Oktokolo
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Posts posted by Oktokolo
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What happens if I perform an action that disallows me from completing an objective and the game autosaves?
Then you load an earlier autosave slot. That is the reason, why other games provide multi-slot autosave and quicksave systems.
No save system is perfect. But there are techniques that can make them extremely robust against crashes and bad luck. Multislotting and prevention of saving in immediate danger are low-hanging fruits that are rather easy to implement and work for all missions of the past and the future without needing intervention from mission authors.
But one also could store the N last game states in a ring buffer and provide the player with the power to literaly rewind himself out of a mistake. Shadwen implemented that - it worked fine and was fun to use as it did not involved any delays or load screens.
Would have to be combined with slotted autosave to also provide automatic protection against crashes though.
I don't think we will see this implemented in the id Tech 4 engine (it would certainly be a monstrous amount of work). The game state buffer approach costs memory (naive approach is most likely unbearable and differential snapshots with "keyframes" all N seconds need more developer time for implementation) and is harder to implement than traditional save systems. A compromise would be to implement interruptionless saves by copying the current game state into a buffer on demand and then streaming that to disk while the player continues. That still might give the player a micro stutter if the engine does not follow a strict copy-on-write philosophy already and therefore has to delay progress until the current state has been duplicated in RAM...
And of course: You could use hand placed checkpoints. That is the one system that has to be designed in and taken care of in each mission seperately. It does not just work for all missions of the past and future - like the other save systems, that are either actively triggered by the player on demand or by a timer guarded by rather simple mishap-avoidance code...
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You may think that manual saving is the best thing since sliced bread, [...]
There is something even better: Manual saving + configurable multi-slot quicksave + configurable multi-slot autosave. Multi-slot to be safe from savegame corruption (does not happen often - but if it does, it is always near the end of a mission).
I do not think, that TDM absolutely needs the full set. It is fine with manual saves and quicksaves.
But timed multi-slotted autosaves that are only triggered when not hunted, poisoned, under water, midair, exposed to bright light or standing right next to an AI would actually improve the usability of the save system. No more need to tap the quicksave key, just set the autosave timeout and slot count once and never think about manual saving or quicksaving again.
Maybe the reason, it is not in the game already, is that saving interrupts gameplay for half a second and therefore is somewhat immersion breaking when it occurs without being directly triggered by the player...
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You can give this argument about everything, as Spring already mentioned.
I could. But i don't. And it would be totally wrong anyway.
Most stuff defining a mission is not easy to be changed by a player. Even ghosts don't add AI, patrol routes, traps, hidden mechanisms, noisy surfaces, lights... to a mission as they play it.
Personally I always play a game the easiest way possible, and I am not talking about the difficulty level, I choose the highest one normally. What I mean is that I see games as a sum of problems I have to solve, and I am always searching for the easiest and sometimes most elegant solution. I would never restrict myself in the ways you mentioned. Why should I?
You should not as you obviously do not like to. But if you would like ghosting for example - you would try to ghost missions regardless whether they feature a hardcoded ghost restriction or not.
Of course my arguments are subjective. We are talking about TDM mission restrictions. Especially, whether the ones, that are hard to ignore (if hardcoded) but easy to add by the player if not, should be hardcoded or not. It is a subjective topic, this thread is evidence enough
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Also in the betatesting forum, you might find Shadowhide's City map building thread. Their map file might be huge too.
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The majority of difficulty effects could also be player controlled. Players could just decide not to KO anyone, to find all the loot, to drop all their equipment at game start, and to never save the game.
Checkpoints are no different in that regard.
I mentinoned my opposition to no-ko objectives in the same post you are citing.
To make my point even more clear: Both - ko/kill restrictions and save restrictions - can be emulated by the player quite easily and therefore are to be avoided in mission design.
I most often try to use as few ammunition and one-use items as possible and also try to get as much loot as i can without getting bored.
Loot goals are meant to give players some sense of achievement. They are normally easy to achieve even on hardest difficulty tier. They are certainly not neccessary but the mission goal achieved sound effect is something a lot of the players like to hear. In my opinion, loot objectives should be optional when there also is a less generic main objective.
Start equippment is a valid point. There are missions based on the player starting without gear and some missions are based on the player being broken and starting with basic equippment only. But for most missions it indeed makes sense to start with a diverse set of equippment. And so it already is: Most missions give you plenty of it even on hardest. Sure, most of the time all the lights you would like to douse are electric and not switchable... but lack of equippment was not what i experienced in most missions on hardest.
There also are missions that have non-limiting "checkpoints" implemented as ticking off (possibly optional) objectives (like "find a way into the mansion") as the player explores the map. That are fine. I just see no benefit for implementing save-system-crippling checkpoints.
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The same argument could be made about no-kill or no-ko objectives.
Yes, and for that reason i am against these too (no-kill seldom is a restriction though). For me, emptying the map is an additional goal for most missions. Therefore i would love to be able to always chose the "difficulty" tier wich features the most traps, AI, lights... and then defeat all the obstacles by disabling each trap, ko-ing each AI, robbing the place blind. For me, "difficulty" tiers are more like content tiers anyway - you get the most gameplay on the highest tier most of the time. Lower tiers often hide some of the stuff from you or dumb the mission down too much.
I too think checkpoints are more about game design than difficulty. If they supplement the design and they're triggered often enough, they're like chapters in a book, or even paragraphs on a page. You stop thinking about saving after a while, and the whole system alters your play style a bit, i.e. you divide your playing sessions to get to next checkpoint.
Checkpoints provide a subset of the features of the regular save system. They would probably do what manual saves do but are not directly controlled by the player. So they are the same tool but with added use restrictions.
Gameplaywise most missions feature multiple areas of relative safety already. Some of that areas would probably become checkpoints. Players already use such areas for saving. But players also save occasionally before trying risky actions or in case of crashes. Removing the latter use of the save system means to discourage experimentation.
Milestone-dependent autosaves are most likely the better choice in almost all cases. They do not discourage experimentation. They also relieve some players of the need to remember hitting the quicksafe key once in a while.
But designing a mission so that it contains some sanely spaced out safe areas is a good idea regardless whether it actually implements checkpoints or not.
So checkpoints add nothing a player could not add himself without touching DR.
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I always thought, checkpoints are an artifact that arrived on PC because of bad console ports. Past-gen consoles where extremely RAM-limited and therefore could not assemble a real safe containing the current state of the game world. So they settled on storing the last checkpoint or safe zone reached and respawned the full world on reload.
If it is about difficulty: Don't do it. Players can decide to limit their safe count rather easily by just not safing as often or restarting instead of reloading.
Keep the difficulty tiers for switching additional traps, lights, AI, easy solutions...
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I wouldn't want another part done by the team which did Thief 4, i think it's pretty much common consent that they didn't do a good job with it.
They did not do a good job. But they did not do a bad one either. It is an average stealth game with good visuals and technically challenged sound design (forgot that one in my list, but the sound is really bad in that game). Don't be fooled by the name. It is not a part of the Thief series. It borrows some elements from it and they got the trade marks to aid advertising...
See it as some independent bootleg "influenced" by the genre, the original series established. then you can play it without having to puke most of the time.
They should try a second one. It will not be like the original series either. But that is fine. We got TDM and all the fan missions for the originals. And they could not catch the feeling of the originals anyway - no matter how hard they would try. But they diversify the genre. And i had some fun playing their "Thief" - even completed the "campaign" (well, it was more like a lengthy intro; but would not have completed it if i would not have had some fun with it).
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My thoughts in random order:
If the new Thief will be sort of a sandbox again, they should add a fast travel system. Traveling thorugh the city of all-the-same buildings featuring insane geometry got annoying fast.
They should make the night less blue. Yeah, it is dark and cold and stuff - but some missions of The Darkmod show that it is possible to make the night look dark and cold, and have colorfull outdoors too.
They should get rid of locked animations. Let us gradually open doors and please drop the consolesque button-mashing sequences too.
They should drop boss fights and call-of-duty-style sequences, where you have to run down a preset path fast enough to survive. Such stuff does not fit well with a stealth game.
They should allow us to outsmart traps by clever positioning and triggering them by throwing stuff at them. There are not much traps in TDM missions. But when they are, they can always be outsmarted and reward cautious behaviour even if you did not notice them in time.
They really should allow Garrett to not beeing an idiot. The cutscenes and plot feature a good amount of facepalming. Always give the player the option to not walk into an obvious trap or do obviously stupid stuff. Yeah, i know, it is so much moar drama when Garrett does a frontal confrontation - but it also is an insanely stupid thing for a master thief to do. Next time let us just frame, poison or sniper that "Thief Taker General" and the Baron. Yeah, it does not make a good movie if i just sniper the super villian. But that is fine, because it is a game and not a movie anyway.
Make more modules or reduce the size of locations. I do notice the heavy reuse of modules and it really hinders navigation a lot if everything looks the same. Geometry was superb otherwise.
Drop the fake reflections. I do get confused if i see a window in a reflection that was not there last time i looked behind me. Use parallax corrected cubemaps, realtime reflections or just ordinary specular maps. No reflections are better than false reflections.
Most of the buildings' floor plans are not believalble at all. I guess, that is on purpose and because of level design. But there are TDM missions showing the possibility of sane room layouts. So please get a rwal world architect into your team.
Do not try to continue the old Thief series. You would need the original team for that. Without it, you are bound to fail. In that regard, it was a wise decision to not even try to do that but only using the "trade mark" for marketing.
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A more universally usable species would be the ratmen (Skaven in Warhammer).
But some smaller or bigger humans might be better for adding some variation in "regular" missions containing lots of guards and thugs. I would also expect altering a copied models' body mass or height to be easier than creating new models from scratch (but i am no artist so could be wrong on this).
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I enjoyed this mission on 2.06 with soft shadows. There where some graphics glitches that i attribute to 2.06 beeing beta. It still was a fantastic experience.
Minor findings follow:
- All spiders clip into the ground on several occasions making them harder to hit. They might need moar monster clip.
- The small barrel behind the alchemist's counter is levitating a bit.
- The architecture of the lord's flat is somewhat odd with its wide hallways and tiny rooms.
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which background do you prefer? a (live) ingame background or just a picture.
When a mission is selected, an ingame screenshot would be best as it adds life to the menu.
But for a platform supporting missions with different "moods" and when no mission is selected, the skyline is better because it is more "distant", neutral and generic.
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Nice. I will certainly enjoy playing it and from now on eagerly await the appearance of its thread in the beta testing forum.
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I'd still have to upload changed source code with it.
The engine is on github and you are on github. So why not fork the engine on github and start sending pull requests to "upstream" your patches. Forking just for developping a single bug fix or feature is okay. That is the natural way when working with git repositories.
Github is made with that in mind and knows the initial repo you fork on their site. Therefore i am pretty sure it internally deduplicates away everything that already existed before your fork anyway. So feel free to fork any project you want to write on.
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Well, i guess, it would be best to implement an FM manager in your mod. Then one would select your mod as an FM in TDM and then select the actual FM using your mod's FM manager. That way, users would still only need one base TDM installation. Also, cyberpunk FMs will probably be distributed over a different channel than standard TDM missions anyway. You might want to provide download-and-install functionality using that channel in your mod's FM manager.
I wonder, if it would be possible to nest mods indefinitely by using that method...
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If it is for the new SciFi mod, you probably want to replace most of the arrow types with your custom weapons. You could have a pistol, a taser, a shotgun, an SMG, a rocket launcher, a laser gun, a sniper rifle and a dart sniper rifle and a grappling hook without exceeding the limit. That are nine different ranged weapons. You could still keep the sword (maybe a vibro katana), the blackjack (maybe an e-shocker), the broadhead (as it is still less noisy than a silenced pistol). That would be twelve weapons in total. So still four to go. You could support different ammo types (regular, non-lethal, piercing, incindiary, explosive) and modes of operation (single, multi, continuous) with additional hotkeys and visualize that by extra GUI elements next to the selected weapon indicator. And can still have an unlimited number of different mines, hacking devices, grenades and field deployable turrets on top - as that do not count as "weapons".
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Not sure why people are so obsessed with visuals these days.
The graphics in current AAA titles are that good, that broken animations are instantly noticed because they contrast with the rest. In a way, the graphics are too good for the animations they used them with.
Like a golden Rolex with a plastic wristband.
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Nothing against a system providing aid for people to mark missions as "contains X" where X might be stuff including "spiders", "undead", "jump scares", "quicktime events", "keyhunt", "gore", "sexism", "racism", "murder", "torture", "porn", "child abuse references"...
Should be easy to maintain a wiki page containing a more complete list for mod authors to pick matching keywords from. There also already is a "Spiders and Undead" Column in the missions list that might be filled with other keywords as well.
Does anyone know of existing detailed lists of things we could build upon?
