I.C.H.I.

Oh, how I wish sound processing in games worked by real world physics laws, so we wouldn't need all this hack job for the audio to at least work. Unfortunately, sound in games historically was terrible or plain broken. I've yet to see at least a single game that has perfect sound, not just design-wise(we have some good examples for that already), but also comparable to how it is in real life. Internet is full of articles about ray-traced sound, but I so much hate that people write them and rarely put their theory into something that we can actually use. Who needs all this dry writing if it's doomed to stay on paper? This makes you think that majority of people just don't care about sound at all or they're probably deaf...

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy had this feature, it was pretty unusual. https://psiops.fandom.com/wiki/Cooperative_Mode

The problem with dlls is that they destroy platform agnostic nature of the scripts, so you either compile your code for every platform in existence and take a responsibility for supporting it in the future, if you care about it that much, or you lock it to a specific user group until it gets somehow broken by an update of the engine. TBH I'm not a fan of this. Also, I don't want to deal with security risks here, not matter if you create some protection against them, I just don't believe in its rigidness at all.

I thought it was by design? BTW the only FM that gave me real troubles with hiding bodies was Vengeance for a Thief 3: The Art of Revenge, it just felt plain broken because of its poorly set lighting.

And the 3rd back leg doesn't bother you at all? I so much hate AI generated images...

Never found it useful, unfortunately. I steal a key from an NPC, he unlocks/locks doors without it anyway. A bug or a feature? Couldn't tell. But even if I lock a door with that key, NPCs still can unlock it. Maybe it works properly in some specific mission? I tried doing this only if a few missions and then gave up on this idea entirely.

Wait, this mission is not in the database? Why?

I always loved indoor lighting in Metro: Last Light, absolutely nothing better comes to my mind of all I games I've ever played. Can we reverse-engineer it somehow?

AgX looks so much nicer and softer to my eyes than the original. The original lighting always gives me eyestrain, especially with bloom enabled. But I'm comparing only these screenshots, this needs even more comparisons, because judging by the carpet some textures lose contrast unfortunately.

Am I the only person who never uses them? In general I avoid being seen because I hate combat in TDM, it's so fundamentally broken that I'd rather never use it at all if it's really possible.

The only notable thing about Mooncrash DLC for me is the ugliest characters in the entire history of gamedesign, they look so bad that it's absolutely remarkable that it was totally fine for the devs to put them in the game.

Something I very much dislike about fresnel in games is that it makes things glow like a velvet cloth while nothing IRL glows like that except the velvet itself. Brick walls should not glow like velvet, marble statues should not glow like velvet, wood should not glow like velvet. Fresnel should make things reflect light for each case differently but instead it makes them emit it into your eyes in a single universal way which makes the image very unrealistic.

When this thing receives FM downloader I will stop using the native FM selector forever.

Bonking everybody is the juice of TDM and often it's more complicated than being a ghost. I especially love clearing out taverns full of people if it's really possible. Thankfully, most of the time it is and in some cases it requires thinking outside the box.

Something that always bothered me about Thief and TDM is how you sometimes go through a sewer or worse, right through a toilet, but you never have appropriate consequences, such as the stench that should reek from you afterwards. So, I think it would be great if TDM had such a mechanic and this should make you think twice before infiltrating compounds through a way that stinks so bad. How can this be done? On the engine level attach to the player a trigger sphere with 2 properties: stench radius and stench strength, by default they should be 0 and always present. The stench radius is needed for enemies' reaction while the stench strength will control for how long the stench is going to persist, basically it controls the speed of shrinking of the stench radius. To have the stench transfer effect, add new property to a trigger, only one is needed - the stench strength which should also function as the gradual stench transfer speed, if the value is very big then the stench transfer speed will be big too. Gradual effect gives some window for error in situations when you touch the stinking trigger for a split second by accident. Afterwards, if the received value is too big then the player may wait for hours for it to wear off passively, unless he finds somewhere a clean water which will gradually reduce the size of his stench sphere to 0. The water itself doesn't need any new parameters, just check if there are no stench triggers touching the player and he is in swimming state instead of just slightly immersed in the water volume. It is better to add stench strength to a trigger instead of only water volumes, because not only water can stink, a level designer may place this trigger anywhere he want, for example in an animal stall or on a random pile of crap in the corner or in the bushes where you might hide from a guard. The stench effect needs some new icon for HUD, a double purpose one that will show environmental stench and player's own stench at the same time. Environmental stench should have hiding effect for the player's stench if it's bigger. Also, would be fun to give the stench trigger sphere to some enemies, like the undead, or a guard that didn't use a bath for months and their own stench radius should affect yours the closer you stay to them, this should be even faster if you pick them up killed/KO'ed, like a contamination effect. Human enemies should react to the stench in a similar way they react to the player's visibility except the game should check the proximity to the stink sphere and the sphere shouldn't penetrate walls, but L-shaped corridors shouldn't be an obstacle either. Enemies also need some new reaction barks and probably a bit of new animations, such as if the stench is too strong, then they should cover their noses. I think, this will be a great addition to the realism and the proposed method will make all older FMs unnaffected by this mechanic because they don't have any of such properties in the level data and were never designed around them.