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Rottenberry

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That's true, but it's pretty random. Sometimes people go into shock, sometimes they don't.

 

Interestingly enough, I read an article a while back where a security professional interviewed someone who had been in prison for a while. The interviewee had witnessed and taking part in many "prison assassinations" or shivings. He was saying that the only sure way of really making sure a guy goes down with one stab is to stab him in the armpit (which usually means the attacker has to lift the arm up with the other hand, but that's do-able when people are taken by surprise). The reason was: This immediately collapses a lung and puts the victim into shock. After that, they're much less likely to cry out/continue to fight back.

 

Often the goal of a realistic game / simulator is to reward people for doing the smarter thing. So rather than simulate a random chance of the person screaming out or not, Thief chose to punish us every time we killed by making a lot of noise, because there was usually a better alternative to killing available.

 

Using a flight simulator analogy, you CAN sometimes crash land a plane without deploying the landing gear and walk away, but most of the time you don't. So the simulator punishes you for not putting your landing gear down before you land by killing you every time. :)

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  • 2 months later...

For me personally, more realism = more fun, and i want a thief type game that comes as close as possible to actually being in a mansion stealin' stuff (without the risk of actually going to jail). A real thief will usually avoid killing or even touching a guard, preferring to slip by un-noticed. It is extremely difficult to render someone dead or unconscious without attracting attention - even if you sever the spinal cord at the base of the skull, the body will twitch and spasm violoently for potentially minutes as random nerve pulses travel through the body. People being choked thrash around violently, and will probably make a lot of noise. Even blackjacking is pretty noisy (hit someone on the head even lightly and it makes quite an audible sound), and there is a fairly high chance that you will just hurt them and make you victim cry out in pain before you get another whack in... a pure thieving expereience should involve no murder or violent assault unless the thief is cornered. Flashbombs, throwing sand in the guards eyes and other distractions are the preferred method of escape once detected.

 

Granted, the Thief series was always pretty flexible as far as murder and assault went, and if that is your cup of tea, you should have the option, but i think there should be some realistic penalties for doing so.

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Actually, now that I think about it, you could always sneak up behind someone and use chloroform or similar to render someone unconcious, use of poisons and chemicals is probably the only way you could have a truly stealthy KO, but you would have to be careful to lower the body to the ground, as a falling body makes a pretty loud and distinctive sound, even from a couple of feet onto carpet...

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Even with chloroform there would still be thrashing for a few seconds before it took effect I would think.

 

If you read above in this thread, I think you'll find most people agreed with you that trying to choke someone out would be way too noisy.

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Chloroform wouldn't cause much thrashing if used well, i.e. place it over the face as fast as possible, and by the time they've got chance to cry out, they have a cloth in their mouth and they're feeling sleeeepy. Obviously also depends on the dose, although if you're trying not to kill anyone, then a high dose carries a high risk of death.

Indeed, blackjacking itself is very unrealistic, IMHO, especially with the helmeted guards that weren't unKOable - imagine the clang! I'd tentatively suggest the option to use a sedative soaked cloth instead of a blackjack, or at least have alternative methods. A club to the face certainly wouldn't knock someone out, and yet leaning forward + BJ is so useful...

 

Difficult call.

--

Somethin' fishy's goin' on here... Come on out, you taffer!

 

~The Fishy Taffer

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Btw @FishFace: Do you have a reference for your claim that chloroform would take effect before someone can thrash around? Sorry, but this is the Intraweb, so I don't instantly believe what anyone says without a reference.

 

Wouldn't it depend a lot on whether someone happened to be inhaling or exhaling when you shoved the chloroform soaked cloth in their face?

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Well, I don't have a reference handy at the moment, but I used to work in a molecular biology lab with chloroform and dozens of other organic solvents, and I can tell you from experience and numerous occupational health and safety courses that these chemicals are pretty darn potent if you cop a good lungfull - you need to work in a fume cupboard or you risk rendering a lab full of scientists and technicians unconscious (or dead). Bear in mind that a lot of these chemicals have the added effect of making you feel pretty woozy or 'high' in even small doses, and you would not have much time to struggle if someone held a cloth soaked in chloroform or some other chemical anaesthetic/sedative/tranquilizer directly over your mouth when you weren't expecting it. HOWEVER, most of these type of chemicals have a pretty strong odour, so if you recognised the smell, you might be alerted, and they evaporate quickly, which means you would have to pour out your bottle of chloroform onto a rag and apply it to you victim in one fairly swift movement for best results.

 

But if this is a thief-like universe, I can quite easily imagine an alchemist or apothecary whipping up an odourless knockout potion you could use in this way (for a price, of course!).

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I've worked with organic solvents too and yeah they can make you pretty woozy if the hood isn't working well, but here we really need to define what having "not much time" to struggle means. If chloroform takes even 5 seconds to act I would think that would still be enough time to struggle and make some noises.

