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I think it would be smart to go ahead and start a "Newbie thread" that covers all newbie questions in one place, as with the TDS Forum. It doesn't have to be this one, just for future reference. Aaanyway, I was going through the A-Z Tutorial, and right about the time you make the pool of water, I fixed some leaks, thought I got them all. Now it won't Dmap again, but when I hit Pointfile, it says "Could not open pointfile: E:/games/ ... /TutorialMap.lin" I don't know why since it's been working up to now. So if I have a leak I can't find it, but it's troubling just that Pointfile suddenly, inexplicably doesn't open! There isn't any ".lin" file either; not sure what happened to it. Any ideas? Edit: I started a map from scratch and Pointfile didn't show up again. So whatever it is, it isn't something I messed up in that first map, but a general problem I'm having with DR. Edit2: But it does Dmap and Map just fine, so that's ok.

Wow that looks really cool! I have one in my WIP after saw it being talked about on the idtech4 discord the other day - I had no idea they even existed before that though. A lot of potential but it was certainly kind of a pain in the ass to setup. I don't understand all the parameters but I also always have a problem where the intensity of the waves seems to keep growing or multiplying gradually over time, so it looks great at map start, but after a decent amount of playtime it gets completely out of control.

There are currently nearly 200 missions to the game. That's a lot. So I made a list of the ones you shouldn't miss. If you're a beginner, do not start with the best missions. Play a few others first to learn how the game and controls work, and how you can use some items to interact with objects on the map. You will appreciate them more that way. Tastes vary. My subjective assessment is based on how enthusiastic and interested I was during the mission. Generally, I appreciate the unusual circumstances. If I felt lost too many times or needed hints to solve the plot, those were clear disadvantages. I don't like the needle in the haystack type elements. (Secrets are fine.) The list isn't a quality line. I don't want to add precise ratings, that's not the point. I have a message for those whose missions didn't end up here: Don't worry. Others may judge differently. In any case, some missions may be added here with some editing. A few didn't make it here only because of the obscure wording in the descriptions of objectives. Give me tips if you think something is missing from the list. 200 missions are a lot, I might have skipped some gems. BEST MISSIONS -A House of Locked Secrets: Very funny, diverse and memorable, sometimes nonsensical. The best mission. 4 hrs -Seeking Lady Leicester: It's probably the second best mission, but I won't argue with anyone who ranks it first. Knowing how to rotate items is essential to play this mission (middle mouse button). 6 hrs -Volta 2, Cauldron of the Gods 2.5 hrs -Volta 3: Gemcutter 3 hrs -Penny Dreadful 1: The grail of regrets 1.5-2 hrs -Penny Dreadful 2: All the way up 3 hrs -The Painter's Wife: A monumental mission. The size doesn't mean this is the best one. -Hazard Pay 2 hrs -Now and Then 5.5 hrs -Black Mage 3 hrs -Requiem: The mission is excellent and imaginative. But it's painfully difficult to move without being noticed at certain points. 4 hrs -Crucible of Omens: Behind closed doors: Excellent mission, the only problem is that it's difficult to navigate between the different parts, and it's hard to find your way back to places. Having a route back to the first part, which could be opened from the later part of the map, would have helped the flow. 5 hrs RECOMMENDED MISSIONS -Iris I hesitated a lot whether to put this in the list of best missions. But the first part of the mission offers so many options, it's rather a caricature of the genre. And the environment isn't very good either. Less would have been more. The second part of the mission is much better. I appreciate the innovative element. 7 hrs -Chronicles of Skulduggery 0: To Catch a Thief -Chronicles of Skulduggery 2: A Precarious Position 2.5 hrs -Chronicles of Skulduggery 3: Sacricide: Good, traditional mission but the story is too black and white. -No Honor Among Thieves: The end isn't satisfying, but otherwise this is a good mission chain. 5.5 hrs -Shadows of Northdale act 2. 3 hrs -The Last Night on Crookshank Lane 4 hrs -Penny Dreadful 3 -Mother Rose Funny. It's not for beginners! 40 min -A Score to Settle -Sir Talbot's Collateral -Talbot 2: Return to the City 1.5 hrs -Talbot 3: Fiasco at Fauchard street 1.5 hrs -Thomas Porter 1, Knighton Manor: Good jokes. -Thomas Porter 2, The Beleaguered Fence -Thomas Porter 3, Glenham Tower -King of Diamonds -Accountant 2: The code is good. -Golden Skull: 30 min -Vengeance for a Thief 1-3 -The Factory Heist -A Good Neighbor -Snowed Inn -Langhorne Lodge -Heart of Saint Mattis 3-4 hrs -Perilous Refuge 2.5 hrs -The Hare in the Snare: Part 1 -Rightful Property -Alberic's Curse 1.5 hrs -A Night in Altham: A strange mission. 9 hrs -By the Cookbook 1 hour -Wizard's Treasure 1 hour -A Night to Remember 1.5 hrs -Lord Edgars Bathhouse 1.5 hrs -Last Offering: How much you enjoy it depends largely on what equipment you choose at the beginning. 1 hour -The Rift: Quite cool, but the music isn't on the ambient channel so it's not possible to make it quiet. 1 hour -Briarwood Cathedral 1.5 hrs -The Threepenny Revue: 45 min -Mission of Mercy 1 hour

for those still dabling in retro hardware heres some interresting sites https://windowsupdaterestored.com/ windows updates for win 9x to xp https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/tpus-nostalgic-hardware-club.108251/ links to various sites with old software and information on setting up older systems hardware.

I meant all missions in one map file and in the briefing you select the starter position inside the map. every area (challenge) is an enclosed area inside the map file.

hmm another small problem creept up from behind when doing SDL3 builds. SDL3 removed the old hardware gamma ramps from the library so dhewm uses a shader based version. unfortunatly for my hybrid GLSL/ARB interaction renderer it only works in ARB mode because it is hacked into the interaction shader stage instead of the material shader stage and sadly i do not have an implementation of this hack in GLSL . I have a rough idea how to do it but i lack some skills in regards to working with hardware shader code. i do however have an old codepiece which i used in quake as a replacement for the old gamma ramp code but it needs a little work. what it does is actually really simple, it uses the same code as overbrights but scales the output with the gamma value. also overbrights tended to use a texture this code foregoes that completely as it is unneeded and instead outputs to a fullscreen quad. it works somewhat good in quake but there are two values in dhewm brightness+gamma so i might have to get creative.

With parallax occlusion mapping you can have even more convincing effect using one material, without the need for a second mesh / face with "heathaze" material. One issue is that a moving normalmap that has some kind of repeating cloth pattern doesn't look quite right. If normalmap is set to only have the high frequency cloth pattern, and only displacement map (folds) is moving: You could fake the shadows by using ambient occlusion map, which could essentially be the same to similar to the displacement map. But the effect will not be as convincing as proper animated normalmap with folds.

A set of some 200 missions is a lot to sift through to find what one likes. I never used your site but if it provided functionality to search missions for parameters like approximate playtime, series v standalone, and tags like undead, spiders, mansion, city, etc, then it sounds plenty useful. Can the functionality be incorporated into the main web page? Perhaps even integrated to fetch underlying data from the wiki (so that trusted editors can keep the parameters up to date)?

============== -= IRIS =- ============== WELLINGTONCRAB TDM v 2.11 REQ Ver. 1.3 *For Maureen* -=- "Carry the light of the Builder, Brother. Unto its end." -Valediction of the Devoted "What year is this? Am I dreaming?" -Plea of the Thief Dear Iris, I am old and broken. When we were young it felt like the words came easily. Now I find the ink has long dried on the pen and I'm as wanting for words as coin in my purse. I can tell we are nearing the end of the tale; time enough for one more job before the curtain call... ============== -Installation- Requires minimum version of TDM 2.11 **Dev build dev17056-10800 (2.13) fixes several visual effects which have been broken in the mission since the release of 2.11. For that reason playing with that version or later is currently recommended** -Iris does not support mods or the Unofficial Patch- Download and place the following .pk4 into you FMs directory: Iris Download ============== *Thank you for playing. Iris is a large mission which can either take as quickly or as long as you are compelled to play. I hope someone out there enjoys it and this initial release is not completely busted - I tried the best I could!* *Iris both is and isn't what it seems. If commenting please use spoiler tags where appropriate. If you are not certain if it would be appropriate a good assumption would be to use a spoiler tag* *Support TDM by rating missions on Thief Guild: https://www.thiefguild.com/* ============== WITH LASTING GRATITUDE: OBSTORTTE - Whose gameplay scripts from his thread laid the foundation which made the mission seem like something I could even pull off at all. Also fantastic tutorial videos! DRAGOFER - Who built upon that foundation and made it shine even brighter! And whom also provided immeasurable quantities of help and encouragement the past couple years on the TDM discord. ORBWEAVER & GIGAGOOGA - For generously offering their ambient music up for use. EPIFIRE - Who lent me his fine trash and trash receptacle models. AMADEUS - Who was the first person who wasn't me to play the damn thing and provided his excellent editorial services to improving the readers experience playing TESTERS AND TROUBLESHOOTERS: AMADEUS * DATISWOUS * SPOOKS * ALUMINUMHASTE * JAXA * JACKFARMER * WESP5 * ATE0ATE * MADTAFFER * STGATILOV * DRAGOFER * KINGSAL * KLATREMUS - What can I possibly say? Playing this thing over and over again could not have been easy. Deepest thanks and all apologies. -=THANKS TO ALL ON THE TDM DISCORD AND FORUM=- ==SEE README.TXT FOR ADDITIONAL ATTRIBUTIONS & INFORMATION== HONORABLE MENTION: GOLDWELL - If I hadn't by chance stumbled into Northdale back in 2018/2019 I would probably still be trying to get this thing to work in TDS, which means it probably would not exist - though more details on that in readme. ============== Boring Technical Information: *Iris is a performance intensive mission and I recommend a GTX 1060 or equivalent. I find the performance similar to other demanding TDM missions on my machine, but mileage may vary and my apologies if this prevents anyone from enjoying the mission.* *Iris heavily modifies the behavior of AI in the game, how they relate/respond to each other and the player. So they may act even stranger than they do typically in TDM. Feedback on this is useful - as it can potentially be improved and expanded upon in future patches.* -=- This is my first release and it has been a long time coming! If I forgot anything please let me know! God Speed. 2.10 Features Used:

{ blend parallaxmap map textures/test_parallax/blocks_mixedsize02_multicolour_height min -0.05 max 0.05 * sintable[time*0.5] }

In pursuit of a long-sought secret, the key to life everlasting lies deep within the recesses of an ancient athenaeum. Dragofer, Bikerdude, and I proudly present our FM for the Christmas Connections Contest titled "Written in Stone." Notes - TDM 2.10 Beta 5 or later is REQUIRED to play this mission. However, it is recommended to play using 2.10 Beta 6. You can get the latest version here. - This FM is a sequel to The Elixir. While it is not vital to play that before playing Written in Stone, there are some story connections. - This FM may be more hardware intensive than normal. LOD settings can be set below "Normal" to improve performance on low-end machines by disabling certain features. - Various areas will look better with shadow maps enabled at the possible expense of performance. - This FM implements the func_peek mechanic, allowing players to peek through any door that has a keyhole on it by leaning forward. PLEASE NOTE: This function has been known to cause crashes for a small number of players in the past, likely due to using the 32-bit version of TDM. At no point in this mission is it required to use the func_peek mechanic; it is purely optional, so feel free not to use it. As an entry in the 2.10 Christmas Connections Contest, the new features and assets used by this FM are: Download Version 1.1 This FM is available for download here: Google Drive Simply place the written.pk4 into your darkmod/fms folder and you're ready to go! Promotional Screenshots (via ThiefGuild) Credits A big thanks goes out to Wellingtoncrab for making a beautiful city map, Narrator for their wonderful voice work, nbohr1more for creating the original story premise as well as a few readables, Goldwell for animating the introduction to our briefing video and Duzenko for making certain glasses work as well as they do! A huge thank you also goes out to our beta testers: Goldwell, Wellingtoncrab, Kingsal, noodles, Krilmar, Garrett(Monolyth-42) ate0ate, and Mike_A. Thank you all very much for your keen eye to detail and great insights! Asset Credits Kingsal's Killer Assets Wellingtoncrab's Wonderful Furniture and Book Skins ***PLAYERS BEWARE*** SPOILERS lurk in the depths below. We strongly recommend playing this FM first so you don't spoil the fun for yourself!

I put it on a test_liquid.liquid model from the liquidmodel test map: What it looks like without scrolling:

Shroud - a mechanical tomb for someone malfigured by disease or injuries, often a dead-inside person - can be hacked. The procedure then switches to navigating inside of machine circuits with a probe, uncovering depths of both mind and body. The probe's mechanics can be used for controlling a familiar pet (rat, bat, owl, fly, cockroach) or a small automaton, and traversing vents, pipes - too small for human to fit inside.

If you change translation, rotation and scale at different rates it will make looping less obvious. I'm not aware of any random number generator / procedural noise that you could plug in into materials but you can make arbitrarily big table of numbers and use that. I guess you could also multiply / mix different tables. I'm also using rather simple texture generated in GIMP. You can add more variation. One more thing that one can do is animating the strength of parallax occlusion mapping effect. For example: blend parallaxmap map textures\darkmod\cloth_folds_disp min -0.05 max 0.05 * sinTable[time * 0.1] Could be useful. I don't think you can animate strength of bump maps the same way, unfortunately.

Ahh I understand. I may someday take the idea to the lab but I will have to re-think how many things are structured, ie: objectives, items that can spawn in one room but should be used only in that room, ambient light and/or music from room to room... The idea is that each map (room) is completely isolated from others so that authors can do whatever they want without interfering with anything else. Each room can have its own set of scripts, materials, textures, models, music, anything! Sure, a basic set of rules must be respected but mappers will be for the most part free to do whatever they please. Anything and in any form.

hmm its actually rather advanced and unfortunatly a bit of a pain to setup. one example is hrtf (headphone surround) which requires mapping sound locations with a tool they provide. https://deepwiki.com/kcat/openal-soft/5.3-gui-configuration-tool lists a good deal of which steps needed. for all other cases it is probably better to ask on the github forums for it. attached my own config for dhewm3 which sounds somewhat ok. drop it next to the dhewm3 executable. if you feel up to experimenting you can add your own settings to it alsoft.zip

I'm happy to announce the release of my third FM: Year of the Rat. This is my first city hub map, focused primarily on story characters and environment. It's my most complex project to date, taking its fair share of effort to make which was a good learning experience. As an experiment I opted to use no scripts and rely solely on the default entities, as well as no custom assets apart from the map and splash screen hence the small pk4. It features a few special elements, such as factions that are hostile only when the player commits crime or a decoder lockpick used to open electronic doors. The beta testing thread can be found here, thank you everyone who helped find the most obvious problems. You play as a famous thief nicknamed Black Jack: A man who's pulled many crazy jobs in his life, only to be hired for an absurd and insulting task by an anonymous employer. The objective is pretty straightforward: Be kind to the mice and feed them some cheese! Your silly quest takes you to the Lantern Light district during the Lunar New Year celebration, a place where gangs and corrupt nobles do their dirty deeds together. What ulterior motives and unexpected twists could your adventure entail? While the most obvious problems were patched during beta testing, some issues can't be easily resolved due to the complexity of the entity setup and objectives, meaning you may encounter a few inconsistencies. Most notably surrounding AI, which may float above chairs and not react to alerts or oppositely send the whole map into a panic: This is mostly due to how the engine handles AI and alarms. The map is small since I wanted to add more detail without having to work on large areas, as such some places can feel cramped while the skybox may be visible up close. I'll be busy so further updates are unlikely unless I decide to add new content later... you're welcome to report any issues you encounter, but keep in mind that if something wasn't fixed it's likely known but difficult to address or due to engine functionality. Spoilers for objectives and secrets as follows: Download 1.2: Google Drive, Mega. Screenshots with minor spoilers for the various areas:

As my custom assets work has increasingly shifted from models towards scripting, I'll open a new thread here to contain any scripts that I write which can be reused in other missions, starting with the A ) Presence Lamp This is a Lost City-style lamp that brightens and dims depending on the presence of the player or an AI. It fades between 2 colours and can trigger its targets whenever it switches fully on or off, so it should also be viable in various other situations. The standard setup consists of the following: - a trigger_multiple brush. The spawnarg "anyTouch" controls whether AIs, too, are able to activate it - a presence lamp, highly recommended with a colorme skin - one presence light, or any other light with appropriate spawnargs The targeting chain is trigger brush -> lamp -> light When the player or an AI stands in the trigger_multiple brush, the lamp switches on and starts a short timer. Subsequent triggers reset the timer. If the timer runs out because no one's standing in the trigger brush anymore, the lamp switches itself off. Notes - Multiple trigger brushes can target the same lamp, and one trigger brush can target multiple lamps. However, each presence lamp can only target one light, so if you want i.e. a bouncelight you'll need to hide an additional silent presence lamp somewhere and target it from the same trigger brush. - The lamp and the light use their own colour spawnargs respectively, since setting 0 0 0 on a lamp would make it appear pitch black. - Technically the trigger brush can be exchanged for anything else that triggers the lamp every 0.5s (this number can be changed via "update_interval" on the lamp), i.e. a trigger_timer. - This was originally named the proximity lamp and was one of many scripting jobs for The Painter's Wife. I've renamed it to "presence lamp" because the mapper may place the trigger brush(es) wherever he wishes: proximity to the lamp is not a factor. Credits go to Bikerdude for putting together the crystal lamp models. Download Presence Lamps - Google Drive Place or extract the .pk4 into your FM archive, then look up the presence lamp prefabs. If you already are using other custom scripts, remember to add the presence lamp's .script to your tdm_custom_scripts file. B ) Teledoor This is a Skyrim-style door which opens just a bit into a black_matt "void" before teleporting the player to a different area of the map, which may represent the other side of the door. This is used for connecting physically separated map areas with each other, such as when there's an exterior/interior split of a building or ship to allow for more mapping freedom. [Full Thread] C ) Mass Teleport This is a teleportation setup designed to seamlessly teleport the player and any moveables between two identical-looking areas. This allows the mapper to link 2 physically distant areas with each other while maintaining the illusion that they're connected. The teleportation zones should be free of AIs as they can't be teleported like this without their patrols breaking. [Post] D ) Automaton Station A station for Sotha's automatons (includes the automatons) which can be switched on and off by patrolling automatons. (Part of core assets as of 2.10) [Post] E ) Camgoyle A sentient turret originally made for the FM Written in Stone. It's based on the new security camera entity and augmented with scripting to allow it to fire magical projectiles at the enemies it detects. People are more than welcome to use it and to convert it into something else, such as a mechanical turret. [Post] [Download] F ) Audiograph The audiograph is an Inventor's Guild device for playing back recordings stored on spindles, which are small metal cylinders the player can pick up and store in his inventory. [Post] G ) Turret A new companion to security cameras familiar to Thief players. It will become active as soon as an enemy is detected by a targeted security camera, firing projectiles to fend off the intruders. Similar to the security camera and the camgoyle sentry, turrets are highly customisable in their behaviour and appearance. [Thread] G ) Fog Fade Dynamically change fog density depending on what location the player is in. [Thread]

Nice to hear about this. That's an impressive roster of languages... but there's always the question, how good is it for translation to the particular language(s) one needs? Privacy-centered is great too, although perhaps less important for happenings in the fictional TDM world. I was also looking today at Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 announcement, which seemed to suggest that the free tier includes access to it through its API. (In the long run, I can see driving forward/backward translations through different model APIs.) Haiku is claimed to be a small but powerful AI model. A general concern about making models small is that they are less knowledgeable, so maybe less good translations. So many AI systems, under such swift change. In the meantime, I'm taking a slow, cautious, and somewhat piecemeal approach, seeing where the translation problems are, and how to fix them.

An automatic save is created at the start of a room. Once you reach a room you can re-play it (check your saves). I agree it would be cool to have something more visually appealing, a kind of map where rooms unlock as you progress. Mappers create rooms and once we have a good number of maps we stitch them together and release everything in a single package. That's what I had in mind but who knows. I will soon create a dedicated topic and we can discuss everything in there.

Interesting idea, but I would rather choose to start a specific mission instead of doing them in order. I guess that's more difficult to implement though. You could have them all in one map and in the briefing select which challenge to start. I wonder what you had in mind for the community inclusion. Would other mappers add maps to the campaign list, or would mappers make new missions in the same format?

By "IP", I'm thinking you mean my machine's address (not intellectual property). Yes, if an AI was not privacy-preserving, and actively monitoring for and reporting IRL criminal activity (likely many are), and misconstrued what I was doing, then I see your point. For my particular FM, the phrases don't really imply any criminal acts, just clues. This is not the case for all FMs. In those cases, when untrustworthy AI systems allow rich prompts, it's probably a good idea to specifically indicate you are writing for a fictional mission within a PC game. Also, the activity itself, translating into a fixed suite of multiple languages, is probably not something an actual criminal enterprise would do. Talking in the forums about your FM under development would also show that your intentions are not real-world crimes, and I'd like to think ward off all but the most wrong-headed prosecutions.

I have a bunch of weird things like that, but they collect dust in a drawer. It is time to make some use of it. I will try to keep it small and finally release something.

Greetings everyone! I recently got into TDM and am already having a lot of fun playing through and ghosting missions. However, coming from Thief, I am mostly relying on the rules and my experience with that game, while there are clearly differences in how TDM works. Right now, there is talk in the ghosting discussion thread on TTLG to amend the ruleset and include clarifications pertaining to TDM. So I wanted to drop by and ask: is there an active TDM ghosting community already and have any rules for this playstyle been developed? I would also like to ask someone to take a look at the draft of this addendum to see whether everything looks correct: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148487&page=16&p=2473352&viewfull=1#post2473352 Thanks!

@datiswous Interesting to see someone giving portals another go. Regarding making it a "one-approach" teleport, an approach could be to use the direction of the player's velocity and a pair of small trigger brushes within the doorframe. The idea would be the player has to step into brush 1, then into brush 2 with a velocity +x for the teleport to trigger. If his velocity at any time becomes -x (which happens if he steps into brush 1, then goes back out and around the doorframe and walks into brush 2), he has to go back to brush 1 again. Behind the scenes, stepping into brush 1 would set a global variable to 1, i.e. "can_teleport". While the variable is 1, a looping script would check every frame whether the player's velocity is -x, setting the variable back to 0. Stepping into brush 2 would check whether the global variable is 1. If yes, teleport the player. The teleportation offset is handled by subtracting the origins of the teleport zones from each other. If the brushes were changed, the position of their origin relative to their doorframe may also have changed and you get a noticeable displacement.