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Fan Mission: Breaking out the Fence (17/03/2014) by Kyyrma


kyyrma

Poll: Breaking out the Fence impressions  

46 members have voted

  1. 1. Gameplay: Enjoyment, fun duration, smooth flow, etc. vs Bugs, boredom, frustration, frame lag

  2. 2. Appearance: Visual pleasure, lighting, visual style, deduct for bad texturing, etc.

  3. 3. Story: Story and text, briefing, graphic storytelling



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For the rest of who have played this level, could you second any of Sotha's experiences? I need some honest, brutal advice here, because if these issues exist I need to know so I can fix them:

  • Ambient noises are too high, annoyingly so (I'm taking this must mean the rain effects)
  • Voice acting is drowned out by ambient sounds
  • Ambient sound doesn't fade out properly when indoors
  • The surveilance camera alarms are set off unreliably (on the side path leading to the pier?)
  • The target that has to be knocked-out doesn't react to the player, can't be knocked out
  • Killing the fence does not fail the mission

Edited by kyyrma
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With all audio settings set to max:

  • Rain sounds fine, just about as loud as I'd expect for what you can see
  • Ambience drowns out idle mumbling barks in the rain (as I'd expect) but I can hear the fence fine both in the prison and on the pier, and the AI indoors clear as day.
  • Surveillance camera didn't set off the alarm when it wasn't looking at me, and definitely not down the way to the pier. I had to get at least level with the carriage in bright light for it to go off. I think Sotha, like me, wasn't expecting innovation like a big ol' camera and so we weren't looking for it. It's clear where not to go once you know they're there.
  • Tengrove went down like a sack of bricks on my first KO attempt at full sprint. I tested in every room he visits to be sure and it worked every time. Murdering him didn't fail the mission, but did during testing. It must've been messed up while the objective was being fiddled with. I figure we never caught it because it was fine, then the other issue with him was fixed, tested, worked and was put away despite previous functionality getting undone.

It felt like it was never betatested.

raspberry.gif

Edited by Airship Ballet
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Now that you mention it the rain was a bit loud but I took it as being a heavy storm so it didn't bother me

Regarding killing the fence

I loaded my last save game (playing on hardest - no knockouts) where all the objectives had been achieved and went to meet the fence at the pier but before triggering the mission complete I hit him with a gas arrow and he fell into the water so it should have failed the no knockouts as well as the no killing but didn't

Edited by Oldjim
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My condolences Sotha, but the things you mentioned were tested, through multiple revisions, and obviously plenty of others have not suffered your issues. One thought though, which might help ease Kyyrma's worries regarding the alarm, perhaps try on Easy difficulty...

 

 

The motion sensor target areas glow on Easy, so you don't even have to notice the moving sensor. Perhaps that might clarify things?

 

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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My condolences Sotha, but the things you mentioned were tested, through multiple revisions, and obviously plenty of others have not suffered your issues. One thought though, which might help ease Kyyrma's worries regarding the alarm, perhaps try on Easy difficulty...

 

I think in a last minute tweak they were made to glow on all difficulties. Can't check right now myself as I don't have TDM installed, but I seem to recall so!

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On the hardest setting the only indication of the motion sensor direction was the glowing lens on the sensor itself

There were two a small circular one and a larger octagonal one (it may have had a different number of sides than that)

Edited by Oldjim
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Hello everybody. I have only been playing TDM for about 2 weeks now and I think it is an excellent game. I've only played 6 FMs so far and I thought that breaking out the Fence was excelent, I was really impressed by the graphic quality, sounds and atmosphere. The thing is that I have been playing for more than 60 hours and due to not being able to finish the game I just decided to search for tips. I only had two objectives left to go: to knock out the man and to open his safe. About opening the safe I found out here, by reading the tips given to somebody else, 'cos I never in my entire life was going to imagine that I would get the hint by reading a letter I didn't even know who it belonged to, but to knock the man out is not possible because I have killed him, and so I have killed everyboy else in the game but the guy standing at the peer. is the game not supposed to finish as soon as you kill the guy your supposed to knock out or is it a bug? I remembered the old days graphic adventures and I would have played for ages searching a way out without knowing that I couldn't finish the mission. Thank you for your help!

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Killing him is supposed to fail you and make you load a save to try knocking him out again. It's a bug in the objective logic, basically, one that nobody noticed until just now, ages after release.

