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Yes, sometimes exploring could get you killed, but usually not if you are careful and smart about it. I want the player to get the most loot they can easily and run! That is part of the challenge, to see just how much loot you can get without getting into trouble - for me that is the whole point of the game. It is not meant to be an architechtural tour or an exploration game, but a thieving game. doesn't mean you can't explore, admire the views etc, but that is not your objective. The game should be made in such a way that it is easier to sneak past guards than to knock them out, in fact I prefer if it is bloody hard to take guards out. And bypassing parts of the game is what gives it REPLAY VALUE - the next time you decide to play the game, you can try different approaches, explore different areas. If you can explore the whole level in one hit, what do you have left for the next time you play it? Maybe you would also find that your skill level - your ability to complete games without relying on excessive quicksaves - improves markedly if you avoid saving, and instead rely on your wits and reflexes to see how far they get you. Go on, try it!

No, that's what an excess of no saving acheives. Nobody is talking about only being able to save at the start of the map. Yeah you might have to attempt some part again, but why is that so evil? Only saving at the start of the map can be too ridiculously hard and repetative. And saving whenever you want makes it ridiculously easy. I want the FM author to tell me what he or she thinks the best points are to save at, and then try to do it. They set a challenge for me, that's what designing the level is about. And I don't buy the argument that it's making the game challenging with the game settings instead of the game play, I'm sure I've argued against that enough. For me this IS about game play. And to anyone arguing for limited saves to be mandatory, stop it. Nothing like this will ever, or SHOULD ever, be mandatory. It's only every going to be an option, if it ever sees the light of day.

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.

You can do either; it's up to you. If placing them in dark areas in "ambush mode" and lowering the sound volumes is enough for you, that's pretty easy to do. If you want to apply an invisibility shader, that's harder (although I find it hard to believe that one doesn't exist already, you could probably just copy the vertex program or something). That's very simple to put in once you have the shader programmed though. Making AI stick to shadows when they move would be harder though; because it's dynamic lighting, the calculation to see how bright an area is can be a little intensive and you might not want to be doing that for every grid point or calculate a darkness gradient for every AI. You could get the lightness at every AI grid point on map load and hope it doesn't change much, then you might have to reprogram some of the AI pathfinding code so that you could make light grid points cost more than dark ones (ie, make paths going thru darkness desirable). Or, you could put in pathnodes, combat nodes, etc yourself to make them stick to darkness when they patrol and ambush you from dark areas. That would be easier, but not as "dynamic"

Yes i can understand the time issues (not to mention legal/copyright issues) of creating a model and animations etc. that is really a novelty at best. If you aren't going to create new AI or models for stealthy enemies, how difficult would you say it would be for an average FM designer to design an enemy that could be stealthy? Is it simply a matter of removing any sounds that it makes and putting it in the shadows, or does it require some hard programming/coding of AI, such as setting transparency effects on the model, to work?

Yeah there are. In D3 you have Recruit, Marine, Veteran, and Nightmare. TDM will eventually have em as well, probably named similar to Thief's easy, medium, hard, expert settings...though what they'll entail still hasn't been decided fully on yet.

A spider that hunts you would be cool. If you can ever listen hard enough, all you would hear is tick tick tick of its feet walking slowly, but then it would stop when you stopped moving so that you wouldn't hear it. And then it leaps down from above and assasinates you. Spiders in real life tend to just freeze when they thing something has heard them, rather than hide (I think), and I think this comes from birds seeing things better if they are moving, so the spider's best chance is to just freeze rather than run and hide. So for us Thieves it would give us a chance to spot them in the darkness when they are hunting us, and for us programmers we wouldn't have to program some "hiding" ability.

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.

There is no real restriction on level size, aside from the fact that the larger the level = more loading time, more RAM usage. However, D3 splits all the areas up and uses portals and scissoring to decide which geometry to think about, so you can have one complex view just around the corner from another and there wouldn't be any performance impact. The poly-pushing power is quite immense. You do have to be careful with the number of lights on each surface, however. I find Radiant a lot quicker and certainly it was easier to learn than DromEd - the great thing is you have a realtime preview with no compilation time, and you can compile and be walking around your map in literally seconds. Sound propagation is just being designed and implemented right now - we already have physically correct distance falloff and AI awareness, but the actual pathfinding of sounds according to a database is being worked out right at the moment. As to a release - well, you can start right now if you like on level geometry, textures and models etc., but there are major features still missing. The addition of these features would not impact on the geometry you had already built, so you woulnd't lose any work that way. A proper beta-testing public release (with all the basics of stealth/Thief-style gameplay working) could come as early as a year to 18 months from now, with a bit of luck. A "fully featured" release (ie. with everything we have planned) could take as long as another two years, with tweaking and bug fixes. Water already works in D3 and will be added in to the mod soon; there is a water physics mod and a reflection/fresnel effect shader created by some members of the community that pretty accuractely puts in water with buoancy and swimming, and looks nice too. Rope arrows have pretty much been designed and worked out - they're just waiting final coding and testing. Fire arrows are also in. Scouting orbs should be a very easy feature to add. I can't think of anything that could be considered "vital" that will be left out. Certainly we're focusing on the vital bits and the hard bits at the moment - easy stuff like health potions and mines, which could be formed from existing D3 weapons/items aren't really in yet - more important ATM is getting the inventory system to work so these items can be cycled, stored and used. Scripting is, depending on how you look at it, either more complex or easier than DromEd/Dark Engine "scripting". It's certainly more powerful. It consists of text files and uses a C++-like language which is used to manipulate objects, set timers, pretty much do anything you want - it's so powerful that almost all of the AI decisions are handled through complex scripts in D3. So anything could be an objective - the objective could be to push a box, to alert an AI, to jump a certain height! Literally any entity can be manipulated through scripting.

I suppose you could, but there's a lot of competition out there. THere are lots of realatively unheard of guitarists out there, you hear a lot of them on the Naxos label - Jeffery Mc'Fadden is a good one, look out for his Cd on Naxos, is has the best version of valses poeticos I've heard, and Asencio's Collectici Intim, which is a great piece. John Williams said that when he was visiting China, the standard of guitarists in some of the music schools there was unbelievable. As for who's the best - there is no best, it's just personal opinion. I cetainly dont' like Bream, he plucks the strings too hard and plays too near the bridge the whole time producing a very sharp tone. Not to my taste.

I think the best part about Thief 1 and 2 was that you never quite knew exactly what to do. The Dark Engine as it was called was exactly that DARK. The game was never really designed for one specific way of playing. You just did as you saw fit and let everything else just fall into place. Don't narrow players options. Having a button that toggles Saves On/Saves Off is just a plain waste of time. If you don't wish to save then don't. An option is just a rube goldberge way of not pressing the Save Button. Just let the game speak for itself. It doesn't need facy toggle choices or Difficulty Enhancements. All that is needed is one game + one player + how ever that player chooses to play. I really don't understand why this is such a big deal. By the time anyone gets finished debating this issue, more important things could have been achieved. If all we did was sit and argue nothing would ever get done. I got to hand it off to this team making this mod, not only do they work hard in making an advanced mod, but they also take the time to debate issues as silly and pointless as this one. Cheers Taffers....

I haven't heard anybody say "look at me, I'm a badass because I don't need to save". But there are people who think it's all-too-easy to get into the habit of unconsciously quicksaving every 5 seconds and reloading whenever something goes slightly wrong. That's not to say we should make it hard for players to do that. That's just saying that there's are many people (such as myself) who find the game more fun and immersive if saves are restricted, and would like the option for code to restrict it. Am I saying I'm a badass? No... quite the opposite... I rely on saves too much if the game doesn't prevent it. I think levels aren't scary/tense when character death will only set you back 20 seconds. Does that mean death has to be frustrating? I argue that it doesn't. How many people thought death in FarCry was frustrating? The checkpoints were well-placed, and the fact that the game used checkpoints forced you to use your equipment and not worry about if you wasted a bit too much of it... you just wanted to survive. (whereas in T1/T2, I found flashbombs almost useless, because I could inevitably find a way to lure a guard into a dark corner if I reloaded enough) It's true that there were places where FarCry was linear, but does that make it impossible to design a good non-linear level that uses checkpoints/savespots? I think we should leave it up to the level designer to find out, and not prevent them from trying just because you don't think it's possible to do well. Some people worried about what happens if you walk across a check-point when your health is low, or if a guard sneaks up on you right after you get an auto-save. To use FarCry as an example again, it doesn't have a single save-slot per level. There's a save-slot for each checkpoint. If you die right after you get to a checkpoint, you can just reload from the previous checkpoint as though you had died before getting to it. Also, limiting saves doesn't prevent people from playing for short times or leaving the computer. Just use the idea I suggested of a save slot that can be saved upon exit and is deleted when it's loaded. If you die you have to go back to the previous checkpoint or saved game. If you need to leave the computer, you can exit and save, then next time start right back where you left off... of course, upon restarting, the save would be deleted, so if you then died, you'd have to start back from a checkpoint as if you had never left the computer. (sure the player could circumvent this by backing up the save file, but they could just as easily turn on god mode) And, of course, such a style of gameplay would be optional. Am I suggesting that we require all map builders to put save-spots in their level? Of course not. I think that if a map builder doesn't like the idea of save-spots or checkpoints, they should just be able to build a map without them, and the checkpoint/save-spot option would be unselectable if there aren't check/save-points in the map. I'd just like an option at the start of the map to be able to use whatever method of saving the level designer thought was appropriate for their level (which might end up being unlimited saves if that's what the author prefered). Of course, this option doesn't make it so other people who disagree with the author couldn't choose unlimited saves at the start of the level.

In actual fact, the every n minutes would be relatively simple to introduce, since I believe a) Doom has timers and TDM will be implementing saving. Duh. Springheel, you completely ignored what I said about customisation: You only have 30 minutes of gaming time? Set it to 10 minute intervals, and I expect with all of these systems there will be a savegame that may be used when exiting. Like I and everyone else says, the system should suit different tastes. i.e. a system where you'd select from (for example:) Number of saves per mission: <number> (-1 for unlimited, 0 for none) OR Saves per <number> minutes Save game on mission change: <yes/no> Save game on exit: <yes/no> In fact the latter two probably needn't even be options, just do it. Some people want to limit these things with in-game enforcement. Think about it - you can select difficulty levels, and the highest difficulty on TMA was always "don't kill anyone." If you played Hard, you could choose not to kill people, but I'm sure you all chose expert for more than just the small increase in guard sensitivity, didn't you? This is just the same, except not tied to the difficulty specifically. If people want to abuse saving as we put it, then let them. They'll probably find a way around it if they want to, anyway. However, the people who would be tempted by unlimited saves but would like to play the game properly can enforce that with actual rules.

It's a piece by Barrios. http://208.49.149.118/floresta.mp3 This is played by John Williams. I have about 30 Cds of guitar music, just about most ever written for or transcribed to the guitar. Recuerdos de la Alhambra is not hard once you've worked out your tremelo technique, it was one of the few pieces I could play without any mistakes.

Ahhh, Recuerdos... A nice little song, that... Well, Fingernail, congrats on your new guitar, it really looks beautiful... And the clips are awesome as well - may I ask what microphone exactly did you use? It sounds quite good for a dynamic... I've got one classical at home, it's just a cheap 200 dollar yamaha, but I quite like it. It has a nice tone (not fantastic, but very good) and intonation is decent - I've played much pricier guitars with much worse intonation, actually. I wonder how is it to play on a 2500 dollar guitar though Like I said, those clips sound really good. Don't think I'd even try to learn those songs as of now. I'm a self taught guitarist, but I mostly play electric guitar (for 2 and a half years) and only occasionally pick up the classical, and even then I prefer to just make something up on my own. I also played piano in the music school for 4-5 years, but forgot most of it. It's been only recently that I began playing it again (only have a synthesizer, though). Currently I'm attending viol classes in the music school and DAMN, I used to think guitar was hard to play O_o Cool to see -and hear- fellow musicians on this board. Really great, TDM is in good hands

Exactly - it shouldn't be connected to the gameplay, that's the entire point of limiting saves in the first place- so the player can't chicken out and save before every hard part, while leaving it so the player doesn't have to play forever before being able to quit the game and do something esle. And the prolem of an autosave happening at an impossible place is not a problem at all, in the rare event that this does happen, the player can always go back to the previous autosave. The savepoints would stack up, which also solves the problem for people who like to have a bunch of saves throughout a misison so they can drop in at any point at a later date.

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.

Cool, will check those out! Based on this conversation, I hit my not-quite-local Guitar Store today (creative name, huh?) for the first time in a long time. Even bought strings. You see, back when I was heavily playing, every single day, in a band, all that crap, I was an old teenager. Since then, I've cooled down a lot, and at some points, actually taken a year or more away from instruments. Yes, it sucks, and I mean to correct it pronto (and have been doing so, recently). Anyway, point is, when I was younger, there was never any reason to touch the really expensive guitars - no money, so what's the point? Without mentioning that my local crappy shop would keep the expensive ones secured up to the wall, and you'd have to get assistance to try it, so it was always easier to just sit down and fiddle with the newest Satriani series Ibanez instead. Well, today, for the first time, I played a $4000 Martin (steel string, unfortunately - they had one lousy classical/nylon in the whole place ). Regardless - oh, dear lord. Long story short: yes, there is a very big difference. It's hard for that thing NOT to sound simply great. The intonation is perfect at every spot on the neck. Good thing my Takamine is still pretty good, or I'd be in for a largish purchase soon. Edit: Wow, I've only got a piece of each so far (56k) but these are excellent. Glad you chose familiar ones - that makes listening much easier and more pleasing. How long have you been classically trained? Edit2: Nice! At the risk of sounding too fanboi: Do you know Recuerdos de la Alhambra?

I suggest that if you die playing a character, that character is now dead and you don't get to play that game anymore - no restoring saves or anything. That'd make people be a lot more careful. Seriously, you guys put way too much emphasis on saving. We've heard a bunch of "solutions" to people CHOOSING to save "too much", and by-and-large these solutions are basically horrible abrogations of immersion. I don't want to be thinking "hmm, I've got just a few saves, should I save now or later?" I don't want to be thinking "damn, that was hard, I'd better find a save-point." A save-counter would be okay, but please don't ruin the experience for the rest of us just because YOU have no self-control or perspective. If you're going around restoring constantly rather than just when you die, you really ought to consider playing on an easier difficulty level, because obviously whatever you've got it set to is too tough for you to handle. I save a fair amount if I've been dying a lot, and otherwise rather rarely, and basically never restore unless I die. That whole "restoring to save ammo" is someone else's crutch and I don't want to have to wear it.

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.

Thankfully for me, the ones I get often generally mess my vision, but not bad enough that I cant see, depth perception is rather shaky, and make my head feel like it has nails being driven in it. I only get sick on with the worst ones. Seeing double is a very odd experiance I can do my writing if I have notes beforehand to work from, and cad work helps me concentrate on something other than my own misery (Oh the melodrama) :lol: Seriously It helps me to have something I can do. Strangely enough one thing that actually helps me is watching static on TV, which is hard to do on new TV’s. My optician suggested its something about the shifting light and dark patterns effecting my eyes and brain. It helps a bit anyway. My doc argues with my optician over what gives me them. One is convinced it is the other fault. I tend to think it may be my eyes. I have congenital Browns syndrome, which means that my eyes don’t look in the same place, my right looks slightly down and to the left and the left looks slightly to the right, add to that in one eye I have perfect distance vision while the other is long sighted. Then I have differing colour recognition between eyes, and I have difficulty on occasion of differentiating red from yellow anyway, I have to think about it, when I was younger I couldn’t. Lets face it I’m strange

Ish, ghostability is also subjective. This is no different. You just have to look at all the games that use save points to see that they have them at specific points, right before a hard bit, etc. Supplying an approrpiate number of saves or placing save points appropriately is no different than placing guards or water arrows. It's the FM author's idea of what provides a good balance between challange and fun.

How hard would it be to implement ODE into the engine anyway? It can't be as simple as just slapping the code into the SDK, but how much effort would it take? Now that I think about it it'd probably require all the coding lying in the SDK to fit alongside the new physics engine...it'd be cool, but probably too much work for us to do alone.

Have you thought about allowing level designers to make "custom difficulties"? Not only allowing level designers to choose how many difficulty levels there are and what they're called, but also allowing them to create multiple controls that the player can select at the start of the level. For example, Inverted Manse renamed the difficulty levels to cut-purse, rogue and warrior if memory serves me right. Imagine if for Dark Mod, such a level could instead create a second control and call it "character class". This way, a player could choose both a difficulty and a character type. Maybe you could also allow check-boxes. For an undead mission, a level designer might by default have standard undead creatures but make a check-box called "realistic undead mode" (pardon the oxymoron), so at the mission breifing the player can turn it on/off. With it on, haunts couldn't be killed by backstabbing them, and ghosts could automatically sense the player if they're within 20 feet. (of course the mechanics of setting this up would be implemented in the level, or custom gamesys if Dark Mod has such a thing) You could use such controls to slightly alter the map to facilitate various playing styles/preferences that it would be hard to accommodate simultaneously. As another example, you could make a "ghosting" checkbox, and set up the Easy difficulty so it gives you some extra health-potions if the ghosting checkbox is off, and removes certain guards if it's turned on. Similarly, other difficulty levels might do different things based on the playing style chosen. You could make it so that such controls defaulted to whatever you chose the last time you saw them in the campaign. Just an idea I thought would be cool... I'm guessing you'd probably wait until v2 before considering it?

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.