Koki on 15/2/2012 at 20:46
Every Thief player worth his salt deals with marble and steel using stutterwalking, which allows you to move completely silent and yet only slightly slower than normal. But stutterwalking is borderline engine exploit, and seeing Khad's recent failures made me wonder - how developers wanted the player to deal with marble and steel surfaces?
Moss arrows - far too few of them, would need to use them in only extremely key locations.
Avoid the marble - uh cool story bro, at the very least you'd miss out on crapload of loot.
Blackjack - is the marble problem only a problem because we ghost?
wonderfield on 16/2/2012 at 01:48
I'd like to think that LGS would have 'fixed' stutterwalking if they considered its use to be exploitative. After all, what would the side effects of accumulating the steps from the beginning of, say, mission load as opposed to the beginning of a player move be? Nothing, right? Tight vertical nooks would be tough to negotiate, but they're tough to negotiate as it is.
One other possibility you didn't mention is distraction, e.g. noise arrows, or just blatant luring. Get an AI somewhere where he/she/it can't hear the marble and you can dance on it all you'd like (for a brief time, or permanantly if you can trap an AI).
jtr7 on 16/2/2012 at 02:11
There are a lot of things they could've fixed but didn't. Crate-stacking isn't a feature, but it may as well be. Circle-strafing is cheesy and obviously not a tool made by the devs for the purpose of winning in combat. Keyholing, object elevatoring, rope-bounce, and AI/door-leaning were not tools, nor bugs fixed later, like bunny-hopping, placing crates as anchors for rope arrows, zombies and other AIs following the player-character into water, and avoiding AIs by jumping on tables. Exploits are still exploits, and the bugs are still bugs. At least moving slower in increments isn't nearly as unrealistic as moving silently and smoothly in a crouched position, wearing armor and carrying equipment and a loot sack, is.
The devs didn't invent or force ghosting the way players have done, so of course they didn't intend the marble floors to be dealt with without shadows, patrol timing, alternate routes, or rope and moss arrows. Again, without the player-invented ghosting rules, the games are playable as laid out, hints are given before missions, preceding missions give practice areas without calling them that outright, so any Thief player worth his/her salt shouldn't treat their own made-up impositions as the devs' fault. The objectives and loadout store and readables up front give major clues about how to play a particular map, and ghosting is never officially applicable to all OMs. You don't' have to use your equipment in almost every mission, so if you're using up your moss arrows and not using ropes to get off the floor altogether, it's not the devs' fault, just expectations they never had in mind.
If you choose to ghost a mission that was not designed at all with ghosting in mind, be prepared to use exploits and a lot of extra time moving through spaces.
Azaran on 16/2/2012 at 05:48
That's when airborne blackjacking comes in handy. There's a guard in a tiled area, if I'm close enough to him I'll lunge and blackjack him. It usually means 1 or 2 noisy footsteps, but the time gap between them and me blackjacking him are too short to allow him to fully realize what's going on. But I agree, it makes ghosting a lot harder if you don't have moss arrows handy.
When it comes to stutter walking, I don't really see it as a bug, it's more like silent creeping, but it doesn't always work every time.
wonderfield on 16/2/2012 at 16:33
Quote Posted by jtr7
There are a lot of things they could've fixed but didn't.
I understand that. What matters is
why they were not fixed. Some were due to time constraints; others were very likely left unfixed intentionally. 'Stutterwalking' is an exploit only if it belonged to the former set of issues: issues which could not be resolved due to time/complexity constraints.
cast on 16/2/2012 at 20:41
There's a third category: they never thought of it as a tool to be abused. Simple as that.
I actually believe that stutter walking is by all means acceptable, even if it happens to be an exploit - it's merely a solution to the faultiness of the engine. I mean, how hard can it be to just slide silently instead of raising one's feet and thundering with every step? Thief doesn't allow that. Players' creativity does ;)
wonderfield on 16/2/2012 at 21:06
I find it pretty unlikely that it never dawned on anyone at LGS that you could pass over surfaces silently by letting go of a move key every couple world units, and that players would use it as a means to negotiate those surfaces.
R Soul on 17/2/2012 at 20:12
Creep and 'walk slowly' is also completely silent, and not an exploit, though it is slower than stutterwalking. I see the two of them as the equivalent of putting your feet down very carefully.
theBlackman on 17/2/2012 at 21:43
The game is one where the player needs to learn the way to move, and develop SKILL to move. None of this automatic enhancement crap. You learn your limits, the limits of the character and the game engine or you DIE!
Out witting the designers, whether they knew or even cared has nothing to do with it. THIEF is one game where the player is the primary limit setter. You learn to play the game, don't worry about "beating" it, and, as AZALS posts have shown, stretch your imagination and figure it out.
Boxsmith on 23/2/2012 at 21:08
IIRC you can traverse marble surfaces silently using the creep key. There'll still be footsteps, but NPCs are unlikely to pick up on them. I could be wrong though, it's been a while.
I don't see the problem with stutter walking, though. I see it as one of those unintentional bits of added mechanical depth -- the kind of thing that made Brood War great. Think Vulture micro and Mutalisk stacking.
