Door handles...love or hate them?

[Bikerdude]

well creating a FS without a handle certainly saves time for the mapper, its just a tad jarring bot to have a handle on a door etc to the purists out there (me being one of them)

[Springheel]

Maybe the better question would have been, "Should decorative doors be visually distinctive from usable doors." Would those who voted "yes" be bothered by doors that had bars in front of them, or some more natural method of letting players know they can't use them?

[jaxa]

Whenever I've had to check to see whether a door could open, even if this put me in the path of some nearby guard who might catch me if I couldn't get in, I've considered it to be a natural part of the gameplay. The reason you have to wait to observe guard patrols, and use your maps & notes, is the same reason why little things in the mod shouldn't have to be dumbed down (unless they are just completely unintuitive). That said, putting iron bars or planks over a door is a much more natural way of indicating you're going nowhere (until "slashables" get implemented, that is). At the least, making unusable doors/handles unfrobbable ensures that I'll need to get near it but won't need to cycle through an inventory full of keys and lockpicks. Sorry Sotha, I'm with Baddcog on this one.

[Baddcog]

Maybe the better question would have been, "Should decorative doors be visually distinctive from usable doors." Would those who voted "yes" be bothered by doors that had bars in front of them, or some more natural method of letting players know they can't use them?

 

Please don't do this!

 

As much as I really dislike handle-less doors, nothing looks worse imo than bars in front of doors.

 

Sure occasionally there might be a reason for a barred/barracaded door. but bars in front of doors is the most blatant/dumbed down/obvious/ugly way to do it.

 

I'd rather seen a sign on the door that says 'player, you can not use this door'. Seriously.

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How about [feature creep] making a spawn arg for door handle models (real doors use entities), and a menu button. : doorhandles [yes] [no]

 

Then the player can decide if they want the dumb down experience or not. We have difficulties, I always play 'difficult' because I want a challenge.

Not putting on door knobs removes challenge/exploring.

[Sotha]

Heh.. wow, we truly are divided on this.

I see no point in a spawnarg. I will never put handles on unfrobable doors spawnarg or not.

 

Thus far nobody has called my missions 'dumbed down' because of my door handle practice. Actually my missions have been characterized quite the opposite to 'dumbed down' by the community.

[Springheel]

I object to the notion that it's "dumbing down" as well. Is it "dumbing down" that we make our loot look distinctive?

 

bars in front of doors is the most blatant/dumbed down/obvious/ugly way to do it.

 

I don't understand this notion. In real life, a door might actually have bars in front of it, but it certainly wouldn't have a missing handle. I'd think a missing handle would be more "gamey" for that reason.

[Baddcog]

 

 

The game isn't about exploring,

 

Really? I always enjoyed the exploring part of thief. Sure it's not open ended like Oblivion where you can go into every single house, meadow, cave, etc...

 

Also I think a ton of players would disagree. Isn't there a stash of arrows up on a roof in some hard to find/reach place in SL? Simply because players DID explore and find it. Because that's what Thief players do.

 

How many missions have secrets in them? You don't find them because there's a big red arrow, you find them because you are creeping around, looking for stuff. Looking in corners under tables, etc..

 

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To some points above:

 

I don't feel having a door handle is the same as long dead end corridors/tunnels. Sure if a mapper makes a dead end street and you spend 5 minutes to go to the door at the end and it is unusable it's bad design. Why even have that street? But a door across a street...30 seconds...

 

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In Sotha's latest I got a bit of both.

1- no doorknobs and I played after this post so I was thinking about it. It really did make the streets feel dumbed down, though non useable doors were never more than 5-10 second away.

2- On the other hand, the way the windows were handled was perfect. It was easy to tell which windows could be used or not, but they all looked proper and functional. (open shutters and lit glass not useable, closed shutters useable).

 

The main difference there is that the windows ALL looked like they actually worked. Also, windows require a rope arrow and I only had 2, so I didn't want to waste any. They also put you at risk of fall damage and I didn't buy a potion (but did take damage anyway).

There were also what like 10 doors, but 50 windows in the map. So yeah, rope arrowing to 50 windows would have sucked, checking 10 doors that were but feet away was no biggie.

 

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I understand the lack of time thing Spring. Who spends more time working on this mod than you? But then again, how many missions out now really require that much more time to play due to checking doors? None of them are that large, and I honestly can't say any of them have that many doors.

 

Even large T2 maps like CL didn't have that many un-usable doors afaik.

 

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While the loot glint might not be the best example I think it is the same thing more or less. It's telling the player from a distance to not bother. Our loot might have distinct textures, but they are still close enough that sometimes you gotta get close to tell. Same with frob highlight.

But with loot bling you see it's loot from afar, same as no doorknob.

 

In Sotha's map I went to extinguish a candle and 'bling' it was loot. Being a lit candle i just assumed from far away it wasn't loot.

 

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so when I made my way to a door and it isn't operable I always think "why the heck are my lockpicks not good enough to open THAT one door" ... that breaks realism for me. ..

but no door knob that says 'I can't use that door, nor can anyone else in the world' doesn't break realism/immersion?

[Baddcog]

I object to the notion that it's "dumbing down" as well. Is it "dumbing down" that we make our loot look distinctive?

 

 

 

I don't understand this notion. In real life, a door might actually have bars in front of it, but it certainly wouldn't have a missing handle. I'd think a missing handle would be more "gamey" for that reason.

 

But a missing handle isn't in your face. It's a small detail that's fairly easy to miss or overlook. (so it's lesser of 2 evils)

 

Bars in front of a door are big, ugly visual distraction. Like I said SOME doors might be barred for a reason. But look at JDude's city map (I believe that's the one) that did this and it's very unrealistic imo. I didn't look good, there was no 'reason' that I recall (ie: undead in every single house in town), and it was visually jarring.

[Baddcog]

Heh.. wow, we truly are divided on this.

I see no point in a spawnarg. I will never put handles on unfrobable doors spawnarg or not.

 

Thus far nobody has called my missions 'dumbed down' because of my door handle practice. Actually my missions have been characterized quite the opposite to 'dumbed down' by the community.

 

Well I did in the next post, lol. It was still a fun mission regardless so no offense

 

But honestly someone said your missions aren't dumbed down? I understand they have been fairly well recieved, but did someone actually say lack of doorknobs improved them?

[Professor Paul1290]

As far as exploration goes, I prefer it to come into play more when you're beyond the limits of what would be the player character's prior knowledge.

 

City streets outside a building for example are places where anyone can casually walk through so it would make sense for our Thief to already be familiar with which streets go where and which doors lead to what shops or houses and whether there would be any point in going inside. I think it's ok in these places to provide the player with more information in general to reduce aimless wandering around.

At the same time there may be things that are less noticable in the same areas such as windows, grates, hidden holes in walls, and so on that perhaps should be left ambiguous for the player to find. However, things like obvious doors to a random home or shop that aren't accessible in the first place should be marked as such somehow (the more subtle and believable the better of course).

 

On the other hand, when you go into a space that would be previously unknown to our thief then I think exploration should be a big part of gameplay. If it's an area that our thief didn't know the layout of beforehand like the interior of a secured building, a secret passageway, a cave of some kind, an outdoor area behind the mansion that normally isn't open to the public, or perhaps even a section of the city that is not normally visited or accessible to the general public, then it would makes sense to wander around and check every nook and cranny, including doors that may or may not be accessible.

 

I forget which specific ones have this, but I remember some FMs that provide the player with maps of the streets but not of the interiors of the buildings and I like maps like that for reasons mentioned above, they show the player what our thief already knows about the place so the player doesn't wander around aimlessly as much. At the same time areas that can't be casually observed to any random person are not detailed in the map, leaving those places to be explored by the player.

