Water Arrows

[JPMaximilian]

With the exception of save/load, those are examples of things you might really do in that situation; If you're on a narrow ledge, it's easy to fall off accidently. If you're sword-fighting, it's easy to make the wrong move. (and the save/load example is why many games use F5/F9 instead lf F5/F6) However, I can't imagine going to grab a candle and accidently dousing it with a vial of water instead. That sort of mistake is very un-immersive and just causes people to get annoyed at the interface, whereas your two examples help to immerse the player in the world.

 

However, what I would be fine with, is making it so that if you frob a torch while wielding water arrows, it'll douse it.

 

What does frob mean, and if you're worried about accidentally using a water arrow, you could just have is so that if you pull back whilst facing a torch, if you're close enough you just take the arrow off the bow and douse it. I don't know much about programming and less about animation/graphics engines, but this does seem like a lot of effort for somethign that doesn't add to gameplay that much.

[Gildoran]

Frob means to use a highlighted object.

[OrbWeaver]

I'm awfully sorry, but my reply to this is RTFM. Frankly I am appalled that someone not reading the instructions properly can ever, ever, EVER, be given as a reason for not implementing a sensible feature that is gameplay enhancing.

 

It's a goddamn computer game, not a professional engineering simulation. If it requires a manual to understand the interface there is something seriously wrong with the design.

[Subjective Effect]

I'd just like to cite the previous two posts as perfect examples of why obnoxious people shouldn't design interfaces.

This is hilarious seeing as you are one of the most obnoxious and set-in-their ways people in the entire Thief community, who is compelled to negatively comment on every grammatical mistake or post that has an acronym or in-joke that you don't get out of simple ignorance.

If it requires a manual to understand the interface there is something seriously wrong with the design.

If a person requires a manual to understand that frobbing a torch flame when you are carrying water arrows douses the flame and removes an arrow then there is something seriously wrong with them. How much of a logical extension is it to snuffing out candles in Thief 3 really?

 

There are much more complex interface choices in many good games that no one moans about. Except possibly ZylonBane.

[sparhawk]

I'd just like to cite the previous two posts as perfect examples of why obnoxious people shouldn't design interfaces.

 

You can do whatever you want. But you should be aware that I did NOT mean my posting to say that we should do it this way, because I know that it is bad interface design. The purpose of my posting was simply to point out, that the given answer was not a good argument. We ar enot responsible when the player screws up or does something stupid, but of coursewe try to prevent such things as much as possible.

[sparhawk]

However, what I would be fine with, is making it so that if you frob a torch while wielding water arrows, it'll douse it.

 

I don't intend to use up water arrows just because you want to douse a candle. After all, a candle should give off relatively a small light anyway, so I think it would be justified that you can frob it with your hands, without any loss of resources.

[New Horizon]

I don't intend to use up water arrows just because you want to douse a candle. After all, a candle should give off relatively a small light anyway, so I think it would be justified that you can frob it with your hands, without any loss of resources.

 

 

He was speaking in reference to torches on walls Spar, not candles. They're a smaller flame and only need to be pinched out. He meant that in order to 'frob out' a torch on the wall, you could need to have water arrows selected from inventory to initiate it and 'that' would cause the player to lose a water arrow/ crystal, otherwise, the torch would be unfrobbable.

 

Regardless of that clarification, I'm not in support of a 'torch douse' option anyway. It's not needed. It would do the exact same thing as shooting an arrow into the torch. Why have redundant systems that require extra coding/ animations and/or steps to complete. Shoot a water arrow into it. Works fine.

[sparhawk]

Torches are designed to withstand strong drafts of winds. As you may know the corridors of a castle were not exactly air tight, and torches shouldn't go out because of a breeze. Therfore you also can't really extinguish a torch easily and you definitely need a awater arrow for it.

[bob_arctor]

Well the dousing depends on the animation. If there was a "get water arrow out and douse the flame" anim (which might require sucking in to the torch I suppose) then it would be obvious. But if it just vanished in a puff of blue then it's a bit ambiguous to newbies or Thief hardcore vets who get confused by new things.

 

Overall I think just use the bow. Not that hard.

[DopeFishhh]

I remember a similar problem in the hitman games, where objects can have multiple actions to them, they had a little list of actions that would pop up on the screen when you got to an object like that. Usually a door, you had options like open, close, lock, unlock etc... The problem with it was that sometimes it was a little awkward.

 

Another method is that you could have an alternate actions key or button or something like that, perhaps a dedicated button for picking objects up and only picking objects up. Or when you hold down a button like tab it switches from the default action to the alternative action. However this would only solve the problem for objects with 2 or less actions.

 

Could go even further and make loot and other objects require that players do the pick object up button first and then the put object away button. And maybe a dedicated throw object button, outta ammo? got plenty of heavy objects in your backpack? throw em! I've always seen thief as part Tomb Raider so having alot of do-this-action buttons i think would work well.

 

To put out a flame you have to cut off the oxygen, the water doesn't cool a flame down it stops the oxygen getting to it. The thief could easy have a cup like object to put over the torch.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

What age do you think the forum-members are? Kindergarten? Incidentally I had to visit a kindergarten recently, showed them acids and bases, density etc. They were surprisingly smart. Of course I didn't know that kids of different ages were present.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah I once talked to an educator who said she got bored one day and busted out the Calculus in grade school, and the kids were actually getting it. Makes you wonder why we spend something like 5 years on arithmetic and basic algebra in the US.

[Gildoran]

US schools weren't ever designed to produce engineers. They were designed to produce manual labor.

[bob_arctor]

Heh.

 

Although UK schools aren't great either.

[OrbWeaver]

Schools have never been intended to produce "intelligent" people. They are there to get people into employment and therefore paying taxes to the government. Whether this is best achieved through manual labour, academic subjects or "vocational skills" depends on the economy at the time.

[Entropy]

Re: dousing torches (or candles) - require the player hold the frob down for a half-second or so to prevent easy 'accidental' dousing, and in the case of torches accidental loss of water arrows. Releasing the frob before the actual 'douse' event aborts the action with no loss of item. If necessary animations could be added. Conceivably this could replace the two-zone item model (click = pick up, hold down = douse), although this might be best if accompanied by animations to avoid confusion.

 

It wouldn't hurt to release a small training mission to acclimatize all players, if they so choose, to the interface and gameplay of TDM. Just no glowing footprints please

Edited January 3, 2006 by Entropy

[ZylonBane]

Oh hell no. A frob should be instant action. Just pull out a damn water arrow and shoot the thing.

[Domarius]

Always worked for me.

[Entropy]

I fail to see why you would dismiss the suggestion out of hand. Lockpicking in T1/2 is achieved by frobbing with the lockpicks and holding down, so holding the frob is not exactly a new idea. Many people have suggested opening a door partway by holding frob for different lengths of time. The suggested method resolves the pickup vs snuff interface issue in a simple and fairly intuitive way that can also account for water arrow use without the somewhat odd 'shoot an arrow point blank' action. It could always be used on candles only, and leave the water arrow/torch thing alone. Ah well, just an idea.

[woah]

I think, deep down, everybody wouldn't mind having something like this in the game if it were to be implemented correctly. There are many mundane things that could have been implemented in present games, and yet nobody would fret about them as they would have no negative impact on the gameplay (and they might even be neat for a while). For instance, (And I understand these are drastically rediculous examples when compared to your idea) I don't think anyone would mind having the ingame capacity to do such things as rip grass out of the ground and flick it in the air, or perhaps pull coins and jems out of their loot-bag and spin them on some surface. Surely, no person would deplore such things..

 

But, as overburdened modification developers, I think the team is just reasonably trying to eliminate all instances and outlets of extravagant work, and it's easier to criticize the negative mechanics of some idea than to state this. Modifications have extremely limited resources as their developers are 99% of the time encumbered with other works of everyday life (and I expect you already know this). Of all of the games and modifications I have followed, none have EVER lived up to even their core, initial outlines delegated; the finished product always turns out to be about half (and sometimes, but rarely, three-fourths) of the original blueprints. To be honest, and I don't want to sound as if I'm not confident in this modification's ambitions, I would be pleasantly surprised if The Dark Mod resolved a product on par with the complexity of the past Thief games.

[ZylonBane]

I fail to see why you would dismiss the suggestion out of hand. Lockpicking in T1/2 is achieved by frobbing with the lockpicks and holding down

In T1/2, lockpicking begins IMMEDIATELY. You're proposing an annoying time delay before anything happens. That would be teh suck.

[sparhawk]

I always think that timeouts and delays are a last ressort. You can always imlpement such things when you don't find a better solution, but most of the time it's just lazy design.

[Springheel]

Right on the money, woah.

[bob_arctor]

Even commercial games drop a load of stuff in development.

 

I like the door idea though. It would be a lot of work, but allow for more sneakiness.

[Entropy]

I always think that timeouts and delays are a last ressort. You can always imlpement such things when you don't find a better solution, but most of the time it's just lazy design.

 

I don't think this is a case of lazy design, we're simply discussing ways to implement two different game actions on a single object through one basic player action, the click/frob, using click and immediate release, vs click and hold then release. It seems to me preferrable to a two-piece object, but that's for you team-guys to decide.

 

To briefly address Zylonbane's comment, the lockpicking sound and animations start immediately in T1/2, and the team could implement an equivalent reaching or water arrow smash anim or similar in this case, although I fully understand that this is low priority compared to many other needs and thus not likely to happen. Instead, what could be implemented probably fairly easily is the flame flickering and guttering and drawing low before vanishing completely. Note this would only take a second or less, just long enough to allow the player to recognize and change or abort their action, and to differentiate it from a pick-up click, without creating an annoyingly long pause.

 

There is an alternative extra frob-based action to a hold of the button or click, which is a click and drag. This would work most logically if click and drag indicated a pickup (like rocks and trees in B&W), and click a snuff action. I'm not really recommending this, more just throwing it out as a point of interest, because it seems to me that this would run counterintuitive to the usual frob = grab loot, since a frob would make most sense as a snuff and a frob and drag as a grab in this case. I could see some fan mission puzzle use of such an action though to manipulate some object or objects. Is it (a click, hold, and drag by mouse movement action) something supported at the moment in TDM or Doom3? I don't remember dragging anything on the GUIs in Doom, but I didn't play it all the way through, it just got too repetitive.