platz on 14/9/2010 at 15:29

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is there any use for the rope arrow found in the exhibition room ?

Xiaopang on 6/1/2011 at 15:46

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Just playing this gem and I'm pleasantly surprised. Well done! I liked the cinematic flight in the first mission and the overall design of the levels, especially the city in mission 2. I also liked the desks and the fact that each compartment could be opened. I also ran into some bugs and before I forget them, I want to list them. It goes without saying that there are major spoilers ahead:

- Download from (http://www.marcuszuhr.com/NHAT/NHAT.zip) also stopped at 120Mb for me. Using a download manager circumvented the prob and the archive works well. Looks like a server problem to me.

- Mission 1; Experienced a save bug. I quicksaved seconds before ending the mission. Reloading it automatically failed the "Don't kill anyone" task after like 3 seconds. After a couple of more loads, I got to a mission stats screen (despite still failing the mission) where it showed me that I had killed 3 guys, although I only knocked them out. From a layman's perspective this looks like the knockout took almost all the NPC's life points. Upon spawning them during save-load, they usually drop to the ground, or may be even from the air and so possibly taking extra damage that pushes them over the edge to death. Just an unproven theory...

- Another save bug: crash during quicksave. No guard was alerted and the save was destroyed.

- Mission 2: The attic of the house in that you start contains some bags at the window. Jumping on those almost got me stuck.

- You can pass through the bath tub and several ovens in said house. Seems there is no hit detection for those assets.

- In the tavern upstairs in front of the locked door you can lean right into the wall. You can see into the locked room and if you do it too long the game crashes. The room itself contains a black box under the desk. Is that one of those used for cinematics? May be you could place them somewhere where people can't get.

- Sound propagation bugs: "Kutty with a K"'s sound isn't altered if the player moves around. Same goes for sounds when you're under water, but that might be an engine issue. Btw, I'm using TDM 1.03.

- Many of the ledges are not climbable. If that's not a bug then this is certainly no nice tease.

- If you follow the ledge that lets you access the window to the guard watch post to the corner then you fall right through it, even though it looks solid. Also, if you turn around on that corner you can get stuck permanently in the wall without a way to get out.

- Once inside the guard post the only way out seems to be out the window you came in, but without a rope arrow that's hard to do. If I'm supposed to find one on the way then I didn't. How about placing one in the blacksmith's shop? Anyway, I made it back out thanks to some exotic moves which seemed to border on buggy behavior. If I'm supposed to do it that way, then a better placement of assets would be great so that it doesn't take 5 minutes to do that.

- Accessing the sewers and cleaning out the stash there before actually getting the objective still displays a "Objective completed message"

- Despite playing on hardest difficulty where you need 1600 loot to fulfill the objective, it got ticked off at 1300.

- Spelling mistakes in mission 3: One objective spells Archibald "Arcibald". Another one says "find more then one piece of evidence" instead of "than". A book in Archibald's room contains the word "receive" spelled "recieve".



A few small things I didn't like:

- Invisible walls. This is so 90s and just a bad design choice in my book. There's no reason to resort to that. There's always a way to use clever level design to prevent the player from straying off. The tunnel with the invisible wall right next to the ship in Mission 2 that serves as the exit immediately put me off since I tried to get through it right at the beginning. It could have been closed off with a door, or a gate and later opened with a key or a puzzle or an ingame event. I also found it disappointing that I couldn't swim around the ship. You could have used a fence to close off the beach or something similar to keep this more natural. The invisible walls on the tavern were also a major letdown. Access to the ship would have been nice. I checked it out in noclip mode and it does look pretty nice.

- The video quality of the roq-files is abysmal. I know that the video codec isn't the most powerful, but the quality was just as bad as those indeo-cinematics of Thief 1. Even worse, the video for mission 1 contains two video corruptions, one even in the middle of the screen. On the other hand I have to congratulate you on the idea of using the menu animation as part of the cinematics. The quality is superb and the style goes well with the overall look of TDM. IMO you should have completely used this style instead of wasting 50% of the mission's file size on 3 minutes of video in questionable quality with little to no gain to the mission itself.

If you need help achieving better quality videos then I might be able to help you. Just drop me a line. I'm currently experimenting with roq myself and none of my test-encodes look as terrible as yours.

- The sound quality for the recordings of the hero is pretty bad.

- Quoting a religious verse in the beginning of a video is already too cliche in my opinion, but it's something that you'd expect from an FM in thief-style. Quoting half a book like in the mission 1 video is rather boring and you lost me after the second verse. I know some people can't get enough of these pointless pseudo-theological verses, but I'd rather get to the beef of the story quickly.

Anyway, keep up the good work :)

Xiaopang on 7/1/2011 at 08:48

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That's what I feared.




I've been using the latest ffmpeg for the task. Not much you can do there to influence filesize and quality effectively since roq doesn't allow for advanced video features such as B and P-frames ans well as frame prediction which would keep the size way down.




Thanks for pointing that out! I had never heard of OverDose before. It looks like they are working directly with the Quake 2 source, something that the TDM-Team certainly doesn't have access to for Doom 3, so no wonder that they could modify the roq-decoder to accept 720p and other improvements.

The original roq is limited to resolutions that are a multiple of 2, meaning your width and height may have values such as 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 etc. So you can make videos with a size of 512x512 (like this mission does), or you can up it to 1024x1024, or mix and match: 1024x512.

I doubt that the OD-roqs would run in Doom 3, but it certainly would be cool. Too bad the link to their SDK on their official page times out, so I couldn't verify that myself. You don't happen to know where else I could get it? Google didn't spit out another download location.




Amen.

Springheel on 9/3/2011 at 21:11

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I had trouble getting out of there too, although for some reason many people didn't. I forget what their advice was, but in a pinch you can always pull down the console and type "noclip" to go through the walls.

Springheel on 9/3/2011 at 23:21

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Here's where I asked originally: (http://modetwo.net/darkmod/index.php?/topic/10993-fan-mission-no-honor-among-thieves-20100429/page__view__findpost__p__225727)