Fan Mission: Seeking Lady Leicester, by Grayman (3/21/2023)

[esme]

Thank you @Amadeus

[Zerg Rush]

Finished second round in this lovely Mission (nice the Grayman memorial with the sword, like in the painting). Some more loot (7300) but somewhat less discrete (6 KO, and 2 stealthpoints)

[Tarhiel]

So I finished Mysteries of the Sith on Thursday and immediately started playing this mission - what a treat!

Where to begin - audiovisually this mission is top notch:

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Especially the part in the Other world just blew my socks off - being able to mantle to all those floating places, which weren´t just a props for watching, all that small tidbits with that beautifully mysterious Precursor technology, Well with a Unquenching Fire, touching Grayman tribute and the Precursor submarine made it joy to play.

I liked the idea that in order to be able to loot the secret safe with inheritance treasure, you had to leave that Astralux in that safe - and you solved the whole situation in accordance with the saying "Where two parties are fighting, third one wins" - which had me laughing at the end.

The new precursor technology items/textures are beautiful and coherent in what they try to say/be and the new painting of the Leciester family are sight to behold - did somebody paint them specifically for this mission, or did you took them from somewhere? They remind me of Dishonored by style and they look fantastic.

Oh, and I like the new-ish gameplay mechanic/mini quest with finding food for the beggar - it´s simple, but you have to be creative when you don´t wanna travel too far - and the fun I had trying to bring him bread from the lampion side by tossing it to the roof and then taking it with me
 

Story-wise the mission is not anything new, but what it does, it does well and all the clues about what happened makes sense in the end. In general, this mission seem to be more "streamlined" as in not that much of a too difficult puzzles or unclear readables are present, which is definitely a plus, as I can recommend it even to newbie players.

What I noticed was, that main protagonist in the intro video kept calling lady Leicester as Lester. I guess the name got modified later on, but then couldn´t the lines be re-recorded, or readables modified?

Here are some bugs I found:
 

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In police department, this light source is visible through the wall.:

These stairs are smising texture in the protruding side part:

This potion cannot be frobbed:

 

 

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by Tarhiel

[thebigh]

"Leicester" is pronounced "Lester". At least, the real-world place in England is.

[Amadeus]

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

[Daft Mugi]

Spoiler

10 hours ago, Tarhiel said:

I liked the idea that in order to be able to loot the secret safe with inheritance treasure, you had to leave that Astralux in that safe

You can retrieve the Astralux from that safe door by closing the safe door and frobbing the Astralux, which will lock the safe again. It's a bit troublesome to frob the Astralux, though, because the safe door will be highlighted sometimes until the right position is found to highlight the Astralux.

 

[Tarhiel]

17 hours ago, thebigh said:

"Leicester" is pronounced "Lester". At least, the real-world place in England is.

Okay, I had no idea, I have googled it up now and you are right, to my own surprise.
 

9 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

Done, I´ve put some paragraphs which were previously not in spoiler tags into spoilers.

[Tarhiel]

7 hours ago, Daft Mugi said:

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You can retrieve the Astralux from that safe door by closing the safe door and frobbing the Astralux, which will lock the safe again. It's a bit troublesome to frob the Astralux, though, because the safe door will be highlighted sometimes until the right position is found to highlight the Astralux.

 

 

Spoiler

You can do that?

I had no idea, because after opening it I couldn´t frob it again to close it, it just didn´t want to highlight again and I thought this is by design - that once you used Astralux here, you can´t use it anywhere else.

 

[Tarhiel]

9 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Thebigh is right. The pronunciation tripped me up too, but that is apparently how Leicester is pronounced. Also @TarhielI'm glad you are loving the FM but do you mind putting spoiler tags on your post please

Oh, and I wanted to ask you:

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Those pictures of Leciester family - are they taken from somewhere or somebody made them specifically for this fanmission?
They´re beautiful and remind me by style of Dishonored. 

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by Tarhiel

[wesp5]

4 hours ago, Tarhiel said:

Oh, and I wanted to ask you:

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Those pictures of Leciester family - are they taken from somewhere or somebody made them specifically for this fanmission?
They´re beautiful and remind me by style of Dishonored. 

 

I already asked that and the great wellingtoncrab wrote that he made them with the help of AI.

[thebigh]

Spoiler

They do look Dishonored-like, don't they? I think they were made by putting the AIs' faces through Stable Diffusion and then given a lot of post-processing.

 

[wesp5]

10 hours ago, thebigh said:

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They do look Dishonored-like, don't they? I think they were made by putting the AIs' faces through Stable Diffusion and then given a lot of post-processing.

Indeed they do. Maybe game graphics were used to train? Wellingtoncrab, can you give us some more info please?

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by wesp5

[Wellingtoncrab]

9 hours ago, wesp5 said:

I already asked that and the great wellingtoncrab wrote that he made them with the help of AI.