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Indeed, blackjacking itself is very unrealistic, IMHO, especially with the helmeted guards that weren't unKOable - imagine the clang! I'd tentatively suggest the option to use a sedative soaked cloth instead of a blackjack, or at least have alternative methods. A club to the face certainly wouldn't knock someone out.

The definitive word on blackjacks, or at least the most definitive Google would yield with a quick search, can be found here:

 

http://www.donrearic.com/sap.html

 

FishFace, it looks as if a club to the face can not only knock someone out, it might knock them out of this world. Take a gander at the history of the "slung-shot", yikes.

 

It does say that in the right hands, a BJ is very effective at what it does. (OK stop giggling!)

 

What about the idea that 99.9 percent of the time, the Thief's aim is true and he KOs the guard. But sometimes he kills a target, which would zap a Ghost game, or sometimes he misses and the AI zaps him. I always enjoy a dash of uncertainty.

 

P.S. does Don Rearic strike anyone else as being somewhat pro-authoritarian?

 

Update

Ok hes full on whacky, this guy sees a weapon when he looks at his Danish in the morning. But lots of good ideas for weaponry to be found here:

 

http://www.donrearic.com/main.html

Edited by Maximius
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Certainly a BJ to the face can kill, without even looking at the page (I'll take your word on the rest of it) due to the very fine bones in the nose.

 

I would say that even if chloroform does allow thrashing time it would be legitimate to use it in TDM _IF_ gameplay would support it, because whatever Thief is using might be some other-worldly sedative - perhaps with no odour?

I support the idea of it being volatile - makes it more difficult to apply, therefore perhaps balancing the possibility of the BJ making some noise...

--

Somethin' fishy's goin' on here... Come on out, you taffer!

 

~The Fishy Taffer

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Ishtvan, what I didn't quite say so well is that many gaseous toxins have the effect of making you not want to struggle. CO2 poisoning induces a euphoric state where people have reported actually wanting to give in and die (although obviously it would be hard to pack enough CO2 into a gas arrow to KO someone let alone kill them). While I can't say it does it for me, some people deliberatly sniff solvents for the altered state of consciousness it induces (glue sniffing)... so maybe not chloroform per se but there are probably quite a few chemicals out there that would do the job...

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Whether or not blackjacks are stealthy, or are more effective, is irrelevant.  The relevant matter is whether or not blackjacks are "Thief".  And they are.  So...blackjacks it is.

 

That's not entirely true.

 

I had a question for the devs some time ago about whether they could implement going prone.  They all gave there opinions on why it wouldn't work, and although I still think it would be "cool" to have the option, the bottom line is that it isn't "Thief".  Since then, the litmus test of any question I have for the devs is "is it thief?".

 

Of course we try to recreate the Thief feeling. But that doesn't mean that our sole decision point is "Is it Thief?". Fact is that Thief is well proven to be an interesting and fun game. Adding features to it doesn't make it neccessarily better, so the major decision requirement is "Is it fun?". I know that many argue with "realism" but adding realism doesn't necessarily translate to a fun gameplay a player would enjoy. One of the curernt discussions. A Thief can not really know the value the instant he takes an item. To make it realistic he would have to investigate the current prices. Would you really like to do this? I don't because it would become tedious and doesn't really add to teh game. Other points are stamina, limited carrying capacity or going prone. Sure these features sound cool to have, but you should always see it from a game point of view. I know that prone looks cool in movies. But can you translate that feeling into good gameplay? We don't think so. If you really think it through you might realize that going prone would add many problems. Just try to play a scene in your mind where you are sneaking through a normal Thief style mansion and then try to imagine how it feels to use prone for this.

 

That's really all anyone should demand from the devs, not whether the Mod's protagonist can create a reasonable facsimile of Sam Fisher or Agent 47 in medievil times.

 

Definitely. :)

Gerhard

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Certainly a BJ to the face can kill, without even looking at the page (I'll take your word on the rest of it) due to the very fine bones in the nose.

I would seriously doubt that. You can hit the nose in such a way that the bones are rammed into the brain (hitting the nose from below upwards might do that trick). But that doesn't mean that you get an instant kill, because the brain which is located at the front of the head is not life sustaining. The only way to make a silent and instant kill would be at the neck part, because in that area is the oldes part of the brain located. Any injuries to that area result in a very fast (instant) death, because all vital functions are located there. This is IMO also the reason why the neck choke, that Ishtvan mentioned, might work so fast. Because it can hurt that part of the brain. Most other parts of the brain will result in all kind of disorders but not neccessarily death.

Gerhard

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You can hit the nose in such a way that the bones are rammed into the brain (hitting the nose from below upwards might do that trick).

