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I'm back trying to finish what I started a year ago. I haven't had the pleasure of finishing or releasing any FM's just yet, but hopefully that will change soon! This mission is called Vertigo, I'll follow up with more screenshots as I progress. This project is a labor of love for the original thief games. Map is divided into smaller shape segments to help with optimization, it also gives me more flexibility with visual fidelity. I'm (mostly) using Springheel's modules. Visual inspiration: Thief 2014 Let me know what you guys think! Side note: I'm in the process of blending the road in better with grass, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Progress on the lava room I'm working on.

Making some lava flow and sculpting some rock today.

Thank you STRUNK and Geep for posting so many new stuff. That's a good distraction for everybody these days. Thus I have decided to post a few more pics from my upcoming mission before we go beta. And for those who want see more, here comes an ingame video from the starting point showing a peaceful and silent lakeshore...with an invisible infiltrator in action! https://streamable.com/ixzp0

The nights are getting colder and you need to pay your rent on time before you get tossed out into the winter air. Luckily, your neighbor told you about a mysterious merchant from faraway shores who has come to the small hamlet of Wilford's Hollow, and he's staying at the inn next door. What's more, he's brought something with him... Gameplay Notes: 1) This is a fairly small map, but I did intend for this map to be a bit harder than normal Dark Mod missions, even on the lowest difficulty setting. But there will certainly be plenty of rewards for the careful thief... 2) This map implements the func_peek mechanic by allowing players to peek through any door that has a keyhole by leaning forward. PLEASE NOTE: This function has been known to cause crashes for players using the 32-bit version of the Dark Mod 2.07 (should be fine for those running the 64-bit version). While this function has worked painlessly for some, please be aware that crashing may occur. At no point in this mission is it required to use the func_peek mechanic, it is purely optional, so feel free to not use it. Download: This FM is available via the in-game downloader FM: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jNAirhBAB0MPWaXzQO6crCgJVZeOcFFl/view?usp=sharing Promotional Screenshots: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bwuy0QPhaGpV32CgEdXhBIA5KgvcRueN?usp=sharing Credits: A HUGE thanks goes out to JackFarmer, Dragofer, and Bikerdude for scripting, EFX, custom ambient tracks, assets, answering a billion of my questions and doing so, so, so much more to make this mission something special. Thank you! Another GIANT thank you to my beta testers: Jedi_Wannabe, Bienie, Filizitas, joebarnin, bikerdude, Cambridge Spy, STRUNK, Lonewanderer, Rezar. Thank you all very much for your wonderful work and eye for detail! And another thank you goes out to Goldwell and Grayman for scripting help and patient guidance. Assets are from: Springheel's Superb Modules Dragofer's Delightful Assets dmw's Dazzling Textures Spooks' Spectacular Painting for the Loading Screen R Soul's Fantabulous Assets JackFarmer's Miraculous Machines and Sounds Bikerdude's Bountiful Assets ***PLAYER BEWARE*** SPOILERS lie in the depths below. I strongly suggest playing it first so you don't spoil the fun for yourself ***

Spices! I modified the bottom of the jars a bit: And added a .pk4 with all the spices: Basil, Chili, Black Pepper, Coriander, Oregano, Ve-tsin, Cacau, Curry, Tyme, Cinnamon, Black Thea, Tumeric, White Pepper, Nutmeg and Salt : ) Spices.pk4

Another wiki topic added: Your Mission - From Beta Testing to Release and Beyond with links from the endings of: A - Z Beginner Full Guide Page 6 How to pack your Mission The material here will be largely obvious to old hands, but worth stating explicitly for the benefit of newcomers. From the Introduction: This article elaborates typical steps for beta-testing a mission beyond its packaging, namely: distribution, forum presence, and testing. This process continues to Final Release and any updates. Consider this a follow-on to - * A - Z Beginner Full Guide; and * How to Pack your Mission, which fully describes the vital process of packaging and testing a .PK4 archive.

Made a new fancy stove. Stove.pk4

Finally integrated the road, thanks to @Amadeus, I copied the settings from Good Neighbor. Added a few effects and made myself a wallpaper to keep myself motivated while I continue this project, what do you guys think?

