Cradle type missions

[Komag]

I like the woo, as do many Thief fans. My impression is that it is about 1/3 of us that like the woo quite a bit, 1/3 that don't care about it and like other aspects, and 1/3 that really hate the woo parts (and those typically like Thief 2 much more than Thief 1)

[Vadrosaul]

I like woo in small doses, hence why I didn't say 'rearing its "ugly" head'. In my experience, too many FM's involving woo feel as if they included zombies and craymen for the sake of having them, and not to enhance a narrative or the levels atmosphere. My fav level, Cragscleft, had the right balance of woo, applied to a section of the level that made its inclusion believable in context.

[Crispy]

Don't worry, Prey-style portals would be extremely tricky to do properly. To get them working with all our existing code that assumes space is laid out in a predictable manner would be a challenge.

[Dram]

Yes but the country Dram comes from only started a few years ago so he can be forgiven for getting his history jumbled up.

 

I'm from the Czech Republic so it's history goes waaaaay back

 

I only live in Australia.

 

 

 

 

Woo? am I missing something here?

[sparhawk]

Don't worry, Prey-style portals would be extremely tricky to do properly. To get them working with all our existing code that assumes space is laid out in a predictable manner would be a challenge.

 

I don't really think so. I read the thread on doom3world some time ago, and I had the impression that it was not that hard to do. I think he even did this in scripting only.

[Crispy]

Sure, a half-assed hacked version isn't that difficult. But once you start looking at the bigger picture, it starts getting more complicated.

 

Consider AI visibility. Suppose you were standing in front of an AI, in full brightness, with the AI facing you and very close. The AI would check the player's light level (lightgem is fully lit, so this test passes) and do a trace to the player's body (no obstacles, so this test passes), and send itself a large visual alert.

 

Now suppose that you're standing in front of a portal, facing it, in full brightness, and through the portal you can see an AI facing you. The AI would check the player's light level (again, test passes) and do a trace to the player's body...

 

Here's where we run into problems. The AI and the player are probably in different rooms. They might be waaaaay over on the other side of the map from each other. Where does the trace go? Way over the other side of the map, of course. So the trace would fail, even though from the player's POV they're looking straight at the AI.

 

Sure, there are ways around this. You can figure out angles between connected portals and the player and the AI, and do traces from the appropriate points on the portal's surface in the appropriate directions. But it's pretty complicate and makes each trace several times more expensive (keep in mind you have to consider practically every set of connected portals in the whole map), and it's not what I'd call a trivial problem. Certainly not something you could do in scripting.

 

There are doubtless more complications than that; tracing is just one off the top of my head.

[OrbWeaver]

Woo? am I missing something here?

 

A common word for the paranormal.

 

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woo_woo

[Dram]

A common word for the paranormal.

 

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woo_woo

 

Ahh, thank you

[Ombrenuit]

I don't really know what we're arguing about anymore. But Thief did introduce me to horror as I hadn't played anything "scary" before Return to the Cathedral. I do love the Silent Hill series now and horror games in general.

[Macsen]

I'm from the Czech Republic so it's history goes waaaaay back

Sorry Dram Czech Republic only came into being in 1993 when you split from Slovakia. Your adopted country is older.

[Dram]

Sorry Dram Czech Republic only came into being in 1993 when you split from Slovakia. Your adopted country is older.

 

Pfft. Fine then Czechoslovakia

[Macsen]

Czechoslovakia

Don't! That's the word that made Redface's face red in the first place.

 

Hulk Smash!

[Ishtvan]

Now suppose that you're standing in front of a portal, facing it, in full brightness, and through the portal you can see an AI facing you. The AI would check the player's light level (again, test passes) and do a trace to the player's body...

 

Here's where we run into problems. The AI and the player are probably in different rooms. They might be waaaaay over on the other side of the map from each other. Where does the trace go? Way over the other side of the map, of course. So the trace would fail, even though from the player's POV they're looking straight at the AI.

 

Sure, there are ways around this. You can figure out angles between connected portals and the player and the AI, and do traces from the appropriate points on the portal's surface in the appropriate directions. But it's pretty complicate and makes each trace several times more expensive (keep in mind you have to consider practically every set of connected portals in the whole map), and it's not what I'd call a trivial problem. Certainly not something you could do in scripting.

