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Skaruts

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Everything posted by Skaruts

  1. That's where you're making a mistake. Different characters can (and probably should) be different, as well as different worlds, different stories, etc. In this case were talking about the same character. What you're implying is that it would be nonsense to expect Sherlock Holmes to remain British, arrogant, and an avid smoker, or to expect superman to be able to fly, throughout both their series'. Given a well told turn of events, Sherlock could stop being arrogant or a smoker, but not British. I don't know. I'll have to play the game and see. It's nothing new to see characters evolve.
  2. Don't make assumptions about me based on what other people say that I've never hinted at. I don't have a fanboyish mentality. Especially when what I said goes right against that assumption.
  3. Well, they have no obligations at all. But... If you never read Salem's Lot, it's a highly realistic take on vampire huntings. Friday 13th wasn't an intelligent series to begin with... (don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it when I was a kid) Final Fantasy is a series of completely independent episodes (most of them). Quite the opposite of Thief series. Or Sherlock Holmes. Thief is called Thief, but Thief still features Garrett. That there isn't a Stephen Russel is another story, it's still the same Garrett despite the differences in his looks.
  4. That sounds vaguely like saying "your dog smells better than you". Very open to misinterpretations... Not intended, though. I did but forgot to address it. Well, simply because it wasn't marketed as a spin off. It's "not a sequel" in the very same way TDS "wasn't" a sequel: because it's intended to attract new people. For that effect they both just refrained from using 3 and 4 in the titles. Marketing techniques. EDIT: I must point out though, that I'm open to admit that T4 may not actually "ruin" the series. JA3 totally ruined that series, and the next ones just kept stepping on its dead remains (here's hoping Full Control can revive it). XCOM didn't really ruin the series, it just brought it back but left many fans wanting a bit more (like getting half a cookie). And maybe T4 doesn't, too.
  5. @Airship Ballet, but it's one thing to motivate people to get challenged and another to motivate them to be lazy (I wanted a better word for that...). Many people are hardly ever motivated to stop being lazy, or even to think too much, and a good example of that is the way the dumbest shows on TV are among the most viewed. The problem resides in the way businesses are prioritizing their products. They're placing first what is likely to be profitable, and maybe if there's some space they'll place something instructive or intelligently entertaining. People will buy almost anything that is well marketed regardless of its quality, and if businesses had any sense of integrity they could pretty much turn it all 180ยบ. At first there would be a loss of income, but there's no reason to believe it wouldn't catch up to what it was over time, as long as marketing campaigns kept being decently made. The snowball effect is the key. The more they sell dumb things, the dumber people become, and the less likely they are to ever want to be mentally challenged. But it's possible to invert that snowball effect to positive consequences. Similarly with games, the more often you leave challenges aside the more you're contributing to move things towards the lazy side. And perhaps also the more you're turning the gaming industry towards becoming a movie industry. At this point you can say "there are people who don't have time or patience". Fair enough point, as far as I'm concerned. But there's plenty of room to make games to cater to those people without ruining series with sub par sequels.
  6. The big difference there is that dishonored didn't have a precedent to live up to. You can judge such a game on its own merits easier than you can judge a game that needs to be coherent to a series. No matter how long ago it came out, what made it fun made it fun. I often use XCOM as an example, because it's a good example (or Jagged Alliance - but I prefer XCOM because JA3 is a hideous game either way). The stuff that made the old ones fun wasn't so much the plot as it was the gameplay mechanics involved. Come a decade later and the sequels come out not featuring half of what made them commendable in the first place. Things could improve instead of being replaced, complex systems could be made easier to understand instead of streamlined or stripped apart. I don't have a problem with simpler systems, I just have a problem with the wrong mentality on making sequels. Like I usually say, the recent XCOM, as it is, would be a rather good spin off (despite the bland voice acting and characters and generic soundtrack). This mentality mostly stems from the unjustified fear that people these days aren't willing to be challenged. It's bad enough that this generation is getting flooded with press-button-to-win kind of crap or "quick-time-event-them-ups" (as Nerd3 eloquently put it). When it comes to thief, turning him into a hollywoodish super-hero that goes up against a typical B-Movie villain is an amusing thing to do, considering the series' plots used to be intelligent ones. It's as if Stephen King suddenly wrote a sequel to Salem's Lot featuring a stereotypical silver-bullet gun-toting bad ass smoking a cigar and ready to pop some vampires Commando style. Now that wouldn't make much sense, would it? I really hope we're all wrong (all of us with a negative view) about this game. I don't yet see how it can happen, but I hope it does.
  7. Questions like "what's this special texture for" or "is there a hotkey for...", or "what keyword should I google for to find this and that". That sort of things are the sort of things I tend to not create threads about. Though, I understand your point, and sometimes I wonder if creating the thread might be a good thing anyway. But when I was learning to use Hammer I was coming across a million situations I didn't know how to deal with (part of it Hammer's own shenanigans that the wiki didn't talk about), and the already quite extensive and in depth wiki still wasn't perfect, and the forums were a good way of getting answers but took a lot of waiting, or a lot of time searching, and sometimes I made a thread only to find the solution to my problem 30 seconds later by myself, or only to find that I had been overlooking something and the thread was moot. I noticed that the time when I actually started making real progress in my learning and started getting my projects moving forward (and my motivation going up), was when I met a german dude who had a lot of experience with Hammer and was always happy to help. He taught me more in like 3 months than I had learned in almost a year with wikis and forums. And some time later I was helping him (and other people) solving rather advanced or very specific problems. The thing is, even though the community around Valve games was already gigantic, the wiki still neglected things, and this will always happen. Not everything ends up being documented. There is always some singular occurrence it will neglect and someone needs help with. On the other hand as the community grows more people may end up documenting such things. On yet another hand (how many hands do I have? lol) if someone gets answers and finishes their map, that map is also an addition to the resources that are available for research. The good thing here is that these forums do actually store information, as opposed to Steam forums that delete many months-old threads.
  8. Sorry to necro a dead thread, but I was about to create a thread about this, so it doesn't make much difference, I guess. So... is there still no IRC channel? From my point of view it might be a great way of speaking with other mappers about all the little questions I don't think justify a new thread on the forums, among other things. Might be a good thing for new people.
  9. Let me put it this way. I noticed a difference when playing T3. But that was the same feeling of difference that I felt when playing Half Life 2, or Starcraft 2, Warcraft 3, and any other reasonably decent sequels. In other words, the game felt different while still not feeling alien to the series. I didn't feel this when playing Carmageddon 3 (though I kind of enjoyed it) or Jagged Alliance 3 or DNF. That's not to say T3 is a great sequel. It's not quite there, but I don't believe it's a bad one either. Every series has ups and downs, and I view it as if T2 was an up and T3 was a downward slope without being a total down.
  10. It's kind of like playing blackjack with your opponent's cards facing up. I always found myself in a dilemma in that case though. On one hand it's a cheaty feature, considering the nature of the game that we're talking about. On the other hand I'm all for having a camera option in games, to satisfy each one's preference (even though I loathe 3rd person view in most cases- except to look at my character if it's ever pertinent). The reason why it annoyes me is just because I feel like it does a bit of a disservice to the game by allowing some players to "cheat" their way around potentially dangerous features such as leaning. Of course that it doesn't affect me personally if I trust myself to never cheat with it.
  11. I remember seeing something about it not having, but I may be outdated and wrong, they may have changed their mind on that as well. I hope I'm wrong, actually. What Oldjim posted is one the things keeping me hopeful about the game.
  12. Because none of those things really made the game detract from what made it a thief game. What I found quite distracting from the thief concept was the way the plot got overly messy towards the ending.
  13. http://www.pcgamer.c...arretts-return/ One of the problems I have with T4 is the same that I have with most AAA games these days: it's 2014 and most of the mojor points to note about it that I see are aesthetic. The hands are a luxury, it's one of those things that can't really add anything to an empty game. I remember one level in T2 where I evesdropped a conversation between two characters, and boy did that conversation had content. They went for maybe 20 minutes of conversation, and that certainly added to the atmosphere. There might not be a new objective coming out of it, but it surely was a lump of fresh air after lockpicking a dozen doors and creeping around half the map. A moment of soothing recess where you could momentarily meddle into people's affairs. This is one example of the many things which made Thief's such an enjoyable game. Thief revolved heavily around the lore that was extraneous to Garrett, but which was still often useful, or the least, entertaining and immersive. The world felt alive. T3 had much of it too. People often point out its problems while neglecting to consider how the first two weren't perfect either. But the reasons why it was enjoyable weren't only because the gameplay was easily bearable despite its flaws (which I never noticed until I read opinions on the internet much later), but rather because, apart from the rope arrows and the lack of swimming, it still kept much of the original essence. T3's world still felt alive, and the gameplay still felt like Thief. T3 isn't really that far from what I would envision a proper modern sequel to be. T4 seems to be very tunnel visioned and poorly thought out. Maybe even pretentious. It hopped on the bandwagon of games with generic content coupled with a set of marketing-oriented features and overdone aesthetics. T1 got me thinking about the future of games, and whenever I looked into that future I saw marvelous things, I saw NPCs being made more alive and interesting, the gameplay mechanics being improved, among many other things. But it's 2014 and very little of that really happened so far. Doom 3's dysfunctional marine couldn't hold a pistol and a flashlight in each hand and couldn't walk over a wall higher than knee height, Oblivion still had characters standing idle and apathetic behind counters doing nothing from dawn till dusk, and claiming to be busy. But that was nearly a decade ago, somehow I still hoped. Well, I stopped hoping a few years ago. I started looking at indies for innovations on what really matters besides physics and graphics and aesthetics. The fact that T4 doesn't feature undead is seen by some as a good thing, but it's also one example of the series' iconic atmosphere being streamlined... stripped of what made it good in the first place. And at the same time, considering the history of the series, I won't get to suspend my disbelief because of that, since the world used to have lots of ancient places where the Hammerite ghosts were restless, and now suddenly it somehow doesn't. I have other issues with it, such as that the HUD can't even begin to fit the theme, the introduction of in-mission cutscenes on a series that set the example of how to tell a story without them, the lame super-powers, among other things. This is all why I defend that T4 might be a great spin off, but not a main series title. It may still be a good game, but it's probably not a thief game. I'm reserving my judgment until I can play it, but I'm hardly persuaded by it.
  14. Like I pointed out elsewhere a few times, a good reboot should be a plain remake that simply brings back the nostalgic essence and expectations of the title, and new ideas should go into spin offs for a start. This way they wouldn't get any fans pissed off, would get new users familiarized with the original concepts, and the spin offs would get them a good grasp of which new ideas work and which don't, and which ideas the main title might benefit from. Since EM did it backwards (as did everyone else that I can think of who made reboots so far), the main reliance is on the new user base that it'll get, which is probably, and by large, all those people who aren't aware of the original essence or those who don't take it to heart. Which leads to what chk772 said. If the new user base becomes strong and thief 4 does well (and assuming T4 really proves to be the piece of crap that so far seems to be), then a fecal franchise is born and will reek for as many years and sequels as they can stretch it to. Which means thief as we know and love remain dead. Just like XCOM and Duke Nukem. In fact, XCOM is a good example of this. The game isn't a bad game, but its title brings expectations with it that the game doesn't really manage to be on par with. Would be a really good spin off (even if quite generic in many ways), but instead it's a rather mediocre reboot (and one which contributes to this modern video-games-accessibility-gameplay mentality that tries to keep people dumb and/or lazy instead of encouraging people to bravely overcome obstacles and actually achieve things).
  15. I was trying different positions and the fact is that there's always some stretching and shrinking in some parts of the bevel. So I guess the position of the brush is arbitrary. In fact, it seemed like simply pasting natural from the wall to the patch does the job just as well, considering both ways will invariably force you to use the texture editor to make some adjustments. So as long as one can make it align properly, I guess it doesn't really matter how you do it. Tis my conclusion. I believe the stretching happens because the texture editor doesn't have much flexibility when dealing with patches that have 8 subdivisions. Actually, never mind what amount of subdivisions the patch has, the problem is that the texture editor only gives you 2 "subdivisions" to work with, instead of whatever many the patch has, so it's virtually impossible to eliminate some kinds of distortions.
  16. I have to take back what I said about the Texture Tool not being useful in my case. I used Sotha's technique with the diagonal brush and then I played around with the texture tool until I figured out it's intricacies, and it helped a lot. Before that I was having trouble replicating what I had done before, when attempting it with different textures. But this way it worked out very well. Just had to take care of a few seems by simply flipping the texture coords in the texture tool. Tends to happen when you're copying and flipping brushes around. One problem I have with it, Sotha, is that when I needed to repeat the process for the clean brown bricks (without the white bricks) to mix them in there, I had deleted the diagonal brush and had to figure out the position once again, and it took me a while. Do you have any "reference" that you use to know where exactly to place the diagonal brush whenever you need to do it from scratch? Something that makes it not be so much guess work when doing the first time. I assume (haven't tested) that the position should vary depending on the shape of the bevel arch too...
  17. Ah yes. it was suggested. For some reason I thought you were the OP, by now. Must. Go. Sleep.
  18. My point was regardless of your need for a manual switch for the visportal, but rather about the window itself. If I understood your situation correctly, doesn't it happen that whenever you're close to the window the portal should be open independently of the window being open or closed, and when you're away or around the corner the portal should be closed independently of the window as well? Seems like you could just control the visportal without caring about the window, since it's a see through window. Or am I missing something? Sorry to be digressing from your problem, but I'm interested in see through windows and I'm trying to not miss anything.
  19. Sadly I discovered XCOMs a little too late, and the only one I actually played (down to hell's entrails out of) was XCOM Apoc. A friend of mine had Terror From the Deep (or was it Defense? It was known here in Europe as Enemy Unknown) and at some point he borrowed it to me and I played a bit of it, but at that time I also got my hands on... can't quite remember, perhaps Warcraft 2, Red Alert, or DK, and UFO got on the backburner, and I never got around to play it more. There were so many great games at that time that it was nigh impossible to play them all. Unfortunately... But that's amazing news! I'm so going to check that out. And speaking of that, there's also an OpenRA that came out recently, I think, that brings back Red Alert and Dune (all in one - plus online support, I believe). Pretty cool stuff going on around old games.
  20. @RJ, indeed you nailed it there. I never attempted to "tell a story" through the environment, but I love when the environments do, and this will be my attempt at doing so. Or rather more like telling its history, maybe. @Obsttorte & @Sotha, in this case I'm going for a semi-realistic space, because the museum (I'm still not sure if it's a museum, it's just the only thing that came to mind that can have many rare artifacts) is to be part of the city I'm building, in which some stuff wil happen after the big heist. I can still modulate it, but I need to maintain proportions. But I'm trying to avoid laying out an entire building and then realizing the building is only half done and then having to restructure everything. So I need to try to plan out at least the areas where the player can go, but I need to know what areas there are first. Even if I can write down a complete list, some areas may end up being just imaginary behind fake doors, but having a fake door with a plaque saying "storage" is more meaningful than a blank fake door. Blueprints is a good idea. I had forgotten that such a thing existed... wtf... "hey brain, work?" EDIT: wasn't there a specialized google search for blueprints, like the google patents? I could almost swear there was... @demagogue, I like that thought process indeed. Gonna keep it in mind while building.
  21. Is there any real advantage in auto-closing a window that is see-through? I mean, I assume the portal won't close until it's supposed to anyway, regardless of the window being open or closed, so I'm wondering...
  22. The title may mislead a bit, so let me expand on what I mean exactly. I've had this problem for a long time. When designing a building, I usually don't know exactly what to put inside it. For example, if I'm designing a police station, I know it takes interrogation rooms, a mess hall... office booths... cell blocks... and I'm already running out of ideas. It surely takes more stuff than that. I've been trying to design a museum and I'm having a bit of trouble deciding what to fit in it, besides the art galleries. I met a guy once who's job was specifically to plan this sort of thing out for architects (I think), basically listing them what a functional building needs to have inside it, but I don't remember what the job was called. Googling isn't helping me much, so far (I'm trying different search terms). How do you people do it when you aren't sure of what to make of a building?
  23. So I've been complaining about this and that here and there and haven't yet taken the time to deliver some very deserved praise. Shame on me. So here it is, my thank you thread. (I don't mind if others use this thread for the same end. It's always good to have less threads saying the same thing, right?) Some back story: I've been craving for a proper stealth game for years, and thief seemed like it was dead (and in two weeks we'll probably confirm it really is). I tried replaying thief 1 and 2, but during the first mission I just couldn't keep going. For some reason, even though I nearly worship certain old games, I just can't play them. I tried my most favorites, such as thief, Strife, DK, JA2, XCOM Apocalypse, Pizza Tycoon, GTA. Carmageddon... to name just a few, and I just can't keep going past the first level, and I don't really know why. Not even Thief 3... but in this case it's maybe because I replayed it a couple of times before and I burned out. Modern stealth games don't really cut it for me (frowning at you Dishonored). Either the stealth elements are just dumb and stupid (AC, a stealth game??), or a plain fudge like Betheda's thieving (isn't all bad, but........... it's bad). So, modern games, bollocks. Back to old games. Oh wait, I can't play them... Though dilemma. I could keep going if I was playing a proper remake. If a modern game brings back the feel of the old one, I'm a happy panda! I couldn't play the new XCOM for too long, it's not bad game, but the XCOM title makes me expect a proper tactical game, I couldn't play Jagged Alliance 3, and these are way worse in comparison to the new XCOM, I want my money back from Duke Forever... I couldn't stand Doom 3 even (which is why I hadn't tried, nor looked into, TDM before - I could go on all day about how bad D3 is, so don't tempt me - same with Oblivion). I've been craving for something to chew on, and found nothing at all. Found plenty of messed up crap . And none of it are stealth games... So I'm feeling like I'm going "down the shi'er". Then I found TDM. And this is what I found so great about TDM, is that it feels like thief (it kinda lacks that Josh Randall music style though :S). At first I barely even noticed the differences (the ones that prevent copyright issues), I just felt like I was playing thief! Another interesting thing was that I read the gameplay article on the wiki and learned that there were guards with helmets, but they fit so nicely into the game that I only noticed them after I crossed paths with them quite a few times. The lockpicking mechanics didn't feel out of place either. Everything so far seems to fit perfectly into the game. I not only want to thank you for the mod, but I also want to congratulate you on the execution of it. The voice acting is amazing, very... natural. And oh, am I a voice acting critic.... I keep destroying bethesda on this subject (and many other subjects) whenever I can, and I praise Valve endlessly for it. I try to be fair, but it's something I take as very important in games, and not a lot of games get it right. I must congratulate the voice actors here (I'm not yet fully aware of who they are). Other than that, aesthetics are also really good (textures, models, etc - non-mapper stuff). I wouldn't expect this level of standards when considering taking a look at a mod. I might not find this level of quality a few years back, but to be fair that wouldn't hurt my opinion. I like good graphics, but to me it's by far not as important as the gameplay and sounds. That said, it's still surprisingly good. Also, that said, the mapper sided stuff seems to be doing very well. The standards here blossom some really good quality and good looking stuff. So I found a "remake" of one of my most favorite games ever, which looks amazing, plays very solidly, feels pretty much like the original, and has entertained me for a lot of hours already. Plus, it's on a BSP engine (quake based? I don't know if doom engine is based on quake's engine per se, but seems too similar), which I happen to be quite acquainted with, and that allows me to scratch my mapping itch that I had nagging me since Valve destroyed my beloved HL2dm for which I was mapping for a few years (and where the mapping quality standards where as good as the bottom of my toilet after I let go of a generous, reeking torpedo). What else could I ask? I'm sort of living the nostalgia of my teenage years with this game. For all that and more, thank you all so much. PS: Now I just need Jagged Alliance:Flashback, Carmageddon 4 and War For The Overworld to be some proper remakes/reboots, and I'll have all I need to morph into a teenager for real. And someone in this freaking world should remake Strife!
  24. I like ghosting, but I also like a challenging blackjack here and there. I always play on the hardest difficulty, except when it limits blackjacking, unless it's well justified and it's not a generic single mission. The same goes to killing, even though I never kill (really never). Single missions usually feel too isolated in terms of story and context for these limits to sound pertinent. I will more easily accept them in campaign, but like I said, depending on how believable the justification for it is. For example, compare these objectives: From a mission where I'd completely despise the limitations and play an easier difficulty: - A master thief doesn't leave a trace. Don't blackjack anyone. - You're a thief, not a murderer. Don't kill anyone. This bores me... From a mission where I'd embrace the limitations. - Lord Joe mustn't know about you until your buddy Jack tips off the citywatch (suppose you're going to incriminate him). Don't leave any traces. No blackjacking. - Killing anyone might start a civil war if they don't see anyone to blame for it. No killing. This challenges me. Killing might be merged with the first objective, but I made it like that just to complete the point. I still share the notion that a map devoid of AIs is a boring map...
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