[The player has no animations or shadow]

With all that in consideration, without an animator, none of this has any rationality to be implemented ad hoc. Shadows reflecting sluggish animations is not an option.

Player-occluded surfaces affecting player visibility would not require player-cast shadows. So animations or the lack of them do not matter for that.

 

So the lightgem will change brightness moment by moment even if the player isn't doing anything? An AI turns his head and suddenly the lightgem spikes. He turns his head a different way and it plunges into darkness. That would completely destroy the player's ability to know whether they are hidden or not, or why, or whether they should do anything about it.

Yes, it would change its brightness depending on AI locations. As AI position would affect visibility and the lightgem indicates visibility, it would have to change brightness depending on AI locations. The vision cones should probably not taken into account though. I erred on that one.

 

The lightgem because useless at that point. Everything becomes trial and error.

The lightgem would still give you a correct estimation of how long it takes until the AI starts believing, that it could have seen something (needs player experience to take distance into account with and without the new feature).

 

It's fun to watch people make claims about what wouldn't be hard to do.

Just to be clear: Calculating the player visibilities for each AI would probably involve casting rays. So that would not be cheap and probably not easy to implement. I was talking about using the max of the resulting values that would have been stored in the AI state just like all the other stuff (like alertstate for example).

 

Just for fun, would you like to lay out exactly how this would work? How do you propose to get a numerical value from all the different AI in the room and apply it to the lightgem?

 

Pseudocode:

lightGemBrightness = player illumination // that is what we have now.
foreach ai in listOfAis: // There surely is some list of AI in the engine already.
  aiVisibility = getPlayerVisibilityFromAiState(ai)
  lightGemBrightness = max(lightGemBrightness, aiVisibility)

[The player has no animations or shadow]

The lightgem's brightness would have to represent maximum current player visibility for any AI instead of brightness of the players surface only. It could fall back to the current behaviour of showing the player's illumination if no AI has a line of sight and its vision cone pointed in the general direction of the player.

As the AI-specific visibilities would have to be calculated anyway, it would not be hard to use the maximum of them and the general player illumination for the lightgem's brightness.

 

So i think, the lightgem is a strawman. The needed adjustments on the lightgem would be easy and cheap.

[The player has no animations or shadow]

The question is whether turning your head back evey few seconds like in a paranoid mental state is in any way fun. It isn't. Does it contribute to player character or the world in any menaingful way? No it doesn't. Main character is (typically) a master thief, burglar, infiltrator, spy, what have you. He comes prepared, he is in control, he has tools and abilities to do the job. Stealth gameplay is about gaining control in hostile territory.

Don't forgetm, that in most situations we also get sound cues from our environment. even though that sound cues are a bit broken in a lot of missions due to room sealing issues, you still get the rough distance of nearby AI. And if you are in a noisy factory with multiple entrances, you really should be paranoid - especially as a master thief.

It is a bit like with sniper mechanics in other games. In some you just point at the head and score the headshot. Other games (or same on harder dificulty levels) require you to consider distance and wind for scoring the headshot. I get that most players don't want the more sophisticated simulations - but there are tons of games for them out there already.

Sure, more sophisticated simulation of lighting and detectuion is a niche - as is TDM already.

 

As already mentioned: Tools are not even needed for getting through most missions. Player experience matters a lot. But after so many years of TDM, you know where to hide, how AI reacts to what situations, what patrol patterns are most often used and how to douse a guard's torch without him noticing...

 

But i see, neither of us will convince the other:

I will not convince you, that an optional more sophisticated and slightly more difficult to fully master visibility-calculation would be a good thing.

And you surely will not convince me of the opposite.

 

It really helps to sort out better ideas from worse, and to think about other players and play styles than yours (which is typically very limited).

Yeah, surely i could not have thought about the impact on the player base. And of course i am just spilling out ideas as they come without any sort of prefiltering, because only you would be able to do that. Really no belittling there at all...

[The player has no animations or shadow]

Now that was sarcastic, and I didn't think anyone would take this idea seriously, as it would make the game literally unplayable. With effective FOV of 80 to 90, player has no means to be aware what's behind him all the time, and he would be punished for something he didn't know he did. But that's also what illustrates general issue with ideas: everybody's having them. But knowing what would translate into meaningful gameplay is something that requires some more thought, or just testing experience. The core mechanics doesn't have to be super intricate or complicated to be interesting. Simple elegance and consistency works much, much better, and people will suspend their disbelief anyway. We're talking about a guy who's invisible in the shadows, what's realistic is unimportant. What's interesting and meaningful is.

