Elentari on 19/11/2009 at 04:59
I've never really used the orb either. A few times, mostly out of curiosity, or once or twice in a fit of 'oh, I keep getting these, I really should find a use for them.' So I use it a time or two, then forget it again.
But then, I am one of those players who actually uses very little equipment. Blackjack, of course, rope arrows and some water arrows. But the rest I tend to hoard and save up - for a need that rarely comes. Unless I hit an FM that has a tough spot, then I might go through my equipment and figure out what I can use to get by. But thats not the norm.
I can definitely see *uses* for the scouting orb, but I've never been in a spot where its actually been that useful or needed. Listening usually does just fine.
As to the person who said the guards wear boots louder than Garrett's. . .its fairly common to hear of soldiers (in olden times anyway) wearing 'hobnailed' boots that were quite loud on hard surfaces. I'm not entirely sure what hobnails are, or why they were used, but often in stories and historical books they are mentioned as being quite loud. I suppose the idea is that they weren't expected to sneak around.
And now. . .I have to go find out what hobnails are. lol
sparhawk on 19/11/2009 at 08:01
Quote Posted by KoHaN69
If a guard sees a the player in the mirror, could he pursue/investigate?
Is it possible for this feature to be be implanted in DarkMod? :idea:
Actually I had some ideas how to implement some things which would allow the AI to better detect the player in some special cases. The major problem is performance though, because this all costs dearly. Another issue is that the AI has a slight advantage anyway, because if it were not dumbed down you would have a hard time beating it. After all it can always know where the player is, so you have to make it "dumber" without cheating to much and/or make it look stupid.
We also had the mirror on the stick idea. This can be easily implemented. You wouldn't even need the SDK for that and can easily do it in scripts. The real problem is though the renderengine. A mirror requires an additional renderpass, because basically it is an extra monitor. Another problem is that if you happen to watch another mirror with the mirror then the engine will crash because it will go into a recursion. This can not easily solved and without access to the renderengine it can not be solved at all.
Quote Posted by jtr7
In discussions about mirrors, unless technology has made the processing feasible (effectively doubling the power needed to render the visible areas twice, including space behind the camera), doesn't it still require having two spaces fully built (as far as the mirror angles can allow one to see), that are physically mirror images? Since there are no photons in virtual worlds, has fast real time virtual rendering become possible? Don't games still have lag and framerate issues as is because the devs keep packing details into scenes, never letting the renderer breathe?
Erm, mirrors in games are no problem for a long time. Doom 3 can do it and in fact I used a mirror when I developed the lightgem in TDM to finetune the model that we use for the lightgem light processing. And Doom 3 is already many years old, and even before that you already had shiny reflective surfaces in other games. The rendering is not THAT big a problem as computers are already fast enough for multiple renderings within one frame. For example our lightgem uses additional renderpasses of the whole scene to determine the lightlevel that is falling on the player in real time. We did some optimisations for slower systems, but even on my old machine, which was a Pentium 2GHz, I didn't really need them.
So technically mirrors are not really a problem, even though they create some other issues as explained above.
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A virtual mirror requires trickery (extra terrain-building, meaning less level size, since there are still limits on how many brushes and objects are allowed, and the fact that the room built to mirror the one the player is in eats into that count) or a separate screen to eliminate the need to build two spaces.
A mirror in a game is simply an additional camera which is placed where the mirrorsurface is looking at. So technically the same limitations apply which apply to the renderengine anyway. A mirrorsurface is bascially similar as if you had a second smaller monitor installed.
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Don't get me wrong, I'd
love to see mirrors, but they are limited and the extra image requires careful planning to keep processing and terrain-building numbers at safe levels.
The only thing that you really need to take care of is that mirrors shouldn't reflect each other, because this is hard to detect and will crash ayn renderengine.
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Ever since
Duke Nukem 3D, I've been surprised at the lack of mirrors in newer games, until I learned why. I know people are working on it, and there are demos showing small real time renderings--small ones.
Maybe your information is as old as Thief 1? Modern games feature mirrors as it is nothing special. ;)
sparhawk on 19/11/2009 at 08:40
Links to what?
As for your laptop, I don't consider a laptop as a good reference for computing power, unless it was designed with gamers in mind, which many laptops are not.
As for trickery, I don't think that rendering a seperate pass is really trickery, it's just a different method of simulating how the photons arrive at the scene. :)
AFAIK there are a projects for real time raytracing, but the major problem is the computing power. Whith such a renderengine you can make photorealistic renderings in games, but the other problem would be that the scene description is totally different from now. So current 3D grafic card technology would have to be completely replaced. The big adavante though is that this technology is much better scalabel then current 3D scene setups, so such an engine could really make good use of multiple CPUs.
jtr7 on 19/11/2009 at 09:18
Links to examples of mirror effects in newer games that aren't hard on a typical machine, are what I'd like to take a look at, since I don't know what areas in the games you know of have them.
It's not a reflection, and it's not a mirror at all in any sense, so yes, trickery.
And it is as you say, processing intensive, which was my point, including my laptop example, old as it is. Higher specs all around and my system chokes. And not all those who come here asking why the games lag on their 2008 and 2009 systems are on laptops. How can I ensure a new system will play nice with a new or older game before buying both? Why only TDS? What's the issue in a laptop that those machines are to be dismissed out of hand? Why can a console run smooth with large mirrors, as with flooring? Has something been cut back to make it easy on the processing?
