mod: Save At Will

[Oktokolo]

The recent discussion about save restrictions (peter_spy especially) convinced me, that the time for restriction removal mods has come.

The first of the series disables save restrictions. Just drop zzz_saveAtWill.pk4 into your TDM folder and play any mission at any difficulty without save restrictions.

Implementation details:
I made tdm_savegame_admin::updateLoop in scripts/tdm_savegame_settings.script just set unrestricted save mode instead of whatever has been configured by the mission author.

Other anti-restriction mods, i might do (most likely first):
- Disable knockout restriction objectives and remove knockout immunities from AI
- Disable Min loot objectives
- Disable forced ghosting objectives
- Disable kill restriction objectives
- Open for suggestions

 

zzz_saveAtWill.pk4

[Fidcal]

Excellent! And it proves the point that whenever anyone tries to control, manipulate or impose their will on anyone, eventually they will fight back. This is why we have ad-blockers against aggressive intrusive adverts. I don't recall ad-blockers years ago when adverts weren't so aggressive.

I've said it many times: options, options, options (which equates to FREEDOM!)

[Goldwell]

Devs: hey here’s this new OPTIONAL feature which we think might change up gameplay a bit. It’ll be a fun experiment. 

TDM Community: *Braveheart music playing* THEY CAN NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!!!

[kingsal]

...If people have problems with the save room function in a mission let the author know so they can consider "safely" removing it as an option for people.

Mods like this tend to break all kinds of stuff.

[kingsal]

11 hours ago, Abusimplea said:

Other anti-restriction mods, i might do (most likely first):
- Disable knockout restriction objectives and remove knockout immunities from AI
- Disable Min loot objectives
- Disable forced ghosting objectives
- Disable kill restriction objectives
- Open for suggestions

Im up for giving more options , but these especially have implications. It is likely these will break missions.

[stgatilov]

Do you mean it can break a mission because it does not consider what would happen if someone dies?
Logically, removing no-kill, no-knockout, not-seen restrictions can indeed break a mission.
But minimal loot and save restrictions don't change gameplay at all.

UPDATE: Wouldn't it be better to integrate a console command into the core game?
We already have cheats like: god mode, get all loot, show keys, successfully finish mission.
I think it would be OK to have other cheats there too.

[kingsal]

@stgatilovYeah console command would be ideal for the save game admin. This is something we should do anyhow since it will help us test and evaluate the feature and give authors more tools. 
 

The objective stuff turns into a mess. A minimum loot objective  when completed might trigger a script that makes another mandatory objective turn visible, so on and so forth. Objective set ups can be incredibly complicated and should not be modified by anyone but the author, IMO.

For sure people can do what they want. Its a mod after all, but messing with objectives is risky.

 

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Goldwell said:

Devs: hey here’s this new OPTIONAL feature which we think might change up gameplay a bit. It’ll be a fun experiment. 

TDM Community: *Braveheart music playing* THEY CAN NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!!!

It's actually kind of funny, given how stealth games' community members like to think of themselves, as more intelligent, progressive, or sophisticated, than fans of other genres.

And then you get situations like this one, where people would go out of their way to create a mod to alter an optional gameplay mode, so it plays just like those standard ones that are already available to them

[wesp5]

Yeah, I don't really understand it either. I can't even remember a mission with save limitations! Can you help me out?

[Goldwell]

43 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Yeah, I don't really understand it either. I can't even remember a mission with save limitations! Can you help me out?

 

Kingsal's new mission Hazard Pay features save rooms on expert difficulty.

[Oktokolo]

5 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Do you mean it can break a mission because it does not consider what would happen if someone dies?
Logically, removing no-kill, no-knockout, not-seen restrictions can indeed break a mission.
But minimal loot and save restrictions don't change gameplay at all.

UPDATE: Wouldn't it be better to integrate a console command into the core game?
We already have cheats like: god mode, get all loot, show keys, successfully finish mission.
I think it would be OK to have other cheats there too.

Yes, every modification can break things. Even the anti save restriction mod might be able to do that at least indirectly by making players forget to use save items which may or may not need to be useed to trigger plot progression.

And yes, extra challenge switches like this should be in the core game... But they aren't.

As you can already read in this thread, some people indeed are just afraid of greatness freedom of choice. They don't get, that a minority of players wants to be able to mix and match difficulty modes - like in "i take all the AI and objectives but without that save/blackjack/loot/ghost/kill/whatever restriction, that has been slapped on top of an otherwise fine missions like some <whatever-ingredient-you-don't-like> on an otherwise good pizza".
I definitely understand, why devs probably won't want to get involved in heated strawman battles about "progressiveness" or whatever absurd crap people come up with - just because they make another aspect of the game configurable from the settings screen or even just the command line.

