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We can also make a mini map as a menu. The player could go through the main door to enter the mission. Down in the cellar where all the options are stored, in the living room there are the selections for missions, etc. You get the idea. If the ways are short and simple this wouldn't be bothersome to use and may look rather nice.

The way I proposed it is that the FM author can put the support for such a thing if he or she wants. If the support isn't there, and you go to enable the option, it will be greyed out, showing that there is no support for it in this mission.

I did enjoy the Shalebridge Cradle level, probalby the most tense Thief mission IMO - that and the Haunted Cathedral in T:1... I like games that have good replay value, and ones that make it very hard to take in the whole thing in one sitting have that... I'm still finding new things in Deus Ex.. As much as I like realism and immersion, it is still a computer game, and I don't really wan't to die or get arrested for burglary, that is why I play games like thief instead of actually going out and robbing someone's house in RL... I wan't it to be very realistic and challenging, but in spite of that, save games are a necessary evil, provided they are not abused, and do not provide an avenue for players to play half-arsedly. I wouldn't mind if there was only one Quicksave, it at least means you can't go back five saves ago because you used one to many water arrows.... I saved fairly infrequently during Thief1/2 mainly because I sometimesy got stuck in geometry, and in T:3 because it crashed occasionally, not because I died (although that did happen on occasion :lol: ). Other than that, I saved whenever I completed an objective, and that is about it... I have played it a couple of times without saving, and it is certainly doable, provided you have enough time on your hands. As much as you might not want it to be, saves are part of the game - immersive or not they have an effect on how you play the game... While save games might be an abstract concept to the universe within the game, they are part of the game itself, and the reason I am for limited, author defined saves has little to do with immersion or realism, it is because it is part of the challenge of the game, to see how far you can get without needing to reload. Just for the Record, I am Pro Savegames, provided there aren't to many of them, but I am Anti unlimited saves

Sounds good. Let me know when you need the graphics files...I have them all saved at 1280x1024 with the buttons on separate layers for easy access. The "New Mission" menu will be a different design than this one so don't worry about that yet. Just stick to the main menu and the options menus for now. I'll get you the Load/Save menu and Purchase Screen in a bit.

I played Thief 1, gold and 2 without saving (no saving, nothing. NOTHING), it was fun. really fun. especialy on expert. replaying after i died was so boring, i dont know about you guys but once ive played it once, i know the bloody thing back to front and inside out.... problem is, now that ive done that, playing Thief at all is SO simple, as long as your patient. Even thief 3 is too easy, well easy enough, even though the AI are so much smarter. Anyone love the cradle mission as much as i do?

That's fine. I was just saying how for me, it doesn't. I like FishFace's post better though because he said why he didn't like it. But anyway, I daresay there should be no need to "hunt" for save points in a properly designed mission. I was just saying how it wouldn't bother me. *sigh* another extreme... I'm just looking for something more challenging than unlimited saves, something set by the author for me to overcome. I suppose limited saves could work... if the author set the limit.

For me, certainly, savepoint hunting would suck. It makes the player think "I must find somewhere to save," not "I must find somewhere to catch my breath." While the player is thinking "out-of-game" he is not immersed. Unlimited saves you may use without thinking - perhaps what should be imposed is a number of reloads, after which you have to restart the mission? An idea worth tossing around; it completely wipes out the possibility of reloading for the wrong reasons, allows saves in appropriate places and therefore minimal tedium when dying, and yet does not interfere with immersion. Coupled with only being able to save with low light-gem values whilst still, this could be quite effective. I expect I'll never budge from believing save points to be a bad idea, encouraging linearity or being used too frequently, but if you want to offer a choice, I expect people will use it. I don't agree with forcing anything, though.

That sounds ok, but if my understanding of how it would be implemented is correct it might have issues. I guess the area of a wall/floor would have a rather strong loss characteristic to it. would you make the area sound characteristics dynamic? The funky part is where you have an open door the walls are 1 foot thick stone and a dude in the other room, without some sort of pathing system the sound would be nullified even though the person could quite clearly hear through an open door. But i agree with the ray tracing problem, it is similar to path finding. but how about sound nodes instead? Basically at key sound refraction points eg doorways open windows etc... you place a node, it will act like a proxy for the first emanation point of the sound by picking up sound intensity and re broadcasting it. it's a hell of alot simpler than ray tracing around obstacles and is much faster as well. the only drawback is that mission authors have to place the node in the toolset (unless you made it automatic some how). if you implemented the node system you could also alter the ai to go to the emanation point if it's what it is hearing from and go hunting from there.

Thanks for excluding me from your argument Pyrian. This thread is getting a little exhausing and it's probably going to get to the point where people will join in without reading everything that's been said, and all my posts would be for nothing. On that note, this thread needs to be summarised into main arguments for each side if we still need to debate this as a game option (or options, since some people are arguing for different solutions). That sounds like my games - I only died in Calendra's Legacy twice, on the hardest mission of the campaign. I was still placing my self-imposed save points for tension etc. Remember, my suggestion is just an extension of what I'm doing there, but the AUTHOR get to place the save points because they have the best idea of where they should go. FishFace is also in that list - he's for limited saves, but not for save points. I wonder if he's read my recent posts here though. Oh and Gildoran, for putting our point of view out there so well. Bhruic, are you opposed to save-limiting if it were an option you could turn on and off, and was off by default? That's the way I feel too, but I'm all for it being an option, even if it means it might be largly ignored initially. I'm hoping that it would slowly catch on through experimentation and word of mouth. I'm pretty sure it was Gaam Saav or something similar. Totally agree. I wish we could see more of this. Back then it made me squirm at first, but then I realised what it offered in return in terms of tension. People were playing password save games and battery backup save games on consoles for years, and no one complained. And RPG's are the kinds of games that you spend hours on doing non-linear things, such as travelling from place to place, fighting hoards of enemies. Running to the nearest town to save, and being forced to quit the dungeon and start again if they had to stop playing, was not that much of an inconvenience. That's why I think my idea is good. Anyone can turn save points on or off (off by default, majority rules) so just like the gamma setting, its up to the player to dicipline themselves. I just want the author to have the option to describe the challenge in the form of save points, same as they describe different levels of challenge in the easy setting or the hard setting. That wasn't a good example of your personal preferences, because I don't think that seperates you from the rest of us in any way That example could be avoided by good level design. Don't have jumping puzzles (jumping sucks in all video games, except maybe platformers), and put saving points in decent places, like right before a hard bit.

If not much easier... If you wan't to go on an exploratory tour of a mission, to see the sights etc, few things could be as convenient as god mode (add in noclip and you are on a roll!). God mode, BTW, was primarily implemented for level designers, to enable them to play through the map quickly as part of the level testing process. Very convenient, much more so than saving and reloading I would have thought... But again, a convenience that makes for pretty lame gameplay.

I don't think that's true of well designed missions. If you need to get somewhere, and it's hard, you will need to do it, and if you find the easiest way, good on you for being smart. You can load another save game later if you want to experiment. And if something is really hard and you're just curious, a good mission will reward you for exploring.

Considering when I played Quake 2 it took me quite long to get until the end, despite having unlimited saves. If I had only limited saves it wouldn't have made the game more interesting, insgtead it would become more frustrating. I simply wouldn't have bothered to play it until the end. So much for unlimited saves are not usefull. As a gamedesigner I would prefer for many people to see my game through instead of only a few elitists bunch. After all, why spending an effort to create content until then end if only 1% will ever see it? It depends on the type of games though, because there are certainly games which are more interesting without saving, but I don't think that this is the case for TDM . It is doing exactly that. There is no such thing as "play it the way it is meant to be". A game should provide fun for the player. How he comes to his fun is up to the player and not for the designer. The designer only provides the framework. This would be like saying: "Lord Of The Rings will not appear on DVD because the way it is meant to be seen is on a theater screen. The effects wont work on a TV and therefore nobody needs to see it there." Of course it is a much weaker experience on a TV than in the theater, but if I have the choice between seing it on a TV with lesser experience than in the theater, or seeing it not at all, I would still opt for seeing it on TV. It's MY choice. Same argument for swapping memory to disk. It is blody slow so nobody needs it. But considering that you need to run this application slow or not at all, it's better to run it slow. There is no such thing as All Or Nothing in the real world, and therefore it is simply sutpid to request to play a game "as it was meant to be" from everybody. I played D3 ONLY with god mode because it was so boring, but I still wanted to see what it offers in terms of capabillities. So you see, there is already a reason why I needed the godmode. Currently I play Guild Wars. You can not save on a mission because it is an online game and your state is only saved in between when you are in a city. Since I usually play alone (which is NOT the way it is meant to be) I have a hard time in some maps. Fortunately they provided bots which I can take with me, which are better than nothing. Now considering that GW is an online game and is meant to be played with a party, why did they bother to include bots at all? The way it is meant to be played is with other human players at your side, and AI is only for monsters. Apparently the devs were a bit more considerate then some here. Back to saving. I was trying to beat a map "Ruins of Samera" (or something like that) and I went in this map 20 times for sure. Believe me. It didn't make the game more interesting having to enter the same map again and again just because I can't save. After going in for the third time it simply becomes boring. You know the way around the map, you know what the AI will say at each point because the messages are script triggered and you even know where the monsters are at each point. So what does not being able to save achieve? Well I have to learn every detail of the map more than I want to. I have to learn all the locations of the monsters, because every time I get a bit farther, I will see a few new monsters. If I die I have to see the same map again and again. After entering the map several times it doesn't get more exciting to get through, quite on the contrary it becomes just boring because contrary to real live, everything is the same every time. That is what no saving achieves.

Well, I was thinking along the lines of something where the player can safely walk the streets throughout the game, as long as they don't get caught doing anything naughty and unlawful, although guards will be suspicous of your appearance, and if you stay in their view too long, they will come and check you out. But as soon as the player strays off the streets and onto the rooftops, into buildings etc, they are fair game... And I am planning to have levels where there are no, or very few, fake doors - every door in the game can be opened, but you have to find keys for a lot of them, coz the lockpicks won't work on all of them. And load zones would help by letting me finish one section of the city at a time, so people can see what I'm up to, and give me feedback etc before I start working on other parts of the city. The aim is that you will be able to trek for miles across the city, but it will be worthwhile because you can indulge in thiefy action just about anywhere, and you wont be forced to start a mission at one end of the city and then go back to the other when you have finished. I might find that I have to scale down the size of the map(s) in favour of detail though, so it might end up being smaller than I want, we will see.... Detail always wins out for me over size...

I think the largest map someone has been able to compile was about 5 square miles or so. In Doom Units that's like...uh...alot. You have to think about how feisable it is to do a map like that, though. While the engine could support one that's 4 times the size of a T2 city section, you'd have to have massive amounts of ram to even begin to something that size. Unless you want a mission no one can enjoy for another 5 years or so, I'd design it in smaller chunks.

I'm not for autosaves. And this is worse than unlimited saves how? For one thing, at least now they have to go to the effort of physically moving there, instead of relying on their best friend the quick-save key. More to the point, the main problem with saving whenever you want is oversaving in a new hard bit to make it easier. Once you've been there, done that, it doesnt''matter as much. When you are in a whole different part of the mission, nowhere near that save point, it won't matter that you could go back there, because it would be a dumb idea - too far away and bad to back track in the middle of some super hard mansion or heavily guarded floor. Non-linear is just not an issue. You've earned that save point so you can save every time you pass by if you want. The main thing is to not be able to save in certain situations. Yeah, what is with that? Can "save points" be put in the "discuss later" thread now or what?

That. The author can say when you deserve to save, and what parts you have to slog through without the luxury of saving. Saving becomes a reward for accomplishing something really hard to do. We all know there are missions that are "totally non-linear", but this has nothing to do with having or not having save points. Every mission has places that must be broken into, objectives that must be acheived, and precious items that must be obtained some how. Each time you acheive such a point, you definietly deserve to save. An example of other points along the way could include either side of a particularly well-guarded hallway. But it doesn't end there by any means. There are plenty of other creative ways to place save points in a rewarding manner.

I like the idea of having an option for unlimited, and player chosen no. of saves (didn't SOF have this?). I guess in the briefing or readme, the FM author could display his recommendation for the number of saves the player might wanna use on the mission. But no way should a limit be imposed by default, and be unchangable.

You guys are talking about this like it's never been done before!! Like I said, many many console games, dramatically non-linear (eg. huge 5 CD RPG epics), have been doing this for years. Eg. City Bank and Trust? Put one in the vault. Put one after every hard-to-get-past barrier. Every thief mission has them. There are plenty of appropriate places for save points, but I'm not going to elaborate. But in all honesty, if you haven't played such games, it's like me trying to explain red to a colour blind person. There is no way I can convince you it works. But I know it does because I've been playing those kinds of games for years.

In that case, don't do any extra coding and introduce the concept of a "par for saves" where the FM author says "this should take about 5 saves", and you can ignore any saves you made because you had to check the oven (and don't know how to pause the game by pressing ESC). But this is boring and doesn't provide much incentative. This situation is deliberate, but you're thinking about it the wrong way. They require the player to start playing more carefully. The issue is not that you have to run back to the closet. You can if you want, but it's probably a bad idea. The main point of this restriction is to encourage you to play through till you get near enough to another save point, and to do this, you have to be very careful and things will get very tense. And yes you have to make the sacrifice if you get called away from the game to start from the previous save point. It's a sacrifice you make for a more engaging game. The same as other games that use save points. And remember people, this would be a player optional feature. If its disabled, save locations are ignored and you can save when you want. If this feature was implemented, I would leave it on and get very excited trying to play the game the way the FM author intended. If he or she decrees this particular part is too important to let you get away with saving right in the middle of it and it's possible to get past without saving, then I want to do it. You could even allow it to be toggled during the game, in case circumstances change in your life and you decide its not worth playing with save points enabled at the moment. But the stats screen would always show "save points disabled" for this mission, for any save games made after you toggled the feature off, even if you toggled it back on again. If you wanted to redeem yourself, you could re-load from a save game that was created before you turned the option off.

I'm on the last level of the last game all the way on hard mode and no saves cause I can't. "Mission Failed...." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo FOR THE TAFFIN LOVE OF GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo o oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o oooooooo! I think you get the point.

Finger I can not agree more with you. If this argument continues, we can also provide additional challenges, like "This mission must be played while diving in the pool" or "You are a successfull masterthief, so your environment must reflect that. Play this map from a mansion that costs at least 400.000 USD." Poor bugger you only have a rented flat? Objective failed.

Savepoints are usually appropriate in linear games. In Harry Potter they also use save points because this game is designed for kids, so the automatic savepoints are usually when you enter one of the mission maps. All the other savepoints are distributed over the map to avoid having to run through the entire map just to get at a certain savepoint. The conclusion is: Savepoints can be used for linear games because the designer knows exactly where it is needed. TDM is non-linear by definition and therfore it is not really usefull. If a designer creates a linear map, which would be possible, this should be a special case, but shouldn't be directly supported. Savepoints in non-linear games are pretty useless and have the big disadvantage over free saves, because the player would have to run to the point where the savepoint is located.

Well I agree, this could never be about forcing people to do anything. In my opinon the aim of this is for the FM author to set acheivable goals for the player, rather than the player trying to do this for themselves when they have never seen the mission before and have no idea about how many saves will be needed.

The player can always cheat the system. If he deletes the files he can no longer save though, or he would have to restart the mission and play it agina and then he would still have 5 savegames again. Savepoints also can be worked around by taking a snapshot from the memory. If the player wants to go to extremes he can always find a way aroun dit, and that's another reason why it is crap to think about it for so long. Either he wants it or he doesn't. Since this will be optional he doesn't need to go to any extremes.

I like a challenge. I haven't killed anyone since my first playthrough of T2 when I got mad at the Mechanists in Trail of Blood and decided to switch from hard to expert simply so I could kill every single one of them. I've played thru T2X without KO'ing anyone so far. There is no coded in limitation that stops me from doing these things. I make up the rules, I follow the rules, it's a challenge, it's fun. How is that any different from telling yourself "I'm only going to save twice on this entire mission," and then following that rule? We can make killing and even KO'ing have realistic consequences in order to make the game more immersive and challenging. But we can't really have realistic consequences for saving, because saving is not realistic. Saving and loading are an abstract system that exists outside of the rest of the game that's trying to simulate life. Saves are not just for when you screw up either. A lot of the time in T2, AI get stuck on a wall or turning in circles, and the only way I've found to fix it and make the AI go back to their intended patrol paths is to save and load right then. It would be very frustrating if I couldn't do that.