The Black Arrow

Alright, so, I'm a Texture Artist myself for more than 20 years, which means I know what I'm talking about, but my word isn't law at all, remember that. I've worked (mostly as mods, I am a professional but I much prefer being a freelance) with old DX8 games up to DX12. When it comes to Detail Textures, for my workflow, I never ever use it except rarely when it's actually good (which, I emphasize on "rarely"). This is one reason I thought mentioning that I worked with DX8 was logical. One of the few times it's good is when you make a game that can't have textures higher than what would be average today, such as, World Textures at 1024x1024. Making detail textures for ANY (World, Model) textures that are lower than 128x128 is generally appealable. Another is when the game has no other, much better options for texturing, such as Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping. Personally, I think having Detail Textures for The Dark Mod is arguably pointless. I know TDM never had a model and texture update since 2010 or so, but most textures do seem to at least be 1024x1024, if there's any world texture that's lower than 256x256, I might understand the need of Detail Textures. Now, if this was a game meant to be made in 2024 with 2020+ standards, I would say that we should not care about the "strain" high resolution textures add, however, I do have a better proposition: Mipmaps. There are many games, mostly old than new ones, that use mipmaps not just for its general purpose but also to act as a "downscaler". With that in mind, you boys can add a "Texture Resolution" option that goes from Low to High, or even Lowest to Highest. As an example, we can add a 2048x2048 (or even 4096x4096) world texture that, if set to Lowest, it would use the smallest Mipmap the texture was made with, which depends on how the artist did it, could be a multiplication of 1x1 or 4x4. One problem with this is that, while it will help in the game with people who have less VRAM than usual these days, it won't help with the size. 4096x4096 is 4096x4096, that's about 32mb compressed with DXT1 (which is not something TDM can use, DXT is for DirectX, sadly I do not know how OpenGL compresses its textures). I would much rather prefer the option to have better, baked Normal Maps as well as Parallax Mapping for the World Textures. I'm still okay with Detail Textures, I doubt this will add anything negative to the game or engine, very sure the code will also be simple enough it will probably only add 0.001ms for the loading times, or even none at all. But I would also like it as an option, just like how Half-Life has it, so I'm glad you mentioned that. But yet again, I much prefer better Normal Maps and Parallax Mapping than any Detail Textures. On another note...Wasn't Doom 3, also, one of the first games that started using Baked Normal Maps?

So, I love both Thief 1 and Horror, but I can't pick both, so I picked Horror instead. Just saying in hopes that somebody reads this and makes a "Thief 1 Inspired Horror"

Alright, I've tried this about two days ago and I had quite the fun in it. I think saying anything will be a spoiler, so my whole review will be a spoiler itself, here you go: Overall, it's a great short fan mission, it captures the Lovecraftian atmosphere very well, I always loved Lovecraft horror and I hope to see more from you!

I can't wait to try this, Lovecraft's works are one of my top favourites all time, so glad to know there's more than one author who is inspired by it. I never got the chance to read "The Terrible Old Man", but I did read "The Picture in the House". I have this good memory of playing Neverwinter Nights, somebody made a fantastic module about the work I just mentioned, "The Picture in the House", it's actually what inspired me to read it. Let's see how influential this mission will be!

Is that so? Well then, it takes more than one shot to kill a Bull Moose! I do have ideas on what the recipe could have actually been, if you and anybody else wants to know, here it is in spoiler: I always loved when missions have a climax and then you finally read it, you finally know it. You know what they say; curiosity killed the cat...And satisfaction brought it back. I will never NOT play a mission's sidequest. Also I'm glad to know you're very eager for TDM mission making, wonder what you have on the works, no doubt it will be as great as this one and that is much to say knowing that, again, it's your first mission!

I'm rather surprised, for a "first mission", this was so visually appealing that it reminded me one of many Chocobo's classics. I hope your interest in TDM is still big, because I'd love to see more missions from you! By the way, what was Bert's secret?

I would use this massive list for any fan missions, it includes campaigns too: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148090 There are a lot of Fan Missions for the picking, I myself go for the lesser known ones and the short variety, because sometimes they hide a gem or two. Just like jaxa, I'm a bit outdated after the temporal retirement, but I do remember some amazing campaigns like "The Black Frog". If you intend to play The Black Frog, you should play the first two of the L'Arsene series missions, it's how I did it myself. Also, yes, L'Arsene are a fantastic series. The first mission of L'Arsene is a "rough draft", author was a bit new to Thief level making, but still great either way, after the 3rd you will see how his skill increased by a massive amount.

Interesting, it seems that Netherlands is always trying to find a solution for file sharing, I remember using transfer.sh until it got crappily slow and unsteady these days. This looks good enough for me, I'll make sure to try it, thanks a lot for the suggestion.