codereader on 30/10/2007 at 09:17
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Yes. Somebody may want play low gravity thief, or experiment with gravity ideas while planning for a new fan mission. It's not as daft as you think; you've played the Constantines mansion mission from thief 1 right?
I do get your point. You're talking about mission
authors experimenting with gameplay modifications, which is all cool with me. I was mainly airing my concerns about letting (the vast majority of) mission
players break their gameplay code.
There will be plenty of possibilities for mission authors to deliver crazy fan-missions, I'm all for that and we can't stop anybody nor do we want to.
What I'm trying to say is that console variables are NOT suitable for modifiying the gameplay mechanics of a certain mission. The console settings are completely on the client-side and can't be changed by mission authors, hence it might be possible that a perfectly ordinary mansion-type mission is not working anymore on every Dark Mod installation.
I agree that console variables are good for quick-and-dirty testing, so it might make sense to provide some sort of Dark Mod "mission creator builds" providing all the development CVARs.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 09:34
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Even the example you give may be useful. If switching off the lightgem has the effect of causing you to become in effect invisible, then it may of use for some mad keen person wanting to test the behavior of a new community made AI character, or to make way for a strange new lightgem. I'm really not sure why there would be the motivation to remove that kind of testing functionality.
This example just shows that you don't know what you are talking about, which of course is not your fault. If you switch off the lightgem, then you can not test a new AI behaviour, because the AI relies on the value of the lightgem. If you only make the lightgem invisible it wont affect the AI at alol, because the lightgem is still processed. So I don't know what exactl you mean, because if you mean to disable the lightgem at all, to make the player indeed invisible, then I don't know what exactly you would want to test with the AI.
Melan on 30/10/2007 at 09:35
TDM definitely has to establish a standard in the initial release to avoid immediately fragmenting the player/level designer base into several incompatible groups without a common experience. I'm sure people who wish to step out of the box will have enough options to play with. Of course, fan mods are probably considered less "authoritative" than for sale products because of the "I could do better" sentiment, but there are a lot of reasons why standardisation is the way to go.
And now, for something completely different. So far, we haven't seen too much of the technological-gizmos-in-a-middle-ages-setting aspect of the mod (except the odd streetlight). How is this aspect going? I confess the weird technology and rusty industrial infrastructure is one of the main draws of a thiefy world to me, but so far, I haven't seen too much of it. What are TDM's equivalents/analogies to collector towers, spotlights, etc.?
codereader on 30/10/2007 at 09:39
Quote Posted by Melan
And now, for something completely different. So far, we haven't seen too much of the technological-gizmos-in-a-middle-ages-setting aspect of the mod (except the odd streetlight). How is this aspect going? I confess the weird technology and rusty industrial infrastructure is one of the main draws of a thiefy world to me, but so far, I haven't seen too much of it. What are TDM's equivalents/analogies to collector towers, spotlights, etc.?
We have a few models (generators, the mentioned streetlamps, and such), but we could use more. I think Badcogg (=Schwaa) has this on his ToDo-list, so rest assured that there will be awesome models.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 09:44
Quote Posted by Melan
TDM definitely has to establish a standard in the initial release to avoid immediately fragmenting the player/level designer base into several incompatible groups without a common experience. I'm sure people who wish to step out of the box will have enough options to play with. Of course, fan mods are probably considered less "authoritative" than for sale products because of the "I could do better" sentiment, but there are a lot of reasons why standardisation is the way to go.
That's correct. :) I think that most mappers will not mess much with the codebase, and rather produce cool maps. a lot can be done with scripting, so there is no need to modify the codebase already just because you can. More ambitious projects similar to T2X or Hammerite Imperium and others, of course have complete freedom as to what the will add or change, but then this is something for more experienced programmers. With the released codebase there should be no pressing need to start changing stuff right away.
Quote:
And now, for something completely different. So far, we haven't seen too much of the technological-gizmos-in-a-middle-ages-setting aspect of the mod (except the odd streetlight). How is this aspect going? I confess the weird technology and rusty industrial infrastructure is one of the main draws of a thiefy world to me, but so far, I haven't seen too much of it. What are TDM's equivalents/analogies to collector towers, spotlights, etc.?
We could always use more modelers. :) I also love that aspect of Thief, and I would like to see such settings. We already have several new betamappers signing up, so I hope that they will also create new models which can be incorporated into the main mod and provide a bigger variety.
jay pettitt on 30/10/2007 at 09:52
Quote Posted by sparhawk
This example just shows that you don't know what you are talking about.
Clearly ;) . Though to be fair to me, I was just working with the information I was given.
The general point remains though, that the kind of testing & tweaking functionality that you guys and girls use while developing DarkMod may at some point be useful for fans who may be minded to produce their own custom content and modifications. Unless there's a compelling reason to do so, why take it out?
DarkMod is fairly unique in that presumably it's intended to have a shelf life far beyond the year or two of commercial games and could continue to be developed and modded by various different dispersed groups for the next 5 years or more.
codereader on 30/10/2007 at 09:59
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
The general point remains though, that the kind of testing & tweaking functionality that you guys and girls use while developing DarkMod may at some point be useful for fans who may be minded to produce their own custom content and modifications. Unless there's a compelling reason to do so, why take it out?
Well, we already posted the reason. ;)
Anyway, I think we can find a decent compromise by providing the mission authors with a debug/developer build to let them take advantage of all the tools we're currently using.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 10:04
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
The general point remains though, that the kind of testing & tweaking functionality that you guys and girls use while developing DarkMod may at some point be useful for fans who may be minded to produce their own custom content and modifications. Unless there's a compelling reason to do so, why take it out?
We have discussed this already on our board as well. Obviously we don't want to remove cvars which are usefull for mappers while developing a map. Of course there are a lot of variables that we used for debugging special stuff, which in no way makes sense to be exposed to anybody, after the code is locked down. As an example, I introduced a variable where the ingame model for the lightgem can be changed via a cvar. This model is used only to capture light in the players place, to determine how much lit up the player is, in order to calculate the lightgem. Durign development, we had to tweak this model to give the best representation, so we didn't want to change the code all the time and instead put the model as a varaible so we could easily test with different models. This definitely doesn't serve any purpose for anybody and doesn't need to be changed by anybody either unless you are rewriting the lightgem code, in which case you need to adapt to your new needs anyway. So stuff like this will definitely go.
We are also considering a development build for mappers, so that players don't have all the cvars available that mappers may need, as it is way to easy to cheat in Doom and if it is accessible it will be used, which spoils the experience. Of course if somebody insists on using a mappers build to be able to cheat we can't stop him anyway, so there is nothign lost to these players.
jay pettitt on 30/10/2007 at 10:10
Oh right, you want to stop us from cheating. That's very noble of you.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 10:14
Whatever you think. We will release the code when we think it's ready and you can take a look at it by then. I think we already said what we wanted to say, and we will decide how to deal with this issue when it's time for it.
