Rankings and persistent mission statics

[MirceaKitsune]

At the end of each mission, I like checking my stealth score and other stats to see how good I did. I often wondered whether this data could be used to give the player an overall rank, permanently saved as completed mission information. I'm thinking something like "A / B / C / D / E / F" grades since that's the most common system. In my opinion this would make playing TDM missions even more motivating, because everyone will strive to get a perfect grade and tell others "I finally got an A+ for this mission", often having to replay it several times in order to achieve that. The rank would depend on data in the mission statics screen: Stealth score, number of knockouts and kills, bodies found, amount of loot found out of total, number of objectives completed.

 

The main problem I see is that different missions might want to reward different approaches, like for instance: A mission might want the player to kill every guard in a house for an A+, while another could want them to not kill anyone at all... therefore an universal grade might not work. An idea then might be to have multiple scores instead: A rank for how stealthy you where (1 / stealth score), one for how violent (KO's * 0.5 + kills * 1, from amount of all AI present), one for the loot (% loot found), etc.

 

But if this idea is too fancy to bother with: Could we simply persist the best mission statics at worst? At least the stealth score, loot found, and time? You can then at least select a mission in the main menu and see what your shortest play was, your best % loot discovered, and of course the smallest alert score and body count you managed to win with.

[demagogue]

We've talked about this before. Long story short, a rank isn't workable for the stats page. Although a new page in the stat screen I think could be done, eg, retaining 'best loot', 'best stealth score', 'best time', etc. So the player could try to beat past stats.

 

Another way is of course to just make a ghosting or speedrun thread and post your stat screen. Then it's a meta-game competition.

[MirceaKitsune]

We've talked about this before. Long story short, a rank isn't workable for the stats page. Although a new page in the stat screen I think could be done, eg, retaining 'best loot', 'best stealth score', 'best time', etc. So the player could try to beat past stats.

 

Another way is of course to just make a ghosting or speedrun thread and post your stat screen. Then it's a meta-game competition.

 

I understand. I think at least retaining the best stats would be a nice change then, enough to give players a better sense of accomplishment plus a reason to replay missions in order to improve their best scores.

 

As a minimal ranking mechanism, there could be a simple completion bar for that perhaps. Which shows 100% when all of those stats are at their best values (stealth score is 0, all loot was found, no one killed or KO'd). It would simply be taking all those persisted stats and multiplying them to draw a bar indicating the overall score. This is optional though and I mind its absence less.

[demagogue]

Well I made a tracker entry for the idea so there can be a debate on it. That doesn't mean it'll be done, but at least it'll be considered.

[MirceaKitsune]

Well I made a tracker entry for the idea so there can be a debate on it. That doesn't mean it'll be done, but at least it'll be considered.

 

Thanks for that! Since TDM went slow on new features over time, fun additions like this can hopefully be expected over the next months, if people working on the code have the time and motivation for them.

[V-Man339]

As I've found out the fun way we don't have statistics universally mastered yet, so the idea of adding a ranking system derived from that seems out of the question at this stage.

As of yet I'm getting required busts on something like stealth score, rendering this fairly impossible.

 

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, to be blunt, and I love it in things like Hitman, Death to Spies and plenty of action-oriented games like Metal Gear Rising, Viewtiful Joe and others, but the Dark Mod is already all encompassing enough with the stats screen and is too different in design philosophy from level to level to make this kind of idea work.

It's not common at all to see levels where killing or knocking out is all but required for a single piece of loot, rendering all loot and ghost runs mutually exclusive.

 

This means you'd either end up rendering levels impossible to "perfect" rank, or make a best rating too lax for people to truly care.

This is ignoring that the harder "perfect" rank would subtley change the design decisions of map creators to fit that design philosophy, which is rather against the point of the Dark Mod, don't you think?

 

I love these systems, like I said, but it doesn't really fit here, and the stats screen (when we get it working perfectly) will do it's job just fine, in my opinion.

Edited December 11, 2015 by V-Man339

[Destined]

As I've found out the fun way we don't have statistics universally mastered yet, so the idea of adding a ranking system derived from that seems out of the question at this stage.

As of yet I'm getting required busts on something like stealth score, rendering this fairly impossible.

 

I just thought about that again: It should be possible to access the stealth score while playing, via console or script. If the bust is scripted, you would just have to add a line, that sets the count of busts to current minus one. If it is not scripted, this might still be possible if you know the command for the console. That way you could achieve your stealth score without the scripted bust. I don't know myself how to access the stealth score, though, so it's just a thought...

[VanishedOne]

There's a getMissionStatistic() under http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=TDM_Script_Referencebut no setMissionStatistic(). There isn't really a single 'count of busts' either, according to the documentation there.

[SteveL]

I'm a fan of rankings and achievements too. They add lots of replay value.

 

The script function getMissionStatistic() offers:

• numberTimesPlayerSeen
• numberTimesAISuspicious
• numberTimesAISearched

What else is meant by a "bust"?

 

It's possible to call script functions from the console to check on stuff, and even to run complex scripts, but there's a limitation: you can't pass in text as parameters, and getMissionStatistic needs a text parameter to say which stat you want to look at, so it can't be accessed from the console. I've looked for a solution to that, but not yet found one that's easy enough to implement.

 

I imagine people who do perfect Let's Play videos could use an on-screen message to alert them if they triggered a stealth hit, so they can reload or to help in prepping their stealth run. That could be done with a simple hack: you'd need to unpack the mission pk4 and add a bit of text to a script file. You can then run the mission from the unpacked files, without needing to reconstruct a pk4, so it'd be a quick thing to do.

[demagogue]

I had the idea before of offering an in-progress stats screen for this purpose, or maybe a way to force the mission end. But maybe getting stats is the reward for successfully finishing?

[V-Man339]

 

I just thought about that again: It should be possible to access the stealth score while playing, via console or script. If the bust is scripted, you would just have to add a line, that sets the count of busts to current minus one. If it is not scripted, this might still be possible if you know the command for the console. That way you could achieve your stealth score without the scripted bust. I don't know myself how to access the stealth score, though, so it's just a thought...

Personally I'm just going to showcase how I actually test the results in my videos.

After finishing a level, I'll showcase the point just before bust, finishing through console commands (notarget + noclip + manual effort), and then showcasing what happens after doing the bust and finishing the levels (what the stealth score post bust is), and then doing math for the viewer's convenience.

After all this I'll put a title card that says "freeware with less bugs than a Bethesda game™, Dark Mod!"

I don't know, I'll showcase it as lightheartedly as possible.

[SteveL]

After finishing a level, I'll showcase the point just before bust, finishing through console commands (notarget + noclip + manual effort), and then showcasing what happens after doing the bust and finishing the levels (what the stealth score post bust is), and then doing math for the viewer's convenience.

I don't understand what you mean at all. Is there a previous thread where you guys have been discussing it, that I can catch up on? I've been out of the loop for a few weeks moonlighting on another open source project and finally playing Dragon Age:Inq.

We can talk about the proposed feature for 2.04, but in the meantime would a hack for 2.03 that displays the info on the console or screen during play be of use to you?

[VanishedOne]

Is there a previous thread where you guys have been discussing it, that I can catch up on?

Maybe these:

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11058-things-that-could-be-improved/?p=381799

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11058-things-that-could-be-improved/?p=381259

http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4249

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11058-things-that-could-be-improved/?p=380426

 

I started looking at a script and GUI to display stats on request (I was thinking maybe it could be a Use action for the inventory loot GUI), and got this far before something else distracted me:

(Though actually I'm minded to leave time out so the script doesn't need to keep looping to update the GUI.)

Edited December 13, 2015 by VanishedOne

[wesp5]

I started looking at a script and GUI to display stats on request (I was thinking maybe it could be a Use action for the inventory loot GUI), and got this far before something else distracted me:

That looks great! I'm all for including it as a feature into the main mod, because having players edit scripts all around on their own is asking for trouble later on ...