ZylonBane

If TDM will support anything like Thief's schema system, a mapper could simply omit the vulgar barks.

I think I'm going to dig out my old Kingpin CD this weekend, rip the audio files, and turn all of Thief's guards into potty-mouthed gangbangers.

Fine, here are three: Language like that is boring. I think pretty much everyone would rather hear, "Have at you!" than "Die, fucker!". Thief builds its fictional universe by combining iconic elements of various historical time periods. One of the most important of those iconic elements is the language. Conventional epithets like fuck and shit are perceived as contemporary language (blame Shakespeare if you must). Thus, using them in a game that attempts to evoke the Victorian/Elizabethan period undermines that effort. Thief is played primarily by geeks. Geeks love made-up swear words. So taff the frack off, ya frelling smeg-head.

You haven't exactly offered up any stellar arguments for your position.

Not really. No Grand Theft Auto in my Thief, please kthxbye.

That's a good point. A generic non-specific "surprised" bark set would be extremely handy for mappers.

I never noticed it either, UNTIL I played Deadly Shadows, and noticed that the highlight activation was more harsh than I'd remembered from Thief (even taking the Atomic Frob into effect). It's one of those things that you don't notice until it's gone. And no, I wouldn't complain (much) if it was missing from TDM, but it would certainly be a nice bit of detail to preserve.

That's what's so great about it. The fade time is so quick that it barely registers on your conscious mind, but it still generates the impression of a smooth transition. Little "smoothers" like this are all through the game. AIs going up steps don't "snap" to the next step. Doors being opened and closed have a slight acceleration period. Just goes to show what a fanatic attention to detail LGS had.

Guard AI should concentrate on things that happen when the player is present, not things that happen when he isn't.

Nope, it definitely does. It's subtle, only a fraction of a second, but noticeably more smooth than the simple snap on/off of Deadly Shadows. Try firing up Thief and playing with highlighting something large like a door. You'll see it.

Does the frob highlight snap on and off instantly, or fade in and out like in Thief?

Then the mapper shouldn't script the guard to patrol through it, dur.

At the very least, they shouldn't go into a standing coma. It'd be cute to have a set of low-priority barks for when AIs get in each other's way.

Bravo stating the obvious. So how do YOU propose to address this problem? Because it's going to come up a lot. Railings, fences, windows, glass doors... these are all common objects that AIs are going to need to know that they can see through.

Ummm, Thief solved that very problem with the BlocksAIVision property on objects.

You're kidding, right? Of course the AI knows if it's trying to pathfind through a door. It HAS to know that, to implement opening them and using keys on them.

AIs should have a general response to realizing something of theirs has been stolen anyway. This behavior should be distinct from the "cannot reach next trolpt" behavior. An AI who can't get to their next patrol point should move on to the next point in their list, and so on until they reach one they can pathfind to. If that doesn't work, they should try to get to any available flee points. And if that doesn't work... well then they're stuck. They might broadcast an audio call for help every now and then, or even lay down and take a nap after a while. It would be quite awesome to (selectively) give AIs the ability to bash down doors though.

What everyone else said. Now, that being said... Whoever wrote the opening text needs to decide between using "SHALL" and "SHALT".

Sturgeon's Law says *I* give a fuck.

Modular Managed Multiprocessor Massively-Parallel Intelligence Encoder. MMMM-PIE for short.

Exactly. That's the Apple approach, not the Google approach. "iAI".

Ugh, you're crossing Google's marketing with Apple's. What you meant to say is simply: Google AI.

You know what A-Life is at this point? A word. That's it. Everyone was really excited about Oblivion's "Radiant AI" before it came out too, and it turned out to be incredibly shallow and stupid. Ditto for the amazing dino ecologies in Trespasser. History is littered with games that made claims to revolutionary AI, but very few actually deliver it. Better to not believe anything you read until the game actually comes out.

I keep hoping that someday someone will create a 100% software emulation of the old Voodoo card, so we can play old 3D-accelerated games the way they originally looked. F**K modern card makers for blowing off proper implementation of earlier D3D standards.

Looking forward to STALKER? At this point, barely. Stalker was originally going to be notable for two main things-- the amazingly realistic graphics, and the wide-open sandbox gameplay. Such things are now fairly commonplace. So it's going to have to get by on actually being GOOD.