[Feature Proposal] Frob to Use World Item

[Wellingtoncrab]

4 hours ago, thebigh said:

@Wellingtoncrab, if you'd seen this popup on your play of the training mission would it have taken a happy accident to rediscover how to shoulder bodies later?

 

I was typing on my phone earlier so didn’t say everything I wanted - just want to add it’s really appreciated that you took some time to look at this and are offering something that helps new players.

[thebigh]

13 minutes ago, Amadeus said:

This is a really nice little section. I do think it can be expanded a bit though to fully flesh out some of these mechanics.

True, but that's more ambitious than I was going for. All I wanted to know was how effective it would be having a message saying "You can drag bodies or shoulder them" when you knock the guy out. My feeling is a handful of short notes close by are better than a lengthy book readable in another room.

The little snippet I made really is just a re-make of two rooms in the current training mission.

 

[Amadeus]

3 minutes ago, thebigh said:

True, but that's more ambitious than I was going for. All I wanted to know was how effective it would be having a message saying "You can drag bodies or shoulder them" when you knock the guy out. My feeling is a handful of short notes close by are better than a lengthy book readable in another room.

 

Agreed; these notes are nice, brief, and clearly visible. It also adds a nice little bit of immersion, having those notes written to you and posted by.... someone

Edited September 27, 2023 by Amadeus

[thebigh]

10 minutes ago, Amadeus said:

having those notes written to you and posted by.... someone

Bingo! I'm so glad you picked up on the tone I was going for there. The feeling you're being guided through the training mission by some mystery watcher who's helpful and informative, but also sarcastic and distantly amused, would add some character to the Training Mission that's missing IMO and would make up for the absence of the smart but patronising Keepers.

[wesp5]

1 hour ago, ChronA said:

The essence of the proposal is that whatever interaction is the most indispensable--the "primary action"--that should be mapped to the default short frob that everyone is familiar with. The less important "secondary" action gets mapped to the new long frob, which we hope will be more discoverable than the use-while-frobbing combo.

That is the way that Daft and Wellingtoncrab see it, but others like I guess Snatcher and myself see it differently. I believe that the primary and secondary actions should be consistent inside the gameworld and not be connected to subjective opinions on what players might use more often or what they might know from older games. Otherwise the candle light behaviour should be reversed as well, because probably more players want to extinguish a light than carry it around. And consumables should automatically be eaten. Right now it's a wild mix of actions with no coherent reasoning behind it!

Also I just tested the dragging behaviour in thebigh's new training mission segment and it is indeed a chore. If there is a mission where this is needed for a longer period of time, as thebigh claims, players will be annoyed! And it will be the same if the light and consumables behaviour would be reverted as it should be by the essence you see behind the proposal. As for thebigh's new segment, it looks fine, but basically all the info was always available in the book of the blackjack room.

Edited September 27, 2023 by wesp5

[stgatilov]

1 hour ago, ChronA said:

The essence of the proposal is that whatever interaction is the most indispensable--the "primary action"--that should be mapped to the default short frob that everyone is familiar with. The less important "secondary" action gets mapped to the new long frob, which we hope will be more discoverable than the use-while-frobbing combo.

There also such thing as "code inertia".
You are discussing something as simple as "controls" or "bindinds". But in reality it is the whole logic of frobbing, grabbing, dragging, light extinguishing, light handles, scripts and spawnargs --- all tied in a single knot.

The code existed long time in a way that you can shoulder a body only after you grab it, and you can extinguish a candle only after you grab it. As far as I understand, @Daft Mugi did not refactor everything so that this idea no longer exists --- that would be too hard right now and probably break too much. Under the hood, there old logic somewhat remains in addition to the new one.

Such things often bite back with bugs, corner cases. Also it makes it even harder to further change things in frobbing. Of course, one could say that the new code has been extensively play-tested, but then we'll find yet another mission where something is used in unexpected way and we need to change something again. Indeed, happy people will just add more if-s and condition-s, but often it just shifts the problem into a different case.

So you know, if there are several plausible solutions, I would definitely lean to a more conservative one, which better complements the old one.

[Wellingtoncrab]

8 hours ago, stgatilov said:

So you know, if there are several plausible solutions, I would definitely lean to a more conservative one, which better complements the old one.

That honestly sounds a description of the current patch to me - you never responded to my question as to why you view it as “radical”, why you feel like there is justification for you to redefine the scope of the patch at this point to not address the concerns of these players, and way there is cause to not consider expanding the test base by including the patch in an actual dev build?

