Will TDM ever be 'finished'?

[Wallace]

Will there come a time when modders stop improving the game or stop making levels? This is seriously one of my favourite games right now and I worry that one day I'll have done all the missions. I guess I'm asking how many active modders there are and how long they plan to continue making maps?

[Melan]

Yes, all things come to an end, eventually. So it goes.

[Destined]

It might be, that sometimes in the future all support will end. But when you look at how long TDM has existed, I think this will quite take some time. And at that point, I hope, there will be another mod, with a younger community and a newer engine, that will continue the work. It might not be the exact same world, but it will hopefully be an enjoyable sneaking experience.

[grayman]

All things must end.

 

That having been said, we here at TDM Central don't see that end yet. Missions are still being made, new mappers and coders are still joining and creating. Major enhancements are underway, both in mapping and features.

 

When the day finally comes, though, we'll hopefully have paved the way for a new batch of fans to carry the sneaksie torch farther, perhaps on a different engine or different hardware; whatever's coming down the road.

[Sotha]

TDM will never be finished. If all development ends, it still is not finished. Who of us can claim it to be ready? Anyone could pick up the legacy and continue.

 

TDM will not end until the hosting ends. People can download and enjoy all the content that has been made as long as they can be donwloaded and the computers still run the game.

[demagogue]

To be more precise, it's open source, so a group of fans can always take over the task of maintaining and improving it & making FMs of course, and they wouldn't even need to wait for official permission to make their own team to do it. That's actually what a GPL license is designed for. It lets fans take up maintaining software if the original devs ever disappear. (A separate team could even form right now and start developing a branch game in parallel with us, for that matter. I'd actually love someone to do that for a cyberpunk branch.) The point is, legally it's indefinitely open to maintenance.

 

And then 100s or 1000s of years from now future archaeologists can maybe read our code off our harddrives like we read ancient Sumarian parchments and reconstruct the game and go on maintaining it from there if they like. I foresee a whole subdiscipline in history departments dedicated to our era's gaming like medieval historians of Byzantine theological texts.

 

I suppose if you go far enough into the future whatever species we evolve into won't comprehend games the same way we do, but then a lot more than TDM will be 'finished' by that point. [/what you get when you post a question like this while I'm listening to cosmic ambient music]

[Wallace]

Good to know, thanks for the replies. If for any reason this website were to shut down, would the missions still be available to DL from the in-game downloader?

[AluminumHaste]

They are hosted on a multitude of servers, but I'm not sure if parts are on this server also.

Worst case scenario, you would have to download the mission pk4 files from a website and manually copy them to your TDM fms folder.

[HMart]

TDM IMO will never be finished per se, it will mature to a point where new features will be implemented very sparsely but finished no. The engine and tools are still the biggest candidates to be improved and grow, who knows in the future we will gain a candid soul with knowledge to really improve the tech, having the engine and tools source is a door to maintain the game for many many years, and we have that. Also TDM will never die until theres someone making missions, even if the tools and engine stagnate.

 

One thing we can do to not let it die is spread the word around.

Edited May 5, 2015 by HMart

[Sotha]

One thing we can do to not let it die is spread the word around.

 

Aye. Also, you who are reading this, whoever you are:

if you are concerned whether TDM lives or not, or if you appreciate what we have accomplished and been doing here, why not show your appreciation by picking up DR and making a little map? Just a small one. A steady flow of missions is most useful in keeping TDM alive and well.

 

Mapping can be very rewarding in many ways, and anyone could learn how to do it.

 

Here is the tutorial:

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!

[Springheel]

Or talk us up around the internet. I regularly search for TDM posts on the web, and you'd be surprised how many times I find people, still, making posts like, "I've never heard of this before, is it any good?"

[AluminumHaste]

Or talk us up around the internet. I regularly search for TDM posts on the web, and you'd be surprised how many times I find people, still, making posts like, "I've never heard of this before, is it any good?"

 

This, absolutely this, and these posts are usually followed up by some moron with almost 0 knowledge of the mod, spouting some bullshit like you can't shoulder bodies, we use a knife like Thief 3, combat is useless etc.

Makes me want to reach through my monitor and strangle them, they do so much harm to the mindshare of the mod.

[SeriousToni]

 

 

Makes me want to reach through my monitor and strangle them

 

Hahaha... Can't get that scene out of my mind!

 

Yes but as long as they don't believe in the comments of some single, random guys who'd never play this game and instead look at our great ModDB, Facebook and forum pages, they will see, that this is non-sense

[esme]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pju-RPhMAaA&start=108

 

Jump to about 1:10

Edited May 7, 2015 by esme

[Sotha]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pju-RPhMAaA&start=108

 

Jump to about 1:10

 

Oh, so that's what AluminumHaste does on his free time...