I guess, having stuff like this packaged into one tiny mod per changed thing is the best solution i can implement without becomming a TDM dev. So i did just that.
Whether i actually manage to get the other (definitely more complex) mods working and whether they will break tons of missions, i don't know. But "Save At Will" literally only consists of a trivial change to just one core script file not used for anything else than the save restriction system. So i consider breakage to be unlikely.

[stgatilov]

Core game changes won't happen until 2.11 anyway, so mod definitely has its place.

But I'd be happy to include save cheat in the core game.
Maybe also a command to get/add specified of gold.

I don't like the other stuff: all that hacking with objectives system...

[kingsal]

16 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

But I'd be happy to include save cheat in the core game.
Maybe also a command to get/add specified of gold.

Seems like a good plan. Unless there is a better way, right now we spawn in loot items to meet loot requirements when testing. Its a huge pain  

Something like “give loot X” would be amazing to have.

[Oktokolo]

6 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Core game changes won't happen until 2.11 anyway, so mod definitely has its place.

But I'd be happy to include save cheat in the core game.
Maybe also a command to get/add specified of gold.

I don't like the other stuff: all that hacking with objectives system...

I don't like hacking the objectives system either - but someone has to give us special snow flakes our safe space where we can blackjack everyone with no remorse...
Hardest step is to find a way to only prevent objectives from failing when that would actually make the mission fail.
After that, the objective-related stuff would probably be almost the same for all the different restriction removal mod flavors.

[wesp5]

3 minutes ago, Abusimplea said:

I don't like hacking the objectives system either - but someone has to give us special snow flakes our safe space where we can blackjack everyone with no remorse...

I always play on easy after reviewing what additional objectives might be added. Most of the time only the loot goes up and I take whatever I find anyway ;).

[Dragofer]

Personally I think objective types that typically fail a mission instantly like no kills or no knockouts can be disabled relatively safely. But as kingsal says it's possible that authors foresaw something else to happen than the mission failing when such objectives are failed, so you'd have to identify what the consequences of failing the objective are. This could be done by checking for the Mandatory flag and checking whether the mission has specified custom mission failure logic that includes these objectives.

For disabling loot objectives I would lower the loot requirement to a symbolic amount like 1, just so that any associated events can still fire.

Regarding the save restrictions, I think having a console-based cheat for them would make sense just like we have for god mode, notarget, noclip. It's on us if we use cheats irresponsibly (i.e. playing the whole mission with notarget enabled), but cheats do have their place and would in this case allow to experience Hazard Pay's expert-level AI placements etc. without having to make enough time IRL to make it to the next save room.

[Oktokolo]

Just now, wesp5 said:

I always play on easy after reviewing what additional objectives might be added. Most of the time only the loot goes up and I take whatever I find anyway ;).

I played almost all the missions ever made for TDM and am pretty sure, that you get more AI, more random patrol routes, less player tools (most often still more than plenty though), and sometimes even better hidden switches/routes/loot when playing the Expert difficulty of a lot of missions.

The support for the three (not sure whether you could have more) difficulty levels is well-integrated into TDM and used by almost all authors to some extend.
Tying some arbitrary restrictions to a difficulty level is just the most boring and obvious thing, a mapper can use the system for.

[chakkman]

9 hours ago, Goldwell said:

Devs: hey here’s this new OPTIONAL feature which we think might change up gameplay a bit. It’ll be a fun experiment. 

TDM Community: *Braveheart music playing* THEY CAN NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!!!

To be honest, it's pretty annoying though, if you want to play on expert difficulty, and mappers implement unncesseary restrictions on that difficulty. What if I strive for the most loot possible, but want to knock people out, or save a lot?

What's the deal? Let people play how they want to play. There are dozens of ways people play games. Why dictate how they should play the game? Who wants to ghost should ghost. Who wants to knock out every living soul in the missions should do that. Jeez, let people kill everyone even. The essence of a great game is the option to decide how you want to play the game. If you take that away, you dictate how players should play the game, based on your own perception. Not good.

If you need a mod to remove such restrictions, there's something terribly wrong going on.

Edited February 3, 2022 by chakkman

[thebigh]

Yep. In my missions I've used the following on different difficulty levels

* bigger loot goal

* more guards

* no knocking out civilians on medium, no knocking out anyone on hard

* less gear

[chakkman]

To be honest, not knocking out anyone on hard is already something I wouldn't want to have. Why should there be such a restriction on a higher difficulty? If it doesn't make sense not to knock out people in the context of the mission, I don't see any reason why you would force the player to not knock out anyone.

