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Why don't the unconscious ever regain consciousness again?


ocapacha

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Lets assume a 4-lb blackjack, wrapped in thick, soft leather, for arguments sake. One good crack on the back of the head could leave them out for HOURS. A good pistol-whipping can put someone out for at least two hours, maybe even three or four.

 

I'd say that a skilled blackjacker (Garrett, for lack of a better example) could inflict the equivalent of a well-placed pistol-whipping with maximum efficiency, pretty much every time. So two to three hours game time is absolutely long enough to carry out a successful mission, and reason enough to not implement it.

 

If all that weren't enough, the average enemy is a sleep-deprived night security guard. If you get KO'd when you're tired, you will absolutely stay asleep longer. So as for realism? Good enough for me.

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Not that anyone is wrong at all, this is at least a forum where we can at least discuss this idea, - even if there is no intended implementation. - I appreciate other points of view, and points to where my thoughts may not be practical; or where someone my supplement my thoughts, or change them.

 

 

Digital, you got me there!... maybe I could argue the guards have thicker noggins or whatever, but you would argue, Gar would just hit a bit harder. So reality is kept after all!

 

 

M

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Basically, you're punishing the player for not killing the guard. As NH has said, adding that feature would just cause players to kill unconscious AI to ensure that they stay down (with no extra noise as they are already knocked out), which is not what we want to encourage.

 

This is an "issue" about Metal Gear Solid 2...  when you knockdown a enemy with the tranquilizer..  you can grab your socom and shoot in the top of the head..  so this enemy will bring you no problems :)

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This is an "issue" about Metal Gear Solid 2... when you knockdown a enemy with the tranquilizer.. you can grab your socom and shoot in the top of the head.. so this enemy will bring you no problems :)

 

Yeah, than he turns into a ration.

 

Imagine a guard stepping on a mine, exploding into deer legs and apples.

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  • 1 month later...
Why don't the unconscious enemies ever regain consciousness again?

 

I think it would only be logical that after - say 30 minutes - everybody who was hit over the head will wake up again and alarm his buddies.

 

 

 

I know why my enemies dont wake up after black jack em

 

 

I wack em till they die.  :rolleyes:

 

then I find the most amusing place to drag them too  :laugh:

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Yeah, than he turns into a ration.

 

Imagine a guard stepping on a mine, exploding into deer legs and apples.

 

ahhahahahaha... Awesome, i want to see that :laugh:

Ich konnte mich nicht erinnern Teleportation gezaubert zu haben und doch stand ich da... alleine und nackt.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I totally agree that guards waking up on their own from a black jack is stupid, BUT so is the other guards assuming all blackjacked enemies are dead.

 

Here's a proposal for a flowchart of reactions.

 

Guard Unconscious
		|
Spotted by other guard
		|----------------------v------------v
		|					 |			  |
Lying on ground	 Slouching in chair	Lying in a bed
		|					 |			  |
		v					 v			  v
Rushes to side	   Yells to wake up		   Nothing
and wakes guard					|
		|--------------------->|
Guard was suspicious  Guard not suspicious
when knocked out	  when knocked out
		|					 |
		v					 v
Searches for thief	   Guard gets yelled at

 

This leads to guards waking up other guards if they think they should be awake, and searching for the thief if there's reason to be suspicious. Guards slouching in a chair would just get yelled at to wake up, as it is assumed they just fell asleep. Guards lying unconscious in beds would be left alone, baring an alarm of some kind, where guards in bed should be woken up anyways.

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Whether the gaurds wake up by themselves or someone wakes them up, the same gameplay and coding problems (described in numerous threads on the issue) remain.

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Whether the gaurds wake up by themselves or someone wakes them up, the same gameplay and coding problems (described in numerous threads on the issue) remain.

