Anderson

Well, I liked that GeForce Experience usually has a realistic prognosis based on the diagnosis of PC specs. So it usually looks at the worst case scenario and sets up graphics lower accordingly. I never found it to optimize graphics in a way that makes FPS stall. Especially important in multiplayer games. Whereas indeed, often in-game recommended optimization is a hit & miss. I think Source games used to be not so good at it. Didn't play them recently to see if they changed something.

Today many games usually default to recommended optimized settings based on PC specifications. The Nvidia GeForce Experience app is all about that.

Most people I know won't check the settings before playing for their first times. They'll assume it just works or that it might automatically set things up as most modern games do or that the tutorial will show the most important stuff.

Love the calmness. Pleasant to play on medium difficulty. I'm sure it's not too hard on max difficulty neither. My favorite part about small missions is how well their performance is. Not common today with many new ambitious TDM FM's. Very pleasing use of blue moon lights inside the den. One thing that bothered me was that you couldn't take Deadeye back to the starting point if you actually knocked him out on lower difficulties, even though the briefing sort of hints that it could be possible as an optional objective if you go through the trouble to do it. What is the music used in the outdoors city and in Deadeye's den upstairs?

Cry of Fear is lo-fi in a bad way. Too many jump scares.

Since The Dark Mod is gothic, and since we have a new war this year, found a very cool underground Ukrainain dark folk etno gothic music. Reminds me a lot of the Thief2X mod and the Cosas mod for Thief. Some other stuff from them is really this synth or dungeon synth genre.

I found out this is the second part of your series only after completing the mission and reading the description of this topic's OP. Anyway, just completed and wanted to say that it's really cool how the FM is small but at the same time it's spread all over the place. Lots of pleasant opportunities to think vertically with the rope arrow. Other time it's obvious that only vertical is the way to go. Good call on restricting weapons only to arrows to make the player think more. Love that you combined different types of enemies in just 1 missions. I adore the casual burglary or tenants and people in the city. Never know what you may find. Very reminiscent of Thief 3 city free roam and Thief 2's Life of the Party mission. I couldn't figure out for a long time what was the closed un-openable door at the end. Turned out it was the fence. I suppose there shouldn't be a sign for the fence but there probably should be another sign to show what street we're on. Suggestion: Do you think the guard on the tower should have a bow instead of a sword? He has a great shooting position and I expected him to have a bow if he ever had a clear view down. Nobody is expected to climb up. And we can only do that once we get the rope arrow which isn't that soon.

Is EAX planned to be added for Mission 2: The Tears of St. Lucia?

Many FM's alredy use the slow match so I don't know. Each author would have to replace it manually. I never thought of the realism side of it. Maybe the PC can light or extinguish the flint every time. Idk.

The problem is that I have a memory of a chicken and don't play often. But I remember since the Thief games that the brackets change inventory selection.

Thank you for the tip. Ok, this needs to be in the tutorial. I don't remember the tutorial explaining this mechanic. It's really counter intuitive to drop an item in order to use it. I usually drop items if I never want to see them again. Sometimes I can even do that with keys if I'm 100% sure I won't need them, or if I can unlock the same door with lockpicks. Because it's a real hassle having over 9999 items cycled through the inventory when I need something right now - such as a health potion or a lockpick and there's a guard coming. Especially with lockpicks, it's all about timing. We should be able to use the slow match directly from the inventory rather than dropping it for use.

Does anyone know Fan Missions where EAX environmental reverb really shows it's all ASMR beauty? Most FM's seem to be huge missions or campaigns. Seems that older missions have it disabled and only newer updated ones were tuned to have it on. Is there a list of FM's which ones have EAX on?

Thanks. All in all. About 2 hours of play and 1 hour of save scumming. Medium difficulty. It took me forever to find the room with the travel diary for some reason. I went by a million times but I didn't check all the rooms somehow. I tried to take it slow but got frustrated because all story-related doors on the second floor were locked by keys. Here's a question, is it good for gameplay if meaningful progression points are blocked with keys, to force player to find a particular room? Like it would be cool if the player can just unlock every door with lockpicks, albeit on higher difficulty. The downside is that then the player can miss must see content. But to be honest you can't really solve the puzzle within reasonable time without finding the readable anyway. Some people like me just love complicating things That's my humble impression at any rate. Thanks for the great level!

I suggest that progressive puzzles on demand could work. I don't know of ways to implement it other than using the difficulty settings though. Would be cool if the mission briefing reflected the fact that difficulty affects puzzle clues too. Really thoughtful of you to make puzzles harder with difficulty. Usually I assume that difficulty only affects damage that enemies do, the number of enemies, how easy I am to spot. That kind of thing.

I feel like me stupid, me no understand but how to use a slow match? I've probably asked about this before and I forgot. Does the training mission or the tutorial FM's have any hints on this?

I think TDM lacks only some types of FM's at the moment. More middle east, desert missions featuring the moors as we already have moor NPC's - Thief 2X basically.. We also have no FM's featuring the werewolves and we have no Little Big World type of environments such as the secret level from "The Sword" in Thief Gold. Like take for example the smallest FM from TDM and make the player a small miniature figure inside it. So surreal. Just my wet dreams.

Will there be more work to improve performance? For example include common performance workaround tweaks into standard game settings? I mean particularly ”Disabling standard graphics features” I use a fairly newer budget laptop. The new patch helped loading times a lot and I'm glad to see this. But standard performance seems to be inconsistent, especially with EAX. I really want to keep native resolution and EAX on. Everything else doesn't matter to me. Minimum graphics solutions are also described on the forums here: here: And on the wiki here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks#Disabling_standard_graphics_features

Nice mission. I didn't properly play TDM in a long time. Haven't done much of anything since I alerted everyone as usual making things harder for myself. Not a lot of time to play but I chose medium difficulty. I'll see how it goes. Found a weird glitching on the walls at the end of the hallway on the 2'nd floor. If you mantle in the end you can see the walls glitching under certain angles.

I like the darker menu.

My love for small missions started with The Parcel.

I guess I just don't like the ticking clock sound and the music box. Can't explain why. It's part of the logo so it is indeed too much pestering and bothering over such small things. I always love when the main menu music is replaced with something else by Fan Missions.

Alright thanks. Seeding now. Maybe this .torrent that you made could be added on the main page TDM so that people could use .torrent as an alternative to the TDM installer? We could at least put the .torrent file on Moddb.

Agreed, the current music is very obviously looping and very loud to me. Just not a fan of the instruments used in TDM's main menu theme. It's not seamless to the point you don't notice it like the great main menu theme of Thief Deadly Shadows. But maybe I'm in the minority here.