do that? I tend not to like guards with really short patrol routes, it's very gamey and immersion-breaking for me.

Two words: Dwarf Fortress.

I agree with you that Hollywood doesn't do good movie trailers anymore, but I think if they're done right, they can be exciting and stimulate a lot of interest in the product. Check out this one from 1979: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oYNvmNZP2o Hands-down best trailer I've ever seen. To be fair, the movie only became a Hollywood blockbuster by accident, really it was more of a B-monster movie crossed with an oddball art film. But it was the advertising campaign that really made it successful.

I remember exactly that section you're talking about. You're in a little helicopter pad without much room to maneuver, and you have to fight several waves of guys. I tried doing it the sneaky way for like a half-hour but kept getting surrounded. But then I remembered I had some rockets left, and I ended up just blowing up the copter and watching the bodies fall out like candy from a pinata . Far Cry AI was nice but had a few rough spots. One the one hand, I liked how the enemies liked to flank you, and the fact that they were proactive about investigating suspicious activity. It encouraged you to use a lot of attack-and-retreat skirmishing type tactics. On the other hand, sometimes they were a little *too* proactive. One time I shot a guy from behind a rock. The noise alerted the guy across the road, and he went over to investigate. He stopped at the body, I shot him, another guy heard the noise...you get the picture. By the end I had about 20 bodies piled up in the same 10-foot radius. That's a problem I've seen in a lot of computer games, AI never seems to have any way of flagging an area as "dangerous" and seeking an alternate route. The other problem was that AI never seemed to run away and look for help, no matter what they odds. So it's a mixed bag.

WARNING: EXTRA LONG (but thoughtful) POST AHEAD I don't normally post on political topics in forums, but seeing as this is a topic that touches me (I'm a student in at college in Boston, but I grew up in Philly, and went to public school there), I feel inclined to say something. Maximus in not exaggerating. Everything he says about the public school system here and the conditions of the neighborhoods they're in is, for the most part, accurate. Gangs, violence, schools that are falling apart, fifteen-year-old text books, the works. I'm pretty sure I remember a globe with the of the Ottoman Empire marked off on it in one of the classrooms. The teachers are, at best, tired and burnt-out, underpaid and extremely cynical about the situation. It's all completely borked. I did survive the public school system, but only for a few reasons. First of all, Philadelphia has a system in which students with good grades can apply to get into more exclusive magnet schools. It's a terrible system that whisks all of the bright minds away and leaves the neighborhood schools to deal with the dregs, but at least it saves those few from being swallowed up my the insanity. I had the luck to get into one of these schools, but I'm sure there were dozens of equally qualified cantidates that could have took my place. It's all a crapshoot. At the magnet schools, you at least have a chance to survive, since the people around you are hand-picked to be good risks for the school. It's a discriminatory system that favors those who come from families with a reasonable level of education and income, and tends to have the side-effect of sorting people by race, but it works, sort of. The magnet schools are much safer, have less problems with drugs and violence, and the level of education sometimes approaches acceptable. They're kept afloat by alumni endowments, which ensures that they don't fall into the same level of disrepair as the other schools. The problem is that for the students going there, this creates the illusion of a working public-education system, when in reality all that has been done is educate small percentage of the students and leave the rest to the wolves. These schools are being supported by private funds, because the government refuses to pony up enough cash to improve the school system as a whole. It's a stop-gap solution, ensuring that the best and brightest can make it out alive while the whole system collapses around them. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, public schools have more money than they know what to do with. I have a friend who lives out near Allentown, an hour or so drive from Philadelphia, and he went to a public high school that had more money than they knew what to do with. Every time they found themselves sitting on a new mountain of dollar bills, they would just build a new athletic field, or a computer lab. What's the reason for this huge amount of disparity? Well, first of all, the funding for education in this country is tied to property tax values. Property taxes! Can you think of a stupider way to fund education? So the schools in poor areas that need it most get the least money, and the ones in rich areas that need it the least get the most. The government is supposed to help balance the situation by subsidizing schools in poor areas, but it's never enough. Education is a public service, and the money that people put into it doesn't go directly back into their own pockets, so it never gets enough funding. Now, I don't have the amount of scope that some of you people have, so I'm not used to thinking up problems for geopolitical problems, but I think that one thing this country needs is FLAT FUNDING for education. That means that funding for public schools is no longer tied to property values, but instead every school gets the same amount of money per student. The way, if education is underfunded, EVERYBODY knows about it since every person would have to deal with it. That would certainly exert enough political pressure to get the government to fund education at a reasonable level, and it would ultimately improve the school system in this country. It certainly wouldn't solve all of the problems with poverty, violence etc. that we have been discussing, but it would certainly go a long way toward alleviating them. 'course, the problem would be to actually get people to swallow the idea that the central government should dole out the money to all of their schools. Given the extreme paranoia of centralized government ANYTHING in this country, I'm not sure I could see it happening without a massive political movement.

Interestingly, the commercial release of Penumbra seems to have exactly the kind of checkpoint-save system you guys have been talking about: Penumbra Review. The reviewer seemed quite baffled by it. In any case, I have to agree with Orbweaver on this issue. Given the technical limitations of computers and people's time, it's just needlessly inconsiderate to players to limit their saves, especially those with low-end PCs. When my girlfriend plays Oblivion on her aging desktop, she usually saves every five minutes or so -- not because she likes to "cheat" but because the game is prone to crashing at random times. Even if TDM is well-coded and generally stable, there's no way of ensuring that it will be stable on every system. You also have to consider the fact that PCs aren't just gaming systems, they're also workstations -- which means you're constantly opening and closing things and doing other things besides gaming. Save point systems might be OK for console games, where you can just pause it if you need to do something else, but with a PC you can't just do that -- maybe you suddenly realize you need to write up a document, or use the internet, or do some 3d animation or whatever. You can't just alt-tab out of most new games without causing them to crash.

While we're on the subject, how are moss arrows going to be implemented? I did a search on the subject and nothing came up. I always thought that it was kind of stupid that a guard wouldn't notice a newly grown patch of moss under his feet, especially when it was in the middle of a bank. Are there any plans to change the way they work?

I'd assume that they'd have some kind of long stick with which to mount the torches. Maybe electric lights would be better, though.

Hey, that's not quite fair -- Oblivion does have a built in mod manager, it's just that the user-made one has more functionality -- like having different mods for different save games. Judging from the number of mods out there, I'd say that Bethesda did a pretty good job making it mod-accessible. They should get credit at least for not including any ugly copy protection software, although that should be a given.

There's actually a tool for Oblivion called the Oblivion Mod Manager that makes installing new mods a snap. Basically you just drag some files into the right directory, and the mod manager lets you choose which ones you want to run. If you end up not liking one, it's as easy as unticking a check box.

Domarius: take a look at this mod for Oblivion: Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul It's a mod for Oblivion that makes it so enemies are no longer scaled to your level. It improves that value of the game immensely, and it's also very well-balanced. I wouldn't play without it. If you're interested in a few other mods that will vastly improve your Oblivion playing experience, PM me and I'll send you a list.

There are mods that make it both more difficult to sneak and more difficult to pick locks, if you're interested. There's one particularly good one called "more realistic sneaking" that makes your sneaking skill much more dependant on the amount of light in the area. There's another one that makes harder locks unpickable until you get to a certain skill level. Personally I think the biggest AI limitation in Oblivion is the fact that guards don't respond to environmental stimuli very well. They'll go ballistic if they notice you sneaking around the castle armory, but if they come into a room and you're standing over the dead body of the countess, they'll fuss a little bit but won't go after you unless they actually saw you commit the crime. I saw one hilarous situation where somebody filled the guard's food box with poison apples. At mealtime, the guards would take an apple from the box, take a few bites out of it, and then keel over dead (the ragdoll physics were great for this, by the way -- there's nothing funnier than seeing a guard's head roll sideways as he dies sitting in his chair, or his body fall backwards as he expires on a bench). Anyway, she proceeded to wipe out pretty much the entire garrison in this way. Every time a guard would die, she would throw their body on a pile in the middle of the floor. When the guards came in, they would complain about it for a second or two, and then get distracted and go eat another apple. By the end, you could barely walk on the floor for all the bodies. And all of this with her character just sitting and watching, dressed up in full ninja regalia, not looking suspicious at all.

Somebody else has heard of Realmz? I thought that I had hallucinated it. Seriously, though, I've only played the demo version. Seemed pretty neat. From what I hear it's similar to a series of games called "exile" or somesuch. Damn, this has me thinking back to all of my favorite old shareware games. Anybody heard of God of Thunder? Raptor? Zone 66? Tank Wars, Bot, Solar Winds (pretty buggy that one), Jetpack, or Battle Chess (don't think that was shareware, actually)? How about Android pinball?

*cough cough* Iraq *cough* Egypt *cough* Israel *cough* Yeah, in the Middle East at least, the British were pretty much royal fuckups wherever they operated. Out of all of the British mandate states, Jordon is the only really sucessful one I can think of (maybe some of the smaller gulf states too, I don't know much about them). And the only reason that Jordon was able to thrive was that it was small, thinly populated, and had very capable leaders. And let's not even go into the British policies in Africa. Disgusting.

I take it you have some experience with this subject, Ishtvan?

They've been talking about this for years. I'll believe it when I (don't) see it.

In case anyone here missed it, here is a great interview with the developer of the game. At the very least, it's definitely the most literate game interview I've read in a long time. The team really seems to have a vision, and I like the direction they're taking with it. But System Shock 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, so maybe I'm biased

I'm sorry, you're right about that, ladders would be harder. I was mostly thinking about the carrying functionality, where you would just have to disable the key for shouldering. Incidentally, many RTS games do give mission-makers the ability to alter unit stats and tech trees. Do most people do it? No. Do some people? Yes. It's good that it's there just in case people do want to fiddle around with it. I've seen it put to good use many times in fan missions. Of course I agree that a game has to have some kind of overarching structure, and that the rules shouldn't change arbitrarily. If I were making a game with a series of different missions, it wouldn't make sense to have gameplay mechanics that change arbitrarily from mission to mission. But in the case of the Dark Mod, which is first and foremost a toolset, most fan missions are going to be pretty much self-contained. If a FM author wants to switch up the rules for their particular map, I say let them. And let them do it without having to go to the extra work of plumbing through lots of unfamiliar code. But it's not my mod, so if you think continuity is more important, so be it