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Stupid question: I usually play with my headphones on, connected to the front audio port of my computer. Sometimes, I forget to switch to the front audio port from my speakers' output before I start TDM, and, the game's audio comes from my speakers then. In some other games (not all), I can switch to the front port audio using Microsoft's gamebar, Windows key + G, and then select the audio device there. In TDM, while ingame, this has no effect. It doesn't do anything before you restart the game. Would it be possible to make it switchable ingame? I get that that is not highest priority, but, it would be somewhat of a comfort function, not having to restart the game for switching the audio device.

Bye bye!

Great mission Frost I understand the complaint that there were too many doors that were locked from the outside, but I have to say that only bothered me until I realized they were hints that you can find a different way to get get to the other side of the door. Having the distinct lock sound was very helpful as well. Once the mission is finished, with all doors unlocked, it's quite easy to go back and forth. Which is what I have to do because my loot total is very poor.

My god this game is a steaming turd. Turns out it wasn't even setting the res to 4k until restarting, despite not indicating that in any way. Still DLDSR is a good option for RTX card owners, as you aren't actually rendering at 4k. I'm just gonna pretend I didn't even bother trying to figure out this cluster f%#k of a hackjob, and go back to playing Thief.

Then you should probably install the proper driver... or look up where the setting you're looking for is located, because you probably just missed it... Or insult me some more while you keep using a massively outdated aa method rather than one of the key selling points of the RTX cards...

It's not using a massively outdated version of ID tech? For "the rest" maybe you can be more specific about what you think I'm getting wrong, so that I can tell you why you're probably wrong, lol.

In some games yeah it looks like you're right, sometimes even more when hitting memory limits. I guess user bench isn't all that accurate these days. On the topic of 4k though I did just test it and it runs fine 60+. 4k may be less demanding than you think in a lot of games. The AA system in game is the worst I've ever seen, so you lose a lot less going to 4k than you do doubling the AA.

Well the (current) engine is not really from 2004. For the rest I think you don't really have a clue what you're talking about, so maybe be not so dismissive?

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq This game kicked it off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crew_(video_game) Major online-only DRM examples you've actually heard of: Diablo III and Diablo IV.

My driver settings don't have these options.

It's a bit more, actually. More like ~75% to 80%. And, if you really want to play in 4K, then the game will perform even worse, obviously. That card is really not a 4K card.

Have you tried DLAA or DLDSR in Nvidia driver settings? I've found rendering at 4k via DSR is better than in game AA, I can only imagine a.i based DSR would offer even better results!

I don't get why this is such an issue, what games are actually non functional/haven't been patched by 3rd parties to work without the disc? And no, I'm not talking about piracy, which isn't the same thing in any sense.

The Problem Readables are available in a wide range of TDM bitmap fonts. Unfortunately, the majority of these fonts lack non-ASCII glyphs for European languages, and it would be a prohibitively lengthy task to craft them. This is one of several translation hurdles. (Another is soliciting, organizing, and distributing the work of human translators; see “AI for Translations: An Exploration” for work on an alternative. This also promotes the use of meaningful alphanumeric #str_ IDs - possibly automatically generated – instead of traditional numeric.) A Proposed Solution Suppose that when a particular page of readable is shown, it is shown first is English, with the mapper-specified font (e.g., Camberic), and then, after a number of seconds, shown in the current user-selected language, with a different font (e.g., Stone), one that offers the needed diacritics? And with the translated font size scaled down to accommodate potentially more-lengthy translated strings? Both the English and translated text can be viewed in sequence. That opens the door to “quick and dirty” default translations, e.g., machine translation. In particular, the reader may sometimes be able to work-around any layout problems and sub-optimal translation by consulting the English text. (Nevertheless, default translations may sometimes miss subtle nuanced hints, so the ability to improve them with tweaked text is a necessity.) The Proposed Mechanics Recall that the game engine currently passes these values to a readable’s gui: gui::title gui::body With a multipage readables, the content of these parameters changes as pages are flipped. For clarity, it is proposed to replace them with: gui::titleEnglish gui::bodyEnglish gui::titleTranslated gui::bodyTranslated The latter 2 would be just like gui::title and gui::body, except that they would serve empty strings when the current language is English or there is no translation available in the current language (and so be used for gui code program logic, to suppress a transition). Observe that this behavior does not substitute an English string for a missing non-English string. Skip the remainder of this section if details are not of interest. Each stock readable .gui would need a one-time conversion to use them. Instead of the traditional 2 winDef overlays for text, there would be 4, corresponding to the 4 text-passing parameters just mentioned. This allows the translated text to fade in while the English text fades out, when an onTime event starts the transition (at 2 seconds in this example). Here is the fragment of .gui code that has been altered: Aspects of this Design – Transition from English The transition is timed, so no extra “Translate” button is shown, nor a hard-to-come-by hot key required. If you want to see the English again, you would briefly navigate away from the page to another, then return; or, if a single-page, close and re-open it. A simple implementation (as the code above and example below) uses a fixed, hard-coded time. Alternative Mechanism. At some cost to code clarity, it is probably possible to get by with just the 2 normal text-passing parameters (gui::title and gui::body) and their traditional 2 overlays, though additional variable(s) would be needed for tight time-synchronization between engine and gui; and overlapping fade-in/fade-out between English and translation would not be possible. Advanced Version. In the longer term, timing could be made more flexible, by passing it as parameter from the engine, e.g.: “gui::transitionTime” Where does this value come from? While it could somehow encoded into the .xd file by the mapper, I prefer a different approach. Have the engine calculate it from character or word count of the body, with user-specified globals for reading rate and min and max bounds, e.g.: sys_readablesWordsPerSecTransTime sys_readablesMinTransTime sys_readablesMaxTransTime A drawback of a timed transition is that additional reading time is needed to get to the translations, which may, with immobile readables, increase risk of discovery by guards. So having these additional user controls would let a user get to the translations faster, even skip the English entirely by setting bounds to zero. A Simulated Example – FM “readableTranslationFadeIn” In the absence of engine support for the 4 text-passing parameters, it is still possible to make an approximately-functional mockup using some hard coding. However, this prototype DOES NOT suppress the transition when the current language is English. That is, it shows (rather than prevents) an English-to-English transition with change of font & font-scale. TDM with the languages set to “Francais” (French). The first screen shot shows page 1 of a 3-page scroll, momentarily displayed in English with Camberic title and body. After a few seconds, it transitions to the second screen shot, in French in Stone font. With accents. While shown here as a scroll, this approach should be easily adaptable to books and sheets. About the Example’s Implementation The screen shots are from a prototype FM: readableTranslationFadeIn Notable files are: guis/readables/scrolls/scroll_calig_camberic.gui, a custom override of the standard Camberic scroll readable, with the translation transition mechanism from above, plus additional simulation fakery described below. strings/all.lang, a UTF-8 file containing 6 #str_ (2 per scroll page – title & body) in each language section. Only the [English] and [French] sections were implemented. The English example content was loosely derived from the St. Lucia FM. The English text (without #str_ structuring) was manually converted to UTF-8 French using Google Translate (website, not API). strings/english.lang & french.lang. These were generated from all.lang using my gen_lang_plus program to create the 8-bit “ANSI” versions as required, e.g., ISO-8859-15 encoding for French. xdata/readableTranslationFadeIn.xd, that contains the #str_IDs for the 3 scroll pages. Within scroll_calig_camberic, this simulation had this fakery: “gui::title” and “gui::body” were stand-ins for hypothetical parameters “gui::titleTranslated” and “gui::bodyTranslated”; The English text was hard-coded, and the appropriate content selected by actual parameter “gui::curPage”, to make up for missing hypothetical parameters “gui::titleEnglish” and “gui::bodyEnglish”. The READABLE_FADE_TIME is currently set to 2 seconds for testing. Probably 5-6 seconds would be better during game play. Aspects of the Design – Font Scaling As mentioned earlier, the translated font is scaled to make the text smaller than the original, to accommodate languages that need more room. A simple implementation (like in the example code) uses fixed values with “textscale”. So the textscale for the two Translated winDef overlays is smaller than for the 2 English winDef overlays. Specifically, in the example GUI code, the text scaling factors from the original Camberic readable were retained: textscale 0.4 // titleEnglish textscale 0.31 // bodyEnglish and supplemented by (with a different font, namely Stone): textscale 0.33 // titleTranslated textscale 0.24 // bodyTranslated The goal is to keep the rendered text smaller than the original English rendering for languages with more characters per sentence. These values, while hard-coded, will differ across readables (due to different starting fonts), and would need to be experimentally determined. But this treatment, with just a fixed scaling value that is independent of both text content and current language, is unlikely to be very satisfactory. Better ideas, needing additional engine modifications, will be considered in a follow-on post. Additional Considerations When Authoring the XD File. Recall that TDM is relatively inflexible when using #str_ within an .xd file. So this form will not work: "page1_body" : { "" "" "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" } Instead use "page1_body" : "#str_fm_scroll_camberic_pg1_body_parish_inspection_excerpts" With the 2 leading linebreaks moved into the #str content as leading \n\n. When Testing. If there is a mismatch between the TDM Language setting and the PC’s language setting (e.g., under Windows), then some characters may turn out wrong or indicated as missing (e.g., as boxes). The degree will vary by language, and is unlikely to be seen in the initial English render (because that’s almost all in ASCII, common to all the ISO encodings.) Even with such mismatches, the translation can be reviewed as to overall length and where linebreaks occur. Be aware that direct editing of *.lang files is not recommended, and could risk converting from a particular “ANSI” raw 8-bit encoding into “UTF-8”. Applying this Technique More Broadly. A few fonts have oddball glyphs for certain characters, e.g., a skull and crossbones in Treasure Map. This would require special handling during translation. For Briefings, Objectives, and Messages, similar approaches can be conceived. However, for each of these (and different from readables), only one particular font is routinely offered. And there are alternative designs to be considered. For instance, the English and Translated text could be shown simultaneously side-by-side in various ways, instead of sequentially. The Objectives have the additional complication that the font size is already user-adjustable.

