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Thiefy jump


Sayne

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First I want to congratulate you guys on creating a great mod. It's very detailed, and the item manipulation (very cool) and physics are impressive.

 

The movements feel nice, the animation gives you the feel of being in the head of a guy creeping around a dark place and clambering over obstacles.

 

My only gripe (which has gotten me caught by the guards on several occasions) is that the jump feels too short. The character seems to bounce into the air and back down with a great deal of speed, and when running forward, not cover a great deal of distance. I think one of Looking Glass's greatest accomplishments was to give their jump animation the feel of someone leaping through the air and reaching with his legs to at the right point (like when jumping from carpet to carpet over tile) and then bring his center of gravity back over his feet. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=hJLEtMaYKOg 3:54 is what I'm talking about. The jump from the scaffold to the ledge in the training mission kicked my butt because the character was always just short of the ledge, then fell like a ton of bricks, Dropping from a height in general feels just too fast. It doesn't feel... erm... Thiefy.

 

I don't know if that's something hard-coded in the Doom 3 engine, but I just feel the jump length felt overly truncated. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but given the quality and naturalness of the other animations, this one struck me as jarring.

 

It's just a minor thing, I really like the mod, thank you for working on it for so long.

Edited by Sayne
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Just a possible "gripe-kill", but try using mantle more than jump. I really enjoy the specific mantle keybind ability in this mod. It makes missed mantles-turned-jumps less likely to happen.

 

EDIT: I just reread your post and the mantle doesn't work well for the distance jump. That's killed me quite a few times.

Edited by BlackSanguine

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I feel abandoned, but it feels good.

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In the trainer, I don't think it's possible to jump directly from the scaffold to the awning. What you do is jump across but keep holding down the jump key as you drop in front of the awning. You then find you grab the awning on the way down and mantle up.

 

A lot of thought and discussion was given to the run speed and jump length and the team decided these values after taking many things into consideration. Yes, comparing it to some other games they might seem to be less but in time hopefully you'll find it fits well the character and gameplay.

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Indeed, we set up test maps with various gaps, looked at the physics and gravity code, etc etc, and after a LOT of testing came up with the current settings. They work very well, but are not exactly the same as Thief, so you will need to get used to them over some time.

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Yeah the jump to the awning always falls short, but you grab it and mantle up. The thing is, the jump often comes even too short to grab it and mantle up. On The Crown of Penitence, it's hard to jump from carpet to carpet in the hallway with the guard who had his back turned, a jump that should feel easy.

 

Even if you're comparing the jump distance to the player's run speed (and not to Thief), the jump feels unnaturally short to me and gravity pulls too fast. Gravity seems to pull too fast even when just falling from a height, (like in the rope arrow sections of the training mission) though the landing animation is pretty cool, the player seems to fall to his knees to catch himself, well done. The rest of the movement feels right to me, just not the jump.

 

I'm not trying to criticize for the sake of criticism, I like the mod a lot, this is just something that stuck out to me.

 

About mantling, it seems you can't just hold "mantle" to climb up something, you have to look up and move forward. Is that correct?

 

Thanks

Edited by Sayne
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Thief's jump was very slow-mo. Go and watch someone perform a long jump. It really doesn't last half as long as Thief made it. We did add an extra boost to our jump, otherwise the default doom 3 jump is very weak.

 

Concerning the dedicated "mantle" key: you can't look up into outer space or down at your feet while trying to mantle, you have to sort of look at the edge. And you don't have to walk forward to do a successful mantle, either jumping or the dedicated key.

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About mantling, it seems you can't just hold "mantle" to climb up something, you have to look up and move forward. Is that correct?

 

Thanks

 

Not necessarily. Depends on the situation. The mantle feature tries to judge what you want. For instance, go into the trainer and stand in front of the first big crate in the climbing section. Move up close like you would to climb such a thing. Now look straight down and hold mantle or hold jump mantle. Nothing happens. Turn your gaze up slightly so the crate is in view but you are not necessarily looking straight at the front edge. Repeat and the mantle works. Back off and and look straight up at the sky and repeat. Nothing. Look down slightly and repeat and even though you cannot even see the crate in the screen display it knows you want to mantle forward. Here is another situation: if you are facing a 4 poster bed and want to mantle, do you want to mantle onto the bedclothes or up onto the platform above? Try it. If you look roughly at the bedclothes you will mantle on to them; if you look up then you mantle up to the platform. It gets to be fairly natural after a while and even if you miss the odd one it seems natural to turn your gaze more to where you want to go and repeat.

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Indeed, we set up test maps with various gaps, looked at the physics and gravity code, etc etc, and after a LOT of testing came up with the current settings. They work very well, but are not exactly the same as Thief, so you will need to get used to them over some time.

 

Fair enough, but it still doesn't feel right to me. Sorry it just feels wrong (not even in comparison to Theif, but in comparison to lots of other shooters out there and in comparison to real-world parabolic physics). That's just my opinion, but there it is.

 

Can anything be tweaked in the console? Pm_jumpheight can be adjusted, but that doesn't make the character travel any farther in the jump, just makes him fly higher. G_gravity doesn't seem to have any effect, and I'm not necessarily concerned with the gravity, just the jump distance.

 

Again, great mod, but the jump bugging the crap out of me.