This is actually an urban myth (as far as I know). I can't remember where I saw it disproved, but it was pretty convincingly shown that you cannot cause a direct brain injury by pushing the bones of the nose on or up (unless you completly crush the entire face, but that involves a much more forceful blow to the face - say from a hamerite hammer). The bones of the nose are just not strong enough to get through to the brain at that point (too much bone in between). However, the eye sockets are very thin, and you can use your fingers or a knife to push behind the eyes and into the brain. Very difficult to do though unless the victim is pinned down, and the victim woiuld put up a huge struggle, and this wouldn't necessarily kill them, but they would be blind and brain damaged at the very least. Damaging the brain stem or severing the spinal cord at the base of the skull will kill instantly, but there will be vigorous nervous twitches for a minute or two afterwards, so it is not necessarily stealthy.

 

Face it, there are very few ways to kill someone stealthily unless no one is in earshot, or you mask the sound somehow :)

 

And as for going prone adding to gameplay, I certainly think it would, regardless of whether or not it is "Thief" - I can see it as a useful way to crawl through narrow pipes, tunnels, hiding under beds - anything too low to crouch under. It would add more ways to get into buildings etc, and would increase the challeng of trying to find a concealed entrance. It also offers an escape route for thieves who have been detected, as well as providing the ability to use low cover to avoid detection. My preferred way to implement this would be a double crouch - hit your toggle crouch key once, and you crouch, twice and you go prone. I played a game that let you do this this way (can't remember which, Deus Ex maybe?) and I found it quite effective. Hopefully if you don't include it as part of darkmod, this is simple enough for FM authors to implement themselves, I for one would definately include it. If you don't like going prone, you can just unbind the key:)

 

As for loot values, I think a professional thief would have at least some ability to appraise the approximate market value of what they steal, otherwise they wouldn't know what to steal ;)

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This is actually an urban myth (as far as I know).  I can't remember where I saw it disproved, but it was pretty convincingly shown that you cannot cause a direct brain injury by pushing the bones of the nose on or up (unless you completly crush the entire face, but that involves a much more forceful blow to the face - say from a hamerite hammer).

  The bones of the nose are just not strong enough to get through to the brain at that point (too much bone in between).

 

Sounds realistic. :)

 

And as for going prone adding to gameplay, I certainly think it would, regardless of whether or not it is "Thief" - I can see it as a useful way to crawl through narrow pipes, tunnels, hiding under beds - anything too low to crouch under.  It would add more ways to get into buildings etc, and would increase the challeng of trying to find a concealed entrance.

 

There is no denying that it would add additional freedom for the player. The bigger problem for us is to circumvent this. The player has already big advantages over the AI and adding this movement mode would add another one. We don't want to make it easier for the player and unbalance the game. Also it would add other problems as well. You can believe me that we discussed the implications in detail and came to the conclusion that it would not add THAT much given the unbalancing it would cause. Especially when you consider the common scenarious for Thief style maps.

 

Hopefully if you don't include it as part of darkmod, this is simple enough for FM authors to implement themselves, I for one would definately include it.  If you don't like going prone, you can just unbind the key:)

 

We will release the sourceode anyway, and I expect that mods will be created containing such changes. Adding a prone mode is rather easy to code. D3 already handles crouching, so the only thing needed is to look how it does this and change the collision box accordingly, as D3 already does for crouching, and change the camera height in this mode.

 

As for loot values, I think a professional thief would have at least some ability to appraise the approximate market value of what they steal, otherwise they wouldn't know what to steal ;)

 

That's my argument as well. :)

Gerhard

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Sparhawk, I can see your point about gameplay becoming unbalanced, but I think this could also be approached from the point of view of making AI more vicious and deadly - get spotted under a bed and they can stab you through the matress and there is no escape, that sort of thing. Enemies should have means of fishing you out of hiding places they can't get to. And I see no reason why a guard shouldn't be able to crouch and climb ladders and so on - if you can, they can and the balance is not so skewed in the thief's favour. I think that it would also come down to the level design - as long as you don't overdo places where thieves could go prone, you can still have balanced gameplay. Also, going prone should be a tediously slow way of moving around, so that its use is limited to necessity.

 

After all, the advantage a thief has in reality depends wholly on their skill and the security of the place they are robbing - an abandoned bank with an unlocked vault will present no challenge if you go prone or not - it is how well the security is set up that counts for how difficult the mission will be.

 

The AI in the Thief series always had some weaknesses that could be exploited very easily (in a way that made it feel almost like cheating), and I know some of those are unavoidable due to limitations on computer power, but again, I think the more realism there is all round, the more it will balance itself out.

