Pickpocketing rats and towns people

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Aeuc
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Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Aeuc »

I remember in classic you use to be able to pickpocket rats in dungeons when sneaking. You could spam click and pickpocketing would raise, even though rats and other animals in game usually don't have any loot on them. I can't seem to pickpocket rats in DFU, but I'm able to pickpocket people in towns, sort of. In towns when you pickpocket someone once, you are unable to continue to pickpocket them and must switch to another npc then back again. Just doesn't seem like pickpocketing is working correctly, at least not how I remember it.

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Interkarma
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Interkarma »

As Daggerfall Unity is a ground-up rewrite (not a source port) there is bound to some acceptable divergence in how systems are implemented.

If you're able to pickpocket beasts without pockets and endlessly farm town NPCs in classic Daggerfall, and this behaviour is not present in Daggerfall Unity, I'm not sure I would consider this a bug so much as a purposeful refinement.

Allofich would be the best to comment here as he was the one who implemented the pickpocketing feature.

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Interkarma
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Interkarma »

Looking back through the code, I can confirm both of these items are intentional refinements. Commits are below.

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... e9c00f9d59

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... e9c00f9d59

Allofich's code comments indicate that even classic Daggerfall handled pick-pocketing of humanoid enemies and creatures differently depending on patch level.

Code: Select all

// Classic allows pickpocketing of NPC mobiles and enemy mobiles.
// In early versions the only enemy mobiles that can be pickpocketed are classes,
// but patch 1.07.212 allows pickpocketing of creatures.
// For now, the only enemy mobiles being allowed by DF Unity are classes.

Aeuc
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Aeuc »

In the video link below, move forward to 27:20 to see the pickpocketing of a rat in Daggerfall classic and spam clicking it. I do understand the DFU engine is a rewrite, but I guess I'm not understanding what is and what is not a bug or missing feature in DFU compared to what existed in classic.

https://youtu.be/HNpzOVp3JYU?list=PLp-w ... iZLdBu6LMA

Aeuc
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Aeuc »

Sorry, I didn't see your post when I posted the video link.. I must of still been typing, my bad. Hmm.. I suppose that decision to pickpocket classes only, will help balance things. I just assumed you guys were keeping things that existed in classic in DFU, instead of the refining them.

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Interkarma
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Interkarma »

I would personally consider this a bug in classic Daggerfall, not in Daggerfall Unity. You're welcome to disagree of course, but I'm not interested in debating the virtues of pickpocketing beasts that do not have pockets. :)

I respect Allofich's implementation as it stands. If he chooses to change this again later, I will merge his changes.

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Hazelnut
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Hazelnut »

There's a lot of DF systems that they simply didn't finish, and many more that never got refined. Pickpocketing rats is silly, and I agree with Allofich's implementation that it should not be in DFU.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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Interkarma
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Interkarma »

Aeuc wrote:Sorry, I didn't see your post when I posted the video link.. I must of still been typing, my bad. Hmm.. I suppose that decision to pickpocket classes only, will help balance things. I just assumed you guys were keeping things that existed in classic in DFU, instead of the refining them.
I describe Daggerfall Unity as "Classic Daggerfall Plus". It's intended to be a very faithful recreation with additional quality of life features and modding support. A lot of care goes into every feature so that it emulates classic very closely, but sometimes the small details might be different.

It can be difficult to assess what is intended design (however quirky) and what is a bug. I trust the core developers to make thoughtful judgement calls in these cases, and I know Allofich has done his homework on this one. I'm not sure why classic later allowed the pickpocketing of rats after .212. It's hard to say if this was intentional or simply another bug introduced after fixing something else. It could really go either way.

For what it's worth, I think Allofich has made the right call on this one.

R.D.
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by R.D. »

I'm the one who implemented that, while making it so so you can't pickpocket from enemies other than the "class" enemies like knights, thieves, etc.. I found that in early Daggerfall versions this is how it worked, and so I chose this as a "true to classic" but still, IMO, better solution. Not really sure why they made that change in one of the patches.

About spam pickpocketing, classic has a mechanism to stop that on townspeople. If you fail a pickpocket, a flag gets set and they are no longer pickpocketable (I guess the idea is they noticed you). But there's no such check for enemies, even though they are probably paying lots of attention to you if you're in a fight with them. So I expanded the check to apply for them as well, which also seemed like a classic-friendly solution to me, maybe even what the developers had meant to do.

I'm also somebody who likes having the option of classic behavior, though, so I'm open to adding an option for pickpocketing creatures if it's wanted, since it was in an official patch. Spam pickpocketing seems like an oversight to me, though, and if we put that in it would make sense to recreate all such oversights/exploits, and I don't think we're looking at doing that.

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Jay_H
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Re: Pickpocketing rats and towns people

Post by Jay_H »

Probably the greater issue is the inability to rapidly level up Pickpocketing. It's an unwieldy enough skill as it is, but to have to seek out a new person every single time you want to attempt it (let alone get an advancement check) becomes extraordinarily tedious. That's the main reason I can think of for the otherwise illogical change. If its advancement ratio increased greatly, then the tedium would decrease.

The developers might have also wanted some comic relief to grab a shopping list from a rat's pocket :lol:

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