Melan on 8/12/2018 at 08:37
Never start a campaign unless you are absolutely, 1000% sure you can finish it within a short timeframe. In fact, do not start a campaign at all. If someone invites you on a campaign team, run.
-- t. Guy Who Has Learned This Lesson At His Own Cost
PinkDot on 8/12/2018 at 08:47
Quote Posted by Brethren
The problem with working on a campaign for the T2 20th instead of a contest is, you're excluding all the beginner to intermediate dromeders who want to participate. Any campaign should be of the highest quality, and likely only the seasoned community veterans around here would be able to do it justice.
Of course, there's no reason we can't do both (a campaign and a contest). Any group project like a campaign would require a strong leader, whereas a contest kind of runs itself and people are free to do what they want at their own pace.
I see what you're saying. We don't want to exclude anyone in this fan-based community. And if contests is what brings more fun, I understand this. If we have enough man power to do both, that would be brilliant.
My idea was to create a project of the complexity level of campaigns that normally take 10 years for a single person to do all the stuff on their own (well, usually still with a help of others, of course). But this time all the work would be better organized, with each mission being developed simultaneously and a team of artists working on custom resources, to make it a unique experience. Something that would bring the creations to the engine's limits. Using the T2 anniversary could be a strong motivational factor for such a thing to happen, as otherwise these ideas tend to stretch in time endlessly.
Quote Posted by bbb
I would be happy with a one year, stock resources contest.
Quote Posted by Marzec
Everyone publish your own town house made in DromEd 2 with stock resources and derivs only.
No, please no! Why would people enjoy imposing such strong limitation on themselves?!? OK, I kind of understood it for this T1 anniversary contest, but for T2 we'd need to think in terms of future and breaking the limits, rather than confining ourselves into something that we know just too well. Some of us play these days on higher than full HD screens and sticking to 64x64 px textures is just too harsh thing for the eyes and the brain to do.
Then think about all the custom content, which is among the biggest contribution of the community - why would you want to exclude all this community effort?
PinkDot on 8/12/2018 at 08:49
Quote Posted by Melan
Never start a campaign unless you are absolutely, 1000% sure you can finish it within a short timeframe. In fact, do not start a campaign at all. If someone invites you on a campaign team,
run.
-- t. Guy Who Has Learned This Lesson At His Own Cost
Are you talking here about your TDM experience?
Why not learn from it, instead of running away?
If nobody dare to starts campaign, then the community will never have any more campaigns, right?
Melan on 8/12/2018 at 09:47
Quote Posted by PinkDot
Why not learn from it, instead of running away?
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
Also,
The Black Parade never ever. :angel:
DirkBogan on 8/12/2018 at 10:01
If and when a Thief 2 Anniversary contest happens, I definitely think it should stick to stock assets. Firstly, because an Anniversary contest is a celebration of the original game, warts and all! Other contests will exist with parameters more conducive to custom assets. Secondly, if people have a long time to make an FM with custom assets for a competition, we will invariably end up with a load of bloated maps with massive poly counts that tank the framerate and ugly +512px .dds textures that cause insoluble temporal aliasing (unless you manually compress their resolution in GIMP etc!) because authors will want to demonstrate their DromEd prowess. It's amazing that NewDark runs as well as it does; far as I can tell, it doesn't even properly support multiple CPU cores.
Some of us are lucky to have powerful modern computers, and even with these we have to deal with the limits of an ancient game engine. I have seen many people excluded from playing excellent newer FMs because they do not have high-end hardware; this should not be mandatory for ~20 year old games! I think Melan's Rose Garden has shown that you can make staggeringly large and impressive FMs without making them prohibitively performance-heavy.
(...I also selfishly wish I could play everything at 120fps, and most FMs kindly oblige)
Schlock on 8/12/2018 at 10:21
I think another contest similar to this one would be good. It's a sensible way to celebrate each game, it would be a good opportunity for anyone who wanted but wasn't able to make an FM for this contest, and it seems to have been a magnet for new authors.
Quote Posted by PinkDot
Why would people enjoy imposing such strong limitation on themselves?!? OK, I kind of understood it for this T1 anniversary contest, but for T2 we'd need to think in terms of future and breaking the limits, rather than confining ourselves into something that we know just too well
The limitations force you to get creative. Breaking limits doesn't mean better design and missions such as The Tower are great in no small part
because of their constraints.
Personally, after the Thief 2 anniversary contest, I would like to see a brush and object count restriction contest similar to Quake's 100 Brush Contest. It would be interesting to see what people come up with when they're compelled to ditch the greebles.
PinkDot on 8/12/2018 at 11:14
Quote Posted by Schlock
The limitations force you to get creative. Breaking limits doesn't mean better design and missions such as The Tower are great in no small part
because of their constraints.
Personally, after the Thief 2 anniversary contest, I would like to see a brush and object count restriction contest similar to Quake's 100 Brush Contest. It would be interesting to see what people come up with when they're compelled to ditch the greebles.
True, but *time* is always a constraint.
Object and brush count sounds interesting though, just as long as it's a reasonable number. (100 seems like too little for anything interesting in Thief game)
We could also try something like zip file constraint or resource files number constraint. So, you'd have a pool of let's say 100 files and it would be up to you if how do you spend this credit - books, cutscenes, map files, textures, models, motions etc...
Or we could go for a "No XXX" kind of a rule, where XXX would be an element chosen from a predefined pool of common gameplay or world elements in Thief. For example: [blackjack, extinguishable light, electric light, a human guard, crate, lock pick, door, window, wooden texture] etc... So, you'd pick whatever suits you, let's say "No windows" and build a mission with no windows - so probably you'd have to come up with some dunegeons or forest or underwater etc...
marbleman on 8/12/2018 at 11:16
Quote Posted by PinkDot
Or we could go for a "No XXX" kind of a rule, where XXX would be an element chosen from a predefined pool of common gameplay or world elements in Thief. For example: [blackjack, extinguishable light, electric light, a human guard, crate, lock pick, door, window, wooden texture] etc... So, you'd pick whatever suits you, let's say "No windows" and build a mission with no windows - so probably you'd have to come up with some dunegeons or forest or underwater etc...
This idea is similar to that of the Words Contest. I'd love to see another one of those. After the vanilla Thief 2 contest, of course.
fortuni on 8/12/2018 at 15:47
A problem with having another contest using only stock assets is that there are a number of authors who will not enter the contest without being allowed to use custom objects.
We've just had a stock assets contest so why have another one immediately on the heels of this one? There will be plenty of time later for another stock assets contest, after all it won't too be long before the 30th anniversary of Thief. :sly:
Thief is 20 years old, Newdark is 6 years old, and too many people to mention have made a whole repository of custom objects in the intervening years, there must be 1000's of custom objects available to authors nowadays, so why ask authors to restrict themselves to the limitations of assets from 20 years ago?
By doing that you are in some ways restricting the parameters of the judging criteria to the story telling abilities of the authors and the mission build quality alone, but with allowing custom objects and textures you are widening the contest massively.
Lets celebrate the T2 20th anniversary by showing the world how far thief has evolved in 20 years.
vfig on 8/12/2018 at 17:20
Quote Posted by fortuni
By doing that you are in some ways restricting the parameters of the judging criteria to the story telling abilities of the authors and the mission build quality alone
I mean, yeah. Seriously, what other criteria would you judge any mission by? Yes, you could add in a "looks" criteria, but honestly if people want to compete on art skills, the Dark Engine is really the wrong tool with which to do so. And anyway, people have made great-looking missions for this contest, even with the "stock resources only" rule. The Mages' Guild in An Enigmatic Treasure for example. And Catacombs of Knoss has done great things taking that limitation in a different direction.
But then I've never been a fan of high res textures and high poly models in the Dark Engine, and doubtless many other authors will disagree with me on this point.