 

I guess some people dislike realism because of the complexity it adds to gameplay, and the can of worms it opens up for level designers - the more freedom the player has, the harder it is for level designers to guess as to what sort of things players will try to do. In the first level of TDS, I managed to push a couple of barrels around and mantle up onto a wall I wasn't meant to, 'cause on the other side was... nothing;)

 

But as a level designer/mapper, I reckon I can balance out a map that supports going prone just fine :)

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The major problem with the AI is that it has to be coded. There is no such thing for free. If you make the AI smarter you have to use cycles for it. Sure it can be implemented that they cvan stab through certain surfaces. They can learn to climb ladders, and many other tricks. But this all needs to be balanced in such a way that the framerate is keeping up as well. We have several big drains on the framerate. One is the rendering itself which relies on the image complexity in a given scene, then we have the sound propagation, the lightgem and the AI. Of course there are additional things like particle effects and such, but these are the big ones. Adding AI complexity can cause problems in other areas so the question is: Is it neccessary from a game point of view and pays off for what you will loose.

Gerhard

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So I guess I will just have to wait for next gen engines, physics processing units, audio processing units, AI processing units etc... Actually, the specs for the XBox 360 are pretty impressive, 3 dual threaded processors, so you can use 6 threads to independently process graphics, physics, sound, ai and so on... that thing is way ahead of current PC tech. But I never could get used to the controller for Xbox, I am addicted to my keyboard and mouse ;)

 

I think multithreading will open the door for realism, at the moment graphics are getting pretty close to pohotorealism (the Unreal 3 engine looks very impressive, but I wonder if I'll ever be able to afford the beast of a system it will need to run it? Windows Longhorn looks like it will suck a ridiculous amount of resources up too...),

 

it is AI, physics and time/money constraints of developers that seem to be the factors holding things back. I think that once computers with 64 bit dual threaded processors become a bit more common, plus PPUs and APUs, interesting things will happen :P

 

That being said, enemies can climb ladders in splinter cell, and that runs fine on the original X Box, which is basically a 700 odd MHz PIII with a modified GeForce 4 MX, so I can't imagine it sucks up that much processor time on a decent up to date system... And I thought rendering was largely dependent on the GPU these days, no?

 

I guess from a level designers perspective, I would rather design my levels in such a way that at any given moment, there is only so much going on in the scene that a playable framerate is kept up, rather than compromise on the quality of the AI. As long as FPS stays above 30 (as low as 15 can be imperceptable in certain types of scenes) everything is sweet, I'm assuming people aren't playing Thief or DarkMod to show off their ultra overclocked rig with their liquid nitrogen cooler, they are more interested in an immersive game that gives them freedom to explore and play to their style...

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One of the biggest questions we ask ourselves after, "Is it fun" is, "Can it be exploited?"

 

Guards climbing ladders has huge problems with player exploitation. Guards become quite defenseless while climbing, leaving them open to all kinds of attacks. It is also pretty easy to "trap" a guard on a ladder by blocking them. There are all kinds of guard behaviours that wouldn't be appropriate on a ladder (like attacks) which means all kinds of new coding would required to tell the AI how to make decisions in that situation. It's not quite as easy as it sounds.

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I think multithreading will open the door for realism,

 

If that were the case we would arelady have it. :) Multithreading is supported for a long time already. The issue is not multithreading, but multiple CPUs, because if you have a single CPU which does multithreading, it still has the processing power of one CPU. :)

 

it is AI, physics and time/money constraints of developers that seem to be the factors holding things back.  I think that once computers with 64 bit dual threaded processors become a bit more common, plus PPUs and APUs, interesting things will happen  :P

 

There is no such thing as a fast enough computer. If machines get faster and faster, there will be additional things that will beimplemented and require enough resources again to require a still faster machine. :)

 

That being said, enemies can climb ladders in splinter cell, and that runs fine on the original X Box, which is basically a 700 odd MHz PIII with a modified GeForce 4 MX, so I can't imagine it sucks up that much processor time on a decent up to date system...  And I thought rendering was largely dependent on the GPU these days, no?

 

You should not consider a single feature, like ladder climbing, you must see it as a whole. Can SC also do dynamic shadows (which are a big drain)? Does it do sound propagation? How many things can the AI potentially do? Every feature that the AI can handle requires processing power, and depending on what it is and how it is coded it will also require a bit of processing even if the action is not needed at the moment, because the condition has to be checked wether any given action can be done.

Gerhard

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To briefly add to the discussion of how to kill an opponent as quietly as possible, I remembered a conversation with a cousin of mine who holds three blackbelts and a host of incidental knowledge of the martial arts. There is a stabbing blow, the target is somewhere on the left or right side of the back of one's neck about an inch below the hairline, that pierces through the neck into the windpipe. IIRC, in Chinese martial traditions this area is known as the the "winds gate" or something like that. The great advantage to an assassin is that when you stab someone this way, they cannot call out, in fact they can no longer really breathe. Down you go, choking and bleeding.

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