BoilerDunce

Once NPCs can mantle its a wrap

I was thinking it won't matter which. You can only read small pages of stuff that's not too far away to read, so the light gem value could be recycled with nothing seeming out of the ordinary. And since a long range frob for giant signs isn't in the game to my knowledge, we don't have to adapt for the possibility of trying to gather remote luminosity information and all the computational hiccups that has been said to involve. If its a big signpost or something, the player would naturally be happy enough just looking at it.

In my opinion, a voluntary option should never be thought of as a hard sell. It's voluntary. If it defaults to unchanged, who can complain? Honestly. I feel like this has to be repeated so much that it may as well be a topic of its own, but I'm probably not going to start it. Making things toggleable can remove the controversy from almost any change that isn't outright vision-changing like "include a potion that turns the player the size of a mouse."

Reading in the dark is virtually impossible. In this game, however- no problem. Your readable GUI is always illuminated. But suppose the 2D readout was only as bright as the local light level. If a mission had the oversight of requiring the player to read an unmovable readable in the dark without any provided light sources, it could be impossible to complete without a walkthrough if there's a critical hint in that readable. On the other hand, it would add a nice extra purpose to the mechanics of relighting candles and moving them as desired, and it also just feels fun to me to light my lantern before reading anything, for instance. There is a somewhat ambiguous line that has to be drawn though if it was decided to make this affect mission objectives that depend on acquiring information. That would be: How bright is considered bright enough that the player character counts as being able to read that information? It would have to be an estimated in-game equivalent to a few candelas per square meter.

Right, right, I know that its "up to the author", my only bone to pick is that the default is that it's not droppable. In other words, every time the author really has no opinion or forgot about it, I have these cursed undroppable keys, and it's in a high number of the missions as a result of being the default. My only contention is, it's better off droppable by default. And since wesp5 got on making it a reality, my business is done here!

Do we have window textures with snow built up on the windowframes yet?

Freedom of choice defines the feeling of a game like this. It's too videogamey to have a game rule tell me I simply can't drop a key unless its literally under some kind of curse. When your only remaining objective is to leave, you will have no more use for them. It also helps to stage your actions as though there never was a break-in, and they might have been committed by someone internal to the building. This makes them more likely to overlook things they can do to make future break-ins more difficult, in case you think you might have to go back to that place on another job some day, especially if its a place where intriguing things happen. Even if you anticipated the location becoming an important place later on, you would not want to steal all the keys as this would let them know to change all the locks and not just the ones they think are exclusively in compromised hands. If you brought some clay with you, you could create imprints of the more common keys and to copy them for an easier exploration later. It's just a way to hope you can reduce the chance they'll change them all and make your next visit just as difficult.

Wonderful, wonderful.

Why are the vanilla key entities provided with the editor not droppable? There are tons of missions where I can't leave the keys behind. For those of us who aspire to be gentlemanly professional pilferers, this is most annoying. I'm guessing its also baked into the missions by now and can't be retroactively changed by the stroke of the TDM team's pen. Or might I be lucky to be wrong?

I've been thinking about calculating contrast with the background and how its been described as too resource-intensive in other threads. If only we could somehow re-use information from the lighting and have the NPC compare the brightness of the world objects in the cone of vision to the brightness of the player. If the player is in the dark but has a bright area behind him from the view of an NPC, he should be treated as easily seen because of his dark silhouette.

And while we're at it, let us throw them at nobles to make them run around like a chicken.

the autocommands aren't being enacted for me

The vines cast by vine arrows behave badly. They keep trying to interfere with mantling. I made the training mission impossible to beat because the vines were blocking me from mantling into the window, forcing me to hold on to them right after any jump. This is terrible. While we're on the subject of the bow and arrow, why don't I mention that the bow's range is weak? Does it feel right for any RL archers that the final target in the training mission requires you to rain an arrow down on it?

While you're letting the mod breathe, I've got a thread somewhere about HRTF. I really think something's messing it up in stereo. Sound is just jumping all over the place extremely choppily while I look around. It's making more noise than two skeletons dancing on a tin roof.