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Oktokolo

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Posts posted by Oktokolo

  1. 11 hours ago, Baal said:

    Does anyone have a strong opinion about that?

    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...

    • Like 1
  2. On 9/30/2022 at 2:28 AM, Xolvix said:

    Baby steps. Be grateful this appears to be a regular installation and not a virtual machine.

    Not sure it makes it any better that the no-longer-patched Windows is not running in a virtual machine...

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  3. 14 hours ago, wesp5 said:

    Oktokolo is right, but judging all the needed changes I would say: Never touch a running system :)!

    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.

    13 hours ago, chakkman said:

    I agree with your other points made, but, I can't agree with the first part of this one. Why would you want players not to save in the first place? How do you even think you know how players use the save system? (Goes to mappers who think about such systems, of course.)

    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).

  4. 15 hours ago, ChronA said:

    Is it technically and conceptually possible to have the tokens as a carrot for these desirable behaviors (AND have them be effective carrots) without the stick of actually removing at-will save states? Part of it is probably making the curtailed save system pleasant to use: Providing convenient save points near difficulty spikes so players need never suffer a reset time longer than 1-2 minutes at most, and doling out a few item-based save tokens that give players an option for when they need to save/load somewhere the map maker did not account for. In all but the most extreme circumstances that would address the valid complaints about wasting the player's time and punishing curiosity, right?

    After that, how do you discourage free saving without actually banning it? For the analogous situation of restricting knockouts, I think an optional objective is the best solution. But for saving I question whether that could work, both technically, and in terms of narratively contextualizing free-saving. Maybe instead make it so the free save ban is over-ridden by purchasing a special item from the pre-level shop?

    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.

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  5. 7 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

    So why should there be save restrictions? Because we should be open as players and creators to trying new things.

    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.

  6. On 9/22/2022 at 5:21 PM, datiswous said:

    That makes no sense. If you are limited on time go for a smaller mission with a very structured plot and objectives. Iris is very loose, so let's say you play it a couple of hours spread during a week, you often might not know what you're doing or don't get sucked in enough because of lack of time.

    Of course it makes sense: Iris is the best and longest mission available. So it should last a while. It also is the best content available - so no fear of missing out. If you ony have limited time, skip the slow buildup and dive right into the best stuff. That way, you get the best use out of that limited playtime.

    31 minutes ago, thebigh said:

    Making a map, even a small and simple one, is a lot of work and I don't think it's fair to deride even less highly rated levels as "amateurish" or "mediocre". Mappers are creating something and giving it away for free, and that kind of talk seems disrespectful to me.

    The wording isn't diplomatic - but the intent obviously isn't to deride anything or anyone. Just a player who wants to dive right into the best content available - and that is okay.

  7. 1 hour ago, demagogue said:

    It's interesting that you can do (what seem to us like) really high level things, like this procedural art, chess engines, and probably music and other forms soon, with an earthworm sized brain; but really (what seem to us like) simple things, like ordering lunch at a fast food  joint or other open ended things, run into the AI Complete problem, i.e., you can't even do the most simple operation unless you have full human-level cognition and world knowledge.

    Simple things for AI are the things that we already know how to implement. When someone discovers a new design that allows to model a currently impossible task, that task suddenly becomes "simple" for AI.
    Of course, if we wait till hardware with the capacity of the human brain becomes available, we probably could just train it as long as we train a human child and it would become a general AI even with our current level of knowledge.

    But for each task, that AI already has achieved superhuman levels in, the brain of the best humans at that task obviously are the same ~8 orders of magnitudes less neuron-efficient than the earthworm AI beating them. So there seems to be a shitton of optimization potential when not modeling the human brain, but the resulting abilities.

    What really holds AI back isn't the hardware anymore. It is the lack of knowledge about good AI designs, training methods and how to debug that beasts. Also, a lot of the human brain mass probably is just really lossy memory. We already have pretty good non-neuron-based replacements for that. So even for recreating the brain the actual distance could be a few orders of magnitude less than it seems...

  8. 32 minutes ago, geegee said:

    I don't think so.

    Well, some people actually doing research in that field are. And that is what ultimately will lead to further improvements in that fields.
    There surely will be a working model of a whole human brain including its peripherals (the "body") in the future.

    The idea of how a transistor could work is a hundred years old by now. We can run The Dark Mod on a personal computer smaller than a cubic meter now. And there still is plenty of time to research the inner workings of the human brain before our sun dies (although it i would guess it needing hundreds of years - not billions)...

  9. 12 hours ago, geegee said:

    But what is that skill?  How can I know what it is, since it's beyond me?  I can deconstruct the map and recreate the gameplay along different lines, throwing in glitz like volumetric lights and so on, and come up with something unspeakable.  By proceeding that way, no matter what kind of glitz I throw in, what kind of diversions and filler, what kind of joy all this copy/pasting gives me, I'm not matching the "skill" that went into making Glenham. 

