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Pupil Dilation?


firoso

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Bloom is a poor-man's HDR, it was available in Lost Coast as an alternative (although I actually preferred it to the HDR as implemented in that demo).

 

yea basically, with a few tweaks and not nearly as effective, it's more about overbrightening than HDR, WOW uses bloom as well but at least it looks good in WOW.

I'm in yur forumz,

Makin' them frobbable.

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I've never been a fan of redundant forced visual effects.

-screwing up my night vision, when a flashbomb already did it for me...

-motion blur, when that's not something my eyes explicitly recognize or need help seeing...

-depth of focus, which already happens with my eyes, where *I* choose to be looking. I don't need a game to do it again for me, forcing me to see something blurry if I choose to look directly at it, while something I'm not looking at is in focus... :rolleyes:

 

Just about the only one I can somewhat accept is the flashbomb blindness, as it has a gameplay aspect. Just sayin'.

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that effect of walking into a darker area and having your eyes ajust to it and vise-versa as in tds, was called

bloom, and it did add another level of realism to the game overall.

 

People keep mentioning this effect in the earlier games...I never even noticed it.

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-depth of focus, which already happens with my eyes, where *I* choose to be looking. I don't need a game to do it again for me, forcing me to see something blurry if I choose to look directly at it, while something I'm not looking at is in focus... :rolleyes:

 

The funny thing is that such an effect has exactly the opposite effect on me. Because when I look at the 'unfocused' area it should get into focus, but of course it remains unfocused and the result is that it looks wrong. A good example where 'more realism' is not even useless but also has the opposite effect.

Gerhard

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Getting inside the skin of Garret i would prefer relaying the ability of "lighten" a room to his mechanical eye. I think it would be more inmersive to let Garret see more "ambient light" because he has a mechanical eye that allow him to it, rather than providing him a lantern.
We don't wish to violate IP, so Garret isn't in TDM. Also, as far as I know, the player's character that comes with vanilla TDM doesn't have a mechanical eye.
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By the way this is random but for a challange, try ramping up all the sensory settings in default.ini in thief:DS to around 3 or 4 (vision etc.) and have a go, it's way more realistic. Quite fun really :-P

 

Yes the TDS AI is actually very good in certain ways, like seeing missing loot and then a missing friend and going "Hey!" and having a good look round.

You need The Minimalist Project or Thiefbot to see it though.

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People keep mentioning this effect in the earlier games...I never even noticed it.

 

I noticed it all the time I played the original games, although I always wondered if it's because of special programming or because my room is pitch black and I'm staring into a monitor with an extremely high contrast and low brightness (which by the way makes up the ideal monitor for playing thief).

 

The glowing carryable mushrooms always were present and I'm planning on having them in my mission in TDM.

The lantern sounds like a very good idea, but it should not be droppable, it should be gently placeable. And If the back is covered with leather, it should still allow an unobstructed way for the hot smoke and the leather should not dry out from excessive heat. Something like a carriage lantern with a 1/4" round wick made from brass with one side glass sounds most appropriate. I have a lantern collection, tell me if anybody needs pictures and i'll snap some.

 

I wonder if you could eat those mushrooms after you're finished lighting the way with them.

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I am extremely sceptical that the classic Thiefs had High Dynamic Range style lighting acounting for intensity adjustment. I have no idea where people got that idea. Probably they are just playing in the dark. Remember Thief: The Dark Project is really old, so old it could be played in software, and the dynamic lighting was uncoloured. Effects like intensity adjustment were unheard of. And TII used the same engine, but upgraded.

TDS just used bloom, which just makes lights have a... like a corona or something, a big bloomy thing of white around them.

 

Now as for mechanic eye vision, you're missing the point. It's not The Thief. It's not Garrett.

And while the initial idea is very likable, I fear that shoddy frame rates like TDS from doing too much will make the game unenjoyable. Maybe The Dark Mod 2, in 2020, they will do that.

 

The lantern though, I love! It's great! Of course I reckon it needs:

Carryable and placable. Carry= no other weapons at the same time. You would need to place it to use rope arrows etc.

You can cheat and put it away again in your massive silent coat-of-in-game-rules, however maybe a speed penalty of lighting/pinching the flame or whatever to avoid exploits.

It shows you up.

It's not the bright.

It's atmospheric looking.

Infinate fuel. Otherwise I'll never use it. I just can't use things that run out, flares I never use in TII (or extremely rarely, I exagerrate a bit) because I try (hard with FM variable brightness) to have my contrast/brightness set up so I can see anyway.

And having finate fuel would be boring and frustrating. And don't do that game recharging thing either. There is penalty enough from having it show you up, and the fact you have to place it to use other things.

 

An end to the mushrooms would be good. They wouldn't quite fit in I don't think with TDM look.

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The hooded lantern will be an inventory item, and will have unlimited fuel. It will be up to the FM author to make it available on mission start...it's also possible to find one in the map and use that. Don't know if we intend to let players put it down somewhere while still lit, though I don't see any obvious reasons not to. Having the lantern out definitely makes you easy to spot--that's the price you pay.

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We are assuming the lantern is waterproof, or will gameplay mechanics distinguish it. Same goes for torches. Light in deep dark water sounds intriguing though.

 

Mushrooms sound like a good idea. Frob one from the floor. Carry it with you. Hide it in your backpack. Throw it somewhere else. It's waterproof. Once frobbed, it dies very slowly. Not like stupid flares which die in seconds.

 

Domarius and all you other guys brought up some good points.

Edited by jtbalogh
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The concept is that the FM author can rely on the player always having the lantern as a light source, so they can freely create spooky dark areas and not worry about the player being stuck with a black screen, unable to move anywhere because they can't feel their way around like you can in real life.

 

Making it undroppable is also up to the FM authors discretion, for the same reason above, but in spite of this, all the other guys on the team simply cannot accept the idea of the lantern being undroppable by default :/ They want it droppable by default.

 

So yes, unlimited fuel, waterproof - its going to have to be magical. Or maybe not - we can just say the fuel is longer than any mission is likely to last. That's all trivial.

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I don't think anything should be undroppable unless there is a specific reason for it or it is set that way by the FM author.

 

Provided it doesn't require any excessive coding, there is no reason why everything shouldn't be droppable, even the sword and blackjack.

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I don't think anything should be undroppable unless there is a specific reason for it or it is set that way by the FM author.

 

Provided it doesn't require any excessive coding, there is no reason why everything shouldn't be droppable, even the sword and blackjack.

If there is no gameplay benifit to dropping something, ie. the sword, blackjack, or compass, then the only reason to allow it would be to allow the player to accidently do so by an errant button press and frustrate them. And if it fell somewhere inacessable, it would incapacitate them for the rest of the mission, forcing them to reload.

 

If dropping them made you run faster or something, or the FM author required you to drop your sword somewhere to complete some objective, then that would be a different story.

 

The lantern is even more important because if the FM author counts on the player having it by making a huge underground cavern or something, with no crappy "light mushrooms", and the player looses the lantern, the player is just going to have to reload, because he or she will be staring at a black screen with no movement feedback (and no way to "feel around" like you would in real life).

 

But the "droppability" of items is totally up to the FM author.

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I just wanted to say that I don't think HDR or bloom is in any way related to the brightness adjusting if the player sits in the dark too long... I think they are totally unrelated effects. It is used in splinter cell 2 (hate the game btw, just mentioning it) btw.

 

Also, I like the idea of the lantern and the mushrooms just the same as it sounds like their differences are simply aesthetic. But the mushroom is likely to need less resources to be created. There would be no need for light up animations and flames and things, it'd just be a glowing object - maybe they could even be used in tougher mission parts as torch replacements that can't be doused with water arrows.

 

Maybe it could be something even simpler that wouldn't require the creation of new objects that could affect gameplay in other ways, like using a fire arrow's glow as a limited light source... Either by making it "usable" without having the bow equipped (then when selected you would walk around holding it in front of you) or simply having the player have to draw out his bow and load a fire arrow and walk around like that.

 

The latter is not as convincing but it could work and save resources... As long as you can cancel shooting the fire arrow at any time of course, you wouldn't want to waste one every time you wanted to use its glow.

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If there is no gameplay benifit to dropping something, ie. the sword, blackjack, or compass, then the only reason to allow it would be to allow the player to accidently do so by an errant button press and frustrate them. And if it fell somewhere inacessable, it would incapacitate them for the rest of the mission, forcing them to reload.

 

There is also no gameplay reason to have a silver cup and a golden one as loot. And if the player wants to do something stupid, then it should be his choice. We don't have to hold hands for every potential case. We already had this discussion a hundred times and now it's started here again?

Gerhard

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The lantern is even more important because if the FM author counts on the player having it by making a huge underground cavern or something, with no crappy "light mushrooms", and the player looses the lantern, the player is just going to have to reload, because he or she will be staring at a black screen with no movement feedback (and no way to "feel around" like you would in real life).

 

In that case it is up to the author to ensure that the level can be completed in some other way, without relying on the presence of particular pieces of equipment.

 

An example of this is in the Bonehoard where you have to open that gate in the floor with fire arrows. If you had no fire arrows you would be stuck here, so in Thief Gold they added a fireshadow creature which drops fire arrows by itself when you attack it, thus ensuring that they would be available to players who had already exhausted their supply.

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Well you should be able to see a latern if you drop in a cavern. Because you know, it's like a lantern. Which gives off light. Hence you can see it.

And I think it's only going to be dropped in places where the player wants to see what they are doing while holding something else, like a rope arrow.

 

And I'm pretty sure Thief I does not have brightness adjustment. Maybe it's your eyes and the monitors brightness or the way the lighting/textures looks, but if TDS lacks it, and if I found myself without any idea where I was due to a constant pitch blackness., it's looking pretty unlikely.

 

And the key difference with the mushrooms is that they don't really fit in very well, in my opinion, with TDM style, and also they die after frobbed as the idea was put above. Laterns have infinate fuel.

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What about when in Thief1/2, whenever you pressed 'Use' on a scroll or booklet, the viewing screen was very bright yellow.

 

When that happened, it tended to blind me, and when finishing reading it would take another 10-15 seconds for my eyes to readjust to the area I was in. It was especially brutal activating when you were positioned in a pitch black area.

 

Are you guys considering a slow brightening of the screen or gradual increase in gamma, potentially allowing a bindkey for stopping the increase at player discretion?

Loose BOWELS are the first sign of THE CHOLERA MORBUS!
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@Vadrosaul, I'm guessing that was a real life effect on your eyes rather than coded in. I noticed this effect too, but also noticed that I didn't start to get my nightvision back until the bright blue resolution display at the bottom of the monitor went away, and blocking that with my hand made the transition much faster. I'm not sure I agree with people who say the dynamic range of your monitor is not high enough to saturate your night vision with bright lights. I certainly remember playing games like Splinter Cell in a darkened room and wanting to put my hand over the neon green PDA light in the middle of the character's back.

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I learned to squint or avert my eyes in preparation when pressing the Use key to read.

 

As long as your readable viewscreen isn't blindingly bright (TDS had a less jarring one) then there's no need to input code for what I've said :D

Loose BOWELS are the first sign of THE CHOLERA MORBUS!
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