I don't think, it would make the game unplayable at all. It would make most missions only slightly harder to play. A few missions would indeed become a nightmare. But most would keep beeing pretty playable. I am in no way a ghost and not trying to brag or something like that. But i completed most TDM missions on hardest and most of them without using consumeables. There is some room for more environmental-awareness-based difficulties in TDM.

 

FOV is not that much of an issue because you indeed can "turn your head" while walking using mouse and keybord. I always crouch and go sideways or backwards as the situation calls for it - it works pretty well in TDM missions with their mostly surprise-free environments. Not that far a way from scanning locations for their shadows to also look for high contrast surfaces to avoid while at it.

And such a mechanic would obviously be off (or tuned down to irrelevancy) in easy mode anyway. So it would not scare away any new players.

 

You might be sarcastic about it or not. You might belittle me for beeing a mere player since 25 years.

But evaluating the contrast between player and occluded surfaces for adjusting the effective visibility of the player is a pretty feasible idea gameplay-wise, most likely easier to implement than detection of cast shadows, and would spice up the hide in shadows mechanic a bit (yes, TDM already does that better than any other current stealth game out there - but there still is room for improvements).

Sadly, we probably don't get any of the two anyway (because dev time is scarce too).

[The player has no animations or shadow]

Oooh, and doesn't it bother you, that you can stand in the shadows and if there's like a fireplace or something bright behind you, the AI can't see you? I mean it's unrealistic too, right?

It bothers me. And as AI already has to somehow do a line of sight check against the player, the cast ray might get continued through the player until it hits some geoemetry. AI could take into account the difference in brightness and color between player and occluded surface when calculating player's visibility.

 

 

I'm not sure most players would find it "immersive" to be caught because of situations that they can't control.

Players control light occlusion and therefore shadow-casting just as they control surface noisyness: They see the threat and act accordingly. Lights obviously are the most visible thing in the game. Light occlusion and shadowcasting are well-known things. People experience that in the meat space all the time. They just never have the need to avoid occlusing lights and casting suspicious shadows there. But if they know, that they have to consider that in the game, they should not have too much problems doing that. As any difficulty-altering thing, it would be optional anyway. So casual players would not get griefed by the slightly increased difficulty.

I am pretty sure, ghosters would love it.

[The player has no animations or shadow]

Walk on the wrong side of the light and suddenly a guard down a hallway that you can't even see knows you are there.

That is exacly, why i would like gameplay-relevant player shadows. I sometimes observe in my own gameplay, that i unconsciously avoid passing a light on the wrong side to avoid casting suspicious shadows already. Looks like my brain is trained to expect me casting shadows already. Like with traps i would like to see suspicious shadow casting mechanics in TDM (but i don't expect it to actually happen), because it would probably add to immersion.

 

In current missions there are sometimes lights you have to pass and where you would not be able to avoid casting a suspicious shadow that would be seen by AI. You would have to hide after passing such lights - or time the passing of the light using audio cues (so the guard does not see the shadow).

So from a gameplay-perspective it would be nice to have AI reacting to such shadows. That could be configurable like other difficulty- and performance-related stuff.

 

Resource costs might be turned down drastically by limiting the shadows to be a somewhat "symbolic" representation of the crouching or standing player (might look off while doing some things but i don't think it would be too distracting). No animations needed when doing that way.

[Sniper Ghost Fail 3]

The drone was a joke: Much less battery life and radio range than current consumer products.

But yes, you should be able to lose it in the field and then have to retrieve it to get it back. It could also be treated like a mix between grenades and weapons: If it gets shot down or falls down because of empty battery, it is gone (but you can pick it up from where it "landed", if it did not flew too high). But you can buy another one back in the hideout and may also carry two or three of them.

 

The in-field energy recharging is not that unrealistic though. Compact methanol fuel cells exist and are in use by some armies to power laptops, long-range radios and other equippment.

[Sniper Ghost Fail 3]

I never missed a grappling hook in that game. It's not Just Cause. A proper visibility indicator would be a "thievy" thing i actually missed though.

[Darkmod: Inspiration thread]

Isnt all the stuff IP restricted, so its for inspiration only..?

Yes. It is high quality inspiration stuff. That could be the assets FLOSS games use if we had a society featuring an unconditional basic income

[Sniper Ghost Fail 3]

It still looks nice and you can snipe an endless (because respawns) amount of people

 

Openworld is hard to get right. You have to be Bethesda or Piranha Bytes to be able to build an openworld shooter, that does not suck (Arma does not count, as it is not a game).

[Killer Smartphone: 5.5", 2.5Ghz quad, unlocked, etc]

Well, it should be still enough for (voice) chat. But without security updates it surely would not be yours for long.

