TDM Mapping Conventions

[Xarg]

According to lore, TDM takes place in the 1600s, but since steam-powered devices were developed earlier in history, it looks more like the Victorian age in lots of places.

 

I knew it! I went googlin' for stuff on shields, and it seems that widespread usage of shields in infantry combat died out from the 1400's onwards, which would explain why no AI in TDM use any, but it would stand to reason that there are still stockpiles of them around, or they've been repurposed into family crests etc, but we aren't yet in the age of the firearm (even though they do start showing up at this point in time in real history, though I believe they're still at the matchlock stage, possibly heading into flintlock).

[Springheel]

I was playing the other night and noticed that the convention used in nuThief for unfrobbable doors was to not use handles at all, on both exterior and interior doors.

[Springheel]

I was playing the other night and noticed that the convention used in nuThief for unfrobbable doors was to not use handles at all, on both exterior and interior doors.

[Paralytik]

Many interesting things here, especially about how to draw the player's attention to possible routes and items. One thing commonly used for this purpose is movement; a swinging sign or spinning fan will be features our brain will notice instantly, even if the player consciously doesn't reflect on it.

 

When it comes to consistent design, I'd say it's much more important with internal consistency in the map or campaign, than general consistency over different maps created by different authors. This is something that needs to be focused on, maybe with some general tutorial-like texts on the wiki? Though, a consensus about the presentation of useable/unuseable doors might be a good thing.

 

About the age/time period in which TDM takes place, I interpret it as a completely fictional universe, hence all talk about which century it would be closest to in real life history seems completely arbitrary if you ask me.

[Tels]

Yes, paintings are one of those cases where the loot and non-loot versions look identical, which is generally a Bad Idea™.

 

I agree that something should be done to make loot paintings stand out from non-loot versions, but I'm not sure of a general rule that can suit all situations.

 

Also, just out of curiosity, anyone know why atdm:loot_painting_small is worth 325 (more than a purse full of emeralds) when atdm:loot_painting is only worth 125 and atdm:loot_painting_medium is worth 225?

 

I'm not sure if I set the values back then when I created the technical demonstration (would need to look into SVN log), but I'd wager the default values where set more or less randomly, and not in combination with all the other loot values.

[Tels]

An excellent alternative to this would be to have old torches in place but extinguished and give the player at the start, a lighting stick (of have them find some near the beginning). This would add realism and immersive feel to a crypt having to light the long extinguished torches. It would also be neat when the player lights a torch to see what it lights up and the mysteries it uncovers. You could have the first unlit torch near the beginning where some light is creeping in and makes the first unlit torch seen. From there its just connect the dots.

 

Obviously the blue flame is magical and therefore always lit but we don't see much of that either. Some have done this, though in favor of believability many don't favor the blue lit environment.

 

I do like the idea of lighting the torches yourself though I'm sure many would be put off by the idea of having to do this extra work in the environment themselves. Many players I guess don't like getting a real sense of place from a game and just prefer to game.

 

If you want the "player lights torches", you need him to not have a lantern, and a slowmatch and the knowledge to do that. Most players would probably fail

 

There are some "unwritten" conventions in gaming, that work because they exploit or show the human nature. You can see almost all of them in work if you watch the various Santa Lucia plays on Youtube.

 

A few big ones are:

 

* Follow the light. The player will follow the light, even tho in TDM he will avoid it. You can see this in SL that virtually NOBODY walks into the first door straight across the start, and finds the hidden pub, because, heh, the door is in the dark but the street has interesting lighting. (And humans avoid the dark instinctively)

 

So, if you have a side-street with no light, and a almost-well-lit mainstreet, the players will follow the mainstreet, completely overlooking the side ally.

 

Most games have the "light up interesting points" strategy, so players are also somewhat conditioned to follow it. Even TDM follows it with the "hightlight objects the player can manipulate"

 

Btw, good lighting is in SL with the statue, the head of the statue is lit up, marking it as an important place/point/object. Placing the lights in your map is an effective way of guiding players around. But it can also make it follow the wrong path.

 

 

* Follow the main way. The player all progress along the main street and rarely leave it. (In SL, sometimes they leave it because they see the lady go into her door, or because the door with the beggar is well-lit. Or because they run against the guard. But except in these cases, they all follow it first.)

 

The first two work most-often in common. In "slower" games like TDM players explore a bit more, but still, they usually try to follow the "main" route, however they determine what the "main" route actually is. And if the main route is the one with the lights... you get the idea

 

And:

 

* There is no vertical space (Valve said this one of their core level design rules IIRC). E.g. "players never look up". You can see this in SL play-throughs quite cleary. Most players would miss anything that is not on the streetlevel. In TDM it is a bit better, because players know to explore, but even here players rarely look up at all. "Interesting" stuff to the player is always left/right/front of him.

 

* There is also the "give up on first try". This one makes playthroughs painful for me. Guy runs up a ladder, falls down, and says "oh I can't climb here" then pursuits 10 minutes a different route. Or decides "I go left in labyrinth", then gets sidetracked for 30 minutes and never explores the right side of labyrinth.

 

And last but not least:

 

* Players never read READMEs, tutorials or wiki. It is painful to see how many people don't know you can shoulder bodies, pinch out candles, or relight flames. They skip most in-game readables if they are longer than a page, too, missing important clues.

 

For the last point I always thought TDM should have some sort of "hint" system that plays hints for important things the first time a player encounters them (regardles of FM). Like if you drag a body, a popup says "press X to shoulder body, X again to drop". If you hold a candle it says "press X to pinch candle out". These tooltips would default to be on and play the first X times (1..3) something important is detected.

 

 

Some mappers get these points intuitively, f.i. putting a light near an openable door, and keeping uninteresting doors in the dark. But then, all rules can be broken.

 

Anyway, I think it is very valuable to have someone play your map and look them over the shoulder. And sometimes painful

 

 

Btw, in one of the playthroughs for SL some guy picks up the heavy rock and tries to knock down the pot with the rock. Of course he can't throw it that high up, so the rock falls down. And accidentily kills a rat! The guy then picks up the rat and is all awe and wonder that you can pick up rats - completely missing that he just killed it

[Tels]

I'd like to expand the point about the readables a bit more:

 

Players easily loose interest. So if your readable is over one page, expect content on the second page and beyond not to be read by most players. So putting crucialhints for map progression there is probably frustrating the players.

 

And, more importantly, if your map has many readables, many with "only" lore, you can expect your player to skip read readables after the first 3 or 4 (some earlier, some later). So if the player encounters 5 lore books and then the important hint about the important safe, the chances are high he will "skip reading the boring scrolls and doing something fun first". Like running around the entire map and killing/knocking down every AI because she "can't find the damn safe" ...

 

In addition, the "pick up every readable" will clutter the inventory for players. Experienced players know how to toggle groups (like skip to the lockpick with "p"), and they also know how to drop "unimportant" objects like lore readables.

 

Many players will, however, not know this, because they don't read the README nor the keybind settings in the menu. So they will struggle with rotating through 20 inventory items just to find their lockpick...

 

Again, the SL playthroughts are very good in showing these things, because SL seems to be the first mission played by many people.

 

There are probably no "real, 100% right" solutions to these problems, but the knowledge may help designing maps. (There is, of course, also the target audience. Do you want to make your map for seasoned, hardcore players, or accessible to first-time-every players? And is it really possible to make a map for both at the same time? Entire books have probably been written on these topics

[Cookie]

One thing I have noticed is, that many city missions make it hard for the player to notice, which one of the 20 windows on the 4th floor

is actually accessable and hides a flat filled with loot needed for the objective. This often results in running around multiple times and

checking every single one of them. Just a thing that might be considered by mappers (you are still awesome Melan ).

[Paralytik]

The detail about players never looking up is not only a problem in games; generally people don't look up IRL either. All of you who own the Portal games should really check out the developer's commentaries while playing. Among many things, they address exactly this problem, and how they try to condition the player early on to pay attention to the vertical axis, since the games rely heavily on both vertical and horizontal movement and problem solving.