 

Welcome to the forums by the way ^_^

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Thank god I decided to search for help then, 'cos I'm very stuburn. Because he was dead and I had to knock someone out to carry on, I thought that Tengrove had to be somebody else hiding somewhere. :D Thank you for answering, I'll go for another mission then.

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I just had a go at this mission today. It felt pretty complete.

 

 

 

The sewers were well done and had a great mood about them. I accidentally frobbed the sewer key trying to frob the green mushroom in the bottle so good placement of that interesting object. It drew the players attention well and worked.

 

The security cam was a neat idea. I didn't have any issues with it acting up. It never detected me when it wasn't looking at me or if I was out of range. I did have issue with the breakable windows in front of the store. You can frob all the loot through the window (if you're at the right angle) and you don't have to break the windows. I found out later you can get in behind them.

 

The architecture was pretty basic but it was appropriate to the story you were telling and did the job. More detail/dirt decals, etc. would have been welcome but the areas felt good for the most part.

 

I didn't have any issues with the safe other than you can't shut the safe door after you empty it. Would have liked to have "left no trace" but I couldn't shut the safe door. A nice safe too, is that your own design?

 

I noticed that the door frame on the safe is not attached to the safe, you can see the wall through where it attaches, all the way around. Is that a stock model that got resized? Also the texture on the shelf in the safe was not properly aligned on the top or front edge. The corner of the room across from the safe also had Z-fighting going on in the ceiling corner.

 

I saved rescuing the fence till the end because I wanted to have a clear path and I didn't know if I'd need to follow him out or what.... so when I opened the cell to let him out the screen faded out to black and DAda... that was the end of the mission? Other people were saying you had to follow him out on to the pier? Didn't work that way for my playthrough unfortunately.

 

I did find a breath potion in the display case and wondered where I might use it but never got to do anything after freeing the fence as the mission ended promptly.

 

Let's see, what else. I thought the AI paths were really good. Challenging getting around some of them and made the player feel thiefy and smart. I didn't notice any AI turning on switches from the wrong side of the wall though someone did post a fix for how to stop that behavior in a different thread.

 

I liked the ambience and overall feel throughout the mission. I thought the sound choices were all very suited and well picked. I also did have the issue Sotha mentioned where the ambience drone music was too loud. I also tried turning it down but it was not controlled by the "Ambient" slider. It was instead controlled by the "SFX" slider which I thought was odd. So if I turned down the ambient sounds it also lowered all the sound I wanted and needed to hear, so that was a bit distracting at first. I did decide on a happy medium setting but it was still overpowering the other audio and not balanced well within the environment.

 

I like the rain ambience and thought it was done well though. I only had issues with the drone music ambience.

 

As has been mentioned earlier in the thread, was there only a single person beta testing? Not good. It doesn't matter how good someone is at beta testing, everyone misses things that other people spot easily. The other thorn in the side for testers is that, most of the things we "gloss" over and miss we continue to miss, because of the same reason we didn't spot them initially. Its always good to have at least 3 sets of eyes looking things because then there's much less chance of things slipping through the cracks. Some things still go unnoticed but the chances are much slimmer.

 

 

 

Overall a great mission and lots of fun. Great progression from your last FM and I look forward to the next!

 

Thanks.

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I just had a go at this mission today. It felt pretty complete.

 

Thank you for the detailed feedback.

 

There were three people beta testing the level during a period of roughly a week before release, two from the forums and one a friend and a colleague IRL. It's possible however, that because I incorporated a lot of the testers ideas and also let them help out on the actual mapping here and there, they too might have developed blindness towards some issues. You never see anything wrong with your own baby after all.

 

Despite all the testing its apparent that some rough edges remain, and I'm most puzzled by the objective logic acting up. The good thing is that there has been a lot of very constructive feedback, and I can look into patching the level into top form soon.

Edited by kyyrma
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snapback.pngkyyrma, on 17 March 2014 - 06:25 AM, said:

 

I'm adding this in the OP post for future reference, because my testers also found this to be a bit too difficult.

 

Tester singular, thank you very much!

 

An awful lot of love went into this, and a lot of enjoyment is the result. Grats on the release! ^_^

 

Oh, I saw this on page two and that's why I asked. Good to hear otherwise.

Edited by Lux
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Oh, I saw this on page two and that's why I asked. Good to hear otherwise.