 

 

Ideally I think it's better to have most doors be accessible and there be something there behind them, even if it's relatively simple and not important to the mission, but that's not always possible to performance and time constraints. The more possible targets of opportunity the better of course.

Edited April 11, 2011 by Professor Paul1290

[Sotha]

Well I did in the next post, lol. It was still a fun mission regardless so no offense

 

But honestly someone said your missions aren't dumbed down? I understand they have been fairly well recieved, but did someone actually say lack of doorknobs improved them?

 

Well.. Nobody except you have complained about the handles.

 

I know I have complained a few times about having handles on unfrobable door on some other missions too.

 

So there we have it.

Looks like we have two schools of preference in TDM: the handle people and non-handle people. There might be the love handle people too but that is a minority and thus omitted.

 

You use the condescending term 'dumbing down' for our preferred way of doing things. Surely you see it is not nice, but it must make your way feel superior: The True and Correct Way.

 

To react to this provocation and to achieve the required Balance of Evil, I propose the non-handle people will call handles on unfrobables as 'idiotic frustrati-o-factinizing.'

 

Or alternatively, we can all grow up and let all the flowers blossom (that means tolerating other views) and both factions refrain from using provocative terms.

 

People can politely complain about the mission not matching their personal preferences.

 

And great Fun will be had by all!

[nbohr1more]

This is great.

 

It's like TDM's big "nature vs nurture" debate

 

Yes, given how equally divided things are... I'd say this should be mapper's choice.

 

Next we will debate whether all missions should make a Blackjack available to players... (super-flame-warz! )

[demagogue]

I think the factions are more properly defined as "more concrete immersion-centric" vs "more abstract gameplay-centric". I mean every game needs some negotiation between immersion and gameplay, concreteness and abstraction, but people sometimes have opinions about specific elements on that line.

 

I personally think it's not worth being too partisan, since sometimes I want to confronted with more concreteness and sometimes I want to be confronted with more abstraction for gameplay purposes, even over the same thing (like doors)... And I'll feel the character of the game a little differently each way. It's why FMs have been made across a spectrum from almost Tomb Raider-like levels to worlds you feel are very concrete and real and you're in it -- and I like that there's that spectrum.

 

Generally I default on the concreteness side. Unless there's a really good reason to abstract it, then the default is to represent it more or less as a concrete thing in the game-world as well as you can. (That was the original ideology behind the idea of a first person sim that LGS developed.) But of course there are serious limits to that and you absolutely have to abstract a lot of things (or a little of everything) for the game mechanic to work, which is why I'm fine with painted doors or handle-less doors and I'll immediately take them as a gameplay mechanic in themselves. Do you want doors represented more like part of the world or more like a gameplay mechanic?

 

What strikes me here, though, is how people get partisan about it... when I find the negotiation between abstraction and concreteness an inescapable part of game design with a good reason to pick both sides.

 

Edit: BTW, on windows. The problem with leaving windows transparent or open a crack is, of course, that that opens the visPortal and messes with performance. In my FM at least, I didn't realize just how much it screws performance until after I built it that way. And I just didn't want the FPS hit with so many AI around, at least not so early on. So if you want to open one a crack, you need to design it from the start keeping in mind that that VP is going to stay open.

[grayman]

"And the Lord of the district, increasingly fearful that the townfolk should rise up in arms against him, had all the handles removed from the village doors, thus locking the townfolk inside their houses.

 

And the Lord, increasingly fearful that the townfolk should discover egress from their houses and attack the Lord's castle, had all the handles removed from the castle doors, thus preventing the townfolk from wreaking their revenge upon the Lord's person.

 

And the Lord, discovering that the handle to his chamber door had been removed as well, denying him access to food and water, did by his own decrees waste away to nothingness."