Videoscreen goat ^^ https://streamable.com/bvftb

Transparent video screens: video

As promised, here is the Arx: End of Sun fish set up as a wandering 'ambient' AI in TDM. Download link Remember to credit the EoS team if you use it (their asset licence is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported). It should work as randomly moving scenery. Anything else might work - I hit one with the blackjack and it bit back - or might not. EoS stopped its fish flying out of water with some custom code to allow a maximum flying height. In the absence of that, if you want to put one in open water all I can suggest is seeing whether a monsterclip 'ceiling' works. The AAS and scriptobject are from the Elemental, but the dimensions are taken straight from EoS; you may find the swim animation occasionally clips into the floor (presumably preventable with monsterclip if it's not sand/mud/etc.). This is the first AF/ragdoll I've made. I think I generally got rid of the bad behaviour, but fish are slippery creatures. Textures are in TGA format straight from EoS; you may want to convert non-normals to DDS before FM release. (Normal maps are actually unused by default; see .mtr for details.)

A while back Atheran made use of cloth simulation to create covered versions of various kinds of furniture. While others and I have been putting these models to good use in our FMs since then, they didn't get taken up in TDM's core assets because of numerous issues. So I've put a decent amount of time into fixing these issues, and can confirm that they were numerous indeed. Automatic mesh generation sure causes a lot of collateral damage, as the cloth UV map was split into a thousand shards, the shadowmeshes didn't work and intersected with the cloth, excess/missing verts and faces everywhere and materials were messed up. But I think it was worth it: They all sit around 3000 tris. Could probably shave off several hundred off each model's shadowmesh, but I suppose they're mostly intended for dark, cobweb-filled rooms and mansions anyway. Here's a download (just drop or extract the .pk4 into your FM). I've also uploaded them to 2.08 (Rev 15867)

Since TDM was invited to use Arx: End of Sun assets, I decided to try adding the fish AI to TDM (as wandering ambient AI, though it would be possible to make them dangerous again if desired). Whereupon I ran into the same experience Obsttorte had with the werebeast: there's something about TDM's handling of AI that makes going near them trigger a crash if they lack an AF. So: The fish is now usable in an aquarium - or a kitchen - but I'm not sure whether it'll be possible to put it in open water without scripting its behaviour. It's possible to tell AAS to calculate 'swim reachabilities' but I don't know whether they can actually be used for anything; EoS calculated both swim and fly reachabilities, had the fish use MOVETYPE_FLY and added some code to let a maximum fly height be set in a spawnarg.

We should have an FM building competition during the outbreak! It's not like we're going anywhere anyway, for a while. I mean if we all are gonna be home for who knows, why not dust off the editors and build lots of FMs for Thief & The Dark Mod. I'm thinking about trying again, since I'm stuck in Sweden the next 3-4 Months. My 89yr old mom doesn't dare fly now. Sweden has closed its boarders now anyway too, so that leaves me & my wife over here awhile longer. She's outta school the next 2 weeks, but she likes watching Movies. I'm actually getting tired of TV & binge watching. Wanna do something else…

Behold, forged in the holy fire by the builder himself, the relic that rewards the believer whose work proves worthy. I give the relic as the first prize to the believer who survives the plague and whose work is chosen by the brethren of the builder, the pagans of the unbelieving forest god and the thieves of the night. The courier will be rewarded from my secret treasure, so that he may reach the victor unharmed and swiftly.

Just freshened these wiki pages: Model Scaling Triggering events when looking at something Attaching Props to AI I had a year's worth of notes about wiki work, that I've been working through this last month. Getting near the end now, then back to mapping.

@Jedi_Wannabe I also have stew now: If only there were more foodstuffs, ' cause this doesn't look like haute cuisine really : D Tomorrow maybe I'll try to have the foodstuff bobbing around a bit ^^ Did I show my kitchen/diningroom divider yet?

Still another new topic, from 2019 work: Objects Floating in Water This covers func_bobbing and moveable methods at a tutorial level, with pointers to other methods. By tomorrow, I'll add links to it from other relevant pages.

For rat hunting. If your rats decided to build a bunker. Gas operated, box fed, falling block cannon with revolving loader mechanism. It is a mix of ideas from the Forgotten Weapons channel.

Catching some of these new fishes: https://streamable.com/qb49h

Well, speaking of Lovecraft... (Asset source)

But will it grind? https://streamable.com/dteg9

Clearly, The Rats Triumphant was ahead of its time.

... and here we have the proof: "Vitalic Fever" reactivates even the higher brain functions in the undead!

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, things have eggscalated ^^ https://streamable.com/gbth8

The foodstuff is now bobbing ^^ https://streamable.com/vttnb#

Added my first TDM Wiki topic, "Video Briefing".

The Dark Mod got a big mention in this video about the history of the Thief series.

Hello everyone! I started playing The Dark Mod a few days ago and I'm pretty sure it's one of the best open-source games available, so naturally before even installing it (after reading reviews and seeing screenshots and videos) I was asking myself: Why isn't this more popular?? Sure, immersive sims are a bit of a niche, but some of them have a large number of raving fans recommending them everywhere 20 years after release - I see people recommending System Shock 2 and Deus Ex on sites like reddit at least once per month even though I don't watch gaming discussions a lot. Why aren't they recommending The Dark Mod just as much? What's different here? In my first post here as a random nobody, I will criticize TDM, and I'm aware that it may come off as arrogant. I'm doing it because I'd love TDM to be more popular and well-known and I believe that looking at it with fresh and naive eyes (although after 20 years of gaming and with a little coding and 3d graphics experience) might provide some value in this case. I'm strongly convinced that the key to not only retain new players and convert them into raving fans, but also for various potential media efforts to work well (including being on Steam, which as I understand it is still possible, although not planned right now) is overall polish and first impressions, which is an area where I consider TDM to be lacking the most. From the beginning I played TDM with a notepad open, writing down everything that I saw as an issue, especially those that seemed realisticly fixable. I'd like to contribute somehow, so I see this as a first step, perhaps I'll be able to do more in time. Here it is: Starting missions. I see this as one of the most important things, because nearly everyone will play any levels you include in the installation first and see them as an showcase of what TDM has to offer. Being thrown into a mass of missions to download with no easily reached information on their quality and limited other information is confusing and annoying. The best solution would be a complete high quality campaign, but that's not realistic. A good solution would be to fix issues that are present in the currently used levels and bring them up to date with best current practices. I don't remember having problems with the first mission, but I encountered several in both the training mission and The Tears of St. Lucia. By the way while the training mission is quite plain in some places, I believe that the concept of training on your own is good and I don't think it would have to be remade completely (as I saw someone saying around here). A better solution would be to do the above and also select and include say top 5 missions (could be done by community voting) that are great in both the concept and execution, technically up to date and with varying themes. If better missions come out, there can always be another vote and a different set of missions integrated in the next release. Mission browser. The fact that the game has to restarted to play a new mission is annoying. But the bigger problem is that the game doesn't tell me that or why that is anywhere. How do I play a new map? Oh, I'm supposed to install it? But it's already installed, I just downloaded and installed the game and it says that the map is already included...? A tooltip explaining this shown after first launch would help, perhaps also using a different word than "install". Missions have varying quality, sometimes simply because they were made for an older version of TDM when the state of the art was a bit different. Allowing