"The Elevator Odyssey" - a thrilling Story of Multiplayer and "Ominous Bequest"... - by Sephy
Sephy on 10/12/2011 at 02:52
Attempt #6: Who needs walls anyway?Well, if tampering with the elevator wasn’t the right way of tackling this problem, how about turning things around and tampering with that which surrounds the elevator instead? The wall. (Pink Floyd reference not intended)
The first idea was to simply delete the tunnel around the elevator, but that lead to nothing good. Then, there was the idea to manipulate the mesh of the tunnel to make it bigger. Yeah, because changing the size had worked so well on the elevator before… Well, long story short: We didn’t succeed. Even when we managed to make it look bigger inside Dromed, it was still the same in the game. Similar to the endeavor to alter the elevator’s size, we were obviously lacking Dromed knowledge to make this work.
Well, if all your more or less elaborate ideas come to nothing, what have you left? Resignation?
Hell no. Brute force, of course!
Quote:
demagogue:
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.
So: Yes, you're right! This was indeed the idea that would get us somewhere... We even thought of putting some ladders in there ourselves, but since we didn't know how to do that in Dromed, we merely thought of this as something to investigate later, if other ways failed.
The idea, then, was to use brute force and carve (as soon as we would find out how) a new and huge shaft into the walls.
Long story short: This time… we succeeded.
A lot.
Actually...
Too much.
We loaded our latest save game and found that with our clumsy skills we hadn’t just torn a hole into the elevator shaft… We’d torn one into the
complete Rumford manor.In other words, we could tip our hats to various guards in the distance while standing in front of the elevator… Except for, we had no hats. And they were unconscious. But, yeah, hypothetically speaking, that’s what we could have done...
Anyway, what should we care for the house anymore? May it fall apart for all we care! All we wanted was to get down, and that, indeed, worked incredibly well now, as we found out rather bluntly…… by accidentally falling to our deaths.
CONCLUSION: By now, it was already the second night, so: Heureka! Finally, we were able to get down the elevator shaft!
Sidenote: Right after me happily saying to my friend on ICQ that apparently we could finally proceed with the mission now, my internet just decided to spontaneously lose its connection for more than half an hour. You should have seen the look on my face...Attempt #7: Hold on to it...Yes, we could get down.
But, as pilots should know best, there is the ever so slight difference between simply getting down - and getting down alive...
So, when our victorious laughter was mingled with Garrett’s oh so familiar, agonized “GNAAAAAHHH!” we were forced to admit that the problem could not exactly be labelled as “solved”.
There were some misguided ideas such as trying to slow down the fall by attempting to somehow get stuck briefly in one of the three recesses that housed the stained glass windows, but I doubt that you will need a detailed report of how well that worked …
How about we just paraphrase the result of this experiment in the language of statistics:
“Scientific studies have shown that 10 out of 10 Garretts trying to hold on to a sill in free fall will show symptoms of sudden dying and spontaneous death, often going hand in hand with being dead.” [1]
Yep. Another idea had to be found.
One was collecting all boxes we could find and pile them up to create a sort of stairway, but that idea was scrapped rather quickly (although it would, I think, have been possible).
CONCLUSION: Ouch.
Footnote [1]: Also, they die.
Sephy on 10/12/2011 at 13:03
Quote Posted by nickie
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.
We were in that one already, too. And I will have to say a few things about our adventures there, later, as well. :cheeky:
Sephy on 12/12/2011 at 10:56
Attempt #8: Catch!
As you know, games often differ from reality in various aspects, and even those that attempt to be realistic to a certain extent will still have blatantly unrealistic features (for which I do not criticize them, most 100% realistic games would be either too boring or too hard - or both).
It was exactly such a feature that we needed to find now, and sure enough, we did.
Here's an idea: Suggest this to the next friend you'll see: Tell him that you have to jump down from a dangerous height and for the sake of your own safety you would appreciate it if he'd be so kind as to stop your fall with his face.