 

As in I didn't find it difficult, not as in I was the single tester. Also the objective logic was flawless save one problem. That was reported, then the current issue arose when that problem was fixed. Since it had worked first pass through and the fix on the broken part worked as intended, we collectively marked the objective logic as working and moved on. It's usually things missed in that way that you see getting fixed in early patches in most games.

Edited by Airship Ballet
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Very nice FM kyyrma. It's nice to see weather effects in an FM. A little difficult to pull off IMO. The FM reminded me of the jewellers shop you break into at the beginning of Thief 4. A coincidence I'm sure. This FM shows a great leap in your mapping abilities since your first FM not that there was anything wrong with your first one. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. I believe that with time you could be capable of great things when it comes to TDM mapping.

"I believe that what doesn't kill you simply makes you... stranger"

 

The Joker

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  • 1 month later...

Just finished playing this tonight. It was a nice little mission but had a few frustrating moments for me.

 

 

I didn't totally finish because I failed to figure out the safe and without it I couldn't meet my loot goal, even though I feel like I went everywhere. I had to read the forum to find the key to the spider area too, even though I specifically looked around there for the key. The spider area was fantastically creepy, but I never saw any actual spiders...I expected to see a big one come down from the ceiling or something, but I never saw anything, or heard anything when I turned on my light and ran out of the area...turned out to be a slight bit anticlimactic.

 

The sewer areas were great and looked fantastic, and I liked the creativity of the security cameras. Unfortunately, the alarm didn't appear to do anything (other than scare the crap out of me)...guards continued to patrol around casually and payed no attention to it.

 

The alarm first went off when I mantled into the carriage to pick up the letter, so not only did it scare the crap out of me, but I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from, since I hadn't read about it yet (scared my wife in the other room too).

 

I did have some of the same issues as Sotha...I found the ambient noises really loud, to the point that I couldn't hear my own footsteps.

 

The safe failure was really my own fault...I tried 15/15, for the daughter's age and date of birth, but never thought to try the month.

 

The rain was a nice touch, but there were spots where it came through the walls, and a couple rooms where the rain noise was as loud as if I were outside.

 

Favourite moment: I was in a hall in Tengrove's place, and used a gas arrow to KO a guard that had just turned on a light and was about to see me. I grabbed the body and tossed him into the small dining room. Just as I turned back to grab his dropped sword, Tengrove stepped out into the hall. I grabbed the sword and backed into the room, but banged the sword onto the floor and he heard it and came in to look for me. He turned on the light, saw me, and I flashbombed him and tried knocking him out (which didn't work for some reason). Then I turned off the light and we played cat and mouse for a few minutes in the dark before I was finally able to lean out from the table and KO him as he searched.

 

 

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Unfortunately, the alarm didn't appear to do anything (other than scare the crap out of me)...guards continued to patrol around casually and payed no attention to it.

 

 

 

Were you playing in the regular version of the game, or a pre-release of a future version with the propagation changes? (I expect to have a similar issue with my mission too when that change hits.)

"The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out."

- Baron Thomas Babington Macauley

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I was using 2.02...are you saying guards react to it in2.01? If so I need to investigate.

 

edit: Did some tests, and there is apparently a problem with 2.02 that causes it not to alert the AI.

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Really a nice mission, I've enjoyed many parts of it. The safe code wasn't that difficult :), but some loot was really difficult to find. At max difficulty is really difficult because the guards keep turning the light on or go crazy if they find a door open. Nice, that behaviour was really realistic. My only complain is that once you are so realistic you should also add a way to destroy the lights or to switch off the energy somehow (generator in the basement?). There should always be a way to turn off a light source (with consequences depending on what you have done: it a light has been broken then the guards should start investigating...). In the end nice mission, a bit different from the average thief missions and that's good.

System76 Gazelle professional with Intel® Core i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 8GB ram and Intel HD Graphics 4000

 

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/gazp8

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Congrats on the release Kyyrma. Just started this today (sorry running so far behind on things) and noticed this after I

picked out the knife from the chest of the guy in the spiders lair. Inventory items and loot count overlap each other so is a little difficult to read.Did a read through thus far and haven't seen anyone else mention it. I played a bit farther into the mission (did beggar objective first before going on) gathered some loot from his place and the overlap didn't go away. See picture: post-3777-0-06748900-1401295351_thumb.jpg

So far not a deal breaker just thought I'd mention so I wouldn't forget. Will write more when I finish the mission. Edit - Problem seemed to clear itself once I was inside and grabbed the first piece of loot. (Didn't clear with grabbing arrows etc.) 2nd edit - Finished this up last night and enjoyed the mission.