There could be a reason not to knock out people in context of the mission, for example, if the contractor orders to cause as little confusion as possible, or if someone wants you to act as if you were never there (stealing some papers, or similar). But, not in the context of robbing a rich Lord's home. There's hardly anything more severe that you could do. He won't care about any guard knocked out on the way. That doesn't make sense. In the original Thief's, no kill objectives were given in the context menus, e.g. Gennivere didn't want people to be killed because of her escape.

If people want a challenge, they should just ghost, or not save. No need for a specific objective. It's their decision, not yours.

Edited February 3, 2022 by chakkman

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Dragofer said:

Regarding the save restrictions, I think having a console-based cheat for them would make sense just like we have for god mode, notarget, noclip. It's on us if we use cheats irresponsibly (i.e. playing the whole mission with notarget enabled), but cheats do have their place and would in this case allow to experience Hazard Pay's expert-level AI placements etc. without having to make enough time IRL to make it to the next save room.

IMO it's not the same thing as other cheats. Different approach to saving is more like having a different gameplay type, and it's okay if you don't like it or don't want to play it. Why trying so hard to alter that mode then?

And, e.g. you don't complain about RE typewriter saves or roguelike games, insisting that authors should change it to your needs. You either make time for these games, if the gameplay is appealing to you, or you avoid them. Same thing here so far, you can always just choose different difficulty/game mode.

And raging about that is IMO just not listening what the other side is trying to communicate here, not to mention that it sounds super entitled. Authors can design missions however they want and they do not owe players anything.

[chakkman]

5 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

IMO it's not the same thing as other cheats. Different approach to saving is more like having a different gameplay type, and it's okay if you don't like it or don't want to play it. Why trying so hard to alter that mode then?

Why implement that mode in the first place? People who don't want to save don't have to. People who don't want to knock out guards don't have to.

Contrary, if you implement such a mode, people who want to save can't save. Bad.

Don't implement that mode: Everyone will be happy. Implement it, only half, or a small amount of players will be happy.

Edited February 3, 2022 by chakkman

[Guest]

Just now, chakkman said:

Why implement that mode in the first place?

Because it changes your approach to gameplay and levels are/can be designed in a different way. You have to take risks, make guesses, and go with the consequences. It makes for sudden and interesting development of events, player panicking and thinking on their feet. It makes players forget about their stealth score 0 and just having fun, even if being clumsy at that. You can already play games like MGS5 or Prey Mooncrash to see how letting go of your inner perfectionist can lead to much funnier and more interesting experiences.

And again, so far it's a  C O M P L E T E L Y   O P T I O N A L  mode/difficulty level that you can try. The standard gameplay is still there, on other difficulty levels.

[thebigh]

34 minutes ago, chakkman said:

To be honest, not knocking out anyone on hard is already something I wouldn't want to have. Why should there be such a restriction on a higher difficulty? If it doesn't make sense not to knock out people in the context of the mission, I don't see any reason why you would force the player to not knock out anyone.

I've often seen higher difficulties as kind of a dare, after the player completes the easiest difficulty: "OK, you stole Lord Bobson's silver sceptre. Nice. Now let's see if you can do it without knocking out any of the guards."

10 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Authors can design missions however they want and they do not owe players anything.

I design the sort of missions that I want to play, but I still do expect and hope that others will enjoy them. Otherwise what's the point?

[Dragofer]

39 minutes ago, chakkman said:

If it doesn't make sense not to knock out people in the context of the mission, I don't see any reason why you would force the player to not knock out anyone.

This is my approach to arbitrary restrictions too. They often feel to me like a quick & dirty shortcut to having multiple difficulty levels without putting effort into organically making the mission harder by changing how it's designed.

That said, I think for a horror survival mission like Hazard Pay there is a believable justification to restrict saves, just as there is a believable justification to start a jail break mission without your blackjack. It's an intentionally designed gameplay experience to make you feel at risk, cautious and plan for what to do if things go wrong. As peter_spy says, there are whole games designed around this kind of gameplay. For a regular mansion heist save restrictions would feel artificial, but for a survival mission it's a part of the experience that the mission has been designed for. And as said, if players don't feel up to it they can choose a different mode.

My regrets are that this takes up one of the difficulty slots, so one potentially can't have expert-level mission design without save restrictions, as well as my earlier points about unfair deaths and losing progress if you run out of RL time for your session before you make it to the next save room.