ZylonBane

Save-point systems are only ideal for people who have no problem spending large blocks of time playing a game. For people who actually have jobs and lives, save-anywhere is essential. A video game is, ultimately, an entertainment experience-- just like non-video games, books, movies, and TV shows. And what all those have in common is that you can stop and start them AS YOU WISH. Vocal detractors of save-anywhere are, without fail, prima donna control freaks. (Note also that consoles are starting to use PC-style saving now that they have to storage space to allow it. Save points were never a feature, they were just something console game makers had to deal with, so they made the best of a bad situation.)

But it won't be, because 99% of PC gamers hate the mother-loving shit out of restricted save-game systems. And with good reason.

Oh please. It would only be exploitable if it was implemented in an utterly incompetent fashion. AIs move around constantly... this would just be another way of moving them. And it would only work if they were unaware, and if the player ran into them at full speed.

Speaking of throwing things... how does the D3 engine handle collisions between AIs? Would it be possible for Gareth to shove a guard off a ledge by running into him at full speed?

Let me guess... if you beat someone at a "childish" game like, say, Chess, you celebrate by punching them in the face? After all, losing isn't apparently a sufficient consequence, right? Perhaps some day you'll come to accept that normal humans play games for FUN, not as affirmations of their sexual identity.

Wow, forced stealth followed by forced hurrying. How delightfully awful. Thief gameplay is about manipulating the environment. This is fun to do at the micro level (a single or small set of rooms), but excruciatingly tedious to do at the macro level (an entire mansion). Therefore, your ideas are bad.

I figure if Garrett doesn't use his hands to open doors, why should anyone else? http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-05-10

Wow. Fuck you too.

Yes, in mindless arcade-style games. Thief aspires to a slightly higher level of realism than that.

As I already mentioned over on TTLG, it would be nice if the type of object thrown was based on the material type the AI is stand on. So for example, if they're standing on grass or rock they throw stones. If they're on tile or wood they throw bottles, etc. On the other hand, the whole concept of AIs pulling objects out of thin air seem a bit dodgy. Wouldn't it be less immersion-breaking to just give every guard AI a set of throwing knives?

This forum software seriously needs a LVLSHOT tag. Or more clueful posters.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the difference is between moddb and addondb.

Well really, the only solution that would never look "wrong" would be a texture that was continuously rendered from the player's POV, and done so at screen resolution. In which case you may as well not bother.

Because there IS NO simple trick that's sufficiently robust. The static texture solution fails to take into account parallax, dynamic lighting, and the presence of AIs.

Let me be the first to say, that would infinitely suck. A pox on you.

Do you sometimes make so little sense that you even confuse yourself?

Nope. Same old version.

The video is up. It is nifty. However, Ken has mentioned that it's of the E3 build, so it's quite out of date now.

Which is why many chipsets that generate 16-bit RGB give the leftover bit to the green channel (RGB 565 format).

Argh, don't get me started on ModDB. Someone created an entry on there for SHTUP without even asking me. I've tried to contact the admins there about it at least twice, and never heard anything back from them.

You lose forever.

At the risk of threadjacking, I hope the final blackjack texture is considerably more scuffed up than that. Looks like Gareth is carrying a shiny new handbag.

Q: Who actually read all that? A: "nobody".

Hooray. We've discovered the cure for aspirin.

You're both wrong. Randomness is like tea. Provided you have an atomic vector plotter on hand.