piln on 20/10/2009 at 02:03
First of all, THANKS. This is a great thing to have fall into my lap, totally undeserved, for free. Your hard work is appreciated.
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones, as it runs mostly trouble-free for me. I have had a couple of CTDs, but these were not repeatable (and I'm literally talking two crashes in two days of playing all three FMs + training). 1920x1200, everything on/full - looks gorgeous :cheeky: My only repeatable crash is this: Outpost crashes on Mission Complete. It doesn't go to the post-mission menu, it goes straight from in-game fade-out to this error message on my desktop:
Code:
WARNING: idClipModel::FreeTraceModel: tried to free uncached trace model
--------------------------------------
********************
ERROR: idPVS::FreeCurrentPVS: invalid handle
********************
0 0 1920 1200
Regenerated world, staticAllocCount = 0.
--------- Game Map Shutdown ----------
--------------------------------------
Shutting down sound hardware
idRenderSystem::Shutdown()
Shutting down OpenGL subsystem
...wglMakeCurrent( NULL, NULL ): success
...deleting GL context: success
...releasing DC: success
...destroying window
...shutting down QGL
...unloading OpenGL DLL
------------ Game Shutdown -----------
--------- Game Map Shutdown ----------
--------------------------------------
Shutdown event system
--------------------------------------
idPVS::FreeCurrentPVS: invalid handle
This does not happen with the other two FMs.
Another technical issue: I have an old Sound Blaster Live! with 4.1 speakers; I am not able to select Surround Sound ("no surround speakers detected") or EAX ("no EAX hardware found"). Speakers are set up correctly in Creative control panel (windows audio properties lists them as "quadrophonic speakers"), and it all works fine in other games (positional sound is superb in Thief 2, EAX works correctly). My sound card just too old? :p
Some observations & comments, I know some may seem trivial (at least at this stage) so feel free to ignore ;) :
Body handling: This is the one thing that bothered me most. First, the ability to shoulder a body with the "Use" key is
seriously under-publicised, as is the fact that you can then turn a body over to reveal pickable items still on the belt. I've followed the mod's news fairly closely, played Thief's Den and St. Lucia, and since 1.0 release I had played the full training mission, Outpost and most of Chalice - and up to that point I had
no idea you could do either of these things. They should both be in the training mission (if I missed a text explaining this then I apologise, but even so I think this should be actually demonstrated, not just described). It's important: in Chalice, I knew I was missing several keys and suspected they might be on blackjacked AI, but not knowing this functionality I searched and did not find. I could not progress, and it affected my opinion of the mission. I only found what I needed to know by chance in a forum; I've since replayed the mission and enjoyed it a great deal, I think it's the best of the three. If you plan to update the training mission,
please add in a task that requires turning a body over to recover an item (I'd suggest first having to drag it out from under a bed - this will teach the two body-handling modes
and the turn-over in one task).
On aesthetics: a body-over-my-shoulder graphic would be much nicer than the the current "two hands" indicator IMO.
Movement: it seems as though player movement is "all or nothing", meaning from stationary I push W and go instantly to full walking speed (or SHIFT+W instantly goes to 100% running speed, etc) with no gradual acceleration. Have I got this right (if there
is gradual acceleration, it's so slight that I can't detect it)? I think there ought to be some inertia to the movement to regain a similar feel to Dark Engine. A small amount of accel/decel, if this is possible, would feel better, smoother.
Random question: it seems analogue movement (for joystick/gamepad control) has never been supported by Doom3. Is this something that you have any interest in addressing for Dark Mod?
Footsteps: Sorry, you must be sick of it, but I'll echo what others have said just to add another vote here :) Player footsteps are generally a bit too loud on hard surfaces. I think the main problem, though, is not volume but the "sharpness" of the sounds (I'm no audiophile so I don't know the best terms to describe it). They're very harsh. I think the AI footsteps do the job OK for now, except for tile - player & AI both, it sounds awful (sorry). For player sounds, I think soften them up a bit and adjust the volume for some - on stone, for example, I can crouch-walk quite close to AI and not be heard, but the noise
I'm hearing is not nearly quiet enough (it makes it hard to believe I'm getting away with it!). Then again, player carpet and metal sounds seem OK as they are, so each needs addressing separately. I've noticed in Thief 2, player's footsteps are a fair bit quieter than AI's on any given surface; this works well for realism (I'm sneaking, they're not) and game balance (so my footsteps won't drown out AI's; unfortunately this
is happening in TDM at present - try walking on Chalice's 2nd floor while listening to the two guards who patrol here - it's very hard to distinguish your footsteps from theirs).
A question related to sounds and movement: what determines the footstep sound I make? Is it the actual "measured" speed of movement through the world, or is it the speed state as determined by keyboard input (eg, creep, walk, run, crouch/creep, etc)?
A couple of things about AI: What makes them turn their heads to look at certain things? At one point a low-level alerted AI appeared to be staring
right at me while I hid in darkness, which was just awesome. Unfortunately, I've noticed another AI get his head "stuck" looking up and to the side and he walks around like that all the time. He looks a right nutter! :D
In general, I have a feeling AI is a little too sensitive,
but I haven't experimented enough to give useful feedback and I've only played on Expert so far.
Some control issues: I guess you know you've got quite a lot of keys to map, and you need to take great care to keep it intuitive and as streamlined as possible. My first issue concerns body handling - when I have a body shouldered, my frob key doesn't do anything (nor attack). I have to hit "Use item" to drop the body, and this is kind of muddled and contradictory in the overall control scheme. In general we are used to frob picking things up and dropping them - I don't see any potential conflict here, so for consistency's sake frob should drop a shouldered body. "Attack" should drop a body too. "Use item" ought to toggle the body between dragged and shouldered states rather than dropping it, if that's possible.
I was going to go onto streamlining issues (along the lines of combinations like "manipulate" and "block" sharing a key - a good thing), I have a feeling "use item," "manipulate" and "drop" could be streamlined into a more intuitive system with fewer keys, seems more fussy than it really needs to be atm. I started to type and quickly saw it's an issue that needs a lot of thought, time and words to address so I'll leave it for now :)
Another couple of points:
* Not being able to jump with a body shouldered is fair. But I do think you should still be able to mantle (perhaps limit mantling to waist-high objects while carrying a body, if it's possible to make that distinction).
* Chests! The chests in Outpost have frobbable lids; the chests in the other two missions are frobbable all over, and highlighting items inside them can be a real pain in the arse. I would love it if all chests were like the ones in Outpost (ie, only frobabble on the lid).
OK, hope you'll take all of that as constructive feedback and not complaints. The mod is an incredible piece of work and I can't wait to see what's to come. I wanted to save something positive for the end: I really have to praise the lockpicking system. I admit, on reading the description I didn't think it sounded so great, but in practise it works brilliantly - I have already found myself in tense race-against-time situations, as in Thief 1&2, but knowing that my skill and composure make a difference really raise it to another level. And the sound-only situation described in training is a stroke of genius.
Oh and btw, I have had no trouble at all with water arrows. The bow is a little tricky to aim, but aside from that my water arrows have behaved intuitively and predictably - I'm not consciously treating them any different to Dark Engine water arrows. It's puzzling that reports have been so mixed.
Anyway... thanks again. :thumb:
