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Just wanted to say thank you for this install script. Made life easier! I'm new to the dark mod (but not to thief) and have just set up my steam deck to try it whilst away for a few days. Looking forward to some portable sneaking!

Alright, you convinced me that this convo is no longer productive. You clearly just wanna be right, so I'm not gonna spend anymore time on this. EDIT: I cant help myself, I'll end on a more thoughtful note. I care about all the feedback I get from all players, however there is a difference between "caring" and "catering to". Just because one person says they don't like X doesn't mean I'm gonna make a change, especially when other players do like X. I'll always hear out beta testers and players and listen to their feedback, but I am by no means beholden to that feedback

I could take your reply much more serious, if you wouldn't call my valid objections "whims". If you don't care about what players think about the decisions you made in your missions (or your "whims"?), then I wonder why you make your missions public at all. Seriously, I'd recommend to get off your high horse.

Any news about this project? I really like those changes for the Main Menu.

Well, I actually found that initial folder in the HiRes SVN repo. This is different from the TDM assets repo as it has a bunch of source files for textures, fonts, etc, but they aren't really game-ready assets. This is where I found the tga image files for the fonts I thought you were looking for. I haven't uploaded Tels folder yet, but I was thinking of uploading them in the HiRes SVN repo, just for the sake of backing it up

That may be where @Amadeus got the folder provided to me earlier. Tels folder has - - .xcf files, not found in earlier work - for any given system font (stone, carleton, manon) and size(particularly 24 or 48), often more .tga/.dds files than earlier work (which originally had just ASCII characters). (You can open the files in GIMP to be even more definitive).

In our SVN under the devel folder we have a font source sub-folder. Do we know for sure that these are all newer?

Arrows are a core part of TDM. They should be moved to C++ and have dedicated Cvars for both players and mission authors. Plan: 1) Implement Arrows in C++ ( evaluate changing some old defaults ) 2) Make associated Cvars "non-archived" 3) Mappers add mission.cfg to enforce their customizations 4) Players can alter mission.cfg to their preference Along the way, reduce some of the performance impact of the weapon script constantly invoking "raise torso" and other nonsense due to using scripts rather than C++ https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=4203

And it's your right to disagree, and it's your right to critique those FMs. But that doesn't mean authors need to make changes to cater to your whims if they don't want to.

I think you just gave me an idea for the next April Fool's FM

Well, I disagree. I play this game for the features it offers, not the features some mission author thinks he has to change to his personal favor. And, frankly, some of the more current missions offer too much of that "I think this works better" feature change. For example, the sounds some missions introduce add nothing over the original sounds, but are rather worse in my opinion.

Yeah, some (myself included) would argue that is a feature, not a bug. The important thing is that the FM plays "well" and is "enjoyable".

Again, that's not the point, The point is that the game is all over the place, if every mission feels and plays different. If you want that, hey. But, in my opinion, that's a big mistake.

Damn right, and I personally am going to keep making changes on how I want MY mission to be played and what I think is best for MY FMs. If that's not to your tastes, then I'm sorry these changes don't align with your preferences, but there are tons of other missions you can play that do. FM authors have ZERO obligation to provide uniform experiences that try to cater to everyone. Some people are going to enjoy these custom changes (I really loved the Resident Evil style saves, and I can't wait to see more missions with that) and other players are gonna be unhappy about them, and that's a crying shame, but it is not going to stop me from making FMs how I want them to be. Never once has a beta tester or a player brought up an issue about these kinds of choices I made for my FMs

Well that doesn't mean that everyone is d'accord with all the gameplay choices he made in these missions, does it? All I can say is that I never got the impression here or elsewhere that there are issues with the weapon behavior in TDM. Maybe apart from the blackjacking, which has been a controversial topic in the past. I can only repeat myself in arguing that the big problem is the uniformity of essential gameplay elements. The game just doesn't feel coherent, if every FM author changes important gameplay dynamics, and it makes it difficult and frustrating, not just for beginners.

Gosh you're right. As a result it only managed to snag spot #10 in terms of highest user rated TDM missions on thiefguild. Kingsal could make a mission where you crawl around like a baby in moon gravity and I might be right there with you saying it was a bad idea. It'd still be his mission so his choice.

Yep, moved on to greener pastures. BTW, what I quoted above from him will soon be untrue for Stone 24pt due to my upcoming bitmap surgery. Actually, the values in the current stone .dat file are already misaligned with what any archival font patcher script would produce, due to 2.12 tweaks with q3font & refont. I'll add a note to the wiki about this (explaining it better than here).

I hope you didn't forget the (controversial) discussion about his implementation of a Resident Evil style save room in Hazard Pay. Or the change to the arrows, which one head shot zombies. These changes are anything but commonly accepted and wanted. Rather something he implemented, because he thought it was a good idea. Which is fair enough, but, it unfortunately leads to the lack of uniformity that I was talking about, when every FM author thinks he has to reinvent the wheel. Especially new players can't get used to how the game, weapons and enemies behave, if the behavior is different in every FM.

I don't think there's a consensus, or a general opinion that there are "issues" with the existing weapons. It's rather that FM authors take the liberty to change things to what they think is better. Or different. Or whatever.

Sounds great. Unfortunately you don't have to get very far in any discussion about either changing existing gameplay mechanics or about giving players more in game customization options to see why mappers stop bothering with the debate club politics and instead divert the energy to do what they can to address what issues they can themselves. There is clearly also a disconnect between how people think they feel about these changes and how they do in practice. Kingsal's missions seem to be widely considered as some of the most polished missions in the game, because they are a holistic designs that look, sound and play a certain way. As a result I have never seen a player complain about something like the run modifier being increased in a particular missions thread and it’s clear there are very few players who are ultimately conscious of anything besides that the overall experience feels good. So there is reason these get adopted by other authors. The players are entitled to their opinion - but it's the mission authors choice ultimately. And I can only speak for myself, but I came to TDM because I saw working examples of things I wanted in my mission. These were not “stock” or “standard”. They were achievable by virtue of the games extendability. If the day comes where we get locked out of that kind of control of our designs, I would probably walk.

I think this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because the ability to customize exists does not mean most mappers will use it. On the contrary, if one considers the customization that are already available, we see that the overwhelming majority of mappers stick to the defaults. The exceptions are interesting also. Kingsal's the only mapper that readily comes to mind who habitually deviates from presets seemingly just for the sake of being different. However everything they make is clearly in service of cohesive visions. Hazard Pay, no matter how you feel about it, unarguably loses a great deal of its survival horror character if you take away the napalm arrows or the punishing save system. The Voltas don't need to use Thief style elemental crystals in place of TDMs arrow model, but the fact that they are there makes a definite statement about the author's awareness of their inspiration for their work in TDM from the original games, which in turn draws attention to other, subtler creative choices. I think it's also telling that some of kingsal's modifications have been adopted by other authors. As OrbWeaver said, "If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed." However, how can the community come to a consensus unless there are maps to showcase the advantages of new innovations? Requesting, or worse requiring, players to go in and manually change settings in order to experience a new mechanic is never going to gain any traction. Certainly it is not worth the effort of creating an entire map built around a new paradigm.

I agree entirely. Unless a mission is aiming to present a completely different gameplay experience (like making a rapid-fire archery-based combat mission instead of a stealth mission), I see no reason why things like bow aiming should vary on a mission-by-mission basis. If the defaults are widely disliked, they should be changed. If they are a matter of taste and there is no agreement on what the value should be, they should be configurable by the player and take effect in all missions. Imagine if every desktop application made its own tweaks to your keyboard layout or mouse acceleration because the author didn't personally approve of the default values. It would be a horrible user experience. Some applications actually do this with fonts, and yes, it's horrible. Potentially useful functionality made inaccessible because the author decided to ignore system font choices and DPI, and impose his hand-picked non-scalable 10pt font which I can barely read.

Here's a link with the Engine, Game and Input file in case anyone would like to dig in but don't own or have the game installed. Either for Performance or Quality optimization: https://github.com/honzi/files/blob/master/Config/Thief/2014/ThiefEngine.ini

He's alive!!!