Ishtvan

I like detailed games, and realism is good IMO unless it tries to replace something that we do naturally in RL thru other senses than sound and sight with some clunky awkward interface ingame. For example, it would be silly to have a key for "step with right leg" and "step with left leg" and then 10 keys for different leg movement speeds. Personally I'm pro-saving, because things like game crashes and AI's getting stuck do occasionally happen, no matter how carefully we code the AI and how carefully the map is designed. When I'm playing T2 and an AI gets stuck at a corner or along a wall somewhere, resulting in the map becoming un-ghostable, I like to be able to restore the game to some point without losing 30 minutes of progress (maybe 5 minutes of lost progress is okay) I know we've been over this debate in the private forums several times, but I think making limited saves an option, or even just reporting the number of saves/reloads at the end stats screen is enough for people to enforce save-discipline on themselves if they want. Enforcing limited saves on everyone will not result in revolutionizing how people play games, it will just result in people who don't like limited saves not playing the game.

In case anyone cares, I finally got Silent Hunter III. I'm still getting into it, and yes, it is hard on the "historical" difficulty setting. For example, to execute a torpedo attack: You have to identify the ships yourself thru the periscope, using an identification manual. If you start out by identifying the ship incorrectly, your firing solution is useless, and your torpedo may be set for the wrong running depth and pass harmlessly under the keel even if it happens to go anywhere near the ship. The historical U boats had a Torpedo Data Computer ( so the player doesn't actually get to do the trigonemetric calculations looking at trig tables and using a slide rule.. damn, such an easy game! ). The required inputs for a firing solution are Range, Angle on Bow, and Speed Range: Estimate range by measuring the angle made by your periscope reticule when you sweep from water line to highest point on the ship. An automated calculor then outputs the range based on the identified ship mast height (again if you identified the ship wrong, you be screwed). If you don't believe the range, you can calculate it yourself using the formula range = (mast height from ID manual) / sin( angle ) Angle on Bow (or your sub's bearing as seen from the other ship) : This can be estimated visually, using the different perspective pictures in the identification manual. Visual estimation is the most inaccurate method. The most accurate method is to change your heading so that you are travelling parallel to the target's course (the lateral distance remains constant). Then the Angle on Bow is simply 180 deg - (the target's bearing with respect to you). Report that to the TDC officer. Speed: You can estimate speed by locking the periscope on target and starting a stopwatch, which records range and bearing data, and automatically calculates the speed from that. If you are not satisfied with the calculated speed, you can enter another value yourself. A bad Range calculation will also mess up your Speed calculation. You can also bring your sub to a parallel course and same speed (which means the range will not change over time), then just enter in your sub's speed. Finally, you send all this data to the TDC officer. If you want, you can take over his post and man the TDC yourself at this point, and change the calculated firing solution however you want. This is also where you set torpedo running depth, speed and detonation method (magnetic vs impact). More advanced torpedos have other settings like pattern running and acoustical guidance. Once you've done all this, you fire the tubes and hope for the best. As in real life, you'll sometimes get a dud torpedo, and sometimes they will detonate prematurely (esp. when set to magnetic detonation), which alerts everyone to your presence and means you'd better do some fast thinking. So that's just the "executing a torpedo attack" portion of the game, which lets you command pretty much all the U-boat systems (altho not all of them to that level of detail).

Don't we have a "darkmod includes" file already that we can just add stuff to, so that we don't have to modify doom_main?

Haven't done any modding before, unless you count coding on old skool muds, mushes, mu*

If anyone needs a photosourced texture of a Tiffany lamp, my parents have one at their house... I could probably convince my Dad to take some digital pics and email them to me. There are probably tons of pics of them online though too.

Nice thief! [edit: if you want 'constructive' criticism: the head looks a bit big proportionally (although maybe that's just because most of it is in shadow), and the area where the top of the hood drapes over the top of the head looks a bit weird ] Btw, based on the submarine art, you might like the WWII submarine sim Silent Hunter III! I feel a moral obligation to pimp this game now that I see that retail stores aren't putting it on shelves at all.

I think first person games have a distorted perspective because they compress a wide FOV down to the visible space of the monitor. Consequently, things along the edges look kind've compressed (like where AI feet would be if you were looking around at eye level). I don't personally know this though, just regurgitating stuff I heard from people who know a lot more about graphics than me.

Btw we have rattling chain sound effects. I don't know if this is the best place to say this, but someoen was asking about haunt sound effects earlier.. we have rattling chains for the idle/walking anim.

I didn't like the SC:PT interface because you have to use the mouse to select your weapon and stuff (if that's what you're referring to?) It's very console-esque because you have to pause the game and then use mouse and movement keys to select your item; I'd rather have it done in real time with the standard next item/prev item / hotkey shortcuts. I don't know if that's what you meant tho.

I have to go with Oddity on this one, esp. since I'm the one programming in the volumes and stuff... I don't want to "reveal" too much, but just follow your ears

The sound meter was kinda crappy though. The response time for environmental sounds was horrendous (witness the thunder). You can tell it was meant to be a static thing based on the map location and then they just hacked in some global changes in it when the thunder happened (altho I dunno, maybe some later levels in the retail version do a better job with the sound meter)

I posted a thread about the demo earlier. You can KO them when you have the gun/knife to their head, it's just a choke out but they're still alive. Or you can stab 'em unnecessarily.

This is starting to sound like a broken record... settings on top of the standard AI difficulty, combat difficulty and extra objectives should be optional. Some people like a time limit, some don't, so make it optional. Problem solved, no need for pages and pages of argument for and against.

Man, I mentioned trying to buy Silent Hunter III earlier. Maybe some of Spector's insane ranting hit close to the truth in this case: None of the places that carry games/software in my area are even putting this game on the shelves. I had to mail order it after accepting the fact that it's been a week and a half since release, they're not going to stock it. I guess submarine simulators are not "mainstream" enough, and can't take up one lousy space on the shelf to displace the latest "stare at someone's 3rd person ass while they run from side to side dispatching hordes and hordes of mindless opponents" game.

Imposing self discipline to ghost seemed to work great for a lot of people in T1-T3

I want a random chance that they get the creeps or the willies or the 'heebie jeebies' and look back over their shoulder

And if you like ghosting but don't like the loot hunt, you can always set the required percentage to 75 instead of 90 or something. It's like the Special Olympics: Everyone wins!

I agree the loot hunt is kind've lame, that's why we should have an option to set the percent loot down if you want. That's why we're making these playstyle options, for the very reason that someone might want to turn the AI all the way up and then set loot percentage to an "easier" value. I don't think the argument of what a "real thief" would do works though. Remember we're not just playing a smash & grab burglar, we're playing an artist, who paints the canvas of others' worldly posessions with negative space. Also, the "real thief" argument could be applied to blackjacking vs ghosting too. In real life, people do not move on predictable tracks, always looking straight ahead of them like cardboard cutouts. Supposing you have to move thru a brightly lit area with 5 AI walking back and forth thru it. A real thief under a time constraint (like get out before the sun comes up) is not going to sit there for 20 minutes timing all the peoples' motions until they find a "sweet spot" where they can run thru the lit area with no one looking. Real people are not predictable like that. If forced to take a well-lit route patrolled by several guards, a real thief would even up the odds by knocking a few people out (ie, ambushing them in completely dark areas of their patrol). This also applies to crossing behind a stationary guard in a well lit area, esp if your path out of and back into the shadows will put you "out of reach" of the guard. In real life, would you just cross and hope the person doesn't randomly turn around, then scream out an alarm before you can get to them to silence them? Or do you get as close as you can to the guard while staying in shadow, wait for them to turn around and then KO them, THEN worry about crossing the well lit area? I would argue that the KO option is more viable for a "real thief," since in real life you can never be assured that a person will not randomly glance your way while you're taking 10 seconds to cross a fully lit area behind them. The consequences of them glancing back and seeing you may be death, and in life you don't get to reload. So I think a real thief would not so easily decide to abandon an open shot at the back of the guard's head in favor of a risky crossing behind them and hoping they don't look back (The best option is probably to cross closely behind them with the blackjack raised, ready to strike if they turn around, but sometimes the path to the shadows on the other side of the area you want to cross doesn't let you stay that close to them.) (As a side note, this is completely OT, but this is another reason to make AI have a lot of random actions, like glancing behind them when on patrol. I'm tired of feeling like I'm ghosting past cardboard cutouts on tracks that will always keep looking the way they're walking unless I make a noise to alert them. Yes it will make ghosting harder, but it will also make it feel a lot more real, which makes it worthwhile IMO) Anyway, sorry to rant. What I'm saying is: sometimes it's more realistic to KO people rather than try to ghost by them, but that shouldn't stop us from letting people choose a "ghosting" playstyle to get more challenge. Similary, it may be more realistic (as well as easier) to go in, find a few choice pieces of loot, and get out, but that should not stop us from letting people choose a higher loot requirement to add more challenge.

I would call that "dynamic difficulty level" instead of "karma" (usually you don't get good karma for killing people ) It's an interesting idea, but personally I would rather just set the difficulty settings to one value at the beginning of the mission and then run with it. If I want to play on expert, I want the guards to be extremely hard from start to finish, not easy at the beginning and then only harder near the end when I'm doing well. Also, I don't really like games with dynamic difficulty, because it always leaves me wondering: Did I get thru that difficult situation due to my own skill, or did the game just dumb it down for me because I screwed up something earlier? FM's are reasonably short; it's not like you have to stay at the same difficulty for a whole game. If a player is having too much trouble, they can always restart the mission with easier difficulty settings.

I have to agree with Springheel on this. What possible effect will it have on you if other people abuse the save feature? If you're worried about people abusing it to get "perfect" stats screens that they can brag about or whatever, all you have to do is keep track of number of times saved/reloaded and display it in the stats, or if we make it an OPTION to limit saves, just show the status of that option in the final stats display. There will always be people who feel adamantly about saving, and even if we write it out of the game, someone will probably hack it back into their own game... and you can't stop them. So why waste the time worrying about how other people save in the first place? Just play how you want yourself, and set the option for limited saves if you aren't disciplined enough to limit your own saves.

Part of letting the player excercising their Thief skills is finding stuff that is hard to find. If they don't want to find every single tiny piece of loot, they should turn the required loot percentage down to 80% or whatever. I don't like the idea of glint, but I do kind of frown upon mappers placing tiny pieces of loot in obscure corners, and then giving it such a large value that you have to find it, unless there is a readible or something saying that so and so lost their tiny but very valuable ring while playing in the music room or something like that. Actually it's not all that bad, since we're going to have flares anyway, might as well use them in areas where it makes sense. In fact, we could have some metal loot textures in low light areas have really high spec maps/gloss maps, so that when you light a flare in that area, you actually will see the light from the flare glint off the metal, if that's possible to do with textures.

Okay, I have to throw my suggestion in the ring now: When you restore a savegame, the game will call you a twat, and there will be a 10% chance that it will format your harddrive.

Wow, awesome door. Is that central knocker thing part of the model, or is that a normalmap?

Happy Birthday GIMG!

This might be a little much work, but would it be possible to turn the table into an anvil, and the piece of wood into a piece of metal (possibly with parts of it red hot?)