obscurus

Or do people use quicksaves simply because the designer put it there? I found Splinter Cell (XBox version) to be reasonably enjoyable, although overly linear, but I particulary liked how the save game system was implemented - there were about three save locations per mission (and they were optional, too, you could choose not to save at that point), which could be triggered only once in the mission, and you had three save slots available. It also saved at the start of each mission, so you could go back and restart if you really botched it. Now, perhaps some players found that restrictive, but I don't really think it was unreasonable at all. There was a good balance between the amount of game you had to replay if you stuffed up, and they were placed intelligently, in a way that made you worry about being killed. Yes I may be coming across as elitist, but so what if I am? Would you rather have mediocre soldiers protecting your country, or elite ones? Who wins all the medals in sporting events? That's right. the elite athletes. I want to make games that are l33t, not mediocre, and unlimited saves and quicksaves are a crutch for the lame, and games that have them have dipped their toes in the pool of mediocrity IMO. But I'm just an elitist, opinionated, facist bastard spouting off...

Very true, but nevertheless, the game is designed in a way that encourages frequent saving, and providing the facility to do so means most people will inevitably overuse it. Doom 3 has autosaves and checkpoints, personally I find that to be sufficient, and I don't touch the quicksave at all (and I unbind the keys in case the temptation becomes to much for me)... It has already been discussed why overuse of saves is equivalent to cheating. But if you are not saving fequently, you will be more inclined to play like a thief, because death in the game has more significant consequences, which also enhances the tension in the game, which keeps you in the game. Of course, dying will naturally 'take you out of the game', regardless of how often you save, but having to replay whole sections is a big incentive for avoiding death. I'm not telling other people how to play the game per se, I'm rather telling them how not to play the game. There is a slight but important difference there. A game designer has every right to include or exclude features as they see fit (so fair enough if the Darkmod team wants to include all of the save options under the sun, that is up to them), and anything a game designer makes is inherently giving the player of that game the freedoms and restrictions of their choice, not the players. AndI do agree that it is better to have a feature and not use it than to not have that feature and wish you could, but I for one expect players of my FMs to play by the rules I make, if they don't like it, they can turn the cheats on or not play it at all While this of course is absolutely true, if the temptation is there, people may not be able to control themselves, and therefore inadvertently deny themselves the experience that was intended for them by the game author. I suppose you can counter that I am an unpopulist facist bastard, and that if players of games want to have a different experience to that which the author intended, that is their perogative and fuck the game designer. To which I counter, just limit saves by default, so people can try it the right way first, then if they don't like it, let them say "up yours" to the game designer and enable the features that make the game easier, or to their own preference...

Quicksaves are the order of the day for games like Doom 3, because your chances of being killed in game are dramatically higher than in Thief (if you are playing it properly). In Thief, the objective is to remain undetected by the AI, and in the event you are detected, you can usually run away and hide somewhere until the AI gives up looking for you. So unless you do something really stupid, or the game crashes, you should be able to get by without much saving. In a game like D3, you cannot really run or hide, and you are likely to die several times in the game... I don't think you need many options for saving in a stealth game. In my opinion, unlimited saves are the worst thing that ever happened to computer games in general - it became about saving your way through the game instead of playing your way through the game. While I am generally in favour of freedom of choice and options, I think unlimited saves and quicksaves are just unnecessary and bad for proper gameplay, and should be removed from the pool of options... Taking out quicksaves etc is not to make the game more difficult or to annoy people; it is to stop players from cheating and making the game easier than it was meant to be. You don't have god mode switched on by default, because you want people to "be" in the game, not walking through it like a spectator, and every time the player saves, they go "out" of the game for a second, instead of thinking about how they are going to stay alive in the game. And a good game should be so immersive that the player doesn't even think about saving anyway... (it also should never crash though, so you still need some kind of savegame feature)..

Well, I was thinking along the lines of something where the player can safely walk the streets throughout the game, as long as they don't get caught doing anything naughty and unlawful, although guards will be suspicous of your appearance, and if you stay in their view too long, they will come and check you out. But as soon as the player strays off the streets and onto the rooftops, into buildings etc, they are fair game... And I am planning to have levels where there are no, or very few, fake doors - every door in the game can be opened, but you have to find keys for a lot of them, coz the lockpicks won't work on all of them. And load zones would help by letting me finish one section of the city at a time, so people can see what I'm up to, and give me feedback etc before I start working on other parts of the city. The aim is that you will be able to trek for miles across the city, but it will be worthwhile because you can indulge in thiefy action just about anywhere, and you wont be forced to start a mission at one end of the city and then go back to the other when you have finished. I might find that I have to scale down the size of the map(s) in favour of detail though, so it might end up being smaller than I want, we will see.... Detail always wins out for me over size...

I figure by the time I finish, computers with 2 - 4 GB of ram will be commonplace... It probably isn't feasible to build as one single map, which is why I am interested in loading zones and hubs...

Two way load zones? So if you go to one map, you can return to the previous one and everything you had changed in that map remained changed? I hope what I am asking here is clear...

So it can be done then? Will DarkMod suport this? I guess I want a combination of Hubs and Loading zones. Do you have a rough idea of how large a level can be in terms of game world units (I am NOT talking about poly counts here)? How big is the player in terms of the maximum dimensions of the map? I want to be able to make very, very large city type maps, and I would prefer to keep loading times down, but still not have too many loading zones. The city in TDS was like a little village, I want to make something at least 4 times the size of the city sections in T2, with non-linear gameplay, with lots of little stories rather than one big one like T1/2/3. not so much individual missions, more giving the player the choice of what to rob, and can rob places repeatedly (and each time things change as you would expect for a place that has been burglarised a few times...), until the owner runs out of cash and abandons the joint... Yes, I know this will take me forever to map :lol:

Have you guys seen this mod? Excomunicated Slightly simliar theme to DarkMod, but more mediaeval than Victorian. Maybe there could be some sharing of resources between the two mods...? Do you (the development team) check out other peoples work, or are you mostly working off your own ideas? Looks quite interesting, although I think DarkMod has more to offer stealth officionados like me...

I have mainly made maps for Unreal engine games, and one of the features that Unreal engines make easy is having maps with multiple paths to other maps. As Doom 3 is quite new to me, what I want to know is, how easy is this to do with D3/DarkMod? Let me illustrate by way of example: say I want to have a level that has three alternative paths out of the level, leading to three utterly different maps, with branching paths, which might connect up again later in the game. Ideally, the player should be able to go back and forward between levels, much like the City section in TDS or much of Deus Ex. In Unreal engine, this works using teleporters placed at the transition points of all the levels, and for some games, a somewhat complicated system for keeping track of what happens in all the connected levels so they aren't reset each time you enter them. How would you do this in the DarkMod, assuming the D3 engine permits it? The reason I ask is that I want to build a whole bunhc of interconnected levels as part of a highly non-linear game, with multiple alternate endings, and multiple ways of progressing through the game, and I'd like to know if I'll be able to do it (I've been working out this game on paper for ages now, hope the time is getting near that I'll have an engine capable of doing what I need).

I think Hylix made a pretty good case for why that should be a few posts above. PC games are by nature much more likely to be buggy and or crash than console games. I don't mind losing some time if I manage to get the character killed, but losing a lot of time because the game crashed, or a bug made it unplayable, is just silly. You can't see a crash coming and auto-save the game before it "exits," because a crash is usually not a controlled exit, the program just stops at whatever section of code it was supposed to be executing. Aside from crashing, there are a bunch of annoying bug possibilities, such as getting stuck. How many times did you get stuck in TDS or T2X even? It happened to me a helluvalot, because I like to explore and find good hiding spots, which often results in getting irreversibly wedged into geometry, and having to reload from a save. Should I be thinking "Well I'd better not try to hide in that corner between those boxes, because I'll probably get stuck and I haven't reached a save point yet!" How does that help gameplay? That doesn't make the case for unlimited saves, merely that more than one is desirable. If you can make the case that you need more than two per level (three at the absolute most), even for a very buggy and difficult game, then I'd like to see it... If you have two saves, and one turns out to be a dud because of some glitch or a really stupid error, you have another one to fall back on, in the unlikely event that also fails you can restart the level... I really don't see the problem. If you have a campaign with 14 missions, 14 save slots - 1 per mission - plus one extra in mission save should be sufficient. If you are not using autosaves or checkpoints, then the case for more than even one save slot is weak, because the player can choose to save at a safe point in the game, and is not subject to running through asave point with 15 guards running behind them, and not being able to use that save... I did find TDS could be a bit buggy when saving, sometimes I would save by overwriting the previous save, and the game would crash, losing the save in the process, so I used two saves throughout, deleting the oldest save every time I saved... 2 save slots would have been more than enough.

It is all relative Sparhawk, sorry if I sounded so absolute! All of the levels in TDS are pretty linear, in that they all have a single beginning and an end, and fairly restrictive options for the order of completing certain objectives, and so is Shalebridge Cradle (looking back at my post, I obviously overstated it quite a bit ), but it has enough running around backwards and forwards and enough variables to appear relatively non linear in comparison with some of the other levels... I would hardly call the level of linearity in the City levels of TDS extreme, as you do have the option of running around the city (between missions) in no particular order, and you can chose to do some missions in different orders (eg Pagan Tunnels/Hammerite Factory). That is a lot less linear than most FPS or platform-type games, which would lie at the extreme end of the spectrum. And it is hardly any more linear than the Cradle... I don't know how extensively you have played TDS (I kinda get the impression, correct me if I'm wrong, that you really didn't like TDS very much), but there are a number of little side quests in the City that are entirely optional, and can be done in no particular order, and that is just enough to scrape into the slightly non-linear category in my book. Fair enough, it is still very linear, as is the game as a whole, but I was talking about it in the context of being relatively less linear than say Doom 3, but more linear than say Morrowind. The idea in TDS was that on a particular day of the game, you could do things in a slightly non-linear way, but as each day passed (a fairly reasonable form of linearity), events changed the game world. A non-linear game does not necessarily mean that you can go back to every level, or do every level in random order, because time itself is linear (at least it appears that way to most people) - even a non linear game with branching storylines will still have story lines that will result in events in the game permanently altering the game world. And there is nothing wrong with a bit of linearity anyway, it helps drive a story along, and bring a game to a conclusion. I personally would have liked it more if the whole city was 15 times larger, and you could access most of it from the beginning, and you could do most of the missions in any order, but it would have been at the expense of the story in TDS unfolding as it was. True non-linearity means that there is no one story path, which means a game will become vastly more complex to make as linearity decreases, which is the main reason so many games are very, very linear. That was the worst thing about Splinter Cell - it was so linear it was little more than a slightly interactive movie broken up by occasional stealth gameplay... I say this because I am one of the few who does not think restricting saves should be optional, but rather compulsory - just like you shouldn't sell alcohol to alcoholics, you shouldn't allow players of stealth games to have unlimited saves. I am well aware that it has been mentioned hundreds of times that people want this to be optional, but I have resigned myself to the fact that I am in the extreme minority in wanting it to be otherwise... Im not trying to misrepresent anyone here by suggesting that anyone else wants this though, sorry if it looks that way

Why thank you, Hylix I didn't mean to suggest that Thief 1/2/3 were linear in the sense of individual levels (obviously, some levels are very non-linear, the Shalebridge Cradle being a particularly good example), just that the games as a whole are linear, in that you progress from level one through to two and so on... Whereas some games are non-linear to the extent that there are different endings, and you can "complete" the game without actually seeing the whole game world, to a much greater extent than in Thief. So no, Thief is not particularly linear on a level by level basis, but in terms of overall story, the players actions don't affect the final outcome that much so in that sense it is pretty linear. I actually thought TDS was considerably less linear than the first two in the series, because you could do things early in the game that affected things later down the track (they were subtle and not significant to the final outcome though), and the City sections made for some very non-linear gameplay... Console games can be linear, or not, it is nothing in particular to do with any hardware limitation: Both Thief DS and Deus Ex 2 are on XBox, and there are a few RPG titles available for consoles that are not particularly linear. I am not trying to sound boastful or that I am super-skilled etc, and I recognise the need for save games as a failsafe against bugs, crashes etc, but my point is that the experience you get by relying on save games as a crutch to get through the level is different to that of just scraping through by the skin of your teeth, accepting the chips where they fall, using saves very sparingly. OK, a lot of players like to save frequently (and if I find a game boring or uninteresting I will often use lots of saves or god mode to see if the game is going to get any better), but when you use save games to reload because you are just playing recklessly, I just don't think it is in the spirit of the game... I just think save games should ideally be for one purpose only: to load the game from where you left off when you exited to windows to do something else, not a tool to make gameplay easier, and I would prefer it if the mod was set up to discourage excessive saving - the best way I feel is to simply restrict the number of save slots, and the frequency with which they can be used. Not to be a fascist bastard, but so that people can really see what it is meant to be like - the tension and suspense is amplified greatly when you have to make each move in a carefully measured, calculated way... But since everyone else except Domarius seems to hate the idea of restricting saves in any way, I guess I will just bow to majority rule and say no more on the subject.. Jeez, this thread I started is getting long :lol:

Oh, sorry, I didn't really say it, but my preference would be for something that gives you either a single save on exit, plus either objective-linked autosaves or a save slot or two that restrict you from saving again until a certain amount of time has lapsed (say 15 - 20 minutes). So by limited save I mean number of save slots, as well as some limitation on how frequently you can use those saves.

Thief is still ultimately quite linear, less so than doom, and Half-Life had some puzzle sections that broke up the linearity (and you could seamlessly travel back and forth between a lot of levels). But none of these games engines inherently limit games to linearity - you can quite easily make a level that has two alternative endpoints, resulting in a game with branching storylines (Unreal engines have a 'teleporter' set up that makes it easy to create reticulated, highly non-linear levels, Deus Ex made use of this feature quite markedly). You can also just as easily teleport the player using scripts that don't rely on a specific location in the level to trigger things (could be you killed a Burrick, stole a jewel, whatever). Besides, I still think tying saves to specific objectives is the best option, maybe timed autosaves next. In non linear levels, autosaves would be problematic if done any other way. I still don't see what the problem with limiting saves by default is - have you actually looked at how much hard drive space save games take up in D3? In TDS they were huge, and if you went around saving all the time, your performance could very well suffer if hard drive space got smaller, and save game files got more fragmented... Games only started offering unlimited saves when hard drive sarted getting bigger and cheaper, and I don't think anyone would really suffer if you limited saves to ten or less (Thief 1 & 2 were limited to about 20).

However, you can play Deus Ex in avariety of ways, and it most certainly does affect the outcome of the story - kill one character and different things happen later on in the game, and there are three alternate endings. No reason you can't do that with Thief style game... Uhmm, well, lets see, now how about any of the Quake 2/ Half - Life engine games - you simply put an entity in the map which saves the game when the player intercepts it, and Doom 3 from my cursory observation is no different - it has savepoints in the game, no reason why any mods would be unable to make use of this. Most games have savepoints, and all that have editors for them allow you to create auto save points - Far Cry, Medal Of Honour (Most singleplayer Quake 3 engine games), quite a lot of Unreal engine games... Not all games, not even console games are so predeteermined, quite a few are non-linear, with various paths for the player to chose from... I have never come across a comercially released game that will allow you to irreversibly access part of the level before completing an essential part of the level, thereby forcing you to restart or reload. If you can provide an example of any game where this has occured, write an angry letter to the game designer, because that is one of the biggest no-nos in game design! No level designer worth their salt would make a map that allowed the player to become stuck in this way. A lot of games actually have a variety of fairly contrived means of avoiding this situation (play Half-Life and you'll see what I mean), because it is such a bad design flaw if present in a map. This is all beside the point, as this is a level design issue, and nothing to do with savegames. A level should never be designed in such a way that the player needs to reload, unless they explicitly die or fail the objectives of the map. In your above example, the player should either be reminded to complete other objectives before proceding beyond that point, or there should be another way back up to the attic from the dungeon. That might not be how it could happen in RL, but that is one piece of realism that has no place in a game (this from a diehard realism fanatic!).

