Ishtvan

Oh, one other nitpick to the otherwise great gameplay:

There is still some WIP code for that (unless someone cleaned it up since), it is enabled with a cvar. The control scheme itself was not that hard, but it turned out to be hard to make sure you trigger all the proper door opening and closing events, and don't break the system by letting the door go farther than it should, etc. It would still be possible to get it working given enough effort.

I just played the latest version without trying the earlier ones. With the new AI changes to make them take slightly longer before deciding to charge you if they see you, this is very playable! Just find hard cover and lean around to see if anyone is there first. I really liked the new gameplay and the story/readables. Visuals were a bit blocky, but I understand that may be a limitation of a wide open are that's fully lit.

I enjoyed this one a lot as well. Very good visuals and storytelling. Personally I don't mind long readables. Every bit helps flesh out the story, and if you're in a hurry you can just skim them for clues, surely a useful skill for a thief. Overall a very enteraining mission. A few bugs occurred, playing with the current 1.08 build:

We've talked about a cancel mantle in the past. For instance, you would hit crouch to let go of a ledge and drop down, like you do to drop off of ropes, ladders and other climbing situations. We even talked about letting you drop down to a hang and then start back up again. All of this ended up being pretty hard to code within the current mantle system, thus it got shelved in favor of higher priority features. Someone could still come help out and implement it; it's all possible to implement, given enough time, even shimmying sideways along ledges, but that would break a lot of maps. We also talked about "noise masking" from loud, expected noises in the room. This feature was planned to be in from the very beginning, and there is some skeleton code for it, but it also fell by the wayside in favor of more important things.

Finished! Another excellent mission. I liked the RIT gameplay as well. It really makes you pick a spot in a room that no one can possibly get to (like crouched on top a bookshelf). I also liked the frequent relighting of candles (on difficult, at least). That makes you remember what places were brightly lit before you extinguished the candle, and stay out of those areas if someone's coming to relight it. Or, you can try to slip by when their back is turned relighting it. Awesome gameplay overall.

Oh, I found it.

I can't find

It was

And now I'm done. Incidentally, the slick surface additions in the latest version do affect the snow in this FM. It's a little disconcerting because it sounds like unpacked snow due to the footsteps (trudge trudge trudge), but it behaves like iced-over snow in that you keep sliding along a bit. I'm not sure we should apply slick to this type of snow surface?

One year later... I just played this. Praise be to Sotha for another great FM. I loved the following and overhearing conversations aspects. I've ghosted so far with no KO's and minor alerts, took a break to come here because I couldn't find one of the objectives.

Just got a chance to play this last night, and it was extremely enjoyable!

Well played. I think it is also in Macbeth, "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep." A collection of weird fiction from a railway historian sounds pretty awesome. Hopefully we learn the horrific origin of "Boxcar Joe."

The audience is mostly voyeurs. The audience wears Commedia Dell'arte masks, and talking is forbidden, but occasionally you become participants, as the actors are free to bend/break those rules. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it seems like the actors choose participants based on who's paying attention and willing to interact, but maybe anyone can also find/do things that trigger certain events independent of that. It's put on by this British group called Punchdrunk, and also an American group called Emursive. I really want to go back now. Damn them for adding so much replay value!! Here is the link to the NYC version: http://sleepnomorenyc.com/

Oh, also there are times when you pick up something and are examining it, then a character comes in the room and you're thinking, "oh crap, put it back before they notice that it's gone!" In practice though, they have these very subtle "helpers" on the sidelines who try to make sure you don't screw up scripted sequences too much. It would suck if Macbeth was unable to kill Duncan because you blocked the chamber door with a crate.

I did a search and didn't see anyone posting about this before. Sleep No More is a theatrical... experience that is very much like playing Thief in real life! I have to be very vague to avoid giving away spoilers, but imagine a real life location with over 5 floors and 100 rooms of Noir/medieval aesthetic, where you're free to move around as you please, follow characters around and watch any of many simultaneous scenes playing out (it's not quite Thief because they don't beat you to death if they see you). It loops a few times so you can see different things that were happening simultaneously, but you'll never see it all or figure out the entire plot the first time you go. Now add to the mix: readables, searching through desks and chests (you can touch and interact with everything), finding special items and using them somewhere to trigger an event, unexpected one-on-one interactions with characters including being sent on missions by them, speakeasies, detectives, black magic, and freaking SECRET PASSAGES! So much like Thief in real life! If anyone is in a city where this is playing (currently in NYC, has been in SF and maybe London), I would highly recommend it! It costs nearly $100, but it was worth every penny! I didn't go for a while, because I didn't think it could possibly be as good as people were describing, but it was! I went in, wandered around for a minute and then was like "holy shit, READABLES!" Real life doesn't pause when you read them, though. So I'm glad TDM prepares you for that. I also used the trick of bringing over a lit candle to explore a dimly lit room. So badass! My only complaint is that it's too easy to lose someone when following them down a stairwell, but hey, that's real life for you.

Okay, whenever it can get done, on top of all the other stuff that needs to be done. I noticed something else: Is it just me or is the player's thrust animation slower on the recovery or cancel animation? It's slower than I remembered and now, I tend to not have time to parry after making a thrust attack, and feint attacks with the thrust don't work either. The rest of the player attacks are fine. These haven't been changed in a while, the log says this: Feb 26 2011, greebo: Merged changed from 1.04 release branch. Jul 03, 2009, ishtvan: cut one frame off the end of cancel anims, blends into idle anyway So what were the changes in the 1.04 release branch? Could the anims, particularly the thrust one, have gotten slower?

I can confirm that it is not good gameplay-wise ingame after testing. I really can't tell the difference between the overhead and the side slash at combat speeds. After many repititions, I started to pick up a slight difference in the way they hold the non-weapon hand, but that is not good enough. I understand you don't have the source files Spring, but whenever anyone who does can get around to addressing this, it would be better if the hand went more distinctly up and back over the shoulder. It would be a shame for the latest release to needlessly make melee combat even more frustrating than it already is.

Yeah, I can see how that would penalize a player for being careful. I guess they'll have to get used to opening it, frobbing it to stop it at a crack open, and then maybe waiting for the AI to de-alert before they close it again. It would be nice if it only went off when the door was opened to a larger angle, but that may be hard to code. We also have a commented out system for "advanced door opening" where you hold down frob and then up/down mouse movement is mapped to door movement for slow opening, but it wasn't quite working to detect when the door reached its closed/open states, so we abandoned it for the time being.

Mostly gaming of course, and occasional finite difference time domain simulations.

Slightly off topic, but I currently have a "Bloomfield" I7 920. I'm debating whether to upgrade to an i7 3820, but I'm not finding much reason to. Twice the bandwidth for RAM transfer is nice (51 vs 25 GB/s). The clock rate increase of 3.6 vs 2.7 GHz is not that big a deal to me. 30% more is not worth buying a new CPU for me (although I know the actual performance increase can be more than just the clock rate, e.g., if they do other things to increase the actual FLOPs). Does anyone have an opinion on this? I guess if there's a lower-end IvyB that way outperforms the 920, that would be cool too, but I feel like they're still all priced about the same.

If by "accomodate the swashbuckler players" you mean "not break a feature of the mod unnecessarily," then yes. Otherwise, go back in time and tell me not to spend any time on that feature because it will just be broken later.

Regardless, we shouldn't make manual parrying impossible to do with ambiguous animations. Why did I spend all the time coding it if we were just going to ignore it?

I guess we might as well auto-reload whenever anyone gets into combat on Expert, then. Oh, wait, you can still parry or hit and take advantage of the AI's "flat footed" moment to run away, or wound your opponent until their health is low and they flee.

Regarding the blackjack separation: Yes, good finding on the earlier reports. I don't think it would show up as an issue in any specific animation, because it happens during animation blending from the raised animation back to the idle animation. The blending system is not smart, it just kind of linearly interpolates all the joints from one position to the other. So if the blackjack is a separate joint not stuck to the hand, it makes sense that it could move away from the hand during blending. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we don't see it for the sword because we got rid of (or made invisible) the sword object in the animations, and used the physically attached sword that never leaves the hand joint? We could try to do the same thing for the blackjack, or we could just disable "block to cancel" with the blackjack. I feel like it was disabled at one point. It's kind of nice to have that level of control, like if you raise it up in a room full of glass jars or something, and then decide not to swing but don't have anywhere to "air swing," but not strictly necessary.