It is correct that the portraits are AI generated, but I would stop short of saying I “made” them. While there is a method to guiding and getting results which are consistent using these ai art tools, it isn’t really an art or craft. That belongs to the artists the “training” algorithm has stolen from.

Pictures of AI posed in game were used as a starting image for all of the portraits. From there it was a combination of text prompts and other images being blended together by the ai into each iteration. I am not exactly sure how many times it needed to run through, but it was a lot.

I did not use images from other games to influence the result, just old oil painted portraits (such as those by Rembrandt Peele) and feeding the images back into themselves. Sometimes I would feed a siblings portrait into another result in effort to create some kind of sense familial resemblance and bring in more consistency between the portraits without completely losing their relationship with their in-game counterparts (where they had one).

Hopefully this makes it feel like the individual portraits of the Leicester family members were all by the same artist. All post processing as well as the frame and canvas materials and height information were made in substance designer.

It is very difficult to use technology like this and not feel conflicted about it. Were we not a very small team working on a non commercial project I would not have done it. We did obviously all really like the portraits, but probably did not expect them to be the seemingly standout thing in a mission rather crammed with new assets.

[ChronA]

It's a new tool that makes it possible to rapidly produce high quality new assets that would not have been practical to acquire any other way until now. Of course it's exciting in the same way any tech demonstrator FM is exciting. I think you guys should be really proud for being our trail blazers. 

(Warning: topic-tangential tech rant below)

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Also, in a few years I think all this hand wringing over supposedly stolen training data is going to seem very silly. Most importantly the cat is out of the bag. The technology is only going to get better and more widely distributed. It will not take long before it becomes informatically impossible to distinguish between low res images generated by AI and those generated by humans. Once that happens you can use a low res generator to create a composition, claim a human (you) did it, and then openly AI upscale it to create your final composition. Unless someone digs up server logs, or the first AI leaves a water mark, (or the human claiming the work is just not plausibly that creative/talented) there is no way to tell the difference. Any artistic style the up-scaler applies is fair game, you can't legally claim a style as IP unless there is an element of deliberate passing-off involved. And even if that changed, like with encryption, you can't legislate math.

Secondly the whole idea that these algorithms are stealing their training data fundamentally misunderstands how they work. It's not storing memories of works it likes and riffing on them. Rather the process of training a neural network could be better described as a hyper-multi-variate statistical analysis of the atomic data composition of the training set. It will be very difficult to argue much less legislate that such analysis is not fair use without huge collateral damage. (Deep Learning is not the only algorithm capable of doing this stuff, just a particularly easy and well demonstrated method.) And once you reach the point of the fitted model, any information from the training set (barring statistical flukes that inevitably crop up in such huge data aggregations) has been effectively purged, so you can't argue making or using the generator is theft either (unless again there is deliberate passing off involved).

Third I think there is a bigger elephant in the room. With all AI's recent successes (paging GPT4), the old hypothesis that solving a general intelligence (including the super-human kind) should be easy to brute forced with enough training data and neurons, is looking more and more like it could be correct. It may be very soon we won't worry about algorithms stealing work from artists, but that we are stealing work from an algorithm, and it or its AI friends may not be inclined to let that continue. Not without some sort of concession to its goals and values... play ai_knockoff_terminator_score.mp3

That aside, the mission sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to playing it soon.

[bobber1]

Wow.  Wonderful mission.  Now I have to play it a second time on hard difficulty. Skimming through the comments I seem to have missed a bunch of stuff.  Thank you authors.

[esme]

I have a question

Whats the deal with

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rat-boy in the sewer section in the exploded world ?

Does he do anything ? do I have to give him something ?

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like I did with the beggar

I noticed there's

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a carrot down in the water, but I couldn't pick it up & give it to him & there doesn't seem to be anything else I might hand over

[Wellingtoncrab]

@esme

Spoiler

They are just a friendly face.

 

[Oleron]

On 4/2/2023 at 1:35 AM, thebigh said:

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They do look Dishonored-like, don't they? I think they were made by putting the AIs' faces through Stable Diffusion and then given a lot of post-processing.

 

They look more like MidJourney to me.

This is easily one of the sharpest, most polished, imaginative, and generally well done TDM FMs I've played. I've spent hours in it, and as far as I can tell, there's only one thing left I'm concerned with that eludes me:

 

Spoiler

Where's the damn exit?

 

Oblique, tangential hints are quite acceptable.

 

 

Edited April 3, 2023 by Oleron

[Wellingtoncrab]

@Oleronwhether you’re in the middle or the end I think the answer will be:

Spoiler

from the same place you started.

 

[Xolvix]

Well I finally finished it, I think I stopped for a while once I got to the void section of the mission. While I did enjoy the mission I got kinda lost and befuddled in this area.

