Randy Smith interview posted at EvilAvatar...

Vigo on 17/7/2006 at 05:41

Quote Posted by Tony

I didn't mean the smoke, I meant the lighting in all dark areas. There was no true blackness in the game, the darkest shadows were merely a very dark blue. This was even advertised by Ion Storm as somehow being a positive aspect.

I really don't get all the complaining about the blue shadows by some people. Turn the gamma down to 6 and you'll get shadows as dark as you could like, while not effecting your ability to play the game. I really don't see how this can be a big enough problem to gripe about.

Alvar on 17/7/2006 at 06:18

Those climbing gloves were mechanicaly sound, which is a big plus, but why werent they used to greater effect in the city? It seems like without rope arrows you would want to highlight what is left to work with. I barely used them in missions too though. I just thought the climbing gloves could have taken more of a role in the thief toolset. Escpecially if they were in development from the start!

sparhawk on 17/7/2006 at 08:17

Quote Posted by Krypt

The animations themselves looked ok to me with a few exceptions,

Hmmm ... The first time I started TDS and I saw the animations I immediately thought that they were walking as if they had a stick in their spine. They didn't look natural or good to me. Well, it was not really a big problem, because I got used to it after a while, but this was definitely one of the less good animations in a game.

Quote:

The blue smoke was a convention meant to show the player where the map transitions are.

I think what he means is not the transition fog but rather the art direction going into these bluish maps direction. I guess there is not much around that fog and since you have to switch the map somehwere (using the deisng you ended up with) this was at least a good solution. The better solution would have been to make dynamic map loading like Gothic or other games do, but of course this is a much higher effort and also needs to be planned to be supported by the engine.

Quote:

Prior to their implementation there was no way to tell where a map transition was, becase it was usually just a normal-looking hallway. This was very confusing for new players because they would just walk down a hall and hit a map transition and wonder where it came from.

That would have definitely been worse. :) I remember from playing Might And Magic 4/5 that it was always annoying when you crossed a border of the map segement. You didn't see it indicated beforehand. So when you run into it you got a dialog asking if you wanted to switch to the next segment. And unfortunately any other key then the no key was accepted. Which means that you could easily accidently cross over if you moved to fast in one direction. Pretty annoying, so I guess the fog was ok for that puipose.

Quote:

Incorrect. It was planned since pre-production to have both climbing gloves and rope arrows.

Intersting. :) I think most of us thought that they were thrown in as an afterthought because the arrow didn't work out. but if it was planned, I wonder why they were implemented so poorly. I think while playteting it should have been obvious that they are not so good. Or you could have asked us for an opinion ... :ebil: :)

Vigil on 17/7/2006 at 08:24

Quote Posted by Goldmoon Dawn

It is for the first time obvious to me that your main concern here is to attack me. You win. I'm not gonna sit here and try to take part in some strange TTLG fact finding argument. I already told you.

If hostility is all you are after, you are barking up the wrong tree.

Gestalt wasted a lot of breath arguing patiently and clearly with you. The last thing he was after was to attack you, and to say so is to do him a disservice - an especially pompous one when your only intention in doing so appears to be to attempt to back out without losing face by acting wounded and accusing someone else of being antagonising.
I, on the other hand, genuinely am only here to attack you. Spot the difference.

Tony on 17/7/2006 at 20:25

Quote Posted by sparhawk

Hmmm ... The first time I started TDS and I saw the animations I immediately thought that they were walking as if they had a stick in their spine. They didn't look natural or good to me.

Not only in their spines, but in their arms and legs as well! They did not seem to have any secondary joints. The effect was reminiscent of a cheap marionette. Compare them with the realistic motion-captured animations of the Looking Glass games. It's sad. But thank you, Krypt, for explaining and putting up with complaining.

Goldmoon Dawn on 17/7/2006 at 21:10

Quote Posted by Vigil

I, on the other hand, genuinely am only here to attack you. Spot the difference.

Oh please, I knew (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106444&page=4&p=1463132) that a long time ago.

You don't scare me, Vigil.

In fact, you remind me of my older brother when we were younger. I used to blast a boombox outside the bathroom door while he was taking a dump.

Quote Posted by Vigil

has made me clench my fists so hard in frustration there's nailmarks in my palm.

:p

At least the stuff I post has to do with the glory of the games and company, not my own ego!

Apparently, I'm programmed to spout off about LGS and Dark Project. I feel that I've always maintained my sense of humour, even in the darker times.

I'm surprised you would take me seriously.

And way to use Gestalt as a thinly veiled attack on some dumb fanatic.

Is that a Dark Project thread I hear calling? Oops. Gotta run.

Goldmoon Dawn on 17/7/2006 at 21:33

And dear Gestalt. I finally got around to reading through all that stuff, and it was good. Very good. But this part in particular made me laugh when I thought of some of the memories.

Quote Posted by Gestalt

before further unveiling your discoveries to the world.

My first game ever was when I was 5. My uncle gave us a trs80 with a game. It happened to be a 1st person dungeon crawl with wireframe monochrome. That was 79'.

The next few years saw the birth of Wizardry and the rest is crpg history. I may not be a programmer or whathaveyou, but I know rpgs about as good as one can. I "grew up" with them. That includes all the consoles.

That, my friend, is my only point of reference.

Understand?

Eye on 17/7/2006 at 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alvar
Those climbing gloves were mechanicaly sound, which is a big plus, but why werent they used to greater effect in the city? It seems like without rope arrows you would want to highlight what is left to work with. I barely used them in missions too though. I just thought the climbing gloves could have taken more of a role in the thief toolset. Escpecially if they were in development from the start!

i agree.

the absence of rope arrows didn't bother me as much as it did a lot of people, and i think it's because i felt that the rope arrow's greatness in the first two games owed more to the general design of the levels than it did the rope arrows themselves. they were novel and fun to use, but they were great because they introduced a whole different way of approaching a particular environment (moving through it or interacting with the AI's).

when the rope arrows were at their best it was in the kind of large, open-ended gameplay spaces that i found noticably lacking in the much smaller, more linear TDS (presumably because of the engine's limitions). i wouldn't argue that you couldn't get anything out of rope arrows in TDS, just that i really never felt i was playing a game in which they'd be anything other than a way of getting from point A to point B.

all this seemed to me to be validated by how little the climbing gloves added to the game. even setting aside the issue of whether the gloves had the potential to do what rope arrows could do, it's clear that in a different game or with more time they could have done more than they did. hell, i would have been happy to settle for using them to get a birds-eye view of an area or spy on guards, but the damn body awareness made it impossible to do anything but look at garrett's shoulder or inspect the grouting between the stones and think, "oh yeah, this is why i don't use these things."

i'd be curious to know whether gloves and rope arrows, back when they were both in, were conceived to do exactly the same thing, overlap but with different strengths or be totally differentiated.

Aegeri on 18/7/2006 at 03:13

Quote Posted by demagogue

So I can imagine in this situation how Randy could have been de facto being pushed out of a position, I mean, "Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run" inverts the whole development hierarchy from top-down planning to bottom-up crisis-control, consistent with what Randy was saying in his interview. I guess the lesson here (?), is that it shows how a few mis-steps at the start of a development process can really explode in your face if you don't get things under control from early on (e.g., choosing to stick with Unreal Engine and keeping the design agenda on a realistic track). Oh, the first part of Krypt's post is also interesting because it suggests that it wasn't really anyone's explicit fault why they fell into the problem (with Flesh), and not even a bad calculation per se. It was more path-dependent. They wanted real-time shadows, a programmer gave it to them in a new engine, and only later did they find out the engine was crippling but now they're out of time. What can you do? I guess be more authoritative and clamp down on the seams of the project so things like this can't slip through the net (?).

You know, it's reading things like this even many months later after the fact that get my blood boiling. I was infinitely disappointed with both Deus Ex: IW and Thief 3 and the fact the consolisation process had such a lot to do with it really does miff me no end. They should have stuck to basic principals, either making a specific PC only version or doing one designed for a console and another for the PC. It sounds like they wasted just as much man-power figuring out how to get the thing working in a limited environment as they would of making something specific to begin with.

I love most of all, after many months down the track how Warren Spector and many other of the developers changed their tune from a defensive one to the new "well obviously it was screwed up" one. I still recall when Warren Spector was proclaiming that PC gamers just didn't 'get' Deus Ex: IW and yet now sings a different tune.

Hypocrite.

Also

Quote Posted by Zylonbane

I will readily acknowledge that the developers of Invisible War and Deadly Shadows took huge risks by making significant changes to games that were both supposed to be sequels. But will Warren acknowledge that this was exceptionally stupid and hubristic of them?

Ion Storm had two of the most-beloved properties in the game industry, and handed them to newbie design teams that thought they could do better instead of just following what was already there.

Exactly.

cacka on 20/7/2006 at 14:45

Quote Posted by Krypt

The blue smoke was a convention meant to show the player where the map transitions are.

I prefered the method they used in RTCW. Whenever there was an oncoming map transition a small icon appeared in the top right of your hud (IIRC). I think Arx Fatalis had something similar. Maybe a couple of other shooters too. Certainly a more elegent, less obtrusive solution :)