Dev Log #56: Experimental Branch with Version 1.0.3.13

[ShockMonkey]

Any news on expansion???

[Twiglard]

Then remove hostile triggering part of pickpocketing too.

Remove the hostility of stealing?  That's ridiculous.  If you do that you may as well remove all sense of ownership for everything in the game, which is also ridiculous but not worse than removing the inherent hostility of stealing - which is what pickpocketing is.  Stealing.  Unlike opening locks which aren't owned.

By your suggestion, pickpocketing would no longer benefit from skill investment beyond threshold clearance.  That would have the advantage of making it more like other non-combat skills in the game, but it would also have the disadvantage of making it more like other non-combat skills in the game.  You would just have an NPC inventory to choose from, and a set value of what could be taken.  This deprives the player of agency by removing their ability to improve the amount of items stealable (the effect of the skill, and thus the effect of the build).  It also would put a fairly large burden on the devs to rebalance the inventory and/or pickpocketing threshold of every pickpocketable NPC.  No, it appears that what you want is to prevent players from being allowed to make good pickpockets, so that everyone who is a pickpocket is instead an utterly average one.  That's terrible design.

Exceeding the suspicion meter is clearly labelled in the user interface. It's a user interface matter, not personal property semantics or politics. I believe the original point was to prevent the user from shooting themselves in the foot right in the user interface.

Then again I could be wrong, stealing always looked like a waste of levelup points. Wish it was derived from stealth and lockpicking instead.

[ciox]

I also had the idea that the UI could just prevent you from taking items that you aren't good enough to steal, that's how it works in Thief for example.

Though honestly faster saving (including autosaving during transitions) would help with a lot of these issues where something happens and you want to reload, what does the team think about trying to add multi-threaded saving? Basically just use a thread to copy the savedata to RAM and process it and write it to disk, so that the normal game thread is left alone and you can play while autosaving/saving.

[Fenix]

in Thief for example.

In which?

[ciox]

in Thief for example.

In which?

All of the good ones, which is 1 and 2, trying to pickpocket an AI that's actually even slightly aware of you will not work, but it won't alert them to your exact position either.