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Professor Paul1290

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Everything posted by Professor Paul1290

  1. I just did a run of this mission and it's definitely a huge improvement over the original. Heck, I think it's one of my favorite missions now. Just a couple bugs/odd occurances though:
  2. On a related note, it looks like GOG has just recently added a way to submit indie titles: http://www.gog.com/indie A lot of it doesn't apply to The Dark Mod (since it's free) but it's interesting.
  3. Having played Thief doesn't really guarentee that the player will remember to use lean forward right away. I've seen more than a couple Thief players who didn't realize they could lean forward right away, as odd as that might sound. I'm guessing it might be because good portion may not have touched Thief in years so less commonly used controls would have fallen out of memory. There has been at least one Thief player who didn't use it at first and who at some point ended up believing that requiring players to jump on top of chests to get items out of them was some kind of weird design decision meant to slow them down and get them caught, but that of course is not the case. To be sure, as Springheel mentioned, it's not 100% required in Thief or TDM. However, in TDM not using it can lead to some frustrating usability issues for some people, particularly with the way containers like chests and boxes work. Unlike Thief none of TDM's default chests or containers send their contents straight to inventory, you always have to frob the loot and/or items themselves every time. On top of that it's very common in TDM for mission authors to mix useful items with junk in such a manner that is intended to cause noise via physics if you don't manipulate and frob stuff carefully.
  4. I think there are a couple important actions in TDM that new players miss to often and have a hard time managing without. One is the "lean forward" F key. I think this might be too easy to miss given how important it is. It's easy to miss because this action isn't exactly common among first person games, but in TDM it's used for reaching into chests/boxes, reaching over tables, retrieving rope arrows, spacing for pickpocketing, and all sorts of other important things. I almost feel it needs a specific example training mission because it's unusual enough to miss but is pretty much essential for smooth play. Maybe just pick one of the rooms and add a few chests and a shelf with objects that are reachable with the F key and put some text there. Another thing is handling of corpses and unconscious NPCs. Some players don't realize that you can flip bodies by quickly picking them up and dropping them, and that's important for getting things like keys off of them. The first guard you take out with a blackjack in the training mission sort of handles that because he has a key on him, but that depends on whether he lands face up and doesn't just get pickpocketed while standing. Maybe one of the doors should have an already dead/knocked out guard next to it who has the key and is lying face up so the player has to flip them over to get the key and put some text there, that would probably have a better chance of getting this across. Is there anything else important that you see new players frequently missing?
  5. If I remember correctly it used to be louder. It ends up being one of the reasons I avoid older gameplay footage when introducing people to The Dark Mod. If I show older gameplay video, footstep tapping is literally one of the first things that get pointed out as jarring. I notice the current sounds are just much better recieved generally. Interpret that how you will of course.
  6. Yeah, that's the plan for now. I guess in the meantime if anyone has anything to suggest between now and release feel free to do so.
  7. Hahahaha I love that. XD I did notice that the guards would "fill in" for each other, but since I was trying to minimize knock-outs on my first run I didn't think to try to exploit the behavior that way.
  8. I just finished the Brigmore Witches DLC for Dishonored, which has the second half of Daud's campaign. Something interesting I noticed is that it seems to continue with the crazy patrol patterns from The Knife of Dunwall DLC. It makes me wish they'd go back and re-do the patrols and guard placement in the main campaign in that style.

  9. If you can only pick one (I would recommend just getting both because they're cheap enough now) I'd go for Thief Gold. You already have The Metal Age and in my opinion that's the best game in the series (of course obviously some would disagree on that).
  10. New version up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFeaBDNmR4 I swapped out the font and I swapped out the St. Lucia statue scene and replaced it with a clip of dialogue from A Score to Settle.
  11. No idea if GOG will take it, but I just posted about it on the GOG forums and so far the response has been very positive so there's "demand" there at least.
