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Interaction with objects


snatcher

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9 minutes ago, Nort said:

But then the upper drawers will block the view of the lower drawers

You could make opening the top drawers all at once when you frob any one top drawer, then when you frob a bottom drawer, the top drawers automatically close. etc.

 

7 minutes ago, snatcher said:

Regarding my second suggestion, you can see it in action here:

I think I already like it more than the current (optional) frob outline, if it could be made slightly more subtle.

Edited by datiswous
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40 minutes ago, datiswous said:

 [..] if it could be made slightly more subtle.

The gif I created is a straight animation from non-frobable to frobable and back, using game defaults. I didn't add/remove any extra brightness or changed anything. Up to the developers to tweak it, if required.

Take also into account the lantern is on and the effect should be more prominent in low light conditions.

Edited by snatcher

TDM Modpack 4.0

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20 minutes ago, snatcher said:

The gif I created is a straight animation from non-frobable to frobable and back, using game defaults. I didn't add/remove any extra brightness or changed anything. Up to the developers to tweak it, if required.

Take also into account the lantern is on and the effect should be more prominent in low light conditions.

Looks great, but what to consider, is that the human attention notices changes more than it notices states, so you don't need it to go full frob brightness. This is something that needs to be tweaked until it's just right, I guess.

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2 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

I'd be happy with the T1/T2 mechanic whereby you automatically loot the contents of a chest when you open it.

I have no idea why this was changed in TDM. It seems like another "let's make things physically realistic for literally no gameplay reason" mechanic.

 

If I recall that wasn't a default option in T1 / 2, but was something you could enable in the menu if you so chose.  It would be a good idea to have it.

As for the subtle frob fading in and out displayed in the gif above, I and a few others suggested that over the years.  I personally think it's something that would work beautifully in both light and dark areas since the slow pulse is going to draw your eye in.

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8 hours ago, Nort said:

But come on, datiswous: Is that really your idea of fun to open and lift the clothes of every drawer, to see if there are some coins hidden underneath? There's a reason why pixel hunting is so impopular. Is it really the point of Thief games?

In this community, yep :P

6 hours ago, New Horizon said:

 

If I recall that wasn't a default option in T1 / 2, but was something you could enable in the menu if you so chose.  It would be a good idea to have it.

In the original games contents of openable chests etc. was directly transfered to your inventory. There was no picking the items physically out of the containers, at least not for the standard stuff like footlockers et. al. This was introduced with thief deadly shadows, and they bypassed the frobbing issue by making all items comically large.

 

In regards to the frobing container issue. A good solution might be a compromise. Once a container got opened by the player it becomes unfrobable, so the player can loot it without interferences from the container. Once the container is empty it could close itself or become frobable or both, although this would only be necessary if the mission is setup in a way were the ai actually notices open containers.

 

Another approach could be to utilize the lean forward action. If the player leans forward frobbing is only enabled for small items.

 

Personally I would second the empty container once opened setup, as well as looting dead or unconsciuos ai upon frob. As stated above, the game is not about frobbing.

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11 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

I would second the empty container once opened setup, as well as looting dead or unconsciuos ai upon frob.

While I agree with looting NPCs, because often you need to turn them around to frob a key or a purse, I'm not so sure about the containers. I like the little details like the purse hidden under a hat and this would get lost :(! Your other idea sounds great though, to make the container unfrobable once it is open. Dragofer already made a similar script which made the base not frobbable once the top is opened, but he started with only the top being frobable and there are missions in which this doesn't work. So scriptmaster, could you provide us with a script that only makes the base not frobbable once a container has been unlocked and with the NPC looting on frob script you suggested above :)?

Edited by wesp5
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I can't imagine that making open chests unfrobbable would go down well with the ghosters. I believe some people take particular pride in making it look like they were never there after stealing everything, which would become impossible if there was no way to close opened chests.

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1 hour ago, wesp5 said:

Dragofer already made a similar script which made the base not frobbable once the top is opened, but he started with only the top being frobable and there are missions in which this doesn't work.

You mean that is the default state of the chest and the script made the body being frobable as well?

Edited by datiswous
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What I do in my missions is to only make the lid frobable to prevent the body from interfering with frobbing the contents. The idea of the script was to apply the same principle to all other missions too, identifying all chests in the map and setting the bodies to nonfrobable. This is hampered by the fact that there are edge cases which use a similar setup to chests and require the "body" entity to be frobable.

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This sounds like you need some sort of "frobable_bind" optional property, which the mapper can use to make the player able to frob entire groups of objects (like the top and bottom parts of a chest, or the body carrying a key).

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12 hours ago, wesp5 said:

So scriptmaster, could you provide us with a script that only makes the base not frobbable once a container has been unlocked and with the NPC looting on frob script you suggested above :)?

Dunno. I don't really know what kinds of setups are commonly used. Would have to get an impression of that first. It is basically possible, but might not apply to all containers in use.

What is easely possible is to create entity definitions and script that could be used on containers to get this behaviour, but than mappers would have to actively add it.

12 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

I can't imagine that making open chests unfrobbable would go down well with the ghosters. I believe some people take particular pride in making it look like they were never there after stealing everything, which would become impossible if there was no way to close opened chests.

While I don't really care about ghosting I guess that the setup described by wesp5 wouldn't contradict it, as the lid could still be closed but the body wouldn't get in the way.

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22 minutes ago, Obsttorte said:

What is easely possible is to create entity definitions and script that could be used on containers to get this behaviour, but than mappers would have to actively add it.

That wouldn't help us with the over hundred missions already out there. Dragofer already made a script that is close, I need to take a look and maybe PM it to you. As far as I remember he just somehow detected the base of a container and set it to non-frobable once the top had been opened. And yes, this would work fine for ghosting...

Edited by wesp5
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The options I think might be good are, 1, if they made it default at the start for, or it's explained in the tutorial mission, which a lot of people play their first time. Then people know how to turn it on & off when they want it either way. The other option would be a setting-setting that comes on with a first install with a prompt like "what kind of experience [or UI] do you want: 1. An authentic or more realistic experience closest to the classics in this genre, 2. a UI designed to make game play more accessible and fun with less hassle, and then the system picks different sets of options based on one's answer to that.

It's obvious or anyway intuitive to me that people in the "1" camp are going to be alienated by these features and people in the "2" camp would find it hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want them.

Part of our entire MO in our design doc from the start was to make the experience as pared down and closest to reality as reasonable, with UI features putting things in the world just to the extent the medium was limited in giving world-feedback to the player. More to the point, it didn't like the turn to screen bling that started happening after 2004, so made an intentional point of limiting the bling to what was necessary.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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18 hours ago, wesp5 said:

So scriptmaster, could you provide us with a script that only makes the base not frobbable once a container has been unlocked

16 hours ago, Dragofer said:

What I do in my missions is to only make the lid frobable to prevent the body from interfering with frobbing the contents.

I actually went pretty far down this rabbit hole myself because I really wanted to have the whole chest simultaneously frobable (frob_peer'd) when closed but only the lid frobable when open.  I came to the conclusion that if the AddFrobPeer and RemoveFrobPeer functions were exposed to scripting, it would be possible to achieve this.  I haven't gotten around to actually implementing and testing it yet, but definitely want to before 2.11 starts stabilizing.  My end goal was to make an entityDef where you supply the body and lid models along with the hinge location and out pops a fully-functional chest.  The first iteration of this is actually already in my SW1 FM, and I hope to refine it more for my next one.  This is definitely more of a look-forward approach rather than something that would improve existing FMs, though.

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6 hours ago, demagogue said:

1. An authentic or more realistic experience closest to the classics in this genre, 2. a UI designed to make game play more accessible and fun with less hassle

This is a bit of a contradiction. The classic games just gave you the content of the container after opening, so they were not as realistic as possible. And a higher accessibility doesn't mean less realism.

6 hours ago, demagogue said:

and then the system picks different sets of options based on one's answer to that

Which basically results in the players having to check the options either way as they have no idea what is setup in which way for whatever reason. I am no fan of such automatisms to be honest.

 

8 hours ago, wesp5 said:

That wouldn't help us with the over hundred missions already out there.

I never said it would. The problem is that their may be different setups in use. It is like with the other stuff. Some place a torch model and than the fire particle in addition, some place doors and then the hinges in addition. Making changes to such setups without missing some special case already present or possible in the future is nearly impossible. That's the issue with non-uniform building styles.

3 hours ago, jonri said:

I came to the conclusion that if the AddFrobPeer and RemoveFrobPeer functions were exposed to scripting, it would be possible to achieve this.

Did you ever file a bugtracker for this?

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3 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

This is a bit of a contradiction. The classic games just gave you the content of the container after opening, so they were not as realistic as possible. And a higher accessibility doesn't mean less realism.

I was thinking about things like frobbing coins and doors, but you're right about containers being an innovation, and more generally that realism and era don't match up all that well when you get down to details. But that wasn't really part of my point, so it's best to rephrase it.

The point is there is a category of player that hates screen bling, or will say they hate it (we're really talking about a whole philosophy towards games & immersive sims), and that type would view TDM is the kind of game where you can get relief from it (etc.). I don't know the best way to summarize that in bumper sticker form for a button. Any way you try there are going to be problems, like you're saying. But it's still a real category. I'm open to suggestions for the best way to succinctly describe what it is.

  

3 hours ago, Obsttorte said:

Which basically results in the players having to check the options either way as they have no idea what is setup in which way for whatever reason. I am no fan of such automatisms to be honest.

I was trying to throw a bone to people that don't like the default and wanted another option that worked for the other player type that says frob-hassle is a pointless frustration, but I agree with this. Having some big-scale option setting moment is a bad idea, so I'd even retract the suggestion. But that would just lead me back to: ideally we keep it the way it is because it's consistent with the design doc from the very beginning. You can't micromanage or tweak a design philosophy forever; it's a kind of endless feature creep. 

Now that I think about it, that's probably closer to the root issue. There are always pros and cons with different features. And here if you're talking about two different types of attitude, which the same person can even go back & forth on, you can't win. But at a certain point a feature becomes part of the character of the game, so it's best to stick with it. That's only my view though. (And I like that frob help is an option out there I can use sometimes.)

Of course another option is what Springheel likes to do with his loading screens, which is having hint texts on the Main Menu screen that inform players they can do stuff like this that they might never notice otherwise. That's a good idea for other reasons because there are quite a few things that would be hard for players to know but which they may find really useful.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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23 minutes ago, demagogue said:

The point is there is a category of player that hates screen bling, or will say they hate it (we're really talking about a whole philosophy towards games & immersive sims), and that type would view TDM is the kind of game where you can get relief from it (etc.).

We are not really talking about screen bling here. No fancy popups, markers or whatever else modern games tend to "please" us with. But the mentioning of the term "immersive sim" makes the issue pretty clear imho. I hear that term every now and than and honestly it doesn't make any sense to me. All games except maybe abstract ones should or do provide a certain degree of immersion, and neither Thief nor TDM nor any other stealth game are simulations. There is nothing that gets simulated here.

23 minutes ago, demagogue said:

I don't know the best way to summarize that in bumper sticker form for a button.

You don't have to, I am no idiot. :) I see were you are coming from, and I see what the people arguing against specific changes are coming from. At a certain point comfort features can have an impact at the gameplay, sometimes to a point were the soul of the game vanishes.

 

But for one many comfort request like the frob helper doesn't arose from the desire to simplify the gameplay, but because the original implementation has its issues. The original Thief games, as much as we may love them in our nostalgia, are far from perfect and full of issues in many respects. Their were outstanding for their time, but there is lots of potential for improvement.

 

Another point is that we really have to judge as objectively as possible on whether a comfort element really messes with the fundamentals of the gameplay. And I cannot see this here. I neither see how the frob helper impacts the basic requirements on the player nor how changes to the frob behaviour of containers would. Taking something out of a chest isn't a difficult or clumsy task in real life. So if it is in a game, the game is broken and needs fixing.

 

23 minutes ago, demagogue said:

Ideally we keep it the way it is because it's consistent with the design doc from the very beginning.

I don't know if this design doc still exists in written form, but due to the time TDM already exists I may dare to note that a lot of the members who influenced that aren't part of the community anymore while a lot of new members joined later on. And from my experience the design philosophy of the different team members already differs strongly.

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4 hours ago, Obsttorte said:
7 hours ago, jonri said:

I came to the conclusion that if the AddFrobPeer and RemoveFrobPeer functions were exposed to scripting, it would be possible to achieve this.

Did you ever file a bugtracker for this?

Added bugtracker entry #5976 and added the respective script functions to the code:

void addFrobPeer(entity peer);
void removeFrobPeer(entity peer);

While doing so I encountered an issue that I have to resolve before commiting. The peer entity stays frobhilighted if the frob peer gets removed while hilighted, even if the player moves away. I guess the code doesn't reset the shader parameter 11 that is used for frob hilighting, as the entity is no longer in the frob peer list.

 

EDIT: Got the issue sorted out. It doesn't work as intented on the doors in the prefabs folder, probably something caused by the was the auto setup works, but that isn't the intented use-case anyways. On the container in the prefabs folder it works pretty well. Added with revision 9935

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

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14 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Was this something which was shared with the comunity or only with the devs? I would be interested to read it.

I was using the term more metaphorically. There was a design philosophy. Whatever the literal doc itself said wasn't really the point. Well I shouldn't have referred to it as such since it wouldn't be on point anyway. Most things got pounded out in the dev forum across countless threads, but that's harder to explain. I was using the term "design doc" as a cheaty shorthand so I wouldn't have to explain. XD 

Anyway, long story short, if there's a vote among the devs to change a thing, I trust everyone on the team has the best interest of the game in mind, so of course it's proper they can change something like this that way. I wouldn't vote for it, but I'd respect the vote and be fine as long as I could turn it off.