voting and sorting by popularity would help tremendously. A featured most recently added mission could be shown by default, so that they have a chance to get ratings. A possibility to flag missions as being bugged in the current release would also be great. There are some weird clunky behaviors. The most annoying I've noticed is that only one thing can be downloaded at once, so when a mission is downloading and I try to open the description of a different mission, it won't load until the mission download is finished. And to close the loading box I have to exit to main menu and then come back. The loading is glacially slow. I realize this is probably a multifaceted issue complicated to solve, but couldn't the loading start in the background during the intro video/text, difficulty selection and shopping? That would be a huge improvement. Sounds in the menu: the clicking sound when you put a cursor over a menu item gets very audibly cut if you quickly move your mouse from item to item. I realize this may seem like a small detail, but it's literally one of the first things a new player will hear and it gives the impression that the person implementing the menu sounds didn't care much. If allowing the sound to overlap and play more at once at the same time would be too much of a hassle, just use a super short click sound where it won't be as obvious. Quicksave & Quickload It seems that the HUD overlay breaks for a fraction of a second when saving/loading, but I noticed that this is a known issue. The sound sometimes pops annoyingly, perhaps a super short fadeout/fadein would help. It's a bit weird that quickload doesn't start immediately when pressing the button. Even weirder that the game simply goes on until it starts and doesn't pause itself - that would help and should be easier to fix. Movement Always run is not very usable. Believe me or not, I actually finished Thief Gold and TDS with always run and preferred it that way, the difference is that you could press shift to walk or ctrl to creep, while in TDM you have to pres shift AND ctrl at the same time to creep. That's really uncomfortable. I cannot mantle to those high above head places while running. I personally don't like this, but if it's a conscious design decision, the game should definitely tell me this and give some explanation during the training mission. Seems to be fixed in 2.08 I seem to sometimes get quiet crouch-drops and sometimes not, even from low elevation, don't know why. Object manipulation it's very annoying to frob small items. This seems to be adressed for the next relase with an aiming dot if I understand it correctly, which is good, but I believe that small items like rings, individual coins or keys on corpses should also simply have larger frobbing areas. In the training mission I was not able to pick up a ring lying on a movable box at all. I believe that TDS used larger bounding boxes for item selection, so you didn't have to aim at tiny items precisely and it seems like a good solution to me. Item highlighting is sometimes nearly invisible - this happens with well-lit objects like candles or items right next to them. Picking up a an item and resting it against the wall or furniture while still holding it results in repeated and yet weirdly spaced clanking sounds even when I'm not moving anything, not even touching my mouse. This is especially weird when it's a candle making metallic sounds even though the candlestick is not touching anything. Also, door sounds are SUPER LOUD, which is weird because a thief won't be banging doors, and weirder because most guards either ignore them or only notice them when standing very close. Default keybindings for use item make no sense to me - how could I use a health potion or a flash bomb in the middle of a battle when the key (Enter or U) is nowhere near my left hand position or on the mouse? I mapped it to tab, no idea if that replaced any other key binding, but it seems to be working. Not sure if this happens everywhere, might be a problem with older missions, but I've seen NPCs do such long strides when on stairs that they're nearly sillywalking, even though they're walking in normal speed. This is all for now, I noticed more issues, but those seemed to be mission-specific and therefore more difficult to fix. I can write down issues I had with the 3 included missions if there's interest.

