DingDong
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Posts posted by DingDong
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Sounds like it would be hell to code, and then more hell for mappers to setup. Mappers would have to manually define these areas. To the computer, a room is just a room, so the mapper would have to flag areas as safe....but of course then there is coding all the potential scenarios that this new system would have to account for.
Interesting suggestion, but it would alter gameplay drastically and it's beyond the scope of what we want for the toolset.
Masking the player with some loud noise is doable, but for reliable gameplay...what you hear is what you get.
I figured it would be too much for a mod team to do and to be honest I didn't expect the suggestion to be taken seriously, it's just how I think it should be done if it were to be done. Perhaps the people making Thief 4 should do that, would definitely be something that's never been done before. I think though that it wouldn't bug out too much as long as the logic is correct - NPC's would draw a line of sight to your location, if you make sound and you're in their line of sight they're suspicious, if not then no they aren't. If a person who patrols that path hears you (and knows that no one should be there) then they become suspicious regardless unless there is another path that would explain to them why they hear footsteps, but they again trace line of sight so if you're in a shadow thats in their sight your cover isn't effective. In theory the algorithm doesn't seem all that complicated at all.
Also my idea is that it should be done with AI patrol paths - that some area is drawn around the path within which you may walk, around each NPC is a circle within which the path is "cancelled out" (People who walk their own path know what to expect). So it only works with NPC's other than the AI's path that you're using as cover.
sounds like too much of a restriction on the gameplay that allows you to do what you want and when you want and not be restricted by triggered events as thats what am reading these bubbles as.[/Quote]Not really, you can't run around and jump, you have to know the guard's path to know when you're safe and the original guard would have to not hear you. I think essentially only attentive thieves would be able to utilize such a feature.Those who don't pay attention that much probably wont notice that much of a difference.
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Yes, yes, and yes.
You're right, realistically it shouldn't happen. But trying to figure out some kind of general, codable rule for WHEN it shouldn't happen would be nightmarish.
This is how I think it should work: I am thinking of an AI path saturation principal. I don't know if it would be easy to code but it would sort of work like this:
Along the AI path you have allowable "sound bubbles" that is to say if you travel roughly along the path people wont suspect a thing, around the NPC is another sound bubble and if you're in the intersection of the two bubbles your cover is blown for that path; however if there is another path your cover isn't blown. You would however have to keep pretty close to the path and walk at the same rate, i.e running should alert people. In the case of the servant in the kitchen the saturation would be the whole room (because his path is all around the room) thus when you knock him out and begin walking you are covered.
Ideally though there should be a sight checking system so that if you make noise people look there and if they don't see a guard they become suspicious. So it only should work well if people can't visually see the path.
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Does anyone know if, realistically, a torch would go out if you drop it? I imagine it wouldn't, since it's basically a rag soaked with flammable liquid.
It shouldn't , it's just the fuel being oxidized so as long as there is oxygen and it isn't severely disturbed it should keep burning.
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The blackjack arrow/bolt... Physics doesn't work that way. The arrow would merely annoy the guard slightly, even if you were supremely precise and accurate. I'm not a total expert in physics (still below university level) but it seems to me that:
1) It would be too heavy at the point, so to counterweight you'd have to make the arrow ridiculously heavy at the other end
2) Even with a longbow with a heavy pull, you wouldn't be able to generate enough force to knock a guard unconscious at anything more than close range (where you might as well go and blackjack the poor bugger).
What the hell, go ahead and make it anyway. It's just my 0.02USD that they didn't include it because it's just slightly too overpowered (and practically impossible).
I think an arbalest (heavy crossbow) would easily generate enough force to kill a person even with a blunt end (The reason they had hand cranks is to be able to crank mechanical work into the crossbow to be released in the form of accelerating the bolt) . These heavier weapons were strong enough to pierce STEEL plate so knocking someone out would be easily accomplished, these weapons had basically the strength of a horse's kick behind it so this is very powerful stuff. The question is, why would a thief have something THAT powerful? I think it would be more suitable for a mission where you are a medieval sniper or something.
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I liked the mission overall , especially the crown replacement part but I couldn't ever shake the feeling that it was a bit too cheesy in the sense that you were always just finding keys in a rather limited space before opening some other area, finding a key there and going elsewhere. I guess it felt too monorailed and too much find this, find that, do this and then that in this precise order. The mask placement I did like and the fact that you can go through the fire places to cut your routes short and make it easier. I guess the issue was that it felt constrained, I could always figure out where I had to go and what I had to do. The mission for me was just moving a few objects around and finding what I had to get to go to the next area.
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The combat in this game is really good, in fact I completed all the missions in "assassin" mode where the goal was to kill every last guard and servant (And the lord/priest of course) preferably with a sword . The armor is pretty well done in that you can instantly tell where you can hit and where you can't. For this reason alone the regular guards are actually much harder to kill than hammers because you cannot stab them in the head from behind, you have to stab them in the face (or shoot an arrow in that region).
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I think even in the originals you weren't a very fast runner, what seems to be missing is a speed potion for a full very fast sprint.
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<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I always ghost myself and I have beaten most missions in thief 1-2 ghosting on expert as well as the maps for this mod. What I mean is think of something like the thief's guild in Thief gold where you had to do some careful observation of patrols to just barely get by guards/open locks and where you had to do some nifty rope arrow placement/moss arrow placement to get by some guards. That's what I mean, where it's hard to ghost.<br /><font size="1">If you're equating "Harder" to "More difficult"</font>: It seems to me that people who truly want to <b>ghost</b> through a level often prefer to use <i>their own</i> yardstick instead of depending on what their PC or Mapper defines as <b>ghosting</b>. I'd hate to be sneaking through a level when the screen suddenly shows "Mission Failed" for what seems to be no reason at all.<br /><br /><font size="1">If you're equating "Harder" to "Longer"</font>: Beta mappers have shown that TDM can definitely handle humongous maps. No worries there!<br />
<br /><br /><br /><br />Yes, there are some FMs coming up that have pretty challenging bits (and undead); they're coming. But also it's still early on, to say the least! I think as mappers start to understand the new AI and systems better, they'll figure out how to create some very challenging FMs. <img src='http://forums.thedarkmod.com/public/style_emoticons/default/ph34r.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='
' /><br />Good stuff, I want something REALLY challenging.
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I dunno if I will get to map any time soon, but in my opinion maps need to be epically difficult on expert. I remember on expert some maps in Thief 1 took literally hours to complete and when I was done it was so satisfying. I think mappers for this mod definitely should strive towards that sort of thing. Also, I already mentioned it but I hope for some convincing undead, undead are always a bit harder due to the psychological stress they cause.
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It's great overall, there are some minor flaws, which have been mentioned, but they don't bother me very much. I can't wait for the undead, those missions are my favorite! Hopefully someone will make a really scary mission.
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Well I have beat all 7 levels now, the pairs were all pretty easy now that I know what I am doing. 3 at once was hard because they kept pushing me out of the actual arena . It's overall a very good system but it annoys me a bit that the enemies keep running right into me and somehow blocking hits while being pressed up against me. Weird!
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Well I am not that badly trained! I managed to dispatch the Thug+hammerite combo (Did an overhead slash into the thug's head) but I do understand that it's not meant to be easy to fight at all. I would say that this game got that right - enemy numbers actually do make a very huge difference 1 on 1 you can generally win , 1 on 2 you have much less a chance.
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Ive done the tutorial but so far I can only get up to the guard+hammerite before I get raped and can't defeat them. The combat is a bit awkward in that it isn't clear when your opponent wont block your strike, it seems kind of random and the only guaranteed time you can hit is during a very small window of a counter attack. I have had a lot of success just bunny jumping around my opponents and slashing like nuts but surely this can't be the way. Blocking seems to quit working once you have more than 1 enemy against you since they often attack both at once.
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1. You're referring to the
unopenable door in the passage down the bottom?
It's been a long time, but IIRC
there is a crypt behind that door, you just need to find an alternate route into it.
I could be wrong though - might be thinking of another area.
Wait you mean the place that you go to by elevator with one guard? Well I guess that makes sense now...Lol, I was kind of expecting some haunts or zombies I guess. Just seemed to small to be a "real" crypt Lol
2. Yup. There's at least one I'm thinking of that's epic.[/Quote]Great news.
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By the way, I also wanted to ask:
1. Saint Lucia seems incomplete without the crypt added. Is it going to be added?
2. Even this map seems to be larger than the standard Thief 3 maps, how large are you capable of making maps? I played Doom 3 a bit and their maps seem to be pretty big.
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Thanks DingDong. Glad you enjoyed it. There's a lot more fun on the way![/Quote]
Glad to hear it!
Combat wasn't finished in St. Lucia but you'll find in the new training mission that it is much advanced.[/Quote]
Very good, I saw a video of it so I was kind of surprised that there wasn't much to it in this one. It seems nearly impossible to melee hammers to death, even in a 1 on 1 fight.
I was screwing around with it some more and was trying out the arrows, shooting a noise maker arrow into someone's head is hilarious. Two odd things that did happen though - when I shot from above I hit the guard in the head and he backflipped from the arrow hitting him, the master thief must be real strong! Also firing moss arrows at a guard's face slows him down tremendously, is this on purpose?
btw you should put a spoiler around the cause of the alert you mentioned.
Done
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I just finished playing it, beat the map in 52 minutes with 0 kills and 0 times being spotted
(Except when I dropped the hammer on the statue)
2002 loot (Apparently there's another 500 I missed somewhere) .
Overall I think the mod stays faithful to the thief series much more than Thief 3, it feels like I am playing an updated Thief 2 (or Thief 1) with newer graphics and nifty additions. The physics interactions are very good and convincing. The way the character moves especially the mantling is probably the best I have seen, its very fluid and intuitive making climbing things much easier. Definitely an improvement over the original climbing. The AI seemed to do everything it should and the patrols were again an improvement over the original Thief 1 and Thief 2 - the guards seems to glance around more often and had more unpredictable movement patterns often turning around to close a door (That caught me off guard) , they also seemed to react to motion very well, that is I had to stay perfectly still for them not to say anything. Their reaction to sound I am not so sure about, at first I wasn't sure how quickly I could traverse terrain but found that crouch running generally didn't alert anyone if it was stone floor, that seems fair enough but dropped objects seem to be a different manner. I was fiddling around trying to pick up a golden plate and accidentally knocked it off with a candle, there was a loud CLANG and a guard like a few feet away, he didn't seem to react at all. Kind of odd especially how loud the thing was. The combat seems to be good because enemies are a very actual threat, more so than in the originals but I still haven't figured out how to work it, I always get killed in a fight (Not that I generally do but its definitely tough). The story was also pretty convincing (as well as thiefsy) and made me feel like a complete dick especially when I read that the statue is meant to give hope to the disillusioned masses and I ruined it all .
Overall the mod felt very intuitive to me and easy to get into as well as being professional and faithful to the originals.
Also, is it just me or do the Hammerites sound almost exactly like the Black Guards in Dark Messiah? Lol!
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<br /><br /><br /><br />Make sure there's a config.spec file in <i>Doom 3/saintlucia</i> (or <i>Doom 3/thiefsden</i>, if you're playing Thief's Den) as well.<br /><br />Do you have your visual quality set to "Ultra" in Doom 3? If so, dial it down to "High". "Ultra" forces the engine to never use compressed textures, which is exactly what we <i>don't</i> want.<br /><br />If that doesn't help, here's a workaround: Try putting those settings into <i>Doom 3/saintlucia/autoexec.cfg</i> (or <i>Doom 3/thiefsden/autoexec.cfg</i>) instead. If that file doesn't exist, create it - it's just an ordinary plain text file, with extension cfg instead of txt. That should force them to take their correct values on each startup.<br />The last solution worked! Thanks!
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Is there an empty file called config.spec in your Doom 3/base folder? If not, try creating one.
Seems that yes there is one, it's named config.spec and the size says 0 Kb.
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Help guys, I have the same problem but each time I edit DoomConfig it reverts the settings as soon as I launch the game
AI reacting to sound
in The Dark Mod
Posted · Edited by DingDong
I think that you'd have to make players aware of this feature in a tutorial then. For them to use this feature they must first observe the AI's path and then they must utilize it when the said AI isn't within hearing range. It would promote slower gameplay I think.
I think the main issue is probably that it wont have that much of an effect on game play, people who ghost wont ever know about it unless the map forces you to use it. Might be too gimmicky even though it would be realistic.
I think that in the end it would probably be too much work for the minimal reward even thought it would be insanely cool to see. I understand also what you mean about elegance in that it would be difficult to utilize effectively (Whereas everything else is straightforward) because you have to remember quite a bit of data and it would only come in handy in situations like described in the first post, but how many situations like that are there? Then again such a feature would have been insanely useful in some Thief 1/2 missions.