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A Problem Existent In Past Thief Games


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Does a mirrorRenderMap use the same RTT mechanism? The performance seems fine for mirrors but maybe it uses some other kind of hack.

 

A mirror render uses the same technique, but as I said, it is rendered to a texture in gfx memory and doesn't need to get propagated back t main memory. So it doesn't suffer this penality. You just look at the mirror, but AI usually doesn't use it so it doesn't have to know what is shown on the mirror.

Gerhard

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When you say "mirror", are you talking about actual mirrors or some technical term within the program?

 

If the former: Will the AI respond to seeing things in mirrors and act intuitively? For example, if an AI were to see your reflection, would he know where you are in the actual room, or would he run at the mirror?

 

If the latter: Forgive my stupid questioning. I'm not much of a technical buff.

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They are "actual" mirrors in that they look and behave like mirrors (or shiny surfaces) in game, but they are rendered by taking a snapshot from the mirror's perspective and applying this as a texture, rather than calculating light reflection.

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When you say "mirror", are you talking about actual mirrors or some technical term within the program?

 

If the former: Will the AI respond to seeing things in mirrors and act intuitively? For example, if an AI were to see your reflection, would he know where you are in the actual room, or would he run at the mirror?

 

If the latter: Forgive my stupid questioning. I'm not much of a technical buff.

 

The mirror are real world mirrors from the players perspective. So they refelct what would be seen from the position of the place wheer the mirror stands. And AI can not react to stuff, being seen in the mirror for the same reason why we can't implement silhouetting. Technically these two are pretty much related. Actually, from coding they are the same.

Gerhard

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Well it would be possible to do specific situations where an AI is planted facing a mirror, and the AI is modified to (literally) have eyes in the back of his head.

 

Hell, couldn't we just use a stim/response setup so that everytime an AI faces a mirror it gains an additional FOV going reverse of their POV? It wouldn't be perfect, but should work most of the time.

http://www.thirdfilms. com

A Thief's Path trailer is now on Youtube!

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I also think it should be possible; the AI FOV check is exposed in the AI code, so it should be possible to do that check, then if a mirror is nearby (we could leave this part up to stim/response system to determine), do another check with a mirrored FOV (calculated w/ ray optics?)

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the Minimalist Project and jacked the AI vision and audio sensitivity, way the hell up. The game totally lost the gameplay dynamic that made it fun...guards spotted you realistically...yes, but reality in exchange for gameplay...at least in this case, was a poor idea.

 

 

I forgot that you made the Minimalist, unfortunately I played through the game w/o it the first time, it was a massive improvement and allowed me to play T3 again, something I sure as hell did not think I would ever want to do.

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I forgot that you made the Minimalist, unfortunately I played through the game w/o it the first time, it was a massive improvement and allowed me to play T3 again, something I sure as hell did not think I would ever want to do.

 

Glad you were able to play through again. :) The Audio and Visual acuity of the AI is a lot lower than I had originally made it. I think it's pretty solid right now.

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Questions for the team: what hardware are you running your dev Dark Mod on? Is it mid range or high end? If someone had a dual SLI 7800 GTX PCIx 16 setup with an AMD64 X2 4000, and 4GB RAM (ie, a very high end system) would you get playable framerates with current implementations of sillhouetting, or is it just that AGP and PCIx16 busses just can't pass back data to the CPU efficiently no matter how powerful the hardware? What FPS are you getting on x hardware?

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How much did you set it? I set it to about 1.5 I think and that felt quite right for me. I was using this modifier applet, that run in the background.

 

I used the same applet when I played, at 1.5 visual / 2.0 sound. All the modifications helped, but that game is not replayable.

 

OrbWeaver, I agree that the best door system would be Raven Shield's gradual mousewheel method. The variable lean (hold down ctrl, use mouse to lean) is also the best I've used.

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When I first started making Minimalist, I really bumped it up there. 2.8 or something I think.

 

Visual is 1.8 now and Audio is 2.0.

 

 

I did something similar and then notched it back a bit. Ive uninstalled T3 though I MIGHT check out some of the few FMs that have come out. I take it as a sign of editor problems that there are only four missions on CheapThief, fact there is a dedicated link to the T3 FM tech support thread on Cheaps homepage. Anyone here tried out the FMs?

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Again, not a computer techie, so this is probably redundant but; Could you set it so there is an AI behind/on the mirror, that has a 180 degree arc of vision, so when the player moves into enough light to make them visible, the mirror AI will see them and make a sound only 'actual' AI can hear.

 

(That's a long winded, poorly written sentance...)

 

It has flaws, but if it were possible, it would be another method.

Edited by Mr Retarded
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Maximus, there should be 12 playable missions there for download.

 

Impurities in the Mix

Speacial Vintage

Two Steps

The Walk

Krellek's Labyrinth

Lord Raven's Mansion

 

and 6 contest missions, in order of placement in the contest:

 

The Crypt

Starting From Scratch

Defender of the Crown

Forgotten Stash (Mine. Still needs work, but I managed to finish it in the 2 month deadline) :)

Skullduggery

Creature Clash Thief3

 

I think you'll enjoy at least some of them.

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You could try convert to jpg, then add it in under file attachments, then after you click add it should give you an option to include the image in your post.

 

 

Thanks, I got it up on image shack. And thanks Bardic, Ill check those out ASAP.

 

ok, here goes...

 

http://img205.imageshack.us/my.php?image=soundidea9aw.jpg

 

 

 

This is my idea for using sound to mimic backlighting again. look at map one. This is a birds eye view of a long rectangular yard, a lamp at the west end, the thief in the middle, guards to the north, north east and east.

 

The vertical bars starting with number 1 at the bottom of map I represent a special trigger brush, invisible to the thief. Each one does the same thing, when the thief is standing in that zone its sends a "wavefront" of directed sound out ahead of the thief. The sound is a trigger to cause the AI to act as if they had seen the thiefs backlit silhouette, they never actually see him so there is no need to process vision and all that jive. Its just a zone that sends a wave of sound that roughly corresponds to the angles of vision that would be a backlighting danger zone. In map 1, the guards to the NE and E of the map would be triggered by this sound and would become alerted, im sure they could be coded to react to this special sound to say someting about a visual contact rather than having heard something. The guard to the N of map I is not aware of the Thiefs presence, the sound angle is pretty tight to mimic the direction of light travelling from the lamp. As the thief creeps East, the zones are activated and then deactivated as he moves forward so that guards in zones to the left or right or behind do not receive the sound trigger. There is no constant processing of anything far as I can tell, except a trigger activating the zone that the player is currently operating. The rest is standard stuff for the AIs except for some coding tweaks to make them react to this sound as if it were a sighting, AFAIK.

 

Now take a look at map II. This is in response to Ishtvans point about backlit walls. In map II, the N wall is of a lighter colored material and it is reflecting the light from the lamp to the West. For this map, two grids are needed, one like map I for the lamp and then another, the one actually shown in II, running horizontally., 123 &4. Same deal. Whatever zone the thief is occupying is activated and the special sound is sent out, again at all angles that would mimic angles of vision for AIs. In this map, the guard to the NE is unaware of the thief,although the backlit signal is being broadcast to the S of the yard. The same goes for map III, this time the backlit wall is to the S and the light is travelling north, again a guard to the south would not be triggered.

 

I realize its a rough fit, and I realize that it would take alot of attention from mappers,but it could be standardized I believe and wtf, we all have to learn new mapping techniques all the time, right? What do you all think?

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Didn't have time to look at it in detail, but just a few comments:

 

1. You can't have directional propagation over only a certain arc like that in the current soundprop system. Soundprop assumes spherical spreading from each sound source, so the sound amplitude is uniform across a sphere at a constant distance (assuming that surface doesn't intersect doors or portals). Otherwise you'd have to deal with diffraction and other wavelength and geometry dependent stuff that would require calculating acoustical mode coupling or something instead of simple least-loss ray propagation which is fast and doesn't require calculating the acoustical modes of complicated geometry.

 

2. It's probably better to just have one brush around the light and then have the code calculate the angle to the light rather than have a huge number of brushes in a grid. Each nonblocking brush costs something to check if the player intersects with it, and the mapper would have to place tons of brushes in every room instead of just one to define the "silhouette radius" for the light. Not that I'm saying that would work either. :)

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Didn't have time to look at it in detail, but just a few comments:

 

1. You can't have directional propagation over only a certain arc like that in the current soundprop system. Soundprop assumes spherical spreading from each sound source, so the sound amplitude is uniform across a sphere at a constant distance (assuming that surface doesn't intersect doors or portals). Otherwise you'd have to deal with diffraction and other wavelength and geometry dependent stuff that would require calculating acoustical mode coupling or something instead of simple least-loss ray propagation which is fast and doesn't require calculating the acoustical modes of complicated geometry.

 

2. It's probably better to just have one brush around the light and then have the code calculate the angle to the light rather than have a huge number of brushes in a grid. Each nonblocking brush costs something to check if the player intersects with it, and the mapper would have to place tons of brushes in every room instead of just one to define the "silhouette radius" for the light. Not that I'm saying that would work either. :)

 

 

Well, shucks. I thought that you could have sound that spread only in a limited direction, a quadrant of a sphere as in the illustration. And I guess its too power hungry after all. Sniffle.

 

sparhawk, heres another link

 

soundidea9aw.th.jpg

Edited by Maximius
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