[SteveL]

One thing I have noticed is, that many city missions make it hard for the player to notice, which one of the 20 windows on the 4th floor

is actually accessable and hides a flat filled with loot needed for the objective. This often results in running around multiple times and

checking every single one of them.

Agreed, leave them slightly ajar please! Or if that's too obvious in a certain spot, perhaps put something on the windowsill to indicate that it's been recently opened. There's nothing I find more enticing in a map than a slightly open window that's hard to get to :-)

[chedap]

Meh, I am of the opinion that trying your hardest to avoid player frustration, especially in the level design area, is just aiming for the lowest common denominator. And on topic of Valve's mapping guidelines I also think they might have been on target with Left4Dead, but then they way overdid it with Portal 2 (to the point where you just automatically shoot the only two bright squares upon entering the room and voila - puzzle solved, without brain involved). Like, go play the second level in Duke3D: can you imagine a progress-critical vent shaft above eye-level in a modern FPS? And yet, I don't remember having much trouble with the level, despite it being one of the first encounters with verticality in FPS for me (and, I assume, for lots of others too). Possibly without mouselook, too!

 

Exploration is a quality I personally value the most in Thief/TDM, and it's pretty much dead in most modern first person games, even in supposedly "oldschool" FPS's. Avoiding frustration in this context is synonymous to "streamlining", and it's a slippery slope. Give the player a good map instead - not necessarily the most detailed one, but one that can be used to intentionally explore the place. It's something that can make or break an FM for me, and I especially noticed it with larger TMA FMs: e.g. "Art of Thievery" has great structure, but you'll only know that when you're almost finished, since the map is worthless. And, in contrast, something like "Hidden Agenda" or FMs by Morrgan are a joy to explore when you can understand the scale of things and plan your route. Intentionality is even more relevant for ghosting, nobody wants to repeatedly avoid same guards while aimlessly running around the place looking for a room you didn't visit.

 

All that said, it's a good rule to respect the player, and player's time as well. Fortunately, switch- and key-hunts (the worst offenders IMO) aren't popular among TDM mappers.

Edited August 18, 2014 by chedap

[Cookie]

The detail about players never looking up is not only a problem in games; generally people don't look up IRL either. All of you who own the Portal games should really check out the developer's commentaries while playing. Among many things, they address exactly this problem, and how they try to condition the player early on to pay attention to the vertical axis, since the games rely heavily on both vertical and horizontal movement and problem solving.

 

Sorry if this might have been misunderstood, this was not about vertical movement, but closed windows, with loot hidden behind them and the point that it is sometimes hard to notice, which windows are "real" and which ones are just window-painted texture walls.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Cookie

[SteveL]

@cookie: it's two conversations intertwined rather than a misunderstanding.

[Paralytik]

Wow. I just wrote a very long post (like 20 minutes worth) with lots of thoughts and stuff, and then my browser tab crashed.

Struggling with motivation as it is, this did not push me in the right direction. Dammit.

[Cookie]

@cookie: it's two conversations intertwined rather than a misunderstanding.

 

My fault then. To add to Paralytik´s point, as far as I know, Valve originally wanted to add an additional gel, which would have let you

walk on walls (and the ceiling?), but stepped away from it, because of players motion sickness and the point you have added.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Cookie

[demagogue]

Wow. I just wrote a very long post (like 20 minutes worth) with lots of thoughts and stuff, and then my browser tab crashed.

Struggling with motivation as it is, this did not push me in the right direction. Dammit.

 

This is why a always copy my post as I'm writing it & before I hit "Post".

Only takes one or a few times to get paranoid about this.

[Melan]

One thing I have noticed is, that many city missions make it hard for the player to notice, which one of the 20 windows on the 4th floor is actually accessable and hides a flat filled with loot needed for the objective. This often results in running around multiple times and checking every single one of them. Just a thing that might be considered by mappers (you are still awesome Melan ).

My design philosophy is: if you can climb up on it... you should climb up on it. You don't really need those obscure pieces of loot, though. They are mostly for explorers.

(I don't remember that particular window, though - I usually either leave them slightly ajar, entirely open, or make the loot visible from a distance.)

[demagogue]

Openable windows was the one thing I actually wrote on my loading screen (for ver 2) to give players a heads up because it was both very important to the FM & enough players complained about it to show it was a real issue.

 

Edit. If it wasn't mentioned before, of course the reason it's not easy to leave openable windows a bit ajar as a signal is that it often kills performance to leave that portal open.

[Tels]

All that said, it's a good rule to respect the player, and player's time as well. Fortunately, switch- and key-hunts (the worst offenders IMO) aren't popular among TDM mappers.

 

I do agree that stream-lining your map is catering to the lowest common denominator, and that all modern games suffer from it more or less. Especially the FPS, but also the stealth games.

 

However, it is quite hard to design a level for all players. That's why we have difficulty levels, and I think it can be useful to think of them more of "player levels" that just difficulty. For instance, in "Easy", make books glued to the ground, in Hard let the player pick them up. Or in Easy, make the window slightly ajar and well lit, in Medium ajar but normally lit, and in Hard just closed.

 

That way people can choose their style. It is not easy, however.

Edited August 19, 2014 by Tels

[NeonsStyle]

Yes, paintings are one of those cases where the loot and non-loot versions look identical, which is generally a Bad Idea™.

 

I agree that something should be done to make loot paintings stand out from non-loot versions, but I'm not sure of a general rule that can suit all situations.

 

Also, just out of curiosity, anyone know why atdm:loot_painting_small is worth 325 (more than a purse full of emeralds) when atdm:loot_painting is only worth 125 and atdm:loot_painting_medium is worth 225?

 

Doesn't the gold frames do this? I don't know, as I'm learning TDM atm and havn't added and paintings yet, but I always thought playing TDM any lootable painting

had a gold frame.

[Obsttorte]

The models are more or less randomly choosen, as well as the loot values (hence I tend to change them). But yes, it would be good to use this approach, or another way to communicate to the player a painting is valuable.

 

However, not all missions are using loot paintings.

[NeonsStyle]

Why not just put something next to the door, ie some junk to signify that it doesn't open. The player

will quickly realise that any door with that object next to it is decorative. Solves the problem of people

who have a reason to use a non normal handle, ie the knocker.

 

It really doesn't matter what is used to make it noticeable, aside from flowing stuff (ala T3 - hate that stuff),

but any small model could be used. A broom, a bucket, anything. Just whatever it is, it becomes a standard.

I always find doors without handles break my immersion, and I never like it. I think there are more subtle

ways of doing it.

 

Even a type of non glowing decal would be better, ie a clear dirt stain, or something similar.

[Airship Ballet]

I feel like that's far too vague for somebody to pick up on. In the same sense that door handles might cause problems for somebody who wants to buck the trend and use that taboo door handle for a real door, that would screw over everybody who just wants to decorate around a door.

[Lux]

For me at least, I find this whole line of questions/suggestions on doors kinda funny. Obviously this is only my view but I personally like it when all doors have handles openable or not. Areas that have a bunch of doors without handles feel like a Hollywood set; fake. When you go up to a door and right click it, if there's no sound, you can't open the door. Check the door.

 

From my perspective at least this is just purely either laziness on the players part, "I don't want to check all the doors"...hey, then don't. Check off your objectives and get to the end already cause you just want to get the experience over with. Or, pull out your spyglass and look at the doors from a long distance and establish that, "you don't have to waste your time going to check them." Wow. So thiefy.

 

I just don't get any of it because as a player, I want to do things myself and not have the mapper doing them for me so I can decrease the amount of time I'm immersed in their world.

[esme]

I check every door, regardless of handles. if cant find a way to make it react by either frobbing or a switch I ignore it from then on.

 

In the original thief I would use a blackjack to make sure something wasn't an object by hitting it, if it made a sound it was an object if it didn't it was a texture applied to a brush, I found a lot of secret doors like that.

 

It's part of the fun.