nicked on 15/4/2006 at 15:13
I'd imagine it would be possible. There's certainly the ability to time scripts so they could wake up after a certain length of time.
You'd be best off experimenting with zombies to start with, cos they have the ability to get up when "dead" anyway. But with guards, you run the risk of them waking up and being up to their torso in the ground. Not to mention the problems already stated of what happens if you manage to dump a body in a small crevice somewhere?
For it to work, you'd probably need to disable frobbability on guard's bodies, but in principle, I'd imagine some of the clever folks over in the editors guild could do it...
Oh, also, there may not be a motion for a guard standing up, so it might end up that they instantly become upright rather than getting up.
Vigil on 15/4/2006 at 15:36
When an AI is knocked out or killed, the game stops treating them as active and happily optimises their AI behaviour out of existence. They enter a state that is hard-coded to be non-reversible; the game simply doesn't offer any way to allow them to come back to life, because there's nothing left to come back to life. Their souls have departed for good.
People have had some success in working around this however. This involves rewriting the way that knockouts are handled so that they don't change the AI into this state, but instead emulate the inactive/dead state in a way that leaves the AI still active but dormant (and able to be revived after a timer).
This requires serious intervention into the game scripting and as far as I know the mission itself needs to be edited to support it. The Zombie behaviour is too hard-coded for it to be applicable; the same script that handles the falling-over-and-getting-up-again also has specific behaviours in response to fire arrows, flashbombs etc. which are completely inappropriate for regular guards.
It might be possible to encapsulate rewritten knockout behaviour by using a custom gamesys and/or scriptpack though, which would mean the original game could be patched with this behaviour.
UNWANTED GUEST on 18/4/2006 at 16:59
Especailly want to empasis.............
Shadowspawn
Member
Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Randolph Center, Vermont, USA
I had two AI in "Lorgan's Web" which would recover after being knocked out. One was your partner Cudget and the other one was Lorgan. (If you threw him down with the spiders in the sewers, he recovered long enough to curse at you, before the spiders ate him. )
It was a huge hassle, I had to build a new knockout system and never allow those AI to "die", only go into "Sleep" mode.
I think in general it would be easier to re-spawn an AI, although getting them into the correct position and then getting up (we actually have those motions available) would be difficult. Making an AI recover was damned difficult.
demagogue on 19/4/2006 at 01:06
The problem I see with re-awakening guards is that there isn't a way to limit it (or you'd need a way to limit it). Some FMs have 40-50 AI you have to pass, and sometimes you need to clear out a space by just taking them out one at a time, and it's time consuming ... and while it might be interesting if 5 or 10 woke up later and you had to deal with them again, 50 knocked out AI coming back would just be a pain and cause people to shut the game down in frustration: who wants to go to all that trouble again! But it if were kept to a handful, it might be interesting.
On that note, though, I like the technique of teleporting in more guards into previously-played areas as the mission progresses, which effectively does the exact same job as this, but is much easier for the author to balance and control. He can control exactly when they are cued and how many, so can keep balancing issues under taps so the player is not suddenly overwhelmed.
Surprisingly, just 30 mintues ago I was playing Meeting at the Bar for kicks, and I knocked out a sleeping guy (you know, when they stand up just to fall back down uncns), then picked open a chest, and the guy woke up screaming and ran out the door (it looked like he was scripted to do that) ... and I was very surprised to see it.
Holywhippet on 19/4/2006 at 01:07
I personally think that it would be better if Garrett had some way of inducing sleep rather than a KO. The difference being that a guard might assume they fell asleep because they were bored when they wake up vs. feeling a headache and knowing they were KO'd.
dlw6 on 19/4/2006 at 11:29
Quote:
50 knocked out AI coming back would just be a pain and cause people to shut the game down in frustration: who wants to go to all that trouble again!
I agree that too much AI replenishment can change the game from stealth to FPS-style. Re-spawning AIs can make sense if the story has a reason for it and they come from somewhere besides thin air, like through a series of doors the player can't open.
I tried the SS2 demo and discovered, if I stood in the correct spot, I could watch those zombie things respawn right in front of me. That permanently killed the immersion for me.
Don
Domarius on 19/4/2006 at 13:34
Ah come on. You already KNOW they're respawning. Just because you see it happen a few times doesn't matter when you consider the following;
For me and my brothers, the respawning zombies kept us on the edge of our fricking seats the whole time, rather than the usual Thief situation of having put the entire city to sleep and running around without a care in the world.
Sometimes we'd open up a door we'd already been through and this time there'd be a zombie right there on the other side, screaming and charging at us. It's tension like nothing we've ever experienced.
I think its important, because on the movies, you never see Sigourney Weaver strolling around the hallways confident that she's killed every single last alien.
Why not in a game too? Well, a movie is a story about a few narrow escapes that almost defy beleif. Games work differently - they need to last a long time, and you need to have a reasonable fighting chance, since you don't have the same "luck" the action hero had in the story, you'll just be reloading a lot if its as hard as it was in the movie.
So, to keep that action happening, you need to keep throwing more enemies into the mix.
Vigil on 19/4/2006 at 14:16
System Shock 2's respawning was the right design decision, it was just poorly balanced in many sections of the game. For what it's worth dlw6: the later patch to SS2 fixed the respawning so that it no longer occurs within your field of view (though you may still very occasionally catch it happening if you turn around fast enough), and added in configuration variables that allowed you to tweak the respawn rates.
