ZylonBane

If the leaning is wrong, they may as well not bother.

As I've been given to understand it, the player's physical model in Thief is a pair of bounding spheres covering the top and bottom half of Garrett's body. When you lean, only the top bounding sphere moves. Works remarkably well, since they programmed a fair amount of "flex" into how far it can deviate from where the code wants it to be while leaning.

Pfft. Bonehoard is easy, but time-consuming. Granted, the first couple times I played it I spent minutes just being spazzed out by the zombie down below where you first descend into the crypt, trying to figure out how to get down there without getting anywhere near him. It kind of sucks knowing how relatively harmless they are now.

You haven't played Thief 1??? Security!

It's been fun watching Komag slowly come to the realization that no, TDS isn't the future of Thief FMs.

They won't have to fix it if the programmers would just stand up to Oddity's hissy fits.

In the end it's going to be the mappers who decide this issue, not the developers. Just provide an "undroppable" property on objects and let nature take its course. The absence of such a basic feature would surely piss mappers off.

Actually, it would be great to have optional key mappings for cycling through specific sub-sets of the inventory-- keys, readables, food, etc.

No kidding. The inventory in Soulforge gets clogged up fast with machine parts and blueprints. I pose to you the opposite question-- How dumb would you have to be to WANT TO throw away a quest item? There follows a brief dissertation on players who screw themselves, and how games deal with it: PLAYERS WHO SCREW THEMSELVES, AND HOW GAMES DEAL WITH IT The issue here isn't really whether players should be given the latitude to screw up, the issue here is one of time. If I slip into a pool of lava, or dive off a high ladder, or try to attack an armed guard with a carrot-- I die. And that's fine, because it's immediate. There is an unmistakable cause-and-effect chain in place. Action X lead to result Y in a clear and visible manner. Or say I make too much noise sneaking around, and guards show up a little while later. This is good too. I know I was making noise, I know noise attracts guards. All is fair, the cause and effect are clear. As a thief with free will I should have the freedom to attract guards, accidentally or otherwise. But now... consider a mission that requires a blackjack near the very end. And the player, puffed up with stupid arrogance as he is, chooses not to bring his blackjack. This player has, in effect, jumped off a ladder that may take hours before he hits the ground. And he doesn't even know he's falling. The same problem applies to losing quest items, either intentionally or otherwise. The player is, to use the vernacular, screwed. It's a double-pronged problem as well-- The player doesn't know what effect an action might have, and they don't find out until long after they've taken the action. Either situation is bad design by itself, and together they're worse. This is where well-designed games step in to prevent this sort of foolishness from happening in the first place. Games are supposed to be fun, remember? If a game can save the player from unknowingly screwing himself, it should. Lock down the core toolset. Make quest items undroppable. Fail the mission immediately if you kill a plot-essential AI. In short, if the player makes an irrecoverably bad choice, the game should either let them know immediately or just not let it happen.

Wow, it just gets better and better. Now you're advocating that TDM should allow discarding quest items? Locking quest items into the inventory is an exceptionally GOOD thing, because it saves the player from accidentally and irrevocably screwing an entire mission due to losing something important.

They did, however, recognize this as a potential problem -- which is exactly why Thief Gold introduced the Fire Shadow. Thank you. You have just summed up exactly why even the existence of the ability to discard core equipment is a bad idea. Is anybody honestly arguing that it doesn't cause more problems than it solves? In fact... what problems does it solve? Other than satisfying Oddity's fanatic fetish for "thieving naked", is there any actual reason for this feature? Look, when an FM author is designing a mission, they have to make certain basic assumptions about what the player can do. It is assumed that the player can run, walk, jump, duck, pick things up, set things down, mantle, frob, climb ropes, and knock out AIs and use a sword. If you make those last two abilities optional, it just makes life for FM authors harder. Sure, if a mission requires a sword or blackjack the author could place them somewhere in a mission, but that's just as bad as placing a stack of health potions before a tough battle. It says, "HEY LOOK! YOU'LL NEED THIS!". It's far better to make the core equipment something that's just "there", neither confirming nor denying whether any particular mission will need them.

Please tell us you're just pretending to be dumb. There are missions, even in the Thief OMs, that REQUIRE the core equipment. The player doesn't know this in advance. The player shouldn't have to know this in advance, because only a stupid and/or suicidal thief would intentionally embark on a job unprepared for the unexpected. This end result of this design flaw is that mission designers won't even be able to put in something as basic as a slashable banner and assume that the player will be able to get through it. Or more realistically, word will get out that the ability to start without a sword and blackjack is a silly feature pushed through by a borderline insane member of the team and should just be ignored.

And that's exactly why the ability to drop core tools, either pre-mission or in the mission, is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea. If the sword and blackjack could only be accessed by cycling through all your inventory items, there might be an advantage to dropping them. If there was limited inventory space, there might be an advantage to dropping them. But both of the above conditions are false, so there is literally ZERO advantage to dropping them. It is the very definition of a useless option. Hey, I want to roleplay a thief who only walks on one foot. Give me a walk-on-one-foot key!

But that's the problem right there-- you have no way of knowing what you'll need until you actually play the mission. Precognition is not a valid design premise. This is probably why so many Thief FMs omit the loadout screen entirely. The pointless ability in TDM to discard common tools will mean that FM authors will be constrained to never require the use of those tools. A good thief is always prepared, anyway. Intentionally bringing only the bare minimum equipment that you expect to be absolutely necessary to get the job done is throwing the roleplaying aspect completely out the window (unless you're roleplaying an arrogant, shortsighted halfwit).

You know, I think I've used some interfaces designed by you people.

Still, it seems like the sort of thing that will end up screwing newbies. Like if every time you booted up your computer it asked, "FORMAT HARD DRIVE?". Well yeah, sometimes you do want to format your hard drive. But 99.999% of the time, you don't. You really, really, don't. In short, as described this feature sounds way too "Oops!"-able. This isn't like Deus Ex where you can throw all your weapons in the ocean and have a full set again by the end of the mission.

Some players want a USB attachment that will deliver an electric shock to their testicles every time a guard spots them, but really, how much should you let Oddity drive the game's feature set?

Oh crap-- you're actually implementing weapon-dropping? For the love of god, WHY? It's not like this is a Deus Ex game where weapons consume inventory space. They're just... there. What possible purpose is served by getting rid of extremely useful items that you have no way of knowing whether or not you'll need later in a mission?

On the other hand, shit happens. Things do not always go exactly according to plan, and a game who's sole failure state is "YOU LOSE - START OVER" would not be fun (unless your name is Oddity).

I disagree. I think we're arguing about it because it's a fascinating problem.

You're new to this whole "internet" thing, aren't you?

The problem is, a get-up-from-ragdoll algorithm would have to know how to deal with a nearly infinite variety of possible starting conditions, to include the overall angle and rotation of the body, the angle of every joint, and the shape of the environment. And in a real-time application like a game, there's no time to crunch through "practice tries". It has to be immediate, and look natural.

The Unreal Engine does everything required to run Unreal. Anything beyond that must be added or modified.

THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ HAS SPOKEN!

You don't count. You're weird.