jay pettitt on 30/10/2007 at 11:23
@codereader,
Your argument for maintaining control to guarantee a consistent gameplay experience across missions is a moral argument, rather than a technical one.
It's obviously not my call, but I think you should sleep on it.
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Thank you very much for all your work and dedication. I'm really looking forward to the release :)
Seconded - I am of course very appreciative of your efforts.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 11:56
Quote Posted by R Soul
I'm not arguing about removing some of the more advanced variables, but:
I imagine the authors of T2X would have liked that ability. So just in case someone wants a mission about a n00b becoming a thief, can you leave that one in? :)
That's not neccessary. We have provided other means if you want to manipulate the lightgem. We know the code, and we have done the right decisions so far, so you can rest assured that we will not remove stuff that can be of help. ;)
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 12:02
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
You don't? you never mentioned performance, stability or usability. You've argued that it's somehow morally wrong to be able to deviate the gameplay mechanics of the DarkMod and that you therefore have a responsibility to mappers to make it difficult to do so.
Hmmm. I seem to recall reading this only a few postings above which indeed adresses usabillty and stabillity, but maybe you missed these two postings from codereader... But then you even responded to these postings so I'm a bit confused now ...
Quote Posted by codereader
The Dark Mod is indeed a toolset, one that is aimed to be used for actual gameplay. Creating good gameplay requires certain conditions to be fulfilled,
this includes a consistent set of rules and behaviour.
Quote Posted by codereader
Beta testing and tweaking is one thing, but
leaving console variables with gameplay-breaking potential open to the public is another.
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Mostly though I'm surprised that you seem not to be embracing the idea that people will want to further modify DarkMod outside of the official builds, or just have fun poking about and seeing how things work and that you think it should be necessary that players need to download a separate edition should they decide at some point down the road to have a go at this map making malarky. I'd have thought the emphasis would be on leaving as much of this stuff in as possible, rather than stripping it out in an attempt to prevent modification.
Ah, now I understand. You are just making fun of us. :joke:
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 12:07
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Your argument for maintaining control to guarantee a consistent gameplay experience across missions is a moral argument, rather than a technical one.
It IS a technical decision and not a moral one. After all, the game designers are responsible for creating a consistent gameplay. It doesn't matter wether it is a toolset or a locked down game like Thief. If designers change the behaviour of certain keys in every other map, it wouldn't be well received and rightly so. So disabling stuff that is for development only and breaks the game mechanics is definitely neccessary. There is a reason why it is considered for development purposes.
You wouldn't really want to have your disk full of snapshot images, just because I needed it for debugging, and you think this should be left in because somebody might find it usefull someday.
Crispy on 30/10/2007 at 12:13
Sigh. Now I understand why gamedev companies don't let their employees talk about the projects on forums much. :rolleyes:
I think there's a bit of misunderstanding here. Jay, you apparently think that we're being obsessive control freaks by trying to lock everything down. I apologise on behalf of my team members if that's the impression they were giving, because it's not true.
It's not cheating we're trying to prevent. It's the complete fragmentation of "The Dark Mod" as a game. People wanting to change these values in their own Dark Mod variants will always be able to do so, and we don't want to prevent that from happening, just as long as there is a common, standard baseline which everyone can agree on. Experience shows that no sufficiently large group of people can ever agree on such a baseline (we even have trouble doing this internally), so it's in everyone's interests that a pre-existing baseline is laid down, fiat-style. That's what we're doing. If you want to change this in your own copy, and maybe distribute your changes to others, then that's great; we want you to do that. Just as long as everyone agrees that your version of the mod is not the baseline, because otherwise we'll end up with 50 different Dark Mods within a week. That's in nobody's interest, because:
(1) For the benefit of FM authors, we want to establish and encourage a canonical set of "standard Dark Mod" settings, because FM authors' lives will be hell if everyone's TDM is utterly different. If every Dark Mod player has a different walk speed (for example), it will throw the game balance completely out of whack. (Walk speed is a pretty important setting in a stealth game.) We don't actually mind if people screw up their own game balance, but we do want to make it easy to deliver an FM in the expectation that balance-critical settings are reasonably standardised.
