"The Elevator Odyssey" - a thrilling Story of Multiplayer and "Ominous Bequest"... - by Sephy
Sephy on 8/12/2011 at 09:50
The Elevator Odyssey
Greetings, taffers and taffresses!
Today I would like to tell you a most thrilling story that spans many ups and downs, and ends in a rather... curious finale.
It may be a long story, but I hope you’ll enjoy the ride as it gets better (worse) and better (worse)! :D
Our story is set in the Multiplayer world of Thief 2 and takes place in the FM Ominous Bequest, the author of which (Eshaktaar) is welcome to consider this an indirect and very positive review of his FM. ;)
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves…
- Prologue -
It all started when, with quite an astonished and unbelieving look on my face, a few years ago I read about Thief now having Multiplayer. Despite considering myself an ardent fan of the series, the information that Thief 2 had originally been planned to incorporate MP must have slipped past me like sneaksy Garrett himself, so reading about a functional Thief 2 MP version was kind of like being slapped in the face with tasty bacon – twice:
It leaves you with amazement at what just happened, and then you realize its awesomeness and consume it happily.
But with whom should I play it? I remembered a friend of mine whom I had tried to get into Thief on several occasions. But he hadn’t finished Thief 1, yet, so I couldn’t just throw all of Thief 2 at him! Still: “Playing the first mission”, I said to myself, “won’t hurt anyone, since the story only starts rolling in later missions.”
So, we had our first Thief 2 Multiplayer experience, exploring the Rumford manor together - just so that Mr. Can’t Get Anything Done On My Own (also known as Mr. Birdie Whistle) could have some sexy time with his beloved.
It felt odd at first, but quickly became a lot of fun (please never quote me saying that out of context :P). Still, we decided not to continue with Thief 2 until he’d finished Thief 1. So, what else could we do?
It was then that I remembered this awesome FM I once had played… Ominous Bequest! And I figured: To get my friend even more into Thief, why not start with, like, one of the best FMs out there? If I was going to have his mind blown, why not have it blown royally!
(NB: There are, of course, many equally awesome FMs, but most of the other ones I came up with contained spoilers for Thief 1&2 and weren’t fit for him; A Night at Rocksbourg begins, for example, with comments on the ending of Thief 2 and, thus, had to be ruled out…)
So, now you know how the stage for our adventurous story was set:
Off we were, to Farrington Manor!
We knew, the Multiplayer was still buggy, and we knew that there were problems with elevators - I had even read a thread that considered this FM unfinishable in MP, due to the elevators - but we thought, we’d just try and see how far we’d get. There had to be a solution, right? It couldn’t be that hard to somehow get past these darn elevators, right?
Little did we know...
Sephy on 8/12/2011 at 11:06
- First problems -
We were able to enter the manor alright, and things went well for quite a while.
Sometimes we went different paths, sometimes we explored together.
Sometimes he picked up items, sometimes I did.
Sometimes he pressed buttons, sometimes I did.
But in doing so, we seemed to have upset the Builder!
“What beeth this?” the Builder must have said to himself. Well, or to herself. Or whatever gender you have when you are the Builder. Sure enough, the Hammerites depicted the Builder as a male figure, but it’s not like I’d mind a hot female… Anyway, so the Builder continued: “Mine eyes must trick me! TWO Garretts? And they work together?!”
In a universe where the main character is mostly only helping himself, this must have been quite a confusing sight, not to mention the existential questions it raises! Is he now breaking his habit and not helping himself anymore? Or can Garrett helping Garrett still be considered helping himself?
This perplexing predicament must have caused a space-time-distortion in our game’s universe!
…At least, that would be a good explanation of what happened to us:
At some point, when I pushed a lever or button, it wouldn’t react anymore. Only when my friend’s game crashed and I was alone all of a sudden, would it work again. We opened the server again, only to see that during our time of absence the hungry Builder must have eaten all my equipment. And my inventory. Quite the hungry one, huh.
Or maybe the culprit was Garrett himself who’d wanted to munch down some tasty sword, bow and inventory items in one bite for a change. Whole deer legs do get boring after all.
Anyway, simply put: Everything I had been carrying was gone, including items we would need later. We were stuck. But by now we were so enthralled by the mission that we just started it all over again…
This time, we decided, only ONE of us would push all the levers and take all the important items. We hoped that this could solve the problems we had previously encountered. And apparently it did. I let my friend take all the important stuff and push all the buttons, and confined myself to blackjacking each and everyone who crossed my path.
Soon enough, we encountered another problem… Some documents we just couldn’t read. Here, however, we found a solution rather quickly, when we discovered that you could just read them outside the game in the Books folder. :thumb:
BUT THEN!
Then we encountered our arch nemesis...
I suppose it’s not hard to guess what I’m talking about.
Yes: The elevators.
There we were, having explored most of the currently accesible manor itself, standing in front of these two elevators that lead down to the underground cathedral, and they just wouldn’t bring both of us down there… Only the one who was hosting the mission could use them. For the other person the elevator would remain in its place and wouldn’t move downwards no matter how often he flipped the switch or shouted wild curses at it.
And this is where our real adventure began…
Sephy on 8/12/2011 at 15:07
Main Act: The endless Elevator Odyssey
How were we to get down there?
Was it impossible?
Were we supposed to just shrug our shoulders, tell each other “Well, it was nice while it lasted, but that's it...”?
Our answer was: NO.
And so we began brainstorming...
(I must say that I'm not 100% sure about the exact order of our attempts, but I will try to stick to the correct order as much as I remember it.)
Attempt #1: Try to be the slimmest Garrett ever
(also known as MC Garrett breaks it down like never before)
I've read of some Garretts being able to lean their way through doors.
So why not through a thin gap between elevator and wall?
While my friend tried some ideas on his own, I stepped onto the elevator dancefloor and went batshit insane and did the craziest Garrett breakdance ever seen (well, almost, but more to that later), standing on the edge of the elevator, leaning and moving into every possible direction.
I must have looked like a rabid weasel chased by hornets while having a seizure, a heart attack and being electrocuted at the same time.
But alas, it was to no avail...
After some time, I realized that - apart from making quite the spectacle of myself - I wasn't really accomplishing anything with this.
CONCLUSION: Nice dancing skills, Mr. Garret. However: Attempt failed.
Sephy on 9/12/2011 at 08:49
Attempt #2:Isn’t there any other way down there?
If I remember correctly, we explored the manor some more, but apart from a massive amount of blackjacked guards didn’t find anything. (Well, there is a way, but it opens only later...)
CONCLUSION: Nope.
Attempt #3: I have no idea what I’m doing… What could possibly go wrong!
So, there was only one option left...
(Actually, there was another one, but we didn’t come up with that one, yet.)
We saved the game, quit it… and opened Dromed! (dun-dun-dun-duuuuun)
Now, if you are reading this, Eshaktaar, I want you to realize what a tremendous praise this is for your mission (make more FMs! *hint hint*), because instead of giving up and leaving it be, we were so thrilled to go on with the FM that we installed & opened Dromed, even though neither of us had the slightest clue of how it worked!!!
Many of you, however, do know how it works and are familiar enough with Dromed to probably agree with me when I say that it is NOT exactly what you would call intuitive to use for people who open it for the first time…
As for me, I felt like a retarded ape staring at a rocket cockpit going like “…Banana?”, and the face I made was probably comparable to a frightened rabbit that has just been placed in front of a glass door behind which three thousand hungry wolves are smacking their lips while a timer next to the door goes “Door opens in 3, 2, 1 …”
Nevertheless, we grit our teeth and managed to find and open the right file.
(YES, that WAS an accomplishment already!)
And, after quite some struggle with finding out the controls for walking through the map and turning around within Dromed (by simply guessing and trying various keys; I know, we could have looked stuff up, but that would’ve been too easy, right :P), we managed to get to the spot where the elevators were situated – during that time I lost track of how often I turned into the wrong direction or suddenly was turned upside town because I just couldn’t get the right keys into my head...
CONCLUSION: So far, opening Dromed seemed like a good idea that might lead to something… as soon as we could find out how to actually DO anything. What happened next?
(To be precise: We had already installed/opened it before Attempt #1 and messed around a bit, but at that time had not really been serious about really using it, since we considered it completely out of our reach - which is why I do not count that as #1… Here, however, we were desparate and got serious about doing something in Dromed.)
nickie on 9/12/2011 at 09:26
:laff::laff::laff: Brilliant! And . . . what happens next?
Sephy on 9/12/2011 at 14:25
Attempt #4: Begone!
So, there they were… Our enemies…
Could we just erase them? Delete their very existence from the world and send them straight to the plains of Oblivion? Or, at least, delete them from the map?
Well, that’s what we tried.
Every professional elevator-killer should have some practice before he goes to carry out his… elevating task (ha-HA)! Hence, first a few stones and trees at the start of the mission had to suffer from our destructive and all-erasing tendencies. Since deleting these seemed to work, onwards to selecting the elevator!
It was hard enough to be sure whether or not the elevator was actually selected while clicking at things and lines frantically, but at some point it looked like the right thing was highlighted! The DEL key followed and – behold! It was gone!
