New Horizon

Hey folks. For the month of May I am running as great a distance as I can to raise money for one of our local Canadian children's hospitals, the IWK. Today all donations are matched dollar for dollar by a corporate sponsor. If anyone would like to support my efforts, it would be greatly appreciated. https://www.millionreasons.run/fundraisers/timgormley Thanks!

TTLG? That's Through the Looking Glass Forums. A looking glass fan community. Has been around for a long, long time. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/

My Memory is equally blurry at this point. lol I'm 47 now with two kids. I think they have consumed a lot of my brain matter. haha I have really fond memories of working with Spar in the early days. I think we used to chat on MSN. I was quite the night owl back then, so with the time differences our schedules lined up quite well and I would sit up at night helping him test out his systems as he figured things out. I'll never forget how he scared the hell out of me with the S/R system when he first got something working. He had a simple room map, something standing in for loot that I could frob and when I did, it spawned a doom 3 zombie behind me. Not the best thing to experience at 3am while testing in the dark. haha Amazing to see how it grew into the TDM it is today. Amazing really. Some folks over at TTLG said we would never do it.

Incredible!!! Awesome work, as always!

I honestly couldn't say. It was so long ago. There certainly wouldn't be anything left of it ingame after all the work that has been done.

Not really interested in it. I don't care for the effect. It was dabbled with in TDM quite some years ago.

WOW!! Great updates!!

Darkradiant just keeps getting better and better! Amazing work. Thanks Greebo!

Not necessarily. The core mod is designed to be more challenging to experienced players who found Thief too easy. If a Thief player comes into it, who did not try to ghost missions or ran around blackjacking everyone, expecting the TDM AI to behave in the same manner without lowering the AI hearing and visual accuity, then that's a legit question. I work in QA for a development studio...if you don't ask those questions, you can't possibly begin to evaluate whether or not there is indeed an issue. The settings are there to allow players to tailor the AI behaviour so they can play in a way closer to their expectations.

I believe I suggested the hearing settings back then too.

I only mention those settings because they do indeed make blackjacking more beginner friendly and the entire game in general. The default settings are definitely geared toward players who want a tougher go at it but it would likely be beneficial to give more attention to the specific settings that can bring the experience closer to classic Thief.

If you go into Settings / Gameplay / Difficulty, what are your AI Vision and AI Hearing set to? I think a lot of people don't realize that these can be adjusted to help approximate the behaviour in Thief.

My suggestion would be to implement something between the two. Test it and see if people complain or hate it. I think the rules we laid out during development were good on paper but in practice ended up being a turn off for a lot of players. I have never had an issue with it personally but I know how it works and expanded one some of the code when I was doing some tweaking a few years back to make it more forgiving. So yeah, go with some of the suggestions here to find a happy place between TDM and Thief and let people test it. There's no harm in that.

From my recollection it was less an issue of people aiming low and more an issue of them getting too close to the AI and the collision for the blackjack ending up in front of the head cone projecting behind the AI. I had tweaked it a few years back to be pretty forgiving by making the cone larger but unfortunately due to the way the collision worked with the animation, it did have the limitation where it could fail you players got too close.