Free Form Thief-like World

[Garion]

Greetings.

 

I'm an avid Thief fan who found his way here and was immediately impressed by work that's being done. This looks to be an amazing project and I'm very excited about seeing it completed! I've looked through the board and haven't seen a topic on this so I thought I would post it to see what kind of response I would get.

 

I had an idea for a Thief-like game which I'm sure has been thought of by others, but not talked about much, that being the concept of a free form world. As I know nothing of programming, or modding either, I was wondering how difficult it would be to code and create a near complete free form city or world using the concepts and tools you have now?

 

For clarity's sake, by free form I mean a world or city where there are no painted buildings. All, or nearly all, objects can be interacted with and every building is accessible to the character, from individual homes, to shops, to the castles and mansions in the city. Obviously, all the buildings would have multiple access points, including the roof or high window and you could literally have a complete 'thieves highway' of all the rooftops in the city. Virtually all walls would be scalable as well. Naturally this would take a great deal of time and effort to do, but I was wondering if it were possible, and even desireable, at this point.

 

My general idea is a free form, non linear stealth game where you start out as a novice thief in the city. You have a small apartment/safe house, a few simple tools, and a few NPCs on your side like a fence and a few tipsters/informants for potential mission info. As you go through the first initial missions (heists) you gain access to more risky/lucrative missions and you get more and better tools. You would also have access to more fences in different areas (possibly getting better deals for your merchandise), and more informants, possibly even a bit of political clout if you do certain missions for certain people. But none of these missions are literally required. You can just as easily walk down the street and enter a random shop or house and burgle for extra cash if you choose. Assuming you take more and more lucrative jobs, you eventually become a 'master thief' and perhaps even start your own thieves guild with you as the head, if you want to go that far. Creating a random building and/or street generator into the mix would create even more replayability since each new game would have a different city with different buildings.

 

Naturally there isn't much in the way of actual plot, which a good number of people would want, but it would still be an interesting endeavor for those who want a little variety from the more linear style of play.

 

Any thoughts?

[Dram]

you could easily make a gigantic city and all and have it the way you want. It would take a huge amount of work, but its possible. A few scripts could take care of your reputation in the city and all, so you could technically do it, htough i recommend not going it alone lol, you'd never get there

 

As far as randomization of houses and all goes, it should be possible too, because the actual .map files are in text formatt, so you could create a program which would randomize some things there.

 

Anyways, hope that answers your questions

[oDDity]

It's basically GTA:Thief City you want then.

There's no reason why it couldn't be done, but it'd be a huge project.

[Garion]

Cool. Thanks for the response. Keep up the good work!

[Maximius]

Since this is a wish list kind of thread, I have another question. how hard would it be to make an air ship that could travel about this city? Im thinking of a blimp like thing that the player could sneak aboard to ride across the city or hell even steal and navigate his/her way around. Imagine being pursued to a roof top where your only escape is to leap onto an airship passing nearby . Or stealing an airship only to be pursued by the Fuzz in their own airship.

 

Another fun item would be some sort of glider craft. The Thief could hop off of a taller building and glide to a lower rooftop of a building unaccessable from the ground, or break into a building at the bottom level, work his way up to the roof and escape by gliding off into the night.

 

Im sure these ideas have some purists muttering but I think they would be a lot of fun if they would be possible. Comments?

[Dram]

LOL. I love the ideas lol. Yeah, it'd all be possible, again with a hell of a lot of scripting. The blimp would be easiest if it wasnt player controled because it would only have to follow a path like in D3 level "monorail". To have it player controlled, that takes more work.

 

But yeah, crazy things like that would work. The glider idea, you could make a "weapon" which basically changes the way gravity affects the player and keeps giving him a forward thrust or something. A coder would know best. But yeah, crazy shit like that is possible, but takes work

[Macsen]

The blimp would be possible but the framerate would drop to about 5fps while you were up there looking over your massive city. You'd need a lot of cloud and some tall towers...

 

There was talk of flying steampunk air-ships on the forum some time ago, iirc. But such daydreaming will probably have to wait until the Dark Mod Team finish the basic, hard work. In a few years, anything will be possible*.

 

*As long as you have tons of free time and/or are God.

[bob_arctor]

/Imagines massive Arcanum style airship (NOT A BLIMP) to sneak around in.

/A rigid frame airship you see.Without Americanisms.

[Maximius]

LOL. I love the ideas lol. Yeah, it'd all be possible, again with a hell of a lot of scripting. The blimp would be easiest if it wasnt player controled because it would only have to follow a path like in D3 level "monorail". To have it player controlled, that takes more work.

 

But yeah, crazy things like that would work. The glider idea, you could make a "weapon" which basically changes the way gravity affects the player and keeps giving him a forward thrust or something. A coder would know best. But yeah, crazy shit like that is possible, but takes work

 

That all makes sense to me. I was thinking of a hang glider like in FarCry, which was a hell of a lot of fun to soar around in. Until the helicopter gunship arrived....

 

The blimp would be possible but the framerate would drop to about 5fps while you were up there looking over your massive city. You'd need a lot of cloud and some tall towers...

 

There was talk of flying steampunk air-ships on the forum some time ago, iirc. But such daydreaming will probably have to wait until the Dark Mod Team finish the basic, hard work. In a few years, anything will be possible*.

 

*As long as you have tons of free time and/or are God.

 

Here is an idea for the giant city and making it more workable. What if the city was split in half, so that it was actually two separate levels. So when the player is on the ground, and looks up, he sees what appears to be really tall towers and sections of the sky but he is actually looking at a low roof. He can enter any building and go up so far, but past a certain point he would actually be entering another map, this time a map of the top half of the city. Now, in the top half, when he looks over the edge of a roof or whatever, he sees what appears to be a city street far below but he is actually looking a t a floor that is only a few feet away. Every building would have an inter-map portal joining the top half to the bottom half at the same point.

 

 

/Imagines massive Arcanum style airship (NOT A BLIMP) to sneak around in.

/A rigid frame airship you see.Without Americanisms.

 

Im not familiar with Arcanum airships, I proposed a dirigible ( ) because it is relatively low-tech and doesnt require a magical explanation to explain its ability to fly. And no, we dont have to have all the crews be Americans either......*<;o}

[Ishtvan]

Prey has 3d space flight, and it's based on the D3 engine. I don't know how much they modified the renderer so that it didn't die in those flight simulator sequences though.

[Dram]

I proposed a dirigible ( )

 

I see someone's played Redguard

 

I loved that game, it ruled. And yes that would be an excellent idea. You could even have the city pretty much flat and have the ground as one texture which has no lights or what not, but is a screenshot of the other city from above. That would boost fps tenfold.

 

Prey sounds pretty damn good too, i might get that.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

My biggest concern about flying is the frame rate. As far as I know it is not possible to render real-time and fly in a CITY at the same time. Unless there was a patch to the rendering mechanism which fed it everchanging meshes of static pictures of the city below.

 

Since playing Thief TDP in 2001 I have been dreaming and planning of creating a giant city. With a complex story and relationships between people and events. I was planning that lots of work will be required to make enterable and real as many apartments, rooms, halls and houses as possible. I also thought it was a must to have a good sewer system. I still have those sketches of the whole city overview map in my filing cabinet. Doing chemEng at UofT unfortunately affords no time for pleasures like this.

[Domarius]

Vehicles are already possible in the 1.3 version of the SDK, so you don't need to fix the blimp to a monorail.

 

All of the big city, flying, etc. ideas you have are possible but you need to get very creative to use tricks to keep the frame rate reasonable, and you need to clearly define exactly what you want to acheive. Eg. you go up a tall tower from the inside, and when you exit at the top, you are actually in another map. The city below is a very simplified version of the real city, but from way up here you can't really tell the difference. If you ever fall down, the game will kill you before you hit the bottom so that the illusion isn't spoiled. THen you can fly your craft around, but there are only specific landing points, which have a door tha ttake you down a building to the ground (to the real city map). There is an invisible floor that stops you from flying down too low to try and land wherever you want.

 

So with the above, I've acheived flying above the city, and being able to land at key points that are important to the mission, without having to make my own GTA:Thief City.

[Dram]

you could even have it that the floor is actually there, but when viewed from above you only see an animated texture of people moving around etc. This would keep an excellent framerate, and keep the illusion of depth from above. Plus, through this method, the people below this animated texture would still keep doing their patrols and all.

[sparhawk]

The only problem is, that the people on this animtated texture would have to match the movement of the actual people. Otherwise you will have a nasty surprise if you target on one of them and suddenly he is somewhere else when you get closer and switch to actual rendering again.

[Domarius]

I doubt an animated texture would pull off well... for starters it would probably need to be a pretty huge bitmap to cover the entire city in enough detail that you could see individual people moving around (even as small dots). Then you would have to animate that, as if it wasn't big enough already, you're going to duplicate it. THEN it would have to be a fairly long animation to capture all the patrol routes. Since all textures are decompressed into raw data once they enter your video card RAM, no person would ever have enough video card ram to store that. It'd even probably clog up your regular ram.

 

If you really wanted to see things moving below, you could probably make fake simplified people actually walking around in the fake city below. The example I was using had an actual modeled city below, just really really simplified compared to the real one.

[Dram]

but would require a load dom. Which is what we all hated about T3.

 

With an animated texture you could take 1024x1024 pictures of the whole map and place them appropriately. You would'nt need people patrolling on them because you would never be close enough to the texture (and when you go to land you would make sure it sent you through a tower or something).

 

Anyways, there are obviously many ways to do this, two of which have been suggested here.

[sparhawk]

For a specialized scenario this could be done for sure. But then it would be highly attuned to the given map and can not be used for other maps which are different. As for the animated texture being to big. There is no need to store the animated texture in the video RAM, you can just as well stream the animation from RAM instead. Actually Id also uses this in D3. I doubt that they realy load the entire video into the UAC console commercial when you are looking at that screen because this is pretty long too.

[Dram]

yeah spar, afaik it streams in like video, and the sound is separate. That is, it loads one frame, unloads it and loads the next. something like that anyways.

[Gildoran]

@Maximus: IMHO, doing an airship would be tricky. One thing I haven't seen many people mention about airships is the level of detail in the airship. You're a lot more limited if you want to be able to interact with the city around you while you're on the airship. With an unmoving (i.e. docked) airship, the game can use visportals to only render the parts that are visible (e.g. if you're on the deck, there's no need to render the hold below, and vice versa). This would allow you to have a much larger, more finely detailed ship with elaboratedly decorated rooms below deck. For a moving ship, there's a couple of ways you could do it. The most obvious way would be to implement the ship like a giant monorail that is actually physically moving through the level, but that has the problem that it'd be difficult or impossible to apply optimizations like visportals. So the entire ship would probably be rendered, which limits how big/detailed it could be. You'd probably want to omit indoor rooms on the ship. Also, I worry about how well AAS (AI awareness system) handles moving platforms. Would guards on the ship accidently walk off it? IIRC, notice that the only person on the monorail in D3 sat in one place while it was moving. But I don't know much about AAS so maybe my concern is unfounded. What I would be inclined to do, is make the ship unmoving, then use scripting and sky_portals to provide the illusion of the ship moving throughout the city (in other words, have the ship stay in one place, but use a camera that moves through the city to paint the backdrop). Of course, this has the disadvantage that you can't interact with the city around you. For example, you couldn't fire at guards on a "nearby" roof-top and they couldn't fire at you (or even see you), since they're in an entirely different part of the level and only appear to be nearby. So you'd probably want to avoid situations like that, and have all the gameplay take place on the ship. Or you could combine the sky_portal idea with some archer-laden roof-tops that physically move by the ship in sync with the camera of the sky_portal. This has the disadvantage that it's a little more complicated, though it could spice up gameplay. If your city is low-poly enough that the entire city can be viewed without a drop in frame-rates, you could take a third option of keeping the ship still, and having the city be the "monorail".

 

I don't claim that the above is a comprehensive list of ways of implementing an airship, but hopefully it'll give you a few ideas about possible limitations of the D3 engine.

[Dram]

Gildoran, the engine culls unseen polygons, so the lower deck of the airship would not be rendered visually, so no worries there.

[Gildoran]

But doesn't that either require calculating the position of the poly or using visportals?

[Dram]

if i understand you correctly, no, doom3 culls unseen polygons by itself, so anything behind a wall is not visually rendered (note visually. it is still rendered for aas etc as far as i remember). It does'nt require visportals, no. I'm not truly sure exactly how it all works, but i remember testing in my mansion this when there were no portals and you could see that it was not rendered. I think it at least doesnt render the important parts - speculars, diffuses, etc, not sure about everything else. The reason you put visportals is to make it completely not render anything behind them (there are overrides of course, such as a key value in the AI which if you set to 1 it renders them anyway), which includes characters, objects, textures etc. This is why you get stutters on older vid cards when you walk through a door into a big room, it has to load everything in.

 

I don't know what you mean by position of polys, but i think you mean the position of the actual polygons on brushes and all. Think of the monorail as it moved, it still culled the unseen polys.

 

Anyways, i hope i understood you right.

[Domarius]

but would require a load dom. Which is what we all hated about T3.

No it wouldn't. With cube mapping, you can make the player see any 3d stuff you want on any surface.

 

That is, it loads one frame, unloads it and loads the next. something like that anyways.

It's still pretty big for a texture. It still has to go through video ram to be displayed in the 3D world, so its going to push out lots and lots of much smaller textures that are used more frequently. Watch your framerate drop as it has to keep swapping stuff out of video ram and system ram. And you would have to create this video yourself somehow.

 

Gildoran, the engine culls unseen polygons, so the lower deck of the airship would not be rendered visually, so no worries there.

No it doesn't. Your video card does, that's what 3D acellerators are for. Doom sends it a bunch of polygons, and the Z-buffering in your card works out which ones are covered by which. This process takes time, and your frame rate will still drop proportionately to how many polys there are even if you can't see them (though of course its not as bad as drawing them as well). The purpose of visportals is to work out what really does need to be sent to the video card and what shouldn't be at all.

[sparhawk]

No it doesn't. Your video card does, that's what 3D acellerators are for. Doom sends it a bunch of polygons, and the Z-buffering in your card works out which ones are covered by which. This process takes time, and your frame rate will still drop proportionately to how many polys there are even if you can't see them (though of course its not as bad as drawing them as well). The purpose of visportals is to work out what really does need to be sent to the video card and what shouldn't be at all.

 

If Id would really do that, then they would have done a pretty bad job with their engine. Of course the engine does seelct potential polygons and sends them to the video card. The final culling is done by the hardware, yes, but this is only on a limited subset. There is no way you would get enough performance for modern games if you would just throw all the polygons at the gfx card and let it sort out the details on it's own.