Anyone ever play any of those arcade games where if you died near the end of the game, and didn't have any lives left, and no money to continue, it was game over? Nothing like that for incentive to play the game as it was intended... Save games are usually found in abundance on PC games, consoles have always used saves sparingly, but then most consoles are very linear. Regarding save points, in a non-linear mansion (as I've said before), it would probably be better to have saves linked to specific objectives (ie, "find the Ornate Chalice of Doom" - Chalice is frobed, game saves, player can reload with one chunk of the level completed if they need to) rather than particular locations. That makes way more sense to me... And since you need to complete the objective anyway, the incentive to do it for the sake of saving is moot - if you don't like how it went up until then, restart (however it could be frustrating if something bad happens right on that save, like a game bug, and a separate save might be warranted). And many games these days will automatically save when you advance from one level to the next (especially console games). Still, if anyone can give me a good reason why they need more than one (1) save per level[i/], I would like to know what it is... at least with only one save per level, you are still stuck with the consequences of your actions up until that save, which means you can still leave your game to do the weekly shopping and come back to where you left off, but are still encouraged to take the game seriously... I am all for choice and freedom normally, but superfluous savegames to me are a choice that leans towards the same category as enabling god mode or unlimited ammo etc, and so should not be enabled by default.

That's why I like the idea of the game automatically saving when you exit to the main menu or to windows - you can "put the game down" and "pick it up again" as you need to in order to take a break from the game, take the kids to school, hang the wash etc.. But is having more than one save slot per mission really necessary? Playing the game should not be like having multiple system restores in windows or backing up the hard drive... I get your point about players being self disciplined enough not to abuse the save system to make the game easier, and it is something that I am able to do, but I think knowing that there are potentially unlimited snapshots of your game definately detracts from the expereince... for me it detracts from the immersion if I know I can go back to where I was five minutes ago - savegames jack you out of the gameworld. That said, there is a difference between using save games to make the game easier, and using save games to compensate for a buggy game engine that leaves the player stuck or in an impossible situation - an unreliable engine needs savegames for that reason. The corollary to your book analogy is that using savegames can be like skipping ahead a few chapters and then reading up to them, knowing full well what is going to happen - sure you can do it if you want, but you end up with a disjointed experience that is far from what the author intended. As a level designer, I want to give players the incentive to avoid dying and to play the game very carefully and fearfully. They should be afraid of doing something wrong, because it means restarting or playing a large chunk again. For me this makes the game more immersive, because I am thinking about avoiding death and mistakes in the game world, and not about whether or not I should save here or there (an out of game concept). A lot of people might be too impatient for that style of gameplay, but I want those undisciplined savaholics to give it ago (the can say they hate it afterwards), and disabling multiple saves by default is the best way to do that. There is no way anyone can deny that playing a game without saving (apart from saves to do something outside of the game) is a much different experience to playing the game and saving frequently. A game without saves is more tense, careful and dynamic than one where you can simply reload every time you make a little mistake... Playing the game with unlimited saves is like the player having the ability to predict the future, which gives them a huge advantage over the game. Some games are obviously designed with the expectation that the player will be saving and reloading a lot, and it usually means that the game is either too hard, or designed for a target audience of careless, impatient Rambo wannabes. I'm not saying that games with loading screens etc are not immersive, but, it still pulls you back into reality, if only briefly, when one pops up. The original Half-Life was much more immersive than many games because the loading screens only took a second or two (and because the story and environments kept you in the world, more importantly!), and were very inconspicuous. Thief only had loading screens in between the mission, not during it.

Yeah, it could be a bitch if there is only one objective, and it takes six hours to reach it... :lol: But hopefully FM authors have the sense to balance things like this out (assuming they are implemented, of course). A really large, hard map should have more save points, or more objectives (with save on completion) than a small, easy one. I personally like checkpoints, especially if they are done in a way that you don't notice when a checkpoint has been reached - in some games a small drop in framerate and an inconspicuous messages is the only clue you have that an autosave has occured. I would be really happy with not telling the player at all that the game has been saved, keep 'em on their toes I say! I think it is a good thing to give players the message, one way or another, that saving constantly is the same as using god mode or unlimited ammo, and is a form of cheating, and I think the default game setting for FMs should be for restricted saving only (and players have to go to some effort to unlock unlimited saves)...

OK, OK I know that would be a bit hard to animate... Maybe you could have the gaurds hand moved towards the arrow, and the arm would be pulled along using the ragdoll system or inverse kinematics (yeah, I know this would be a load on the CPU and hard to do).... just a wistfull musing....

What about having a save every time an objective is completed? That way you don't have to worry about non-linear level design....

Actually, that brings up another idea - you could frob the arrow out of the guard, causing the guard massive pain and a fair bit of damage in the process, could make for an amusing fight. Oh and realistic blood would be nice, or if it is not realistic, how about Quentin Tarantino - Kill Bill style blood, and have it so the player and any other AI slip over in pools of blood. Are you guys likely to include oil flasks like in TDS?

Some great ideas here, but also some potential difficulties. I really like the idea, from a players perspective, of experimenting with different playstyles, character classes etc, and it would certainly boost the replay value of the game immesurably. Deus Ex did this sort of thing very well. The biggest problem is that it means a hell of a lot more work for the level designer. You have to make sure all of the difficulty settings are their for each guard, item and AI in the level, and you have to playtest the map on all the difficulty settings and playstyles, and tweak the map(s) until the balance is right for each setting, in terms of AI placement, item placement, and whole sections of a map might play well for a sneaksie thief ghosting the map, but could end up being ludicrously easy for a thugish killer type player, and the mapper might need to make major changes to geometry if things aren't working out. As a level designer who can only devote a few hours a week to designing a map, the more options there are, the longer it will take me to build something that works for everyone, but those with more time might not be concerened about that So someone like me (who favours fairly realistic game design and playstyles) will probably make maps that are biased towards ghosters, but can still be finished by more noisy, violent players (but at a cost). I suspect individual level designers, like me, will follow their own biases and prejudices when designing maps, and while I would like to see more RPG elements come into it, the extra workload might turn a lot of designers off... So I think it is probably better to wait for version 1 to be released before experimenting with the complicated stuff... Renaming difficulty levels would be the easy part I imagine...

Actually, that could be kinda funny, having the guard pulling out the arrow, then saying "Uh oh, I don't think I should have done that, (gurgling noises)" then dropping dead from internal injuries caused by removing the arrow... :lol: I may be on the wrong track here, but would it really be much more expensive to bind an arrow object to the gaurd model than having a guard model and an arrow model in the same scene, but not connected? Maybe it is - there are a lot of games out there that claimed they would have this type of feature, but it never made it into the final release... Oh well, woulda looked nice

It is my understanding that Doom 3 does per-pixel collision detection, if so, can the following be done? When shooting an arrow at a guard, the arrow remains embedded in the guard where it hit (maybe there could also be an animation of the guard pulling out the arrow, or even cooler, pulling it out, nocking it in his bow and firing it back at you). Leave wound decals on people who have been injured, such as big bruises on blackjacked AIs (maybe have a normal map for the bruise decal to make a nice big lump), slash marks on sword victims etc. Have blood spurting out of wounds. Leaving every arrow where it lands, even if broken, rather than making them disappear (and maybe using arrows on the ground as an AI suspicion trigger). Is any of this possible? Would it be too much work to implement? Too computationally expensive? What does the team think?

That is a brilliant idea Gildoran, that would work for me (and maybe a few checkpoint saves if necessary). No idea if the D3 engine can do that, but if it can, excellent... Doom 3 has checkpont saves, quicksaves and unlimited saves, which doesn't make for much of a callenge if you abuse them... I think it adds hugely to gameplay if like in RL, you know that a fatal slipup will mean losing everything you have done (wouldn't it be nice to have quicksaves in RL, and every time you made an embarrasing faux pas you could just hit reload..), you play the game in a completely different way - more cautiously and conservatively, the way a thief should be. Well that's my opinon, anyway...