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Things that could be improved


Berny

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Does leaning forward not help in those situations?

Does leaning forward not help in those situations?

 

NH - I've been on a TDM hiatus for a while but it did seem that replaying some missions showed that it was perhaps harder to get loot from a chest than it was before. Has something changed?

 

I had quite a bit of trouble getting some items (flat out gave up on one - the penny in the chest in the guard's quarter's in A Noble Home) what so ever. Is there a reason that only the lid of a chest is ever frobbable, and the base isn't. Would seem to make this much less of an issue but I have vague recollections of this suggestion years ago.

 

EDIT - and yes I use all the leans and combination of such, and have done since the Assassins demo.

Edited by Mr Mike
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It doesn't help for old maps, but for new creations, not making the chest/box bottoms frobbable, only making the lids frobbable totally resolves this issue, without the player needing to lean, mantle on chests, and camera around horribly.

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"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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What's the reason for making the chest body frobable in the first place then? I assumed it must serve some purpose.

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I imagine the original idea was to have the whole box highlighted like T2. There's a good case it's better only the lid highlights than both sides highlight separately though.

 

Forward leaning is exactly what you want to do in this situation. But ideally, mappers should expand the frob box size so that frob highlighting occurs further back.

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

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But ideally, mappers should expand the frob box size so that frob highlighting occurs further back.

 

So is this determined in each map for each item? Otherwise I would have suggested to increase frob size for getting items or lockpicking on a whole! I rarely lean at all and leaning forward is just another key that isn't really necessary except for very few occations. For me the less keys in a game the better!

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As I said, forward leaning doesn't always resolve the issue, or certainly leaves it as a game of swooping the mouse around until it magically selects the item you want.

 

Would it be possible that items of value have a stronger, or larger frob zone than junk items? This may also require disabling until a box or safe is open etc. This would also help scenarios such as when you're trying to pick up the expensive wine bottle at the back of a shelf surrounded by empty bottles and what not.

 

'Press X to win' is the antitheses of good gaming for me but scenarios such as taking loot from a box should be as slick and simple as possible for a rewarding and non-frustrating experience imho.

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leaning forward is just another key that isn't really necessary except for very few occations
You should just try using it more. Increases blackjack and pickpocket range, allows to pick the locks just out of reach, and more.

Can't think of a reason not to make chest base non-frobbable though, would definitely smoothen the experience.

Edited by chedap
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So is this determined in each map for each item?

 

Yes.

 

Would it be possible that items of value have a stronger, or larger frob zone than junk items? This may also require disabling until a box or safe is open etc. This would also help scenarios such as when you're trying to pick up the expensive wine bottle at the back of a shelf surrounded by empty bottles and what not.

 

They typically do, but it depends on the mapper. There are several controls, size, distance and priority for "frobness" of an item. Frob is disabled until things are opened already by default. A wine bottle at the back should have it's frob_bias increased, so it highlights "more" than the junk bottles in front.

 

See http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Frobbing for more details, but all these controls already exist.

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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It just means activating something in the game that's highlighted. You frob a door to open it, you frob loot to pick it up.

 

So is this determined in each map for each item?

 

There are frob defaults of course.. you don't *have* to set it for each item, but you can fine-tune it if you want.

 

I'm happy to hear there's a chest workaround. I seem to have difficulty with them too. All chests in my map are going to be easy-frob I think :)

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I thought of an improvement for secret switches and stuff. When you approach an object that can be interacted with, it lights up to let you know that you can frob it. It would make finding secret switches a bit better balanced if for example there would be a delay in the highlighting, if the switch was defined as "secret" by the level designers. So you couldn't just strafe next to a bookshelf waiting for things to light and spamming the use key. You would need to either know which book is a lever, or slowly and tediously go through the shelf one book at a time.

 

This feature could be combined with randomization, by including the necessity to investigate for clues in the mission. There would be information hinting that "book A3" is a secret switch, and the next time you play the hint and the secret would be different. So if you would have a mission objective saying "Find information about secret X" -the player couldn't just skip the investigation part and go straight for the secret. And because of the randomization, the investigation part wouldn't be just some chore that you need to do in order to get an objective checked for mission completion.

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or slowly and tediously go through the shelf one book at a time.

 

I'm not sure slow tedium is something to encourage, but mappers can already simulate this by reducing the frob distance on secret things, so you have to be much close and pointing at them directly.

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Random thought that is probably not going to happen for obvious reasons... While playing Tg again (yeah I bought the trilogy :)) one of the things I seem to miss the most in TDM is the smartass comments of Garret every now and then. I love those. Altho' I understand that because we're not using Garret for copyright reasons, mappers ended up inventing a bunch of thiefs in TDM and this makes my suggestion near impossible. Add to that the fact that in that case, we'd need special dialogues for every map and I know it won't happen :(

 

But yeah... That's probably the only thing I really miss in TDM.

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Sometimes I want to scream

So long that life escapes

And then I'd shut my eyes

I'd be the angel of disgrace

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One thing is bothering me... (or my slow system, actually)

Whenever you start a new mission, you first get the Intro with typically quite a bunch of text to read, followed by the selection of the difficulty.

The next to happen is that you get a couple of minutes that I use for having my first coffee-break, because the first loading of a mission typically takes quite a long time.

I wonder if it would be possible to trigger a 'simulated mission start' while you are reading the Intro stuff.

Because once the first loading of a map is complete and all the map info has been processed, any following load up of the mission is much faster.

I understand this might be hard to implement, but I would apreciate it very much.

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One thing is bothering me... (or my slow system, actually)

Whenever you start a new mission, you first get the Intro with typically quite a bunch of text to read, followed by the selection of the difficulty.

The next to happen is that you get a couple of minutes that I use for having my first coffee-break, because the first loading of a mission typically takes quite a long time.

I wonder if it would be possible to trigger a 'simulated mission start' while you are reading the Intro stuff.

Because once the first loading of a map is complete and all the map info has been processed, any following load up of the mission is much faster.

I understand this might be hard to implement, but I would apreciate it very much.

 

I remember asking this question years ago, but now that I've been in the code, it's easier to understand why it's not a simple change.

 

The design is that the *.map file isn't read until after the difficulty selection is made. Knowing which difficulty was chosen is important for setting up the optional shop and sifting through the objects, weeding out the ones that only appear in the difficulty modes not selected.

 

A lot of the loading time is taken up by reading texture files, blah blah blah, and the order in which things are done is important.

 

So it's not simple to break that sequence into bits that can be done in parallel.

 

That having been said, it's a task I'd like to take on at some point. I can't believe there are no optimizations available. But I'm standing on the shoulders of giants who went before me, and if they say it's gotta be this way, there's a very good chance that I won't find anything.

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Random thought that is probably not going to happen for obvious reasons... While playing Tg again (yeah I bought the trilogy :)) one of the things I seem to miss the most in TDM is the smartass comments of Garret every now and then. I love those. Altho' I understand that because we're not using Garret for copyright reasons, mappers ended up inventing a bunch of thiefs in TDM and this makes my suggestion near impossible. Add to that the fact that in that case, we'd need special dialogues for every map and I know it won't happen :(

 

But yeah... That's probably the only thing I really miss in TDM.

 

The closest we can get is a campaign that has the same main character passing through several missions. I don't plan to do that for the Steele missions. I'm not sure if Crucible of Omens has something planned.

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Any news about the key changes that I and someone else asked for recently? Like that every key doing something should also be used to undo the same thing. Like Frobing a document in the world and press Frob again to close it!

Edited by wesp5
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Depth perception and bumping into AI

 

Some players have trouble with depth perception in first person games, and this makes it hard for them to land hits with short-range melee weapons, and judge the range of melee weapons of any sort. The orignal Thief games had poorly coded base AI interaction, so bumping into the AI did not alert them. But I never considered it as a bug. The main character is a master of stealth, and he wouldn't bump into his enemies while sneaking up on them. Of course that is inconsistent because no other stealth mechanic in the game is automated like that, but I still think it was a genuinely positive feature, rather than just a programming oversight. It helps players with poor depth perception find the proper distance for blackjacking guards. I guess you can be the judge of which one is less immersive. Not alerting guards when you make contact with them, or repeatedly swinging and missing with the blackjack until you get close enough to hit the target.

 

Inb4 git gud

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I remember asking this question years ago, but now that I've been in the code, it's easier to understand why it's not a simple change.

 

The design is that the *.map file isn't read until after the difficulty selection is made. Knowing which difficulty was chosen is important for setting up the optional shop and sifting through the objects, weeding out the ones that only appear in the difficulty modes not selected.

 

A lot of the loading time is taken up by reading texture files, blah blah blah, and the order in which things are done is important.

 

So it's not simple to break that sequence into bits that can be done in parallel.

 

That having been said, it's a task I'd like to take on at some point. I can't believe there are no optimizations available. But I'm standing on the shoulders of giants who went before me, and if they say it's gotta be this way, there's a very good chance that I won't find anything.

 

Just rambling on about a couple of thoughts I had when I read this:

 

On consideration, this should be possible for some difficulty changes.

The LOD\SEED system changes map entities and entity attributes on the fly rather than prior to map load so

an equivalent difficulty based change should also work.

 

The bigger problem (and I'm not sure how much of a problem it is) would be changes to map worldspawn geometry, changes to light

locations, changes to pathing. I know that at least two of those can be changed dynamically so I guess the pre-calculation

phase on them being lost wouldn't be that big of a deal. As far as worldspawn entities? Can those also be dynamically created

and destroyed? Certainly you couldn't dynamically seal and unseal a live map so it would only work for cosmetic geometry anyway.

 

I think part of the problem is that the map load design was probably influenced by Fidcal's use case in Heart of Lone Salvation which

uses the difficulty selector to choose different "performance" levels. Now we have the LOD\SEED system which can do a simpler

geometry evaluation like HoLS with the LOD_BIAS spawnargs or can do more traditional dynamic LOD for performance. Perhaps cutting

off the ability to change worldspawn geometry based on difficulty might be a good "stick" approach to get mappers to use LOD for performance

variance... though I think it has already been widely adopted with only HoLS being the only outlier anyway.

 

@Biker. Does the new HoLS version still offer 3 different performance levels (per difficulty)?

 

As far as parallelism goes in general, there are a couple of barriers that you may want to look at tinkering with.

 

1) As I recall, the interface between the engine executable and the game dll is serial. I'm pretty sure this can be improved

without hitting any OS roadblocks.

 

2) The engine initialization itself was meant to create threads for the render frontend and backend as well as the game code (etc).

There are bugs in Windows API that prevent it from working in certain orders but the research into the workarounds for those problems

was done by Carmack already.

 

 

John Carmack - This was explicitly to support dual processor systems. It worked well on my dev system, but it never seemed stable enough in broad use, so we backed off from it. Interestingly, we only just found out last year why it was problematic (the same thing applied to Rage’s r_useSMP option, which we had to disable on the PC) – on windows, OpenGL can only safely draw to a window that was created by the same thread. We created the window on the launch thread, but then did all the rendering on a separate render thread. It would be nice if doing this just failed with a clear error, but instead it works on some systems and randomly fails on others for no apparent reason.

 

The Doom 4 codebase now jumps through hoops to create the game window from the render thread and pump messages on it, but the better solution, which I have implemented in another project under development, is to leave the rendering on the launch thread, and run the game logic in the spawned thread.

 

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...)

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Wouldn't it be possible to move the difficulty selection before map loading and intro movies? Like the difficulty could already be selected from the mission main menu after a mission has been installed? It would fit nicely with the "finished at difficulty" stats there and then the intro movies could play while the map is loading. After all the difficulty is not in-game content anyway so it need not to be on the objectives page at all!

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I would not like that idea.

I prefer to see upfront if some difficulty would require ghosting or something I one might want to avoid (such as killing someone).

The idea I had in mind was to 'simply' trigger a simulated mission start with default difficulty (e.g. Normal).

From my experience re-starting a mission on another difficulty does not cause the entire map to be calculated from scratch all over again and is way faster then the first startup.

So, that first simulated startup would do the donkey work and would basicly be disposed off, and a real start would follow afteron with the real difficulty settings.

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I prefer to see upfront if some difficulty would require ghosting or something I one might want to avoid (such as killing someone).

 

Oops, I didn't think of that.

 

So, that first simulated startup would do the donkey work and would basicly be disposed off, and a real start would follow afteron with the real difficulty settings.

 

This sounds like a plan :)!

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This dawned on me while making the master list of reverbs and checking all the sounds.

 

It would be GREAT if there was a way to dampen the frequencies of an AI when they leave a room, or are in another location, and have it sound like they are, and not just a lower volume version of the existing sample.

 

Ideas on how to do this.

 

1) If there was some type of equalizer built into the mod, it can completely be done with programming.

2) add second set of vocal samples with changed frequency, and make only play when a wall of some sort is between the AI and player

 

Yeh, this is a huge thing, I guess, don't expect it to happen but would be amazing if was figured out.

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Probably better to wait for SFX to be implemented, rather than put extra work into all that stuff. :)

 

What is this SFX? Also as an active developer, any chance to get the key suggestions to be implemented that were asked for? Like using FROB to close a document in the world or using HOLSTER again to pull out the last weapon?

Edited by wesp5
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