  12. I suggest considering trying to get TDM 2.0 on multiple services and not just Steam. I know Desura has several free games available on their site, so getting it on there might alert a lot of there users to TDM's existence. (how many I don't know) GamersGate also has a few free games, but not very many. They did test a portion of their service specifically for free games a while back and expressed interest of bringing it back and/or expanding on it, but that's a bit of an unknown. In any case, I notice a lot of indie titles seem to have an easier time getting on Desura or GamersGate than they do trying to get on Steam. GOG.com also has a few free games, though not as many so that'll probably be a more of a longshot. However, seeing as The Dark Mod is heavily inspired by Thief there's a slight chance that they might feel it fits might, they have Tyrian 2000 there after all.
  13. I'm not going to say that there are no problems with digital distribution and DRM, there definitely are, and I dislike them just as much as anyone else and again I try to avoid them where I can. However, there also exists the notion that method of distribution by physical media is/was better. That particular notion is one that, as someone who has a sizeable collection of old games, I disagree with for a number of reasons. One is the question of reliability. A lot of people/groups will give you varying figures for how long a CD/DVD lasts under ideal storage conditions, but from my experience it's a vague and depressing "0.5 to 15" years. Much of this is not due to poor care, but often due to factors simply beyond the consumers control such as those that occur at manufacturing. You can make an argument that there might be an element of the classic "planned obsolescence" at work there. Sure, hardcore gamers and hobbyists like us know to make back-ups and maintain them well, but the average consumer arguably does not have any better long-term playability with physical media than they do with digital distribution. Another was who got to decide who got to get their games out to the public or not. Physical media offered privacy to the user, but it also gave companies a level of control that wasn't as obvious but isn't any less significant. With physical media, publishers and manufacturers had greater control over what got to be easily available. Sure there was shareware and other such models back then, but back then it wasn't capable of reaching people to the extent that it can today and was mostly limited to hardcore geek types. As nasty as some big game companies are now, back then they were just as nasty AND everyone had to go through them if they wanted to get any kind of visibility at all. There are reasons why indie and niche games have become a big thing on Steam and even the upcoming PS4 despite the control these companies want to exert. Because normal gamers have gotten used to the idea of digital distribution, those games would become widely available to some extent regardless of Sony or Valve's actions, so in a sense they HAVE to accommodate such games to some extent otherwise they would happen and evolve without them anyway. Digital distribution age may have granted big companies more control over the games that they themselves produce, but I would also argue that it also opened the door for other portions of the industry that they do not have as much control over. Even now as big AAA companies exert more control over the games they make, they arguably don't have quite as much control over how the gaming scene as a whole works as they did back in the day partly because of the ease of digital distribution. I believe the recent surge in more focused, specialized, and niche games and the return of some previously unpopular genres, largely through various forms of digital distribution, is indicative of this. Another reason involves incentives to keeps games available. Games are not like paintings or sculptures or buildings, games are more like machines. People need to care about them or they simply don't last, even if you write them into an indestructible medium and stash them into a vault somewhere. Until we have a reliable developer of perfect emulators for everything that work an all the latest systems, it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Digital copies of games don't take shelf space, there's no visible excuse to take them off the "shelf", and above all people can always see them there. That sounds rather trivial, but when it comes to keeping things working long-term that can be just as powerful, if not more powerful, than any physical medium. When something is kept widely and easily available, there is an incentive to maintain it, and that's an important thing. I would not be surprised if eventually we have a greater percentage of all the games produced in 2008 still widely and easily available by 2016 than the percentage of games produced in 1994 still widely available by 2002 (yeah those are totally random dates, but you get the idea). I wouldn't be surprised if that was already the case to some extent, there are a few early 2000 era games I'm still trying to get copies of. Now that is NOT to say that I don't agree with what what you've said, and I'm not arguing against a lot of those points because I do agree with them. I agree that Steam, Origin, or whatever's DRM and policies are something I would rather not have, and I agree that it would be preferable if we didn't have to deal with privacy issues related to that. There are many ways I would wish the situation to be much better than it is now. In fact, I avoid Steam or Origin where practical, preferring less intrusive stores and services for games I want to keep (my Steam library may be big but my overall game library is even larger and much of it is NOT on Steam). I would even go so far to say I am glad some people have objections to Origin, Steam, and other such services. I know a lot of people like that and I think that's very important. Heck, I am a also GOG.com fan as well, and will say that a large sub-group of that community has no shortage of negative things to say about Steam, many which are pretty rational. However, I guess if I am arguing something, I argue against the notion that the previous era of physical disks only was better, as I very much disagree with that. I argue that it was just as shitty back then as it is now, it was just shitty in different and less up-front obvious ways. I suppose on the subject of disruptive technologies such as 3D printing, of course as new technologies like 3D printing become widespread the law will have to change to accommodate such things, and eventually we'll have to decide how to best handle that. This discussion is one that happened when VCRs came about, when we got writable CDs, or even home computers became widespread for that matter. Ultimately there is no "right" or "wrong" to what happens, at least not one that isn't merely what people make up and agree on. What really matters is whether we can agree on where our rights should be.
  14. Eh, I'd chalk it up to there not being a reliable way to ensure a customer is really "returning" a piece of software for a long time. The thing with software is that in a lot of cases by necessity the machine that runs it is also capable of copying it. I mean, you can get into details about specific laws and the nasty details of the back and forth action on those, but when it comes down to it the above issue is why that conflict exists in the first place. That's part of why there are consoles and other kinds of similar hardware. With a console the device that runs the software doesn't need to be able copy it. Because of that they make returns viable. Consoles don't see as much obvious DRM because consoles themselves are the most widespread and accepted form of DRM, they just act through hardware rather than through software. That being said, there is currently at least some experimentation in systems that allow returnable software to be more viable (see Green Man Gaming's "Capsule"). It's not anywhere close to being widespread yet and it still has a LOT of issues, but it is something that's starting to emerge and develop.
  15. It depends on what mood I'm in really. The first time through I always play on the mission's middle difficulty setting (whatever that is called in that case) and with everything else (options menu stuff) set to default. Personally, I believe that "middle" or "default" settings (both mission and TDM difficulty) should be what you design the mission around first. Missions can and should be harder or easier than each other at that setting (that's good and adds flavor), but I think that authors should test and build towards that setting so that there's always wiggle room both higher and lower from the difficulty the mission was designed at. On that note think that the in-mission difficulty ("easy, medium, hard" or "normal, hard, expert" or whatever the author feels like) are fine as is. They can represent three slightly different visions for how the author sees the mission can be played. As for TDM "options menu" difficulty settings that are all tied to very specific values and are the same all the time (combat difficulty, guard vision, and so on), I think "test at default" also applies, again to leave room higher and lower. However, I also believe that you should NOT build missions to accommodate for the highest settings when it comes to these kinds of options. That probably sounds like a bad practice but the reason I believe that is because since these are the same across all missions and are tied to known values, they are the best place to leave room for "people who are just more badass than you". Basically, I think that the "all maxed out" settings should be allowed to become seemingly impossible or impractical for some more difficult missions, as that leaves room for certain players pull off crazy things.
  16. I guess on that note, are there any suggestions for a more TDM-like font? I tried looking for one but admittedly I'm not very good when it comes to this sort of thing. Right now the text is in "Book Antiqua", which is Microsoft's imitation of "Palatino".
  17. I thought it worked pretty well as the intro is intended to be rather silly, so if anything maybe it should be more silly. Maybe it should end with "He's one of Bridgeport's greatest thieves, and he'll slip in like a ghost's shadow and leave with all that is valuable before you even know he's there... *alarm* ...well, most of the time..." .
  18. New version with slightly increased brightness, shortened sword-fighting scene, added chase scene, and an improved intro with 100% more deep-voiced "In a world..." thanks to TylerVocal.
  19. Is it just "a bit" dark that you think it will hamper a significant number of people's ability to watch it or is it just "a bit" dark in that it just feels a bit to dark in a slightly annoying way? I used the same brightness as my earlier trailer and my gameplay videos and I'm a bit hesitant to change it as it took a bit of trial and error to peg it there. I was trying to find a "sweet spot" where it was dark enough made sense for the guards to have trouble seeing me (mostly for people who have never played it) while at the same time just bright enough to see what was going on. On the other hand, what's appropriate for gameplay videos might not be for trailers of course. If more people could weigh in on this so I know if I'm too bright or too dark that would be nice. It's not too necessary to be honest and wouldn't be hard to replace. I just included it because sort of want to include at least one "semi-unique" scene just to show how "hand-crafted" the missions were. The statue thing in St. Lucia seemed like a good choice because it's short, it has a bit of a "kick" to it, it doesn't involve multi-step puzzle, and it's something you know you need to do in that mission early on. If you feel it's too much of a spoiler it wouldn't be much of a problem to swap it out though. I guess on that note, for the beginning I could put some titles in. I could probably put in "Broken Glass Studios" and then follow with some other text and/or credits. Any suggestions? Oh wow, could you upload it without the background music? That might actually be something nice to squeeze into the intro because it's so over the top!
  20. Since 2.0 is getting pretty close, I went back and revised my earlier trailer. A lot of it is recycled from my old one, but I swapped out some scenes that I didn't like from before or didn't reflect the current version anymore and added a scene where a guard gets knocked out by a falling object. I also added a short funny clip of The Knighton Manor at the beginning as an intro. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58om5DXeqGo&hd=1 I left it unlisted for now in case there are any edits that would still need to be made. EDIT: New version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFeaBDNmR4
  21. I'm rather eager to try out the new AI stuff and I should have time over the next couple weeks, so I can pitch in if you need another. Windows 7 64bit Professional
  22. It's up to you really. Standalone is close but not really close and you can get Doom 3 pretty cheap now. I guess the other option is if you have the patience and can and put up with some possibly broken stuff for a while, you could ask to participate in testing for the standalone 2.0 version. Having someone completely new might be helpful.
  23. This is a bit off-topic and probably a broken record from me at this point, but it's not like Steam is the only digital game store out there. I mean off the top of my head there's GOG.com, GamersGate, and Desura in addition to Steam. GOG.com is DRM Free (they don't let games with DRM on at all) and aren't limited to just "old games" anymore, they've started expanding their catalogue to new games as well and have kept their "no DRM allowed" policy. Desura is DRM "agnostic" in that it has games with DRM (depending on pubisher) but doesn't have DRM itself, so games only have DRM if it comes from the outside (which is noted on their store pages). GamersGate technically has light DRM that checks on install, but that is mostly there just so they have "something" and they've even straight up told their customers how to subvert their "DRM" it if they needed to, and it's "agnostic" otherwise (see Desura). Not to mention most of the indie games I've bought have copies direct from the developer's site which are naturally DRM free (except for the occasional key). I haven't tried it yet, but there's also Green Man Gaming, and from what I can gather they have their own DRM, but they're notable for actually allowing returns/trade-ins on games that only use their DRM and not a third-party. (or something like that, maybe someone else here uses them and can clarify) Yea, it's a bit off topic, but some people seem to be under the impression or are implying that Steam is the only digital game store out there when that isn't really the case.
  24. I'm pretty sure saying "most" is a hyperbole here as despite having 190 games on Steam the only one I have that requires an account on another service is Dark Souls with GFWL (which, due to it's oddball multiplayer-in-singleplayer component, effectively requires another account across all platforms anyway). That being said I do try to avoid this where possible. Ultimately it's up to that game's publisher how that ends up going, and often times for the "store" it can be a case of either accepting that or not having it available at all. I know there are several titles GOG.com (which I again recommend to anyone who really wants to avoid problems like this) effectively cannot carry at all right now because their policy does not allow for outside DRM.
  25. It appears Yves Grolet has already posted on the Open Outcast forum to clarify that they have no problem with Open Outcast as long as they don't try to make a profit off of it, so it seems there's nothing to worry about there. I should re-install Outcast...
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