If by "alot" faster you mean ~%50, then yeah where you're getting 100+ I'd be getting 75. Still I'd rather drop a couple settings to play at 4k and not have to rely on in game aa. For an RTX card you're probably better off just using DLAA, or rendering at 4k via DLDSR. Currently I've settled on 4x aa at 4k, but I'll probably end up using some SMAA via reshade instead. I get what people are saying about shadow maps, but I find they look better than stencil when set to high, most of that noise is removed at high when softness is set low enough. You have to look at softness differently for stencil and maps, just because the slider is set lower doesn't mean the shadows are less soft.

Yep, that AA system sure is strange. I did indeed get better results enabling MFAA in the nvidia control panel, but performance is so garbage for the image quality improvements, I actually had better results using DSR to render at 4k instead of 1080p, where I was able to drop from 8x ingame AA to 4x with a better picture and better performance. I haven't seen that sort of behavior before with Antialiasing in any game, even back when games used MSAA instead of shader based.

Saw the new mission of the Lieutenant series and decided to replay the whole thing, because for some reason forgot to played Lieutenant 2. Want to congratulate you with the release. I'll post my opinion in a week I think.

Well, upon closer inspection, it appears that it isn't broken entirely. AA works but doesn't seem to be as effective at any given setting. Maybe it's just my imagination. Assuming the in game AA is entirely built into the game and not just enabling driver level AA, I must have had some additional form of AA active in the GTX 970 driver settings, perhaps MFAA. Generally my take away from this is that many of the settings/fx built in TDM kinda suck performance wise... I suppose that's what you get when hacking experimental modern fx into a game engine from 2004, and i suppose the AA is either FSAA or MSAA at best.

What good would it do to know that a game will die in 2 years? That wouldn't fix the problem that the people that will still want to play it at that point, can't. Is a non-solution what the initiative is really asking for? And how is a company supposed to predict how long they'll support a game anyway? Games can flop and have to be shut down within a year or less. Regulations have to accommodate to cases like these, and you can rest assured companies will find ways to use this to their advantage.

This is one of the biggest misunderstandings, I think. Such games that choose spacetime-warping DRM or online services they wish to neglect on a whim, can still exist - they simply must provide some 'truth in advertising' by clearly informing customers of a minimum support window. If a product only to support for 6 months, they certainly can, but not sure if customers will be as motivated to join in that experiment, that's all. This whole movement is to stop treating players like labrats and preserve ALL games for ANY reason. It is NOT about stopping any development, definitely not legally, whatsoever. Go ahead and still produce the cigarettes, just make them honest about it.

I suspected as much regards the rope arrow. Seems every time I thought a rope arrow was required. I found another way. I don't know how I missed the map. Having a lot of fun playing this mission

I playtested that area a dozen times and I never experienced anything like this, but I admit I never went too loud when I did that. I'm surprised that an AI guard killing himself with rocks counted against the No Kill objective, I could have sworn I set "Player Responsible" as a condition properly...

@SnugglyBurrickyou could try asking the Gloomwood developers, that game is developed with Unity and has something like a light gem (there it's a small stone on a ring the player is wearing)

@geegeeright, one more thing: IDGAF about the name Ok, it might sound a bit generic, but the bigger (but still small) issue was that the description also made it sound kinda basic - there probably are several missions about acquiring a cure for some kind of plague (e.g. housecall, I think there's at least one more but don't remember exactly) so a description that makes this mission stand apart might help. Even if it's just something like "Collaborate with the pagans to find a cure for your daughters sickness" But this is also no biggie of course.What I also forgot to mention, I also enjoyed the humor Just one more little nitpick (sorry, I start to feel like Columbo), as I just read that in another comment: I also didn't get what the gargoyle switch was for. I frobbed that thing and apparently nothing happened so I assumed that I'd need something to interact with it (maybe to open the glass case). According to a comment that switched off Walking Stick defences, so I never noticed those existed in the first place