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Airship Ballet

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Everything posted by Airship Ballet

  1. Man, a grunge song hasn't kept me listening all the way through for years =P
  2. It doesn't really take a whole lot of money and gear. It's possible to film somebody and underlay frames from the video in modelling software, then use it for key-frames. The only thing that bugs me is zombies calmly opening doors by the handle but overall I don't think the animations are that bad at all; you're just being self-critical =P
  3. Well they're a definite improvement. Given that players spend roughly equal amounts of time looking at people and architecture, improvements like this are great.
  4. As somebody who studied English as a foreign language, I've been taught that efficiency is a hundred times more effective than eloquence, when trying to be taken seriously. Posting carefully crafted walls of unnecessarily florid text will get you nowhere because it just appears pretentious and contrived. In a formal debate, you make your points as simply as you can with evidence and careful attention to avoiding fallacies, and then let somebody else do the same back to you. [moderator edit] At their core, Thief and TDM are very simple games. They let you use their mechanics however you like, but the mechanics themselves are simple. You open doors, you stay in the dark areas of rooms until nobody's looking, then you pinch whatever you want or you blackjack somebody on the back of the head. If there's a metal floor you use a moss arrow, if there's a torch you use a water arrow. You progress through the mission, getting a sense of direction from the architecture and importance of each room based on it, get to the top-ranking rooms, steal the objective loot and then leave. Any other objective is a derivation based on something you'd do in other missions anyway, like assassination or just swapping something shiny for a fake. In Thief, you can club people any which way you like and they'll most likely succumb if you weren't jiving in front of them under a torch to begin with. In TDM, you can't, because people can't to begin with. As a race our senses have developed to a point where we have a sixth sense for people creeping up on us. We feel disturbances in the air and have crazy peripheral vision, although it's so condensed at the far edges that we can't make head or tail of it, only react on an impulse to turn around. Aside from patrol paths with several targets and occasionally swiveling their heads in random directions, there isn't any RNG involved in the guards' vision. If you are in the dark and not touching them, they won't see you. You can get away with a lot of noise without them actually coming to investigate, and can easily avoid any of that noise by just not moving when they're nearby. Between gas and water arrows, there's no reason to not be able to knock out an entire household's staff without raising any alarms at all so long as you're patient. The fact that you're having so much trouble implies that you're not because you're trying to blackjack people in broad daylight rather than following them somewhere quiet and dark. Lockpicking is simple and can be done in no time save a few rare instances such as vault doors, but that's kind of the point in that context. Again, the only thing that would delay it is impatience, clicking and thinking you got it first time rather than waiting to hear the full pattern. I do that myself, but it rarely gets me into trouble anyway. As for swordfighting, it's just a case of holding a button and looking at their sword. That is really not difficult, almost impulsive to begin with I found. It's true that they do a lot of damage and your sword is crappy, but that's kind of the point. You had a dagger in Deadly Shadows and couldn't defend yourself with it anyway. They're armed, armored guards and you're a thief! Superior engine aside, the main aspect of TDM that sets it apart from Thief is its AI. In the latter, AI either stood on the spot and grumbled about hearing things or went about a fixed, predictable path. In TDM, they look around, react to things, divert from their path to close doors, can be set to randomly walk between points of the path and are generally a lot better at guarding places. If you were to go rob somewhere, you'd find the security to be even more alert than the guards in this. When you're put somewhere at night with the sole purpose of being alert and listening for disturbance, you're going to hear a fly land on a window, nevermind a guy in tap-dancing shoes blundering around behind you slamming doors and accidentally knocking over piles of plates in search of shiny ones. The game could definitely be more difficult, but then it would be an irritating slog of Hitman Absolution proportions. It has its bugs inherent in the engine and it has the occasional sadistic mapper who cranks up the difficulty because it seems too easy to them, but overall it is too easy. Once you know a guard's path and have plotted a way through the darkness of an area, you can just sprint along setting off level 1/2 alerts or go slower if you're after a good stealth score. Beyond not touching a guard and not being in 100% light while in line of sight with one, you can do whatever the hell you like. All it takes is patience, observance and occasionally speed. If you're having problems, you need to brush up on something. [moderator edit]
  5. Metal Gear sparked my interest in military history at a young age. You can actually learn quite a bit from it too, if you're patient enough =P
  6. ♪ The cockles are always warmer In somebody else's lake ♪
  7. Granted, but I think the door handles being at the regular height yet 3/4 of the way down the door suggests they may be a tad too tall.
  8. Getting bigger is mandatory, growing up is optional!
  9. Ladies, form an orderly queue.
  10. Speaking of only crawling, here's a little progress video of my currently nameless, aimless FM (Nemo being a pseudo-witty placeholder name): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lYVGgWlzg
  11. (I've just never heard that saying before. I'm immature, and I was weak.) Welcome to what I believe is one of the raddest communities out there. Lots of kindred spirits from similar generations (read: old farts) that will welcome you with open arms, I'm sure.
  12. ♪Welcome to the Hotel Daaark Mo-ooood♪ in all seriousness this is a pretty great mission you guys...
  13. Don't mention it; I should be thanking you for giving me something to do =P
  14. I'm all done and have a little write-up. Don't expand the spoilers if you don't want it... y'know, spoiled. I'll delete and move it once there's a thread in the beta testing forum if need be.
  15. Well every game's moddable, it just depends on the devs' methodology as to how much can be done and whether or not it's worth the effort. Some build with modders in mind and some just happen to have a work structure that accomodates getting into the files and messing around. And yeah, M&B is fun but I tend to run out of steam after a little while when I become overpowered and realise I have nothing to really show for it other than lots of heads on spikes. If it lets you build an army it should let you build castles a la Stronghold, and if it won't I always thought it should come with an army builder, a la Gratuitous Space Battles.
  16. Seems a lot deeper and directed than Mount & Blade. I never enjoyed M&B simply because it has no real direction. It's also pretty basic and generally has unresponsive, unsatisfying game feel. I'd happily play this just for the swordplay, should it be as dynamic as the footage implies.
  17. I'm still working on mine, just keeping quiet about it! =P
  18. I think portfolio links or dynamic profile links like mine are the best. I've found Steam signatures conjure a bunch of discussion about what I've been playing, and portfolio links are just handy for networking. You could always turn your sig picture into a URL leading to a portfolio if you have/make one.
  19. Yeah, I just downloaded it but can't play until I get off work. I'll happily compile feedback and the like once I'm home. If there's no beta testing thread by then I'll just post in here with spoiler tags.
  20. You're welcome, and a fresh install is probably best. Like Gnartsch said, TFix and a loader of your choice is all you need, then you can add what you like after that with with the help of the ttlg forums. I'm at work so not right now. If it doesn't have many seeds to begin with, probably not.
  21. Bah, must use that broken link to get to the actual download. Just go to this site and click the CONVICT.OSM link at the bottom. This is only necessary if you get a prompt saying you're missing convict.osm once you give it the game directory in GarrettLoader. http://www.thief-uni...lfile&fileid=84
  22. Yeah, it definitely takes a nose-dive towards the end. Maybe I prefer keeping them looking aged for the sake of nostalgia, who knows? http://www.shadowdar...downloadst3.htm Here you go. This trumps Dark Loader since it can play pretty much everything LGS touched and a bit more. If you're using Thief Gold and haven't got DromEd installed, you'll need to put this in the same folder as your thief.exe in order to play FMs: http://www.thief-universe.com/?go=dl&fileid=92&dl=true
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