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Can anything be tweaked in the console? Pm_jumpheight can be adjusted, but that doesn't make the character travel any farther in the jump, just makes him fly higher. G_gravity doesn't seem to have any effect, and I'm not necessarily concerned with the gravity, just the jump distance.

 

Again, great mod, but the jump bugging the crap out of me.

Our jump "boost" forward is in our TDM code. You'd have to make a code change and compile it yourself as soon as we release the VC++ Solution.

 

The Thief jump did have a very nice feel of a person flying and then his legs "giving" a little when he landed. But I actually was bugged by the speed of T1/2's slow rise and gentle fall like Garrett was a dove coming in for a landing instead of a ~140 lb man.

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You can in principle tweak pretty much every aspect of jumping by changing the corresponding CVARs, but in my opinion this kind of things should not be changed by the player, as it potentially messes up gameplay. If an FM author didn't want you to jump over a specific ledge (maybe because you need to find a rope arrow first or lower a drawbridge) it kind of spoils the entire mission if you are able to jump over it anyway just because you altered your local settings. One could even argue this goes as far as cheating.

 

Why not change the maximum possible mantling height, because you feel it's too low?

Why not change the run speed to 200 because you feel the player should be faster?

Why not make AI walk more slowly, because you think they are too fast?

Why not decrease the AI's vertical FOV, because you think shouldn't be able to spot you up there?

The list can be continued for pages.

 

FM authors need to be able to rely on certain settings, if players out there are going to change whatever settings on their systems, this opens lots of cans of meaty worms. So, while you certainly can play around with settings for the fun of it, you should never change these when playing missions, it potentially breaks the game for you.

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greebo's basically right. But, Sayne, we hear you and have noted it. If quite a lot of other people are very bothered by the jump, we may revisit it and see if it can't be tweaked. The mod IS in beta officially, which means such things can still be adjusted. However, after a lot of feedback from many other players, I haven't heard anyone else complain about the jump yet, so at this point it may just be something you'll need to get used to.

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I personally had problems with the jumping too. In the training mission I gave up trying to get to the awning. I even looked in a dictionary to see if I knew what an awning was to make sure I was trying to jump in the correct direction. This is coming from someone who plays Counter Strike only for the non-combat climbing maps, but maybe I was doing something wrong in this case.

 

The first time I played Crown of Penitence I also got busted while attempting to jump from carpet to carpet.

 

 

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Yeah. There's a common misconception that TDM is trying to recreate the Thief gameplay style and/or engine. That's not always the case. Its made into something that's also our very own.

 

I can understand where you're coming from, though. It's the same reason that we got running/walking speed exactly the same as Thief.

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I'm pointing it out for now (and it is worth noting as feedback I guess), but I intend to let it sink in for a while before I do something rash, like ask for it to be altered.

 

I also definitely agree that Thief doesn't need to be emulated entirely.

 

 

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The first time I played Crown of Penitence I also got busted while attempting to jump from carpet to carpet.

 

I have made that jump on several occasions, but I have missed a few times as well. Instead of complaining about the jump distance, shouldn't the complaints be directed towards the mission itself? After all, the author should know the ideal distance (not max distance) to place the carpeting/awning/ledge to achieve the desired effect, so if it's too far it can be adjusted in updated/future FMs. 

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It felt like I should have been able to make the jump easily while running. What I'm saying is, if I give it some time I might end up with a completely different opinion of the jump distance instead of using Thief as a reference point. It's been less than two weeks since the beta was released.

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After playing the training mission I considered starting a thread like this one. Looks like someone beat me to it. :)

 

I know the team spent a lot of time tweaking these things and I fully respect it. Like greebo pointed out, consistency is important because authors rely on it. But since the release still wears a beta tag it is also OK re-tweak some (but not many) minor things.

 

IMO it's only the jump. Walking/running speed, mantling and all the other movements feel just right. This is subjective. I like games better when they focus more on fun, less on realism. Right now jumping feels more like in real life, like I should eat less junk food and do some training.

 

My vote goes for giving it some more length and make the character feel less weighty.

 

If the team decides to keep it like it is, I'll happily readjust my perception and get used to it. You did some great work here. Just imagine all these parameters that go into movement -- and people only complain about jumping...

 

^_^

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I fully unterstand what Sayne means and I second his proposal for a change. To me, the jump is one of the most important settings making a game feel good or not. 12 years ago we discovered the strafe jump in Quakeworld, and that made us feel like we were a little bit flying. When Q3A came out, they had removed this "bug", and it was amazing how much that removed the fun from running and jumping. Actually that was the reason why our clan never moved to Q3A, we just didn't enjoy it when running and jumping and moving. It always felt kind of wrong...

 

The jumps in T1/T2 really were perfect to me. The Doom3 jump was like you would never really like to do it for any reason.

 

It was also an important feature in T1 (even more like T2 I think? Can that be?) that when I was running away from guards, I started to jump several times. I'm not sure if that really speeded me up, but at least it made me *feel* that I was getting faster by the jumping, compared to just running.

 

Of course TDM doesn't have to be a 1:1 copy of the Thief movement! But I strongly vote for imitating the T1/T2 jump as much as possible. Just to make me feel good ;-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Agreed, that's not the main purpose of jumping. There is a small speed gain when jumping once or twice, but it won't speed you up at all on the long run, literally.

 

I can see the point of the jump-from-carpet-to-carpet issue, but jumping is definitely not intended to be used as free get-away ticket.

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