Spoiler

I found items like dewdrop, the heirloom and the looking glass echo, but no means of using them. I used the astralux to unlock an area which lead to another area with the grayman's sword and the scholar's journal, suggesting a sort of trip but that's basically all I worked out. I guess I'm not a fan of puzzles that require scavenging when you don't even know how to use the items you've scavenged. Plus of course that great big safe who's code eluded me. It's all optional of course, but it's content missed because the void became too much of a challenge for me to understand I guess.

Still, this sometimes happens when playing such a large mission for the first time, so a replay is on the cards!

[vorob]

 

I'm getting some weird "boxed" glitch on light source and weird shadow line. Everything on absolute maximum. Tried to turn off experimental features and reboot via VID_RESTART, but no change. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by vorob

[Klatremus]

What an absolutely fantastic mission, guys! The dark world (which I call it) was truly stunning, and very creative. The atmosphere there was really captivating. I actually found the inside of the Leicester manor in the city to be the least interesting, though the surrounding streets were top notch. Great use of readables to tell the story, especially the precursor tablets.

Finished first playthrough missing about 1K in loot. Went back to scour for more and found quite a bit, but still missed just over 200. So I resorted to the loot cheat and discovered something interesting. I did miss a few coins and a goblet, but 185 of the loot I was missing is, to my knowledge, unobtainable.

Spoiler

Two coins worth 10+5 in the locksmith's safe is embedded in the safe's floor and thus invisible. They can still be taken, however.

One gem and two square coins worth 100+35+35 exist in a second airship to the far west of the dark world. It seems like an exact replica of the airship I used, except the control panel with the astralux was nonfunctional. I had to use 'noclip' in order to reach it. Can you get here somehow? Maybe by teleporting?

I also managed to get two secrets:

Spoiler

Feeding the well and stealing the inheritance. I also was able to help Lady Leicester move on. Are there any other secrets? I did help the homeless get some food, but that didn't change the objectives.

I also noticed by seeing someone's stat screen that their loot max is 8715. Mine is 8935. I realized that I play version 1.0 while the 1.1 has been updated in the first post. Can someone please tell me what loot items have been altered between the versions? I'm asking because I made a loot list, and I'd hate to double check every item over again to know what has changed. Possibly some of the "unobtainable" items mentioned above have been removed?

Thanks again!

Edited April 7, 2023 by Klatremus

[Wellingtoncrab]

Glad to hear you enjoyed the mission @Klatremus , thanks a lot for taking the time to play!

3 hours ago, Klatremus said:

I also noticed by seeing someone's stat screen that their loot max is 8715. Mine is 8935.

Thanks for catching this and those other loot bugs. There are two pieces of loot worth 110 which currently do not spawn on the lowest difficulty causing this discrepancy. As far as I can tell there are no loot differences between 1.0 and 1.1 and the totals are identical. In the next patch with the inaccessible loot removed the new loot total will be 8765 across all difficulties and everything should still be where it was in your initial playthrough.

Regarding Secrets:

Spoiler

In terms of secret objectives there is more, though players in this thread have found all of them at this point. Regarding secrets in the truest sense there are plenty I am yet to see mentioned.

The beggar will provide some updated objective text depending on when you feed him. Since the reward is a clue to get into the manor, the mission doesn't bother to do this if you have already completed this objective.

Thanks again for playing!

[tapewolf]

On 4/3/2023 at 6:01 PM, Oleron said:

Oblique, tangential hints are quite acceptable.

 

 

If you still need it, I found
 

Spoiler

Two ways to enter and leave the Otherworld.  One is to simply use the room where the ritual took place.

However, there is a second entrance/exit in the Grimoire shop.  Getting there from the Otherworld will take a bit of scrambling around however, as the hatchway used in the real world is shut.

In both cases these can be used to go back to the Otherworld if you need it, it's not a one-way trip.

 

[Klatremus]

3 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

In the next patch with the inaccessible loot removed the new loot total will be 8765 across all difficulties and everything should still be where it was in your initial playthrough.

Ok so then I assume you are removing the three items in that faraway airship, and also making the two coins in the safe visible.

3 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

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In terms of secret objectives there is more, though players in this thread have found all of them at this point. Regarding secrets in the truest sense there are plenty I am yet to see mentioned.

The beggar will provide some updated objective text depending on when you feed him. Since the reward is a clue to get into the manor, the mission doesn't bother to do this if you have already completed this objective.

In that case I can mention a few more things I found:

Spoiler

There was a box with a small hat on top of the tower in the dark world that takes you back to the bookstore in town. I was surprised not to find loot up there, but I guess that is a way to "hide" it even more.

I found two more hats on top of the ruined manor in the same part of the dark world. I had to climb up a broken wall to get there. One of them was on a toy horse, if I remember correctly.

I also saw a figure in blue haze staring at you through a window in a tower far away. There was no way to get there, but zooming in on him it was quite obvious.

Oh and relating to the unfrobbable trophy that people are experiencing. I also could not obtain it, until I realized I could take it when the chest was closed, through the lid! I assume that means you don't even have to unlock it.

Edited April 7, 2023 by Klatremus