New Horizon on 25/11/2009 at 17:33
Quote Posted by driver
So it's a waste of time yet you can't tell me what the time could be better spend doing. Nice work.
Bickering with you is a much bigger waste of time, and I didn't feel the need to justify, or prove anything to you. Why should I? Who the hell are you to demand anything of me? If you can't even think of things that time could be better spent doing, then you shouldn't bother asking. Having said that, the AI are likely to be the single largest hurdle in any Thief game. They were probably the last thing to come together on TDM, and from the developer interviews I've read, and ex-T3 developers I've spoken to...the AI were definitely one of the last things to really start coming together for them too. Not for lack of talent, but rather time. During development, there is more time spent bug fixing than actually designing and implementing. It pisses me off when people who have absolutely no sweet clue just shoot their mouths off with crap thinking, 'oh, we just need to do this, this and this...and everything will be awesome'. lol That's not how it works. The more you add to your plate, the more you have to bug fix later...and there will ALWAYS be bugs, bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Don't even try to kid yourself that there won't. Body Awareness is a huge departure from classic first person, especially with some many other core systems at stake for a Thief game. Thief is not a simple run and gun shooter with simple AI.
If EM was lucky enough to be starting with a previously finished Thief engine, that would be a huge help. Then they could enhance the existing AI, graphics, stim/response systems, scripting, sound prop, editing tools, and leave it at that. EM doesn't have that luxury however, they're starting with a non-Thief engine, the TR:Underworld engine. So, they're going to be doing pretty much exactly what we had to do. Study the original games inside and out until your sick of them. Document all of the primary systems, plan how to replicate/incorporate them into the existing engine, and enhance them for the next evolution of Thief gameplay.
Taking all that into consideration, it's not as simple as rebuilding the original house. It's going to be more like renovating an existing house to look and feel just like the old house, except maybe the new house is slightly bigger, has an additional garage and a swimming pool....again, much like we did with TDM.
The stim/response system in Thief was among the best, and probably still is. They'll have fun recreating that, and finding ways to make it even more flexible.
Thief is more than just a game, it's a mapping community. The core systems are far more important than many realize. The games were so well done that I don't think anyone truly realizes the complexity of what is going on under the hood. Even though the Thief 3 editor is a rather rickety thing, it's easy to see Ion Storm understood the importance of the core systems. They did a very good job recreating those systems, but their deadlines caught up with them and the game didn't get the final month or two of polish that it really needed.
You have your agenda, and you're going to argue against any point I make. So I won't jump through hoops to entertain you anymore.
Quote:
And what if I think adding BA would improve gameplay for various reasons stated multiple times in this thread?
You can 'think' whatever you like. The proof of the pudding is the eating.
driver on 25/11/2009 at 18:07
Quote Posted by New Horizon
Bickering with you is a much bigger waste of time, and I didn't feel the need to justify, or prove anything to you. Why should I? Who the hell are you to demand anything of me? If you can't even think of things that time could be better spent doing, then you shouldn't bother asking.
Quite simply because (Brace yourself) I have different opinions to you. If you can't appreciate that I believe that being able to see your own body in a game where you're trying to conceal yourself is a worthwhile addition then there's not much I can do to help you.
I can't say whether the things you regard as more important than BA actually are if you don't tell me what these things are. I'm not 'demanding' anything, I'm just trying to find your argument so I can understand your standpoint. Waving your hand at a collection of other threads and saying 'There's lots of other ideas' is ludicrous, do you believe that every other idea posed in this sub forum is more worthy than BA?
Quote:
You can 'think' whatever you like. The proof of the pudding is the eating.
I'm very much aware that arguing the merits of BA here is pointless, EM will make the decision and we'll see how it turns out. No significant step in games has come overnight and in perfect order first time round. EM may very well cock it up, but I would hope that even then it would provide lessons for future games that seek to improve immersion by including BA.
New Horizon on 25/11/2009 at 18:38
Quote Posted by driver
Quite simply because (Brace yourself) I have different opinions to you. If you can't appreciate that I believe that being able to see your own body in a game where you're trying to conceal yourself is a worthwhile addition then there's not much I can do to help you.
I didn't think I made any allusions to not realizing your opinions were different.
Quote:
I can't say whether the things you regard as more important than BA actually are if you don't tell me what these things are. I'm not 'demanding' anything, I'm just trying to find your argument so I can understand your standpoint. Waving your hand at a collection of other threads and saying 'There's lots of other ideas' is ludicrous, do you believe that every other idea posed in this sub forum is more worthy than BA?
I'm not arguing, I'm stating what I know from our experience working on TDM...and as I said in my post, from the experience of previous Thief developers.
As I said, if you were to take the time and start breaking down how many 'under the hood' things there are going on in a Thief game, you really gain an understanding and an appreciation for the level of complexity behind it.
When it comes to the core gameplay, BA is extra icing on an already tasty cake. I think it's great for simpler, run and gun action games where the AI and other core systems require much less work, but on a Thief type game I feel it detracts from the core. Whether people personally prefer it or not is irrelevant because what comes to pass will come to pass. As a gamer and someone who has been involved in game development, I feel pretty confident in stating where BA should be on the priority list during development...but that is also irrelevant. What happens, happens.
The Shroud on 25/11/2009 at 19:21
Fair enough.
Fafhrd on 26/11/2009 at 01:10
Quote Posted by sparhawk
Care to explain the difference between a "professional programmer" and one working on a mod team?
How many man-hours a week were put into TDM? How many man-hours TOTAL were put into TDM? How many people were on your QA team? How often were you in real-time communication with the rest of the team all at once? What was your bug documentation process, and how did you prioritize fixes once found?
I didn't say 'professional programmer' I said 'professional
development team.' The difference is logistics, experience, resources, QA processes, and TIME. Sometimes there's less time professionally, but I'm willing to bet that hour vs hour, Thief 4 will have more time spent on it in the two to three years it's in development than TDM had in the six years that it was.
Quote Posted by New Horizon
When it comes to the core gameplay, BA is extra icing on an already tasty cake. I think it's great for simpler, run and gun action games where the AI and other core systems require much less work, but on a Thief type game I feel it detracts from the core.
Couple of fallacies you're making here. A: Time spent on a body awareness system is not time
not spent on AI or other core systems. Animators aren't AI programmers aren't level designers, professionally speaking. Stop thinking your experience on TDM and some anecdotes about T: DS's development are applicable to every office development environment. B: A body awareness system isn't a purely aesthetic thing. It offers immediate, intuitive feedback to the player about the player character's relation to their environment, a much more accurate player collision mesh (no more (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--9WuTcTGAc) bouncing off counters that you're trying to climb on top of), additional movement abilities that wouldn't look fucking retarded (seriously, show me a game that has first person ledge hanging without any sort of body that doesn't look stupid), player cast shadows that directly effect gameplay, and for visibility checks, rather than choosing an arbitrary point in relation to the camera and doing an ambient light check, you can do ray checks against the surface of the player model to any light sources (no more magical Shoes of Hiding). And then you can have some REAL fun with it. Modifiers based on the player model's surface colour versus environmental colour average checks within a certain radius of the player. Imagine being in all black against a black wall, stopping as a spotlight passes over you, and a guard being none the wiser to your presence, or having to pick camouflage as part of the mission loadout. (I'm sure you and jtr are shitting your fucking lungs out at the formula breaking that would entail.)
The benefits to player movement alone are worth it. Seriously, have any of you people banging the 'NO BODY AWARENESS' drum actually taken a step
back from Thief for a while? I tried to play through Gold again for the first time in literally years not too long ago, and while the sound design, level design, atmosphere, and AI are still better than pretty much anything that's come out since, the actual player movement is kind of awful by modern standards (see aforementioned (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--9WuTcTGAc) BOUNCING OFF THE GODDAMN COUNTER video).
Quote:
Also, ME is an object-based platforming game like Assassin's Creed, so it locks the player into positions on objects, and moves using a scripted path and animations on that object.
Um, what? There are five object types that have scripted movement interactions: springboards, ladders/pipes, ziplines, balance beams, and swing bars. Everything else is done on the fly based on shape, size in relation to the player, and the player's speed. If everything were scripted, it wouldn't be so easy to glitch out level event triggers when running certain paths.
sparhawk on 26/11/2009 at 09:58
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
How many people were on your QA team?
It's not really a matter of how many people, but how good they are.
Quote:
How often were you in real-time communication with the rest of the team all at once?
Why shuold that matter? As you surely realize, our team is distributed all over the world, so the only means of communications was our forum and chat. And frankly, having the team all at once in a discussion is not really THAT helpfull in many cases. I'm attending such a meeting every week, where my team, from the deperatment I work for, meets for a regular meeting to get up to date. And I can tell you that this is quite a waste of time in my opinion, because most of the time, there is one guy talking about a particular problem where nobody else really knows what he is talking about. So you sit there wasting time listening to problems that you are not even concerned with until it's your turn. Sure, a forum is not the optimum, and many issues could have been resolved in a shorter time if we could easily have talked to each other directly. But then again, you can also sort that out via the forum as we did, so in the end, everthing worked out fine nevertheless.
