Darkness_Falls
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Posts posted by Darkness_Falls
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1. The blackjack *thump* sound doesn't occur until it's at the bottom of the screen or beyond. Would like the sound to be timed more with it's impact on the AI's head or neck to make the action feel tight.
2. Would like blackjacking nerfed a little more. I'm a KO'er and it's very difficult to catch up to guards without alerting them either as you approach or, if nothing else, at the last second. (They often seem to have a sixth-sense at the last second, becoming aware and attacking you.) And while trying to be careful to not get caught, it often requires traveling a fairly substantial distance, relatively speaking, with greater risk of running into or being seen by other AI that shouldn't really have factored into the situation, just because you're trying to catch up to your target. (Might be nice to have the AI's default walk speed a little slower.)
3. The vocal sets could use some improvement and more added, of course. I've played a mission or two the past week where one of the guards seems so disinterested, with a "ho-hum" attitude when he's attacking; He's literally just calmly speaking the lines in a dejected manner that's reminiscent of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, for lack of better comparison (sorry). If it's an intentional characterization, it's not delivered in a believable manner and hurts immersion. I'm not yet sure if this voice is unique to the map(s), or a part of the default voice set included with TDM. The same goes for other voices, though -- ones that are default to TDM -- where they're not really sounding genuinely angry or riled-up when attacking; they just casually talk or deliver the lines in a highly scripted manner.
4. If you have auto-lockpicking enabled, it should successfully advance the lock to the next level after one full lock-jiggle cycle, not two or more. (I have mine set to two, and I can't remember if that's because of a tweak I did or if it's default. Seems like the default was four?, but I could be wrong.) I feel like it's a penalty to force me to sit through it multiple times before advancing to the next lockpick. I just genuinely don't like lockpick minigames that require more than just the T1/T2 style. I liked that classic style so much that I don't want to bother with mini-games. If I do the lockpicking manually, I almost always get it on the first try... so why shouldn't the auto-lockpick be successful on the first attempt, as well? I just don't personally understand having a penalty for auto-picking; why should its use be dissuaded? People who like the manual mini-game can keep doing the mini-game, and people who don't like it can automate it (i.e., it wouldn't hurt the experience of people who like doing the mini-game).
5. I wish putting out candles didn't require the candle to be picked up first. Also, when picking candles up, it sometimes clangs around as it tries to center itself in your view or whatever. (I think it's a lot better than it used to be, but it still causes the occasional unexpected/unforeseeable cacophony of sound.)
6. It's usually very difficult to get items out of chests. I think mainly because the entire chest frob-highlights; it might be partly due to the chest height (not sure), as when trying to hit the sweet spot that makes the loot in the chest highlight, I often have to crouch a little.
7. When trying to exit either the Map or Objectives screen -- can't remember which one offhand, or maybe it's both -- I almost always hit the ESC key out of habit. But doing so takes me to the game's Main Menu instead. Is it possible to make ESC act like an "I'm closing the book" type of key in that instance so it brings you immediately back to the game rather than to the menu screen?
Sorry if some of these are already in the works, were already deemed technically impossible, or labeled 'not happening.' Just trying to share some ideas that I've felt would make my experience a little better. Definitely a fun game, if I may be so bold as to call it a 'game'
, but look forward to seeing more refinement. -
The Merriam-Webster dictionary will need to update their definition of a game if The Dark Mod isn't a game. I will submit feedback to them to have their entry updated if the net result of this discussion ends up being that TDM is not an activity people engage in for pleasure, diversion or amusement...
merriam-webster.com
game noun \ˈgām\ : a physical or mental activity or contest that has rules and that people do for pleasure
1 a (1) : activity engaged in for diversion or amusement
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Thanks Jesps. I will be able to find it now
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Pretty good mission so far. I'm playing because it's close to Halloween and it seems to be on everyone's Top 10 list for creepiness. I need some assistance, though. I'm unable to find the...
treasure map in the desk (in Room 4), despite the hints given above. Please provide the exact location of the secret switch. Which drawer, cupboard, or cosmetic feature of the desk... and if it happens to be somewhere within those vertical slats holding paperwork vertically on the right side of the desk, please tell me which exact slot it's in and the specific location within that slot (high, medium, low, front, back). It's very difficult to highlight objects in desks, chests and drawers in TDM since TDM very strongly prefers to highlight cupboard doors, entire drawers and entire chests rather than the objects within, which is frequently a bit frustrating (not just in this mission, but all) -- so I'm sure that that isn't helping to make the switch any easier to locate. I've already spent at least 30 minutes trying to examine every part of the room, of which at least 15 minutes was for the desk alone once I heard that's precisely where I need to look. I've looked at and around the desk with lights doused and not-doused, and with using my lantern, etc. Sorry, but I've lost my patience with this puzzle, and most of it is because having to deal with the desk door and drawer mechanics of TDM (I'm getting tired of fighting with them
). Hoping you could help 
Maybe even tell me what the switch looks like and how large it is. At this point, I just desire the exact solution so I can move on... -
Glad to hear! Then I'll say one more:
Also while the inspirational chord was playing, I put a lit candle in the hand of the church statue that had a bracelet on
It was a nice trade: a bracelet in exchange for making her beautifully glow. She looked lovely when holding a candle, actually -
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Bravo! That was a great FM. Conclusion spoiler:
At the end, when the inspirational musical chord was playing, I felt inspired to take a lit candle from the church and place it next to the gravestone that had flowers next to it. That is a special type of unexpected gameplay action I'm sure won't be possible in the new Thief, sadly. It was a uniquely special moment for me, but for the new AAA Thief, the devs don't want you doing anything they don't want you doing or can't predict that you'd want to be doing. Outside of the box actions are frowned upon.
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Yes, the moveable defs now have new snd_bounce keypairs set.
Is awesome you have this recording access! Congrats! I've personally always wished the sounds for taking an arrow out and putting it away were improved. Something more whole; heartier. I don't know what it's supposed to sound like... I just feel the current sounds are hollow and ungratifying. And they don't really sound realistic to me. I'm pretty sure some folks here like the current sounds, so please take it for what it's worth. Also, I might recommend the water arrow splash and douse sound could maybe use a little refinement. I'd be curious to see what could come up for these, in case they happen to be improvements everyone agrees with.
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The only one I know about is the
key: it is on the belt of one of the guards patrolling right before the door you want to open.
Ahh, thank you. That worked...
Found it! It hadn't fallen off his belt, it was just hard to see and obtain the way he was lying on the floor.
Fun mission, thanks!
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I'm stuck...
I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to unlock the door to upstairs. The note by the door says to check with Capt. Bernard, but I admit I don't know where he is. Since I've KO'd everyone I've tried to double-check all the bodies for a key, but I can't seem to find one. If it dropped off a guard's (or Bernard's?) belt onto the ground when I KO'd them, then it will be like finding a needle in a haystack. I'm hoping I don't have to re-start the mission
I also see a charred note in the fireplace implying I can find a secret switch in the kitchen. Not sure if that's where a secret switch will be or not, but that's how I interpret the note. I can't find one there for the life of me (unless I already flipped it a long time ago, before seeing the charred note and have just forgotten; but I don't think that is the case). I've scoured everywhere else in the level, too, trying to find what I need to do next... but I can't seem to progress any farther in this mission. Thus, I'm stuck
After spending an hour or two in just being "stuck" -- apparently missing one little switch or one little key -- I'm just looking for the a "walkthrough" type of answer to the above to help a poor taffer out so I can get to the next area.
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I just think some people are going to
at it is all.It's impossible to please everyone; of course some will roll their eyes. I would roll my eyes at "Team Dark Mod" and many others that were proposed. This name was the only one that finally brought a good amount of unity and solidarity behind what the name should be. There was a lot less divisiveness with this name than all of the other ones. Squabble Studios was mentioned as a candidate in jest for good reason, lol.
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I think me titling it a splash screen for a 17+ second video was a bit of a misnomer on my behalf
My fault. If a true splash screen is ever created and if it ever gets used, it'll certainly be shorter and more to the point. No worries.
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LOL! That's a hilarious idea
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Oh - in theme with "Picking up the peices left from Looking Glass Studios", you should just have the "Broken Glass Studios" logo shatter - but play it in reverse. So there's a pile of broken glass - and it plays in reverse (with the sound effect in reverse too) and forms the Broken Glass Studios logo
Ooh, I forgot about that saying! Great idea.
Sneaksie and Squill, those are awesome ideas, too!
I love this animation stuff; wish I was more adept. Perhaps in due time I will be able to make some of these ideas come to fruition!
Thanks for all the feedback/ideas...
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Good feedback, esp. Domarius. Gracias!
I'm glad you think the logo showing up twice is kinda weird. My first tests were actually without it re-appearing (which is what I first wanted), but that, too, was odd -- in a different way. I think it just boils down to the composition not being ideal, having limited resources to work with and losing patience with my computer
I just wanted your guys' feedback, so won't be posting on YouTube. Besides, if a splash screen ever comes to be, I would think we'd want to wait for release rather than publicize prematurely?
I wish my PC wasn't ancient so I could whip through and easily create test reels. Takes hours to process these stupid things!! So I'm kinda left to work with whatever movie generates sometimes. I'm getting better at setting the animations up, though, so some day I'll have a better idea of what the final product will be before generating the movie. Not perfect, though, since my PC is so slow and I sometimes have to look at wireframes rather than shaded models in the layout.
I think in the end, the length of these would make them more suitable for the intro to some publicity video rather than a splash screen. And loudly shattering glass isn't really thief-like; so I'm not a huge fan of that. But if was fun breaking things!
Utimately, I was treating these as fun experiments. I'll try some shortened splash screen experiments based on some of your guys' comments since those would be equally as fun (and educational). Unfortunately, I think NH's request might be out of my league! I'll try to figure out how to do that, but I think my skill-level is a little too low for such a feat. On the other hand, if it's more glass flying, it'll still be loud when it shatters -- unless we just use whooshing sound effects or something as an artistic substitute. Maybe instead of the glass flying, the glass could form stress fractures throughout it and then subtly drop to the ground; then rise up to re-form a Broken Glass Studios logo? That would be more subtle than glass flying. Still probably out of my league to do, though; but I'll be thinking about both ways.
NH: Just to clarify, when you say "flying outwards," do you mean "into the screen/away from the user" or "out of the screen/at the user"?
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Some ideas for a splash screen I whipped up for fun:
Broken Glass Studios - Splash 1 (.avi, 7MB)
Broken Glass Studios - Splash 2 (.mov, 5.6MB)
Broken Glass Studios - Splash 3 (.avi, 4.6MB)
Let me know what you think. I know in the past, I think it was the consensus that most were against splash screens. I personally like them. I wonder if anyone's minds have changed here. If you want me to tweak anything, I can. I know these are not subtle with the glass sounds, and all, but I can make subtle ones by not breaking the glass, if you wish. I usually like subtle, but I might be okay here... since the studio name is a bit of an oxymoron anyways. I also had limited sound effects choices, so if you have better, I can try them.
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I'm not sure if this is useful for the mod, or not -- or if you've already seen -- but I just stumbled across this and thought I'd share in case it is helpful:
http://www.cgarena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=52789
ANNOUNCEMENT: Over 2500 free human motion BVH files now available at cgspeed.com July 22, 2008I'm happy to announce the free release of an enhanced BVH conversion of the entire set of 2548 human motions from the Carnegie-Mellon Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database.
Which links to here...
Looks like they have animation files in a few formats, like .bvh, .tvd, .c3d, .amc. Are they usable in a video game at all? I'm not familiar enough with rigging and animating in 3-D apps to know if they're useful.
A few animation video samples:
Drink Soda (AKA Benny taking a swig, lol)
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Crispy - And on the flip side, seeing only the candle flame move wouldn't do much for me, personally. If something like this were ever done, I would think you'd also want some light bouncing off the table underneath the candle or the chair on the right. Candle Flicker 2 has just what you say (static Dark Mod logo), but with the chair bouncing light from the candle. It should probably be softer and more subtle than what I have, though.
SH - I'm not sure if Noisycricket was looking to modify the forum's banner, or was just wanting a more atmospheric home page (thedarkmod.com) upon or nearing the release. I thought it was moreso the latter.
I feel the banners used on the sites could use some subtle life somehow someday, but I would agree it's probably not a pressing need by any means, considering the toolset is still under construction. And no matter what the site looks like, people will download The Dark Mod. I think it would accentuate the final product by having a more atmospheric site or sites in the end. (And no, I'm not saying a candle flicker would be the only way.)
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The flame in Candle Flicker 2 is an actual candle flame. I filmed one on my desk at home and put it in there, and the flame had some nice dancing to it you can't really see in that compressed video.
At the time, I had also tried to make an animated GIF of it, but as stated above, it looked really bad.
With more time, I might've been able to make something for a web page... but just kinda gave up on things when I couldn't get After Effects to cooperate very well with file sizes and video compressions, etc. It probably wasn't the most ideal application to use.
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The team tinkered with the idea of a flickering candle and other ideas for the forum pages here years ago, but the thoughts were pretty quickly dismissed in favor of actually doing work on the mod itself. Would've been too much unproductive time.
I did some tiny candle flicker experiments... nothing special. I think oDDity did some experiments, too -- and his were probably, naturally, better. In the end, though, the idea just kinda fell by the wayside.
I just now uploaded my quick video tests to imageshack here. (Wow, imageshack sure degrades the quality when compressing. Not that the videos were very HQ to begin with, but one of these is atrocious.) Regardless, you might get the idea of some things we were messing with. (Before you click the play button, that's more like the original image quality of how the video is before imageshack compression):
It was fun to mess around with the idea for a short time anyways. If anything were to be done to the website for the release, I'm thinking it would be funner to do more than a candle flicker. But it really does take time away from creating the mod toolset to do stuff like this.
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Here's an old thread that has discussions about how maybe make loot items appear as though they are loot before picking them up or before frobbing them without going the TDS route.
I can't tell if you're doing the things described in that thread or not. If not, no worries; I'm sure you're on a good track. I'm just bringing it up for historic reference in case it helps...
Don't worry, I've been quiet a long time here so I won't claim to be up-to-speed on the mod; and so I won't dig up old threads to refer to hardly ever.
I hope it was okay to post this here. The ability to distinguish what is loot before frobbing and what happens when you frob loot kind've go hand-in-hand, so I didn't find it too off-topic, if at all.
PS: I can't believe you guys have such high post counts now! Unbelievable!!
-DF (going back into the shadows)
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Good day,
I saved all my source audio files as .OGG from the start, as that's what I was told the mod needed. I didn't create a lot of audio files, and I don't think very many are being used in the mod(?), but I just wanted to mention. I wonder if other audio guys also thought they should just save as OGG and not have any WAV files?
For some of the things I did -- including machine sounds -- I made the audio rather long so they could be trimmed, as needed, and looped, if possible. (Better to give more than not enough, was my rationale.) I also wasn't good at seamlessly "looping" the wavelengths (not sure I have good software for it).
Let me know if you need more explanation or anything. I wish I could say I had "source WAV files," but I don't. Pretty much have only OGGs and MP3s on my end. Sorry!
-DF
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I like the idea of an overall performance grade, since it rewards careful and skillful gameplay:
Already considered. It was in the plans to do this. I think it's still planned, but can't say for sure as I've been dormant for a while.
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Ahh, bummer Baddcog - I use Lightwave. Thanks tho!
Springheel ~ Okay, I'll try that tutorial again and hope it works this time.
Edit: I got it to work.
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Very cool. Is there one UVMap tutorial in particular that you found particularly "good" or useful compared to the others? I've tried to find a good one before, but they all seemed to be pretty bad, imo. I just need a tutorial to simply take me from start to end, without a lot of fluff or missed steps, with screenshots that match my screen.
I remember trying this one (and others), but none have yet to successfully work for me:
Just curious if there was one tutorial that stood out for you.
Things that could be improved
in The Dark Mod
Posted
Candles - Interesting. I'm just reporting what pretty much every map I've played has done; so I assumed it was a default implementation provided by the toolset.
Chests - I wouldn't like the way you say because I want control. I'd want to be able to shut the lid even without taking everything. (Besides, sometimes there are junk objects in chests that you won't want to take; so you can't count on it being emptied every time.) I think they should just make the *lid* frobbable; not the entire chest. From a player's perspective, I don't think the entire chest needs to be/should be frobbable.
KOs - I don't mind a little risk... but I don't like frustration. Sometimes seems awkward/unrealistic about how it currently works. Maybe if guards didn't get a sixth sense at the last moment or if blackjack attacks had a slightly larger strike zone/distance I'd be more okay with their movement speed.