Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Thief revisited and compared


Fidcal

Recommended Posts

AFAIK it's not a marker but the signal propagated by the sound. This is the same as object collision. If drop or throw an object the audible sound comes to the player but an inaudible 'sound' (I call it a signal but it's called a propagated sound meaning propagated to the AI) is triggered. The same can be (indeed I think already is but disabled) applied to a door sound. This is why I think the best solution is to keep this signal reasonably low so only an AI who is right near the door will go to a high alert and distant ones won't. This propagated sound system is already controllable. All that is needed is to only do this if the player activates the door just as collision signals are only sent if the player drops a goblet and not if an AI accidentally kicks one or knocks on by opening a door.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you're talking about two different things. Sotha is talking about *seeing* the door.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, the noticing left-open doors behaviour is already working (just with the problem of not knowing who left it open).

 

We're talking about seeing the door *actually open* right in front of you. Currently, you can swing a door open right in front of an AI (even an alerted one!) and he won't notice or care. That's a bit silly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, the noticing left-open doors behaviour is already working (just with the problem of not knowing who left it open).

 

We're talking about seeing the door *actually open* right in front of you. Currently, you can swing a door open right in front of an AI (even an alerted one!) and he won't notice or care. That's a bit silly.

 

Yeah. For immersion *seeing* the door open is more important than *hearing* the door open. We are probably assuming the thief opens all doors with stealth and carefulness. I hope someone figures this out.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

for the sound-alert:

So, why don´t do it the other way around? Make the player opening doors in stealth the standard and add a 'bash door'-cmd that will alert nearby guards when the player is in a hurry or want to distract guards. And if we do this for doors, the same should be done for chests and stuff like that. Same thing. Also this could be done for lockpicking? Adding a slower lockpick-rate that is less louder, and the normal pace will make AI suspicious?

 

This standard could be: much lower door-sound, much slower or even player-controlled (with help of tdm_door_control).

 

Actually you can have tdm_door_control activated without changing/breaking anything. It´s only active when you hold the frob-key, but you have to remember that you don´t use it on locked doors.

Edited by LEGION

-> Crisis of Capitalism

-> 9/11 Truth

->

(hard stuff), more
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On the Eidos comm chat, not the regular comm chat, back in the day, when it was busy in the cripple burrick. We had a great group of guys that were really the first ones to perfect ghosting, and the varied extremes of it. Sneak was the one that started it all. He was able to ghost the golden child in T2 by letting his system run over night, and nudging and waiting to get past that little creep, he did it, and had screen shots too. Been a really long time for that.

Supreme is unseen unheard, no busts, keys put back, shut doors, no use of ammo, hard core man. I'm too lazy for that. :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I remember in the last Randy Smith interview him mentioning something about video games being a form of spirituality for our generation, one kind anyway, with its own meanings and little rituals. I didn't know how far to believe it, but when I think about ghosting, I think there's something to it. Especially the hardcore kind... It's getting way past just being about "fun". It's like you're on a mission to do it, do it carefully, and do it right.

 

Maybe it is a kind of insanity, but a liberating kind.

I don't know... I sometimes think that way about building, lol.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For me it´s an immersion-thing. Meaning given the case sth goes wrong I won´t reload a 'save' save, I just go on but I do it in a way as I would in real life. No other game than Thief/TDM had that need for immersion for me. Other games are just Entertainment, but TDM goes a level higher, it´s so special, I´ll never abandon TDM. :wub: You can try, but you won´t get rid of me. :o

 

Hehe, that golden child-issue is really funny, especially that my actual Thief2-save is exactly after I read the builder scripture and I already heard the child, but I don´t remember what will happen next, so I´ll try but I think it´s more fun to hear the noises this little thing makes after it spot you...

-> Crisis of Capitalism

-> 9/11 Truth

->

(hard stuff), more
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I didn't follow the discussion very much, so I'll just continue to comment on the first post of this thread... ;) I am dealing with a nasty cold at the moment and the best way to do that is to get a canister of tea next to your pc and play some classic thief. :)

 

I played the Thief 2 Dracula Reloaded campaign, because I always like vampire stories, besides Twilight maybe and I never actually saw any Dracula movie other than the Leslie Nielsen parody years ago. It's a five mission campaign with intro and epilogue mission. The campaign was ok-ish. Nothing too fancy, but I also wouldn't go that far to say that I wasted my time. Despite some neat views, the graphics were rather bad, but I recognized a lot of cgtextures.com material, including some textures I converted for TDM myself, which made me feel like I was playing a low-res TDM. This lead to some direct comparisons between the games independent of this thread.

 

It is really astonishing how well TDM improves the gameplay experience in nearly every aspect compared to T2. Fidcal already mentioned the mantling. OH MY GOD!!! I spent 5 minutes trying to get off a rope-arrow without falling to death. There are many, many more aspects, in which TDM succeeds, like way better animations, ambient soundtracks and graphics of course. It's really too many things, so I'll just concentrate on the other things, that T2 still manages better.

 

The first thing I noticed positively about T2 was that movement felt a lot smoother and faster. I know there have been lengthy experiments to exactly match the playerspeed in TDM to that of T2 by reproducing architecture in DR and doing a run-test. But well, it still feels totally different somehow. Especially crouch speed. Raising the playerspeed at this stage of development would of course alter the difficulties of FMs, but I guess I'll do some experiments locally, to find values that feel right. The jump-issue has also been brought up numerous times already. The TDM-jump feels a little weird, especially when compared to the T2-jump.

