Gin
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Posts posted by Gin
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Flash bombs did make alerted guards vulnerable to blackjacks in Thief. I'm not sure if TDM does that or not.
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I think if headshots should be changed in any way, it would be to increase the penalty for missing one. At the moment, hitting or narrowly missing a guard makes them aimlessly search. It would be more interesting to have them search in the direction the arrow came from in those cases.
Even with hardcore AI difficulty, they can't tell what direction they were hit from when I shoot from about 10 feet away.
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Watching the video, it seems like the problem stems more from savescumming than headshots. He failed several times, missed a ton, and only was able to do it because he kept reloading.
Restrictions are important, but you have to consider whether a restriction or a tradeoff works better. The way broadhead arrows work now is balanced through a tradeoff, and is actually more elegant than your proposed melty arrows.
Broadhead arrows can take down guards from a distance, but it kills them and produces a bloodstain. You need to use a water arrow to erase the bloodstain and you need to walk to the body to move it. In other words, it's a long distance take down with the tradeoff of making a bigger mess than a blackjack. Not to mention that the longer the distance, the harder it is to pull off.
Killing in general is a tradeoff in a similar manner. If you kill someone in a lit area, then you might need to use a water arrow, resulting in you able to douse one less torch.
Your melty arrows just add another consumable on top of a system that already has you use a consumable to clean up afterwards. It's redundant.
I really like the killing mechanics in TDM and wish there were more missions that took advantage of them. I've wanted to make an assassination mission that would make the most out of the dynamic between water arrows and killing, but I've just never gotten the time to learn dark radiant and make it.
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I decided to give this mission a try since it seemed to spark some debate. It was much easier than I expected, I always play on challenging AI, but the mission never felt like it was too difficult patrol-wise. I did end up dying once by falling to death, and that was a bit annoying. By the time I had finished the gold objective, I could not find another save gear so I had to cut my losses and complete the mission even though I wanted to explore more. Well, I could always do it again on a lower difficulty, I suppose.
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I'm a simple man. I'm happy with only allowing saving/loading while hidden, and not allowing either when being hunted.
I think loading is more important to restrict than saving because only restricting saves means you can still just load back to whenever you last saved if you happened to accidentally get spotted, which doesn't solve the savescum issue at all, only makes savescumming slightly more tedious.
This thread reminds me of either the Arena or Daggerfall manual (probably Daggerfall), where the devs state they understand savescumming is a thing, but don't encourage it because you end up missing out on certain things like the criminal system if you do. Thief/TDM is like that, where if you savescum you do cut out aspects of the game when you do that.
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Material Maker would probably be best used as a way to create textures that you cannot find already made, or for textures that you want to be easily modifiable in a nondestructive way.
For example, this material of sewn flesh I made would probably be hard to find a CC0 material of otherwise, and if you don't like stuff like the size of the threads or patches it's easily changeable through editing node parameters: https://www.materialmaker.org/material?id=453
It wouldn't be efficient to use it as a replacement for materials that you can already find as CC0, though, since it takes time to make these.
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That makes sense, these programs are more for making textures from the ground up than generating normal maps from existing images. Though, there is someone working with Material Maker who has been using it to create normal maps from photos, but they seem to be doing the studio method to get exact normal maps from the images.
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Ah, it didn't come up in the search I did, sorry about that.
Edit: I just tried Texturelab. It's more polished looking, closer to Substance Designer visually, and connecting nodes is less finicky at different zoom levels, but it has much fewer nodes than Material Maker. It's hard to say it's currently usable since it's also lacking some key nodes like curvature and occlusion, but it would be nice to see it get better eventually. -
Some people here might already know this, but there is a free node-based material creation program made in the Godot engine. If you're familiar with Substance Designer then you probably would understand how useful this is. I've been using it in my own projects lately and I figured it might be a good idea to post about it here since I didn't find any threads mentioning it.
https://www.materialmaker.org/
The website also features a user-created library that includes CC0 materials people have made. A lot of them are mostly tech demo materials, but even ones that aren't general use can be downloaded and examined to see how they were made in the program, which helps with learning it. There's also a lot of tutorials for Substance Designer itself online and, though it doesn't line up 1:1, it seems like you can generally get most of the same stuff done in Material Maker using different methods.
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Well alright then. Here's the source files: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ud744tya2bf7be3/Thiefier Sounds Source.zip?dl=0
If you've using using this, you might have noticed wood sounds a bit quiet, that's because TDM doesn't increase the wood's footstep volume when running. I wonder if it's a leftover from transitioning from using multiple sounds for each movement speed, because wood was also using those. Tile doesn't increase volume either, but it doesn't use those old sound files though.
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I’ve been tinkering with the player footsteps sounds for the 3 surfaces that I found to be the weakest in the base game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get anything to sound right from just editing the existing sound files, so I hunted down for some free sounds to create a sound pack that tries to emulate the feel of Thief’s footsteps for tile, wood, and stone that people can use if they want to.
I understand why this kind of stuff is usually avoided because of copyright shenanigans and such, and that’s why I’m just posting this as a sound pack people can choose to use if they want to instead of expecting it to be put into the base game or anything like that.
Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ysfamuwxd5cisws/Thiefier_Sounds.zip?dl=0
To install, use 7zip to open the “tdm_sound_sfx02.pk4” in your TDM install directory as an archive, and replace the folders in it with the ones in the link above.
I’m not sure how often I will come back to edit this. I’ve been working on this on and off to try to keep a neutral ear to it, but I’m also not a sound designer so I probably won’t be able to make it much better than this.
Credits:
Wood and Stone: Everyday Cinematic Sounds https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKhZFIZjpB7Vtf_XKOvBzrg
Tile: Music & Sounds Effect Library https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-iLJ2ifYw0mV8AaAa1fFA
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The main thing I got out of metroidvanias was a focus on exploration, and I think TDM and Thief have that down already. You don't really need gated progression for that, and even TDM technically has gated progression with keys, rope arrows, broadhead arrows for buttons, spyglass for seeing written codes and notes from far away, etc. You would just need to design a mission to have these things not available at the start.
Hidden Hands: The Lost Citadel has a section that requires a rope arrow but you're not given one at start. The placement of the rope arrow might be a bit underwhelming if you're expecting something like Metroid, though.
Personally, I do prefer having a solid starting load out, even better if it's a shop, and focusing on exploring with the tools I have on hand rather than hunting down for all of the tools first. Though it would be a neat setup for a setting where Corbin got caught or something, I think I have seen FMs do this but usually all the lost equipment is in one place. -
I've been playing with this and the player lantern really works nicely with this. It lights up areas that the lantern alone couldn't light up very well such as small nooks and cupboards, as well as making the general area feel brighter and easier to see.
Even if this doesn't get support for every light, I'd support at least the player lantern getting this treatment.
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I just noticed wood has the same problem. It doesn't get louder when you run on it, just like tile.
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I'm not really talking about the sound files and more about something in the game isn't making tile floors increase volume when being run on, which is why I set stone and tile to the same sounds to show it off. The sounds get louder when I run on the stone, but don't when I run on the tile.
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I've been tinkering with sounds here and there and I noticed that tile floors don't get louder when running. I've always thought it was strange that tile was so quiet, and this is likely one reason why. I'm not sure if this is intended, but I've made a video showing it by changing stone and tile to the same sounds.
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11 minutes ago, SeriousToni said:
That was me.
The alternate footstep sounds are still available here:
Just tried it and the stone ones are just perfect for what I wanted sound-wise.
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I decided to spend some time to quickly edit the sounds. I couldn't do much with the stone footsteps other than lower their volume and trim out the really bad ones (01 and 05).
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1 hour ago, OrbWeaver said:
Manipulating already-compressed OGG files is a bad idea since it introduces generation loss (and unfortunately the original uncompressed files were not all retained for subsequent editing).
Although to be honest I really have no idea what you are talking about regarding the footsteps. Both stone and tile sound (to me) very similar to the original Thief stone and tile, and are clearly distinguishable in both tone and volume (although I suppose the tile could be made a bit louder to make it clear that it is a "loud" surface). I have no idea how the stone footsteps sound like "two bricks rubbing against each other" — are we even playing the same game?
I agree that the water sounds are rubbish though; it is clear that these were made by somebody swishing their hand around in a container of water, and do not sound anything like footsteps.
If it really bothers you that they would be edited compressed sound files, then I won't bother.
I could ask you the same question. I have no idea how you could think TDM's stone and tile footsteps sound similar to Thief's at all. Thief's stone footsteps are a softer sound and have less of a strong impact feel than TDM's which is grainy and has a harder impact with no follow through with a sliding sound. Thief's tile footsteps have a higher pitch than TDM's, but also it has a little reverb onto it to give it that "loud echo" feel. It's less about the loudness of the sounds and more about the pitch and reverb that gives the tile the loud feeling it has in Thief. Maybe bricks rubbing together was the wrong word for it, but you can tell when you compare Thief's almost whisper like stone footsteps and TDM's stone stomping that it sounds off.
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I'd probably try manipulating the sounds before recording new ones, and I'd attempt to do it myself, but I have no idea where the sound files are stored, and I'd need a list of footsteps showing their noise levels. I'm also no sound designer so if I can't make anything good out of it, I'll probably give up on my end because recording new sounds is out of my reach.
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If there is something that needs to be changed with the footsteps, it's the sounds. At the moment they don't properly convey the noise level. A few I can name off the top of my head are: tile sounds quieter than stone, stone sounds like two bricks rubbing against each other, and wading through water sounds like swishing your hand through a filled sink. Tile is definitely the worst of the lot though. If you compare with Thief, as soon as you hear the slappy tappy tile footstep you know "oh shit, this is loud," while the TDM tile footstep sounds like a dull tap that can even be hard to distinguish from stone sometimes.
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Kicking in doors works as well with the game thematically as a submachine bow and quips about balls of steel. Well hey, if we're taking inspiration from Postal, how about the ability to unzip your pants and piss on torches to put them out too? If you want to make Corbin Nukem in your own FM, that's fine because there's some great joke FMs out there for Thief, but it's not something that works well with every other FM. If breaking down doors is something that does get put into the game, it should be a breakable flag such as how Thief uses, but no kicking, that's just silly. (Even then, nobody breaks down doors in Thief anyway.)
At least the mic idea was founded on the focus of sound in the game, it just was just redundant and not relevant to 90% of the players.
As for the ice, T3 actually had similar with oil slicks. I'm unsure if TDM can handle bringing a character back up after they've been ragdolled, but that would be a cool trap (though, redundant with the flash bomb so it's not really necessary). T3 tends to get overlooked (for good reason) but it did have some nice stuff.
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TDM doesn't have a limited inventory so I'm not sure what crafting would really add. I know I tend to be a naysayer, but adding things due to spur of the moment ideas and novelty seeking is what leads to bloat.
In T1 there was a mission where you had to make a holy symbol for a ghost, but it was a part of the mission and wasn't just having a bunch of miscellaneous items clutter in your inventory so you can get a roundabout reservoir of water arrows. Consumable item crafting would just add extra tedium to the current method of getting more consumable items, picking them up in the map.
The best implementation of this would be for each of the base resources to make multiple kinds of consumables, and for the FM maker to carefully curate the number of base resources, so the player has to pick and choose if he wants to make more of one item or another, making the consumable items still limited. This doesn't address the issue some of the other people in this thread have with the limited resources, but managing limited resources is a major aspect of TDM and Thief. However, even with this best implementation, it's still adding little more than tedium to an established mechanic in the game, picking up consumables in the map.
Also, why do you want TDM to be a disposable AAA game?
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34 minutes ago, SeriousToni said:
I remember there was a discussion (as always) about that topic once a long time back, but I can't remember what was the final reason they now decided to decline this feature.
How long ago was this because I know I doused a torch guard in 2.9. I can't test it in 2.10 because the mission I remember doing it on isn't supported yet.
Headshots (and insta-kills by extension)
in The Dark Mod
Posted
My suggestion had nothing to do with whether it was realistic or not, it was only suggested as a harsher penalty for missing a kill shot. As it is now, it's a bit too easy to just take pot shots at guards a short distance away while they wander in random directions.