clearing on 6/10/2008 at 05:44
Sorry, Vraptor7.
gunsmoke on 6/10/2008 at 12:20
Dude, twist, relax. You are way too obsessed w/this crazy logic path you started yourself down. It's tiring to wade through all of your muck. You most certainly had to consider light, sound, AND line-of-sight. They all played a role, however small.
Back on topic:Auto-heal? Will suck. Third person was primarily used in Riddick because they wanted to show off their awesome animation and models. It was immersion-breaking there, and it will be in DX3. And this crap about making the weapon skill based on my skill is stupid. It's just going to play like every other shooter, then. Not DX. The only weapon upgrades are going to be add-ons like bigger clips, stocks, and sights. No more accuracy, distance, etc. And don't get me started on the super-soldier punching through walls/swinging around on Dr. Octopus arms bullshit. Lame, and gimmicky.
I am extremely disappointed. Eidos better start media damage control, and seriously consider the consequences of these design decisions, because if DX3 ships like this... it'll actually be WORSE as a DX sequel than IW. It'll just be a shitty action game w/a conspiracy going on in the background.
D'Juhn Keep on 6/10/2008 at 13:48
Quote Posted by gunsmoke
Back on topic:Auto-heal? Will suck. Third person was primarily used in Riddick because they wanted to show off their awesome animation and models. It was immersion-breaking there, and it will be in DX3. And this crap about making the weapon skill based on my skill is stupid. It's just going to play like every other shooter, then. Not DX. The only weapon upgrades are going to be add-ons like bigger clips, stocks, and sights. No more accuracy, distance, etc. And don't get me started on the super-soldier punching through walls/swinging around on Dr. Octopus arms bullshit. Lame, and gimmicky.
While I agree with most of your points I'm actually liking the sound of the augs. They have room to make some really awesome and creative stuff happen with mechanical augmentations, I think. And punching through a wall sounds pretty cool to me!
Matthew on 6/10/2008 at 15:58
I can never work light-based stealth systems at the best of times, so cover sounds good to me, but we'll see. Auto-heal could be interesting, but I would like there to be some limitation on it, e.g. that it's dependant on having a reserve of whatever is passing for bioelectric energy in this game.
gunsmoke, I think the devs clarified later on that in fact accruing XP and levelling-up would be a part of the game, no?
rachel on 6/10/2008 at 16:09
Quote Posted by gunsmoke
It's just going to play like every other shooter, then. Not DX. The only weapon upgrades are going to be add-ons like bigger clips, stocks, and sights.
I for one would invest in accuracy or distance as well... provided they make it worth it. DX was pretty good in that regard.
Quote Posted by gunsmoke
And don't get me started on the super-soldier punching through walls/swinging around on Dr. Octopus arms bullshit. Lame, and gimmicky.
I'm pretty sure JC Denton could easily punch through walls as easily as you and I can punch through styrofoam. The only reason it wasn't done was engine limitation. It'd be quite cool to be able to do that...
The bungee-jump-tentacle thing however, I don't know, sounds a bit too much.
ZylonBane on 6/10/2008 at 16:13
Something I keep reading on the Eidos forum is that DX3 will switch to third-person for stealth.
If this is true, someone on the dev team needs a beating.
Papy on 6/10/2008 at 16:37
Quote Posted by D'Juhn Keep
They have room to make some really awesome and creative stuff happen with mechanical augmentations, I think. And punching through a wall sounds pretty cool to me!
Personally, I don't give a shit about "awesome" or "cool". The only thing that can really interest me is gameplay. Good graphics and great story can be icing on the cake, but icing without a cake is not good. Of course creative use of mechanical augmentations and punching through walls could make a superb gameplay (Lady Bug was my favorite Pac Man clone), but I doubt it will be the case. Developers are far more obsessed with controlling the "player experience" to allow emergent gameplay. When I see a comment like "we want you to see Adam doing cool things", I'm thinking those developers are thinking more about showing off themselves than about the player having fun.
If auto-healing is made as an option, if they abandon forcing third person for us to see "cool things", if they stop focusing so much on guns (which screams to me : another boring FPS), then I might listen. But from what I know now, I guess the game will be even worse than Invisible War.