Quote:
What was your bug documentation process, and how did you prioritize fixes once found?
Oh, we definitely setup process for different tasks, if I understand your question such that you imply that we didn't have something like this. On such a big project, you can't really survive without that.
Quote:
I didn't say 'professional programmer' I said 'professional
development team.' The difference is logistics, experience, resources, QA processes, and TIME.
Time is certainly a factor. Logistics can be easily done via the internet, that never was really a problem. The biggest key to success is, to setup the infrastructure and guidelines early at the start so that everbody knows what to do and also what to do if something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. As for experience, I think we got a pretty experienced team together. Much more experienced than in many professional teams I have worked with. There are differences inherent to a free project which pose some problems, but a professional team also has problems, only of a different kind. For example, you can't really force somebody to work on something or within a particular timeframe. Everbody uses his free time and if somebody takes a task and doesn't process it then you have to deal with that. In a commercial team you can fire such a guy (in worst case) and maybe hire a different one. You don't have that kind of power in a free project, but it's questionable if it really helps you. So time and resources are certainly differently handled in a free or commercial project, but they are the key factors in both cases. And as we see for comemrcial games, even though they seem to have bigger resources available (which I doubt is really true at the core), they suffer from very similar problems. As can be very well seen with TDS, but also other titles.
Quote:
Sometimes there's less time professionally, but I'm willing to bet that hour vs hour, Thief 4 will have more time spent on it in the two to three years it's in development than TDM had in the six years that it was.
So what? Do you think that this makes T4 a better game? Maybe yes, maybe no. Spending a lot of time doesn't mean that a good outcome follows as a neccessity. ;)
Quote:
A: Time spent on a body awareness system is not time
not spent on AI or other core systems. Animators aren't AI programmers aren't level designers, professionally speaking.
They all have to work together. BA can not be slapped into a game without designing all the other componenets including it. If it were that easy, then it would be quite simple and more often done. So of course you need programmers time as well and certainly also level designers time as well.
Quote:
Stop thinking your experience on TDM and some anecdotes about T: DS's development are applicable to every office development environment.
The experience of TDM is a valid game development cycle. It's not different from any other game development process and it's definitely more than from somebody who never did a game and is only theorizing about the problems.
Quote:
And then you can have some REAL fun with it. Modifiers based on the player model's surface colour versus environmental colour average checks within a certain radius of the player.
I think you never thought about this much deeper then a few minutes to come up with that. :joke: In fact, we were even thinking about such things to be implemented, and I had definite ideas how to do this, but the problem is that this wont run with a decent enough framrate on even good machines. You need a LOT of processing power for that kind of environmental integration. And in fact, 90% can be done withouth BA for the player. A player model is definitely neccessary, but that doesn't include BA also. In fact, Doom 3 has a player model for some reasons you mentioned here, but also doesn't feature BA.
Jashin on 26/11/2009 at 13:34
Body Awareness - I like it, I want it.
End of the story.
jtr7 on 26/11/2009 at 13:56
More like, the title of a novel, with much 'splainin'.
Platinumoxicity on 26/11/2009 at 15:53
About Assassin's Creed:
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Um, what? There are five object types that have scripted movement interactions: springboards, ladders/pipes, ziplines, balance beams, and swing bars. Everything else is done on the fly based on shape, size in relation to the player, and the player's speed. If everything were scripted, it wouldn't be so easy to glitch out level event triggers when running certain paths.
Incorrect. The game world is built out of objects resembling buildings. Those objects, for what I can see are built out of script-points that are set in grids. Those points are used to deliver the animations for climbing, hanging from a ledge or a beam, and shimmying on a ledge. Those animations use interpolation algorithms to smoothly switch between eachother. When the grid has climbable objects(script-points) in coordinates next to eachother, Altaïr can climb smoothly along the path determined by those points. When there is a 1-point gap between points, Altaïr needs to perform a jump to pass the empty point to the next point. If there is a 2-point gap between points, he can't move from point 1 to point 2.
I drew the grid on the scenery here. I forgot to draw those special points around the market stalls, you know when you press "up-action in high profile" Altaïr performs a special jump through the stall. The grids on the windows determine where his legs and hands go depending on where is the next point that the player can move to.
Inline Image:
http://old.filesmelt.com/Imagehosting/pics/0e4af76beebc18bd9418c9ed67692713.PNGFafhrd on 26/11/2009 at 21:14
I was talking about Mirror's Edge, genius.