    Artificial "intelligence" isn't there yet. But "But what is that skill?" - how exacly our senses, thinking, intuition and creativity works - is exactly, what the AI research at its core actually is about. There might be an AI that your descendants can feed their favorite missions and it will give them a new mission that is comletely different but "feels" the same and "bears the mark" of the author of the original missions. Maybe that AI will have to be created by a "general" AI, because there just isn't enough original training material for training such an AI with any method known today and you can't just substitute stealth immersive sim missions with maps of other game genres (i would even go so far that you can't really use Dishonored missions as training material for TDM missions - despite both being stealth immersive sim games).

    AI will get there though - if we or our descendants don't nuke eachother into oblivion first.

  10. 10 hours ago, jaxa said:

    Speaking of which, we could use better storage technology. Consumer holographic drives with hundreds of terabytes, please.

    Nah, just make sure, that the AI image generation process is deterministic (the actual AI should already be). Then you only need to store the AI, maybe a seed value for the deterministic pseudo random number generator used to get more variation, and your image description text. That way, one Gigabyte of disk space gives you exabytes of AI image storage capacity.
    Storing images like that also means, that there finally isn't a distinction between vector and bitmap images anymore. Both would be generated by an AI and are therefore sorta infinitely scalable (but ultimately the contained detail in the resulting image keeps being limited by the size of the AI of course).

    The only catch is, that you can't store non-AI-generated images that way - yet (surely there also could be an AI that takes an image and generates a detailed description from it, but some human-visible details would likely be lost in the process).

  11. 23 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

    I see two possible solutions:

    1. Avoid any animations like that as idle animations
    2. Introduce an additional check to explicitely exclude the possibility of the ai to see anything behind itself (behind in respective to its bodies orientation).

    3. Fix the animation.
    This isn't a bug in the engine. It is acting like intended. The issue is with an animation, that didn't take player expectaions into account.

    4. Close as "intended behavior".
    It probably happened to me too. But normally the AI gets blackjacked before it happens. And it is part of "getting good" to learn to anticipate odd behavior of AI like sudden changes of direction, looking behind, relighting light switches, reacting to open doors, sometimes leaning so far forward, that it can actually see behind itself...

  12. 20 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

    That point is valid if the clock is really working against you, like if you have to do something within a certain amount of time or else game over. If the amount of time it takes you to get to a certain point decides on how the story evolves from there, then this could actually add a nice touch to a mission, if executed properly.

    Sure, if it isn't forcing me to hurry, it is fine. I actually just hate timer-based objective fails.

  13. One thing i really like about TDM is the timelessness of the world. I start a TDM mission and have all the time of the world to explore it and try different things. I don't have to rush anything.

    I like environment changes triggered by my actions. But gaming against a clock was never fun for me.

  14. On 7/21/2022 at 10:14 AM, wesp5 said:

    But I would really like to fix the issue that candles you just extinguished by frobing get taken automatically, because the main idea behind the direct frobing was to remove possible sounds when picking them up.

    The clunkyness of picking up stuff has been fixed in TDM version 2.04. I confirmed empirically, that even a clunky player can pick up stuff without making a sound since then.

    On 7/21/2022 at 2:59 PM, wesp5 said:

    Speaking of details though, to not get any silly connotations, shouldn't we rename it to Snuff?

    How about extinguish?
    One of the clunkier words. But it is a common one and not overloaded with different meanings or connotations.

  15. 14 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

    We already discussed this here, would this be possible? How do we highlight a bright flame? Because this could also fix all the oil lamps that are not extinguishable by the patch right now, although it probably would mean to rewrite everything!

    Highlighting is solved by enabling the black frob outline. I play with it since months and it works fine even in darker areas.

  16. 34 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

    It’s discouraging to read both a developer and a player saying we give no consideration to certain design elements of our missions in the context of a conversation that seems to be about overwriting some of those intentions anyway.

    If it makes you feel better: I still am of the opinion, that Iris is the best TDM mission created so far. Also i would have expected winning that contest to somehow protect against such ultra-fast discouragement a bit...

    But yes - ignoring some outliers and special missions - actual balancing of tools is basically absent in TDM.
    And that is okay as long as noobs still get enough tools on easy to somehow make it through the mission (which seems to normally be the case). I am in the "play it as you want" camp btw and rarely use tools anyways - so too much tools are just translating to more loot for Definitelynotgarret to pawn after the mission...

  17. 1 hour ago, snatcher said:

    I read carefully all posts in this topic. Everything there is to be said has been said, in my opinion. My goal wasn't to bump this topic to resume the discussion but to make a particular point a few years later: what if?

    You heared the people in charge: It is set in stone and can't ever be changed because old missions would become too easy and some people would end missions with 15 instead of 10 water arrows.

    I would even go so far as to suggest making torches hand extinguischable. And i am pretty sure i could even do it myself in meat space by suffocating the flame with a damp leather hood. Like with the oil lamps, you would have to step into the bright light to do extinguish them (but dousing a torch probably takes more time).

    Just adding to the pile of everything for the record (and maybe for @wesp5). Also definitely not starting a discussion about necromancy...

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