Thief 3 Gold – Hand-drawn maps and briefing videos

Judith on 24/8/2014 at 16:24

First of all, try pasting or typing Alt + 0151 in Gimp's text editor with Carleton font selected ;p Secondly, use of em dash in anything but dialogue lines is frowned upon or considered pretentious since 20th century or so, at least in my University books on subject-matter. Still, using en dash, (Alt + 0150) won't work either :/

Smarty-panting aside, I was trying to make Inn quote with Keeper Compound map 1 & 2. The problem is, there's nothing interesting in there. Just a set of narrow corridors, and the meeting chamber. I'd opt for using streets for Keeper quotes then. I won't have time for making any more videos though, I'm helping a friend with recording / production stuff for video project for a film critic contest, and the deadline is pretty tight. I'll think of something next month.

Beleg Cúthalion on 24/8/2014 at 18:46

Take all the time you need. Oh, and leave the dashes out completely if you're unsure. I just thought the double minus looked odd in any case.

Mapwise, I would have thought of the library anyway, it's got the very high room across all storeys, the ones with the bridges in between and the small book-filled ones on the side. Oh, and there is the secret room at the top with the large statues. The railing on the highest floor where Caduca and Gamall are patrolling should provide nice foreground/background dynamics, too. I would keep the streets/City settings for the non-faction-specific quotes.

Muzman on 24/8/2014 at 20:00

Here's an attempt at what I was talking about with "scripts" of a sort.

Code:

<table style="width: 200px">
<tr>
<td>--the inn/training--

I got a tip last night from my fence, Heartless Perry.
A nobleman named Lord Julian had some sort of quarrel
and showed up at a local inn well after nightfall
and in a foul mood.
He's carrying a velvet bag, about the size of a man's fist,
and it never leaves his sight.
Sounds likely to be valuable,
but I'll know for sure when I steal it from him.

Perry sent over a floor plan of the place, the Blue Heron Inn.
Finding His Lordship won't be hard,
his room number will be in the guest register,
if I can get to the front desk to read it.
The inn will have guards, but not as many as a private estate.
That should make things easy
– which is one of the reasons I'm willing to try it without
knowing for sure what the take will be.
Lord Julian is so protective of that bag,
there's got to be something of value in it.
</td>
<td>- Perry and Garrett passing a note or
whispering under a lamp post.

-The fight between the two brothers (a la Judith)?
Zoom to: Julian gripping the bag in one hand

- the map,
Fade to: exterior of the Inn with guards

- Pull out from: Julian’s hand gripping the bag on a table;
to reveal Julian sitting pensively by the fire place.
</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td>--rutherford castle--

I had my fence take a look at Lord Julian's medallion.
Perry says the crest belongs to the Rutherfords,
one of the oldest so-called Great Families,
with a castle in South Quarter and a street named after them.
They've got a lot of wealth,
and a nasty reputation for turning on each other.

Based on that conversation I overheard,
Julian is definitely carrying on the family tradition.
Lord Ember, Julian's cousin, currently resides in the castle,
and Julian wants revenge.
Julian had a good plan -- hide inside a supply cart
and ride in after dark.
Then signal the cook to open the side door by
putting out the lion's-head torch in the courtyard.

A good enough plan for me to use myself.

That 'Bloodline Opal' sounds valuable, and it's
better off with me than sitting around in their vault.
But I can't get lazy. Ember will have his personal guard,
and doubtless a few other family tricks
in store for anyone who comes after the opal.
</td>
<td>-Perry, wearing a jewelers glass, shows Garrett the crest.

-Fade from the medallion to a large crest
above the gate of Rutherford castle.

Details of this scene/image are focused on.

-a figure at a high window (Ember), or on the ramparts

-a supply cart about to be ushered through the gate with…

-a glimpse of Garrett in the back of the cart.

-erm…crossfade to version of the same image with
the gates now closed maybe…
</td>
<tr>
<td>
--south quarter--

South Quarter...one of the City’s most crowded residential
districts, in the center of town, near the river.
It’s not wall to wall nobility, like Auldale, but there’s
money here... if you know where to look.

South Quarter’s where I live, so I guess this is home.
As long as I behave myself, I can go anywhere
and do as I please and the residents won’t
give me any trouble. But the City Watch will.
The entire force knows what I look like,
and they’ll attack me on sight.
If I don’t stay out of the way of their patrols,
I might be looking at some jail time...or worse.
First thing I need to do is see my fence,
Heartless Perry - his shop is down in Black Alley.
I’m bringing Perry the Bloodline Opal.
I don’t want to hang onto this stone any longer
than I have to. Something about that job has
left me with a bad feeling...
</td>
<td>
- cross faded montage of city streets, rooflines etc?
(hooray for detail)

-Pull out from the City Watch banner on a
wall to a stern faced guardsman

-Watchmen posting wanted poster of Garrett

-A face (Perry) peers though a crack in a door.
On the wall is seen the handprint mark

-Pull out from detail to wide in a picture of
Lady Elizabeth pipetting poison ingredients
in front of an array of vials
</td>

</tr>
</table>

It's fairly sparse, obviously. I was thinking start small and think of essentials then add. I could go hog wild with visionary director bollox, but that would not be a reasonable workload for anyone.

This is not supposed to be definitive by any means. Just a way to sketch out ideas for possible division of labour, "outsourcing" and so forth. Additions, subtractions, completely discarding everything is always a possibility.

Judith on 24/8/2014 at 21:34

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

Huh, now that was weird: when I tried to paste the dash from Word, nothing happened. But, when I typed it in the notepad and pasted, suddenly it worked \o/. I was about to say that it would be best to leave it out instead of doubling it, but hey, problem solved ;)

Judith on 25/8/2014 at 11:15

(https://www.dropbox.com/s/qzb99aovvinbmzd/Quote00_Inn.mp4?dl=1)

Actually I had some trouble sleeping yesterday, so in order not to waste time I tried making that Keeper Quote for Inn mission in the Keeper Compound. I used static 2D text because sentences flying in an arc motion looked a bit silly ;) I decreased the font size a bit - guess T1/2 videos used large fonts because videos were such low res at the time and it would have been unreadable otherwise. Now we all use bigger screens and HD-ish quality, so it doesn't have to fill the whole screen all damn time. I also thought about having a whole quote on the screen, just appearing in stages - maybe I should look into it later.

I changed a few things within the environment as well, to make things more interesting. Tweaked video levels a bit to get more contrasty look. I tested it on a few screens and a TV: it looks darkish (soulish), but there shouldn't be any black areas without details, so it will scale nicely with other monitors and individual gamma settings.

Tell me how it looks like on your end, and whether we can keep the background for next keeper quotes.

Ok, next up will be the Castle mission, so a City section, right?

Beleg Cúthalion on 25/8/2014 at 11:34

I think that looks much more Keeperish. It would be nice, I guess, if the video could show some sort of Keeper symbol at the end, like one of those statues or a stained glass with the crossed keys. Oh wait, there were none in T3, am I right? They just had those glyphs everywhere. :erg:

Yes, Rutherford Castle would be next. For using the Inn briefing we'd need the same hack that snobel wrote for my FM: it plays the game's intro videos after hitting "start new game", the Inn briefing would then be an intro video...unless....I manage to put a script into the Entry map. Hm... The other videos shouldn't be a problem. Rutherford Castle will be merged with the Keeper Intro video (so maybe we don't need a Keeper symbol at the end of yours after all), probably the same for Hammer and Pagan Intro and all following missions were started by frobbing glyphs anyway.

Judith on 25/8/2014 at 13:57

Btw. did you two managed to add H.264 codec support? As Snobel mentioned, it would be quite handy, the quality / file size ratio is really nice, and encoding time is much faster than with .bik files.

Anyway, here's the second version, more T2-styled text appearance, slower camera movement, and shorter. It's kinda ridiculous for such a short quote to have 24-second clip, isn't it ;)

(https://www.dropbox.com/s/pvbhwhbblzoou0b/Quote00_Inn_v2.mp4?dl=1)

snobel on 25/8/2014 at 19:38

Both those videos are very nice. I prefer the T1-style text of the first (doesn't feel long to me), but the slower camera movement of the second. :p

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

For using the Inn briefing we'd need the same hack that snobel wrote for my FM: it plays the game's intro videos after hitting "start new game", the Inn briefing would then be an intro video...unless....I manage to put a script into the Entry map. Hm...

If that's possible, then it's a better solution. The problem with the repurposed intro video is that it doesn't support subtitles. I could revisit that and try to use the normal video playing code instead but the time would be better spent on other things...

Quote Posted by Judith

Btw. did you two managed to add H.264 codec support? As Snobel mentioned, it would be quite handy, the quality / file size ratio is really nice, and encoding time is much faster than with .bik files.

...such as H.264 support. :) With the tweaker and fat SU in the pipeline it's going to be a few months before I can start looking into this.

Judith on 25/8/2014 at 20:31

Yeah, I tend to make the camera move too fast only to realize it later :) Well, we won't finish the briefings anytime soon, so deadline isn't the problem.

It's also worth noting that slower camera movement in both quotes and briefings would allow us to use speeds like 20 FPS. That, along with proper h.264 compression, will dramatically reduce the filesize. The shorter version of that video in 20 FPS is only 2,2 MBs. And it compresses within 15 seconds, not over 2 bloody minutes, like those .bik files. So, that might help a bit with distribution problems.

Another thing that worries me is the quality of original .bik files, the difference in quality between old and new movies will be substantial. A restoration project would be more than welcome, at least if there is any room for improvement.

Beleg Cúthalion on 26/8/2014 at 07:19

I thought the quality difference wasn't overly worrisome because we are introducing a new kind of video into the game and don't complete an existing one. In any case, when snobel needs more time to do something about the video codec, I'll have to use bik files as well for now. I'll try something out this evening hopefully.