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Should small static oil lamps be extinguishable up close?


wesp5

Oil lamps  

38 members have voted

  1. 1. Should small static oil lamps be exstinguishable up close?

    • Yes
    • No
    • Yes or no, depending on a new gameplay setting.
    • Yes or no, depending on how mappers define them.


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Springheel, on 03 Sept 2015 - 4:47 PM, said:

 

 

You're seriously advancing the argument that breaking a glass bulb or stamping out a campfire is _less realistic_ than pinching out an oil flame?

Of course not

 

And yet once again in this post you're making your argument by commenting on what "could be done in reality."

 

You're either using "realism" as your argument or you're not. Which is it?

 

Even without seeing my hands, frobing a candle or an oil lamp to put them out seems realistic to me because I know it could be done in reality.

 

 

"Even without seeing my hands, frobbing a glass light to break it seems realistic to me because I know it could be done in reality."

 

Both statements are equally true if you're talking about realism.

 

If you're not talking about realism, then I have no idea what your argument is. You seem to want to pick an arbitrary line simply because it suits your preferences better.

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we have storm lamps, near impossible to blow out, you need really small hands to pinch out, plus its liquid paraffin and it burns really hot, so to pinch it out you would have small burnt hands, they usually left till they run out of fuel.

In game you would expect them to put guards into full alert if they ever went out if they still have fuel left.

the paraffin is usualy running under pressure hence the pump seen on some models, sometimes mistaken for a on/off switch.

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I don't like the "as the mapper defines them" as it leads us to what we already have with the oil paintings: Some missions allow to collect them, some not. Many players don't know that they're collectable because when they tried once on a map which forbid this, they'll barely try again. I think essential things light lighting and loot should be more consistent. :mellow:

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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"Even without seeing my hands, frobbing a glass light to break it seems realistic to me because I know it could be done in reality."

I'm fully aware that you left the more critical torches out of the discussion because you very well understand where I am coming from and you are only too stubborn to agree ;). As for the glass lights, you are right! Why not add this too :)? FROB an electrical lamp and it will break with a loud noise that alerts nearby guards or maybe hit it with the blackjack instead. In my opinion this too would add to the gameplay and the consistency of TDM! Compared to snuffing out oil lamps it would be more dangerous, but why not?

 

As for the storm oil lamps, the ones I found in TDM are looking similar to the one I have at home. Most of the time they are used in indoor mansions of the rich compared to torches outside or in more mundane homes. Nothing storm resistant needed and the player is wearing leather gloves anyway. As SeriousToni said, consistency is important so I would again recommend to select this by a difficulty setting option. It won't be a problem for mappers and all players could decide if they want to play the old or the new way!

Edited by wesp5
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I think you believe everybody here is conservative, or stubborn, or something, because they disagree with you. Like I said, make a variant, offer it up, do as you please, but accept that the people who decide what goes into the core mod don't see the point in making the game easier by allowing a player to click on oil lamps to put them out. I don't either. It's dumb, really dumb. We've already established that consistency is important, also that people value realism to differing extents. I talked about game mechanics and that, along with a lot of what else has been said, has flown over your head. Maybe it's unrealistic to require a water arrow, I don't know, and honestly don't care. Not only do I have a considerably lesser experience with real-life oil lamps compared to the surprising majority here who do, but the lights work fine as they are now. It's not a case of proving whether or not oil lamps can be snuffed, it's a case of the game having a flaming light that cannot be snuffed, that is more refined than a torch but not electric or gas. That's a game thing, not a realism thing: you need something shiny and presentable that isn't raging away like a torch, but that can't be snuffed by hand, for gameplay balance. Take away oil lamps, and how am I going to make a respectable hallway difficult without using electricity? I can't use torches, and I can't use candles or lamps. That's the purpose oil lamps serve, the gap they fill. That's not going to be changed because it's potentially unrealistic that you can't spit them out.

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I agree with Toni, either add it in game or not but don't let the mappers decide. It will only make the game more inconsistent and make the gameplay feel weaker. There should also be certain standard rules to follow for map makers, specially when it comes to lighting and min/max radius of each light type cause that also makes the gameplay inconsistent between missions and diminishes the whole experience.

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The TDM guys are really understanding and usually go out of their way to argue any proposal out there, to give you a fair hearing. But there are limits to that. Not only in terms of resources, but also in terms of possible conflicts with the vision and design choices that support the game and give it the intended coherence. We, as fans, need to understand that.

 

I agree with Airship, many sensible arguments were put foward here, many were simply ignored, and thats no way of making a case. There also doesnt seem to be majority supporting the suggestion.

 

The game is open, though - that means anarchy; you can take it, tweak it, share that improvement with like minded people. Even though its not a part of the original game itself, its still open for all those interested, so its no different than having a "on, off" button inside the options panel. Like I said before, go for it man, beta test it, make a forum post about how this works for the player. I would rather see that than this conversation going nowhere.

Edited by RPGista
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Sorry in advance, I've kinda lost patience with this issue a bit

 

As I said before it can be given as an extra option if the devs decide to put it in the core software, but kindly leave existing missions how the author made them.

 

If you wish to tweak a mission on your system then fine, that's your system and you can do what you want with it, there are plenty of cheat codes available in the engine if you really want to make things easier or break out DarkRadiant & mod the hell out of it, but there's no reason why something you do on your system with the missions you've downloaded should be retrofitted to the core engine to force everyone else to do the same thing on theirs.

 

Regarding the 'consistency' argument complaining that different missions, by different authors, made at different times, behave differently, I think there may be a clue in this sentence that invalidates the argument.

 

If an author or group of authors create a campaign, then across the campaign you can expect consistency and legitemately (although a bit douchily) complain if you don't get it, but these missions have been gifted to us by many different people, with many different skill levels at many different times and you can't guarantee or even expect features that one author provides to be used by another.

 

If the author put a fixed light source in an inconvenient position, then deal with it, TDM is not supposed to be an easy game to play, it's supposed to present you with a challenge that you don't get in other games, dealing with inconvenient light sources is part of that challenge.

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I don't understand, why this discussion is still going on so heatedly... If extinguishability can be implemented via spawnarg (as SteveL suggested (at least I think it was him, too lazy to look it up, sorry)), that is turned to "0" by default, no older maps should get broken, authors can easily use it in new maps, if they want, and people who want it in older maps can also set the spawnarg to "1" in their def-files and have it their way on their system.

 

It is a solution with which everyone should be happy. So why keep arguing, when either party has their opinion made up will not change it. The length of this discussion has shown at least this last point.

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It is a solution with which everyone should be happy.

No. It only works for people who read this thread and don´t fear messing around with their game files. As the poll results are almost 50/50 % here I bet that there are thousands of players out there annoyed by this who will never stumble over the simple solution once this thread is outdated and gone. I accept that you will never make it default behaviour but why won´t you add it to the options with a warning that it may make old missions easier? Then it's up to every player himself!

Edited by wesp5
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Well, if people are too lazy to use google, they will just have to accept the mod as it is, I think. I am noone, who usually tinkers with his games very much (I have even avoided most mods for Skyrim, if I feared they might change gameplay too much), because I belive, there is a reason, why developers have made it the way it is. If I am unhappy with it, I have two options: stop playing the game or google, how to change it. If you stop playing, it would be sad, because there are a lot of great missions, but other than missing out on these you have lost nothing (at least, TDM is free). And if you google, you will find this thread or at least the forum, where people can help you. Of course, this is not very convenient and you have to become active yourself, but that is life.

Well, rereading, what I have written, I think it sounds a bit like "help yourself or be content with what you have", which is not very user friendly. But you cannot make everyone happy (as this thread proves).

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My God, it's just a discussion. How is this a "controversial", "heated" thread to you guys? I'll honestly never understand the weird tendency some people have to just hop into a thread and be like "Guys calm down the people next door can hear you talking. Also I have nothing to contribute to the topic. Also I'm better than you savages." Maybe it's me, but jeez, nothing would ever get done if you had your way.

 

Anyway, my suggestion is to just create/comish a model and create a switchable gas lamp entity with it. I'd be cool with that being included in the mod. Doesn't step on anybody's toes, doesn't cause any consistency problems, doesn't change anything that's already there, adds more to the game. A switch in the options menu is just lazy design, would still ruin some maps, blah de blah. If you'd like something of yours to make it into the game, you need to pull your finger out and make it happen. It's community-driven, it's entirely down to you. A bunch of people appear and shout stuff from the sidelines and get irritated when nothing comes of it, as if their idea alone was enough to spur a bunch of busy people into changing their project at a moment's notice. Go make/ask for a pretty oil lamp to be used exclusively in tandem with your idea and you'll have my vote for sticking it into the core download, because I'd use it for easier areas. Keep having a fit and being all passive-aggressive, and it'll be dead in the water once you lose interest.

Edited by Airship Ballet
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Well, rereading, what I have written, I think it sounds a bit like "help yourself or be content with what you have", which is not very user friendly.

The problem is that it took me a bit to implement this change and I'm an experienced modder myself, only not for TDM. It's indeed not very user friendly to just say people can do it using an old by then old thread. What's so bad about adding an option for any users who want this feature? I can't really believe the argument that old missions are sooo important, this is used all the time when people ask for actual new game features, but it strangely was never an issue when the whole sound or AI systems were changed!

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Well consider your reaction. Getting all personal and stuff. You know it gets heated and controversial when you get personal.

No but that's what I'm saying. It isn't, at all. Like, that's just plain not personal. It's like when somebody in a conversation goes "awkwaaaaard." It wasn't awkward until you called it awkward, and it's not an issue until somebody derails the thread telling people to stop being so gosh-darn hostile. Making fun of someone's receding hairline or whatever, it's bullying, but tackling one another's arguments just plain isn't. It's like some people want nothing to get done, for fear of upsetting one another. People just have a weird threshold, or the preconception that anything other than agreement is hostility. It's like to some people we're all doomed to never be comfortable talking to one another, so we have to pretend it's parliament, that we can't poke fun at one another because it wouldn't be proper. It's the minority, but there's one for every thread that gets somewhere, I swear. actually even MPs often debate with a bit of snark

Edited by Airship Ballet
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My God, it's just a discussion. How is this a "controversial", "heated" thread to you guys? I'll honestly never understand the weird tendency some people have to just hop into a thread and be like "Guys calm down the people next door can hear you talking. Also I have nothing to contribute to the topic. Also I'm better than you savages." Maybe it's me, but jeez, nothing would ever get done if you had your way.

 

I think, you got me wrong: I just wanted to point out, that this discussion was only circling at the moment. "I want it in" "But we won't put it in in the way you suggested. How about this compromise" "But I want it in, how I suggested". And as I understood, it there was a compromise, that just got ignored. I would never had said a thing, if the discussion would have been constructive at that point, but it wasn't (at least in my opinion).

 

The problem is that it took me a bit to implement this change and I'm an experienced modder myself, only not for TDM. It's indeed not very user friendly to just say people can do it using an old by then old thread. What's so bad about adding an option for any users who want this feature? I can't really believe the argument that old missions are sooo important, this is used all the time when people ask for actual new game features, but it strangely was never an issue when the whole sound or AI systems were changed!

 

Well, if you would have put a lot of thought into your mission and especially that one point that is a bit tricky, where the player has to think around the corner to solve this problem and then in the next update, the whole thing becomes moot, because the critical element gets changed and the whole situation is easy peasy, without any challenge. How would you feel about that? I completely understand, that old missions should be playable as they were. Of course, it is not always possible, but if you have the option to not change older missions, why not use it?

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Well, if you would have put a lot of thought into your mission and especially that one point that is a bit tricky, where the player has to think around the corner to solve this problem and then in the next update, the whole thing becomes moot, because the critical element gets changed and the whole situation is easy peasy, without any challenge. How would you feel about that?

 

 

Exactly.

 

Keeping mappers happy is high priority.

 

Without mappers, TDM dies.

 

(though rejecting this idea has less to do with keeping mappers happy, and everything to do with not making the rules less consistent to support a specific vision of 'what makes sense' that is, as far as I can tell, completely arbitrary.)

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the discussion would have been constructive at that point, but it wasn't

I just think it's better to point out the elephant in the room and suggest an alternative, to keep it going. You never really know that it's pointless until you've given up. Dude might come back with a fully functional switchable gas lamp alternative, and that'd be great.

A person doesn't necessarily need to get personal to get comfortable.

I mean I'd suggest otherwise, that there's at least some correlation there. When I think comfort I think of having settled in, thrown off your shoes, gotten rid of your work face and put back on your own. If a community is just really cold, impersonal formal debate, it's far from comfortable, to me at least. Yet when anybody's more casual than that, throws in a little joke, gets irritated, someone's always all "woah woah pump your brakes Son this is a sterile speaking environment." That sucks, really. I wanna make friends, people you can talk passionately with, rather than dry remarks and simple statement of opinions. but maybe im just a dork like that

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