Just some Ideas

[mathi_r]

Hello together,

 

at first thank you for all the hard work! It is a very very great mod, i love it!

 

I played the mod a bit and have some thoughts:

 

1. I know, it was never like this in THIEF, but I think, it would be realistic, if a AI notices you within about 2m 180° in front of him, no matter how dark it is. It's about the "feeling" that there is someone, i think everybody has.

 

2. When walking on robes in the air, it feels like going on hard ground. Maybe some tottering would be nice, when walking on such.

 

3. There should be a possibilty to open a door just a bit and have a little look inside instead of push the door to open. Also moving doors should be more recognized by AIs, in a radius of some meters.

 

4. In general, flying arrows should be recognized more. Exspecially flames going out by water arrows.

 

5. What about extinguishing little gas flames by hand?

 

6. Is there a way to knock an a wall to get attention. Always waving around with the sword seems not to merge.

[grayman]

Welcome to TDM!

 

Some quick responses:

 

1 - This is a gameplay issue. You're a master thief and I think it's reasonable to assume that you can remain undetected under certain conditions. The amount of light falling on you is key to being seen or not. If an AI bumps into you, though, you're busted immediately.

 

2 - This is a good idea, which would require mappers setting up a "moving bridge" for the player to walk on. IIRC, someone has already done some work to cause movement when walking on a rope bridge.

 

3 - If you frob a moving door, it will stop. So this is already in place; you just have to frob it rather quickly if you only want it to open slightly. There was also a discussion about AI noticing moving doors, and someone is already looking at implementing that. It hasn't been completed yet.

 

4 - I think most flying arrows were noticed by AI originally, but gameplay requirements reduced that to just recognizing the fire arrow while in flight. There are many things in real life that aren't (or can't be easily) simulated in TDM, and atm an AI noticing a water arrow dousing a torch is one of them. The mapper has the ability to mark torches and other lights so that AI will notice when they're out, possibly relight them, and possibly be alarmed by finding them that way. So--while an AI doesn't care that a water arrow just hit a torch--he could be made to care that the torch went out.

 

5 - A good idea, as long as the flame is obviously fed by oil. It's dangerous to douse a gas-fed flame by hand. One would prefer turning it off by turning off the gas.

 

6 - I don't think banging your sword or blackjack on a wall is heard by AI. I honestly have never noticed if it is. It makes sense, though, since hearing your footsteps can get AI riled up, and those aren't as loud as banging on a wall.

[demagogue]

6- I thought they were. I thought there was an attribution check for sound alerts, and if they belonged to an enemy team... Ah but do the bangs propagate to AI at all? Hmm, something to check in game. I agree it'd be useful. I've banged doors in Thief FMs to get AI walking towards them before, then run around another route... Sort of like a noise arrow on the cheap, but balanced because you're sending them directly towards yourself.

[Sotha]

I've definately alerted AI's by bashing my sword against the walls during my WIP testings.... One must to hit the wall at least twice and be somewhat nearby the AI.

[grayman]

I've definately alerted AI's by bashing my sword against the walls during my WIP testings.... One must to hit the wall at least twice and be somewhat nearby the AI.

 

There ya go.

[AluminumHaste]

Yes it does, failed blackjacks from hitting the ceiling alerts the AI you're trying to KO. I've banged on doors also to get AI attention I think.

[SeriousToni]

Today I reinstalled Thief III Deadly Shadows after I played it last (4 years or so).

 

I must say besides the crap like climbing gloves, or not being able to lean and other unnecessary changes, they made a pretty good job on the ai!

The ai realizes when torchs go out and walk towards them (they even totally freak out if it happens right in front of them). They talk to each other very often and have some nice voice acting. Also they notice when the player throws stuff around or when he steals loot. They also react to door sounds.

I didn't recall that - I was totally positive surprised.

 

I wish the level design was somewhat better (its somewhat confusing, not many markable places, bad map, and those portals ... booooy who came on with this stuff?!?)

 

Nice to see that TDM ai gets smarter and smarter too!

[Springheel]

have some nice voice acting

 

If you can ignore the god-awful dialogue ("Hey, you wanna knuckle sandwhich?")

[SeriousToni]

haha sounds very funny - where took it place??

 

There is really neat stuff like the guard mumbeling the "a guards life... protecting persons and places..." monologue! Awwww! Thats so lovely!!

 

But nevertheless I totally miss the german voice over. They put so much effort at it (and had very popular synch artists) in Thief 1 + 2that it was a shame that they wouldn't spend the money for the third Thief translation. Instead I have subtitles that pop up far too lately to follow the english audio and it gets confusing that much even in the videos where you only read texts instead of watching the movie. My english isn't good enough that I can understand everything and it's partly hard to follow the story. But if we speak about the general audio quality it is very good.

 

Hah! Damnit even the guards react to rats!!

[RPGista]

Yes, the Thief 3 npc AI had some interesting features, and also some unfortunate limitations. They are able to remember the player's actions (the player is tagged as an enemy if he decides to cause a bit of the old "ultra-violence" in some of the city areas), will respond to bumps and try to avoid the player if hes blocking his path, and quite interestingly will know if the player is inside a place he shouldnt be (forbidden area), and react to that, which is something we dont have at the moment.

 

The problems:

 

A whole area of the city and its npcs are alerted and react to the player on sight after hes tagged as an enemy. There should be a difference between npcs that are eye witnesses (and would recognize him), npcs that were alerted by those (and will be on the lookout but cant know who the player is) and unaware npcs that were too far from the situation to be alerted.

 

You can frob the npc and stalk him all over the place and they wont notice you, nor will anyone around watching you do that. Though they will notice theyve been robbed, they will not link it to you (the guy that was just following him 30cm behind down a dark alley), and it is a shame that npcs that witness you pickpocketing someone will not alert the unsuspecting victim or tag you as an enemy (alerting the guard, attacking, etc).

 

They will not notice suspicious behaviour - you can pickpocket people in the middle of a crowd, break into houses and stores, lockpick front doors, sneak around and stalk people, climb your way over balconies and building walls in broad light, walk around with drawn weapons, aiming at people or ready to stab someone, noone will notice.

 

Still, even though the city section is as inconsequential as GTA's (where they were aiming at), I thought it was a very nice feature to have between missions, if only they could have explored much more scripted scenes of interactions between npcs.

Edited July 3, 2012 by RPGista

[STiFU]

3 - There were also once plans to have penumbra like door opening, where you control how far the door opens just by moving the mouse. I believe Mortem Desino once posted in the "Help Wanted"-Forum, that this would be a good task for someone new, who is not yet too familiar with the code.

[stumpy]

thief 3 suffers from the limitation imposed by having the game run on a console, or 2 consoles, where each version has to be the same

[Melan]

What it really suffers from is a bad engine hack that was introduced early on in the development process, and made it into both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows. Consolisation is responsible for some of the development choices, but not necessarily performance/level size.

[pusianka]

I am sorry, but I would never say that thief 3 AI was good. IT WAS HORRIBLY FUNNY. I had authentic situations where I hit the guard with my blackjack from side and he just says: "What the hell was that" and keeps on moving! Aside, they were never checking the places I hide in. Like they were afraid of shadows! Or programmed to just pretend they look in them but never get inside of them. Another funny situation - Total darkness, thin corridor guards heading towards me from every side(THE FUCK SHOULD I DO?) - I stick to the wall. It took them a while to finally fit in when bumping into me and each other but they managed to have a nice chit chat in the midnight and walked along. These situations are in hundreds, so I'm sorry but the AI in Thief 3 was like the crappiest of them all.

[AluminumHaste]

What it really suffers from is a bad engine hack that was introduced early on in the development process, and made it into both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows. Consolisation is responsible for some of the development choices, but not necessarily performance/level size.

 

Consoles were directly responsible for the small levels and loading zones. Remember the devs lamenting for just 128 MB of ram.

[Komag]

and consoles also responsible for the lame moments of AI, making the game easy enough not to be frustrating for console crowd

[SeriousToni]

The Cradle knocks it out.

[demagogue]

Consoles were directly responsible for the small levels and loading zones. Remember the devs lamenting for just 128 MB of ram.

 

But the engine hack AFAIK exacerbated what the engine could crunch and made the console limits force even smaller areas than what a better engine could have handled.

[pusianka]

The Cradle knocks it out.

 

The cradle was indeed brilliant but it was because of great plot and amazing soundtrack. However as I watched many horror games on youtube lately, I came to thinking that they could have done a lot more in cradle to make it even more scary but then again I would probably never finish this mission then

[Ishtvan]

There is still some WIP code for that (unless someone cleaned it up since), it is enabled with a cvar. The control scheme itself was not that hard, but it turned out to be hard to make sure you trigger all the proper door opening and closing events, and don't break the system by letting the door go farther than it should, etc. It would still be possible to get it working given enough effort.

 

3 - There were also once plans to have penumbra like door opening, where you control how far the door opens just by moving the mouse. I believe Mortem Desino once posted in the "Help Wanted"-Forum, that this would be a good task for someone new, who is not yet too familiar with the code.

[SeriousToni]

Wth this is totally unnecessary - why all the work for changing the door opening control via mouse move? You can just click again and that's it!

 

Plus the players all must get used to something new which just does the same as the old way did.

[pusianka]

but you must admit it is not a very precise way of doing it while being a master thief...

[Tels]

Opening the drawers/doors/levers with the mousewheel has one distinctive advantage - it is a fluid control that lets you continually manipulate the thing. It works just like real life and the "translation" for your brain between "scroll the mousewheel" and "move the door" is rather easy - the brain is very flexible for "manipulating by proxy". The "click button and door opens" is a complete different control scheme, and the "click again to stop movement" is something altogether.

 

The "scroll" means "continued muscle movement", the other means "time a one-shot muscle movement right".

[pusianka]

wait, wait, wait scroll?? You can scroll doors?

[Tels]

wait, wait, wait scroll?? You can scroll doors?

 

No, not yet. But there was talk implementing it and someone asked "why?". That's why I explained that it is something worthwhile to have. We just miss someone who implements it.