You mention the code has been this way for a long time - it takes a very shallow glance to see how long players have also been posting on this forum asking how to shoulder a body and getting some frigid responses about reading the wiki or playing the training mission. It has been consistent since at least 2009.

The idea that a game that is still in active development can’t strive to improve these things just does not resonate with me at all.

Edited September 28, 2023 by Wellingtoncrab

[Wellingtoncrab]

14 hours ago, thebigh said:

Also, this would ruin a mission like Heart of Lone Salvation, where you have to drag a body some distance because the ceiling is too low to shoulder it.

Checked this out - good chance to replay the mission which I hadn't in some time (good one!). There is an optional objective involving moving a body (the optional aspect might be difficulty related?). The body has the shoulderable spawnarg set to 0 because yes while the area is large enough to still shoulder body - it's small enough if it were shoulderable it can softlock you because there is not room to drop the body.

Dragging the body with the patched version seemed totally doable, but yeah in the patched version players would not be able to complete this optional objective unless the have learned to drag the body.

14 hours ago, thebigh said:

here's something I threw together today. It's a re-imagining of a tiny part of the training mission

This is definitely a nice addition! If the simplified interactions don't make it to core my only suggestion would be to make the gui text a little more specific to press "Use Inv Item" instead of just "Use" to shoulder the body.

[Daft Mugi]

@thebigh It's really great to see you step up and work to improve the training mission for new players. Thank you!

[thebigh]

That was just a proof of concept of a simple point I was trying to test, namely whether a collection of short notes presented locally are more effective than a big block of text read earlier. It seems that it is.

I don't have the skills to take on the whole thing. If there was a community effort to re-make it I'd definitely want to be involved though.

[datiswous]

Btw. the original training mission has a room you start in where you go to the different sections with tutorials. Instead what could be done (since 2.12) is implement a choice menu in the mission briefing where you choose what tutorial you do and then the mission starts in that part of the map. This can be done via the "Controlling Where the Player Starts" functionality introduced by Grayman. Just an idea.

Edited September 28, 2023 by datiswous

[wesp5]

I don't think this would fix the problems of the current tutorial. Which for me is that it is just too boring and random, especially because you can select what section to do in what order! I can imagine player trying one or two and then abandoning the rest while missing information. Maybe we could add more tutorial-like situations and infos to the official campaign missions instead?

Edited September 28, 2023 by wesp5

[datiswous]

I guess we've gone off-topic already...

My own idea is to add gameplay info to the main menu that you can quickly skim through in every mission you play (could this be added via a plugin?) It's kind of ridicilous having to start a seperate mission and in it read a book to understand gameplay mechanics. Personally I hated the tutorial missions (what a waste of time!) in every early game including Thief.

[wesp5]

2 hours ago, datiswous said:

My own idea is to add gameplay info to the main menu that you can quickly skim through in every mission you play

I did something similar by improving the description of some of the key binding. Everybody is going over them and might pick up additional info about e.g. the use key. This is one reason why, escpecially if we can't agree on a frob behaviour, there should be an option button to switch it, which automatically will make people aware that the feature exists!

Edited September 28, 2023 by wesp5

[stgatilov]

This patched version is available in tdm_installer as test-frob-daftmugi.

[Skaruts]

I was thinking about the concern @snatchermentioned about this making the ability to manipulate bodies around prohibitively tedious. I think there a bit of truth to that. I don't think it's that bad: I just manipulated a body around with not much hassle. But I can see how the delay might end up feeling like a stone in your shoe, for someone who does this often.

But as I was testing this, trying to manipulate a guard around, I noticed that most often when I want to manipulate, I have a tendency to want to not just click and hold, but to also drag the mouse (or start walking). And that's where the delay interferes a bit.

So I was thinking, maybe the implementation could also detect mouse dragging after the initial click, and immediately enter manipulation mode when it detects it? (Maybe it would be wise to still have a slight threshold for this? Not all mice and hands are exactly steady when clicking, so I suppose there might be a slight unintentional movement. I suppose this would have to be better thought about and tested.)

And maybe the same could be said about detecting walking right after the initial click.

Edited September 30, 2023 by Skaruts

[Daft Mugi]

34 minutes ago, Skaruts said:

But as I was testing this, trying to manipulate a guard around, I noticed that most often when I want to manipulate, I have a tendency to want to not just click and hold, but to also drag the mouse. And that's where the delay interferes a bit.

So I was thinking, maybe the implementation could also detect mouse dragging after the initial click, and immediately enter manipulation mode when it detects it? (Maybe it would be wise to still have a slight threshold for this? Not all mice and hands are exactly steady when clicking, so I suppose there might be a slight unintentional movement. I suppose this would have to be better thought about and tested.)

I agree. I considered this as well. Once I get my gaming dev machine back up and running sometime next week, I'll do some code experiments and let you know.

[Skaruts]

@Daft Mugijust in case you missed my edits to my post, I realized just a few minutes ago that sometimes I also tend to start walking right after the initial click. So maybe that could also be considered as a potential indicator of the intention to drag a body.

[nbohr1more]

I moved Snatcher's "Global Tip System" comment to it's own thread:

 

[Daft Mugi]

On 9/30/2023 at 11:33 AM, Skaruts said:

I was thinking about the concern @snatchermentioned about this making the ability to manipulate bodies around prohibitively tedious. I think there a bit of truth to that. I don't think it's that bad: I just manipulated a body around with not much hassle. But I can see how the delay might end up feeling like a stone in your shoe, for someone who does this often.

But as I was testing this, trying to manipulate a guard around, I noticed that most often when I want to manipulate, I have a tendency to want to not just click and hold, but to also drag the mouse (or start walking). And that's where the delay interferes a bit.

So I was thinking, maybe the implementation could also detect mouse dragging after the initial click, and immediately enter manipulation mode when it detects it?

I implemented this for bodies. It's working well. Thank you for the suggestion!

[Daft Mugi]

Updated patch along with new test builds.

• Windows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13lQig7Yzfc_jovU2zZklxLV1QOKAjkXe/view?usp=sharing
• Linux/Ubuntu: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j7DoWBKuBAFdVH2Y-2LcYsgdtJNBabmn/view?usp=sharing

@stgatilov Could you please update test-frob-daftmugi?

Changes in update:

• Bodies can be dragged instantly by holding frob and moving the mouse.
• Food can be eaten the same way as extinguishing a candle.
• (Pending) Add menu setting "Hold Frob to Use", with options:
  • Quick (200ms) - short delay before use
  • Delayed (400ms) - long delay before use
  • TDM original

 

Current design:

• Frob
  • Pick up body and shoulder it (carry it) / Drop body
  • Pick up candle/lantern and carry it / Drop candle/lantern
  • Pick up food and carry it / Drop food
  • Pick up an item and carry it / Drop item
• Hold frob (for special action)
  • Drag body or body limbs
  • Pinch out candle (also, pinch out candle while carrying it)
  • Toggle lantern off/on (also, toggle lantern while carrying it)
  • Eat food (also, eat food while carrying it)
• Hold frob and move mouse to instantly drag body.

 

Addressed concerns from initial design to current design:

• Changed the candle behavior to pick up on frob and extinguish on held frob.
• Added @AluminumHaste's suggestion to allow un-shouldering a body on frob.
• Added @nbohr1more's suggestion to allow extinguishing a candle while holding it.
• Added @Skaruts's suggestion to allow instant dragging of bodies on mouse move.
• Tried to address @snatcher's suggestion of making the extinguish candle delay 500ms instead of 200ms. There's a planned menu setting to set it to "Quick" (200ms) or "Delayed" (400ms). Also, I hope the "instant" body dragging will work well for you.

I think this is finally in a good place. It's evolved quite a lot since its initial design. I've tried to address as many concerns and suggestions as I could. Thank you everyone who gave feedback! It's much appreciated!

[wesp5]

I would still argue that you use semantics to swap the physics and special actions for bodies, but I can live with that :)!

[stgatilov]

19 hours ago, Daft Mugi said:

Updated patch along with new test builds.

• Windows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13lQig7Yzfc_jovU2zZklxLV1QOKAjkXe/view?usp=sharing
• Linux/Ubuntu: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j7DoWBKuBAFdVH2Y-2LcYsgdtJNBabmn/view?usp=sharing

@stgatilov Could you please update test-frob-daftmugi?

I can add test-frob-daftmugi2.
But could you please attach source patch?

[Daft Mugi]

1 minute ago, stgatilov said:

But could you please attach source patch?

Same patch link as before: https://gist.github.com/daftmugi/41d0324107e8734f364bb3e50ff00794

Can it not replace the current test build name?

[snatcher]

20 hours ago, Daft Mugi said:

• Tried to address @snatcher's suggestion of making the extinguish candle delay 500ms instead of 200ms. There's a planned menu setting to set it to "Quick" (200ms) or "Delayed" (400ms). Also, I hope the "instant" body dragging will work well for you.

Are you guys getting your core mechanics right or do I (as a player) have to decide everything?

It's getting out of control: