DarkMod first impression

[Sotha]

1 second! Are you crazy? The optimal would be 1.195s faster get-up time, in my opinion.

 

Humor aside, it probably won't be worth to make such changes. Quite soon afterwards someone goes "wtf!? Guards getz up så fast! *I* don't like it. *I* don't think it is realistic. *I* demand you to change it back to original valuez. Lusrs!"

 

Four seconds is just fine. Remember, those who want realism, that in real life the guard would not be sleeping in armor. He certainly would not have his sword in his sheath with him in the bed while sleeping. He would have to bounce up, and grab his sword from nearby table or something. I think this would take longer than 4s from sleeping, hearing a noise to fully combat ready situation.

[swordbreaker]

1 second! Are you crazy? The optimal would be 1.195s faster get-up time, in my opinion.

 

Humor aside, it probably won't be worth to make such changes. Quite soon afterwards someone goes "wtf!? Guards getz up så fast! *I* don't like it. *I* don't think it is realistic. *I* demand you to change it back to original valuez. Lusrs!"

 

Four seconds is just fine. Remember, those who want realism, that in real life the guard would not be sleeping in armor. He certainly would not have his sword in his sheath with him in the bed while sleeping. He would have to bounce up, and grab his sword from nearby table or something. I think this would take longer than 4s from sleeping, hearing a noise to fully combat ready situation.

 

lol, you missed the point.

[maga]

I disagree, and suggest we make vote for it.

 

FOUR seconds to get up, and animation looks like some kind of slow-motion thing. First he transfer from lieing into sitting position and then from sitting into standing. Why can't it be 2sec animation straight from lieing into standing?

 

It can be 2 type of animation, example from video would be sutable for "just standing up", and if he wakes because of danger it will be like i described.

[nbohr1more]

LOL.

 

The guards awaken behavior is not realistic but how could it be. You would need to model a real nervous system and muscles and skeleton (etc) to get close. The perception of slowness is due to the fact that we would expect a rapid and chaotic sequence of flinching then scrambling before the guard composes himself and gets off the bed. What is needed is a larger library of custom animations for awakening the guard not a speed adjustment.

 

TDM better hire more animators with all that revenue they receive I suppose...

Edited April 6, 2011 by nbohr1more

[Springheel]

*insert exercising restraint emoticon*

[New Horizon]

*insert exercising restraint emoticon*

 

Here you go Spring. lol

[maga]

And another thing, why boxes are moving so slowly? I can already look at another spot but box is slowly flying to my new orientation.

 

And body dragging is horrible, why do the stuck in every polygon?

[nbohr1more]

Plus... My soup is cold!

 

Not enough salt!

 

And and and... what? No breadsticks?!?!

 

This is a travesty!

 

GET TO WORK!

[Johannes Burock]

And another thing, why boxes are moving so slowly? I can already look at another spot but box is slowly flying to my new orientation.

 

And body dragging is horrible, why do the stuck in every polygon?

 

so, why are u playing TDM anymore ??? Dont play it or join in and do something better or improve it...

[maga]

I'm just suggesting things, why my critics is welcomed with spears? You accept only praise? Just making boxes to move like candle would work much better. Speeding up animation also won't take too much time.

In the end, I'm not talking here about the soft shadows or adding SSAO.

Sorry if my words looked like an accuse or smth. Dark mod is wonderful and interesting project, but as anything else, in our world, its not perfect. I'm trying to summarize all disadvantages to see if there is any way to solve them. For example low performance or widescreen friendly interface could be achieved only via source code, ok, no problem. And so on...

[Zaratul]

@nbohr1more

Calm down,maga criticism is actually constructive.

 

@maga

I agree with you,box moving speed should be increased a little bit.

[nbohr1more]

I'm calm...

 

But my soup is not getting any warmer over here

 

[Melan]

And another thing, why boxes are moving so slowly? I can already look at another spot but box is slowly flying to my new orientation.

 

And body dragging is horrible, why do the stuck in every polygon?

The boxes move slowly to simulate weight visually. The heavier a moveable object, the slower they move.

 

Body dragging is IIRC Doom code. But in any case, you are supposed to shoulder bodies when carrying them at length: pick up the body, then press use. When you'd like to release it, press drop to return it to drag mode. Then press it again to drop it (bodies fall on a different side each time you do this - this is to make it easier to pick up keys, purses etc).

[Springheel]

I'm just suggesting things, why my critics is welcomed with spears?

 

Maybe because in the span of a few days you've complained about more than a dozen things, without offering a single positive comment?

 

Keep in mind that what you see in TDM represents hours and hours and hours and hours of work, done by people for free in their spare time. We welcome constructive criticism, but when someone shows up complaining that the menu should be redesigned because he doesn't like scrolling, or that characters should get up from bed in 2 seconds instead of 4 (by comparison, Thief didn't even HAVE animations for getting out of bed) it's going to rub some people the wrong way.

[Johannes Burock]

Maybe because in the span of a few days you've complained about more than a dozen things, without offering a single positive comment?

 

Keep in mind that what you see in TDM represents hours and hours and hours and hours of work, done by people for free in their spare time. We welcome constructive criticism, but when someone shows up complaining that the menu should be redesigned because he doesn't like scrolling, or that characters should get up from bed in 2 seconds instead of 4 (by comparison, Thief didn't even HAVE animations for getting out of bed) it's going to rub some people the wrong way.

 

for the almighty builder, amen

[7upMan]

Don't bite my head off, but is there a way for a mapper to make someone get up in 3 instead of 4 seconds, or is the animation hard-coded? Personally, I always thought that AI really takes its time to get out of bed.

[Springheel]

You can change the animation rate with a spawnarg on the AI, but I have no idea what that will do to the bounding box and sliding code that is working behind the scenes.

[maga]

-- delete --

Edited April 7, 2011 by maga

[OrbWeaver]

The boxes move slowly to simulate weight visually. The heavier a moveable object, the slower they move.

 

As I recall from the discussions in the past, it's more than just giving the impression of weight (mass): if heavy objects are allowed to rotate at the maximum turning speed of the player's view, the resulting momentum calculated by the physics code will be unrealistically high, which can cause problems when determining impact damage and the like.

[ungoliant]

impact damage? in my random tdm experiments i whacked a guard in the butt with a 2x8 plank 50 times just because they couldn't figure out my position when I did it. guard was at full health. but it was pretty damn funny though.

 

btw could you fix that right away, and i have compiled a list of 78 other articles of complaint into a pdf document and will be uploading them to all team members tonight. pls fix immediately. kthxbai

[Mortem Desino]

Springheel's got it spot-on. Thousands of manhours of work are never seen, recognized, or appreciated when you've got features like "Grabber: Let gravity acceleration help in the downward direction".

 

Here's something I mention to a lot of my friends while they critique TDM: Sometimes realism and "OMG ITS SO IMMERSIVE" is kinda cool. But often, gameplay is a lot more important than realism.

 

About "boxes move slowly", take a look at this bug/feature report. I would say the thoughts behind this are a lot more detailed than "I don't like it." Saying "This stinks, and I don't like it." is not constructive. The grabber code that does that is probably over three years old. First time I've heard this complaint.

 

Body dragging, sure, I can understand frustration. But that's related to a Doom 3 closed-source physics limitation. Plus, I never drag bodies anymore. I shoulder them, and set them down. If there's a stray arm or leg sticking out into the light, I'll use the grabber to tuck it back into shadows.

[Fidcal]

I have mixed feelings about this thread. On the one hand it is just genuine useful impression feedback but on the other it does sound like a new inexperienced managing director giving orders. May be a language thing. Instead of "this is too slow. It must be changed to..." try "this looks fine although it felt too slow to me; what do others think?"

 

Going on impressions only I agree that arising from sleep might be tested speeded up slightly - maybe 2 to 3 seconds instead of 4. I also originally opposed the slowness of crate turning (although I've got used to it.) However, as others have said, there may be other reasons not to do these changes including physics problems and gameplay (sleeper alerts and gets up too quickly for player to hide/run.)

 

BTW apart from crate turning the carry feature is outstanding. We watched it developed years ago when it was being tweaked. Among other things I recall how easily things got knocked out of your hands but now it is incredibly robust. Perhaps I don't play enough other games to merit an opinion but my guess that Ishtvan's grabber feature is the best in the world.

[Sotha]

I'm just suggesting things, why my critics is welcomed with spears? You accept only praise? Just making boxes to move like candle would work much better. Speeding up animation also won't take too much time.

 

I think it is like this:

Your criticisms are mainly superficial and dealing with features that are already 'working.'

 

The usual justification for your criticism is that "you don't like it."

 

Can you see where this is going? Imagine a world where everyone are like that. The team works it's ass off and all they get is "I don't like this sword, the blade is too silvery color. I think it should be more greyish" and "I don't like to scroll, redesign the UI" and so forth.

 

The team's resources are limited and they cannot possibly go on and fix already working stuff just because someone doesn't like it. Therefore that kind of feedback is absolutely useless.

 

For the future of the mod, it would be more beneficial for the team to make broken stuff to work rather than redoing things that work, just because someone does not like the specific way the thing was implemented.

 

If you want to be of help, like it seems, it would be better if you tried to find things that are broken and not yet known by the team. And if you don't like how existing working things are implemented, you could do an addon mod for the mod. "Maga's TDM tweak pack," which shortens the get-up time and redesigns the UI. You and people sharing your views could just install the addon and that's it.

 

I didn't like the standard animated briefing, and I created the SoBuCoB. Stgatilov didn't like the savegame size, so he went and wrote a compression thingy for the mod. If you want to help, then contribute, don't just nitpick. Don't demand the team to see the trouble, they are already working on some more important stuff.

 

I thought that normal human beings have enough empathy to understand how "I don't like it" justification simply sucks for a criticism, which demand others to do work in their free time to change it. Maybe people should just accept the design decisions and trust the developers that they are doing the right thing. Goddamnit!

 

End of rant. Thanks for reading. Hope you gained some insight.

[dSpair]

I agree with d'spair. It could be 1 second lesser.

 

Pardon me, but I haven't uttered a single word in this thread. What exactly you agree with me on?

[maga]

No its not like "guys, your box movement is horrible, quickly remake it or else i won't play your mod@. Its more like showing, from another perspective, which part of mod looks weird or unpleasant. If its possible to make guards standing up faster, it would be perfect, if its not then no problem. Sorry if i sounded like an angry kid who don't like his present...