What an easy victory! That went fast! Now we just have to-
Just have to…
Umm…
Do we have to, like, umm, just save it…?
Or, err, do we have to, like, somehow explicitly export it as a new file?
Is… Is there… anything else we have to do? Like, tell Dromed to rebuild and recalculate stuff?
The answer to that should be obvious.
If you know how to use Dromed.
As that wasn’t the case for us, we just behaved like every man of reason would: We wildly guessed and randomly tried stuff ;D (reopening the server and loading our save file in front of the elevators repeatedly). But nothing would work: While, rather curiously, the previously deleted stones and trees were indeed gone in MP now, the elevator wasn’t, even though it was gone in Dromed!
(I would, by the way, be grateful if anyone could give an explanation or at least a hypothesis as to why the deleted stones&trees were gone in Dromed as well as in the game, whereas the deleted elevator was gone in Dromed but not in the game … ;D)
Well, great. We had succeeded in sending stones and trees straight to Oblivion, but apparently the gods of Oblivion had no need for elevators. Stupid technology-hating gardeners.
Our cries of victory, thus, died away quickly.
So much for that...
CONCLUSION: The elevator got the last laugh out of this. But we’ll see! We’ll see…
Attempt #5: This elevator is way too safe!
I don’t know about you, but now that I think about it… The elevators in Thief aren’t exactly the safest I’ve ever seen. No cabin, not even a handrail, just a platform of which you could fall down very easily…
Then again, in a world filled with haunts, zombies, religious fanatics (whom you have enraged several times), rather misanthropic pagans (whom you have enraged several times), frightful deities (whom you have… well, you get the drift) and ancient tombs with deadly traps, a world in which the only thing that is not all too dangerous are the tremendously stupid guards (“Oh, a-are you alright? No, no, of course you're not alright! Sorry…”), I suppose elevators are really the least problem you have.
Unless you’re us.
So, since literally erasing it from the face of the earth didn’t do the trick, we thought of just making it “more dangerous” by trying to SHRINK it. If it was shrunk enough, the gap between the elevator and the wall might enable one of us to just fall through. This, however, brought us back to the problem that would continue throughout our adventure with Dromed: We had no idea how to use any of its functions.
Yet, after some guessing, clicking, entering values and a few crashes, we somehow managed to shrink the elevator in Dromed.
But, as you may have already guessed, the same issue occurred as before: It appeared unaltered in the game itself.
Since we didn’t know what we were doing wrong, we came to another dead end and had to realize: Manipulating the elevator won’t work.
CONCLUSION: Fuck.
nickie on 9/12/2011 at 19:29
Personally, I hope you keep trying for the next few weeks because I haven't been so entertained for some considerable time. :laff:
Now, just for fun, you could go to wherever it is along the top bar that shows persistent_player_ position or some such (it might be in tools or game, don't know without looking myself) and either put yourself where you want to be or if you can't do that then go alt+g to go in-game and then, when you get to the elevators, do alt+e to go out of game, move yourself where you want to go and then do alt+g again.
And hopefully, now I've posted this, someone who does know what they're talking about, will come along and correct me. :D
But thank you! I've really enjoyed your tale and I sincerely hope that you figure it out sometime, despite my amusement at your failures. :)
And once you've finished with Ominous Bequest, which I agree is up there with the best, try Broken Triad, another Eshaktaar gem which I think will fit your criteria.
demagogue on 9/12/2011 at 21:53
Probably easier to make the gap bigger on one side than the elevator smaller.
You could also plop in a few ladders so you don't have the big fall and you can get back up.
But maybe you're not done with your story yet.
If you change an elevator I believe you have to recompute the pathfinding, and if you change any brushes you have to portalize. Or just do "full mission processing" to cover everything just in case.
I'll admit to going into dromed to fix an issue a few times, or even just to to do new things for fun, though I won't say for whose FMs. ;)
BG_HHaunt on 9/12/2011 at 23:03
Very entertaining (and funny :cheeky:) story hope you find a way to do it at the end of it.
Sephy on 10/12/2011 at 02:10
This just as a general reply to the last few answers: When I read your answers I immediately wished I had indeed posted this issue while said friend and I were actually fighting with it. :joke: Seems like more or less all of you would have certainly be able to help us out with this. :)
It is, however, actually something that happened in 2010 (according to my ICQ history we initiated the general idea of playing this mission in Multiplayer on the 24th of August at exactly 20:43:28), so as undoubtedly grateful as I am to everyone who thought this might be currently happening, it is a story of the past.
Still, there is more to tell, and I shall do so. :cheeky:
