Npc Armor And Headshots?

[Springheel]

If you want to prove me wrong, make a game according to the above principles and I'll tell you if I enjoy it or not, and if I am the only person who likes it, or evenI turn out not to like it, I'll shut up.

 

Actually, you're the one trying to convince people of an unconventional idea, so the onus falls on YOU to create the game to prove your point. The millions of people out there who play and enjoy non-realistic games are more than enough evidence for our side.

 

Let me know when you're done, I'd enjoy trying it out.

 

But a lot of the reasons behind our desicions is it's simpler - people will be happy if we get this thing out with sort of Thief 2 features - we're focusing instead more on AI behaviour.

 

That's highly misleading. There are hardly any features--and certainly no major ones--where we've made a decision to do something just because T2 did it that way.

 

and there is no argument to suggest it would be less fun other than some reference to some outdated "professional" game design dogma formulated in the 90s for Nintendos.

 

Since you weren't privy to the seven or eight page discussion we had about the pros and cons of stamina, you're not really in a position to say how 'outdated' the arguments were.

 

 

I'd like to write some arguments about reality vs gameplay, but I'm pretty sure we've had multiple arguments like that in this forum already. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll cut and paste.

[Domarius]

Gameplay will evolve from the rules of the virtual world, if you try to create gameplay first, you are actually putting the cart before the horse.

...You first create the model of your virtual world, then you run your simulation, not the other way around, which seems to be how a lot of game devs play it.

And they do it because its a better way. You are starting to sound a bit like a philosopher, having these grand theories with no concrete examples to base them on. It's fine if you word it in a "what if" way, but you're talking about it like it's true.

 

I used to think the way you do, but ever since I seriously got involved in game development (before I started working in my current job in a video game company), I know different. If you put something realistic in, and people don't find it fun, you take it out. That's putting gameplay first.

 

Anyway we are getting philosophical again. I want to know what people think about this;

 

I'm two minds about wether or not to remove shouldering. When I think about it, it affects both blackjacking AND killing equally - you're going to be more inclined to avoid confronting the AI altogether if you know you're gonna have to spend time dragging the body to a dark place, especially if there aren't many nearby. Not because of how long it takes, but because of how long you're going to spend out in the open unprotected in the light. That puts the emphasis more on stealth.

 

@Springheel;

That's highly misleading. There are hardly any features--and certainly no major ones--where we've made a decision to do something just because T2 did it that way.

I meant things like light gem, sound prop, things that we know work - no advanced fighting system or stamina system.

[ZylonBane]

Shouldering has to stay in, because otherwise how else are you going to toss bodies off rooftops? (or into fireplaces, swimming pools, etc).

 

Yes, as much as it may shame us to admit it, corpse desecration was another one of those fun little roleplay-facilitating details in Thief. Who among us hasn't knocked Benny out and then left him in his master's bed?

[oDDity]

Me, for a start.

[sparhawk]

Me too.

[sparhawk]

@Springheel;

I meant things like light gem, sound prop, things that we know work - no advanced fighting system or stamina system.

 

IMO this is a bit missleading. The lightgem and soundprop are not features that you could discuss much about. Soundprop is definitely needed. It's not as if a Thief style game could do without it. If you do it's not thiefstyled anymore. And the decision to show the lightgem is on a similar vain. The lightgem serves two purposes. It informs the AI about the player state. This is the important part, and a thief style game again would not really work without that information. A good example is the much cited Splinter Cell, because it is simlar in gameplay and also requires that feature. To display the gem as it is, is definitely a concession to the original games, but this is the small part. Even if we decided to NOT show the lightgem and let the player rely on the much enhanced renderengine, the functionality would still be there because it is a must for the AI. Displaying it also on the playerscreen is a nice, but not strictly required, sideeffect and in fact we provide an option to turn it off as well.

[Domarius]

Shouldering has to stay in, because otherwise how else are you going to toss bodies off rooftops? (or into fireplaces, swimming pools, etc).

Well, depending on how dragging is implemented, you could just drag them off the edge. The default Doom 3 dragging involves pointing at a body part, holding a button down, and then moving your view to pull it in that direction. It should be possible to drag them off any edge.

[ZylonBane]

Me, for a start.

You don't count. You're weird.

[sparhawk]

You are right. One has to be weird to participate in a free mod for such a long time.

[Bukary]

Zylon is right. Playing with corpses is very "important" part of Thief experience. Everyone (except Oddity and Spar) seem to have fun with Benny's unconscious body.

[sparhawk]

I didn't say I hadn't fun with him, I just said it was not in bed.

[Domarius]

From philosophy to the gutter Is there much chance of staying focused? I'm interested to see where this goes.

 

If you could drag a body anywhere you could by shouldering it, then is there any reason left for shouldering existing, given the playability argument I gave earlier?

[oDDity]

You don't count. You're weird.

Yup, people who spend time arranging computer generated corpses in sexual positions and then take screenshots of them are perfetly normal.

I, on the other hand, am a drooling, perverted weirdo.

[Domarius]

Cyber-necro-phillia.

[New Horizon]

I have dry humped the screen. Yup.

[Ishtvan]

As I've tried to say many times in this thread, you cannot drag a body anywhere that you could move it by shouldering. Ingame dragging itself is a very abstract representation of the actual action, one where you only have one hand and you always hold that hand straight out in front of you. This, coupled with the AF system, brings in some limitations that wouldn't actually be there in reality. Shouldering is an option to get around those limitations.

 

With the AF system, we can't give the AI bodies all the joints that a person would have, because that would take too long to compute. Therefore they can't "deform" in all the ways a real person could, so you will run into cases where you can't drag them thru a doorway or thru a narrow hallway, while in reality you could.

 

Also in reality, you could grab another part of a person with your other hand. Say for example their arms kept spreading out and getting stuck in a doorway. Solution: grab one arm with one of your hands and the other arm with your other hand, and bring the body's arms together as you drag thru the doorway. However, you can't do that because the physics interface design doesn't allow for two hands that move independently of the player view - and for good reason: mouse/keyboard controls aren't up to it. Maybe when we get a direct neural interface with the brain, we can revise that design decision.

 

Until then, we have to represent these realistic body-moving options that cannot currently be modeled by adding in shouldering of bodies as an option. Maybe shouldering is a bit unrealistic itself, but it a lot less noticably unrealistic than if the player were to get stuck in situations where they absolutely could not move a body up a 2 ft ledge or thru a doorway because of unrealistic physics.

 

=====================================

Don't bother reading this part if you're pressed for time, it's just rambling

I'm generally for realism, but only up to the limits of what the controls and engine can handle, plus the scope of what we can code and get the mod released within a decade. There are plenty of examples where making one feature a little more realistic actually leads to the player noticing a lot more things that are less realistic, and getting frustrated by them.

 

For example, if we added in a system where damage to the player's sword arm meant they couldn't swing their sword, that seems more real right? But a real option in that situation would be to switch your sword to the other arm and conduct all the attacks from the other side. Whoops, attacking with the off-hand is not animated or coded, and there's no option to switch your sword hand? Guess you're just stuck with the sword in the gimp arm, because the game is not realistic enough in other respects.

 

Or take Unreal Tournament: Infiltration, an extremely realistic game I used to play. In the latest version, they made the map sizes huge, which was good, and set the stamina and movement such that it would take you ~5 minutes realtime of jogging to get from the insertion point to the places where combat happened, which was realistic. Sounds so realistic and fun right? But there were no vehicles due to UT engine limitations, so as the aggregate hours spent traveling miles and miles on foot with no action added up, you began to wish for vehicles, which realistically would have been available, and instead of a great combat simulator, it became a "move slowly in a blocky landscape" simulator.

[obscurus]

Hey Obscurus, here's some realism for ya-- you get hit by a couple arrows, drag yourself into a dark corner, and spend hours bleeding to death. Yay, fun!

 

Holy crap you're clueless. You come across exactly like an ivory-tower dingbat who doesn't actually like gaming, but for some reason spends hours thinking about how games should be made. Like the ancient Greek philosophers who were convinced that you could build up a factual body of knowledge about the universe from pure theory.

 

Well, fire isn't an element, our bodies don't have four humors, and the foundations of a good game must be built on gameplay, not blind application of realism.

 

 

Hmm. You seem to be only capable of levelling childish verbal abuse in lieu of a cogent argument, and I don't know what your rambling references to Greek philosophers was supposed to be in aid of. Did you think it made you sound intelligent?

 

You miss the point entirely if you think I am talking about "blind application of realism". You have got everything arse about face, and you are barracking for blind application of gameplay, to use your terminology.

 

Like I say, if you set up a realistic simulation of a quasi Victorian city and give the player the objective of stealing things without being caught, and give the player realistic (or at the very least plausible) abilities and limitations, good stealth gameplay will inevitably flow as the path of least resistance.

 

The main reason game devs have not been taking this path is purely out of fear derived from giving control to the simulation, having unscripted events unfold without their stamp of approval, and giving the player the freedom to decide their own fate without letting them act like a demigod. It is all about fear of the unknown, and fear of losing control.

 

 

As it happens, I play games fairly regularly, and for the most part I find them enjoyable. Perhaps it is because of my scientific background and broad general knowledge about how reality operates, but everytime I come across an aspect of gameplay dynamics that is completely at odds with what is even vaguely plausible in RL, it breaks immersion to some degree for me, and detracts, sometimes quite heavily from my enjoyment of the game. It is different if a game makes no attempt in any way to be realistic - I have no expectation that Sonic the Hedgehog will be at all realistic, but in a game like thief, where many aspects of the game are quite realistic, the ones that aren't screw it up for me. I need consistency to fully enjoy a game.

 

Now, Thief (1, 2 & 3, but especially 2) are three of my favourite games overall, but I nevertheless disliked many of the gameplay aspects that either seemed contrived, silly or just plain preposterous. Given the limitations of game engines and computing power at the time it was released, some of those things were forgivable, but some had no reason for being there, and I found them just plain irritating . Body carrying in the way thief implemented it was one of them, and I never liked doing it, and I was very annoyed when the game made it an objective to complete.

 

Some people evidently seem to derive some kind of puerile delight from aranging virtual corpses in amusing positions, but that was never my cup of tea...

 

For the record, I have been working on a game for some years now, but I am waiting for the technology to reach the point where it will do my ideas justice (not to mention the time and the money to invest in it). It is getting close with some of the newer game engines, but I plan on using TDM as a testbed for some of my ideas, which is why I am pushing for certain features....

[Springheel]

I have been working on a game for some years now.... I plan on using TDM as a testbed for some of my ideas, which is why I am pushing for certain features....

 

Maybe you should join up and contribute to some of the actual work, if that's the case.

[Domarius]

As I've tried to say many times in this thread, you cannot drag a body anywhere that you could move it by shouldering. Ingame dragging itself is a very abstract representation of the actual action, one where you only have one hand and you always hold that hand straight out in front of you. This, coupled with the AF system, brings in some limitations that wouldn't actually be there in reality. Shouldering is an option to get around those limitations.

Aha, fair enough. I think we could really penalise the player in the movement speed then.

 

The main reason game devs have not been taking this path is purely out of fear derived from giving control to the simulation, having unscripted events unfold without their stamp of approval, and giving the player the freedom to decide their own fate without letting them act like a demigod. It is all about fear of the unknown, and fear of losing control.

Well, as much as you feel this fear is unjustified, you're wrong. This fear is learned behaviour; It comes from the game breaking horribly, in many ways.

 

When you go beyond making arm-chair observations and actually start making games, you'll realise that just like any other form of programming, predictability and control is extremely important.

 

And as well as technical control, you need plot control if you want to tell a story. The more you let the player do, the less you can immerse them in a story. GTA vs Thief.

 

For the record, I have been working on a game for some years now, but I am waiting for the technology to reach the point where it will do my ideas justice (not to mention the time and the money to invest in it).

That makes you no different than the majority of every other aspiring video game hobbyist. Everyone can make an unfinished game, and most everyone does. That's easy. It's no claim to fame.

[Ishtvan]

@Obscurus:

Okay, feel free to just ignore my argument about lack of realistic control input and manipulation meaning you can't realistically drag a body and need other options to accomplish realistic body-related goals.

 

Anyway, I'd like to respond to this:

 

if you set up a realistic simulation of a quasi Victorian city and give the player the objective of stealing things without being caught, and give the player realistic (or at the very least plausible) abilities and limitations, good stealth gameplay will inevitably flow as the path of least resistance.

 

That seems doubtful. Lets suppose you set up the most realistic simulation ever, and it's exactly like real life. Again you're given the objective "steal things and don't get caught." The "path of least resistance" to come out of that simulation would be the actions of RL people who have demonstrated the ability to repeatedly "steal things and don't get caught." However, those actions are not something I would call "good stealth gameplay."

 

Think about real people who have developed successful strategies for stealing things and not getting caught. First of all, most of them are far removed from the actual stealing. That's the best way to avoid your "get caught" objective, hire other people to steal for you. For example, they could pay off port security and hire people to go to ports and take things off of shipments coming in. Or pay off government officials to award public works contracts to some company they own that will spend more time syphoning off the money than doing actual construction. Or set up a fake charity, or become the CFO of a global corporation. Sounds like great gameplay!

 

As for people who are actually involved in the stealing, they often spend weeks researching their target, and I don't think many gamers want to spend real-time weeks per stealth mission. Often they work in teams. They employ strategies like getting hired at a place, waiting for everyone to go home and then using the keys they were issued to rob the place and disappear. In the case of the recent multi-million dollar bank robbery in Ireland, they took a bank manager's family hostage at their home and threatened their lives. Again, more strategies that I would not describe as "good stealth gameplay."

 

What logic leads you to believe that the real world is the best setting to facilitate great stealth gameplay?

[New Horizon]

For the record, I have been working on a game for some years now, but I am waiting for the technology to reach the point where it will do my ideas justice (not to mention the time and the money to invest in it). It is getting close with some of the newer game engines, but I plan on using TDM as a testbed for some of my ideas, which is why I am pushing for certain features....

 

Excuse me? Sorry, but that ticks me off a little bit. This is a Thief inspired toolset, and we appreciate fan input, but I personally don't appreciate people coming into our forums with an agenda and trying to force us to incorporate ideas, that we've already discussed and voted down years ago, in hopes of just being able to walk in after we've done all the hard work...just so you can 'test' some ideas. The Doom 3 SDK is openly available...and for that matter, the full Quake 3 source code is now available. You could gather your own team and create the technology by rewriting the engine with your own team...instead of pushing ideas on us. We've got a big enough workload without this crap.

 

Sorry, I don't mean to be rude...but it really upsets me.

[obscurus]

@Obscurus:

Okay, feel free to just ignore my argument about lack of realistic control input and manipulation meaning you can't realistically drag a body and need other options to accomplish realistic body-related goals.

 

There should be no body related goals, but if there are, dragging should be sufficient. If the body gets stuck, that isn't unrealistic - if you are dragging a body in RL you should expect it to repeatedly get snagged on things. Sure it would be an abstraction, but not such a silly one a shouldering. I also think the player should have to walk backwards while dragging (more realistic).

 

Anyway, I'd like to respond to this:

That seems doubtful. Lets suppose you set up the most realistic simulation ever, and it's exactly like real life. Again you're given the objective "steal things and don't get caught." The "path of least resistance" to come out of that simulation would be the actions of RL people who have demonstrated the ability to repeatedly "steal things and don't get caught." However, those actions are not something I would call "good stealth gameplay."

 

Think about real people who have developed successful strategies for stealing things and not getting caught. First of all, most of them are far removed from the actual stealing. That's the best way to avoid your "get caught" objective, hire other people to steal for you. For example, they could pay off port security and hire people to go to ports and take things off of shipments coming in. Or pay off government officials to award public works contracts to some company they own that will spend more time syphoning off the money than doing actual construction. Or set up a fake charity, or become the CFO of a global corporation. Sounds like great gameplay!

 

As for people who are actually involved in the stealing, they often spend weeks researching their target, and I don't think many gamers want to spend real-time weeks per stealth mission. Often they work in teams. They employ strategies like getting hired at a place, waiting for everyone to go home and then using the keys they were issued to rob the place and disappear. In the case of the recent multi-million dollar bank robbery in Ireland, they took a bank manager's family hostage at their home and threatened their lives. Again, more strategies that I would not describe as "good stealth gameplay."

 

What logic leads you to believe that the real world is the best setting to facilitate great stealth gameplay?

 

 

You are taking things far too far, as though you can disprove my argument by pretending I am arguing for a far more extreme appraoch than really I am. Obviously there is a limit to how much depth you can put in the game, but that does not mean you cannot have a reasonable abstraction that has a level of realism that is generaly consistent with the real world.

 

If we assume our thief is a known wanted felon, he is unlikely to be setting up businesses or doing all of the things you have described. We can assume he is one of those people hred to steal, not one of the ones doing the hiring. We can assume our theif likes to work alone, not wanting to share the spoils with anyone. There are plenty of such thieves around in RL. We can assume our thief has a few people willing to do business with him, but generally most people will recognise him as a thief due to 'wanted' posters, bounty ect.

 

There are lots of people who have different strategies for theft. Our character is a cat burgler. Perhaps he just likes the thrill of it - such people exist in real life. Perhaps he has no interest in whiote collar crime.

 

Hostage taking amost always fails as a strategy for theft, almost all hostage takers have been captured and/or killed as a result of their stupidity. Cases like the one you mentioned are extremely rare.

