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Argh, don't make me repost why it makes sense to amplify some sounds for the player, but still use realistic values when propagating those sounds to AI!

I think I may have asked this before but Ill try again. The problem with AIs and ladders is that the player can use them to confuse the guards, climb halfway up and jump off, lead all the guards up a ladder then run away, leaving them searching fruitlessly while you plunder three rooms over. So what about if, in every five or ten guards, only one or two could climb ladders? A fully armored guard is not going to be climbing much anyway, one fall and you will shatter bones with 40 lbs of armor on. But in every group of five, for example, there could be one guard who is lightly armored and who will climb any ladder the Thief is seen scaling. It wont matter if the THief jumps off or not, because the guard is not just chasing the Thief, he is going to guard teh room at the top of the ladder. So the Thief is pursued by a gang of guards. He scoots up a ladder. One of the guards breaks off and climbs after him. The Thief hops down and runs off, the other four pursue him but the climbing guard continues to the top and then patrols the room up there. Maybe he wont even come down for the rest of the mission, he will stay up there to insure that the Thief wont try to escape his fellow guards by climbing up there. Essentially, the guards realize that they cant follow the Thief up ladders so one of them stations himself up there to preclude the Thief from hiding easily. I realize this doesnt address all of teh problems with ladder climbing but perhaps its a start? Of course this doesnt say anything about pagans, townsfolk, and servants who have nothing to stop them from climbing wherever they like. I do think that AIs NOT climbing ladders detracts from the atmosphere, nothing was sillier in T1/T2 then hiding from an ape-beast , who can obviously climb like devils, by climbing a ladder.

i guess that could work yeah even better would be to put teleports when lets say entering a tower (the player wouldnt notice tho) which teleports you to another part of the map, but with a simple city. This way you could easily make the crazy airship above the city. also, ish said something about the ai being able to be set to be rendered all the time (instead of going idle if not in the same area) so that in this case guards on the other side of the map would still do their patrols. anyways, all this is talk but no walk lol, its time to do a few tests i think i'll post results later, it'll take a long while tho, as you can imagine.

That would be fun, the player could even be made a little nauseous looking down towards the city if the rocking were bad enough, talk about realism! Gildoran:If your city is low-poly enough that the entire city can be viewed without a drop in frame-rates, you could take a third option of keeping the ship still, and having the city be the "monorail". Ok so how about the map, the giant City, has three levels? 1. the ground floor, with active streets and small homes and shops and sewers to explore. halfway up the tallest buildings is a level portal to 2, the second half of the buildings and rooftops, wizards towers and thieves nests, level 1 being a low rez floor below if you look over a ledge or window and the sky being a slightly higher low rez roof. Now at certain rooftops there are air ship stations where the Thief can sneak aboard a docked ship, which then kicks off 3, a leisurely journey to another air station across the City. This 3 could be a "city monorail" with the rooftops well below the ship so they could be pretty low rez, the ship could be detailed and explorable, robbing guests and crew and stuff, then docking across the city, level portal, back to 2 but at a different site of course. When the Thief wants to head back across the city, he could sneak back aboard, perhaps randomizable guests and guards and other foes could be generated for a different trip each time.

IIRC in Thief as you ran out of breath, your life meter would drop but it would recover if you surfaced in time. I always read this as the player using his last few breaths, so it made sense that they returned. I guess I was assuming something similar would happen in FC, that the red meter would be your last few seconds but recoverable.

No it wouldn't. With cube mapping, you can make the player see any 3d stuff you want on any surface. It's still pretty big for a texture. It still has to go through video ram to be displayed in the 3D world, so its going to push out lots and lots of much smaller textures that are used more frequently. Watch your framerate drop as it has to keep swapping stuff out of video ram and system ram. And you would have to create this video yourself somehow. No it doesn't. Your video card does, that's what 3D acellerators are for. Doom sends it a bunch of polygons, and the Z-buffering in your card works out which ones are covered by which. This process takes time, and your frame rate will still drop proportionately to how many polys there are even if you can't see them (though of course its not as bad as drawing them as well). The purpose of visportals is to work out what really does need to be sent to the video card and what shouldn't be at all.

Its not as bad a slog as D3 was, that much is for sure. One of the things I liked as well was the ability to simply walk past enemies, whereas it seemed in D3 the player was constantly forced to confront every AI in the place. In some areas, I simply crept past the bad guys to conserve ammo/save time. Did you quit because you were getting bored with it like you did with DUUM 3?

That all makes sense to me. I was thinking of a hang glider like in FarCry, which was a hell of a lot of fun to soar around in. Until the helicopter gunship arrived.... Here is an idea for the giant city and making it more workable. What if the city was split in half, so that it was actually two separate levels. So when the player is on the ground, and looks up, he sees what appears to be really tall towers and sections of the sky but he is actually looking at a low roof. He can enter any building and go up so far, but past a certain point he would actually be entering another map, this time a map of the top half of the city. Now, in the top half, when he looks over the edge of a roof or whatever, he sees what appears to be a city street far below but he is actually looking a t a floor that is only a few feet away. Every building would have an inter-map portal joining the top half to the bottom half at the same point. Im not familiar with Arcanum airships, I proposed a dirigible ( ) because it is relatively low-tech and doesnt require a magical explanation to explain its ability to fly. And no, we dont have to have all the crews be Americans either......*<;o}

Since this is a wish list kind of thread, I have another question. how hard would it be to make an air ship that could travel about this city? Im thinking of a blimp like thing that the player could sneak aboard to ride across the city or hell even steal and navigate his/her way around. Imagine being pursued to a roof top where your only escape is to leap onto an airship passing nearby . Or stealing an airship only to be pursued by the Fuzz in their own airship. Another fun item would be some sort of glider craft. The Thief could hop off of a taller building and glide to a lower rooftop of a building unaccessable from the ground, or break into a building at the bottom level, work his way up to the roof and escape by gliding off into the night. Im sure these ideas have some purists muttering but I think they would be a lot of fun if they would be possible. Comments?

Im almost finished with FarCry so I thought Id grade it and get all your opinions. Overall, I give it a B+/A-. Its was a lot of fun, the outdoor scenery was incredible, its the first FPS with outdoor action that actually made me feel I was outdoors. The indoor sequences were pretty good too, I know some here thought it was a "corridor crawl" and thats true to a degree but I still had a lot of fun fighting my way through. The AI were pretty tough. I would have liked to have seen more grenade use by the mercs, as well as ladder climbing. They did use the vehicles effectively, at one point I killed a hummer squad only to have a third merc sneak up behind me, jump in the vehicle and run me over. The mutants were not the best idea in the world, a little dumb looking compared to the rest of the AI, but they still pulled it off. BTW, is this the "Island of Dr. Moreau" or what? The snipers bugged me a little though, I could see that they could see me at a certain distance but they would not start firing until I got closer. I could snipe them, so it unbalanced their effectiveness. The merc conversations were pretty good too, but I thought they could have been improved in one or two ways. For one thing, you dont say "I dont know what that was and I dont care!" or "Not my problem!" when a grenade goes off 30 feet away. A nade going off 30 feet away IS your problem. Nor does a merc shout "You're going down!" to a slobbering monkey mutant who is charging you, you scream mindlessly and shoot the fucker. I thought that they could have worked the merc commentary to a bit of a finer degree, but this is of course nit-picking. The physics were really cool. one time I tossed a nade into a room and when it blew up, it sent a merc through the air, smashed him into a shelf of crap which toppled over spilling its contents, and he lay on top of it sprawled like a rag doll. Another time I was being pursued by a patrol boat, I turned my turrent around and started returning fire and after a few seconds of exchange the gunner pin wheeled off the back of the boat into the water. It looked like a scene from an action flick. Yet a third time I pushed some barrels down a slope, they rolled right over two dudes and flattened them. Fun! I did NOT like the "detection meter" thingy. I found it mostly useless, it was either too late, it went red around the time bullets started flying or too early, it was like an ESP that told me something was watching me when I didnt even know it. I would have much preferred a light gem like thing, to tell me my relative level of exposure and let me use that to navigate the terrain. I LOVED the rock tossing thing though, what a common sense, low tech way to distract or attract guards! Love it! The weapons were pretty cool too. Each was useful in its own way, with the exception of the pistol which I found mostly useful only to conserve rifle rounds early on. The shotgun was a real treat, I mowed down legions of AIs with it, usually with a flash nade into a room and then the scattergun! The MP5 navy (i think) the silenced sub machine was nicely balanced, only a 9mm so its not overpowering but the silencer made it very useful. The best was the assault rifle with the grenade launcher attached, that thing simply kicked ass. I also like the limitations to carrying weapons, I would have made it even tougher by making the player able to carry only 3 weapons if one was the rocket launcher but thats just me. The vehicles and turrent weapons were both fun to use and useful, I cleared out a lot of indoor AIs but leading them back to a point where I could jump into a machine gun nest. Overall, a really good game, i recommend it and I cant wait to mess with the editor a bit.

They definitely use per poly colision for projectiles, though you can switch that off, but it is on by default for all the models. Then there is the ragdoll collision boxes which come into play when the AI is killed, and then there is the clip box whch dictates how close the player can get to the model.

I doing some (long overdue) work for NIghtblade right now. Our player model will not have the same dimensions as the doom guy. I suppose I can knock up a basic version of it for now and them I can make the proper one later on using the same dimensions. The version you need doesn't even need to be textured.

Hexen, there are many of us who agree with you (like me). But there are many more who don't. That is why it will always be an option. It is the best it's going to get. Like spar said, if you do a search, you will see where we've discussed this long and hard, all of us, every aspect of the topic. My solution to make it optional for both player and author is the only comprimise.

Hey there. Been following this project for a while, and I must say I wait eagerly to see it complete. Although I have browsed thru older topics and even read some of 'em, I couldn't find one where this theme had been fully discussed. If there is, I may have missed it . Well, here I go anyway (sorry for the long post): I think that there should be more than one choice for a damaging melee weapon (aprat from the blackjack, which MUST be permanent, if not this wouldn't be Thief related anymore!) that the player can choose to buy or just pick from the start depending of the mission and the objectives you have. It would help a lot to mission balance. I've already got some ideas and the different scenarios to make an example: 1.- Dagger (don't flame me for this one!!!): let's say you have a mission where you need to sneak inside of a very fortified zone, like your typical Thief mission. A dagger is easyr to carry and is capable of killing foes cleanly and quickly. But it's pretty useless against armored foes. It would be useful only in places where you expect less or weaker resistance, or if one of your main goals is to stealthily get rid of some character that's inside the complex for some specific reason. For that last one, a sword would be less-than-ideal. 2.- Sword: but then there's a mission where you somewhere you know there'll be heavier resistance, call it armored guards, better trained swordsmen... or maybe you go into a pagan forest or a cave inhabited by dangerous animal species. A dagger wouldn't cut it, but a sword would be much more effective, because of its longer range of attack and superior damage dealing. Let's not even talk about blackjack here! I found pretty stupid the fact that you could just go and blackjack a giant two-legged, gas-belching lizard with an enormous and thick cranium. 3.- Small mace: then come the zombies... they feel no pain, they won't die from bleeding wounds, won't stay put for long after they fall down. That makes the dagger a no-goer, and makes the sword much less useful. You should have some means to deal with the undead face-to-face. To crush their rotten bones and rend them harmless. Can you spell "mace"? But a mace is a mace, it's heavy and slow. Zombies are slow too, so no big deal. But most guards and pretty much all of the critters aren't that slow, or aren't slow at all. So a mace could be evaded easily and lose a lot of potencial. Of course that Thief has always been about stealth and stuff. But shit happens. You do run out of fire arrows to blow up incoming zombies. You can accidentally trigger a trap that sets off an alarm and sends five or six guards after you. You can accidentaly wake up a whole nest o' burricks. You can't always rely on stealth to survive. I believe most thieves don't have a magic "Quickload button" to resort to in this cases (well, we have one... but that's no excuse! ). And a master thief always plans ahead for a mission (even if you can't always predict what you'll find). So I believe it makes sense from a realistic point of view... Apart from this: will we be able to see our body? I really liked that about TDS. I think that it's pretty dull when in a game you look down and you don't see yourself. It's like "Yay! Looka t me! I'm a floating hand holding a sword!". At this point of gaming history, it's something so basic I wished that more game devs had thought of. If you made it down to here, thanks for reading!

D3 comes with a builtin editor, so your version will have it as well. As for tutorials I suggest going to this site and registering there http://www.doom3world.org. As for modding. Witht he tools available you can create primarily levels which are just more of D3 maps. If you can do your own textures, then you can create maps which look very different from D3 maps but will have the same gameplay elements. Without touching the code, you can already create different weapons and scripting can help you create other stuff. You can also replace the player and AI models as long as they are similar enough (in behaviour, not in appearance) to the original game. If you want to start implementing different behaviour, or totally new features, as we do here, then you need to code it in C++ using the SDK. With the SDK you have a pretty good access to most parts of the game. You can create new AI, new physics, completely new wepaon types ore new special effects (like the lightgem that we are doing or soundpropagation which we also need). So depending on your skills or your determination you can go pretty deep or stay at a higher level. Whatever you want to invest in terms of time.

Well, I may be wrong, but there is a general consensus in the thief community that the tap forward bug is not quite kosher (that is why it is generally referred to as the tap forward bug - it wasn't intentional). In RL it is physically impossible to move without making any noise at all, though you can certainly be so quiet that for all intents and purposes you might as well be making no noise, but some surfaces would make it extremely difficult to walk on inaudibly. If it comes to that, the sound of your breathing and your clothes ruffling, leather boots creaking, joints cracking and so on will be amplified by the acoustics of certain types of rooms, so the suggestion that tapping forward is a feature and not a bug ont the principle that it simulates very quiet movement doesn't cut it with me. There should be some surfaces in the game that are stupendously difficult to cross without alerting all AI in earshot - otherwise the challenge just dissapears, and it merely becomes a test of your patience - you could sneak up on just about any guard almost anywhere with no penalty (apart from your time). Some surfaces need to be unavoidably noisy in order to create challenges that require a bit of thought and creativity on the part of the player. The reason moss arrows were included with the original thief was based on the premise that you could not walk across certain surfaces without making noise, but the tap forward bug rendered moss arrows all but a novelty (mind you, I prefer the idea of laying down a cloak on the ground, or using slippers to cross some types of floors, the idea of a moss arrow is a bit silly IMO). It was a shame they didn't fix it for T2...

Body awareness introduces a LOT of development time and really complicates things. It's not a matter of "thinking of it", its actually implementing it that shits all over your project. For example, rather than having the player simply stick to the ladder, you now have to worry about forcing them into exactly the right position smoothly so that the hands will catch on the rungs. And some things won't look right unles you make new animations for them, like swimming. It's a lot of work, and we decided its not worth it for what you get from it.

We set down many moons ago that there will be no dagger. It's just not what we want to portray with the toolset/ campaign. The sword we are providing is a short sword, something slightly more managable. Hmmm, a mace is getting into different territory...we're trying to stick to the basic tools here. As far as dealing with Zombies, we have some plans for them. The player can still 'bless' his water arrows to dispense with zombies of course...or avoid them altogether. As it currently stands, we're not supporting body awareness. It introduces a lot of issues with control and we don't immediately want to spend our time working on perfecting a system that isn't as flexible as the standard first person system. The trade off for the little extra eye candy that it provides isn't really worth the loss it introduces to the controls. For me personally, when the game has done its job and pulled me into the game world, I don't notice that there aren't any feet there....my mind accepts or paints in certain details. Hopefully FM authors will be able to create worlds with our toolset that will do exactly that. Thanks for posting.

NWN is probably good with a Dungeon master, but show me ONE party that has one non-magic user in it, just one, and I'll show you a group that has a player that feels he or she is severely marginalised and not contributing to the party's sucess. NWN's hugest flaw is that it doesn't implement resting the way it works in D&D. In D&D, a spell is a big deal. It's really powerful, and once it's cast, no more till beddy byes. And you can't camp in the middle of some enemies house in D&D the way you can just click "rest" and wait ten seconds in NWN. Non-magic characters are sitting there hitting one guy doing about 10 hp with each hit, then magic users run into the room and do 50+ damage to every enemy in one shot. Then they just sit in the hallway and "rest" for 10 seconds and then get back into it. Yeah I'm sure the lord of the mansion would appreciate comming home after a night out to a house full of sleeping adventurers in his hallway and dead guys at one end and guards who have no idea at the other. Without a DM, NWN is not much better than Diablo 2 in the way you just kill things and get better stuff, except there is the odd chance to persuade someone and the storyline is a bit more involved. Also the turn based side of it sucks. Keep that for pen and paper D&D where it belongs. There is nothing more stupid than running away from a baddie who is doing a melee attack, he swings, he misses cause you're at the other side of the room, but no, the game says "you're not techincally fast enough to do that" and you get hit anyway, even though he's nowhere near you. The numbers shit is for pen and paper where you are simulating real tiem combat. There is no need for this in a video game that is already real time!!

Actually that is what marketing is about. If you read interviews from Warren Specotr or the other guys, talking about their product, then they also tell us how great it is. Of course they do. If THEY don't say it's great, who will? If somebody tries to sell me a product he is working on, I expect him to be convionced about this product. If I still think it is crap, then that's my opinion, but what shall I think about a product, that not even the guy who is doing it, is convinced of? I don't think that this is the publicit on it's own. There is this attitude that "professionals" get money for it and therefore have to be better at it. It seems that many people don't realise that the difference between a professional and an amateur is very often only the money. Especially in software development you can easily see this. In some cases this is even true. A professional football player is much better than an amateur, but a professional artist doesn't need to be automatically better than a amateur artist. And this is the same with software developers. I have seen enough programmers who are much worse then people I know doing it just for fun and working on something else for a job. They are doing it out of passion and this is the reason why they are good at it. And another fact that people don't seem to realise is, that often professional software developers are the same persons doing it for fun in their spare time as well. So this attitude is quite stupid if applied in such a general way.

I liked NWN a lot, single player in fact, what connection it has to Diablo? It's turn-based and has a completely different experience system! And it's not composed of empty areas. What I hate about Diablo II, is those big fields of nothing. DS and NWN are not like that. Hellfire was the best. And those stupid "save and exit". Well, I think I won't buy AoE III after that demo. I think the Colonial Ages are a big problem with me. All those trading posts, home cities... And, MAPS. The map I liked best in AoE II was Black Forest. I like having closed up areas. And AoE III levels were wide and open, fortunately, the campaign wasn't, but still, forest is no longer an obstackle. Another thing is those stupid sounds. WHen the home city is ready, of someone attacks. The unit control - where are the formations and attitude? Resourses - where is stone? ANd why on Earth is the game 3D and so ugly... Coming back to AoE II, giant Black Forest map, 5 enemies, hardest...

I actually enjoyed Diablo 2 - mainly because I played co-op with my two brothers and we had really different characters working together fighting alongside each other. For what it is (bash, get more money and weapons , bash some more) its fun. DS is more of a chore than fun. And Neverwinter Nights is not much better - its the same thing with a storyline slapped on. Setting up your own game with someone playing Dungeon Master would be awesome, but as a single player or co-op game playing the original missions - its diablo with a story line. Bleh. At least Diablo - All of the character classes are very very well balanced. NWN is SHIT becaues all the magic characters are the best, and no other class can keep up with them. Its heavily magic biased, and the community expansion pack makes it even more so. That game seems to have a huge "magic is da coolest" nerd following.

I think he means the volume that you, the player hear, rather than the volume the AI hear. If you really want to turn off ambient music and turn the footstep sounds down, you can. I don't know if we'll support an easy way to do it in the options screen or not (the final options screen is far far away in the future right now), but right now it's tweakable in a def file if you really want to. As for environmental sounds masking suspicious sounds, it's planned, but no promises.

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understood that correctly..so forgive me but I don't think it would be a very good idea to give footstep volume control to the player. That's something that needs to be delicately balanced for gameplay...it should not be considered a feature.

There is a caveat that I've noticed about large maps in D3 though... The amount of time it takes to calculate the AAS (AI awareness system) seems to be proportional to the volume of travelable space in the level, so a level with that much open space takes FOREVER to compile if you have an AI in it. Of course, for a game like TDM, I don't think there are flying enemies, so in a map with large open skies you could probably put a clip brush in the sky, covering areas you don't expect the player/monsters to be able to get to, in order to cut down on compile times. I should also note that I don't have much experience with AAS, so there may be other better ways of decreasing compile times. As for Farcry, I played through on medium and really enjoyed it. The game was stunningly beautiful, the AI was great and on medium it seemed to have just the right difficulty - it was tough and I usually died a couple of times for each checkpoint, but not enough to make it boring. (though I found the final boss to be very difficult, they had enough sense to place a checkpoint right before battling him) With the lack of quicksaving I found myself just enjoying the game more rather than trying to conserve ammo, and was terrified to enter mutant-monkey-infested jungles at nightime. Also, I think people who like Thief would love farcry - aside from having stealth combat with wonderful AI (I thought it was perhaps the best I've seen in an FPS), it's loads of fun going level spelunking in farcry levels. I was often able to figure out how to climb into areas I wasn't supposed to (and was rewarded with great vistas), and there were even a few levels where I was able to bypass entire sections by climbing over the right mountain range. The only thing that really bugged me about farcry was the water reflection bug (things below water would appear in reflections, which looked wrong).