I did find the voices drowned out, sorry to say, but not so bad that I didn't want to continue. I even made it through the spider lair without shooting the little ones (once I noticed they didn't move); sounds, though, kept me on my toes. LOL! The hardest part for me was finding all the loot - personal goal - as I'd finished the mission and noticed I was missing quite a bit (almost a 1000) so went back in to look for it. I had trouble at the pier with the water. I couldn't see anything - I'd see the odd shape but it was mostly blackish grey and I also couldn't find a way out so would have to reload. Tried this a couple of times with the same result. I felt there had to be something there as mission didn't end until I got in the boat so kept looking. After searching everywhere else again, I used show_loot (fail on my part) and saw it showed it was in the water so jumped in. This took several tries as I couldn't see anything. Finally after diving down many times I caught a glimpse of the chest. (nice bobbing in the current effect by the way) and was able to make my way out at the end of the pier although had tried the same spot earlier.

Thanks for the mission, look forward to your next one.

Edited by Thiefette
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  • 1 month later...

The gameplay on this one was suprisingly fun, tough trying to sneak with such few rooms. Good example of few guards used well. Though the extra few guards outside thanks to shouting of AI, has kept me more on my toes after being foiled. Nice placement of that sewer gate key by the way :P

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  • 1 month later...

Thank you releasing this cool mission. I've just finished the previous one and now in a process of going through this one.

I am playing on maximum difficulty and I wanted to clear one moment out. Guards seem to be with perfect hearing. Is it supposed to be so? I understand that it's the maximum difficulty, but still. It is extremely difficult to do anything with them, especially that the max. difficulty is oriented on ghost-run. I thought that it could be an issue when

 

1) I walked the door near the mission start, there was a guy (a hunter?) sleeping. And there was no way I could not to wake him up. Even moving in a slowest way.

2) When I got down to the sewers I was running in there, exploring (it's sewers so I thought no one could hear me there?). But to my surprise I found myself attack by a couple of guards (how did they got there?)

Not to mention that all other guards are extremely difficult to avoid and it seems completely impossible not to alert them.

I've just remembered that TDM update 2.02 changed AI hearing, so maybe that is the case?

 

Like I was saying, I haven't completed yet but I've just began looking into

beggar-related ques. It reminds me of mixture of necromants with their spider cult from M&M and Cthulhu myths.

So much fun!

 

Edit: ok, so I finished this. What I liked most is style, especially rain & puddles! The sewers were cool too. I noticed different ambient\music in different places of the map, which is good, as in some missions there is one music playing all the time which is kinda annoying.

I liked the intro story, so I guess I'm the type who likes skulduggery stories :)

From gameplay point of view I liked

the idea with that inventors guild' detector machine (or how is it called?) and a badge. Also I liked that you don't need to babysit the fence when you break him out. "Meeting at the pier" is IMO is the best solution which could be found for such kind of mission. I managed to guess how to open Tengrove's safe on my own, which is delivering, though it wasn't difficult.

But unfortunately it was difficult for me to find that dang key in the sewers (which was mentioned here already). So I had to look here to find it. My issue was that I saw the pipes, but didn't see the mushroom in a bottle behind them. I guess if did, then I'd certainly come closer to look at this and would have found the key. But unfortunately that didn't happen, so I guess you should make the mushroom more visible somehow.

 

Edited by Lex

How we speak depends on how we keep silent.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Very fun mission. I don't know what all this stuff about architecture is, but the mission looked good to me. The rain was very loud, but no problems with ambient otherwise. I was very surprised by the alarms. Might've been a good idea to put those in the briefing. Keys were all fine, no problems with that. Sadly I missed the beggar objective, would've helped with the loot. I will echo others in that the loot objective was too high. Unfortunately I also didn't figure out the safe note: I figured the hint had to be something more blatant (as it usually is in TDM missions). Thread came to the rescue though.

One more issue was when coming up from the Prison to the ground floor, there was this guard that kept standing around. He just wouldn't move, and I ended up having to use a noisemaker to get him to move. Then later on he appeared to get stuck twice more, and to only move if something around him happened. Did you set him to wait for like 60 seconds or what? Because that's a long-ass time.

 

All in all had a good time. Thanks!

You can call me Phi, Numbers, Digits, Ratio, 16, 1618, or whatever really, as long as it's not Phil.

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