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Ish, about the ambient music - will there be an option to turn it off, and if so, would it be possible to adjust (to be quieter) player footstep sounds and so on accordingly? I usually prefer to turn off ambient music in most games wherever possible, I find it gets annoying after a while, even if the music is quite good. I find it more atmospheric with just realistic ambient noises as appropriate to the map anyway, rather than actual music. It would also be nice, if for example, there is a thunderstorm going on outside, that the noise of the storm covers quiet sounds... I have a mission in mind where the player will have to predict when the noise of a thunderclap will arrive after seeing a flash of lightning in order to sneak past guards on a noisy floor, and it would be nice if ambient noises drown out player and AI sounds in a fairly realistic way.

Yes that map is huge, but a huge map with nothing in it other than some simple boxes only proves that the engine is capable of drawing shapes that large, and not that it handles such large spaces efficiently when you start putting in the rest of the game, like AI pathfinding. Also don't forget the issue of needing to section off large areas of high detail with visportals so that the engine isn't rendering things unessecarily. I bet the non-acellerated games from the days of the 486 could also do a map just like that one - it's pretty low detail. At the end of the day, any city map will be more efficient if its "corridored" as much as possible, because when you get down to it, Doom 3 is a BSP engine, and they work better that way. So a huge city shouldn't allow you to get onto a roof that can see over a huge portion of the city - maybe only a small house surrounded by taller buildings that don't let you see beyond them. And that big tower mission you have planned Maximus, should be mostly contained inside the tower so that you can rarely see into it from the outside except for some small windows, and they shouldn't really look in onto anything too complex.

Oh, they could be animated. Here's the menu slightly animated in AfterEffects. I really don't think we need to argue about this right now. As Oddity said, we are years from even needing a complete main menu anyway. And Napalm should have coded the menu in a general way, so art and buttons can be easily replaced. I thought this was the way we wanted it anyway, since FM makers should be able to replace the menu art to suit their mission, as you could in Thief.

I'll video the making of your water crystal, but I doubt it'll be much good to you unless you want to make another water crystal. The problem with learning CG is that every model is different, a new challenge, and I don't work to a set of rules or plans, I work on the fly and just invent as I go along. The only way you can learn that, is through years of experience and 1000's of hours spent modeling and rendering. Anyway, I think my plans for the arrow situation are the best. Include them both, but give the crystals advantages over the mechanical versions, make the crystals the premium version, but also the far more expensive ones. That should please everyone, and make finding arrows on a mission realistic whether you're in a pagan enclave or breaking into the inventors guild.

Spring, how can you provide both? The only way I can see this working is to provide def files for each, and the FM author has to enable them in their mission, which means they can only have those arrows in their entire mod. Doesn't seem worth it.

No oDDity, I wasn't just saying that they would be useful in outside missions but that they would be useful there as well. If you are on any level that has a sewer or underground water sources or even just pools of water you can leave water crystals there. Same with any plantlife and moss crystals, or fires and fire crystals. It just means you have much more flexibility regarding in-mission finding of arrows. The reason to put them in now is that they can then be used for the campaign. And that is the only reason. Other people will put them in for FM creation afterwards anyway. Believe me, if it weren't for this flexibility I'd say mechanical 100%. I thought the explanation of why the mechanical versions exist by Springheel were perfect and should be slipped into some random guard speech or notes lying around in the campaign. Yes sparhawk, that is a TDS rope arrow. All the components are there in T3Ed for it, the animation, the object, everything. They seem to be having trouble getting it to work though.

As sparhawk pointed out, there is a huge difference between actually exploring a level for real and activating console cheat commands and floating through the walls and such. That would be zero fun. I actually accomplished these things as Garrett, from his perspective within the Thief world, and my reward was overcoming the difficult tasks and enjoying the splendid views. And I think the LG guys would actually like to know that their levels are so well crafted that a player would want to take the effort in the middle of a mission to explore them and look at them for long periods of time from different locations just for their aesthetic beauty, even as loot and danger beckons him in other parts of the level. Anyhow, to each his own play style.

We don't need to follow that RPG pattern so strictly. There is no law that says that every fantasy universe has to have at least all the weapons relating to the four elements. That's why I said we should make them combineable. Then the FM author can place the materials anywhere he wants and it doesn't look as contrieved as finding a wonderful clockwork rope arrow in a cave where nobody was for eons. It only takes the player a few seconds to create an arrow, and has the additional advantage that the player can decide which arrows he prefers. That doesn't mean that he can't buy readymades in the shop at the beginning of the mission.

Ah - that's why its an option, you can just turn it off when you want to explore. I envisaged a system that records this in the save file, so if you disable save points, the menu screen will show this as will the stats screen, even if you enable them again, so that you know for sure if you're playing with them on or not, or if you had to enable it at all to complete the mission. The only way to back track would be to load a save game where you didn't have the option on. Same as killing a guy and then saving means the kill total will be one point higher on every subsequent save game.

I can't remember if this was discussed already or not, so thought I'd mention. In playing Thief 2, you'll notice ambient tracks are sometimes stacked upon each other as you progress through a level. For example, sometimes there's just one ambient track playing by itself and then when you reach a certain point, another ambient track gets stacked on top of that to make that one-layer ambient track become a two-layer ambient track. It's a nice, subtle effect to add nice richness and intrigue to areas. I don't know if that's how all the levels are, but it's a neat effect so as to not make the ambient music overwhelming, and it's also good for transitioning into different areas. For example, the first mission of Thief 2. (I'll speak for just one certain area of the level for the sake of simplicity.) * You'll be sneaking around on the first floor and hear only the background-hum track. No music, no bells, no nothing -- just the Thief 2 white noise we all know and love. I tried to recapture the 'feel' of this T2 background noise in my recent Ambient Track (DF) by having it play in the background during the entire track. It's the sound you hear by itself at the very beginning thru the rest of the track. * So that background white noise is all that's looping in Thief 2 as you sneak around on the first floor, for sake of argument. That is, until you make your way up a staircase to the 2nd floor. At this point, an additional ambient track is added to that background noise track. It's a 'glasswaves' swirl sort of sound -- subconsciously makes you wonder what's coming up. (I call it glasswaves because it's similar to the sound named 'glasswaves' on my keyboard.) It's a subtle enough sound that you don't really realize it was layered on the first track, but cool enough to make you wonder what's coming up. The cool thing about Thief sounds is that they don't give anything away. They're just eerily playing all the time. * At this point in my example, these are the only two ambient tracks playing in Thief 2. They're both very simple and non-obtrusive to gameplay. It's an ambience, not a pre-rendered music track with lots of fluctuations and sound interjections going on. * When the layers get stacked, the 1st track seems to be completely unaffected by the additional 2nd track. The 1st track just keeps playing without the loop re-setting or anything. In fact, if you go back down the stairs to the first floor, the 2nd track shuts off and leaves the 1st track playing as it was and has been. I like this approach and think we should be cognizant of this when thinking about creating The Dark Mod ambience files. I know some of us, maybe all, are already aware and maybe I'm wasting my time here, but I at least wanted to get this in writing. Instead of creating entire ambient musical pieces, we need to also focus on simple background ambient and eery loops to be layerable on top of each other like this. Things that will sound cool together when layered on each other. I've already heard some submissions that fit this bill nicely; but wanted all our sound gurus aware, as I assume we want to try to achieve similar things with TDM.

The primary objective is to find loot and solve the mission objectives. So why does crystal finding get boring? It's not something that you HAVE to do. And the mixing of the materials should be properly easy. There should just be three maximum four materials. Just put them together and you have an arrow. It gives the player some additional choice, it explains why the stuff is found in the map somewhere and the map designer has a better way of distributing the materials, because he doesn't distribute it totally arbitrary. And this is certainly NOT a crap load to implement.

I'm not totally against finding stuff in water and fireplaces, and I'll admit that the first few times finding the crystals were somewhat wonderful and exciting, but to me it got really old after that. I just think there's better ways to encourage exploring. Finding crystals in water got really predictable and unexciting; for me the real enjoyment came from finding some noble's secret cache of loot behind a painting, or finding an interesting readible. FM authors could put some caches of loot underwater, or secret switches in some fireplaces, etc. For the specialized thief tools though, it just feels better to me to bring in what you need at the start of the mission and not rely on finding stuff. I'm open to Sparhawk's ingredient idea though, that might work if it's done well.

Just created a basic machine with some gears and stuff. It turned out to be a water crystal maker, but it could instead be used for almost anything since it's just a basic machine that might appear somewhere in Dark Mod land. However, I think it might be neat to have a side mission or unmentioned task where you can find some Quartz crystals, dump them in, activate the machine and crank out a few crystal water arrow tips.

There's a big difference between a lovingly crafted fan mission and a corporate producton line, who's only purpose is to squeeze even more money out of fans. Franchises are never good, be it Rocky V, TombRaider VIII or Final Fantasy X.

To me ratings don't pose much of a problem. If some kids goes out and blows up a cop car or whatever after playing GTA, i would say that he is somehow mentally imbalanced anyway; and if GTA didn't set him off who knows what could? The colour red, or seeing a clown; who knows? But GTA as a game I thought was crappy anyway; I mean what's the point of it? The entire objective of it was basically to drive cars around and kill a few people. After the first few missions i forgot who the hell my character was; and every mission after that was just one blur. It had no sense of class or style; its big kick was that it was a modern and graphical crime simulator. And the Sex Simulation? I still don't understand why the hell Rockstar put that in. They're a bunch of juvenile deliquants the lot of 'em. Who the hell wants to watch poorly rendered graphical pornography? All their games have this massive amount of negative hype generated about them; which is what gets their sales. At first I thought the gameplay was fun; but after a few hours i found it to be overly boring and repetitive. One game i did like in the style of GTA was Mafia. This game was set in 1930's chicago; it had a good blend of action and driving, was classy and had a passable storyline. If you like (or don't like) GTA try Mafia; its a whole new league above. Heh; now we need a worst games ever thread.

Dude, I cannot believe that this did not pop into my head at the begining, but I think I will pee my pants if someone does it. I have to admit that I was scared playing TDS on that mission, well I don't know I mean not scared, but jumpy Anyway I cannot imagine you will need a disclaimer so no one has a heartattack and blames you

So you KO a guard, walk away and ten minutes later the screen goes black and "mission fails" comes up? Not fun. And it is very arbitrary. Why should a guard waking up mean you fail? Should you immediately fail the game if you set off an alarm? Ten minutes is more than enough time to hide the body and chloroform it, so it doesn't add any complexity unless you don't have enough chloroform. But the result of that system would be players simply killing guards to make sure they don't wake up. Then you have to impose a 'no kill' objective.... When you start having to add new restrictions to the game just to justify adding a new tool, it suggests to me the tool isn't worth having.

I've always wanted to do a completely un-Thief-like mission with ridiculous swordplay and swashbuckling action on a par with the old Errol Flynn movie of Robin Hood.

But making a game with known exploits is just ... a sin. It defeats the whole purpose of a video game. In a real life board game or sport, you have to keep in mind the rules and not break them. I feel that a lot of the fun of a video game is that you don't need to do this - it's a virtual world where you are free to acheive things any way you can. Realisng that guards are helpless on ladders would take me out of the immersion, and I coudn't help feeling "I could take you out, but I won't cause its not fair" that's the attitude I would rather keep for playing against kids. There's a difference between this and what I'm talking about in the violence thread. In the violence thread, I'm talking about making a moral desicion on something that can seem plausable in real life. It's immersion breaking to know of an exploit and have to avoid it. I never really had to avoid serious exploits in T3 or T2 cause most of the things people said were exploits never really worked for me. Eg. there is rarely any slope leading to water to lure AI into - the only one I could find was in Thief 1 in the first mission and I gladly lured those stupid evil zombies in when they chased me that far out. Actually I remember some exploits that did work - llike waiting for them to search close to you in the darkness and just blackjack them in teh face, in T2. Or potentially being able to round evryone up, drop a flashbobm, then blackjack them one by one. It took a lot of effort to forget these tthings, and I was never happy about having to do that. It was immersion breaking for me. For me, avoiding exploits sucked in T2 and it would suck in darkmod too.

It's not the same for me. In a video game (as I guess I would in real life) I draw a huge thick line between deciding wether someone can do without the money or not, and outright killing them - giving them no chance to recover from a few coins I stole. I even find myself deliberately not stealing from the rather poor looking houses, and not stealling that huge amoutn of loot beside the love letter saying how that person and their partner will live happliy ever after with all this money they got as bonus or whatever. I actually only cross that line when I can't complete the mission, and just play the "it's just a game" card to myself and take the loot to complete the objective. I just get more fun playing that way. It's immersive. And I have to justify the stealing for Garret's reasons - I'm playing as garret, so if he has to steal to make the rent, or solve some mystery, then that's what I do, but I do it my way. I don't play Thief for the stealing, I play it for the sneaking required to complete the objectives.

Well I'm not a part of the Hive Mind I guess. One Thief player told me that when he got home from a frustrating day work, he would load up a Thief mission and go around whacking the helpless servents to death to vent his frustration of the annoying co-workers. I can't fathom how anyone could get a sense of satisfaction out of that. When I find myself in a similar mood, the most satisfying use of video games is to channel that pent up energy into playing better than I ever have, and beating something that has a purpose, especially if its about defeating some evil characters to defend some helpless people. I crave the excitement and action, but its the thrill of suceeding against amazing odds that I find entertaining, not inflicting suffering...

Exactly. We already talked about that end over end. A game should provide more than one way of playing. If Guild Wars would be just monsterhacking it would be much more boring than it is. You can find other ways to succeed in a mission and this is what it makes interesting.

You've already got rid of them by punishing violence when it is possible. TDM will never be an FPS where you can go around killing everyone willy nilly - if it were, it would have failed. So actually, you don't need to get rid of the people who like Thief gameplay - you're already making violence more difficult than in Thief 1/2, right? The only question is over people who use stealthy violence. They're not going to be put off by being forced to be stealthy about their violence, but they will if they're prevented from choosing how to tackle the mission. It's not "bloodthirsty FPS gamer" vs "ghosting Thief gamer." In other words, it's not all as clear cut as you make out.

Hmmm. Team 1 would prefer limited tools to work with so that it aids their preference of playstyle. Team 2 doesn't want to be forced into any form of playstyle through limitation. Both of these options are available to both Team 1 and Team 2 through the toolset. Wow, isn't that neat? It's up to the FM author to decide. Yes, that means that not every fan mission will meet one teams specific desires. Boo hoo. I'm sorry if this sounds condescending folks, but this kind of selfish bickering really pisses me off. There is still a lot of work to be done and the toolset you get will be far more flexible than any of the previous editors, so I don't think we have to worry if we don't make it exactly how one team wants it over the other. Please, learn how to share the sand box. Ok?

It may not be possible to strictly ghost a mission of it's not designed that way, but it's certainly always possible to complete the map without killing anyone or KOing anyone. I don't count distracting guards as antighosting, all ghostingmeans to be is not attacking anyone and not being seen. You can't go fishing in the game. Is that restrictive? We didn't give you the tools to go fishing so you can't do it. I don't hear anyone complaining about that. Why didn't we give you a fishing rod and implement fish? - because this is a game about using stealth and thieving skills. Why don't I want to give you weapons? -for exactly the same reasons. Why must killing people be an essential part of the game? Why must you be given the tools to kill people with, or else feel restricted. What is so special about the act of killing that makes it an essential requrement for every game? There will be a billion and one things you can't do in this game, because you won't be given the necessary equipment to do it, so why start crying and claiming 'restriction!!!' about just one of them, if you weren't given the tools to kill people? I want to know what singles out murder as special and a 'must have' in any game. Speak for yourself. I play for the challenge and skill required. THe harder the better. It's no different to games like chess in my mind, just a different game board and rules.