Peter the carpender ..err I mean Peter the spy managed to do an incredible work by creating a game ready model of my portrait from last year. He even build a small map in which you can admire the detailed work he put on the frame and watch the light dance over the normal and specular maps he created for this painting. You can download the map and the model here https://we.tl/t-JffhJLIE2p Also I attached a small preview, but I reccommend to load his FM ingame so that you can see all the details he put in there. Of course you're free to use it in your next FM project if you like to

Dark Mod forums are not your personal army.

1 model, 15 spices, including ginger! Had to fiddle around with the model's spice texture with respect to the overal granular appearence, but it seems to be respectable now. And I added collision. SpicesSkins.pk4

I've just posted a full rewrite of this stylistically-challenged wiki page: Playing ROQ Video Files While use of RoQ is deprecated for new FMs, the article's general approach is still of some interest. I plan to eventually situate it within a set of examples that (on a separate page) include more modern video formats. I've kept the historical aspect of the article, while adding pointers to newer treatments of RoQ files, for anyone who needs to maintain them.

Look! We need to talk about this! Haha!

Moving to another engine killed a number of commercial game projects. Most recently it put System Shock 3 in a lot of trouble. And that project is coming from some of the people that gave us Ultima Underworld, Thief and Deus Ex. I think that instead of requesting more features and better tech, a better move forward would be simplification. Simplification of code, coding workflow and more accessible tools to create new content, especially for new content creators. A lot of companies use git for code. At least all the companies I've worked for and teamed up with, including companies that provide services for game studios. A git workflow allows anyone to submit code patches without any special privileges. A total stranger can contribute code. Then the core team can evaluate the code patches, provide feedback, accept or reject them. The DarkRadiant tool is excellent in the hands of a dedicated and talented content author. For new content authors, the tool requires a large time investment. Maybe there's also room for an easier and much more limited tool. A tool for new content creators that are less interested in visuals and more interested in story telling. Or simply creating and playing their own first missions quickly. And getting them excited for creating more advanced missions. For example, this tool could be a strict 2d editor instead of 3d. The author can draw his world on a 2d grid with a selection of prefabs that snap seamlessly on this grid. Then they can tell their story with it. If the author decides he or she wants more control over its game world, then they can move on to DarkRadiant. I wouldn't worry about TDM being based on an old engine at all. Look at a much much older community. The Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA) community. Their mods and missions use a game engine from 1987! They still have new missions coming out. The latest mission was added in november 2019. Their mission editor is also really easy to use and allows any story genre, so that might be part of their on-going activity. If their community can survive for 32+ years, then TDM will be good till at least 2032 ^^

TDM mentioned in gamers thief doc: The rise and fall of Thief at 31:40 in video:

Done:

An other example of what can be done with thes transparent video screens. It doesn't like skyboxes though (see end of video). video A loop of the owl, shoud be downloadable here: Owl Loop Otherwise here: OwlLoop Attached the .mtr file I use. Just put it in your materials folder and make a video folder and put a video named video.mp4 in there. Then make a 16:9 patch and give it the video texture. videoscreentransparent.mtr

This is one of the most bizarre requests I've read in a long time.

I have some veggies in boiling water now: https://streamable.com/gln5g

Baking some sausages in hot oil: https://streamable.com/g2hpf Changed the .mtr file for cave_water_muddy to have it look like hot oily baking stuff : )

With my workload finally decreasing and having to stay at home far longer than I planned for this spring, I think I'll try to find more time for TDM as well. For the time being, I want to work on those audio projects.

Just had the last ordinary lecture in my university. No idea how would students study from now on: I'm afraid distance learning does not suit everyone. In one orchestra that I play in, all rehersals are already stopped. I guess the others will follow in the nearest future. On the bright side, it seems I have more free time for programming and TDM now UPDATE: On the second thought, I think it is a perfect time to replay the first Deus Ex now

To be more specific: I would like to set up an objective like "Find all four books describing the history of xxx" in my mission. The books then should include text that focusses on a certain event in the history. The books should then explain the facts scattered over several volumes. It is certainly not necessary for every book to contain walls of text. Do you think you could do something like this for me? That would be great. The library:

I don't need no educayshun. Jebus will cure the Corona virus, hallelujah! But remember to buy lots of mah leather-bound bibles and colloidal silver.

The practical problem is there isn't dev time to make such a thing. But that said, interestingly some people have done some of the things you're suggesting for exactly the reason you're talking about. Really early on there was already a beginner's map made (was that Fidcal's?) that already has a functioning base map with AI and objectives, etc,, so the mapper can just take that and add to it. It might be a good idea to make an updated version of that though, because new features have come out since then. But for a newbie, it might be good to start with that map anyway, since it still keeps things simple even today. And Springheel has made a lot of architecture prefabs so a mapper could just grab these fully made prefabs and stack them together to make an entire room or hallway or whatever. He and others have also made newbie friendly tutorials. A lot of tutorials provide a bullet list of exactly what to do, and you just go down the list verbatim. So they're pretty newbie friendly once you see them that way.

I especially liked these ones: A couple hundred bug reports have been processed so far and bikerdude has been spending time working around that vertex limit. @Bienie and I have started fortifying the map with additional readables with @Amadeus acting as our editor, but with a map this size there's still loads of potential for more readables, so any creative writers would be welcome to step in - we have a Google Doc in one of the Discord server's channels. Plus the main storyline has been planned out by @Melan but still needs several important readables. So it's a bit of an indirect response to your question.

Getting close to an update. I am now going through the whole map and giving it some polish. Fixing things I was never happy with and adding some models here and there, changing some lights, etc.