[Feature Proposal] Frob to Use World Item

[wesp5]

46 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

So why is fine control of bodies the first thing many players will learn?

Because it is the consistent way TDM handles all moveable entities. Q.E.D. ;)!

[Amadeus]

13 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Because it is the consistent way TDM handles all moveable entities. Q.E.D. ;)!

I think it's reasonable to assume that players will think that a body behaves differently than a candlestick, or a bottle or whatever other moveable junk a player may find. Players frob arrows, health potions, all kinds of other inventory items; I don't really think players will worry about "frob consistency" when dealing with a body.

I did try out Daft Mugi's NewFrob and it's quite nice. There are several FMs that require players to shoulder a body to complete it (Penny Dreadful 3, Volta 2, Painter's Wife) and there are no FMs that require fine manipulation of an AI's arm or leg.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Amadeus

[Skaruts]

22 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Because it is the consistent way TDM handles all moveable entities. Q.E.D. ;)!

Many moveable entities are not pickable, like keys or anything that goes in the inventory, but which is still a moveable entity.

There's basically two types of entities: those that go in the inventory, and those you can carry around. Bodies are actually the odd ones out, that can be used in both ways. They don't go in the inventory in the same sense, but they do still get pretty much "acquired".

Even if there's an inconsistency there, from a player's perspective, subtle inconsistencies aren't really noticeable if the behavior is intuitive or expected. I personally prefer simple-click to shoulder. It feels more natural to me, because shouldering is also what I want 99.9% of the time (as do most players, I bet). And so, like I said before, it's more a matter of the most used action being the most accessible by default. A simple click is more accessible (and easy to discover) than a hold-click.

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Skaruts

[Wellingtoncrab]

6 hours ago, wesp5 said:

Because it is the consistent way TDM handles all moveable entities. Q.E.D. ;)!

This is another point which been gone over again and again in the thread and doesn’t need more elaboration. Two additional users just pointed out that frobbing is a context sensitive action that is already not “consistent”.

There are lots of moveable objects for example that already don’t work like you are describing. Inventory items like keys are also moveables. The primary action is to acquire them. If you wish to interact with them as you would another moveable you must drop them first at which point they appear in front of the player as other physics objects do.

No one complains about this not being consistent, as it would be tedious and potentially confusing to need two key presses to acquire most moveable inventory items, many of which are required to progress in the game, just like it is tedious and potentially confusing to do this with bodies.

It is TDM which is not consistent with games like Thief TDP/2/3, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Dishonored, etc. Maybe this is in part why it is confusing, as there is a good chance people coming to TDM will have some familiarity with those games.

Thanks for your understanding.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Wellingtoncrab

[wesp5]

55 minutes ago, Skaruts said:

There's basically two types of entities: those that go in the inventory, and those you can carry around. Bodies are actually the odd ones out, that can be used in both ways. They don't go in the inventory in the same sense, but they do still get pretty much "acquired".

That is actually the best explanation I have read here yet...

[Skaruts]

Just to correct myself a bit, there's also a 3rd kind of entities: doors and stuff like that, which you can neither carry nor acquire, only interact.

[snatcher]

I like that we can extinguish candles and light on/off lanterns with a long frob. A lot. It feels very natural. Congratulations for the idea and execution. From an usability point of view I disagree with the default 200ms but since members here are confident players will always get the desired result consider me and oddball. Thanks for having provided a cvar for me to change the timing.

I don't like the fact that the toying with bodies or body limbs mechanic has been rendered unusable. People that don't use this mechanic to its full extent won't understand the reasons: take a limb and painfully carry the body to another room, hide a body carefully in the most peculiar place and position, recreate a crime or comic scene... Only TDM provides this fun, for those seeking it. The potential of the mechanic is gone for both existing and new players: too much long frob / key press to bother. Don't try to convince me of the opposite.

Please make a cvar for snatcher to shoulder and unshoulder bodies on long frob, just like with candles. This is, in my opinion, the wisest of the solutions. Many thanks in advance.

[Wellingtoncrab]

12 hours ago, stgatilov said:

I think not.
The goal is to have convenient way to instantly shoulder a body and instantly extinguish the candle.

1. This just isn’t a true description of the scope as lined out in the original post. Why is it that you feel there is reason enough that you get to decide to just change this?
2. Why is a change which is completely backwards compatible with the existing control scheme “radical”? It is clear in this thread there are players that want this, and anyone who doesn’t doesn’t have to use it.

Why at a minimum can’t it go out for testing with more players in a proper dev build like the frob highlight did?

