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Gildoran

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Everything posted by Gildoran

  1. To use the example above, the reason you never see a version of Tetris with quicksaving (despite the myriad of variations of it), is because quicksaving would ruin Tetris's core gameplay; that save-methods would have such a huge impact on Tetris's gameplay shows that saving is not a meta-gameplay mechanic.
  2. I'll admit that for some games (such as inventory-puzzle ones), unlimited saves are not cheating. But I strongly hold that saving is not a "meta-gameplay" mechanic, and I refuse to even listen to arguments otherwise until somebody shows me a game of Tetris (with highscores) that allows quicksaving. (it doesn't count if you code it yourself ) I think the game creator (or in the case of TDM, map author) should decide what is or isn't officially considered "cheating". The player should be able to play in any way they want, but if they want rules outside of the range of what the game creator specified as acceptable, they should have to turn on some cheat cvars or modify the assets/code.
  3. I've often wished for an equivalent test for basic statistics and logic. Heh, I tend to believe that the sort of people who regularly purchase lottery tickets or are more afraid of terrorism than car-wrecks/heart-attacks are the sort of people whose judgment isn't sound enough to vote. But I'm skeptical a critical-thought test would work out well... for one thing, how do you test critical-thinking skills while minimizing cultural bias? (a lot of tests use hypothetical situations that are most familiar to one culture) As tempting as it sounds, I suspect such tests would do more harm than good. Religious organizations would post cheat-sheets, so it wouldn't screen out people incapable of logical thought. And I think it would only be a matter of time before such a test was perverted to serve purposes other than testing critical thinking, such as only allowing people with mainstream views to vote, regardless of whether they are capable of critical thought. In America, such a test would soon evolve to exclude anybody who didn't accept god as their savior from voting. Then again, I suspect you might not have been entirely serious when you suggested it... ?
  4. There is nothing wrong with cheating in a single-player game. But that doesn't change the fact that unlimited saves are cheating. Players should be able to access unlimited saves, but only through using a cheat cvar. I can't remember where, but I've already seen entire articles suggesting this approach in MMO design forums. Except, they went even further, suggesting a whole pyramid of different levels: For free, players get a basic MMO hack'n'slash game with collecting items, slaying dragons, going on quests, maybe basic crafting, etc. If they purchase a subscription, they also get to buy and sell tracts of land, construct buildings, craft and sell advanced items, etc. If they purchase a premium subscription, they get to be royalty, and tax the land-owners in their kingdom, or recruit armies, etc. The general idea, was that since a player who wants to be king depends on a large range of other players to be their subjects, they should effectively subsidize the other players' subscriptions as RL payment for them pretending to be mere adventurers/peons. Even an inn-keeper or a blacksmith needs other players to pretend to be clients, so even they should subsidize adventurers' subscriptions to some extent.
  5. I personally would prefer to avoid extensive "scientific" explanations of the undead. At best it just takes the fun and mystery out of things, and at worst the explanations sound unscientific and illogical despite their best attempts. I'm sorry, but I find myself unable to believe chemistry creating sentience, or radiation creating zombies. About the extent of an explanation that I'd want is "the person was cursed or their body was left on tainted land, so they became undead". Also, the sorts of zombies I'd like to see would be nixed by "scientific" explanations such as diseases. Imagine a zombie where you hack it in two, and the legs stumble about while the upper body quickly drags itself towards you (sort of like HL2 zombies), so you blast the torso with a fire-arrow, and body parts go flying in all directions... then you notice the arms are crawling towards you... you step back to buy some time, accidentally stumbling over the twitching head, pull back your bow, and impale one hand with a broadhead, pinning it to the ground. While the one hand continues to writhe in place, you quickly impale the other. Killing such zombies without holy water would be a much more involved (and perhaps gruesome) endeavor than in Thief! NOTE: I'm not suggesting TDM has the kinds of zombies described above - it currently doesn't. I completely agree with Nyarlathotep on vampires. Edit: I could have sworn the infection in "28 days later" was more in a matter of minutes. Remember when that girl's father got a drop of blood in his eye?
  6. I've heard that setting a specular map's hue to the inverse of the diffusemap makes for good liquids such as blood... (I assume because it causes the specular to look more white than red) But I think greyscale specularmaps work fine for most textures.
  7. Sadly I was unable to find a hosted version of Mr. Bunwah's Guide to Achieving a Perfect Single-player score, which was an excellent piece of writing about game design. He even had an article about the evil of ladders and advocated placing a pool of water at the bottom of each ladder lest the player lose their grip (under no circumstances should the mapper try to design a safer, less buggy ladder!). He even went into detail about the physics of why you don't break your ankles when landing in an inch of water: You see, the anti-ions in the player's socks and the water repel each other, resulting in non-linear forces and er, quantum stuff... I don't know how it works, but the moral of the story is that not taking damage when landing in an inch of water is entirely realistic.
  8. I completely agree with ZylonBane on the issue of unavoidable damage. The thing is, you really can't predict what's going to happen to the player - how badly they were hurt, how they re-arranged movable objects, etc. Furthermore, unavoidable damage assumes that the player either has a source of infinite healing (which might make the map too easy, depending on the style), or will only be traversing the jump once (which usually requires linearity). Suggesting that you could design a map well enough that that the player manages to find health potions just when they need them sounds like a lot of hubris to me. (unless you're comfortable with scripting, and want to attempt an auto-balancing map, perhaps) If you want the player to feel like they're taking real risks, I'd suggest another strategy. Perhaps have the primary goals always possible to complete, but also have optional goals that are drastically more risky and dangerous. If the player just wants to beat the level (or got the crap kicked out of them, and is in no condition to continue mucking about), they can complete the minimum objectives, but if they're feeling particularly brave (and healthy), they can take a huge risk and try to sneak through the (heavily patrolled) barracks to steal the captain's jeweled sword. That is a real risk and the result of a real choice the player makes. There's only one case where I might consider unavoidable damage ok: cutscenes. Of course, it shouldn't be possible for the cutscene to kill the player - you'd only want to lower their health if it's above a certain amount.
  9. I think that'd be possible, though it might require SDK changes if you want it to wait for an opportune moment to switch, instead of being somewhat abrupt.
  10. Actually, I would say Japanese is very easy when it comes to pronunciation; it has a very small set of sounds that are used, and each one tends to be distinct, and I think most of its sounds are common to most languages. I've heard that Japanese and Spanish are phonetically very similar. To use a computer analogy, I'd be tempted to equate Chinese or English phonology to CISC processors and Japanese phonology to RISC processors; Japanese has fewer sounds that are used at a higher speed.
  11. Whoops, my mistake. That makes sense, given that D3 has a "r_showSilhouette" debug command. Still, it's harder to explain the silhouette version of the problem with pictures...
  12. @Sparhawk: Ok, here's a picture of what I mean: It depicts the invisible boot of a thief that's walking forward, with the toe clipping into the ground. The clipping is exaggerated in this picture, but usually exists to some extent, and the effect is just as noticeable even if the clipping is minor. As you can clearly see, the ground is not in shadow where the toe clips into it. Doom 3 draws shadows correctly for opaque objects, but you cannot expect it to draw them correctly for invisible objects (which wouldn't make logical sense anyway)
  13. I know how the player shadow works. I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm saying D3 is not designed to have correct shadows cast from invisible objects (which isn't realistic anyway). If you have an invisible object that clips into something else, its shadows wont show up where it's clipping, due to how shadows are cast from back-faces. (let me draw a picture to show what I mean) Edit: See below.
  14. I disagree with this statement... The D3 shadow system is designed under the assumption that only opaque objects will cast shadows, and becomes glitchy if there are invisible shadow-casting objects, such as the player's body. For example, if you look at the ground while walking, there won't be shadows where your invisible feet clip into the ground, which tends to look wrong.
  15. At the same time, a simulation may become useless if it strays too far from the behavior it seeks to model. It can easily be argued that when a guard doesn't panic upon finding body, the simulation is doing a poor job.
  16. I think it'd be interesting to have levels where if any of the guards or the loot goes missing, the map triggers everybody to panic. For something like a museum, that could provide a realistic reason to "case the joint". I also completely agree with Ishtvan's concerns... in fact, I worry that even turning up the difficulty sliders might make things easier in certain situations (e.g. being able to lure guards into dark alleys from further away).
  17. I'm still trying to repress my memories of eigenvectors...
  18. Keep in mind that transparent things don't get hit by shadows, which could cause problems in some cases.
  19. Forgive me, but I find myself slightly skeptical of one's abilities to notice how just how active specific parts of their brain are...
  20. I'll guess that screenshot is of the D3ed render-preview, which tends to have shadow mistakes.
  21. Same here... Although I still can't remember the quadratic formula, I can derive it whenever needed. Actually, despite being a math major, there's only like two mathematical formulas that I can remember, the Pythagorean Theorem, anddotProduct(A, = length(A)*length(*cos( angle between A and B ) Is the book in English or German? If English, what is it called?
  22. Heh, that story reminds me of a great math teacher I used to have... On every test, he'd have a "gift" question - if you just followed recipes and cranked out the numbers, it'd take a bunch of time, but if you understood the ideas behind what was being taught in class, the gift problem would become trivially simple. This same instructor also gave out an exam question where the students had to use calculus to optimize marijuana farming. A big pet peeve of mine has been how many other students just try to memorize recipes rather than understand the underlying concepts - memorization is far more difficult and less effective than understanding. I've tutored classmates who act mystified when I'm able to solve problems we haven't been given recipes for.
  23. Queynte is Middle English, but I wouldn't exactly call it quaint....
  24. I'm reminded of something I once read about game design and atmosphere/setting... If magic becomes as consistent as flipping a light-switch, everybody will view it as such. In order for magic to truly be magic, it must be unpredictable and shrouded in mystery.
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