Ottoj55 on 31/12/2008 at 12:24
every time i play this one i drop jeni in bed, basso's wife doesn't deserve to be thrown on the floor, but you do need to put her down in the room to finish the mission.
Jah on 6/1/2009 at 22:24
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Another thing that bothered me about this mission's plot:
Jenievere, a "maiden without sin"?
Cultists' standards have been going down of late if they're abducting married women now.
Maybe they just have a different definition for "sin"? ;)
Anyway, just finished this FM. I'm not too fond of undead missions, so this one isn't going to make it to my list of favorites. At least the author gave us means to actually fight those damn things.
Having to turn the electricity back on in part 2 was pretty silly - there was no logical reason to do so, as all it accomplished was to make things more difficult for you. As for the sudoku puzzle, I just looked up the answer in this thread - I have no interest in sudokus, and I'm not going to spend my time on solving not just one, but THREE of them for the sake of completing a FM. Although that puzzle was supposed to be optional, I found that I couldn't
destroy the skulls with the sword. More specifically, nothing happened when I smashed the last of them. Only after I reloaded and tried it with
the wand did things work properly.
Not too bad for an undead mission, but I doubt I'd want to play this again. In terms of the contest, I felt that the author was bending the rules a little bit by effectively packing three missions into one. ;)
Ottoj55 on 6/1/2009 at 23:16
i think by now the author of this one is clear, maybe tomorrow he'll explain all is motivations.
Ottoj55 on 7/1/2009 at 09:57
so yes, this was my mission and my specific motivations for design choices.
1. the multi level load was to demonstrate an idea i had to get more play out of a small area that had never been done. by using a new difficulty for each part you could reset the game and get to do new things. this came with the downside that equipment can not be carried over.
2. the lights off/on, doesn't make sense and exists solely to connect the lighting choices i had made. i decided that the middle chapter was a bit hard and killed all the lights in it. the last chapter was too easy in the dark with a holy sword, so i made you turn the lights back on to balance gameplay.
3. undead, love or hate them seems to be the way people feel but i had to make it undead. my master of horror mission was never more than luke warm i thought, it was survival horror-esque, which i like, but isn't classically horror.
4. thunder storming was made totally random. through use of nameless voices's scripts i made the thunderstorm totally random, its also more intense on higher difficulty. the older way of running thunder from calendra's legacy involved an ai in a blue room on patrol. i did it in the clocktower with a conversation, but here its truly random and much more real, i didn't script any of the flashes so that you wouldn't be able to wait for a flash, reload the mission and know how long you'd have.
5. the soduku. its perhaps a really evil puzzle, and they are really tough. they were really intended to get people using the map notes. you can write notes on the map if needed. i have never used this feature in my original plays of thief or the fan missions. seems like someone built a really cool tool that was never used. maybe people didn't realize it, but when you grabbed a puzzle it was added to the map. then you could drop in and solve them to get the purely bonus weapons. this also served as a tension breaker, you could get away from the zombies for a sunday morning puzzle.
6. the dumbwaiter. in retrospect it should have been on the north side of the lobby not the south, this would have required flipping the office and bathroom, which were already built, and that seemed like a hassle. also, its opening presented a lot of problems, the opening is 4x4 with a ledge that is the minimum width to be a climbable step and i never had problems with it like those reported by players. i guess people see a ledge and think "jump". my constant self check of "does this look realistic" killed larger ledges, after all, this thing is meant to move luggage and breakfast, you wouldn't want to hang over the ledge to get it. i also should have added a small alcove inside for a ladder, that way people stuck could have climbed a ladder instead of making noise jumping inside the shaft to get unstuck.
7. you might not have noticed the amount of sound design in this mission. there were multiple independent sound systems running. first a creepy sound track and thunder. there were bounds were a sound had a chance of playing if you walked through them. there was a system of sounds throughout playing ghostly voices, and they were faster as the difficulty increased, creating a subtle sense of dread. when the mission goals were accomplished the thunder went back to its easy level timing and the ghost voices stopped. i realized that creepy sound is really very powerful and scary and used it to the max i hope.
8. you might have noticed people becoming zombies. rather than have zombies appear from the undead portal they were all hotel guests. count them up. the guest on the register all became zombies minus basso, jenivere and the cultist. one fun idea i had was that a dead body you'd encounter on normal would be gone on hard and expert, and on hard that body was a zombie wandering around somewhere. on expert a body that was there on normal and hard could now be a zombie. there was a hammerite guest->zombie, and mechanist guest->zombie, the hotel manager was the zombie in the basement, the noble became a zombie upstairs. this was a "shaun of the dead" influence. in the film many of the zombies he encountered were people he knew from the pub.
Jah on 7/1/2009 at 12:53
Quote Posted by Ottoj55
i didn't script any of the flashes so that you wouldn't be able to wait for a flash, reload the mission and know how long you'd have.
There was one time when I was hiding in a room and lightning struck just as a haunt entered the room. It saw me and killed me, so I reloaded a quick save, and the lightning struck again at exactly the same moment.
Ottoj55 on 7/1/2009 at 12:59
i'd have to ask nameless voice how is script works, but in general i couldn't reproduce lightning strikes, your case might be unique, if you were on expert as well the strikes were fairly close together.
Nameless Voice on 7/1/2009 at 14:27
Quote Posted by Ottoj55
5. The Soduku.
I'll admit that it never occured to me to try to solve them directly on the map. I just got a piece of maths paper.
Quote Posted by Ottoj55
after all, this thing is meant to move luggage and breakfast
It also never occured to me that the dumbwaiter was meant to move luggage, that certainly explains its size.
Quote Posted by Ottoj55
I'd have to ask Nameless Voice how his script works, but in general I couldn't reproduce lightning strikes, your case might be unique, if you were on expert as well the strikes were fairly close together.
The random intervals are chosen before each firing, so the time remaining until the next trigger
will be saved, but not the time for subsequent triggers.
In other words, if the script decides that the current interval will be 4 seconds, and you save and reload, that interval will still be 4 seconds. But, after those 4 seconds, the next interval will be a different length every time.
I suppose if you wanted to make it truly random, you could have the lightning timer fire every 4 seconds (for example) but only have a 10% chance (for example) of triggering lightning.
Ottoj55 on 7/1/2009 at 14:42
there are a lot of ways i tried to rig the lightning, finally what i did was a set of markers, one is a master timer for each difficulty with a minimum and maximum time on it, then down a random link to north/east/south, then down a random link to a specific sound effect length and its corresponding flash time. shorter intervals and an additional relay with a high fail chance would have been a really great idea. everything is kicked off by the nvdifficultyrelay script, which was something i had asked for when i was helping out on MX.
BrokenArts on 7/1/2009 at 15:27
The lighting I thought was GREAT. Very bright, very realistic. I loved the effect it had in game. I'd like to see that used more! Good job. :)
Vasmarok on 7/1/2009 at 16:13
Quote Posted by Ottoj55
4. thunder storming was made totally random. through use of nameless voices's scripts i made the thunderstorm totally random, its also more intense on higher difficulty. the older way of running thunder from calendra's legacy involved an ai in a blue room on patrol. i did it in the clocktower with a conversation, but here its truly random and much more real, i didn't script any of the flashes so that you wouldn't be able to wait for a flash, reload the mission and know how long you'd have.
Yes, I loved those thunder storm effects. They were much more realistic than the earthquake effects in Falling Down, which were repetitive and became quite annoying by the end of that mission.