vozka

Very enjoyable, thanks for this mission. I'm just watching the Snowpiercer series (which is pretty good by the way), so this fits right in thematically. Great idea, and it seems to me that a train mission is like the opposite of sewer missions - everybody hates those and they're almost always bad, whereas when a game dares to do a train mission, it's almost always good. I would have liked if it was longer simply because I was having fun. Can't have it all though and compact missions are also nice. Getting enough loot was just fine for medium difficulty, but I honestly have no idea where the rest of it could have been hidden, so good job on that too.

A bit different topic since his games are free all the time and not just during giveaway, but do you know of Increpare Games? He's producing a staggering amount of puzzle games, some of which are really smart and really good. Others just funny and stupid. Often the first goal of the game is to understand how it works and what's the goal. Gestalt OS for example is one of the best puzzle games I've played.

Nope, I don't like downloading codec packs because I remember that they used to create messy situations in the system by containing outdated codecs, unneeded codecs that conflicted with other apps etc. That was about 15 years ago and it's possible the situation is entirely different, but for me it stuck (and up until now I haven't needed to install any codecs separately for about a decade). There's a google webp codec and a windows store webp codec, I used the google one.

Well, yeah, the problem of slow adoption is precisely what I'm complaining about. This is kind of a circular argument - if nobody adopts it, nobody is going to use it and it's going to have little support. I do realize that this is a difficult problem to solve because companies have to basically volunteer to "passively" support it and hope it brings them advantages in the long term. There are other aspects that I omitted as well, like for example HEAACv2 being slightly more demanding to decode (which is also the reason why Bluetooth historically used poor SBC encoding), but those are largely moot nowadays as well (even integrated bluetooth chips and cheapest SoCs can decode pretty much any audio format with no issue. Your point regarding storage and network costs does not cover the whole situation, I see three issues with it. Firstly mobile internet is still slow in many places in the world and it's often limited. Where I live it's difficult to get more than 5 GB monthly limit for a reasonable price. Secondly most websites are bloated as hell and any way to speed up their loading helps. This was the main reason for webp creation and adoption. Thirdly for services like music and video streaming bandwidth is expensive and the difference between using 160 kbps and 96 kbps for the same quality can save a lot of money. That was the reason why Youtube and Soundcloud switched to more modern codecs. And not even that, Netflix in some apps already switched to one of webp successors for movie thumbnails, because in such a large scale even serving the thumbnails in a decent image quality costs a lot of money. Btw in my case webp was certainly not useless, it was just an annoying situation. I use it as backup for my own use (seems to be about 1/5 of png size so far for photo-like files), so I just downloaded a codec from google to get explorer thumbnails and I don't need other people to support it. Although the fact that Facebook messenger converts webp files to... static gifs of all things, is kind of annoying (and funny).

Since this thread is already silly, why not derail it a bit: The main thing I took from this whole ordeal is that it's annoying how long it takes to adopt new and better formats. There are virtually no reasons to use .gif apart from compatibility with ancient systems. Jpeg from an actual image editor instead of mspaint being much better is one thing, but there's also webp, heic, avif, jpeg xl and others, all better than their lossy or lossless predecessors and most have free implementations. Except almost nobody uses them because the adoption is glacially slow. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox are fast, but everyone else isn't, Apple traditionally being the worst. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Blender now supports webp output for rendering, which in its lossless version is straight up better than png or tiff, only to find out that Win10 doesn't support it natively and I have to search the web for a codec to get thumbnails in explorer. It's the same with music files. We've had codes better than mp3, standard aac or ogg vorbis for almost 2 decades now, yet these three are still the most used codecs for streaming music. And when a platform decides to use something else, it's often a step down in quality because they push down the bitrates too much, as with youtube in the last couple years.

However you choose to present your in progress map is of course entirely your business, but I gotta say that "using crappy built-in software" is a strange hill to die on. And mspaint being crappy is the only reason why this funny thread exists.

I believe this is just the matter of using a more sane image editor.

He seems really bitter about the project for some reason, quite strange considering this all happened 20 years ago. Having seen the footage it seems that is definitely more than "a smattering of barely populated test levels" and I can see a group of fans making a game out of it.

I thought about this as well and on one hand I'm excited about the idea but on the other it would bring so many changes I'm not even sure if it could work. You'd have to redesign many of the stealth tropes at least. For example, being in a room with dark walls while a guard holding a torch passes through might be fine, but being in a room with white walls might not because the amount of reflected light would be high enough to make you visible. Awesome. Being careful of other people seeing you casted shadow. This would raise the difficulty so much (if it's implemented in any way realistically) that it might be less awesome. Being seen through reflections in windows, mirrors or water. Possibly leading to frustrating situations where you have no idea how you were seen, unless the game specifically tells you. I'm sure there are many other things you could think of.

Perhaps I was unclear because that is not the case. I am complaining that the way the delay is manifested in the game looks wrong, not about the delay itself. The delay itself is probably pretty realistic, but in real life the guard would not react by completely ignoring something he's seen and going on with is life for a few seconds before suddenly turning around and attacking the character. He would probably stop and be confused before realizing what's happening and then attack. I will have to focus on it next time I'm playing because this is just something that I realized now after reading this thread, not something that I focused on recently. I have not changed any of the AI settings and I think it happens when I'm partly lit and the guard is pretty close.

On the topic of guards, is anybody bothered by how they don't respond to noticing the player immediately but after a short delay? Seems like it might be intentional because most people don't have inhumane reflexes and it takes a moment of confusion to realize what's going on when somebody surprises you. But the issue is that between the moment when a guard has you in his line of sight and when he starts acting, he usually just continues what he was doing. This creates weird situations where guards just walk past you on their patrol after clearly seeing you and then suddenly turn around, yell and attack you. From a gameplay perspective obviously it's not a big issue, it just often looks wrong. So I was wondering if that's intentional or what was the motivation. I'm thinking that playing some sort of "confused, looking around" animation on the guard would make this situation look much better.

There's no simple way to add polygons and make the model look better without a lot of work. What might make more sense would be replacing low-res textures. Those imo are more pain to look at and more often used right next to high resolution textures on the same surface or in the same room. After playing a few games (Thief 1 & 2 among others) with neural network upscaled textures, I believe this technique could be used with success. It takes a while to tune the processing pipeline so that the textures aren't oversharpened, noisy etc., but the results can be good. It takes a while to select the right textures, process them (often needs hand retouching for seamless texturess for example, and alpha channels are not always supported) and test them in-game, but it's doable.

What a great mission. I have no opinion about the various small changes - I enjoy them as they make the mission feel fresh, but I can't say if I prefer them or not. Streamlining the lockpicking is nice on one hand, but on the other hand I've had some tense moments where the timing of a patrolling guard was tight and having to switch between lockpicks and trying to pick some door while he's coming round the corner and nearly breathing down my neck made the situation even more exciting. But I appreciate the effort made so that we can experience something else :). What I liked about the mission the most is how polished and balanced everything was. Like your other missions that I played the difficulty is just fine, the mission is large and nonlinear enough to be fun, but starightforward enough to not be frustrating. Very enjoyable, including the side contracts, it just flows really nicely. I got stuck at the main objective for a while, but there were several hints around, I just wasn't attentive at first. Oh, and bonus points for replacing the mission accomplished sound, always appreciated. And the main menu is nice too.

Gaming laptops are generally bad, but there used to be office style laptops with dedicated GPUs that work reasonably well. I have an 11 years old HP Probook 6xxx like that with aluminium frame that's still working well, that particular line used to be really good and cheap. That's a thick brick from before the style of super thin "ultrabooks" though, which are even worse for cooling than laptops before that. No idea if somebody still makes laptops like that, maybe Lenovo, but those are going to be expensive.

Having limited second hand knowledge of how politics actually works in my country from various friends and acquaintances who are politically active, I find any theories about a "plan" fabulously optimistic. Ime when any significant change happens it's either chaos or greedy people who do not care about anybody else, but almost never any actual plan.