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Things that could be improved


Berny

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Is there a way to get into water more quietly? It could just be clumsiness on my part but I tend to make a racket like I jumped in with both feet even in shallow water.

 

My kingdom for like reverse mantling.

 

 

There's been discussions about reverse mantling, so somewhere out there is an explanation why it's not in.

I don't recall too much. Something about it might be hard to pull off without body awareness, and that's not part of our game.

 

Using it to slip quietly into water is an interesting idea.

 

I have a habit of always crouching before dropping off ledges to cushion it a bit.

I wonder if anyone's ever thought of the idea that if you drop off a ledge or into water in crouch mode it could force a reverse mantle-like drop, since I believe the only reason you'd do that is to cushion your drop or slip down as best you can, and it gets around some problems of placement & consistency otherwise hard to make into a mechanic. So that would be my version of the proposal for discussion.

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Well, crouch-walking/running is generally something done in order to be stealthier, which is consistent with wanting to enter water quietly. My concern with an automatic 'reverse mantle' would be that mantling immobilises the player, which is quite a dramatic thing to do without being explicitly prompted. (If I just want to drop down, must I stand up first? What if that makes me more visible? Etc.)

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Oh yeah, "reverse mantling" would be reverse mantling off of all drops, I wasn't thinking that far. It as just the closest description I thought of. Is that doable? Like if the water is close enough to the drop, like a body-length or somethin, you get a smaller splash and much quieter noise. A splish. A plop.

 

The splash it makes now gives me a recurring mental image of my master thieves getting to the edge of the water, screwing their eyes shut, holding their noses, and jumping in.

 

I don't want to ask for a forced action though.

Edited by Ankai
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I should qualify what I said. I wouldn't actually want a full on reverse mantle. What I'd like is just a slight hobble down over an edge when you go over crouched. So, e.g., if you were facing away from it, it'd be like the equivalent of sitting down, putting your hands behind you, and letting them lower you a bit, and then you drop down. And if the player does it facing towards, then it's like they bring their stomachs to the edge with their hands that lower them a bit, and then drop down. It's just a slight hobble in the animation, a bit more lowering before the final drop-down, and it doesn't immobilize them or put players in a vulnerable situation. It could also be used if someone backs out in the middle of an upward mantle, if they're near the top of it, to quietly drop back down. And yeah, slipping into water crouched would just be a matter of having a quieter sound.

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If the mantling key would be used for that purpose, there would be no risk to it happen automatically, which is something I'm no big friend of, too.

 

If it is just about landing more slowly when crouching over an edge, it could be done by modifying the player script. If the player starts falling (negative z velocity) and is crouching, he gets decelerated for the first one or two seconds of the fall. This would reduce the velocity of him when landing, reducing both faling noise and damage.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Reverse mantling is an interesting idea and those parameters are cool, but I would be of the mind that if the idea is explored it would be best for the function to be bound to its own key since as pointed out before, it takes control away from the player momentarily.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I suggest just leaning forward over the edge and holding the mantle key. It doesn't trigger after a second, then nothing happens.

 

This matches the safe to fail nature of mantling. You press the dedicated mantle key. It doesn't work, nothing happens, no noise or displacement is made.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm gonna suggest an improvement on something that I've not even experienced yet! I know 2.05 is a ways away but I was thinking today about what would make a regular EAX reverb effect into a believable EAX reverb effect and I better jolt it down here. I think, obviously, places with tile and big halls should have more reverb, but as I was in a pretty echoey place today I noticed that the echo becomes less pronounced the closer you are to the sound emitter.

 

The reverb in Thief felt kinda silly since even your own footsteps sounded like they were coming from everywhere. Will the EFX we'll be using do this sort of attenuation automatically? If it didn't, I wonder if you could have it that reverb lessens when coming closer to a speaker (but never quite goes away) the same way/with the same type of code that makes sounds lose volume when going away from a speaker.

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I'm gonna suggest an improvement on something that I've not even experienced yet! I know 2.05 is a ways away but I was thinking today about what would make a regular EAX reverb effect into a believable EAX reverb effect and I better jolt it down here. I think, obviously, places with tile and big halls should have more reverb, but as I was in a pretty echoey place today I noticed that the echo becomes less pronounced the closer you are to the sound emitter.

