Can the guards turn on the extinguished light sources?

[Gadavre]

I have never seen guards light candles or torches extinguished by a player.... have you seen it? If this is not the case, can to add support?

[nbohr1more]

I know for certain that guards in "A Score to Settle" relight torches.

The setup to relight candles and torches must be set by the mapper so there are two things that limit this:

1) The mission must be newer than TDM 1.06 where the feature was added

2) The mapper must decide to use the feature

[Gadavre]

Just now, nbohr1more said:

I know for certain that guards in "A Score to Settle" relight torches.

The setup to relight candles and torches must be set by the mapper so there are two things that limit this:

1) The mission must be newer than TDM 1.06 where the feature was added

2) The mapper must decide to use the feature

thank. I would really like the mappers to do more missions with support for all the a. i. features.

I personally am not interested in the graphics in the game. She's good enough as it is. But strong humanized artificial intelligence is much more interesting and attractive.

[Gadavre]

thank

Edited April 12, 2021 by Gadavre

[Petike the Taffer]

I remember that in Thomas Porter: The Phrase Book, guards would also occassionaly relight open light sources.

[datiswous]

I think this is also the case in The Tears of St. Lucia at least in the area with the sculpture.

[Xolvix]

As others have said it is most definitely possible for the AI to relight torches.

It is a bit unusual for it to be the mapper's choice whether the AI can relight a torch or not, rather than the player being able to force the AI to do so (or not) under all circumstances with a menu option somewhere. It's certainly a surprise when it happens though, and definitely increases the difficulty if you don't knock out the guards (or are restrained from doing so due to the objectives).

Edited April 14, 2021 by Xolvix

[Filizitas]

I would love to experiment with this one. It all comes down to balancing in gameplay.
When you consume a water arrow to extinguish a fire based light source, but a guard can just come and relight it.
It could become annoying fast if they just ALWAYS instantly relight everything.

Thinking about prohibiting this to specific npcs like guards, monsters cant do it and so cant  random civil npcs.
And then maybe a factor of cariness, where a guard can only relight things when suspicious.

Its a cool thing in general, makes ai smarter.

[SeriousToni]

Those factors of randomness are already in the game. The mapper can setup a probability for each NPC to relight a light or not.

@Gadavre
I did this in my mission Sneak & Destroy. Try it out  

[Destined]

20 hours ago, Xolvix said:

As others have said it is most definitely possible for the AI to relight torches.

It is a bit unusual for it to be the mapper's choice whether the AI can relight a torch or not, rather than the player being able to force the AI to do so (or not) under all circumstances with a menu option somewhere. It's certainly a surprise when it happens though, and definitely increases the difficulty if you don't knock out the guards (or are restrained from doing so due to the objectives).

In TDM decisions on map design (including AI behaviour) are generally rather up to the mappers, so they can realise their own vision. As Filizitas mentioned this is also a balancing issue. If all lights can be relit by all AI it would drastically change the value water arrows. If the mapper intended for lights to remain extinguished, he/she will only provide a small number of water arrows throughout. Being able to change this behaviour in general makes balancing much more difficult.

Another important part for the decision to let the mappers decide is the desire of the team to not break any old missions. I am not 100% sure, but I believe this behaviour was implemented later on and consequently could break older missions that were built without this feature in mind.

[thebigh]

I know in Sons of Baltona the guards can re-light the torches on the outside of the mansion.

[JackFarmer]

The possibilities are very tempting (AI reacting to open doors or missing objects, relighting candles/torches), and I wanted to use this as often as possible in previous missions, but everything comes at a price.

For example, Version 1 of HHVF had a guard on the first floor who detected closed doors and tried to close them again. Unfortunately, the character in question was also part of a conversation, which had the effect that he simply broke off the conversation and wanted to close the door.

That was annoying, because a) the voice actor in question had put a lot of work into it and b) I didn't know what the consequences would be when I integrated this (then took it out in version 2 after I saw how boy_lag broke the conversation in a YT video).

The cool option that guards react to missing objects also has its pitfalls. Also in HHVF I had two Builders who guard a door, they shouldn't leave the door under any circumstances. In a room next door, however, I had set a valuable item in such a way that another character walking in and out had to notice its absence. The result was that the other character had also sent the two Builders to search mode due to his startled search, so the door in question was unguarded, which I didn't want. Fortunately, I discovered that before the beta phase.

I had used relighting in two places in HHTLC, but I was able to completely rule out problems (as far as I know), but there are certainly enough other scenarios in which relighting is not necessarily good.

It's always easy to say, "Oh, I would like the mappers to use feature X or Y more often, why don't they?" Well, I'm sure a lot of the other mission makers would like to use these features as often as possible for more crediblity of the scenes, but there are usually so many things to consider that often it just doesn't work.

As far as I can remember, even only a few of the guards in Thief 3 were able to re-light extinguished torches. The reason for this must have been similar to that which some pre-posters have already written here.