sparhawk on 6/9/2006 at 09:52
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
I thought the TDS walking animations were terrible. The guards look like wind-up toy soldiers.
Exactly what I thought as well. As if they had a stick rammed up their ass. Fortunately you get used to it after a while, but this was the very first thing I immediately noticed when I fired it up the first time.
Blau on 9/9/2006 at 14:53
Inever had a problem with the animations at all, nor with garrets movement. I honestly found it worked really well for me.
bobarctor on 9/9/2006 at 15:20
Quote Posted by Gnome
Well, like I said, I disagree. I can't explain to you why, but I just like the way the movements/camera work. They never really bothered me, but I could probably elaborate more if I had a better framerate. I just have an ATI Radeon X300, but I'm upgrading soon to an ATI Radeon X1600.
Remember when TDS came out. Not recently. It unfortunately still runs really quite badly. A move from 512MB to 1.5 gig RAM helped it a bit (for some reason, seeing as I didn't have John Ps, and TDS was made to work on an Xbox) but frame rates are still very poor seeing as my PC stamps on the TDS recommended specs.
The engine is just rubbish. You can't beat around the bush. The devs have said it. It's just complete crap that will never run acceptably.
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Actually Gnome, the camera and movement in TDS is
supposed to simulate real head-bob/body awareness.
But in real life you do not notice this. We experience movement in TDS like an alien who has never been in a human body would. T1/2 is natural.
You say that, but coming back to TII after a few years the slowness of walking, the fact your view bobs with every step, and the gangly PC are all initially quite strange.
Mind you the same is true of HL1: you run immensely fast, skidding round corners.
Quote Posted by 242
TDS AI animations are only partially "wooden".
F.e. they turn around as tanks. But idle animations are very good, walking/running animations are very good too. All motions they did with mo-cap are basically good, bad are only those made manually. TDM probably won't have mo-cap animations and the fact actually bothers me. What I call bad animations are DeusEx1 ones f.e.
The worst thing is how the TDS guards when searching run. Stop. Rotate. Run. Stop. Rotate. It's just so wrong. Why run into a corner, stop and turn round?
Gnome on 10/9/2006 at 07:48
Quote Posted by bobarctor
Remember when TDS came out. Not recently. It unfortunately still runs really quite badly. A move from 512MB to 1.5 gig RAM helped it a bit (for some reason, seeing as I didn't have John Ps, and TDS was made to work on an Xbox) but frame rates are still very poor seeing as my PC stamps on the TDS recommended specs.
The engine is just rubbish. You can't beat around the bush. The devs have said it. It's just complete crap that will never run acceptably.
You say that, but coming back to TII after a few years the slowness of walking, the fact your view bobs with every step, and the gangly PC are all initially quite strange.
Mind you the same is true of HL1: you run immensely fast, skidding round corners.
The worst thing is how the TDS guards when searching run. Stop. Rotate. Run. Stop. Rotate. It's just so wrong. Why run into a corner, stop and turn round?
I'm pretty sure my card came out
before that.
bobarctor on 10/9/2006 at 11:52
Oh. Pehaps I'm confusing it with something else. I never did understand the Radeons much, because I've always had Nvidia cards. No particular reason, just what came with the PC, or what was a bargain at the time.
Wiki says: "Performance
Radeon 9700's advanced architecture was very efficient and, of course, more powerful compared to its older peers of 2002. Under normal conditions it beat the GeForce4 Ti 4600, the previous top-end card, by 15-20%. However, when anti-aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic filtering (AF) were enabled it would beat the Ti 4600 by anywhere from 40-100%. At the time, this was quite astonishing, and resulted in the widespread acceptance of AA and AF as critical, truly usable features."
Ah right. So better than the Geforce 4s. Not bad as the Geforce 4s are pretty good. 4200 still handles source/Unreal 2 games fine.
ascottk on 10/9/2006 at 16:20
I had a gf 4200ti for years & it ran very well. It doesn't support the latest shaders though. I went from that to a 6200 which is just as fast but with more shader support. Denton's Doom 3 Enhanced mod looks great with that card although my system is getting really outdated so framerates drop quite a bit.
DinkyDogg on 26/9/2006 at 00:43
The player movement in the Dark engine was much more flexible than any game I can remember having played, even the more modern ones. As ZB mentioned, leaning in particular is implemented well. There's a simulated tension on the player that pulls him back into position after leaning around corners, so you can lean however you want, keeping your feet in position but moving your head where you want it to go. And when you're done, you'll get pulled back into position without clipping through anything or getting stuck (unless you're actively trying to exploit engine bugs). The player also seems to have a kind of force as he moves, which allows him to move over terrain that's set at weird angles and still move fairly realistically. Try moving around in the Bonehoard or another map without nice right angles everwhere. Garrett can slide over the slanted terrain just fine, and even move a bit up a wall that's at a steep angle before sliding back down. It feels so natural. Compare that to Half-Life or UT or something, where your options are pretty much run over fairly flat terrain or jump onto flat surfaces.
The physics in Dark are pretty simple compared to more modern games, but they work just fine. Drop an object, and it'll fall, slide around, etc. It might not do so as realistically as more modern games, but it's good enough that you can move objects just about however you want (see some of Azal's and Luthien's stuff). You almost never get stuff bouncing around in odd ways. The worst you usually see with that kind of stuff in Dark is part of an object clipping through a wall if you throw it into a corner. Little things like that don't affect gameplay, though. The player can move and interact with objects in a very smooth and intuitive way. It makes gameplay a lot more fun than having to guess what's going to happen to the player when you try moderately complex movement or drop a body or throw an object.
With T3, on the other hand, the player lurches around, gets stuck on stuff, can't move over complex terrain very well... In short, he can't interact with the world as a real person would. It breaks the immersion and makes the gameplay frustrating. T3 lost a lot of the charm that the Dark engine games had because of this, even though things look prettier.
I've worked with DromEd and it can be a real bitch to learn and to use. Haven't done anything with T3ed so I can't compare, but I've had a lot more fun with even mediocre Thief I&II fm's than with the professionally designed T3, mostly because of the engine. I say bring back Dark, or something like it. It's engine is truly the most flexible of anything I've played, except maybe Half-Life 2. But even there, the player's motion isn't very flexible. Run and jump, and that's it.
Sorry if I've rambled a bit. I haven't read a lot of the posts from this thread, so sorry if I've repeated anything others have said. Just my 2 cents.
BrendaEM on 3/10/2006 at 03:37
Quote Posted by str8g8
It's more than a little depressing to labour over a mission knowing that at least half the audience are going to hate it no matter what, or don't even care about it. :(
Hey, thanks for making The Bridge. I enjoyed it. I wish there were more DS fan missions to play. I thought the bridge could have been a good hub to launch other missions.
I wrote a small review of TDS, Minimalist, and John P.s Textures elsewhere. The short of it is: Thief DS wasn't perfect, but I am glad I played it. I feel that people aren't seeing the glass as half full. The game was often rated in the mid to high 8s by reviewers. Thief 1 and 2 set high standards for immersion. Lets face it, the open ended gameplay in the Dark engined games was hard to beat, but they tried. With the Minimalist mod, there is less stuff showing than in the first two games. The models in Thief DS were much more realistic, but the motion capture wasn't there. Perhaps the first games used keyframe interpolation too. The level were smaller in DS, but the quality was there. I have made lots of levels, and some professionally too. I don't think I got stuck anywhere in DS, no Hall of mirrors.
Yes, the archietecture in T1 and T2 got the job done, but I took 58 screenshots in Thief DS.It's a shame that the Unreal/Flesh setup is so mod hostile, having to patch archives to add simple things like textures.
You probably have seen, I made some Thief1ish textures for Thief DS.
(
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109122)
Beleg Cúthalion on 7/10/2006 at 16:39
Quote Posted by BrendaEM
I feel that people aren't seeing the glass as half full.
I sometimes guess all the guys here wanted to have the same game a third time. I have the problem that I often don't divide reality and the game as a game. You can't just walk into the direction you're looking into at the moment, there is at least a small movement to the side when turning around. But for a game it's maybe annoying to have that effect. I didn't have too much problems with it once I got used to it in TDS. Furthermore I liked that Garrett was much more intelligent what concerns climbing onto crates or over a balustrade. But well...complaining about all doesn't help, I'm looking forward to the things that will come to improve TDS. :) Well...I hope they're coming. :erm:
New Horizon on 7/10/2006 at 19:26
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
I sometimes guess all the guys here wanted to have the same game a third time.
That's not what people are upset about at all, and as much as it's a misconception that the people who absolutely loved TDS have lower standards, it's equally untrue that those of us who disliked much about TDS just wanted the exact same game. What can be said to clarify the situation that hasn't already been said? Not much I'm afraid. It was a game designed to reach the average gamer, and while it was still a 'good' game...for many like myself...it just wasn't good enough. Many of us were upset because we were there when Thief was born, and with TDS felt we watched it die in a most unflattering fashion.
For my money, Thief 2X is how Thief 3 should have been. It took the old engine but managed to push things in a fresh direction....without changing the core mechanics of the game...and even using totally different main character. We aim to do the same with Darkmod.
