Open doors/windows/etc like in Penumbra

[melrief]

Hi guys,

 

first of all thank you thank you thank you and thank you for the 2.0 standalone version of your impressive game! Really, the dark mod (that now is a standalone game, no more just a mod, you could adapt the name like "the dark game" or "the-real-thief-legacy" ) is, in my opinion, one of the best game out there. Just thank you.

 

I recently have played the Penumbra games and one thing that I have really appreciated of that game was how your character interacts with doors. It is a nice mechanism that gives you realistic controls over doors. In my opinion it is perfect for a game like The Dark Mod, where do you have a very nice control of object but not over important components of the game like doors and windows. Do you think it could be a good (and feasible) improvement for the game? I see many use cases for it like open a door just a little bit to see (and hear) what's behind it and then open it completely when you are sure.

 

Below a little example of Penumbra and how do you interact with objects and doors:

 

Again thank you for the game. I'm updating the missions right now...

[Melan]

You can already open doors only a fraction of their full rotation by frobbing them again. This stops them from opening completely.

[melrief]

You can already open doors only a fraction of their full rotation by frobbing them again. This stops them from opening completely.

 

True and I did it many times. My advice was on the mechanic to do that, in Penumbra is very natural IMHO. Also because pressing again is not very user friendly for me: the speed of the object and the type of the object can really make difficult to understand when to press again the button. It is like moving object in the desktop but instead of doing drag-and-drop you do one click, then move the object and then click again. You could do that but it's not as easy as drag-and-drop I think. It's subjective , I know, it just felt more natural in Penumbra than The Dark Mod for me .

[Sotha]

That would require some serious coding and testing work, I suppose.

 

I am right if I interpret that you wish to contribute such a feature to TDM? That would be awesome!

 

The source code is available for your perusal.

[Springheel]

We've talked about improved door mechanics before, and someone was even working on a mock-up at one point, but it just hasn't been enough of a priority.

[melrief]

Sadly even if I'm a programmer I have two major problems that prevent me to help with TDM code: 1) I don't know C++ at all because (luckily) I have to use languages with a garbage collector and 2) I don't know anything about game development. For what I can understand from some code that I have read, game programming is real-time event processing that requires a lot of optimizations and tweaks plus physics and AI. That sounds quite difficult to me. I have cloned https://github.com/FrictionalGames/HPL1Engine and I can barely read (some parts of) the code but I have no idea, for example, of where the interaction with objects happens. I am ashamed about that .

 

No, that was just a feedback about doors plus an idea for improvements, Sotha. If it is not feasible I understand completely.

[Sotha]

No, that was just a feedback about doors plus an idea for improvements, Sotha. If it is not feasible I understand completely.

 

Damn. Like Springs said, this has been discussed before, but we simply don't have the manpower to do everything. Usually things happen when someone wants something very much and goes and implements it (with the team's approval for addition to the mod, of course.)

[Obsttorte]

Quite a while ago there was a discussion about opening doors slowly, thus meaning silently. The idea was that a door normally opened would create a little bit of noise causing nearby ai to turn towards the door for a short while, what would be bad for the player if the door is well lit.

 

Maybe I'd come up with that, because it was like that in raven shield, but I'm not sure.

 

However, after that discussion I played around a bit and found a way to do this, but never slipped deeper in to it. This means,

1. It is possible to create doors that behvae like that via a simple scriptobject, thus meaning it would not effect FM's that don't use this feature, e.g. all FM's released thus far
   
2. I never polished the code and wrapped it into a scriptobject
   

 

As I'm currently not (really) mapping, I may could take a look back at the code I've written there and see If I could bring it to the end.

 

Another thing I wanted to add with this was the possibility to bash the door open, knocking out ai that stands behind that. I always found this pretty funny in Splinter Cell It easened things a lot there, because it worked with alerted ai's, too, but I can adjust this. (If there was just one guard behind a door, I tend to make some noise, and when the guard was in front of the door - baaaaaammm )

 

Another possibility would be to implement a "flexible optic" like in said game, that allows you to look through doors. But for this purpose I would first need to know how the camera screens in doom worked. I've played around with that issue, but never came to a solution.

[HMart]

Is the idtech 4 physics engine even capable of something like that? Penumbra and Amnesia use the Newton physics engine that's why they were able to make something like that so stable.

 

A crazy idea perhaps some day in the future you guys could translate TDM to the open source HPL1 engine, that way you guys wouldn't need to code this functionality.!!! just joking i know it will never happen

[Springheel]

Having doors operate differently from one mission to another is probably not a very good idea. Players need to be able to have some basic level of expectation about how the game works, unless the mission specifically says it has a different set of rules.

[nbohr1more]

Doom 3's physics solver is pretty complete and can be modified to do the stuff that Penumbra does. That said, I believe that it's not as efficient due to poor threading support. There were some discussions earlier about swapping the physics engine but those were a bit pie in the sky because it was postulated before the source code was out. The plan was to find every physics hook called in the game SDK and point them to the new solver. Now (cough) all that would need to be done is checking all the inputs for the doom 3 solver and converting another solver to accept them. I think xtreal uses another well regarded solver that was ported this way and since it was done in quake 3 it might be similar to what would be needed here... Someone with more brains than I would need to examine this to verify its feasibility. Plus it would probably be wise to cleanup the build system first so compiling and testing won't be as arduous.

Edited October 14, 2013 by nbohr1more

[Obsttorte]

I guess I've missed something. What has the capability to slowly open a door to do with the physics engine?

Having doors operate differently from one mission to another is probably not a very good idea. Players need to be able to have some basic level of expectation about how the game works, unless the mission specifically says it has a different set of rules.

Yep, that's true. Players needs to be informed that something is different. That's why I would prefer the "flexible optic" idea, as it would just add a new player tool, and not change anything in the core behaviour of the game.

[nbohr1more]

Penumbra has things like drawers where objects inside slide or roll realistically when opening them. Presumably this request is to have the door move objects when opened ( like debris in a decrepit old house).

 

That said its still possible to do that right now with collision. Some folks think Penumbra is more refined in these areas, hard to say. I personally would only be interested in the performance optimization.

Edited October 15, 2013 by nbohr1more

[HMart]

I guess I've missed something. What has the capability to slowly open a door to do with the physics engine?

 

Yep, that's true. Players needs to be informed that something is different. That's why I would prefer the "flexible optic" idea, as it would just add a new player tool, and not change anything in the core behaviour of the game.

 

Frictional games uses the Newton physics engine to make the interactive and fluid system of opening doors, drawers and rotate valves by physically moving the mouse in the necessary direction.

 

It uses a system of hinges connected to ridged bodies, more or less like a ragdoll.

 

Quote from one of the developers explaining to a modder how to make a swing open door.

 

1. IMport a mesh

2. Create a body for the mesh (with shapes that you then click make body)

3. Attach the mesh to the body (can be done using outliner)

4. Give the body some weight and properties (test in the preview mode so that you can throw it around)

5. Add a hinge joint, set the body to be the child of the joint (test in preview mode and see if the door is now "stuck in air" but can rotate around the axis of the joint

6. Go into user settings (it is in one of the menus) set the entity type to be SwingDoor

[PranQster]

Another possibility would be to implement a "flexible optic" like in said game, that allows you to look through doors. But for this purpose I would first need to know how the camera screens in doom worked. I've played around with that issue, but never came to a solution.

You might be able to fake this with a new skybox of the room (view from inner side of keyhole), and a "keyhole" on the door textured with portal_sky. Then you could "see" the contents of the room through the "keyhole", though the door is solid.

Though the FOV, etc of the room will be inaccurate as you move in front of the keyhole (you'll see too much of the room). I have already used this method to make a security camera in one room (test/other map), and LCD monitor in the next room displaying the camera view. It looks pretty awesome, but a bit unrealistic (not to mention wrong technology for the TDM world).

 

Or, next idea... Maybe a door-within-a-door? I mean. Make a door, but with a separate portion for the keyhole, with a real hole to see through. Then have a brass cover-plate for the keyhole. The keyhole would be visportal'd and the brass cover-plate is itself a door, bound to a bigger door.

Edited October 24, 2013 by PranQster

[demagogue]

One thing I recall from our past discussion on this is that in Penumbra you have the floating hand doing the work. In TDM I don't think we want a floating hand, so you'd need another mechanism. There's the possibility of you "grabbing" the door by frobbing it sort of like an object, and then using the object manipulation feature we have, and if you walk away you automatically "drop" it. But that has issues too. It would need to be thought out very carefully.

 

So far our present system works decently, so it's not an impending thing.

But if someone comes up with a cool system it's always worth looking at it.

I wonder if someone could work out a system where it opens automatically as now, but a certain key will "take control" over it so you could control its opening if you want. That could be a nice compromise.

 

I'm all for more realistic physics and physics gameplay in our world generally though, not only doors. Definitely something on a lot of people's wishlists for a long time.

[MurcDusen]

Don't want to derail the topic, but I also don't feel like this is worth creating a new one:

Speaking of doors, is it actually possible to steal keys from NPCs and locking them out of rooms the key is for? It'd just be realistic and what you'd expect. You got the only key, and the door is locked, so the AI without the key shouldn't get in. I know that I tried it with the priest in Tears of St. Lucia, but even though I got his key and locked the door from inside, he still got into the room no problem. Thinking about it I'd imagine there are a lot of potential problems this possibilty could create. How does the AI react? Where does it go? For some reason though I had the feeling it was this way in the original (T2 at least, haven't played much T1... those annoying zombies).

Is that an oversight, a design choice, or simply something you considered and think is too difficult/impossible to implement?

[161803398874989]

This sounds like something a mapper could just do in a script.

[Serpentine]

This thread is full of words. I like ideas. I played Penumbra for a few hours, it was ok. I didnt like the door opening and stuff, it as kind of neat... but also like :effort:. This post is almost entirely off topic.

 

Thats what got me thinking of how I felt in the game. I felt like my player could be a wheel-chair bound elderly man with a walking stick (the kind with that like flat hookish handle). Poking and prodding, opening things by putting the handle of the walking stick through handles and pulling like a spack.

 

Elderly Wheel-Chair Bound Guy Simulator: Old Age Home in the Dark Edition.

 

My thoughts on games are bad

[rich_is_bored]

Just because something can be done on a per map basis doesn't mean it should be. Scripting is a blessing and a curse.

 

Case in point, knocking AI out with heavy objects and AI noticing open doors. These could both be single use scripted events but the combination of these two seemingly mundane abilities anywhere in any map makes it possible to setup traps that knock NPCs out. I love that this kind of emergent game play is possible and I wish TDM had more of it.

Edited October 25, 2013 by rich_is_bored

[Springheel]

Thinking about it I'd imagine there are a lot of potential problems this possibilty could create. How does the AI react? Where does it go?

 

Yes, those were some of the big issues when we discussed that problem. It's not realistic, or particularly satisfying, to see AI continue to unlock a door once you've stolen their key, but we haven't settled on a better solution. If the AI just stops at the door, even if they pound on it in a semi-realistic fashion, that can screw the player completely, as they could get stuck in a locked room with an AI outside pounding on the door. It's way too damaging to gameplay.

 

OTOH, if the AI eventually leaves, where do they go? It's difficult to get them to resume their patrol, and it might not even be possible depending on the map.

[MurcDusen]

So I guess it'd be only possible to implement specifically by the mapper. That settles that.

[simplen00b]

Elderly Wheel-Chair Bound Guy Simulator: Old Age Home in the Dark Edition.

That's a game that needs to be made NOW. (Actually, someone probably made it for the Sinclair ZX80 decades ago.)

 

My thoughts on games are bad

But really funny.

[demagogue]

I distinctly remember in T2 stealing keys from AI and locking them in the room the key was for to trap them in. I always got a thrill doing it.

 

I think it's better to allow that to happen than not, since it opens up more emergent gameplay IMO. If a locked AI screws gameplay, you could see it as the price for player pays for toying with him, or the player could just let him through to fix the situation.

 

But it's not the most important thing in the universe to me, so I don't complain about it not being in TDM anyway.

There are bigger fish to think about.

[HMart]

This thread is full of words. I like ideas. I played Penumbra for a few hours, it was ok. I didnt like the door opening and stuff, it as kind of neat... but also like :effort:. This post is almost entirely off topic.

 

Thats what got me thinking of how I felt in the game. I felt like my player could be a wheel-chair bound elderly man with a walking stick (the kind with that like flat hookish handle). Poking and prodding, opening things by putting the handle of the walking stick through handles and pulling like a spack.

 

Elderly Wheel-Chair Bound Guy Simulator: Old Age Home in the Dark Edition.

 

My thoughts on games are bad

 

You are the first one that i know about that have this opinion about the penumbra way of opening doors and stuff!? Penumbra was critically acclaimed because of that same feature. Maybe you are just so used to the ,click button door opens, that any more effort then that is a problem to you? BTW maybe you should try Amnesia next because they refined the system on it and it works much better and fluidly, perhaps it will change your mind, btw they also have on Amnesia a object rotation system very similar to the one on TDM, you just need to prepare yourself to a very scary game.