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Yeah, the Disqus hack is rather irrelevant as long as people do not use the same password for anything else. Password managers like KeePassX for storing and generating passwords made that easy a decade ago.
But the Equifax hack is something, most are helpless against. Only few can afford to not being known by the credit reporting agencies.
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And what do you think how square enix reacts?
they have seen tdm nc project.
To not infringe the copyrights of Square Enix just do not use their names, artwork, or assets in your work. Also do not advertise it as beeing somehow associated to something they own. Even in the USA you can't protect a complete genre (they surely would if they could).
An example of how far you are allowed to go: The two commercial Torchlight games (same genre and similiar gameplay as Diablo) are not from Blizzard.
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If you want to follow the gpl rules, look at hud code from tdm and rewrite the whole file without any copying lines.
There are two cases to look at:
1. NC-licensed GUI files that do not have to be changed and can be assumed to be present on user TDM installations. This files do not have to be included in the mod anyway. So their license simply does not matter, as they are not included in the new mod.
2. NC-licensed GUI files that do not fit the style of the new mod. That have to be rewritten from scratch to fit the new theme anyway.
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+1 RPGista
You may want to press the "Like This" button on his post.
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Well it's funny that the restrictions here could force someone to become good at ghosting (the ultimate playstyle). They could just hit Escape or Quickload whenever they alert an enemy. Eventually they will need to load the saves less and less (although in my experience stealth is significantly harder in TDM than Thief 1/2).
Ghosting in no way is the ultimate playstyle! Obviously, disabling any thread while staying undetected is! For a perfect playthrough you have to dispose all non-friendly AI non-lethally one by one without anyone noticing. Just kidding. It really depends on the type of mission, environment layout - and player.
Generally, if you need to pass a guard twice, taking it out is most often less dangerous, than sparing it. Taking out wandering AI is more beneficial when it uses randomized patrol routes. Killing and getting seen are almost always bad. But luring an AI by toggling lights, letting doors open, making noise or even letting it get a glimpse of you does work incredibly well sometimes although the latter two raise the stealth score.
I most of the time try to first take out all threats visiting a place before i loot it. So nobody can detect anything missing. I use electric lights as presence detectors, so i know whether a place has been visited by guards after me when i come back. Stationary torches are perfect AI traps. Douse one and place yourself in the shadow opposing the torch. If a guard tries to relight it, take it out with the blackjack. Guards carrying torches can be downgraded by firing a water arrow at something above the torch and dousing it. I never saw an AI relighting a carried torch doused that way. They also do not draw their weapons in reaction. Guess, TDM world knows sudden localized rain drops and there is no reason in trying to relight a wet torch (yeah, it's bugusing - but it's also fun). You can also douse a carried torch by directly hitting it with a water arrow. The AI draws its weopn afterwards and starts searching. But it does not know where to search and has no light source anymore. After some time it will just return to normal routine and can be blackjacked much easier than before.
Pure ghosting is feasible in most missions. But can get tedious rather quickly in guard-filled missions. It is no fun anymore after sneaking past the same patroling guards the tenth time. Just take em out and stuff them somewhere "safe". You might stack them but do not drop other stuff on them - they are rather weak when unconcious.
If using the balckjack (or crates - not tried that yet) would be possibly lethal in TDM, then the calculations would change. But i like that there are guaranteed-to-be-non-lethal methods of taking threats out in this game. Feels somehow better that way. They are just pixels, but most of them represent people that just happen to have a normally rather boring job.
I find it very disheartening that you're needing to ask how to edit a game because someone doesn't like you seeing blood and insults, this far into the 21th century.
Most of the time such harsh restrictions are the effect of the fear of parents that love their child and do not want it to get harmed or dulled by experiencing the forbidden content. There is a common misconception, that seeing abstract virtual violence as a child makes you more likely to use real violence later. Germany has a debate about "killing games" (original term: "Killerspiele"), that boils up again each time a kid goes postal after experiencing years of bullying in school when that kid also happens to have an FPS game installed on his computer.
The real problem is, that parent's love in combination with common misconceptions about the effects of media consumption lead to harsh restrictions they then force on their children. Less fear and more information would probably prevent that.
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Newbie DarkRadiant Questions
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted
You somehow removed the double colon from the actual URL. I got a DNS error on clicking it. But you might have an internet access provider that has its DNS configured to redirect to adverts instead of reporting an error.