Sounds like a great idea in reality?
Yeah, didn't think so.
But in Thief this “Excuse me, dear sir, may I stomp your face?” technique may very well be the solution to many problems... At any rate, it was the solution to ours.
We still had to actually try it, but it was now that - on the verge of (maybe) finally getting down there - the question “Umm... by the way, how do we get UP again?” happened to cross our ingenious minds. “We just die”, was my first answer and, amusing as it sounded, that would actually work. But, truth is, we didn't really care about that right now and went with “One step at a time!”
That said, I took the elevator down (which worked for me, as host of the game). Then, at the bottom of the (now much bigger) shaft, I looked up and waited for my friend to greet my face with his boots. He, on the other hand, just walked over the edge of the elevator right into the now enlarged shaft and - as planned - fell down towards me.
Next thing I heard was "GNAAAHHH!" and the very unpleasant sound of breaking bones.
"What?" you may ask. "Did it not work?"
Oh, it would work alright. It just turned out that catching a falling Garrett wasn't as easy as I had thought (although I'm sure that some females on here would certainly like to try it...).
So, after him decorating the floor next to me for a while, the Garret-rain came to an end when finally we succeeded and he was able to land right on my head, and lo! NOTHING happened to either of us!
(It was only later that I read more about this bug and learned that it can be used to land on guards etc.)
Finally!
Finally!
We rejoiced in victorious laughter! We had defeated the stupid elevators!
Both of us were down there!
We could continue the Mission!
(Keep in mind that what I have told so far wasn't the result of just a few minutes, but of more than one evening spanning hours and hours of pondering and tampering around!)
THE END
...No, just kidding.
Did you think it was all fine now?
We did.
But it wasn't... So let's rewrite that header a bit:
THE END OF THE WORLD
Yeah, that's better.
Next time, I'll tell you why.
cast on 12/12/2011 at 21:00
This is a good read. It really is.
nickie on 14/12/2011 at 16:57
Agreed, and I'm very much looking forward to the next instalment. :)
Sephy on 1/2/2012 at 09:41
Sorry, I've been very busy the past few weeks, but I shall finally continue this. :D
So, where were we?
Ah, right! I was talking about...
THE END OF THE WORLD
And here's why:
After it had rained some Garrett and the long lost Garrett brothers were reunited beneath the elevator in their surreal surrounding of a shaft that partly tore a huge hole through the whole building... it seemed like finally the game could go on!
Drunken with joy and anticipation, we approached the two big doors of the hallway and opened them. Had there been a huge cake, a dancing polar bear parade and a group of ballet children performing on the back of dolphins riding through a pool of rainbow water, it would have certainly fit to our victorious rapture that still filled our hearts since we had finally beaten the trial of the elevators...
...had we not?
Of course, nothing like that awaited us behind these doors. Instead, we entered the cathedral that was down there and started sneaking around like the sneaksy sneakers we were.
But soon, we noticed that something was wrong. Something was... quite odd...
Then it hit us:
The people in there, they weren’t moving.
We could go right up to them, but there was no reaction at all.
Since we didn't remember reading anything about Farrington installing a bloody Madame Tussauds in his basement, we realized that this couldn't be right. :(
Not exactly knowing what to make of this, we simply loaded an earlier save game and were back up in the manor. We walked to a guard (yes, there actually were one or two I hadn’t blackjacked), but either they had suddenly been replaced by aspiring Beefeaters or we were indeed facing the same problem as downstairs, for we could have been balancing a burning harpsichord on top of our heads while playing the banjo naked, covered in dragon guts and wearing roller blades - they couldn’t have cared less.
This left us with only one conclusion: We’d broken it.
Our tampering with Dromed, like a small child naively juggling with Pandora’s Box, had led us to cause a void and lifeless world of frozen people. Although all the great - and with great I mean retarded - casting shows currently on television frequently make me wish for exactly that kind of world, it certainly wasn't what we wanted for the rest of our FM experience...
But, alas, it couldn't be denied. The map had become unplayable.
Now we really were at a loss. My friend only commented this with:
“1:1 … :S
Well played, game, well played…”
Still having some hope and will to fight in us, we started to discuss this new problem.
But what on earth should we do to repair this?
Wasn’t this beyond our grasp?
We were close to giving up.
But we also thought “This is getting personal now!” and got even more eager than ever before to SOMEHOW COMPLETE this FM!
Attempt #9: Just… do random stuff!
Well, technically, this could be called Attempt #1 again, but I’d like to see this still as part of the whole series of problems that we attempted to solve to make the whole mission playable, so let’s keep it at that and go with #9.
We suspected that our destroying parts of the building had also destroyed the AI’s behavior in various ways. This lead us to the idea to open our modified version of the map in Dromed again and see if there was any option to have Dromed recalculate the AI’s paths etc.
Still being the total Dromed noobs we were, this was, once again, a matter of simply trying one option after another even if the option selected sounded only remotely like what we were trying to accomplish.
However, several time consuming attempts later (which consisted of trying new options, saving, sharing the new version of the map, starting the server, connecting, loading the save state and, finally, realizing that the guards still were behaving as if touched by King Midas himself, except that they weren’t golden) we had to admit to ourselves that this just wasn’t going anywhere.
If it was indeed possible to fix this in Dromed, we weren’t experienced enough, and although asking on the forums here was an option, it would have taken quite some time to explain all this (as it takes writing all this :P), so before resorting to that option we wanted to see if we couldn't come up with something else.
CONCLUSION: By now we were just hoping we could at least tell Eshaktaar someday, so he'd know how awesome his mission is. A less interesting mission would have had us giving up by now.
(A side note to all the other great FM creators out there: As of today we have finished many great FMs in Multiplayer and not few of them have caused us problems of similar size that we were able to overcome only by similar patience and persistency, so it’s not like I’m saying that there’s no other great FM out there. There were many that, similarly, had us press on and on only because they were so amazingly great that we didn’t want to give up, and I may very well tell some of these other stories some other day. I’m telling this one right now because this is where it all started…)
Eshaktaar on 1/2/2012 at 11:11
How did I miss this thread? That's some crazy devotion to get this mission working in multiplayer, I must say. :D I'm afraid that even if you managed to get past that elevator, there'd be a lot of scripted stuff later on that probably would be broken as well. Not to mention the other elevator where you need to go back up.
Anyway, thanks for playing! This sure made for an entertaining read.
Sephy on 1/2/2012 at 12:32
Haha, thanks! Really glad you found this. :cheeky:
And it's not over yet - there's still more to tell... (I will also touch upon The Broken Triad briefly at a later moment)
As for going back up, my initial answer of "We just die" (and respawn) was actually the method we chose in the end. :laff:
nickie on 1/2/2012 at 14:07
Excellent timing Sephy! I've really enjoyed your latest update and I do admire your tenacity. Luckily I was able to read it before going offline for a few days and then I'll be on payg mobile internet where browsing is banned!
Quote Posted by Sephy
And it's not over yet - there's still more to tell...
Can't wait to know what happens next though and if someone would kindly pm me when the instalment is up, I can sneak out like a thief in the night, fire up the pc, read the new chapter, choke myself trying not to laugh and hopefully sneak back, all without being caught.
Sephy on 1/2/2012 at 14:26
Thanks! :) That admiration shall also go out to said friend who was the other active part in this kind of meta-adventure.
Quote:
if someone would kindly pm me when the instalment is up, I can sneak out like a thief in the night, fire up the pc, ...
I'll try to remember and pm you when I've written down and posted the next part. Where exactly are you / what are you doing that you currently cannot browse and have to sneak to another place for browsing? :eek:
