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Improving the presentation of TDM


zergrush

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TDM has come a long way since its standalone release, and I've been enjoying 2.10 quite a bit on my legacy machine, which finally is no longer prey to slow loading times!

Because of all technical achievements in the past 3 or so releases I wonder if perhaps it could be a good time for the team to show some love to some more outwardly aspects of TDM. This is because I still think the TDM default package is a bit too bare-bones to incentivize new players to invest time into it, and there are some simple yet significant changes that I believe that could change that. I will try to make a short list of suggestions in no particular order for your consideration and for community discussion.

  • Finish St. Lucia campaign - I think that one of the most disappointing aspects of the core TDM package is the lack of a full official campaign. I remember Springheel mentioning many aspects for the 3rd final mission were underway but left incomplete, and that these resources could be ceded to any interested FM creator who was interested in finishing the mission. Why not taking the initiative and do a public announcement?
  • A better training mission - The current TDM training mission is a strange sandbox that doesn't blend too well with the rest of the package. I think something similar to Goldwell's Thief training mission remake would be a more suitable and shorter solution to teach the basics of the game while keeping it within the narrative. It could even be included in the St. Lucia campaign as Mission 0.
  • Better, clearer main menu - even with the most recent changes, I still feel the TDM menu needs a redesign. I'm not quite sure what would be the best approach, so the only suggestion I have at the moment is to have the Mission Downloader available straight from the main menu, instead of being somewhat hidden on the corner of the New Mission section. This is mainly because the game focuses heavily on downloadable, content and thus should immediately point new players towards it.
  • Two-mission community FM sample - one easy way to make the TDM package more complete is by adding a sample of two FMs to the main package - one short, and one long - so that new players can enjoy a small curated selection of what the game offers without having to browse the forums for mission descriptions. These missions could be selected by community vote and then tweaked before inclusion in the package, with the consent of their authors of course.
  • A better intro sequence - The old glowing TDM logo video is really starting to show its age. I wonder if it could be replaced with a better hi-res version, or even with a simple logo texture with an after effect applied, discarding the need for an FMV sequence.

 

Let me know what are your thoughts. I would like also ask the TDM team members if anything similar to these suggestions is already in development.

 

Edited by zergrush
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I don't like the training mission because it has no story and no ending. It's good to practice if you already know you like TDM, but it's not good at getting people interested in playing TDM in the first place! I also agree to all the other points. Edited by wesp5
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58 minutes ago, zergrush said:

Finish St. Lucia campaign - I think that one of the most disappointing aspects of the core TDM package is the lack of a full official campaign.

Didn't @Springheel donate 3rd mission of Saint Lucia campaign into Abandoned Works?

Don't hope for an official campaign though: there already was one such effort, and the cost was too high for the community.

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A better training mission - The current TDM training mission is a strange sandbox ...
... It could even be included in the St. Lucia campaign as Mission 0.

New Job has some training elements, and is already preceding Saint Lucia.

I think there were talks about a new training mission which will explain gameplay along with some plot and story, maybe @kingsal knows more?

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Better, clearer main menu
the only suggestion I have at the moment is to have the Mission Downloader available straight from the main menu, instead of being somewhat hidden on the corner of the New Mission section.

2.10 redesigned starting/switching missions, and even that redesign would not have happened without painful refactoring of main menu customization. I don't think major redesign of the menu is possible at all due to backwards compatibility problem.

Speaking of missions downloader: I think it is possible to make it easier to notice for new players.

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Two-mission community FM sample

I think this idea was already proposed.

There are some technical issues (prebundled missions and fms are distributed very differently), ownership issues (FM authors will have to grant CC-NC license). All in all, it is possible.
BTW, I don't like the idea of making a large FMs prebundled: in my opinion, prebundled FM should mostly rely on core assets, and not drag along hundreds of megabytes of custom ones. And that would limit the choice substantially.

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better intro sequence

@Goldwell was working on a better TDM logo video, but the work halted for some reason.

 

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20 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Didn't @Springheel donate 3rd mission of Saint Lucia campaign into Abandoned Works?

Don't hope for an official campaign though: there already was one such effort, and the cost was too high for the community.

Do you mean the Crucible of Omens? I totally understand in that case, but I merely meant concluding the last unfinished mission of St Lucia. A three mission campaign (A New Job + St Lucia + Unnamed Unfinished mission) would be more than suitable. Why not appealing to FM creators to wrap up the conclusion?

Quote

I think this idea was already proposed.

There are some technical issues (prebundled missions and fms are distributed very differently), ownership issues (FM authors will have to grant CC-NC license). All in all, it is possible.
BTW, I don't like the idea of making a large FMs prebundled: in my opinion, prebundled FM should mostly rely on core assets, and not drag along hundreds of megabytes of custom ones. And that would limit the choice substantially

It's a matter of nominating a number missions which meet the requirements, a small file size being one of them. I'm thinking, for example, of Sotha's Coercion for the small one; it's only 10mb, and probably one of the best short missions available at the moment.

Edited by zergrush
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A better training mission

- I think we should keep the current tutorial but itțs kind of too punishing and has too much text. I mean we have Deus Ex kind of training where the tutorial isn't really a big part of the story. Same with the Half Life 1 training room and the System Shock 2 tutorial.
 

In general even AAA games regularly mess up tutorials all the time. Thief 1, on the contrary had a good tutorial. Thief 2 and Deadly Shadows not so much, even if the first mission in Deadly Shadows was so atmospheric. But the tutorial in Deadly Shadows was better than Thief 2 because it was more forgiving at least. The problem of Thief 2 and 3 is how much they focused on text in their tutorials. Same problems with text reproduced in TDM unfortunately.

Consequences of TDM's average tutorial:

After a lot playing a lot TDM, I didn't know that by holding a button you can pick up bodies like in Thief and not just drag them. Didn't find that in the tutorial. I've either read this info in the forum or it was just a loading tool tip.

TLDR I think TDM should have at least voice overs of tutorial tips and not just books with walls of text. We can already read texts on the wiki and the forum.

Old video but sums up the things to pay attention to. I agree that Portal had great training. Valid until today:

 

Edited by Anderson

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Best i.m.o. is to alter New Job and Saint Lucia with (more) hints and tutorial aspects and/or including an extra tutorial mission.

1 hour ago, zergrush said:

Two-mission community FM sample

I rather would go with a poll for a bunch of prefered starter missions and then link to that on tdm main page. Inside TDM it should entirelly up to the player what he/she chooses. The mission downloader should have a better layout with filters and better graphics (screenshot slideshow directly visible instead of in sub menu). I already made some changes to the (2.10) mission selection gui for myself.

I think every tdm intro logo gets old over time. I personally like the current one, just not with every mission.

Edited by datiswous
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1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

@Goldwell was working on a better TDM logo video, but the work halted for some reason.

 

I did actually make a prototype which I thought was an improvement. But it wasn't liked and then we discussed adding more complexities which started to expand the time it would take me. Couple that with a lot of real life commitments taking up my time, it became hard to devote time to this. Now all of my spare time is put into finishing off the Shadows of Northdale campaign.

 

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2 hours ago, zergrush said:

Better, clearer main menu - even with the most recent changes, I still feel the TDM menu needs a redesign. I'm not quite sure what would be the best approach

It sure does, as everything from button placement and spacing to options order and layout feels clunky and unintuitive, in comparison to other games. The best approach would be to have someone with UX and interface design background take a look at all options and design new user flows and layout. The second best option would be to take a look at a few modern games (because at least UI design and accessibility is what they do very well) and try to establish common rules they use, and then apply them while redesigning TDM menus.

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The problem with UI, I'm afraid, is first and foremost a technical issue. The existing UI system is an absolute pain to work with, and any effort to implement any reasonable modern UI concept in that system will drive every developer involved in the effort absolutely insane. I'm only half joking.

Before any such effort could take place, I feel that the system needs to be replaced entirely. But that is also a massive pain because there's no good option to keep backwards-compatibility with existing missions. And the most obvious candidates for UI systems are rather large dependencies. So while I agree with the necessity of a UI overhaul, I'm not very optimistic for it to happen anytime soon.

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26 minutes ago, cabalistic said:

The problem with UI, I'm afraid, is first and foremost a technical issue. The existing UI system is an absolute pain to work with, and any effort to implement any reasonable modern UI concept in that system will drive every developer involved in the effort absolutely insane. I'm only half joking.

Before any such effort could take place, I feel that the system needs to be replaced entirely. But that is also a massive pain because there's no good option to keep backwards-compatibility with existing missions. And the most obvious candidates for UI systems are rather large dependencies. So while I agree with the necessity of a UI overhaul, I'm not very optimistic for it to happen anytime soon.

At this point I'm fine with having to reload the game in order to start a different mission, that's a limitation I already got used to. My main gripe with the menu has to do with the placement and organization of the mission downloader. If a full redesign isn't possible I think shifting some things around to make the downloader a bit more organized would still be a fine improvement.

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2 hours ago, cabalistic said:

The problem with UI, I'm afraid, is first and foremost a technical issue.

I wouldn't know anything about this, but I think another problem is that you need to load a mission first to play it which is not common in most other games. Also sometimes this is called "selecting", sometimes it's called "installing", so overall it's confusing! For my Unofficial patch I changed both of those to "activating" so it's more clear what is meant. Otherwise I belive the UI is similar to other games around the time TDM was started which is fine, except indeed for the downloader. I think for each new version in the last few years I report that after loading all new missions the downloader displays "no missions availble" on top of the missions you just downloaded which looks completely unprofessional! Can't this be fixed?

Edited by wesp5
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@zergrush

A new training mission and better / cleaner menu design are definitely on the list of things to do for the next release. I've already got some comps for a new menu but as @stgatilov mention the refactoring needed to happen before we move on any visual updates.  Stay tuned!