 

 

Not necessarily. Gameplay wise, it actually penalizes you less for using a blackjack than the current method. Currently, if you have no place to hide a body, and a guard patrols that area, you don't have many options. With this method, if you can come up with an 'excuse' to why the guard is unconscious (Fell asleep in a chair, sleeping in bed), the game takes that into account and doesn't raise suspiscion. It penalizes you for being stupid and leaving bodies in the middle of the floor, which obviously should be penalized. You never have to worry about some arbitrary time limit on blackjacks, and it makes killing them even more undesirable (if a guard tries to wake another to find out he's dead, there's gonna be hell).

 

Secondly, the coding becomes a lot simpler. Specifically, if a guard sees another guard and is able to get to them, it's a safe assumption that the other guard can be woken up without too much hastle in regards to being lost. As for the animation, the ragdoll issue can be solved by having the second guard roll the first over on his back before he wakes up (probably by kicking him or something). If the guard is under something, and can't get up, the awake guard can pull him by the arm or leg to a sufficiently open area. This allows the state of the unconscious guard to be 'zeroed' and turns a practically infinite amount of animations into 3 (dragging, rolling, and getting up).

 

At first glance, it may seem to be the same suggestion, but it simultaneously solves 3 problems with the origional - it makes more sense, it promotes better gameplay, and it eliminates most of the nasty fringe possibilities.

 

I'm not saying that it's definately the direction you want to go with this, but it at least makes the idea more palatable.

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Unfortunately, the lead weight in a blackjack has a history in British police forces of crushing skulls or causing at least moderate damage (occassionally a concussion) to the head. Thus, the inability to get back up no matter if someone tries to revive him.

 

I DO like the bed case, because I kept trying that in the Thief series to no avail.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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I think you're still severely underestimating the difficulty of believably animating someone out of arbitrary ragdoll poses, without having a billion animations. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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I totally agree that guards waking up on their own from a black jack is stupid, BUT so is the other guards assuming all blackjacked enemies are dead.

 

Who said our AI are going to assume a black jacked AI is dead? I think the goal is for them to be able to tell the difference.

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I think they already can tell the difference. That's as easy as setting a different flag on the body.

 

@killhour: Having an AI drag someone out from under something and then roll them over to a position where an animation could take over to get them the rest of the way up would be extremely difficult. Don't they still have contests to program robots to pick up and place simple objects and manipulate them around obstacles? And you want to add this spatial/physical reasoning to our AI to have them manipulate human bodies around/under couches and things in the game world? Be my guest if you want to do it yourself, but we have more than enough work left just meeting all our existing AI goals.

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I think they already can tell the difference. That's as easy as setting a different flag on the body.

 

@killhour: Having an AI drag someone out from under something and then roll them over to a position where an animation could take over to get them the rest of the way up would be extremely difficult. Don't they still have contests to program robots to pick up and place simple objects and manipulate them around obstacles? And you want to add this spatial/physical reasoning to our AI to have them manipulate human bodies around/under couches and things in the game world? Be my guest if you want to do it yourself, but we have more than enough work left just meeting all our existing AI goals.

 

Robots in real life have to follow the laws of physics. I'm just suggesting dragging a ragdoll like the player would. Just have the AI walk to an open area and the ragdoll follow.

 

I might give the AI a whorl at implementation. Also to the guy that said you don't wake up from a blackjack - perhaps that could depend on how close to the "sweet spot" you hit them. Also, you should wake up from a gas arrow if someone kicks you. I guess the main problem is the animations, and I'll try to give a system for that a shot.

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Robots in real life have to follow the laws of physics.

Yup - as do we, roughly, although we're allowed some latitude in terms of mechanics. It still needs to look believable though, so you still need to avoid things like limbs clipping through chair legs.

 

What if the player puts chairs all around the unconscious guard? The guard could easily still be visible to passers-by, but the body wouldn't be reachable without removing the chairs first, and programming the AI to do that in the general case would be far from trivial.

 

I'm just suggesting dragging a ragdoll like the player would. Just have the AI walk to an open area and the ragdoll follow.