[wesp5]

38 minutes ago, snatcher said:

Please make a cvar for snatcher to shoulder and unshoulder bodies on long frob, just like with candles. This is, in my opinion, the wisest of the solutions. Many thanks in advance.

I am completely on your side and I really would like to have such a cvar too, as I said ;). Then you can include it into your mod and I into my patch and all of us will be happy in the end :)!

Edited September 26, 2023 by wesp5

[ChronA]

I just want to say, kudos to @Wellingtoncrab for so steadfastly championing the pro-change side of this discussion! The people who will benefit most from this change are people whose voices we would normally never hear. It is courageous of you to lend them a voice.

 

Also, at risk of beating an already dead horse, I'd like to raise an objection against the anti-change argument earlier that the current set of control complications are all explained in the training mission, and therefore anyone who doesn't find them has only themselves to blame. That requires the training tutorial be fit for purpose, and according to modern standards it is simply not.

The TDM training mission is technically competent, but it fails at the critical requirement of giving new players motivation to slog through the learning curve in order to play the game proper. This is an area where Thief inarguably did it better even 20 years ago. TDM's tutorial is too long. It is bloated with too much non-essential information, and lacks any teasers of the world building or gameplay loops that would motivate a player to try the game proper.

To anyone with modern gaming sensibilities, the training mission says this game does not respect your time. People today expect game mechanics to be discoverable in the course of gameplay, which largely means clinging to genre conventions as much as possible, and teaching the rest through minimal, immersive tutorialization within the main gameplay loop. A New Job is a big step in the right direction as a replacement, but unless I am misremembering, it is only a partial one. It wisely focuses on the essentials of moment-to moment play, leaving the advanced stuff for the player to discover on their own. Except the whole problem is these advanced features are not at all designed to be discoverable.

If your argument is that something is fine because anyone who played the whole training mission would know how to deal with it, that in itself is a sign of a major problem.

[snatcher]

9 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

I am completely on your side and I really would like to have such a cvar too, as I said ;). Then you can include it into your mod and I into my patch and all of us will be happy in the end :)!

Yeah, actually @Daft Mugi could consider making parts of the source code he works on script-friendly, instead of adding obscure cvars that we easily forget about and might never be worthy of a proper in-game setting.

[stgatilov]

6 minutes ago, ChronA said:

The TDM training mission is technically competent, but it fails at the critical requirement of giving new players motivation to slog through the learning curve in order to play the game proper. This is an area where Thief inarguably did it better even 20 years ago. TDM's tutorial is too long. It is bloated with too much non-essential information, and lacks any teasers of the world building or gameplay loops that would motivate a player to try the game proper.

Yes, absolutely.
It is not tutorial, it is "training" mission.
More like a playground, which appeared when no real missions existed.

New Job does not count either: it just shows 3-4 tips, which are on the level of generic idea.

Tutorial should be short, simple, linear, and able to cite current player's controls straight into text messages.

[stgatilov]

1 minute ago, snatcher said:

Yeah, actually @Daft Mugi could consider making parts of the source code he works on script-friendly, instead of adding obscure cvars that we easily forget about and might never be worthy of a proper in-game setting.

Oh god no!

With this patch, the frob code already looks like spaghetti.
If you make it scriptable, it only means all non-standard configurations will break all th etime.

[snatcher]

I understand what you mean.

[thebigh]

On 9/25/2023 at 9:01 AM, thebigh said:

What all this tells me is that the training mission needs a serious overhaul. In places it ought to use GUIs rather than static books to give instructions.

For example, in the area where you KO the patrolling Builder so you can learn to stash bodies, blackjacking him should trigger a GUI message then and there saying something like, "Highlight and frob the Builder to drag him around, or press ENTER to shoulder him"

At the risk of derailing the conversation, here's something I threw together today. It's a re-imagining of a tiny part of the training mission, specifically the hallway where you use moss arrows to sneak up on a Builder guard and then hide his body in an upstairs storeroom.

I agree with @ChronA that the training mission is only competent, not exceptional, and as a tool for attracting new players to TDM it doesn't really get the job done. One problem is that the TDM universe doesn't really have anything like the Keepers, so it's difficult to reproduce a cool training mission like A Keeper's Training.

The changes I made for this tiny snippet is that the instructions are nearby, not hidden in a static book in another room. The crucial information regarding shouldering v dragging is communicated via a GUI immediately after you KO the Builder guard. @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 also added volumetric lights, EAX, and secrets because I figure if the training mission were ever to be revamped it should show off all the coolest new features :]

(if you look around a bit you'll also see a shout-out to T1 architecture. because I like it, and because I think paying respects to the original is decent)

ztraining.pk4

[datiswous]

I think improvements to the training mission should go to a seperate thread.

> Some games have tutorials inside the in-game main menu. Just some text with images would work fine.

 

17 hours ago, snatcher said:

I don't like the fact that the toying with bodies or body limbs mechanic has been rendered unusable. People that don't use this mechanic to its full extent won't understand the reasons: take a limb and painfully carry the body to another room, hide a body carefully in the most peculiar place and position, recreate a crime or comic scene... Only TDM provides this fun, for those seeking it. The potential of the mechanic is gone for both existing and new players: too much long frob / key press to bother.

I agree that the way this currently works in the patched version with longpress and then keeping pressed is not satisfactury. Can it not be set that the grabbing body keeps grabbed when you release the mouse key? So like a toggle. It's still not great, because it means body control is hidden behind a long press.

Edited September 27, 2023 by datiswous

[thebigh]

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.

[wesp5]

1 hour 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.

Again, this could be fixed by reversing short frob and long frob for bodies. Is it really that much of a problem to hold frob 200 ms longer to shoulder a body?

[thebigh]

I'm just pointing out that any change needs to not break existing missions.

[Wellingtoncrab]

27 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Again, this could be fixed by reversing short frob and long frob for bodies. Is it really that much of a problem to hold frob 200 ms longer to shoulder a body?

Weird how you never commented on how there are several missions which require you to shoulder a body? Maybe because it wasn’t a pretext for you to bring this up again?

2 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 imagine it definitely would have. I will give it a look when I get a chance!

1 hour 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.

The drag body function still exists - you are right to point out a mission requires it but saying it is ruined is a bit strong imo, though I don’t recall the specific example in this case. It fair to say it would be in the place PD3, Volta 2 and TPW are today.

[wesp5]

27 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

Weird how you never commented on how there are several missions which require you to shoulder a body? Maybe because it wasn’t a pretext for you to bring this up again?

No, because 200 ms do not matter to me . Still, I don't really know if I understand the problem with dragging. Shouldn't long frob dragging lock onto the body once, or do you really need to press frob the whole time while you move a body?

Edited September 27, 2023 by wesp5

[datiswous]

30 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

Shouldn't long frob dragging lock onto the body once, or do you really need to press frob the whole time while you move a body?

So you didn't test the patch? No it's not a toggle currently. Please do test the patch before commenting here.

 

1 hour ago, wesp5 said:

Again, this could be fixed by reversing short frob and long frob for bodies. Is it really that much of a problem to hold frob 200 ms longer to shoulder a body?

I think it's considered illogical by some. I would like to try your sugestion though. If both options are available with a switch in the settings, that would be ideal, because it does give an easier shouldering function, while preserving full body control.

Edited September 27, 2023 by datiswous

[Amadeus]

3 hours ago, thebigh said:

At the risk of derailing the conversation, here's something I threw together today. It's a re-imagining of a tiny part of the training mission, specifically the hallway where you use moss arrows to sneak up on a Builder guard and then hide his body in an upstairs storeroom.

 

thanks for making this. I'll check this out in a little bit

[Amadeus]

4 hours ago, thebigh said:

At the risk of derailing the conversation, here's something I threw together today. It's a re-imagining of a tiny part of the training mission, specifically the hallway where you use moss arrows to sneak up on a Builder guard and then hide his body in an upstairs storeroom.

 

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. First, you could also introduce water arrows because those expand moss arrow patches (at least last time I checked). Also, once the body is hidden, you could have another AI come into the room to "check your work". Finally, there could be another tiny section where you need to hide a body in a fully lit room, but to do so you have to drag/manipulate the body under, let's say, a shelf.

Absolutely love the style though, very T1, very cool

[ChronA]

2 hours ago, wesp5 said:

reversing short frob and long frob for bodies

On the off chance this is a case of ignorance and not stubbornness...

Imagine if every object in the game only had one interaction mode. What would you want that interaction to be? For candles and lanterns would you rather be able to put them out or pick them up? For bodies would you rather be able to shoulder them or drag them around by their limbs?

Now imagine for whatever you decided, the game only let you do the other thing. For new players who don't realize TDM supports multiple interaction modes, that is how the game feels right now.

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.

We might not all agree yet which actions make the most sense as the primary vs the secondary, or what should happen in all of the obscure edge cases, but I hope we at least have a consensus that this idea in principle is a worth deploying as an accessibility concession.