 

The reverb in Thief felt kinda silly since even your own footsteps sounded like they were coming from everywhere. Will the EFX we'll be using do this sort of attenuation automatically? If it didn't, I wonder if you could have it that reverb lessens when coming closer to a speaker (but never quite goes away) the same way/with the same type of code that makes sounds lose volume when going away from a speaker.

Maybe the way it's done in Thief: DS? I thought that was the most succesful attempt.

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  • 2 weeks later...

One thing which bugs me unless I am doing it all wrong

Why can't I grab rope by frobbing it rather that jumping onto it because using jump can mean that you fall if you don't do it quite right

Mantling key doesn't seem to work either and it doesn't seem to work the same way as a ladder does

Edited by Oldjim
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The short answer is probably because that's how Thief did it.

It had already established the mechanic, and why reinvent the wheel and potentially confuse people.

 

I think it's linked to jump because that's very deliberate. You can't just walk into a rope and get stuck to it, which is maybe more important for a rope hanging potentially anywhere than a ladder already against a wall. Well not so much the placement as attaching to a rope puts you up "up" hanging on it in a way ladders don't; so the attachment is more radical than a ladder & requiring jumping is part of that. Ropes aren't typically down to ground level anyway. They're often hanging over drop offs, so whatever else it has, jumping on to one has to still be there in any event.

 

But the idea to push the 'mantle' to attach yourself on to one sounds interesting. It's not immediately intuitive it should do that, but I can see it being more failsafe and avoiding a loud 'clop' sound if you miss ... the same argument by the way that led to the mantle key being made in the first place (to avoid jumping to mantle). I wouldn't be against that as a feature.

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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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There are even some Thief players who will not play a Thief FM, no matter how good its reputation, if they hear that you cannot blackjack in it.

 

 

The solution to that issue is to allow a player to choose a to take a blackjack or not.

 

I would like to see guards respond to hearing you pick a lock, especially when they are right next to you.

Fix things that break the immersion. As for unpredictability, I would love if a guard did something I didn't

expect. That would make it harder, and really keep you on your toes.

 

The thing I would like the most though is the ability to suffocate a guard with a moss arrow as you can

in Thief.

 

Oh and better Alt Tabbing.

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Guys,

 

I would like the ingame maps (and loading screen) not affected by image_downSizeLimit command.

 

When I'm playing a big FM like "Erasing the Trail", I have to reduce quality with image_downSizeLimit = 256 or 128

Problem is that the ingame maps become unreadable.

 

So it would be very nice to code something like this :

 

IF image is located in ...\guis\assets\game_maps\ or

image = ...\guis\assets\game_maps\loading_screen.tga

 

THEN don't execute image_downSizeLimit algorithm

 

 

(street signs become also unreadable, but I think it's a little harder to detect the images used for street signs)

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Hi Guys,

 

I would like the ingame maps (and loading screen) not affected by image_downSizeLimit command.

 

When I'm playing a big FM like "Erasing the Trail", I have to reduce quality with image_downSizeLimit = 256 or 128

Problem is that the ingame maps become unreadable.

 

So it would be very nice to code something like this :

 

IF image is located in ...\guis\assets\game_maps\ or

image = ...\guis\assets\game_maps\loading_screen.tga

 

THEN don't execute image_downSizeLimit algorithm

 

 

(street signs become also unreadable, but I think it's a little harder to detect the images used for street signs)

 

Edit:

 

My previous edit was a bad idea.

 

There is a material stage keyword: "nopicmip" which prevents the image_downsize cvar from working.

 

This excerpt in material.cpp

 

 

 
else if ( !token.Icmp( "nopicmip" ) ) {
            allowPicmip = false;
            continue;
}
 

 

could be edited to include a logical or for the image path.

 

I'll have to look at the GUI code to see if it would even respect this process.

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The GUI def doesn't have the ability to define all material attributes but if your GUI path matches

a material path it seems to use that material def instead of using the built-in material def that the GUI ships

with. If I interpreted all that correctly. adding override materials with nopicmip should fix this for players.

 

Example:

 

1) Create a materials folder under your darkmod\fms\erasing\ folder

2) Create a erasing_nopicmip.mtr material

 

Example material:

 

 

 
guis\assets\game_maps\loading_screen
{
 
{
map \guis\assets\game_maps\loading_screen
nopicmip
}
 
}
 

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Preliminary testing shows this method works for background images

but I tried doing it for fonts too and that has failed.

 

I'll research a code based solution since the material creation process is labor intensive.

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Heh, this hack might already be present for fonts. We simply need to rename them:

image_init.cpp

 
    // HACK: to allow keep fonts from being mip'd, as new ones will be introduced with localization
    // this keeps us from having to make a material for each font tga
    if ( name.Find( "fontImage_") >= 0 ) {
        allowDownSize = false;
}
 

So to add GUIS to the exclude list

else if (image->classification == IC_GUIS)
{allowDownSize = false; }
 

Probably should give fonts an image class so that they no longer use the filename hack...

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After banging away against int comparison syntax checks last night, this is what I will be trying tonight unless

someone better at C++ can tell my why I'm wrong:

 

 

 
enum IMAGE_CLASSIFICATION {
    IC_NPC,
    IC_WEAPON,
    IC_MONSTER,
    IC_MODELGEOMETRY,
    IC_ITEMS,
    IC_MODELSOTHER,
    IC_GUIS,
    IC_WORLDGEOMETRY,
    IC_FONT,
    IC_OTHER,
    IC_COUNT
};

struct imageClassificate_t {
    const char *rootPath;
    const char *desc;
    int type;
    int maxWidth;
    int maxHeight;
    bool downSizeI;
};

typedef idList< int > intList;

const imageClassificate_t IC_Info[] = {
    { "models/characters", "Characters", IC_NPC, 512, 512, true },
    { "models/weapons", "Weapons", IC_WEAPON, 512, 512, true },
    { "models/monsters", "Monsters", IC_MONSTER, 512, 512, true },
    { "models/mapobjects", "Model Geometry", IC_MODELGEOMETRY, 512, 512, true },
    { "models/items", "Items", IC_ITEMS, 512, 512, true },
    { "models", "Other model textures", IC_MODELSOTHER, 512, 512, true },
    { "guis/assets", "Guis", IC_GUIS, 256, 256, false },
    { "textures", "World Geometry", IC_WORLDGEOMETRY, 256, 256, true },
    { "fonts", "Fonts", IC_FONT, 256, 256, false },
    { "", "Other", IC_OTHER, 256, 256, true }
};


static int ClassifyImage( const char *name ) {
    const idStr str = name;

    for ( int i = 0; i < IC_COUNT; i++ ) {
        if ( str.Find( IC_Info[i].rootPath, false ) == 0 ) {
            image->allowDownSize = IC_Info[i].downSizeI;
            return IC_Info[i].type;
        }
    }
    return IC_OTHER;
}
 

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People who use image_downSize to reduce texture memory will have blurry maps, menus and fonts if they lower it too much.

 

This will prevent those image types from becoming blurry by disabling image_downSize on fonts and guis. (If I can get it working.)

 

I can at least offer the workaround of the material def for GUI images without code changes,

but fonts are a real pain unless we wanna rename all the font textures and edit all the dat files that point to them...

 

(Technically two non code-fix solutions exist but they are both tedious...)

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Ah sweet, that has bugged me for ages! You get the same bugged main menu and fonts etc when you copy the TDM folder from one PC to another and then launch on the second PC - so I am hoping your tweak will fix that also.

 

Hmm. That sounds more like resolution defaulting back to the fail-safe of 640x480 and associated texture LOD levels.

 

I think the Dhewm 64-bit branch had better automatic resolution detection so perhaps

that would be solved once our variant of that branch is merged into master. I'll look at the 64-bit

screen initialization code and see if it looks like Dhewm when I get a chance.

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Hmm. That sounds more like resolution defaulting back to the fail-safe of 640x480 and associated texture LOD levels.

I dont think so, because if I delete the darkmod.cfg file and let TDM recreate it the res is still 640*480 but all the menu's are nice and sharp again.

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