[Dishonored 2]

Part of the lacklustering of the bank heist mission in Thief 2014 comes from the fact that their engine has the worst trap mechanics implementation ever. It would have been a pretty solid and satisfying mission if they had some properly implemented physics-based traps like they are possible (although rarely realized) in TDM.

[2016+ CPU/GPU News]

Finally a good decision from nVidia!

It is about time to let legacy x86 die. All the devs that had to support the ancient architecture (despite all consumer CPUs being fully AMD-x64-compatible since a decade) will thank nVidia for getting the last nostalgic users to finally switch to an x64 OS. Less compatibility overhead means more time for polishing the x64 versions.

[Beta Testing 2.06]

Bugtracker issue?

Filed as 4712 - also stumbled upon a bug regarding bug list page size selection.

[Beta Testing 2.06]

I just realized, that finished missions are not marked as finished in the mission list anymore. They still show the dificulty levels and last play date in the info box on the bottom left when selected.

I just updated and use the x64 version on Windows 7.

[WTF did I just read?]

Nobody says direct democracy works. That's why populism is blamed. All referendums this year failed in Europe. Is it really not obvious that direct democracy can work only on minor issues like in Switzerland or in relation to a highly educated society? That's why we came up with representative democracy in the first place.

It is mostly about economics. Influencing a poll costs a lot of labour and money. So to make that job easier, we got representative democracy. That way the populists only need to do all that work once every legislative period. They only have to win that one election and can then be lazy until the next. Imagine the waste of resources for never-ending hustings.

[Can't post images on the forum]

Just for the next one, who stumbles upon this thread: What was the solution?

[WTF did I just read?]

Don't be silly. The minute you allow a system that removes opinions you don't like, you've set a precedent for someone else to remove opinions you do like.

Exactly. And Kurshok, who liked the pro-censoring post, would probably be the next to get his topics deleted (for spamming)...

 

Maybe there should be harsher ban policies for two weeks or so. Then, after the censoring-happy people experienced, what censoring looks like (i.e. after they got banned), we could switch back to current status quo

[TTLG - anyone having trouble geting in ?]

Some site stops working because of a server-side database connectivity issue and people start blaming some browser. I better go back to the nazi thread...

[Beta Testing 2.06]

Don't hurry. It is fine to have a beta testing phase of more than one month. Soft shadows are the big next thing for TDM. They are highly visible.

And who played with soft shadows once can't ever go back to legacy shadows again.

 

Edit: Forgot about EFX: That could be as inpactfull as soft shadows if missions get updated with regional acoustic parameters.

[Doctor Troy's Office: Acephali Skeleton Paper]

Abusimplea, that is kind of ironic. "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS"

Yes, it is

 

But really: Install TDM and play some missions (start with the training mission). You will not regret it.

[Soft r_gamma]

Thinking about that - does it make any sense to have a gamma room in Training mission at all considering new players will have gamma setting on its default value? Do we actually expect different visibility on different monitors in digital LCD era? I think that's what people did on CRT's 10+ years ago.

There are people without OLED displays out there and for them backlight bleed is still a thing. It heavily depends on the panel, how much the backlight bleed reduces contrast for darker areas. Actually, some CRTs and especially the plasma TV sets where better than current TFT in this regard as there was no permanent backlight, that could have shined through "black" dots. So until we all got OLEDs, gamma correction will keep beeing a thing - especially in darker games like TDM.

 

And there also are personal differences in taste and physical ability when it comes to distinguishing the darker shades of grey. That will certainly grow a bit as some of the audience of TDM gets older and therefore less good vision.

[WTF did I just read?]

Someone is using the TDM forum for proofreading his dissertation. at least the first quarter is well written despite some ugly preconception in the examples. Attention quota did not last for the remainder though. Also, social status seems to get a bit overrated. But it is insightfull nontheless. Try to shorten it and remove the "the black man generally is not able to assess risks properly" propaganda before presenting to the next non-academic audience (if it is not the KKK). Might as well link sources to increase credibility.

[Doctor Troy's Office: Acephali Skeleton Paper]

That, along with some other things, makes me wonder about troll. Could this be a disgraced ex-member, back to haunt the forum?

Does not look like a troll. More a stalker of some sort. In this case, the stalked one seems to be TDM though.

 

Go, Kurshok, try installing TDM already. Only peeping through the looking glass will never get you what you really want.

[TDM ModDB Mod of the Year]

Well, soft shadows are visible to users. Dishonored would be a better game if rebuilt as a set of missions for TDM (except the visuals maybe). So if anyone wnats to implement the powers and do a port - i would certainly be happy to betatest it