I think one characteristic of this as opposed to the light gem or inventory widget is that at the end of the day this is reticle, and reticles carry a lot of baggage with them in games. Somehow they change the relationship of the player to the game space, at least with my feeling of them. I always turn off reticles in any game I play for that reason (although like I said before, I'll cheat sometimes and turn them on in rare cases; but I don't like them in any game as a rule). So that's one part of this.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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I currently don't have the energy to read every single comment here unfortunately, but I can at least give my 2 cents:

  • Even though it can be fiddly sometimes, I do like being able to manually pick up loot when I open up a container as opposed to everything being sucked into my inventory automatically. There's something to be said for letting the player do things themselves rather than automating the process.
  • That said, a nice feature I saw in Prey 2017 is how if you hold down the use key, it will automatically continue the picking up action so you can sweep across a table for example and pick up the loot like a vacuum cleaner rather than pressing F on each individual piece of loot. Wish I could do that in TDM when picking up coin stacks from a container.
  • Some people have scripts in their missions that show an animation of loot flying to the player when picked up, like in Dishonored. Make that part of the main game with a settings toggle for animated/un-animated loot pickup.
  • Something has to be done about those chests, seriously. The number of times I've tried picking up loot out of them and accidentally closing the chest again, urg...
  • I don't use the frob helper. If something is hard to pick up I just activate the spyglass and use it as an hoc loot aiming device. It a janky solution but due to the lack of any other options for so long, it's proven very effective. :)
  • Modern games like to have an animated shine on loot so that it's easier to see. I would strongly resist implementing something like that in TDM, to the point where I don't think it should even be an option to enable it or not. While it's annoying to miss loot, TDM has trained me to become a very proficient loot hunter and I get genuine satisfaction if I find hidden loot in a room that would otherwise be revealed due to a shiny shader. If someone wants to script it then I'm sure they can, however the absence of anyone bothering to custom script this into FMs tells me everything.

That's a bit more than 2 cents I think, especially with inflation.

A word of warning, Agent Denton. This was a simulated experience; real LAMs will not be so forgiving.

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Just now, Xolvix said:
  1. Even though it can be fiddly sometimes, I do like being able to manually pick up loot when I open up a container as opposed to everything being sucked into my inventory automatically. There's something to be said for letting the player do things themselves rather than automating the process.
  2. That said, a nice feature I saw in Prey 2017 is how if you hold down the use key, it will automatically continue the picking up action so you can sweep across a table for example and pick up the loot like a vacuum cleaner rather than pressing F on each individual piece of loot. Wish I could do that in TDM when picking up coin stacks from a container.
  3. Some people have scripts in their missions that show an animation of loot flying to the player when picked up, like in Dishonored. Make that part of the main game with a settings toggle for animated/un-animated loot pickup.
  4. Something has to be done about those chests, seriously. The number of times I've tried picking up loot out of them and accidentally closing the chest again, urg...
  5. I don't use the frob helper. If something is hard to pick up I just activate the spyglass and use it as an hoc loot aiming device. It a janky solution but due to the lack of any other options for so long, it's proven very effective. :)
  6. Modern games like to have an animated shine on loot so that it's easier to see. I would strongly resist implementing something like that in TDM, to the point where I don't think it should even be an option to enable it or not. While it's annoying to miss loot, TDM has trained me to become a very proficient loot hunter and I get genuine satisfaction if I find hidden loot in a room that would otherwise be revealed due to a shiny shader. If someone wants to script it then I'm sure they can, however the absence of anyone bothering to custom script this into FMs tells me everything.
  1. Reverting it to the classic thief style wasn't really on the table, I think. It's just a statement that some players don't really care and are ok with a simple solution, even if a bit unimmersive.
  2. That's something I never really noticed, or I can't remember. Could be interesting to try to add this. :)
  3. I second this. It doesn't affect gameplay and is a nice addition for those who like it. The only question is on whether the default should be on or off.
  4. That's what this discussion is about and what the above mentioned script functions should help with. My idea is that the lid stays frobable after opening the container, while the body becomes unfrobable. Once the container got closed again, the body is frobable again. I think that is a good compromise that has the potential to solve this issue and don't annoy any purist. ;)
  5. Why easy if it can be done complicated 🤣
  6. In the past I thought that a subtle reflection on the loot when lit would be nice. It wouldn't make a big difference in bright areas probably but would allow the player to utilize his lantern to help him finding loot while taking the risk of beeing spotted. Never really fiddled around with that setup, though.

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My wiki articles: Obstipedia

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