Anyway, since I don't care for body-awareness or third-person in Thief, mirrors--nice as they would be in and of themselves--would create another excuse to have them.:erg:
The Shroud on 19/11/2009 at 09:33
Thanks for clearing all that up, sparhawk. I guess this means a mirror on a stick (or just a hand-held mirror) wouldn't be a problem to implement as long as there are no other mirrors around. Or, how about this - the hand-held mirror's physical model could have a non-reflective silvery texture, but its camera's view could be rendered to the player only, so there'd be no danger of a reflective surface (like a polished floor) reflecting what the camera actually sees. Would that work?
sparhawk on 19/11/2009 at 10:04
Quote Posted by jtr7
Links to examples of mirror effects in newer games that aren't hard on a typical machine, are what I'd like to take a look at, since I don't know what areas in the games you know of have them.
I don't know of any particular links. But for example you can look in the original Doom 3 game if you have it. I seem to remember that when you enter the cleaning chamber right at the start, you could see a weak reflection of your player model in the glass. There are also several maps which include toilets and there are mirrors above the sinks. I'm not aware of other games with mirrors, but that is because I haven't followed games for some time and only played a few. And those few had no need of mirrors. Maybe there were reflections on the water surfaces, but I don't particularly remember it because I was not specifically looking for it. The Doom 3 references I only remember because 1) we discussed the mirror on a stick idea, and 2) I used it as a visual feedback for my development. ;) So if you don't believe that I can't help you anyway and at least in Doom 3 you can see for yourself.
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It's not a reflection, and it's not
a mirror at all in any sense, so yes, trickery.
So whats a reflection??? It's just a different viewpoint. And that's what a mirror is about but that's only words.
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Higher specs all around and my system chokes. And not all those who come here asking why the games lag on their 2008 and 2009 systems are on laptops.
Well, obviously even a newer computer can have an older gfx card, and since this is a feature that runs mostly on the gfx card, it will heavily depend on the performance of it.
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How can I ensure a new system will play nice with a new or older game before buying both? Why only TDS?
TDS was badly done, so I wouldn't count it as a reference. There is no way to ensure that a particular game runs good on your particular machine. In worst case you have to test it. That's what demos are for as well.
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What's the issue in a laptop that those machines are to be dismissed out of hand? Why can a console run smooth with large mirrors, as with flooring? Has something been cut back to make it easy on the processing?
I don't dismiss laptops out of hand, because I have on that I also use for playing, and it runs Doom 3 quite fine. But laptops are designed to be portable and work without a power connection, so of course there are differences which take less power but result in worse performance on high end games. Since several years there are already a lot of laptops also designed for gamers, whith higher end gfx, because the market changed such that gamers started to use laptops as well. And of course there is the issue with heat and space in the laptop so those cards are differently designe which all result in different performance requirements.
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Anyway, since I don't care for body-awareness or third-person in
Thief, mirrors--nice as they would be in and of themselves--would create another excuse to have them.:erg:
The only requirement for a mirror would be to have a player model. Of course you don't strictly need it, but it would look strange if you stand in front of it and don't see anything. :) unless Garrett is a vampire ... :eww:
Quote Posted by The Shroud
Thanks for clearing all that up, sparhawk. I guess this means a mirror on a stick (or just a hand-held mirror) wouldn't be a problem to implement as long as there are no other mirrors around.
Implementing that is rather easy. I think with our object manipulation system it could even be useable as you can fully control it. It's the side effects that can make it problematic.
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Or, how about this - the hand-held mirror's physical model could have a non-reflective silvery texture, but its camera's
view could be rendered to the player only, so there'd be no danger of a reflective surface (like a polished floor) reflecting what the camera actually sees. Would that work?
In order for a mirror to work you have to do a full renderpass from the perspective of the mirror surface. There is no way around that. For a specific map this can be implemented, because the mapper has full control over the content of the map. For a toolset as TDM is, it shouldn't be provided because it can easily crash it and there is no way around it. The player has no way of knowing that around the corner might be a mirror placed if he plays a map for the first time, so there is absolutely no chance for a player to avoid it without foresight. He might not even realize that the crash is due to a mirror reflecting itself and blame it on bad code instead. ;)
jtr7 on 19/11/2009 at 11:55
Nice response! Thanks!
I know Doom (3?) had at least one mirror moment, because the Doom movie had an homage to that moment, so I read. I saw the movie and that little scene, but took their word that it was borrowed right from the game.
I think of a mirror as an object that reflects light rays, not the reflected rays themselves, not the image.
sparhawk on 19/11/2009 at 12:01
Definitely Doom3 only. Doom 1+2 didn't have mirrors as they also didn't feature a real 3D engine anyway. That's why you couldn't look up/down there. Quake was the first with a full 3D engine but AFAIK not even in Quake 2 they had mirrors. Now that I think of it, it might be that mirrors were alread possible or done in Quake 3 but don't nail me on that one. :) Q3 was multiplayer only anyway, so I might missremember some shiny surfaces for reflections.
