Wellingtoncrab

@Klatremusthe guards are supposed to notice the door being opened but they are not supposed to be able to close it again (it seemed strange for them to not react to this mysterious vault being opened). I of course did not take this into account that it may make the mission unghostable at a certain level. I did attempt to design Iris to enable as many playstyles as possible including on the very extremes, so in this instance I do think it is appropriate to make a change to enable the vault to be accessed for these types of players. So I am thinking instead of them reacting suspiciously to the door I will add additional patrol paths so the ai explore the vault if the door is opened. This more or less achieves the same thing "narratively" and will add a nice bit of tension to trying to loot the vault without busting a ghost playthrough.

@Klatremusno that is definitely correct - I ask as files extracted to the directory take load precedence over stuff packed in the .pk4 , so it's possible that if certain files were in the directory they could be overwriting the archive contents but sounds like that is definitely not the issue. I will try installing the stealth tool as see if I can load the save. Ah sorry I missed that! Interesting - the door is flagged that ai should not interact with it but I can confirm with enough time they will eventually close the door even sealing the player inside (for me this took them roughly 10 minutes). Definitely not as intended and I will fix this!

@Klatremusdarn - unfortunately the save doesn't want to load for me even on 1.12 Iris (pre hotfix) and 2.10 release. I am sure there are plenty of reasons a save wouldn't load, but would there be any other reason for differences in you local TDM version or Iris? (Like are you on a dev build, have mods installed, do you have the fm extracted from the .pk4) So for now I have fallen back to just watching the patrols routes for these AI's at 10x speed hoping to see where they might get bound up but I haven't been able to replicate it on any of the recent versions of Iris. Given how many AI in your playthrough have the issue it's almost like there may be an issue with the .aas file which contains the pathfinding info for all the AI, I just have no idea how. I would typically recommend redownloading the mission, but since this no longer matches your local version my guess is it would break your save. My apologies at it certainly spoils the immersion a bit.

@Klatremus sure! That actually could help figure out what’s going on provided I can still load the save. 5 ai getting stuck at this point definitely means something is off.

@Klatremushmm ... that's a tricky one. I spent quite a bit of time at 10x timescale observing these ai and couldn't replicate them getting stuck. Normally I would think the AI must have gotten alerted and deviated from their patrol paths managing to get stuck but since you're doing a ghost playthrough this would also be strange. I moved some geometry out of their way and put more aggressive clipping in these ai's patrol paths which hopefully would prevent them from getting stuck. These changes, as well as the updated AI scripting and other tweaks are available here in this beta branch of Iris Obviously no pressure to test it, but they are there if you are interested. Replace your iris.pk4 with irisbeta.pk4

@Klatremusvery helpful - thank you!

Thanks! Your feedback there will be greatly appreciated. Do you recall the areas where the AI were getting stuck? I can take a look at that as well.

@Klatremus I have been working on some improvements to the AI scripting in the southbridge areas you pointed out which should make those AI act more consistently with the base game (reacting suspiciously to player sounds in areas that are hostile for example). Admittedly I am not much of a scripter so while it seems quite promising I am worried I have broken something or thrown off the mission balance. I could use some help testing the changes and your play style would be well suited if you are willing, but unfortunately while it is just a script swap it doesn't seem to be compatible with older saves so I understand if you're not interested at this point in your playthrough. Still I am attaching the beta version of Iris here which you would just need to replace iris.pk4 in FM's directory with this irisbeta.pk4 if you (or anyone else) are interested in testing it.

This was a very cool playthrough of this great mission @marbleman- "let's plays" are interesting in themselves but it was a nice change to watch such a practiced playthrough and some of the creative solutions you came up with along the way. I am looking forward to seeing you run through Noble Affairs!

No problem - it’s quite interesting to hear how the mission works with this play style and I am glad anyone enjoys the mission enough to even try.

It is a limitation of the custom scripting that handles whether AI are hostile or not in these types of areas - since they are only hostile to the player if they witness the player committing a crime they are technically neutral while you are making that noise.

No, it was a very minor thing regarding something which was added and doesn’t break the mission at all. No need to restart imo.

Well I managed to both include some unnecessary files in the archive (somewhat undermining my effort to reduce its size) and introduce a new bug - so here we have the better and smaller IRIS 1.12 Hotfix available here or in the the original post. All apologies - though deepest apologies to @nbohr1more for having to update the archive server side twice.

I know what I want to do as a follow up at this point - but as much as I’d like to it’s very hard to say if I would be able to finish a project like that again!

@Klatremus

"In the dark one might even mistake its sheen for gold." -{REDACTED} IRIS has been updated to 1.12 Download is via the link in the original post or here Changelog: Modest decrease in the archive size Lots of small bug fixes Fixed issues related to loot totals reported by @Klatremus Added some clues regarding an optional objective For those who cannot stay in bounds added greater mysteries of the void. (thanks for the catch @Dragofer) Regarding the white {REDACTED} in {REDACTED} the player can now reveal {REDACTED} when wearing {REDACTED} Carry the light of The Builder, unto its end.

@Klatremus

@Klatremusthanks for catching those! I have them on my bug tracker to look at.

@KlatremusThanks so much for playing! I am glad to hear you enjoyed the mission!

I think the context cue from the animation driving this thread addresses this aspect potentially well, especially if the legacy blackjack systems stay in place. I would be of the opinion the issue is really with the inconsistency or ambiguities in the core mechanic and that addressing this at the root by simplifying (if not outright aping the thief rules) is the best way to go, and is certainly at a minimum time well spent developing and testing. Not wishing to alter to core mechanics is also an understandable position, in that way I would find the context cue animation to at least be a promising improvement and helpful to players like myself who see the nuances as frustrating instead of engaging (kind of in the vein of the frob helper/bow aimer). To me the KO loop is predominantly about closing the gap and remaining undetected - adding this finicky positional layer has only ever added friction in my experience as a player. More or less I am just happy to see this being worked on and I look forward to testing when it makes it to a dev build!

I think it’s a barber chair as well - more of a Victorian feel which I think can work with the setting - some custom animations would definitely add a lot. There was some question on the discord whether ai would be able to sit in it at all given it’s height and the step so it at least it works (with help from a bit of monster clip) This is very tricky to get consistent across lighting conditions - the “showroom” light is fullbright which kind of exaggerates the effect and they (hopefully) look more natural in scene lighting. All of the four revisions contained some amount of tweaks to specularity on the materials always still working on that! Yeah I would say while I think it’s gotten better over time, until recently video games have seemingly never been afforded the opportunity to be concerned with consistency in terms of fidelity across assets. If you look at the xbox 360/ps3 area where things like asset streaming from disc and memory management were much more constrained the fidelity of assets was all over the place. The detail was of course typically weighted by an assets prevalence in a scene, so you could still argue TDM is at a disadvantage there, but it’s just to say I think you can still have a consistent visual style with varying levels of detail across assets. Bad news would be that kind of consistency is just as hard to achieve. That being out of whack I think is at a glance more likely to cause a player to feel something is out of place. There is obviously some problem with these assets in that they were never intended to be art in an engine like this. The low detail diffuse from a PBR material with the high level of geometric detail on the models themselves instead of say the normal map means they are never going to get as much out of the engine as efficiently as something which was built for the ground up for it. Still … the price and license arrangement is right.

Sure. That’s a dynamic that even exists amongst the core assets themselves. It’s almost as if lots of different people have contributed over a decade plus!

** As of 2.11 many of these assets have been further optimized and incorporated into the core mod** *These are reposted from the discord server* Conversions of cc0 licensed assets from https://polyhaven.com/models: **POLY HAVEN CC0 ASSET PACK 01 "SEATING"** - REV4 - narrow seats. wide seats - red seats. blue seats **POLY HAVEN CC0 ASSET PACK 02 "GOTHIC"** - Initial Release - Even more furniture - Interactive prefabs: Containers, cabinets, drawers, "working" grandfather clock - Fully modular pier kit - A very nice bed ! But AI can't sit in the chair ! Notes on "optimization": many of these meshes are particularly tricky for a very novice modeller as they contain a lot of smaller detail geometry which ideally would be baked into a normal map. That's a bit beyond me admittedly, so a much greater emphasis was put into keeping a higher level of detail but having as few shadow casting triangles as I could manage. The shadow mesh is typically only 10-20% of the overall polygon budget of an asset in the pack with some exceptions for the large "hero" assets like the bed.

(If deemed worthy) I’ll give it a go.