Springheel
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Posts posted by Springheel
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3 hours ago, chakkman said:
I'd really be interested in how many stealth games actually have it. I never noticed it in Dishonored, Splinter Cell, or the Chronicles of Riddick games. The only games where I really ever observed it are the Thief games.
Dishonored has both lethal and non-lethal sneak attacks that only work if the enemy is not alerted. Assassin's Creed has stealth damage, Thief has it, tactical combat games like X-Com have it, most RPGs with stealth classes have it.
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1 hour ago, wesp5 said:
Which might be consistent for us knowing about all the alert-state-changes, but to an average player? The least we could do is write something about this into the loading tips, for example into the line about the blackjack-ko-immunity.
Nothing wrong with including it in the tips if it isn't already. But I would think the average player is likely to be familiar with the concept of "stealth damage" which is common in most games that have a stealth mechanic. You'd probably have a harder time coming up with a stealth game that doesn't include that concept.
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7 hours ago, wesp5 said:
It's not about realism, nobody expects that to be true all the time in a game, but consistency inside the game world. And this for example is not the case with headshots, when they are different from mission to mission or alert state to alert state. Like the player can't easily judge what the result could be and this is the problem!
The rules are quite consistent in the core mechanics. If mappers choose to change them, that could cause some confusion, but there's not much we can do about that.
(For the record, the guards aren't "dodging" the headshot entirely...they're still being hit by the arrow, but the wound is non-lethal)
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But this is not as it plays out in TDM. They already have better hearing and vision when alerted I assume, but a blackjack hit on the back of the head should do the same damage, as should do an arrow right into the face! They couldn't dodge either of them, or if they could, the game should reflect that and not do some immunity or number magic
I'm not sure what claim you're making--that in real life, someone couldn't dodge at the last second to turn a potentially lethal hit into a nonlethal one, or that TDM AI should have some animation to indicate that this is happening.
The first one is rather obviously incorrect, so I assume it's the second one. In which case...ok? It would be great if every tiny detail of reality were included, but we're talking about a game where AI spin around 360 without lifting their feet off the ground and where arrows disappear after hitting someone.-
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15 minutes ago, chakkman said:
With their backs turned? (Talking about blackjacking an alerted guard.)
Also, which other stealth games have this kind of alert behavior implemented? I can't think of a single one.
Yes, you are far more likely to hear and react to someone behind you if you are in a heightened state of alert.
Thief itself had that mechanic, but off the top of my head I can think of 7 Days to Die, and Valheim, for sure, and they're not even primarily stealth games. Pretty sure Far Cry has stealth damage as well.
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Damage to AI is increased if the AI is not alerted, and this includes headshots.
I think that's a pretty common feature of games involving stealth. The justification is that an alerted AI will react quicker, perhaps dodging at the last minute to turn an otherwise lethal hit into a glancing blow.
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Isn't that what helmets are for?
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4 hours ago, Nort said:
Like, I'm going over the citywatch model error right now, and sometimes armor is spelled "armour", and sometimes citywatch is spelled "cityguard". This inconsistency is just asking for more filepath mistakes. The funniest thing, is that the missing material actually exists as a jpg, but not as a material. It's pretty chaotic.
Yes, that tends to happen in a project that has spanned nearly two decades, with multiple amateur developers working casually in their spare time for free.
Quote.and I am fixing these issues on my end now, but I'm hesitant about uploading them to the forum, because I feel like that would actually be discouraging the modeller from shouldering that responsibility
Feel free to upload them. You won't be discouraging me from anything.
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18 hours ago, Nort said:
...so the readables I create, I aim to make them disjointed nonsense with no helpful bearing on the player objectives. Maybe in the kitchen there will be a grocery list, or cook book with numerous real recipés. Maybe some guy wrote a poem about a memory of a past that you're not clued into at all. The sooner the player stops looking for any meaning or clues in my readables, the better. ...but my point is that they will still take time to create. I have lots of notes over readables as well, but none of them is about any objective.
If the readables have no meaning or purpose and you want the player to stop reading them, then why bother making them readables at all?
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Thought I'd share what I've been working on lately. While my mapping days are behind me, TDM still is still an inspiration for many of the fantasy illustrations I do in my free time. Here's a few that should look somewhat familiar:
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19 minutes ago, Melchior said:
DIE!!! , Ect...(need more of these - as they are non-existent for most voice sets)
Every voice set has these.
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Some of our characters have 5-7k high poly versions, as I recall, though they use LOD. We have some prop models that are 10K plus, although they also have shadow meshes and LOD. Today I'm sure we could go higher, although mixing high and low poly assets is always bad for cohesion.
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It's trivially easy to shoot charging guards in the face, so if you let arrows kill alerted AI, the player never has to worry about them. They can even take the arrow back and do the same thing on the next one. Originally I wanted to have AI shield their face with their arm when the player aimed in their direction, but that was too challenging at the time.
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3 hours ago, Anderson said:
Another reason why TDM isn't on Steam is because of bad faith imposters that sell free games like here.
The reasons why TDM isn't on Steam have been listed multiple times. That wasn't on any of the lists.
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21 hours ago, stgatilov said:
But without material frob stages, the objects will be highlighted differently.
Some objects are not highlighted at all.I was assuming the screenshots--which combine highlighting plus dark outline--meant that it was a viable alternative. If it's not, that's going to confuse people.
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19 minutes ago, stgatilov said:
The only thing that I have to say: for me, the dark outline is not doing its thing in typical conditions. When everything is dark (fully dark room), the dark outline is completely invisible, which is not much different from having no outline at all. And it means that if you see a fully-translucent object (like flask) in dark room, you won't notice anything when you frob-highlight it. It does not solve the problem that we wanted to solve with outline.
The only problem (from a player perspective) with the original frob was that you couldn't see it in well-lit situations. The highlight+dark outline combo solves that problem. In dark settings, the highlight is easy to see. In light settings, the dark outline is easy to see. There should no longer be any cases where players can't tell whether something is frobbable or not. Whether players like it, aesthetically speaking, is up for debate (I think it looks pretty good from screenshots).
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This really shows the age of the TDM engine
TDM is now older than Thief: The Dark Project was when TDM was first released.
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The tracker may not have been closed, but I'm pretty sure grayman did implement a lowering of AI acuity during conversations (or rather, they ignore alerts of level 1 or 2).
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23 minutes ago, SeriousToni said:
I think in Thief they gave them a low level of visual and audio accuracy until the conversation finished.
Does anyone know if this is possible in TDM too? I know that you can set those levels for each NPC, however they're permanently, so even after the convo they'd be deaf and blind. Is this changeable somehow after the convo finishes /with a times trigger / script?
I'm pretty sure we already do this.
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13 hours ago, Kurshok said:. So instead of being a sly little rat and trying to go "He's triggering me, ban'em, BAN'EM!" like some potbelly landwhale UBERTriggered Trigglypuff, maybe instead you could act your age and GROW THE HELL UP?
makes me dislike you as being a childish, weaselly suckupNow THIS, on the other hand, does blatantly break the forum rules.
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5 minutes ago, wesp5 said:
I think Dragofer already improved this a lot in his own missions by first making only the bottom of chests frobable to lockpick them and then turning the bottom to be unfrobable and turning the lid frobable to be opened. Thus items inside are not competing with the bottom anymore. This should go into the core game!
I'm pretty sure I went through the chest prefabs and changed them so only the lids are frobbable some years ago. The lid is the thing that is moving, after all...there's no reason for the entire chest to highlight and it's much easier to grab things when it is not competing for the frob trace.
Having everything be picked up immediately on opening a chest wouldn't work for us, even if it was desirable, since chests often have multiple movable junk objects in them, and the player can only pick up one at a time. -
1 hour ago, greebo said:
If I recall correctly, the code is not just relying on a single trace, but performs a small bounds expansion at the point of impact to find things that have been closely missed by the trace, which could be the reason behind things lighting up near or behind the trace end point. I might be remembering wrongly though since I haven't looked at that code for a very long time.
That was certainly the case at one point, in order to allow frobbing of things on top of ledges or objects that would otherwise be difficult to target.
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11 hours ago, Abusimplea said:
The ideal frob highlight would brighten objects in dark environments and darken them in bright environments. It would most certainly not show objects hidden by geometry.
Having the outline appear behind objects is one of the things being tested, so if people don't like it, they should chime in.
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Someone's first post that has a link to an external site, and references nothing that is actually connected to this forum? I'm guessing spam.
Headshots (and insta-kills by extension)
in The Dark Mod
Posted
Just to correct a few things:
Only guards with helmets become completely immune to blackjacking after being alerted (which happens if you hit them incorrectly with the blackjack, but not if you miss).
There has been a plan to improve the blackjacking mechanic for half a decade. The team proposed replacing the current physics-based system with a simple distance and orientation check to remove the problem of getting too close or hitting things above the player's head. It's been on the bugtracker since 2016: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4289 and as far as I know has not been shot down by anyone. In fact, I had a vague recollection that someone was actually working it recently, though I could be wrong about that.