(2) For the benefit of players: Just imagine how annoying playing an FM will be if you need to change your settings every time you play a new one. What walk speed does this FM use? Okay, enter that value. What's the acuity multiplier? Enter that. And so on, repeated again and again. If you make a typo, or forget to enter a value, then the FM might become completely unplayable. Maybe you can't jump that crucial gap if your walk speed isn't just high enough. Or maybe you need that walk speed to dash across a hallway in a tiny gap between patrols, in an area that you can't avoid if you want to finish the mission. Worse still, even the FM author won't necessarily be aware of these requirements; they'll just tune the map to their personal settings. If they forget to tell people the required walk speed, then suddenly what was a reasonably benign part of the level becomes unaccountably fiendish for certain people. And nobody will ever figure out why. They'll just assume that those people aren't doing it properly, when in reality they've been handicapped by the lack of a standard setting.
There are also some console commands that we can't lock out even if we wanted to. noclip, god, etc.; we can't change these as we don't have the code to them. As luck would have it, these are some of the most common commands that mappers use.
Ultimately the entire mod will be open source, so you'll be able to tweak everything to your heart's content. And that's great. We want that, otherwise we wouldn't be making it open source. Just be aware that we need to a standard baseline.
I hope that clears things up a bit. :)
(Come on team, back to work, don't you all have stuff to do? I'm sure there's a lightgem bug or something for you to fix, sparhawk. Get to it. ;) )
jay pettitt on 30/10/2007 at 12:23
No, these are definitely moral issues. There are no technical reasons for preventing (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1662598#post1662598) phide from tweaking his cvars so he can run at 500 miles per hour if that's what he wants to do. Console variables are client side so there are no wider distribution issues and map makers are under exactly no compulsion to accommodate his particular weirdnesses. (I don't have a problem with such moral decision making by the way, it can be very necessary - I was just attempting to clear up a misunderstanding where codereader felt he'd been misrepresented)
Obviously a map makers edition that retains all but the most redundant cvars should they be useful would resolve all these issues and you'll get no argument from me if that's what you really want to do, but I have to say that the idea of maintaining and distributing two separate builds of the DarkMod in order to prevent players up and down the land from tweaking their jump height cvars is the daftest thing I've read on TTLG this week.
--edit--
Crispy has spoken. Normaility resumes (mostly). Phew.
Shadak on 30/10/2007 at 13:08
What Crispy wrote is exactly what codereader and sparhawk were already saying, but only if one were sincerely trying to understand their point of view rather than trying to counter it.
However, I think I agree more with jay pettitt as far as "letting it all hang out" goes for the cvars and such, and having just one main general release download.
All Dark Mod needs to do is say "Folks, here is the standard baseline, and if you change anything you risk screwing up maps and ruining your own fun in many unintended ways. Authors, always use this standard baseline." After that, I really seriously don't think there would be any problem.
sparhawk on 30/10/2007 at 13:19
Quote Posted by Shadak
What Crispy wrote is exactly what codereader and sparhawk were already saying, but only if one were sincerely trying to understand their point of view rather than trying to counter it.
Thanks. :) I was already under the assumption that we may speak a different language. :D
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All Dark Mod needs to do is say
"Folks, here is the standard baseline, and if you change anything you risk screwing up maps and ruining your own fun in many unintended ways. Authors, always use this standard baseline." After that, I really seriously don't think there would be any problem.
If somebody insists on screwing it, we can't really stop him anyway. That's the nature of an open source project. But there are much deeper implications to messing with the cvars, then is obvious on the surface even if it is "just" the player speed for your own local machine. We have discussed this on our board and I don't want to repeat that discussion here, but messing with the cvars can potentially have serious sideeffects which we obviously want to avoid.
jay pettitt on 30/10/2007 at 13:27
Do they contribute to Global Warming? :D
Digital Nightfall on 30/10/2007 at 16:03
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Do they contribute to Global Warming? :D
:nono: You using your PC to post on the internet contributes to Global Warming. :sweat:
