demagogue

Looks like all you guys are on the same page with this. I think it's a good idea too, but a lot seems to turn on what's "reasonable" variability. I get the idea you are trying to connect it to the range of behavior an actual human might display in the same situation ... a little variety or randomness within the boundries of "human" behavior (predictable unpredictability, so to speak). For what my 2 cents is worth, to my mind that would come in three main categories (or sources of "randomness" in behavior) , (1) small range of arbitrary randomness, like slight shifts in pace (best hardcoded into the AI, since it seems entirely internally cued), (2) trivial-cued behavior (only seems random because the cue is so trivial), like looking at a painting or out a window (would that be hardcoded? it's more "environmentally" cued), and maybe even (3) "strategic randomness", trying to be a little sneaky, looking over the shoulder at random times, but mostly when suspicious* (which seems both internally and environmentally cued) -- but the point is, nothing outright irrational, unpredictable unpredictability so to speak (stopping and suddenly running in the opposite direction). Anyway, it all sounds like a good approach in theory, although what's reasonable on paper may be different from reasonable in game, so you'd want to play test any approach quite a bit, but you guys already know that. * which reminds me of the hawk/dove studies (and their math/logic) for "strategically random" animal behavior and game theory economics, which I was about to say is a totally different story, but actually on reflection the insights and math of them might actually be useful to the AI programming, so I'll say that instead.

The programming stuff is actually the more interesting part for me ... tackling some logical problem and getting the mechanism to work right, although I can see how it doesn't translate well to a few bullet points. Speaking of which: Good update. Gameplay-wise, the searching behavior sounds like the most important thing you updated us on. How does it feel against something like T2? I remember them 90% of the time being able to know which direction to go and walking generally towards you, but there were consistent ways you could confuse them to get them going in the wrong direction. Also, iirc the searching behavior was somewhat modifiable in the guard's archetype wasn't it? Guard armor sounds duly cool ... is it hardwired to a guard or a property you can add or take away and the sound is the cue whether a guard is wearing it? Great cathedral screenshot of course. cheers.

Oh, I remember you guys talking about an up-coming special surprise release of something in February. Anyway, I'm not in any rush so take your time to do it right... It's always good to hear the phrase "quite busy working", though.

a-ha... That was actually my original understanding, and then I edited it out of my above post because I though it was wrong!

Ok, maybe not so absurd after all. But doesn't it really reduce the usefulness of a merge function if you can't use solid brushes?

I dont know too much, ok anything, about D3ed, but it seems familiar because of how cells and optimization work in Dromed, so I'll give it a crack. This is more or less a total guess, though. Maybe by edges they mean the edges of a verticy of two pieces, so not the 1 edge of 1 wall, but the combined edge of 2 walls trying to be merged (??). So if it's a building and you are merging a pair of rectangular prisms (i.e., 2+ walls or building sections or whatever), the verticies or corners where they meet will be an angle, which will be either convex or concave, and it seems to only like concave corners. So it likes merging things into, e.g., L or T or X shapes, and not into enclosed bodies like squares and rectangles. At least, that's the initial reading I understand from the message. Or is this just way off? One thing, though, if that were right, it wouldn't seem appropriate to use the word "edges", would it? That word makes it sound more like what you were suggesting, that the outside edge of one wall itself is convex. Then you pointed out that the edge itself is straight. Then again, of course, as a rectangular prism it will be convex thinking in 3D. But then it seems absurd that you couldn't merge rectangular prisms or really any brushes with anything, since they're always convex... Are the edges flush with one another so one corner isn't burrowing into the side of the other? Ok, I give up ... Now's when the experts can come in tell you what it really means. It was worth trying to figure it out on my own though. Maybe you went through the same brain-wracking process?

It's probably true that they are underrepresented in T2 FMs ... because you can only use them with Dedx.

The way I see it, it's all "strategy", but at different levels of grain ... On the First Person level, you have no more info than what the PC has, so decisionmaking is very immediate. For 3P, you have more info than the PC, so gameplay and decisionmaking is more "abstract" in charting out his activity (like you're radioing them in to the PC), to a God's Eye p.o.v. where you can see the whole world and plot on a very abstract scale knowing *many* global things that the PC could never know. They can all be fun in their own way, but you have to admit they are each different paradigms, and run on a scale from immediacy to increasing abstractness .. so IMO it ultimately depends on what kind of "strategy" appeals to the way you like to think in games, or what mood you are in. Are you more in the mood for a boardgame kind of strategy, or paintball (or if I'm going to use an analogy, more like "gestapo", actually a game we used to play at night in the woods, like a nighttime, stealthy capture the flag)?

An extreme case came to my mind, too (as if the case needed more help). When I visted one of those massive "tourist caves" once, they turned out the lights in one large cavern, and it was seriously *pitch* black except for one tiny, tiny red light from someone's camera (or cell phone) really stuck out, and I could tell when people were crossing in front of it because it would pulse in and out of blackness as people passed. Technically silhouette recognition, but from my p.o.v. it was from my memory of the light being there and then being swept in total darkness, not even contrast this time; realistically it was whatever miniscule amount of light was actually hitting him *exactly* in line with my line of sight on the other side ...hardly practical to check.

I was thinking of those exact 2 names myself.

Yeah, but then again there are some people that have released new texture packs at TTLG for T2 and TDS that are pretty good IMO and I wonder if they even know about the need here (not that I trust my opinion of what's really "good", just that some look better than others). Yeah ... I don't know what they were expecting. That kind of attitude makes more sense for some of the other modding communities, like BF-1942 or Source (maybe Unreal), where there's just gobs of people and project ideas, and everyone's kind of doing their own thing, they post their ideas and scout for any random person interested, and there doesn't seem to be much deeper connection between them (and I don't feel like I'm exaggerating that too much). And isn't that the most awful name. I mean, come on, what worse way to taunt for a C&D than calling yourself "Thief Transgressions".

Just a quick note, what you two say about the AI gives me a warm fuzzy feeling ... that's great to hear.

Yeah, it's hard not to notice when you change between 1stP and 3dP you're really changing the whole character of the PC, the game, and the gameplay. 3rd Person instantly makes me think of Tomb Raider-esque gameplay, where you really use the environment as something for your PC to manipulate to advance, more running, jumping, hanging puzzles, and NPCs as just another kind of environmental barrier to "navigate" around (but this time one that shoots back). A bit more gimmicky, although fun in its own way for what it is. 1st person, the environment isn't something you *use* so much as it's something you're *in*, immediately more immersive, more concentrated on the NPCs *as characters in the world with you*, who is where?, than on the hallways and ledges and NPC's around you as just different categories of hurdles in your way, which can never escape a kind of superficialism IMO. FP just makes the gameplay and the whole world a level deeper, again IMO. I wouldn't mind seeing a few 3P oriented FMs if they come out for Darkmod if they can be pulled off, some classic Tomb-Raider like hopping around. They could even be very fun for a quick jaunt, as long as the 1stPerson experience isn't in any way compromised to cater to them. But they just won't tap into what really excites me about FP gameplay that 3P just can't capture. Of course, this is just my preference, but I don't mind acknowledging that TDM's design comes with a kind of gameplay agenda that I happen to agree with.

Crack pipe or not, it's interesting to hear his p.o.v. No wonder I hear you guys complaining so much about wanting texture artists and AI coders. It's not intuitive that you aren't getting textures faster, though. A lot of people around TTLG seem to love making new textures... And while it's not trivial to make good textures, it's not so difficult (comparitively speaking) for someone with a digital camera, time, and knows their way around photoshop or paintshop. I'd have thought this would be the relatively easier area to find support. Or is it just the sheer number of textures you need? Geez, I really hope you guys can get people to take care of the AI, though ... That's where this brand of gameplay really shines IMO. I actually took AI logic as an elective in college, but too bad my programming isn't up to par with my theoretical studies.

He did this with that Chinese movie *Hero* too ... Kind of strange, he has no real role to play in making either movie. It's just to get people interested in foregin flicks. It would work better if he'd pick a little better movies to do that, though. Both Hostel and Hero aren't really the best the rest of the world has to offer over Hollywood IMO.

Yeah, I think that's the best way to go, too. ZB, what about poison tipped arrows for what you're talking about? It may add up to the same thing in the end, but seems a little more intuitive IMO. But I don't have a strong opinion about it. Just a thought. An aside: I could imagine a mace-gas effect lasting for a while ... not knocking a guard out but blinding him so that you could run past, but he also shouts out ... more intuitive than a flash bomb at least.

I wonder if I missed something here. Couldn't the same thing happen with automatic? What if you want to fire a gas arrow at a pursuing AI that runs into a gas room with you, so you go into auto-breath-hold, then you shoot off a gas arrow which explodes next to you, still in the gas-room (or there's just a gas-mine on the ground for some reason) ... so do you take damage from the gas-arrow or not? You're holding your breath because of the gas room, but gas arrows seem separate from the whole breath-holding side of things. I'm sure this has already been thought about, but anyway just occured to me with this post. ZB, it's interesting you bring up that cite (as long as we're in webgeekery mode). A project I've dabbled a little in (re: military law) is how the US uses things like phosphorus gas (i.e., white smoke), which aren't covered under the chemical weapons convention since they are only supposed to be defensive (covering troops to run thru, etc), "arguably" as an offensive weapon, since it turns out there is some contact damage, particularly if they lob a phosphorus grenade that goes off right next to someone's face, makes for some nasty skin effects, and what really counts as "contact" damage, what it says on the label or what physiologically happens in real life under various conditions, and how do you draw the line... Anyway, because of that project I researched a little about the human effects of different substances, and what gets in the CWC and what doesn't, and why, etc... It would be interesting to think about more accurate representation of things like gas in-game, but I also like the simplicity of the Thief world and wouldn't be such a fan of going over board. (It reminds me of the debate in the Battlefield 1942 - WWI TC whether they wanted things like mustard gas in it, and they voted no because it's just not fun to play a game with that kind of thing, and everyone would just use it for every battle, etc...)

There are enough hapless newbies in TTLG that require your services to be dishing them out here (one just asked in ThiefGen "why can't we remake the T1/T2 levels in T3 with its leet graphics already?" and I wondered when you'd pop up) ... but anyway, just to play your game: "Unique" wouldn't capture what I meant at all. It's not just that the features I was talking about (whistle-blowing, breath-holding) are *unlike* other, existing features. You could say the same thing about jumping and leaning, e.g., if you were starting from scratch (say it's 1997), you already have jumping, and now you are debating whether leaning should also be a part of the interface. You wouldn't want to strike it out *merely* because it was different from jumping, and thus unique to the present interface. The term "sui generis" gets much closer to what is really problematic about whistle-blowing and breath-holding as distinguished from jumping and leaning. It's not the relative feature of "uniqueness", that is, different relative to other things already there, which could be totally arbitrary depending on the order you add features. It's that whistle-blowing and breath-holding create and only fit into their own, self-contained little interface-universe, that is, they only fit into a special class particular to just themselves and no other feature. The dictionary supports my distinction, I think, although it is a little ambivalent (a legal dictionary would do it even better, but anyway) : Unique: Being the only one of its kind [i.e., nothing like it] Sui generis: Etymology: Latin, of its own kind, literally "to itself-categorized / -originated / or -generated": constituting a class alone : unique or particular to itself It's the "to itself-generated" and "particular to itself" parts that I'm specifically relying on, which goes further than mere "uniqueness". For the features of which I spoke, you would only ever use them for very discrete tasks/puzzles which, in turn, only specially call on just those features, whereas jumping and leaning have very general versatility in any situation, so they aren't particular to just themselves. You wouldn't create them just to work their own, self-contained interface-contexts. There are lots of times you'd want tojump or lean, not just in "specifically-created jumping/leaning puzzles". So while leaning could be "unique" in a particular context (my hypothetical above), it could never be sui generis in the (admittedly technical) way I'm using the term. There is perhaps no exact term that captures this "special to it's own, specially created, self-contained interface-context", but sui generis really hits the nail on the head IMO (much more so than being merely "unique" as in different from all the other features) and at any rate comes much closer than any term I could think of. Since it is a technical term, maybe people use it differently in different contexts, but the way I was using it, it fits right in specifically with the *legal* use of the term. (And as for being obscure, it isn't for me because I use it in law all the time. But I admit that it isn't in common use in normal conversation. I used it anyway because I thought that the technical understanding of it, as I've tried to explain here by distinguishing it from "unique", really fit this situation well. And now I've explained why.) As for degrees of sui generity ... this is open to hermeneutic (interpretational) debate I think. It's a strong intuition, though, and something that the term should be able to capture even under conservative hermeneutic theories. Of course, my point is valid if you just strike out the word "so" and admit no degrees of "self-containedness" among features. And with that interpretation jumping/leaning would surely be in and whistle-blowing/breath-holding would surely be out, and my point will stand. So we can both have our way on that point, no-degrees of sui generis, and everybody wins. But if you don't admit degrees, then you might be missing a useful perspective buried in my use of that term. Sometimes the "self-containedness" of features really does seem to be on a scale of degree. Think about wall-hugging? Is it general-purpose to many gameplay situations or specific to its own specially-created use? It fits in a middle area, I think. In fact, I'll go so far as to say: as I was using the term, I think you actually could have a sliding scale of the general-usability of interface features. Consider such a scale with one pole being "general to most if not all gameplay uses" and the other pole being "specific only to its own specially designed task which (in turn) only calls on that specific interface feature". It might look like: (1) direction keys, walking (2) weapon draw/cycle (3) inv object draw/cycle (4) running (5) leaning (6) strafing (7) ducking (8) wall hugging . . . (9) whistle blowing (10) breath-holding I think this way of framing decisions about what should and shouldn't be part of the general interface is very useful. And the term "sui generis" gets us closer to this understanding than any other term, including "unique". So I stand by my decision to use the term and even my non-standard application of it (although I am willing to back down on the non-standard application for my above post, which didn't require it, but nevertheless would be enriched if it did). Judges, can we rescind those cockpunches and place all trial-costs on the complaining party in the form of a bucket of toilet water to the face? As for multiple stim "trap" gas vs. "corrosive" (boundary) gas vs. whatever else they can imagine... Whatever. There were a number of ideas on the table, and I don't seem to recall any official, final decisions being made. But anyway, the point wasn't particular to *which form* of insta-harm gas is used, just *some* form. I'm happy to substitute multiple-stim type with "corrosive" type and the general point still stands, that I probably won't use 'auto-hold-breath' gas if it's there. So it's not such a big deal to me. The fact that corrosive gas will also be part of the default set-up, as we all know 110% guaranteed because it's been "noted, repeatedly" ... then all the better. Mainly, though, I just chose that wording because it's what I had in mind at the time, nothing more ominous than that ... and to be honest, my personal preference is *still* towards "trap" type gas than gas rooms (auto-breath-hold or corrosive), just because gas-filled rooms always struck me as a little bizarre and unnatural ... although I concede that my above post didn't explain that, but I'm telling you now.

The more I think about this, the more it occurs to me that these alternative gameplay techniques, because they are so sui generis (that is, really only useful for the one puzzle they were created for), are probably best addressed with inventory-frobbing something you pick up just in the context of that mission ... so like a little whistle or bird-call you can carry (which T2 actually *did* have, although not for general use, but it seems easy to rig something like that up) or a rag or even better a painter's-mouth-cover that (some readable suggests) is useful for covering your mouth to avoid/filter breathing in fumes, and then you can get the idea that when you inv-frob it, it covers your mouth, effectively holding or filtering your breath until you frob it off (remember GATI had something like a chemical rag to frob-knock a person out) ... and each mapper could custom make such objects him/herself. I was never that keen on a special key anyway and just ran with it to be devil's advocate a little (an inv-frobbable object seems much more preferable). But automatic breath-holding also rubs me the wrong way ... but maybe it just means I'd personally tend to mimick gasrooms DX or Thief style (with scattered stims) and not even have to deal with it.

Hey, this is the public forum. We work with what we can get... (_");

Why don't you just pick one of these services and put the link in this thread: http://www.freewebspace.net/guide/diskstorage.shtml I'm sure one of them is bound to work well.

Yeah, but should it happen automatically?

Heh ... this is called the inheretance (or entitlement) bias in economics/cogsci ... people having affinity for (or at least overvalue) something they already have, but are skeptical of (or undervalue) something that threatens to change what they already have, even if it's the *same* feature introduced in different contexts. I tend to think that the more transparency the better ... try to present options in both contexts if you can, so ideally you'd have the skeptical discussion and a little demo of a "nonstandard" option so people can see how it feels in-game going on at the same time (and force the skeptics to frame their arguments in terms of how it plays out). Hard to get rid of the bias totally, but you can recognize it's there and you can let the two sides of it counteract each other in some respect. Anyway, I guess if I think about it, both DX and T2 both used discrete gas-stims even for rooms that were supposed to be gas filled and that worked for most trap-purposes. And now you are talking about adding something more constant & water-like ... automatic? hmmm ... I can see it both ways. I guess I have nothing new to add, except: ZB: re: no first -breath sound, I'd think if you're going to have any breath-holding at all you might want *some* audio-cue. It doesn't have to be an elaborate *huupf*, but something small and telling, an *ugnh* (?). It might be strange either running through corridors or walking into a dark room, before the player registers the gas, and all of a sudden a *breath-left* meter pops up (although altered vision would help). I know it doesn't happen with water, but then again it's always obvious that you're in water, but it might not be obvious you're in a gas chamber for a second. It might not be missed, but it's just an intuition.

I have to second that. I ran into this little jewel on HOTU and the fact that it refers to an official NASA spaceflight manual for its own manual I thought was pretty cool. And it has a great mod community that keeps introducing new stuff.

Just for completeness sake to address this point: I'd think the idea of running out of air while holding your breath (outside the water context) is dumb too and my intuition is that you'd just automatically/involuntarily release your breath and take a gasp of air (mechanics wise: it automatically toggles off), and if you're in gas you'd start taking damage from that point (according to the gas, not the breath holding like in water, and you can't rehold your breath inside gas because of the gas) and if you're not in gas then the hold-breath is just released, no problem, game-on. A toggle key sounds like a good idea just in the case when you're standing right in front of a gas chamber, you know it's there, you want to run through it, you don't want that first cough, so you can toggle-on holding breath right then and there and then toggle it off when you're out, or just wait for the breath to run out and it will toggle itself off. And then it can still happen that if you blunder/fall into a gas chamber or a trap goes off, you take damage right off DX style and have to find a way out fast, since the whole point is you didn't see it coming. (And BTW, this is the one situation where doing it automatically seems a bit counterintuitive, since it's meant to be a trap ... but if it takes 30 seconds before any damage then it's a trap that doesn't cost anything. Logic-centric gameplay works better when there's a real cost to erring.) Anyway, I can see pros/cons on both sides, & I can see some of your points against it ... it's a matter of weighing everything up and seeing which is just better/more intuitive in the end.