Yeah, I doubt the original portal mod covered AI seeing you on the other side of the portal. However, I think it would be possible to expand trace functionality so that when a trace hits a portal, it knows to keep going on the other side of the portal. I could be wrong, but I think the outer parts of the Trace code are exposed to the SDK. Eventually it starts calling stuff in the CollisionModelManager that's outside the SDK, but we might have enough to tell a trace to start a new trace from the other side of the portal if it hits a portal surface, and add up the total distance and return the final result to the original caller.

[Komag]

AI could see you through portals in Prey, and shoot at you too IIRC (at least I know you could shoot at them)

[Nyarlathotep]

They shoot back.

[Crispy]

Yeah, Prey's portals were pretty seamless. I played through most of the game and I never saw any glitches with them.

 

So it's definitely doable, at least with the full engine source. (Prey uses a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine, for those that don't know.) Whether it's doable with just the SDK is unknown. Either way, it'd still be a lot of work.

[Komag]

I remember some minor glitches, such as shadows not being cast in both sections (maybe only in some cases), inability to see through a series of two portals, and some other little things.

[Nyarlathotep]

So it's definitely doable, at least with the full engine source. (Prey uses a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine, for those that don't know.) Whether it's doable with just the SDK is unknown. Either way, it'd still be a lot of work.

But it would be fucking awesome!

 

I remember some minor glitches, such as shadows not being cast in both sections (maybe only in some cases),

That's a pity. I don't think I ever noticed, though.

 

[...]inability to see through a series of two portals, and some other little things.

That's a performance optimization, no doubt. While it would be nice if they implemented a sliding scale of portal depths to render, in some ways, that would make it the limitation of today's graphics cards (and rendering engines) more obvious. Really, the only thing that could be guaranteed to render unbounded portal depths accurately would be a ray tracer.

[Crispy]

It's awesome in Prey. Whether it's appropriate for our setting is perhaps a matter of taste.

 

I guess it would make Constantine's-mansion-style missions a lot more interesting! Still, I was amazed at what they were able to do in Thief with just textures and blocky geometry. My favourite bit in The Sword is that room with corridors leading off it in all directions. If you stand in the middle, it looks like they're all identical; but if you walk up most of them, the "doors" are too tiny to walk through and much closer than they look. Only one of the corridors actually leads anywhere, and you can't tell which one it is until you've investigated each "corridor" in turn! It's an awesome use of perspective; probably the best I've seen in any game, before or since.

 

</gush>

[Vadrosaul]

Was Constantine's mansion the level with the Gullivers Travels sections?

[Crispy]

I believe so. The actual name of the mission was The Sword.

[SplaTtzZ]

Yeah the mission I was thinking of was the sword; i haven't played Thief 1 in quite a while but i really liked the mission for the surreal kind of qualities it had. It truly was amazing what they were able to do with the perspective and textures; in particular I remember one part where you walk into a room with a bridge leading acrossto the other side, but the every surface of the room had a pitch black texture with little points of bright lights that looked like stars. It made you feel as if you were walking out in space

 

I'm quite excited to see what the Doom 3 engine might be capable of in the same area; that is creating levels with a really surreal feel to them. It even adds to the horror genre of levels we were discussing earlier; I envision a genre map that is a maze-like insane asylum that is designed to make its inmates go even more insane. The thief has to navigate these twisting corridoors filled with all kinds of crazy stuff whilst nameless terrors stalk him through the shadows. Hehe, it could be really scary blending surrealistic environments with 'boogotcha!' moments

 

Are there any elements of Prey's code that are open-source or the like? Like would you just be able to, err, 'borrow' assets from Prey and use them in Darkmod or is that highly illegal? Mainly i think it would be cool to have the gravity stuff to play around with in maps but having portals could be pretty fun too.

[Crispy]

It would be illegal.

 

Prey's renderer isn't open source, and as far as I know that's not going to change. It's a pity, because I imagine people would be doing some amazing things with that tech if it was available to play around with. It's understandable though; id software's source code releases are the exception, not the rule. No other AAA development houses that I know of make a habit of releasing their source code.

[Nyarlathotep]

3DRealms is actually one of those exceptions. Alas, the Prey code is not theirs; it's Human Head's.

[Komag]

...I remember one part where you walk into a room with a bridge leading acrossto the other side, but the every surface of the room had a pitch black texture with little points of bright lights that looked like stars. It made you feel as if you were walking out in space

 

 

Yes I recall that room. You were actually just seeing sky texture, normal everyday sky, but below you and all around, which was the UNnormal part.