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Oktokolo

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Everything posted by Oktokolo

  1. Maybe if i hold it a while to get the straight line trajectory. Didn't test. I just remember the throwing mechanic to be incredibly hard to predict.
  2. Use case: Fire at something in front of an AI without a good path of approach, switch to blackjack run to AI and make it sleep.
  3. Honestly, that could make flash bombs usable to a lot of players. The throw mechanic is completely unintuitive and a usability nightmare. But as an arrow it could be actually useful.
  4. They may add as much bugs and jank as they want - if they also add the Bethesda-typical modability!
  5. It will also release on GOG.
  6. I tried it some years ago and it was already abandoned back then. It never got finished, and probably never will. Better try Monomyth after release (it looks like still being worked on, so there is hope).
  7. As probably no one will dare to suggest it if i don't, i do it: Cyberpunk 2077 with Realistic Combat Overhaul (i also use 230+ other mods, but i might be a mod hoarder and you definitely can have a good stealth shooter experience with less than 30 mods) Obviously, that game isn't pure. You probably can ghost your way through a lot of the missions. But if you actually want to play nonleathal, you better play something else. Where it shines, is the world building and gameplay. You get a shit ton of exploration, a pretty diverse set of side missions some with exceptionally good story writing. And you can play most of it as a stealth game. While it is immersive, it isn't really a sim though. You can't use the environment in unexpected ways apart from some verticality (and even more verticality with mods). So yeah, it is more like Deus Ex if it where open world (world opens up after first main quest). But stealth was meant to be a viable option in the base game and with mods it actually is. P.S.: Also the two Styx games - they actually are hardcore stealth. And Arx Fatalis (ugly but aged better than thief).
  8. Splitting functionality up into more files might be easier to do. In both cases, mappers wouldn't need to override the entire thing just to change tiny aspects of it (probably mostly looks and parameters).
  9. 1.5 GHz just isn't enough to get any good single-thread performance and games still need that even when they sortof are multithreaded today. But still kudos to them building their own CPU and it probably more than good enough for powering the offices needed to keep critical infrastructure working. Thanks for sharing.
  10. Humans use semantic information to modulate pacing and pitch over sentences and even entire paragraphs. Having a language model like ChatGPT detect the semantic "features" of the text and feeding them as additional input into the speech synthesis model might reduce the amount of markup significantly or even eliminate the need for the common case where the speaker's emotional state is rather neutral and the meaning of the message matches the actual text. That might be a pretty intuitive way to provide additional emotional context that can't be derived from the text alone - like the state of the speaker (exhausted, happy...) or subtext (sarcastic, ironic, bragging, threatening). But just slapping an emoticon in front of some parts of the text might also work good enough when combined with a language model trained to detect them. I'm excited to see, which path speech synthesis will go. Pretty sure, results will become indistinguishable from professional voice-acting in the next few years.
  11. The voice itself is pretty good. But the sentence pacing just doesn't exist. As a result, the voice has no emotion - it sounds "dead". That said, an emotionless dead-sounding voice would obviously be perfect for characters like Dagoth Ur...
  12. As a player that uses the blackjack a lot, i would like to be able to move bodies over minor obstacles without the intermediate dropping.
  13. I would welcome a minimal impact of movement on the light gem too. But we already have the footstep sounds and therefore it is just a nice-to-have which will likely not be implemented soon except if someone not working on the core game mods it in (if that is possible). If someone would try implementing it, they would probably calculate the lightgem brightness bonus from the silhuette (crauched, standing, wielding a weapon, carrying things or a corpse), the movement speed and the unmodified lightgem brightness (as currently calculated by the game). newBrightness = movementSpeedFactor * stanceFactor * carriedItemOrCorpseFactor * unmodifiedBrightness
  14. No problem, was just amused about stumbling upon what had to be a post quoting SPAM which had since been removed. I assumed that you posted something angry targeted at the spamer and then edited the angry part out after the original post vanished by moderator magic. Leaving the quote with the actual SPAM in was pure irony gold... Btw, it is a common tactic to do some low-effort legit posts before starting to spam. I don't look at previous posts for SPAM detection. I most often don't even follow the links. After all, advertising a service in this thread is as obvious as it gets. That is bot-style bluntness...
  15. Now that is some nice SPAM you are preventing from spoiling in your quote...
  16. I would expect a completely static version only blurring farther away objects to be least intrusive. You can't know where the player actually looks at and mouse-"scanning" the screen gets unimmersive pretty fast. But like very cheap fog, a deapth of field effect could be used to enable more aggressive level of detail reductions for far-away objects. So i would see the effect more as a performance optimization for outdoor areas. It might enable mappers to create more realistic city streets which don't have to do an artifical sharp bend every few meters to allow for geometry culling. P.S.: Don't forget to turn the effect off when using the monocular.
  17. Oktokolo

    Redfall

    Looks like yet another "horror"-themed shooter. Bethesda should instead focus on the Skyrim successor.
  18. I totally get the eyehurt of that streamer. But it isn't the brightness of the guis in general. It is the contrast between the environment and the GUI. GUIs have the same brightness regardless whether you look at them in the shadows or in electric light. The result is that the newspapers actually hurts a bit when frobbing one in a dark environment because of the sudden brightness change. The white default newspaper assets obviously are the worst offenders. But even the beige parchment readables (and also the objective screen using a similar background) can be way too bright when opened in the shadows while playing in a lowlight environment. Considering the average value of the screen the user saw before opening the GUI might indeed work. The light gem value could also be a good enough indicator of environment brightness and is already calculated.
  19. Sorry, but Iran is of geostrategic importance and therefore the people there can't live in peace. That sadly also includes the women. At least the war against Iran and its population is just an economic one - for now...
  20. Sure: Prominent items are expected to be noticed missing by guards whichs' sole reason to be there is to pretect that items from getting stolen... There are some missions using this mechanic and at least one of them even provides the player with a replica crown to swap for the original - fooling the guards. When the mechanic is used, it is important to somehow mark the loot as being special - for example by putting it on a pedestal and lighting it like the holy grail in Indiana Jones. Just outright warning the player in the briefing obviously also works and is easy to disguise as a warning about actually vigilant guards...
  21. Not sure it makes it any better that the no-longer-patched Windows is not running in a virtual machine...
  22. In my opinion, all that changes would actually be good for normal gameplay too. Recoverability of normally final ingame situations and reliability of player tools are a good thing in general as is a clean mission design language. Definitely worth it to improve in that fields. And when it comes to player tool determinism, that actually already happened almost each release. I, as the maker of the mod disabling the save restrictions and a proud savescummer obviously want players to save whenever they want to. But you know, i'm something of a player myself and would like not having to remember to save. It does sometimes fell less immersive when you remember to renew your insurance by tapping the quicksave key. Why players (including myself) use the save system is pretty obvious - it allows to create a snapshot of the current game state and to continue at that state whenever i want to. So it allows to interrupt playing or to recover from undesired game states like getting stuck, dying, getting all the AI into high alert state, wasting tools, runining any scores, failing objectives... It is also quite handy for giving the current game state to someone using it for debugging the game or a mission. And you can preserve a moment in the game as a memory in its fullest form - instead of just making a screenshot (i never did it for that reason though).
  23. The real way to make people rely less on the ability to load (because that actually is, what safe restrictions really seem to try to achieve), is to make failure recoverable without loading. There is no point in saving if you know for sure, that you won't want to load that save. TDM is one of the most stable games today. People almost only save for reallife reasons and to insure against ingame failure (either in general every N minutes or before trying something expected to be a gamble - like extinguishing a torch using a water arrow). Designing for absolute recoverability is at least pretty damn hard. But having safe spaces (rooms, the AI can't reach) near difficulty spikes, reducing the AI cooldown time and using a clear design language would probably make people feel less in need of that revorey insurance already. Important would be to actually advertise deviations from the standard path - so players know, how this mission is different. As an example, expecting the player to get that in your mission headshots kill zombies is a bit far a stretch when the player has played literally over a hundred other missions where headshots wheren't killing zombies. Such stuff would need explicit advertising because a lot of players would only be able to get that insight by accident or reading the spoilers in a forum thread otherwise. Death actually is the elephant in the room. The biggest ingame failure, players insure against by saving, is the death of the player's avatar. So that would have to be eliminated somehow. Technically, it doesn't actually exist right now either as the player can just reload. But that mechanic obviously needs to be replaced by something else if you want players to be confident that they won't want to load. Waking up in a cell instead of dying, just spawning in a nearby safe room, being left for dead but recovering a bit after the AI leaves the scene - all potential replacements for one or the other situation normally undone by a quick tap on the quickload key. There should be way more possible ways to replace that final game element (i just am not that creative). But the point is, that there needs to be a non-final replacement for that final ingame failure. And then there are other ways of getting stuck - on geometry, by going somewhere the designer didn't thought to be accessible, killing the wrong person or just by accidently throwing a key into an inaccessible gutter. These aren't that common (well, the first one is, but the noclip console command exists). But players, who don't save regularly, start doing so when experiencing a non-recoverable situation. So these situations have to be made hard to create or otherwise catered for. On the extreme end, it may be possible to create missions that exhibit no reason for saving apart from meatspace stuff like having to go to sleep. But you aren't fully against saves. So just having a sane autosave system can already do a lot to make the player save less. When the player enters a safe room and ther wasn't just an autosave - just perform an autosave. It signals the player, that this indeed is a safe room - and that you took care of his insurance already. If going the path of confidence, i would actually advice against using save items or manually activatable "bonfires". If the player thinks about saving, they will do so and just fall back to the (still available) save system, they have been trained use by all the games and missions that came before yours. TLDR: If you really want players to not save, give them the confidence that they won't want to load.
  24. Save restrictions aren't new. Not so long ago almost every console port had them. Players of games that are designed with a lot of dying in mind, seem to be fine with save restrictions of any kind. But in Kingdom Come Delivery, the save restrictions are commonly modded away. There are games which are about doing the same area over and over again until you manage to beat it. The experience of overcomming frustration is what the players of such games are after. The more annoying it was to beat the boss, the more satisfying it is to finally have beaten it. Obviously, save restrictions can add a lot of frustration - and therefore are an integral part of such games. Arcades and soulslikes normally profit from save restrictions, while immersive sims, basebuilders and sandbox games normally don't.
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