Deus Ex 3 certainly looks like another console games for young boys.
rachel on 6/10/2008 at 16:48
Quote Posted by some guy who speaks like he's a dev (can't check)
The game is FIRST person, but automatically switches to third person for some contextual actions. You as the player do not have the ability to swap between views...it's a first person game but there are times where we want you to see Adam doing cool things.
If that's true, way to go :tsktsk:
inselaffe on 6/10/2008 at 17:05
I thought that jc and paul were two of the first nano-augmented people and that before that there was mechanical augmentations, as seen in anna and gunther and maybe that subway drug dealer early in the game.
Now I haven't played through the whole game yet (only up to hong kong) and it was a time ago that i played it too so i might be wrong.
But anyway, from the concept art and all, it seems that the augmented person looks almost like a nano - augmented person and doesn't really look like mechanical augmented at all. In fact it was said in deus ex that society feared mechanically augmented people and that they were sort of outcasts, which is why only a few people would go to the lengths to have the augmentations done. I think anna might even talk to you briefly about it at one point.
It just seems that the player should really be mechanically augmented, otherwise the story is going to seem heavily shoe horned and contrived, by trying to get it to be a prequel. Same with the crazy "SUPER HERO YERRR" augmentations. They seem a lot more advance / extreme than those in the original. I mean punching through a wall i could maybe understand if you are mechanically augmented with a metal arm but still, I think even punching through a solid chunky wall (which is likely what it will be, games don't tend to have lots of traditional japanese style paper walls :P) is still even a bit much.
It's like a very camp, over the top angle on things. I always thought deus ex was more grounded and tried to justify it's augmentations, making them seem more credible and scary, rather than things that would be suited more to a children's comic. I just thought that was one of the things that gave the game such an impact. Mind you it could just be i've never been that found of over the top super hero things.
Also, if simons is nano augmented, which he appears to be, why does he look "less normal" than either jc or paul, with all the wiring or whatever it is visible on his face. Or is this explained later in the game?
Anyway, I think it's best people try not to get worked up over things cos it won't help anyone and we haven't really had any info released anyway. Even if they do release the game and it's not aimed for us, there is nothing we can do and hopefully it would still be half decent. I guess it's easy to think negatively about things, because of how the industry has gone, meaning these type of games don't get made any more.
DDL on 6/10/2008 at 17:06
Just to clarify the lighting issue (sorry to bring it back up):
The AI DOES use lighting to determine whether it can see you.
Obviously the computer knows exactly where you are at all times (duh), but to fake it, the key function is AICanSee().
This checks against the player based on four key specified qualifiers: lightlevel, collisioncylinder (or not -so do they check against your centre, or against any exposed part of you), location (are you in front or behind them) and geometry (is there a dirty great wall in the way).
This function returns a value between 0 and 1, and depending on the qualifiers requested, will often just return 1 (if all that's requested is 'geometry', and a line can be traced from you to the NPC without hitting walls, it'll be 1, no matter if you're in the dark behind the NPC, and so on). Lightlevel is one that actually does make this function return values like 0.234 and so on.
Often they do request this function with the simple qualifier(s), for things like "The AI wants to run the fuck away from you", as it's a lot simpler to just check against your general location rather than the finer specifics of hiding.
When they're normally just patrolling, wandering, or seeking, or whatever (when player stealth would be considered important), they DO use the lightlevel. Sadly, they're set up to consider any non-zero value as "I CAN SEE YOU", so you do have to be really quite into the shadows for it to work. Happily, the lightlevel that returns a value of zero doesn't appear to be 100% pitch black, so it's not THAT hard to get dark enough for hiding.
So yeah: shadows work.
As a further qualifier, the light aug spawns a beam actor traced out in the direction you're looking, to represent the end of your eye torches (and a second beam based on yourself to represent you generally just lighting up your local area). The AI can (and indeed does) check for this. Not for the lighting, but the beam actor itself. Because this is a whole lot faster and easier.
Interestingly, and perhaps...idiotically, they ONLY do this if they're already looking for you. If you haven't actually alerted the guards yet, they will be utterly, utterly oblivious to a mystery torchbeam shining out of an airvent (or whatever). As soon as you're rumbled, though, that beam will drag them to you pretty damn quickly.
Hope this helps clear things up.
