ExitApparatus on 16/8/2012 at 05:06

---

Impressive mission, especially the size of the architecture. Good job, guys.

I do think the loot requirement should be a bit lower though, around 4500 perhaps, as proposed before. I solved all the puzzles and found all quest-specific items just fine, but I've been running around your enormous map for 1 or 2 hours now, all guards KO'd, just looking for really obscure loot. Having that there as an option is fine, I just think that level of scouring should be optional, even on Expert.

Otherwise everything felt very fluid, intuitive, natural, no bugs - again, great job guys. Not being able to finish due to the loot requirement does kind of sour it at the end for me, though.

Nightwalker on 10/9/2012 at 19:41

---

I FINALLY got a chance to finish this fantastic mission! It's really well done and great fun to explore. I had to check here for help a few times but for the most part, there were enough clues to figure out what to do. I was stumped for awhile on the evidence objective. I had not found the coroner in the alley so I hadn't gotten the necessary key. Once I had that, it was clear sailing. Thanks very much to both of you for your hard work. I had a blast playing it. :thumb:

baeuchlein on 12/9/2012 at 13:51

---

I know it's almost three months after my last post here, but real life came in between...:(



This is not the case. Comparing Convict.osm from my game (on hard disk and CD) with the one which can be downloaded shows that these are identical on binary level. The date is correct as well.

Meanwhile, I have played the mission again to see whether this bug always happens on my machines, and it did not. The mission did end properly this time. I did modiy the sequence of things I accomplished in the mission a bit, so that might have done the trick. Or maybe not.

Anyway, this strongly suggests that the bug is at least triggered by something the mission "does", although this bug may originate from several other sources (the game, the different machines' hardware drivers, random things, ...) as well. No idea whether one can solve this problem or not - I have not dived too deep into building missions so far.



I cannot nullify that situation afterwards, only reload a saved game. And it is certainly not funny, especially since I did not even know that something went wrong (so much for reloading a saved game). I did not see any indication that I was in the enemies' hideout, either. There was not even any indication that the thief running towards me was having a conversation - the other participants were neither visible nor audible.



What I have learned in my years from playing games is that this is influenced a lot by the game designers. They can do several things to at least make it easier for the player to understand things. Most of the time, that increases the fun for players who don't have enough time to play games over and over again to see whether there's something they did not understand during the previous times. Furthermore, doing the same tasks over and over is not funny but boring for many players. Replay value is influenced by many things, last but not least by the player's preferences, as well as the game designers' choices.



I'm afraid I did not enjoy much of this mission; I just did not want my last post in this thread to sound too negative. But once I began running through the same rooms over and over again, being forced to listen to the annoying victrola music in parts of the town, the fun was over pretty quickly. So, while the mission obviously worked for some people (see Nightwalker's post above, for example), it failed for several others. Fan mission authors will certainly not be able to completely prevent bugs, but they should make an attempt to do so. In my case, running through the mission over and over again without finding anything to do was far from being entertaining in any way. In this case, the objectives' bug was responsible - but that won't give me back the time I invested in this, without getting much back from that.

Confusion, however, arose not from a bug, but from your design choice. You implemented conversations and the situations in which they happened in a way which allowed these conversations to be broken in a very easy way, and sometimes there was no real warning before (or even after) the incident happened.

Other mission authors sometimes put a lot of effort into constructing the situations around their conversations in a way that would not allow the player to break the conversation. Sometimes, Garrett could only trigger the conversation if he was in a particular spot where he would not be seen, so if the player did not make much noise while the AIs were speakting to each other, the conversation would play as intended. On other occasions, authors created invisible walls and other things to even make it impossible for the player to break things.

Maybe you should think about such techniques for important conversations, or implement some kind of warning for the player, like an audible warning from Garrett when he's about to disturb some people. Remember the line "I should be careful, there are likely a few traps around" from one of the original games? Several FM authors used it to warn the player when he/she is about to run into a trap-infested area.

In the end, of course, it still is your mission and your choice. But think about it. For some players, it will mean the difference between a mission they enjoy, and one that remains unfinished because of frustration.

baeuchlein on 13/9/2012 at 13:58

---

My perspective was that I entered some kind of hotel. I was coming from the town side, not from the river, and I think there was something indicating this was a hotel. Some kind of guest list. I went in like any new guest. In theory, this would mean that sneaking would have been suspicious, while behaving like a customer would not. But I think the game mechanics would not allow this; furthermore, since the thieves most likely already knew about Garrett, the one who saw me would have reacted like he did anyway. So it's not a question of thief perspective here.



Sort of, yes. In real life, if I do that, I can hear them speaking. That was not the case in the mission at that point. Apparently, Garrett was too far away to trigger the conversation, but for a short time was directly in the line of sight of this particular thief. (On the other hand, this still is a realistic way in which this situation would proceed, then.)

Also, keep in mind that an author striving for perfect realism will always run into criticism like that. The game just cannot be completely realistic, like any game, and at the same time entertaining - real life itself is not entertaining all the time. On the other hand, would players play a game rather for entertainment or for realism? I think it's somewhere in between - and it's different for any player as well. That does not make it easier for mission autors to exactly hit the right spot, I'm afraid. If there is a "right spot" which is in the same location for any player...

(On the other hand... what about realism and the very loud victrola that could not even be turned off, and would play for hours without stopping? I think someone in town would have tried to stop it from playing. Permanently.:ebil:)



I do not remember it exactly. If you're referring to the in-game maps, yes, I did look at them. But since I ran around aimlessly because of the objectives bug, that did not help.



I did think about that, that's why I tried to prevent my first posting from sounding too negative. It is also the reason why these postings are so long - I try to see both perspectives on these things, mine as well as yours.



Since you spent some time to resolve this problem, that's okay, even if you did not succeed. I have a small program I wrote myself more than ten years ago, and it still has a bug which I have never been able to find. Sometimes, things just don't work in real life. But on the other hand, you certainly cannot expect me to cheer now because the bug in the mission could not be resolved. We'll both have to live with this situation.



Keep in mind that there are different styles of play, even for a thief game. I am far from playing Thief like a first-person shooter (I abandoned that style of playing during the first of more than ten years of playing Thief so far), but there are times in a mission when sneaking is the only way to master a situation, there are times when sneaking is not an option (try to sneak across a chasm instead of jumping over it!:cheeky:), and there are times when sneaking might not be the only way to proceed.

I think our play styles are just very different, so some missions will fit your play style very well, while others rather fit mine.



As I stated in my post, I already replayed it and the bug did not happen. I don't think a third replay would do anything good.

Anyway... By now, I do understand why you implemented the conversations the way you did. I do not lightly forget about the time and effort authors put into their missions either, especially since they do it for free. On the other hand, if this "free entertainment" does not work for a player, then he/she is not going to be happy and write an enthusiastic posting about it. Players expect to be entertained, and when that does not work, they're not happy, not even when it's all for free. So there are consequences, as you said it yourself. If you do not like them, then the only way to avoid these would be not to publish any mission at all.

Don't misunderstand me, I do not wish you to stop publishing missions! But there is no way to publish a mission and being absolutely certain to never get negative criticism. Accept it. This is a very harsh truth, but that's the way it is. So, don't stop building missions - but expect some criticism even if you did anything you could to provide players with something worth their time. Every now and then, it just won't work. That's life, for any author. He has to accept it, and the player has to accept, likewise, that he/she may not like some mission because of bugs, because of the mission not fitting his/her preferred style of play, and so on.

Taffy Mug on 6/10/2012 at 16:34

---

Thanks for the great mission, I absolutely loved it!
What I liked the most is that in the end I was able to navigate to any place easily, like walking my home town streets. Thanks to reasonable and distinguishable architecture and extremely helpful maps.
Mission authors, please do add some maps!
Thanks again, darthsLair!