demagogue

Maybe the most ambitious free roam mission is Behind Closed Doors, the first mission for the Crucible of Omens campaign. It's massive and sprawling, but it also has countless tiny places on roofs, through windows, and down alleys that you can clamber and scramble and wiggle into.

You might be able to do a kind of relay trigger to get your pause and then the final end (you can have the final, final objective to be a hidden one triggered after the speech is over). But personally I'd just have that objective call a script and do it all by script, then there's no relay business. You just directly add the commands to the script: the pause, then activate the speaker, then pause while it speaks, then trigger the final hidden objective directly. And you can find the commands either in the wiki, in other example scripts, or it's basically C++ so look up the C++ way and it will probably work.

Does TortoiseSVN work the same when it's on GitHub? The shell for git is kind of nightmarish to work with. I still have to use a tutorial to walk through the steps to do basic things.

I got them. I bought the DVD-R's and mailed them to him with a self-addressed stamped envelope. I still have the folder on my computer where I downloaded them into (well, via probably 4 or 5 laptops in between). It was from around the same time. The top of the readme says *** FINAL-FINAL KOMAG DVDs MAY 2012 ***

Is it possible to delete it and spawn a new one at the new location?

Thanks for everything you're doing taaaki. While it will be nice when we get a dark theme, I'm just happy we have our forum back. Take the time you need to do things right, of course.

It, uh, has a nice personality? ?

Epic Store is a disgrace, but that doesn't stop me & everyone from taking their monthly free giveaways anyway. And I've almost always taken the devs side for most things, given what I know about it just form TDM's own development dramas. While sometimes devs can be the engineers of their own dev hell, a lot of times the problem comes from management and the marketing/business side (something we've been blissfully free of for the most part), which I feel like devs are also burdened with handling without much credit.

From the perspective of fans it sucks, but as a business model it's a smart system, and I could even argue it's better for the fans in the end. Their business model is every staff picks the projects they want to work on. So if a project can't sustain enough people to make progress, then it means that people don't believe in it and the project was doomed to begin with. In the long run, it means the projects that do make it out are the ones that could sustain people, so they're going to be worthwhile games the devs believed in. And as for the ones we never see, it's probably better that we don't see them. It means you would have had people working on a project they didn't believe in just to satisfy management, which is always a recipe for dev hell and ultimately a bad game. So all in all I'm okay with it. Better a great new game coming out than a piss poor 3

Thanks to taaaki and anyone else that got us back in working order! This is definitely a case of not realizing how much a thing means to you until it's gone.

I understand what you mean, although I have a different take. Speaking of dev time, my dream is that someone makes an immersive platform in which first-person-interactive-fictions (I don't like the term walking sim) could be made. Then they don't lose time working on the systems and can focus directly on the storytelling and gameplay design. You might recall in the heydays of Minecraft modding, there were quite a few storytelling maps that came out on that platform. A lot were a bit juvenile (it's the core audience) but many of them were great with mixing gameplay and story, although there weren't many ways to do good storytelling. But it did give me the vision that what we really need is a system that spawns open worlds with all the immersive mechanics already in place, like Minecraft, in a realistic looking world like, well I would have said Skyrim a few years ago, but I'd say Kingdom Come Deliverance now, where you can build your own architecture directly in-game, make your map that way, and populate it with all the storytelling things you need. To your more general point though, I agree it really depends on what kind of game you want and what kind of story you want to tell, as different systems will allow you to meet your dev goals better or worse. So you need the system that works best for your vision, and visions differ. To that I'd just say that the kind of games you could make like Minecraft story maps in a realistic world that tell good stories like in IF would be the kind of game in this genre I'd like to play, a game like Firewatch is probably the closest to this vision (could have used a touch more interactivity, but the storytelling and gameplay progression it did have were all top notch), and then I recognize there are other games in this genre that are more like Life is Strange or Edith Finch that aren't really for me but I can appreciate them.

I sympathize that there's a real development problem at the base of that. You can have a rich story or you can have good puzzles, but it's very difficult to get those two things to mix. So difficult it's hard to even think of games that do both well. I can just think of the Interactive Fiction Anchorhead, and maybe a few other IFs. (One complaint I have about walking sims is that they don't build on all of the hard-won lessons figured out by 40 years of interactive fiction games how to mix story & gameplay.) So devs can feel forced to pick one or the other. This is one reason why I like Thief & TDM's stealth genre. It's all great gameplay, but because you're supposed to be staying in the shadows and not interfering with the world, you can have great storytelling going on around the player, through readables and conversations. And, like immersive sims generally, it doesn't rely on puzzles at all. It's about simulating a world and solving problems in open and creative ways, not trying to read the devs mind and do the thing he or she wants. This was another major lesson of gaming that walking sims haven't really caught on to yet, leading them to fall into immersive-breaking puzzles or just glorified movies you can walk around in, and why I'm still a partisan of the immersive sim approach. That said, I can still appreciate walking sims as glorified movies you can walk around in. It's just not how I'd make them, and I'd push the genre in another direction if I could make every game I that wanted to.

Empyrion was early access the last time I played it, but that was probably like 6 months ago. I didn't mention the X series because I don't recall being able to visit planets. If we're just doing space sandbox, there are a few more to add, like the new Elite and Avorion, and a few others. Void Destroyer 2 is getting great reviews. (And if you only focused on the alien planet side without the space travel, Subnautica is one of my favorite games of the last few years.) I'm a big fan of Avorion because the ship-building is complete sandbox. You make a ship or station like you would make something in Minecraft. And it's all randomized and kind of rogue-like. It doesn't have a story, but I play that one zen style, so I don't mind. I really like the X series too. It's has both realism and a cartoonish goofy side to it, and is also way more open and sandbox than something like Elite. X4 has had a buggy & bumpy start. I'm giving it a year or two after a bunch of patches come out, the review have a consensus that it's fixed all the bugs and is a complete game, and it's on a good sale. I think I'll like it after that point. Ah, so many good space games and only so many blocs of 100s of hours to sink into them.

Space Engine is amazing. I cruise in that all the time, but I wouldn't really call it a game. It's just a pure space travel sim. My favorite game in this genre is called Empyrion - Galactic Survival, where you just start on some alien planet and first just have to survive, then start building tech, work your way up to building a ship, and then exploring other planets. It's still wonky, but it's better than No Man's Land & Space Engineers IMO, the other contenders. Well if you like pretty simple gameplay, nice stylized visuals, and don't mind the game getting repetitive, you just jump to a planet, do the thing, then off to the next one, you just like the Zen flow of it or whatever, that's No Man's Land. If you like designing complicated machinery, basically Minecraft's Buildcraft in space, but there's really no interaction with the universe outside of that, that's Space Engineers. And if you like an open universe with lots of variety and interaction with the worlds, lots to do over a long and hard-won progression, some cool story, and you still get to build stuff (just not as complicated as SE), that's Empyrion. And now there's this, Outer Wilds. I really don't know where to place it in comparison to those others, so any opinions on that would be interesting to me.

I often like that kind of concept, although the trailer itself was giving me bad vibes. There are a number of open space exploration games that have been misses recently, where it's interesting at first but eventually gets repetitive when you've seen the basic content. I don't know if this game will be like that, but I got those vibes. But I'm open minded. This is the kind of game, like Obra Dinn too, where I'll wait for reviews to come in and once a consensus really starts forming I'll think about if I should get it, wait for a sale, or what... One of my favorite puzzles games with this hook was an interactive fiction called "Rematch", where actually you only have one move before the game ends, but you make that one move 100s of times until you know that world inside out and crack the situation you're put into. I really liked how that unfolded. Afterwards I scripted a few of my own games like that. The one I remember was set in a stadium basketball game with like 2 minutes left (or maybe 10?), and a bomb goes off right when the buzzer goes off. So you can always see the clock and know how much time you have to find the bomb & defuse it. Interestingly, right after I scripted it, the movie Sourcecode came out with the same kind of hook. I like the idea that you can build a lot of storytelling into that mechanic, beyond it being a cool mechanic for a puzzle.

It might be cool if someone made some good box art. In my younger days I might have even printed it out on cardboard stock and made my own box, in addition to jewelbox and CD art, but these days I'd be content with just having an image of it in my TDM fodder folder.

Stalker was one game where the bugs actually contributed to its charm. It was The Zone after all. It's almost to be expected its reality would breakdown every now and then.

I guess at this point this is a full-on genre now. Looks a little rough around the edges, but also more sandbox and open. I like it.

Can you specify where in the wiki you're referring to? Do you mean the "A to Z" Tutorial or another page? If you had this misunderstanding it means others will too and the text should be edited to make it more explicit. But where are you referring to where such an elaboration would be helpful?

It's the aesthetic he's going for. If he were going for gritty realism, he wouldn't be doing windows and siding like that to begin with. I like grimy things too, but I know when an aesthetic needs to be authentic to what it is, and this is true to its vision.

It's running on a server where all clients are seeing the same events, which is the foundation of a multiplayer coop game. That's a big deal. The gameplay and aesthetics you can tweak, but getting all the underlying systems to work and playable on a server is a nice accomplishment. From what I understand of TDM's code, most systems weren't made with multiplayer in mind like he said. I don't know how relevant this is, but systems act directly on $player1 (or whatever it was) all over the place, which is the local client, and I think if it were to be multiplayer, some of those systems would have to be re-tooled from the ground up to handle possible other clients causing events in the same world. I've glanced at Tos's code for multiplayer Thief2 and got an idea of what goes into it. Multiplayer coop for TDM has always been my #1 pipedream for the game, even above standalone and soft shadows and other things that we eventually got. But I don't have any illusions about the challenges. It's not impossible, but it'd take a lot of work for a long time by a very dedicated person or small team. Nice to see this project getting somewhere with it though.

A disturbance in the planet's electromagnetic field maybe?

I got the idea Assange's day finally came because he was smearing poo on the walls inside the embassy, and probably that he was starting to go full Howard Hughes judging by his appearance, and somebody in the embassy made a command decision, probably after repeated warnings that went unheeded, that he'd overstayed his welcome and the embassy invited the police in to get him. More broadly speaking, as a public law lawyer I'm interested in transparency and accountability. I've done FOIA work before (Freedom of Information Act, the law that requires the gov't to release certain info and there's a whole process about it), and have always felt the more info released the better. But I also feel like there needs to be rules where if something is abused, the person can be punished. That's the problem with Wikileaks. It's not accountable like gov't actors are, and Assange's case has always struck me as what impunity does to people, where he started getting cocky and rampantly abusing his power and using Wikileaks for blatant propaganda. If you're going to have it at all, it needs to be independent, professional, and its officers need to be accountable for what they're doing. They weren't. So this is an important step in that direction.

I scripted an entire campaign and it's glorious. I may create only the first mission of it, and then we can see if I can go from there. In a nutshell, the Empire is at war with Menoa, and the Menoan army has Bridgeport under siege. The player character is actually from a minority group in Menoa. To use the European analogy, if Menoa is the Arab world (it is in my vision; I know the canon story, but I'm not above twisting it to the needs of my story), and the Empire Christian Europe, the player would be a Zoroastrian from Persia/Arabia, persecuted by both Muslims and Christians, except in my vision of our world we have Empire Builders (Catholic-inspired), the Menoan Ghazi (Islam-inspired), and Menoan Pakdamani (Zoroastrian-inspired). Long-story short, the player starts in a ghetto with other Ghazi/Menoans in the city and finds an opportunity to get out of the city to help the Menoan army get in. But before he gets to them he gets caught by the Builders who come up with a plan to use the player to sabotage the Menoans (holding his father-figure hostage as leverage), and from that point forward the player is like a double-agent playing both sides, both sides variously trusting / mistrusting him. Along the way he'll visit the Menoan capital (medieval Baghdad-inspired), the Empire capital Sancta Civitas (Rome-inspired), and some deserts, forests, and sea voyages along the way... As each side is looking for a secret & powerful occult relic at the center of both religions that could serve like a weapon of mass destruction to give them the edge (a la Indiana Jones & the Lost Ark). I like it because I went ahead and wrote up an entire history of the Builder & Ghazi religions and the Empire & Menoan empires, and all of the political dynamics between the two and internally, within the empire, Builderism, the different factions, the different feudal lords, etc. (A major piece of this story is the rivalry between Bridgeport & Sancta Civitas a la Rome-Constantinople, where the Archbishop of Bridgeport is trying to get religious autonomy from the Builder Patriarch in S.C., and the feudal lords taking sides in the political implications of that.) The religious implications of the relic also enflames all of the internal tensions in the religion & politics. I already have the whole thing pretty well scripted out, down to the level of map-flow (the basic scenes for each map), story, and dialog. But making the thing is a whole other bag of sardines. But like I said, I hope to at least get the first mission out. It has to get into queue though as my fairy tale-inspired mission will come first.

Cool video of some upcoming medieval games.