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1 hour ago, kingsal said:

A new training mission and better / cleaner menu design are definitely on the list of things to do for the next release. I've already got some comps for a new menu but as @stgatilovmention the refactoring needed to happen before we move on any visual updates.  Stay tuned!

Maybe add new story notes as well to make the point for the new players?

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6 hours ago, Goldwell said:

I did actually make a prototype which I thought was an improvement.

I think it looks great and should be added to core as an option for mappers to include (although I think the audio isn't entirely fitting).

This is how my tweaked mission selection screen looks. If the image was a slideshow and the text was scrollable, with a max height (I couldn't find a way yet how to include those) it would be even better.

new_mission_menu.thumb.jpg.f897ec40c0742631c0e11500c20ac8df.jpg

Now that I think of it, the mission selection screen and downloader could be merged into one screen. where the not downloaded missions have a download button and the ones already downloaded you can activate directly.

Edited by datiswous
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8 hours ago, zergrush said:

Personally I would like it to be a small prelude to A New Job, so it's framed in the same narrative.

Thats the current plan!  Tie it in with the New Job / St Lucia story.

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If the current training mission is too text heavy, you could use conversations rather than readables to impart the necessary information. The training mission of T1 does this pretty well.

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                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

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12 hours ago, cabalistic said:

The problem with UI, I'm afraid, is first and foremost a technical issue.

It is not only technical issue, it is also an artistic one.

The current visual style ("parchments") is spread across core files of main menu and custom GUI in missions (briefing, messages, etc.). If we change the core files to other visual style, that would result in inconsistent visual style in many missions. The end result would be uglier in general.

1 hour ago, thebigh said:

If the current training mission is too text heavy, you could use conversations rather than readables to impart the necessary information. The training mission of T1 does this pretty well.

That would be a terrible approach at the time when the training mission was started. For a native speaker, speech feels more natural, but for a non-native one, text is much easier to understand than speech. Of course, this is not an issue now with subtitles.

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2 hours ago, stgatilov said:

The current visual style ("parchments") is spread across core files of main menu and custom GUI in missions (briefing, messages, etc.). If we change the core files to other visual style, that would result in inconsistent visual style in many missions. The end result would be uglier in general.

I completely agree! The current parchment style fits the game perfectly so the atmosphere is never destroyed, even if you go into a menu. An example for a game where this is completely wrong would be in my opininon Dishonered, where the modern UI takes you out of the game the moment you open it!

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Regarding the St. Lucia campaign, as a TDM newcomer, I do have a pretty strong opinion about it, that is, The Tears of St. Lucia is a major difficulty spike and is totally not for new players. I never finished it and was close to dropping TDM entirely, but thankfully I tried Melan's Return to the City and Spoonman's Full Moon Fever, which finally got me hooked. I believe it should be reworked to be more accommodating for those who are still learning how the game works.

 

Another thing: TDM newcomers often look at the highest-rated, most-recommended missions when choosing what to play. A potential problem here is that these missions are rated and recommended by TDM players who already know the game, and most of these missions are huge and demanding. For example, The Painter's Wife is one of my favorite missions, but I wouldn't under any circumstances recommend it to someone new as they would just get overwhelmed. I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it. Maybe a note regarding the mission's size and difficulty in the mission download menu?

Edited by marbleman
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Arkane games' menus are usually a kind of UI experiments, and they're usually bad in terms of user experience (Dishonored 2 and Deathloop, I'm looking at you).

And while typically boring and generic, games from companies like Ubisoft or Square Enix have a lot of research going into UX and accessibility, so all the AssCreeds, Far Crys and Tomb Raiders might be worth analyzing in that regard.

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2 hours ago, marbleman said:

Regarding the St. Lucia campaign, as a TDM newcomer, I do have a pretty strong opinion about it, that is, The Tears of St. Lucia is a major difficulty spike and is totally not for new players. I never finished it and was close to dropping TDM entirely, but thankfully I tried Melan's Return to the City and Spoonman's Full Moon Fever, which finally got me hooked. I believe it should be reworked to be more accommodating for those who are still learning how the game works.

 

Another thing: TDM newcomers often look at the highest-rated, most-recommended missions when choosing what to play. A potential problem here is that these missions are rated and recommended by TDM players who already know the game, and most of these missions are huge and demanding. For example, The Painter's Wife is one of my favorite missions, but I wouldn't under any circumstances recommend it to someone new as they would just get overwhelmed. I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it. Maybe a note regarding the mission's size and difficulty in the mission download menu?

I personally wasn't bothered by the difficulty of Tears of St Lucia when I first played TDM (this was before A New Job was released), but I did ironically felt frustrated at the safe puzzle in A New Job. The book points you towards the workbench, but it doesn't specify it's located in the basement, so I kept trying to find something at the innkeeper's two desks at his room instead!

Anyway this is also the reason why I asked to include a couple of quality FMs in the main package, just in case the campaign doesn't immediately rub with them and so they could have a taste at how single missions work.

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