Ishtvan

I liked Dune... thought the Lynch Dune had better sets, but the Doom 2000 or whatever was closer to the books

Haven't had time to read those articles yet, but to answer your question: 1. Phase cancellation or addition is not currently considered, but it could be in future releases (We're keeping track of the total distance sound travels (approximately), and multiple paths, so it would be easy to compare the total distance from two paths to the AI's ears and come up with a phase difference from that... As to what frequency to use for the propagation constant though I'm not sure). 2. Weather effects - This can be handled by the current setup. I created map entities that you can place in an area that multiply the loss experienced by sound by a constant. So if you want fog to dampen sound, you put in a loss multiplier greater than 1. If you want an echoing stone room to waveguide the sound with fairly low loss reflections, put in a loss multiplier lower than 1. I'll have to look at those articles to see which sound propagation method is most dominant in which situations (ie, direct vs. diffuse). We could potentially add a flag "diffuse" and "direct" to the func_sound_area_info object. Direct would be the default, and "diffuse" would mark a certain area as a high-reverb environment where intensity is pretty much equal everywhere, and it wouldn't decay (but would probably experience some coupling loss going thru the portals). (eg, a small stone room or short stone hallway)

Yeah... I guess we don't want it to look like a cross

Once again very badass! Is there some significance to the inverted hammer that they wear? (ie, why they wear an inverted one instead of one where the wide part of the hammer is at the top. Is it because they're just so badass that they can turn their holy symbol upside-down and no one will say anything?)

I agree on the gem specular hilights being a little bright... I don't want my night vision to be ruined in a dark room due to the lightgem

Hi guys [Edit - Just to clarify, this is only for sound prop. with regard to AI. ] First of all, I was wondering if anyone could clarify what Theo mentioned about the differences in 'direct' wavefront propagation and diffuse field propagation. I think I understand that direct wavefront amplitude decreases due to geometric spreading of spherical waves (1 / ( radius squared ) ), whereas in the diffuse field, you have an infinite number of standing waves filling up a room. How does this diffuse field amplitude decrease as you move from one room to another? The important question for me is: which one of these models is dominant in indoor and outdoor sound propagation? When someone makes say a footstep or 'impulse sound' in another room, and you hear it a couple rooms away, are you hearing mostly the diffuse field of the sound coupled thru the rooms, or are you hearing the initial wavefront bouncing to you? (I know you actually hear both, but which is the dominant effect?) Also, Theo mentioned that the diffuse field experiences coupling losses when going to another room, and that one model would be to count how many portals sound goes thru and divide the diffuse field amplitude by that. One problem with that approach is: some portals are there solely for rendering purposes and would not really result in a sound coupling loss when going thru them (for example, a portal in the middle of a long hallway). Anyway, if anyone could shed light on this, or direct me to some sources on propagation of the diffuse field, I would be very happy.

*puts on his oDDity hat* Why would that be worthwhile? You want to quietly infiltrate your target and get out with no one the wiser, and you think it would be worthwhile to grab a huge bulky, shiny longsword, and somehow carry it in a way that's not awkward and noisy, just so you can maybe last maybe 5 seconds longer in a duel with a guard that trains sword combat day in and day out?

Maybe the size is a perspective thing? To me it looks fine. I kind've wish we could see a little more of it when it's in the idle state though, ie, if the hand + BJ were raised up a bit more into the FOV, just to get more of that "holding bj" feeling. I know that's probably not realistic though as you wouldn't be holding it right in front of your face. The speed on the down-swing seems fine. Perhaps the part that is a bit slow is the initial raising it up, which is why the speed from single-clicking to raise it and bring it down (without holding it up) may seem slow.

I could be crazy too, just when you held it up to block it looked a bit short

Yeah I updated the bow & arrow animations from oDDity's .zip, as of when that thread in Info&Announcements was posted. There was one weird thing with them, CVS kept wanting to recognize one of the broadhead textures as a text file, when it clearly was not, so I had to manually override it to upload binary.

Sounds good. Maybe for the projectile, it would kill you if it hit you dead-on, and have some lesser splash damage otherwise.

IMO making good animations for the shadow is low priority compared to first person animations and AI anims that we'll need for basic gameplay.

Not sure what you mean exactly, but Doom3 does already have a player shadow option.

The player model that will be seen in mirrors is probably going to have basic animations like walking, running, crouching etc. We don't want to waste time doing more complicated third person stuff though. If a player looks in a mirror while climbing a ladder.. they'll probably just see themselves sliding up a ladder. But that's the player's fault really, because why the hell are they climbing a ladder without watching where they're going?

In addition to just running around with third person, body awareness means you have to link all the animations to the environment in ways that look right.. climbing ladders for example, you have to put a hand on each rung, etc. This is why (I think) TDS always "sucked you in" to those situations, because it always played the same third person animation starting with the same initial conditions. Also it would require animations for swimming, creeping, arrow shooting, etc etc. Would you guys rather have a T1/T2 style game done faster, or a 3rd person supported game that takes another 6 months to produce? The majority of Thief fans didn't seem to get all that much out of playing in 3rd person anyway. Sorry if that didn't make any sense. I'm very tired right now.

Sorry to nitpick, but it was pretty much a shortsword in T1/T2 also.

Also keep in mind that each weapon we include is going to take time to model and animate. If someone wants to walk around "stealthily" taking out guards with a morning star or a cast iron frying pan or what have you, they'll probably have to model and animate that themselves.

It had come to an impasse though

True. If I remember right (from last night ), in T2, raising the blackjack and holding it means you hold it back behind your ear, so it's offscreen, and you see the elbow of the raised arm up near the upper right of the screen. Not saying we should copy that exactly, but that's what they did. [edit - Yeah I guess applying the FPS field of view to the real position, you woud not really see your elbow.. T2 probably just put it in there so people could see it]

That was a bit odd. It looked like it had already died on its own

You don't need one... that's where you get one

I'm playing through T2 again now also, and I just wanted to mention how much of a pain it is to jump to that high crate with the rope arrow in Shipping & Receiving. It's even more of a pain to do it without alerting anyone... had to settle for a minor alert from the guy on the ground 'cause he caught a glimpse of me slowfalling down. But to get my hands on a rope arrow again, it was worth it.

Two things: First, oDDity, I see your point about breaking & entering vs armed robbery charges in modern times. However, as Renzatic said, the rule of law was not so good in the world we're talking about. If you got caught breaking in to an isolated noble's manor, guards could kill you without consequence, or said noble could just as easily have you tortured to death as turn you in to the authorities. Speaking of the authorities, in the Thief universe at least, they were not too kind to thieves. (anyone remember something like "thieves shall feast on the tongues of liars, who shall be fed the hands of thieves"). So even if you were turned over to the authorities, you'd probably end up tortured to death or worked to death in prison. Using a sword to defend yourself as a last option looks more promising than throwing yourself on the mercy of the guards and judicial system of that world. Also, you don't have to kill a guard to get away, just injure him enough so he decides to stop fighting you. Second, the thing that I liked most about the Thief series was multiple pathways. For example, several buildings had many points of entry. It was fun stalking around and trying to pick the best point of entry. So you had a lot of options, some worse than others (like the heavily guarded front door). I got satisfaction in knowing that I slunk around and found a good entrance point. Applying oDDity's logic about sword use to that situation, we might as well not make the front door frobbable right, because our thief character is so good that he'd never consider going in there. We might as well only make only one entrance point for the player, because the character would obviously know what the best one is right? Would I be as happy to find the entrance if it was just a linear map where I had to search for the one entrance that the mappers selected as the best one? No! That's linear gameplay. I like having choies, so that I can feel good about choosing the best entrance. The same thing applies to the sword. I get personal satisfaction from choosing never to draw it, or to throw it away at the start of a map. It's fun when it's your choice (and the game also rewards you by not having the AI come down on your ass when you kill and make a lot of noise). It's not fun when you have no choice.

I hate to use the buzzword 'immersion,' but it is more immersive when, in a game, you know you can do stuff that you would do in reality. If one was sneaking around and were caught in RL, I doubt they'd just say "well, you got me" and let the guard stab them to death while looking for the 'quickload' button.

You can't prepare for everything. Sometimes you have to improvise. Sometimes you have to improvise 6 inches of steel through someone's eye. By being 'good,' I meant of course you as a player had learned to make optimum use of your shortsword in combat.