I struggled with a few missions, just to find the particular "room" or "object" (or whatever I needed to complete the level). And/or to make the correct logical leap as to what I needed to do to tick the next objective. It might have just been my own foolishness & bad luck to keep going the wrong way, or not notice a possibility I needed to exploit, in some cases! I fell into these problems in Missions 2, 4 and 8. But a bit of perseverance got me through! And overcoming those situations still felt like a great thiefy achievement once realised! This happened to me frequently in the Thief games, too! So it was true to tone and form of the source material. ;-) Overall, I really loved the levels that felt like coherent, grounded locations (that are more easily reasoned about), with quite clear objectives and obstacles, etc. The whole thing is great (even those missions I got a bit lost in!), but I especially liked missions 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9. I got so much pleasure out of playing this, and I marvelled at the work put in by the team behind the project. 25 years of accumulated goodness, from the base game technology and contents, through to the whole mapping community over the years, and bottled up into the culmination of The Black Parade. What a great Christmas present!
I think the door problem could be solved by giving the fake doors their own handle designs. Perhaps the engine also has some kind of entity limit and the designers didn't want to waste it on those.
There are lots of ways to create visual language to differentiate "prop" doors from "gameplay" doors. The deeper question is whether immersion is ever better served by *not* doing so.
Curious, now that you look back, and currently play with the moss arrow, do you like the launcher that spawns launchers or would you do something else?
Well, in terms of its appearance, it's definitely a little sparse-looking. Doesn't really show the boundary clearly. Launcher of launchers (with a LOT more bodies) could still work to spread the moss/determine coverage, but I think you'd want to use some kind of procedural mesh generation (e.g. isosurfaces) for the rendering.
Having great fun watching these! :D I'm trying to code my own Sound Propagation system in Unity, and it's quite a bit of work! But it's coming along. :D Honestly, I don't think any other devs have done as good a job as Thief! Most games just don't seem to think sound propagation is that important. But it needs to be done if you want to make a game that strives to simulate stealth and suspense, etc! Here's a short Dev Diary vid I made to show my sound propagation system, although I need to improve my Level Generator to make more interesting spaces, with more hallways and dead ends, to really hear it in action. (My system also doesn't handle "outside" very well, it's tuned for handling "inside" cases, currently.) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FjqArtgPFI0.html
