Dafydd on 25/2/2005 at 00:14

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Krypt, I'm not a DromEder, just a player; but I can think of several gameplay reasons why water is fun and useful.

1. With it, you can survive extremely long falls (e.g., The Taffer's Tower). This is unrealistic, but as HU noted, the whole game is unrealistic.

2. It gave designers a great way for Garrett to sneak into a place. Can't get through the doors? Swim under a river and find a crack. Think Calendra's Legacy.

3. It gives players a medium in which we can "fly," so to speak: real, three-dimensional movement, with the added fun of having to watch the breath bar and pop up for air occasionally. It makes for exciting trials -- long swims where you're desperate to find the next blowhole, possibly even being chased by piranha or underwater Craymen.

4. The "flow" variable allows for players to be carried places against their will, into an area they wouldn't ordinarily enter but which the designer wants to force them to escape from.

I assume ISA has at least considered releasing TDS mission packs... why not make more money out of the same engine? I don't know why they never did with T1/G and T2; probably a majority of game buyers don't download FMs from the internet. And even many of those who do, such as myself, would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for new missions from the team at Ion Storm.

Thus, you could justify the cost in manhours to design a patch that adds swimable water and rope arrows if you could use it to design better missions for future mission packs. Couldn't you?

Dafydd

Krypt on 25/2/2005 at 00:27

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Some of you have misinterpreted what I was saying... I'm not saying we thought water was useless gameplay-wise. Obviously it has the potential to add a lot. We didn't want to cut it, but it was the easiest cut to make at the time. I know a lot of you are probably thinking "Man, those ISA guys are idiots! There was no reason to cut X, they're just lazy!" and I can understand why you would feel that way. I also think that if you saw the conditions we were working under which prompted these decisions, you would understand why they were made.

No, this wasn't possible in our engine. We didn't have the ability to create a volume with different physics properties. Like I said earlier, we had a lot of problems with implementing Havok in our engine, so we were lucky to get the stuff that's in the game now working.

Hylix Ulyx on 25/2/2005 at 00:40

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I'm setting myself up to eat yet more crow, but Krypt has been uncommonly forthcoming in his explainations and reasons behind design decisions made by ISA in lieu of rope arrows and water etc, giving us insights we would not normally be privy to, nor is it even necessary to under normal circumstances. He is under no obligation to explain it to us at all, and yet he does.

Still (and this is the part that I may have to eventually ingest black scavanger bird), I am of the mind that T3EDers will in vain attempt to recreate that which ISA chose not to, even as a programmer bellows from the rooftops that it is not possible, or probable, or worth it. T3EDers will try and try and try, only to find a whole year has passed in earnest, and many days and nights wasted for nothing.

We finally have the editor. Let's just make due with what we've got.

As far as adding things to DromEd that didn't exist in the beginning, alot of the new tricks were simply latent script buried in the editor that we had no access to until GayleSaver: Buried Code that ALREADY lay dormant, waiting to be found. Many of the Custom Scripts and Special Tricks used to enhanced gameplay, though they were indeed Custom and Special, were buggy at best, and often led to crashes and strange happenings.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't try. But knowing what we know now, I think it should be attacked with a measure of...futility. Just an opinion.

Oneiroscope on 25/2/2005 at 01:25

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I'd like to believe that with the amount of talent and skill in the fan community, and no deadlines, an awful lot might be accomplished. More than may seem possible at the moment. That said, if it does turn out that some things can't be done, we'll just have to work around them.

My question is: can the ragdoll effect be fixed? That bugged me more than anything else.

jay pettitt on 25/2/2005 at 01:58

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Rope arrows were undeniably very cool, and its a shame not to have them out of the box - but I'm not too worried.

The mantling system in T3 was very well done. Its not a great stretch to invisage cool ways of making it possible to scale up walls to reach seemingly inaccessible areas and routes...