So the ragdoll magically slides along behind the other AI? Mmm. Call me picky but I don't like that solution very much. :)

 

Anyway, it doesn't solve the problem of how to get an AI to stand up from an arbitrary lying-down ragdolled position in a believable fashion. It's a complex problem, despite sounding deceptively simple. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's pretty cutting-edge stuff.

 

I might give the AI a whorl at implementation.

Good luck. :)

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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There are actually two separate issues here: guards waking up other guards, and guards ignoring bodies that are in beds/chairs. I'll deal with the former first.

 

Gameplay wise, it actually penalizes you less for using a blackjack than the current method.

 

It doesn't actually address the gameplay issues involved in guards waking up. What does the AI that is woken up do if he doesn't have a weapon (the player may have disposed of it somewhere else)? What kind of behaviour does the AI exhibit if he cannot get back to his pathnodes? What happens if the AI is down a pit, dumped behind a couch, or somewhere else where they are cut off from the AAS grid?

 

Even if you could address the above problems, you are still in a position where you are encouraging the player to kill AI after they are unconscious so that they cannot be woken up later. From the player's perspective it would be worse to have the AI find a KO'd body (which will alert them AND result in two enemies rather than one) than just find a dead body.

 

As far as your second idea goes, we have discussed the notion of making bodies put in believable positions be ignored by guards. Many of us tend to do that anyway, and it would be nice for the game to take that into account. Unfortunately, our discussion revealed that the idea starts to break down when you start considering its application in actual maps. There are all kinds of cases where the idea wouldn't make sense--imagine a guard that was on patrol five minutes ago being found sprawled on the Lord's bed? In fact, most guards that were supposed to be on patrol would be "investigated" if found unconscious, even if they were in a bed. It might be possible to come up with a generic system that works, but it requires a lot of thought, and while we may do something like that at some point, we don't have time to do it any time soon.

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I'm on board with AI not waking up as a general matter.

 

But I think the idea might have some traction in a gimmicky FM, where you could just take care of it through brute-hack scripting for the single gimmick purpose at hand -- like it if were part of the plot of the FM, or you had a gimmick tool like a "swab of ammonia" which when frobbed to an uncns NPC scripted their arousal, or something. So the team shouldn't waste time with it. But that doesn't mean an author couldn't play around with the idea in the confines of their own FM.

 

In fact I think that 95% of the crackpot ideas people post in here are better off as fodder to experiment in the confines of their own FM. Let these guys take care of the basics. There will be plenty of time to hack together some gimmick FMs on your own time, with your own FM. That's the beauty of it being a toolset.

Edited by demagogue

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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In fact I think that 95% of the crackpot ideas people post in here are better off as fodder to experiment in the confines of their own FM. Let these guys take care of the basics. There will be plenty of time to hack together some gimmick FMs on your own time, with your own FM. That's the beauty of it being a toolset.

I want to mount this on gold plating on our website :)

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  • 3 months later...

OK I'm sorry, i cant help my self, i know I'm necroing a a really-fucking-dead topic here ... I'm sorry!

 

talking out my ass here, and your right before you say it: this is more for a personal mission ....

 

people waking up on their own = bad.

 

people being found by a guard and then the guard wakes them up ..... hummm.

 

in order for this to work each map would need a "barracks" and few more animations.

 

the barracks could be as simple as just a designated room, or as complex as you want to make it. ( I'm gonna go complex-ish, and add in a thought that popped in my head from other discussions in this thread about guards alert status )

 

(using St. Lucia)

 

expand the armory area (build another room besides it / below it / above it .... what ever.) and add in 5 beds, thats the barracks (I'll get back to the beds).

 

now currently i assume that there are 3 levels of alertness: 0 = idle (not alarmed) / 1 = alerted (searching) / 2 = aggressive (spotted you)

 

expand that to 5: 0 = idle (not alarmed) / 1= interested (something out of place) / 2 = alerted (searching) / 3 = aggressive (spotted you) / 4 = alarmed (seeking help) / hostile (really pissed off)

 

using the guard who patrols the hall between the priest quarters and the chapel: say you black jack the priest as he is going inside his room, loot the room, then run and hide in the other priests room but you didn't close the door to the first room. the guard walks up and notices that the door to the priest's room is open, he then goes into state #1 and investigates the door. when he finds the body of the priest ( because the priest is unconscious not dead, if he was dead the guard would go to #5 ) he goes into state #2 and searches the general are.

 

he doesn't find you so he skips #3 and goes to state #4, walks close to the priest and then kneels down (new animation required) then the priests rag doll gets its clipping turned on so it doesn't get stuck on any thing and gets "sucked" over to the feet of the guard and then it gets lifted into the air and the chest of the priests ragdoll gets attached to a point on the guards shoulder so that the chest will follow the guards movements but the rest of the rag doll will flop about as he moves.

 

from there the guard paths back to the barracks, sets the priest down and then "revives" him. at that point every one (all the guards on the map and the priest) goes into state #5 and hauls ass back to the priests room, once there they do a detailed search with in reason: both priests room, the crypt, the dining room, the kitchen but they don't climb down and search the sewers or run out side and search the town. if they find you the kill you, if they don't find you after about 10 min they got to state #3, return to there normal posts, but remain at #3 for the remainder of the mission. you fucked up = the game gets harder.

 

now if you had killed the priest the guard would instantly go to state #5 setting off all the other guards to #5 also, they then would go into the detailed search mode ( and probably find you and kill you quickly ) if they don't find you after about 10 min someone picks up the priests body, dumps it at the barracks ( obviously it doesn't revive) and then everyone goes back to there posts but stay at state #5 for the rest of the mission. you really fucked up = things get really really hard.

 

now for the beds .... ( going a bit over board )

 

i counted 5 guards so 5 beds, someone said something about spawning guards like MGS .... why? have another 5 guards sleeping in those beds, and at set intervals ( like every 10-15 mins or so) have 1 guard wake up and replace its counterpart, then the replaced guard goes and sleeps in the vacant bed. this could be used to set up shifting "holes" in the guards patrol rout for players to slip through. other features for this would be if you kill a guard the alternate for that guard then replaces the dead/missing guard and if you piss off the guards to state #5 then the sleeping guards get up and join the fun.

 

it always irked me how NPC's would go ape shit when they found a body then settle down and not do shit about there buddy/co-worker/ex-boss lying in a pool of blood.

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Right now, if one of our AI find a corpse, they become very suspicious and more observant (harder to sneak past)

 

I can see what you mean, though, that the reaction might seem short-lived, but a ragdoll->standing up animation is extremely hard. If someone can get it to work in doom 3, I will fly to their home and personally give them a high-five.

yay seuss crease touss dome in ouss nose tair

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Well doom 3 does have animation blending, so it would be possible imo. Might be as simple as blend to a lying on floor animation. Something like ragdoll pose to kneeling pushup pose to get up and stand up pose. Also make an alternative where the guard goes to a sitting position instead then gets up. Could have it check the chest angle:

 

* if aiming up, do sit up -> get up

* if aiming down, do kneeling pushup -> get up

* if on either side, do kneeling pushup -> get up

* if the guard is in a seat (thus angle would be standing up), do get up

 

Though there would probably be certain situations where it would not work correctly (crawlspace), but I guess if another AI is able to get to him to wake him up it would work, as there would be sufficient room and clearance for them both.

 

Code-wise it is another matter, though I don't think it would be that difficult.

 

 

Mind, this is just humouring the idea, it will most certainly not be in TDM V1.0

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hell its not like this is a commercial release, as long as they wont get stuck in a wall screw the animations and just re-load the model, or go slap stick and and have them "dracula" stand up! (arms out straight back stiff and then they stand up from a 180 to 90 degree angle.)

 

 

err uhm .... disregaurd that, i get stupid and hyper off coffee. thanks for humoring me, i get intrested in a game and my ass starts talking about technical things i know shit about.

 

asstalk.gif

 

 

ehh starting school in Aug to attempt the daunting task of edumacating my self on video game design.

Edited by Sogi-Ya
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