 

 

You are just throwing up red herrings, but in no way have you demonstrated that threre is anything inherentlly wrong with my idea, although, I do like the idea of throwing in bribing guards etc as an alternative in situations where stealth might be impossible (although there should be a big risk to the player if the bribe is not accepted)....

 

 

@Domarius

 

You are starting to sound like one of those naysayers, like the people who thought that if you traveled too fast in a steam train that you would die, or that it was impossible to break the sound barrier. Come on. It is getting easier and easier to create open ended, free form games that have few set ways of completing them. Thing is, I don't want a specific experience per se, I want a highly generalised game where a palyer with specific attributes has a bettter chance of success if they play in a certain way (e.g stealthily). I want the players experience to be different each time they play the game, with multiple branching story lines, etc, not another one of those games that when you have finished it it gets proptly deleted.

 

Have a look at Assassin's Creed for example - a game that has all kinds of features that you guys seems to think are unworkable or impossible in a game (granted, it does use next gen hardware). There are a crop of games due for release soon that completely refute most of your naysaying, "it can't be done" "it is no fun" "no professional game dev would do that" nonsense.

 

Open ended, free form games that blend elements of RPG, FPS, action, stealth, RTS, artificial life and economy sims are the way of the future.

 

@Springheel: If you want assistance with mapping, story, in-game readables, modelling (but not character modelling, I'm crap at that) textures, sound design I might be able to help, although I probably won't have a much time for another 4 months or so, I have other projects on the boil. IIRC, I offered to do readables a while back, but there seemed to be a lack of interest in that.

[ZylonBane]

There should be no body related goals

THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ HAS SPOKEN!

[Domarius]

@Domarius

 

You are starting to sound like one of those naysayers, like the people who thought that if you traveled too fast in a steam train that you would die, or that it was impossible to break the sound barrier.

No, I'm telling you that you need a certain level of control, and you need to appreciate this if you ever hope to finish any project.

 

It's more like - I'm the airplane technician, and you're the guy who wants to break the sound barrier by simply strapping a rocket onto the back of his 4 cylinder car. You have no idea what you're doing. You have no credible experience. Just vague ideas based on the other guys you've watched flying around.

It is getting easier and easier to create open ended, free form games that have few set ways of completing them.

And you are basing this on what, I'm curious to know?

Thing is, I don't want a specific experience per se, I want a highly generalised game where a palyer with specific attributes has a bettter chance of success if they play in a certain way (e.g stealthily).

You want Thief: Grand Theft Stagecoach (as ZB once put it).

I want the players experience to be different each time they play the game, with multiple branching story lines, etc, not another one of those games that when you have finished it it gets proptly deleted.

Of course you do. But look at how long it takes to make one decent plot. Until computers can match humans for feeling and inspiration, plots have to be carefully constructed all the way, and anything auto-generated by a set of rules is going to be shallow in comparison.

 

Besides, we already have this, it's called Thief 2 and it's plethora of incredible, better-than-OM quality FMs available on thief-thecircle.com. I've never uninstalled Thief 2.

 

And in case you haven't noticed, that's what we're trying to create here. A toolset with which people can continue to make top quality Thief experiences.

 

@Ishtvan ... you are just throwing up red herrings, but in no way have you demonstrated that threre is anything inherentlly wrong with my idea,

Your "idea" is to simply "create a virtual world" with complete disregard for feasibility in any sort of time frame. Well go ahead, try it. Soon you will learn you'll have to draw the line somewhere if you ever want to finish the game, and where to draw that line is the art of creating good gameplay.

 

You're just like every other game development wanna-be. Everyone starts off with the goal of making "the best game evar!!11", but once you have to act like a proffessional, you realised that you need to become a bit more practical if you ever want to get anything done.

 

Open ended, free form games that blend elements of RPG, FPS, action, stealth, RTS, artificial life and economy sims are the way of the future.

You must be thinking of Oblivion, GTA, The Sims 2 etc. - all good games in their own right, but you can't compare them with the immersive focused plot experience of a good Thief game. It's apples and oranges.

 

Its plot or free-form. Thief or GTA, or somewhere in between. If you can manage to build a game dev team strong enough to do both, more power to ya. Untill then, you're just a wild dreamer with a lot to say but who isn't actually making any games, so we haven't got a good reason to take you seriously.

[obscurus]

Oh fine. I'm obviously pissing everyone off so I'll quit it with the grandiose schemes, OK?

 

I'm just saying body carrying is immersion breaking for me...

 

Sorry for any offense caused. I really didn't mean to upset anyone (well, maybe ZylonBane ).