[Springheel]

I think I'm going to for a compromise in my map. I don't like the look of doors without handles, simply because it breaks my immersion slightly that the door doesn't have one. On the other hand, it also breaks my immersion when I get to a door and I can't even try and open it. And the harder it is to get to, the more frustrating that is.

 

I'm probably going to come up with some kind of distinctive door-handle model and only use it for decorative doors. So they'll look fairly natural, but if you pay attention you can see from a short distance away whether the door can be opened or not.

 

Thanks for the opinons though.

[Baal]

Difficult question. I think the handleless doors look unfinished when they're otherwise the same as the useable ones.

A different handle or maybe a different shape or texture consistently used throughout the map could work.

[Midnight]

This thread has surpassed all my expectations. We now have two additional Dark Mod factions, "handeliers" and "non-handeliers", as well as a cracking good storyline for Grayman's next FM.

 

As I said before, I'm largely ambivalent to how this is done, but it did strike me that if TDM were a fully fledged game, then there would be a consistent approach to this problem rather than leaving it to the mapper of each level to decide how to tackle this issue. Could I suggest a possible compromise would be that all doors that are frobbable have door handles and all decorative doors have door knobs instead (I don't believe I recall seeing door knobs in TDM, though I could be mistaken).

[Mortem Desino]

Ordinarily, I don't look at door handles or door knobs. If I see a door, I'll investigate no matter what the door looks like.

 

Same goes for other games. I've crashed Deus Ex 2 many times stacking items and mantling where I probably shouldn't have.

[Baddcog]

Difficult question. I think the handleless doors look unfinished when they're otherwise the same as the useable ones.

A different handle or maybe a different shape or texture consistently used throughout the map could work.

 

To this regard the 'fake' door textures in T1/2 were round topped doors. They were also green. I think it was only one tex, could be wrong. They were smaller. There was NO matching equivelant model.

 

We also have an option of a model door. Which we probably need anyway, doors aren't that high poly, but we could have a model that is just a flat plane (with or without the hinge plate planes), or just a tex so people don't use door models.

[LaffyTaffer]

Well as long as they are unfrobbable I guess it's okay, but I really just prefer no handle so I don't think I have another door to open.

[Melan]

What strikes me here, though, is how people get partisan about it... when I find the negotiation between abstraction and concreteness an inescapable part of game design with a good reason to pick both sides.

That is well said. Are we getting the knives out because of... door handles?

[Sotha]

That is well said. Are we getting the knives out because of... door handles?

 

I would say that, in general, knives do get out when any kind of purely preference-based things are discussed and then someone goes and starts using condescending remarks about the other parties views. We are only human, I suppose.

[_Atti_]

How about making a 2d decal doorhandle to be used in situations like this? wouldnt look as dumb as no handle, but could be separated from working doors from a reasonable distance.

Edited April 12, 2011 by _Atti_

[DeTeEff]

I prefer handles for the look. If a door is unopenable, I just make it a func static so it doesn't highlight. In T1&T2 I just swung the sword through, because the sword didn't hit unopenable doors...

 

I'm no experienced FM-player, but I cannot recall one occation that I feelt fooled to a hard to reach place, just to meet an unopenable door...

[Baddcog]

I would say that, in general, knives do get out when any kind of purely preference-based things are discussed and then someone goes and starts using condescending remarks about the other parties views. We are only human, I suppose.

 

Enough with the condescending remarks comments Sotha.

 

You've made more condescending remarks regarding the vert contest stories by every other author while floating your own boat about how terrific your mediocre story was than I've made in the entire 4 years I've been here.

You even wanted to vote for your own mission which shows lack of taste imo, so whatever.

 

'dumbing down' is not a condescending comment. It's a common term used for things that are simplified for the user, that is all. Not including door handles by all the arguments I've heard is justified as a way to simplify the game experience for the end user.

 

The knives aren't coming out. Maybe everyone has strong feeling on their side of the argument and are trying to prove it, but nobody has attacked anybody until you told me I was condescending and considered my view superior.