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Yeah, and it's somehow threatening as well. What does it say? "Ears"? "Years"? However, I hereby award you with the new title "DFDD" (=Doctor Frankenstein's Dearest Darling)

You have that backwards though. You first think of something that might make this game even better, and then do what most of us did (that didn't take any classes in coding) and grab a tutorial or surf a forum like StackOverflow and follow instructions to do the one thing you want to do, and now you know that one little thing. Rinse and repeat. You start with just changing up your own local build and no expectations that it will go in the main mod, so it's just you playing and experimenting completely freely and wildly. Mistakes and accidents are expected and sometimes fun puzzles to crack. Just start with changing random code, recompiling and see what happens! We actually encourage that kind of irreverent experimentation. That's how a lot of us learned.

This is the interior of the lighthouse and its cross-section, to give you a better idea. Naturally, nothing is really furnished yet, the only furniture being a few chairs I use to tell the tower floors apart ! It's going to be an intentionally spatially tight, perhaps even somewhat claustrophobic mission. As with most tall lighthouses, the interior space inside the tower itself is fairly limited. This will pose a pretty big challenge for the player as they ascend and descend the structure. There is only a single set of fairly narrow steps inside the tower itself, this long staircase being too narrow for two people to pass each other by. While there won't be that many AI patrolling the stairs, players will have to beware of running into them. Obviously, the stairs, along with the internal corners and room corners in the two large floors at the base of the lighthouse, have been really good places for visportals. I think I still need to tinker with the VPs a bit, but they've been working fine while I explored the whole structure, top to bottom, bottom to top. Trust me, this is one lighthouse that will take you a while to ascend or descend, even if you run with your character in this currently-empty mission. (Good virtual firefighter training, LOL.)

My first time contributing to this thread with some WIP of my own, instead of just "wow, good work, guys" platitudes. Be gentle, I am still new to FM making, beyond the basics. This is the WIP exterior of the lighthouse for my first ever FM, which will be mostly set within this building. The textures are largelly placeholder for ease of building, I'll finalise their selection later. For the most part, I am satisfied with the structure itself. The priorities for the WIP exterior and basic structure went thus: 1. Make sure everything is interconnected well, without bizarre collission, and is airtight. 2. I built the tower floors first, optimalised them to use less brush pieces than the ones I started out with several months back. 3. To test the airtightness, I at first isolated the floors, then tested the first finished staircase (with added visportals and everything), then gradually copied the floor, made a careful connection, then did some testing. The top of the lighthouse (top room and outside exterior walkway around the room, with skybox) and the ground floor and second floors were connected and tested as the last. 4. The skybox is the latest addition, and it will be available in the ground floor exteriors too, but I am first testing it at the top of the tower. I still need to test the skybox a few times, but I think it'll work. Criticism welcomed.

Level design is a funny thing, I was looking through some old screenshots and compared them to scenes now. Here's a street section from August And here's that same street section in November What a difference just a few months makes!

100% behind this! We already have (most of) the assets: It mainly seems that no one had the initiative of making such a FM yet. I'm sorry that I haven't been helping either: I'm busy with many other projects, and due to the non-commercial nature of TDM it's difficult to make even a FM a project for my Patreon which would have made it a lot easier to work on one.

No, these are remnants of a pen&paper rpg system I've been working decades ago. It was a bit like Deus Ex / Bladerunner with oceans totally filled with algae, completely clouded sky, all plants are dead and decaying biomass is everywhere, all herbivores died, so all carnivores roaming in massive swarms, attacking and taking over whole cities. There is a black hole on the surface of the sun, dead people are no longer dead due to advanced life support systems - but if you are not rich enough, your brain will be added to the pool containing thousands of other, forming a collective net, like the elders council. Few factions struggle to find and perform a solution for this disaster.

You're up to incredible stuff, dude. ? I suppose this will be TDM's more steampunky take on the Puppets from TDS. Was this, perchance, inspired by those powered armours from Fallout that are still working decades after the soldiers inside have perished ?

There was this epidemic outbreak, starting at a rock crystal mining facility, deep in the marshes of Rahena. Some poor burglar manage to survive all horrors of the seemingly undead, deranged crew spreading havoc as their flesh started falling apart. He escaped, only to bring the new pathogen to more densely populated areas. Many lives perished in flames of this terrible disease, but much more were kept at the brink of death, but still able to fight it. A victim of the crystal leprosy disease, kept alive by a carapace of prosthetics, servomotors, with all organs sustained in bath of nutritious liquids. Remaining flesh keeps peeling off, and the mind of now unrecognizable human being deteriorates, poisoned by the necrosis - at this point one may ask if there is a living creature still there or is it just an autonomous yet mindless machine with bits and pieces of decaying body.