 

The second aspect I noticed is that the playercharacter is personalized very much by the many voiceovers. While the author of Dracula Reloaded overused those voiceovers a little, I still think those voiceovers do wonders as far as identification with the character etc. goes. You start feeling like playing a character and not just a camera... :-) There once have been plans to record some voiceovers for TDM, but I didn't hear anything of those for quite some time. How are the things going here?

 

Finally, T2 manages to create some very neat lighting occasionally, because of the use of lightmaps. Of course there is not too much we can do to improve TDM in this aspect currently, despite the usual time-consuming tricks with projected lighttextures or baking AO on diffuse maps. However, I had a discussion about this with my close friend namespace recently, whom some of you might still know from his work on the GTK Radiant. He suggested that we cold implement Screen Space Ambient Occlusion if we can access the z-buffer. That would be really awesome, although I'd need a new rig to run TDM with this feature enabled, but it'd be totally worth it!! :) So, can we access the z-buffer?

 

I hope I don't restart a discussion with my post that has already been held in this thread.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm now on the 4th level of When Still and there are a lot of rock and cave areas (so far.) Whereas the first 3 levels looked really good this level shows another advantage of TDM. T2 caves tend to be hard angles with rock wallpaper. I do recall some rock work in 7 Sisters down a crypt I think though which looked the best I'd seen in T2. I think it was a combination of texturing and lighting that hid the angularity. But generally in T2 the caves are nowhere near as good as architecture and interiors.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@STiFU

 

There is some interesting graphics work being done by Sikkpin on doom3world.org you should have a look at. This thread has a good number of examples of high dynamic range, ambient occlusion, and soft shadows...

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=22822

 

Some of the effects are a bit overdone but technically it's impressive considering the limitations imposed by the SDK. I imagine this sort of thing will improve dramatically once the engine source is released and these things can be done properly.

 

I'd also like to tip my hat to JCDenton for his work implementing HDR for TDM. I look forward to being able to use it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unless something new has been discovered (Sikkpin says he is up to something...), all AO implementations in Doom 3 require a hack that involves painting the Z-Buffer to a texture. This takes a heavy performance toll.

 

I believe this is the thread that references this hack:

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=21576&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Phew, thanks for the link Rich. I've just been skimming the images in the thread because it is a little too long for a detailed read. There's some amazing stuff there. I wouldn't have thought the AO passes look THAT good. The soft-shadow stuff is of course also very neat. Both techniques would be great additions to TDM. :)

 

@Fidcal: I just tried "King's Story" as the screens looked pretty nice and I got serious framerate drops at mission 2 too. Like 1 to 3 fps! :D I never had problems like this with TDM, so Shadowhide can suck it!! :D However, a restart of the game made it run a little smoother again. I didn't finish the mission so far though, because it's not too interesting.

 

@nbohr: Dude, the second thread you posted is nearly a year old... ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

:laugh: Yeah... but the end of Sikkpin's newer thread still indicates that he's experimenting with the problem... You have to look for the bread-crumbs at D3W....

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There once have been plans to record some voiceovers for TDM, but I didn't hear anything of those for quite some time. How are the things going here?

 

There are some voice over bits available to use ingame...random little comments, but nobody has used them yet to my knowledge. I'm going to record more when the guy who did the player voice for me is around again. It's also possible that I forgot to upload them. I'll have to double check, because Brodie and I did record quite a few random player comments. It might be that I didn't have them all processed in time for a release and since forgot about them. Eeek.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The first thing I noticed positively about T2 was that movement felt a lot smoother and faster. I know there have been lengthy experiments to exactly match the playerspeed in TDM to that of T2 by reproducing architecture in DR and doing a run-test. But well, it still feels totally different somehow. Especially crouch speed. Raising the playerspeed at this stage of development would of course alter the difficulties of FMs, but I guess I'll do some experiments locally, to find values that feel right. The jump-issue has also been brought up numerous times already. The TDM-jump feels a little weird, especially when compared to the T2-jump.

 

I agree for the jump-'feeling', but the speed? Oh, hell, I feel completely the other way, actually I modified TDM to have an optional slower Playerspeed, also I increased the bob a lot, but still it feels a little 'stiff'.

 

So, if the Team is going to change some Playerspeed-values, please don´t make it in secret ;) (I know you wouldn´t, I just want to make sure) so that I can adjust my 'mod'. :)

 

Oh, and get well, STiFU.

Edited by LEGION

-> Crisis of Capitalism

-> 9/11 Truth

->

(hard stuff), more
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are some voice over bits available to use ingame...random little comments, but nobody has used them yet to my knowledge. I'm going to record more when the guy who did the player voice for me is around again. It's also possible that I forgot to upload them. I'll have to double check, because Brodie and I did record quite a few random player comments. It might be that I didn't have them all processed in time for a release and since forgot about them. Eeek.

 

There was a moment in Glenham Tower where I tried to use the old busted machine and it broke apart and the thief said something like "hmm" and I just LOLed because it was so perfect for the moment, the wry consternation :)

shadowdark50.gif keep50.gif
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 3 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...