Just to stimulate some interest in Goldwell and others, here's a very rough prototype for the loose recreation of G.'s apartment, as seen in TMA. Obviously, this is extremely WIP, I threw it together in a short amount of time, so it will still evolve. I also do not plan to copy the layout of the TMA inspiration all that slavishly, only in broad strokes, for the sake of keeping this copyright-friendly. The main highlights of the apartment itself. The bed, table area. fireplace and entrance door are roughly where they were in the TMA apartment. I still keep thinking I chose overly fancy wood panelling, but as this is a prototype, it can be sorted out later. Maybe some non-cheapo-looking wallpaper texture ? The parquet panels were used in an effort to emulate the floor of the TMA apartment. To paraphrase John Green, "But let's first look at what's in the secret compartment !". The wall between the bedroom area and the entrance door looks like an ordinary wall with wood panelling, right ? Well, think again. As the screenshot in the upper right corner shows, I've hidden a secret door, with doorframe and everything, in that panelling. The small room with green wallpaper, hanger, doorframe and wood panelling door is the secret closet of the flat. Rather than recreate the TMA apartment's closet, and then the secret compartment within it, I instead made the whole closet a secret room of its own, for various secret supplies, loot, and so on. Though I have to ask a question: Would it be cooler if the access door was hidden in the shorter wall closer to the bed ? I am open to suggestions on that.

Well, I'd like to hope I have a good handle on this stuff. I'm still a bit undecided on some plans for the series and its missions, but hey, small steps. I want the first missions to feel like a small start, then build up to something bigger. The concept behind the series is actually an old one at this point, I was already contemplating not long after I joined. Maybe around January 2015 for the first time. I even mention it in my post from that time, though I had a lot less structure to the plan back then. The one major feature I want to experiment with story-wise in this series is having a male protagonist, but a female deuteragonist. Not many major female thief characters in the game so far, so I'm going to try. She'll start out as a civilian before becoming a thief like her pal, and will mostly be an NPC in the missions. I would like to do at least two missions where she'll be the player character, though (as long as we can manage getting those female player vocals finished and introduced in future releases, in good quality).

Thank you. Those are precisely the reasons why almost my entire first mission is set in a single building, that lighthouse. It's a challenge for me as a currently still amateur mission builder. Get the "superstructure" done and working, then start furnishing and plotting. I will confess I made the rooms, especially the ones in the tower, fairly small and claustrophobic, as a deliberate design feature to encourage a "less is more" approach and also force the player to use their wits more while traversing the place vertically. I will also confess the design approach was sort of inspired by what LGS did with Thief II: The Metal Age: Design a cool environment that would be good to play in and explore, then design the meat and the details of the mission around it. (I sort of have a similar approach for the other FMs I'm planning, though those will be a bit more narrative-motivation-first.) Hopefully, the above mentioned approach will be enough of a win-win exercise. I plan this mission to be newbie-player friendly, but a bit more challenging than the really basic "small FM, get in this house and burgle it" - somewhere between those small missions and the more intermediate missions. This FM will be part of my planned Partners in Crime series and will introduce a new city to the lore. Probably not the chronologically first mission in the series, but it might end up as the second or third one (I want to introduce some of the main characters in at least one prequel mission, set before the lighthouse). I am also tentatively starting work on designing that homage of Garrett's apartment from TMA, since it will be useful for a future mission or two. And it helps me practice furnishing interiors, especially the smaller and more "living quarters" ones. You've covered the TDS era apartment, now it's my turn with something related. Thank you for that free ticket to Droolsville, namesake. ? ?

____________ is a rapist. Fill in the blank, post an essay somewhere, and you have ruined or at least severely derailed a life. No evidence, and no police report was ever filed? No problem. Social media is the court. In this specific case, it looks like Jeremy Soule deactivated all social media accounts, and his "agency representative" is also not responding. This could be the right move, as saying nothing is probably better than making a generic apology for "the hurt I've caused" if you think you are innocent of the major claims. Say the wrong thing, and it will be used to beat you into the ground. Update: He has denied the allegations. Accusations against two others in the industry came out in solidarity later, with one accusation from someone who allegedly grifted tens of thousands of dollars from Kickstarter backers without delivering a product. Pursuing false accusers in a real court is possible, but could be difficult and will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, if not $100k+. Anyone who is actually raped should seek help from the police immediately, so evidence can be gathered before it is too late. If the #MeToo movement can reduce the stigma of reporting rape, and force departments and prosecutors to seriously investigate claims, that is a good thing. Earlier in the year, it was reported that Soule had not been contacted by Bethesda about doing the score for TES 6. It might stay that way now that Soule is being dragged into the mud. But given the abject failure of Fallout 76, Bethesda may be incapable of putting out quality games anymore. Time to move on?