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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.

Dark Mod forums are not your personal army.

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

Alright- But I think its a poor design choice to make a feature everyone uses worse to encourage a less used feature. I think locking the player in place is too much of penalty for an action players do all the time. There is opportunity to lessen that penalty by reducing their movement by 50 percent or something during that animation. It makes sense to not walk during mantling, you're moving up in the Z direction.

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.

Thanks! My goal is to have every part of the map have a personal touch. I believe it will give a very organic feel to the environment. Cheers! Yes, I am using patches. Thanks for the links, I will look into it Thanks for that, I'll download his mission and see if I can learn some things! I'll post updated images once I get it tackled, blending the road is my priority right now considering I will be using the method well into the missions final area.

Check Amadeus' recently released mission "A good neighbor". It uses patches with the following material: textures/darkmod/nature/grass/grass_edge/path/dirt/dry_earth_muddy_path

wow Refleks! Absolutely stunning street scene. Love the attention to detail too. I had to do a doubletake to make sure this was actually TDM, haha

Overall this is an exciting list of new features! I noticed something kind of weird about the new body picking up animation. It feels good to kind of kneel down and pick up a body, however locking the players feet in place during the animation feels rough to me. It sort of breaks the nice flow of knocking out an AI , grabbing their body, and quickly retreating. Bug log here: #5202

A Night to Remember is technically Fieldmedic’s second-to-last mission (said last mission being Not An Ordinary Guest). Technical issues meant that it was taken down, but after some fixes were implemented by Bikerdude it was put back up again, hence why I’m just now getting to it. The mission stars the same protagonist from the later Not an Ordinary Guest, Sir Henry Doyle. Doyle is a nice enough chap who’s drowning in gambling debts that have resulted in his de facto servanthood to a noblewoman who uses him to steal from other nobles. Doyle has attempted to flee to the home of one Cromwell, but is contacted by the noblewoman who wants him to steal the blueprints to the Gottfried II, Cromwell’s in-development airship. In theory, this should be a simple job: The guests are asleep, there are no guards on the estate, and the only hard part should be taking enough loot to make it look like a break-in. Needless to say, things go very wrong very fast. This was made as a Halloween mission, and serves its purpose well. The horror elements are well-done, and do a good job of throwing the player off. Almost every room has some minor haunting, and it does a good job of reminding you that you’re trapped in this manor with a bunch of very angry beings. Said beings patrol the halls, damaging you if you get too close and sometimes ambushing you by walking through the walls. That being said, they’re easy to evade once you know where they are, but a new player can easily find themselves stuck waiting for the entities to move on. The manor itself is well-made, with some models that I haven’t seen in other missions. It feels like a mansion, and isn’t too confusing or difficult to navigate. The mission is thankfully free of the jank that you find in some of Fieldmedic’s other missions, with the only issue I noticed popping up very early in the mission; when chasing someone, you can take your time to explore the servant’s wing, even though the mission is supposed to fail you if you go too far off the person’s trail. Difficulty-wise, I found it fair, barring one secret location which you need to access on the highest difficulty (and possibly the next lowest, but I don’t think so). You can find out that it exists and where it is, but I thought that it was very easy to miss how to access it, since the two places aren’t connected (but are close). But on the whole, I enjoyed this mission. There are some minor problems, but it can still provide some good moments of haunted house horror and is one of the more unique missions in The Dark Mod. Recommended.

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

This sick Korean bitch tortures animals like sharks and octopuses to death by eating them alive and torturing them with fire and salt. Can we mass report her please? Asking for support, and yes, I realize the joke of a Kurshok asking for help stopping a sealife abuser.

Transparent video screens: video

@grayman It's lame I know, but something that can be done with looping video's on a transparent videoscreen : )

The language of 'overpowered' and 'balance' does seem to me to be curiously placed here. If you're making a shooter, and one weapon is so much more effective than others that they don't even see situational use; or if you're making an RPG with selectable abilities, and nobody wants to invest in +1 damage against mud elementals when +10% evasion against everything has the same cost, then okay, you have a balance problem. That the feature to make moving ragdolls over distance more practical is chosen by players intending to move ragdolls over distance doesn't strike me as the same kind of thing. Edit: to add a more positive note, I think this perceived problem may relate to the fact that players are most often dealing with human bodies. In Thief a dead/blackjacked crayman just can't be moved from its spot, which means you choose your spot carefully if others are around. In TDM, if anything is like that it's... the horse? But in TDM you also have AI you can drag but not shoulder: so, the lanternbot. Also spiders but you're unlikely to want to hide a spider corpse. I see the new werebeast is also set not to be shoulderable but it remains to be seen what effect that has in gameplay.

Many people would say the same thing about beef or pork. I've often heard it said that if the average person saw what happened in a slaughterhouse, they would give up eating meat in a heartbeat. Animals are reported to scream in terror and pain as they are half-stunned, beaten to death or even skinned alive by overworked, emotionally numbed operatives who have long lost any capacity to care about the humane treatment of the animals they are paid to slaughter by the truckload. But imagine the chaos that would ensue if every ethical vegan made a thread on the forum asking us to mass-report a YouTuber who posted a video about cooking steak.

Wonderful shots refl3ks!

That is incredibly impressive! wow!

I know. But if anyone else disapproves of torturing one of the most intelligent sea creatures in the world by simultaneously scalping and disemboweling them by ripping off their mantle, then making them "dance" by pouring salty soy sauce directly into their brain and heart, then I would appreciate help spreading the word of this travesty against sealife.

Ah, the old 'grass edge' problem. Are you using patches for the grass? Your best bet is vertex blending but it requires using a model; DR has an export script that's supposed to help with this. Failing that, there's this.

Very Nice!!

If I recall correctly, there used to be a menu option to enable / disable. I haven't been involved much in recent times, has it been removed? Edit: Just checked and don't see any sign of it. Probably removed at some point with recent updates / optimizations. Definitely a good thing to have for people who need it, but shouldn't be enabled by default. If possible, I would say put the a texture compression setting in the menu for people who can accept the trade off of performance over loading time.

This actually solved the slow loading problem for me, so thanks for the suggestion. I guess that raises the question of why image_useNormalCompression is defaulting to 1 in the first place, given the problems it causes. Perhaps it is intended as a "safe" default for people with low-memory GPUs.

Well yes of course!

Player's movement is locked for example while mantling and just like in that case, it makes sense to immobilize the player here: Lifting a 140 kg guard is not an easy task, so you cannot move while doing it. And as I said above, this is also meant to balance shouldering vs dragging because shouldering is so overpowered that nobody ever would use dragging (which has been discussed here and in the linked thread). With this brief immobilization, there is a small disadvantage when using shouldering, so the player might consider rather dragging a body than shouldering it in some situations. Anyway, if you don't like the feature, you can just disable it via the pm_shoulderAnim cvars, as I already said above.

Hang on, are you saying that the CC-SA license used to distribute TDM assets is not in fact the regular Creative Commons license, but a sort of hybrid "Creative Commons + additional restrictions imposed by third party texture libraries"? That is certainly news to me. My understanding is that the "sharealike" terms in a CC license are a simple copyleft-style provision that ensure that recipients cannot integrate the content into a closed-source product. If you receive assets under a CC-SA license, you must allow the content to be redistributable under the same CC license. The "SA" section is not simply a placeholder for a list of other restrictions that are not mentioned by, or compatible with, the actual Creative Commons terms.

There was an internal discussion (linked for reference for other team members) about this. It was decided to immobilize the player during the viewport animation in order get a better balancing between shouldering and dragging of bodies, issue #1932. I will therefore close issue #5202. If you don't like it, you should be able to disable the shouldering animation by settings the times to 0 via pm_shoulderAnim* cvars.

I was thinking, Skyrim has a lot of mods, but has anyone added a mod to replace Skyrim Dragons with The Maledict from Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil?

Alright yeah, that fixed that, thanks. EDIT: BTW, it seems when you get too close to an object with SSAO on, you occlude it and it becomes black. I'm encountering this after I uninstalled a mission and started another one, the shadow maps also seemed to be pixelated and not soft like they should've been according to my settings. Other people testing be on the lookout. EDIT 2: Something weird happening in this skybox. (i don't remember what prefab this is but the texture is either clouds2 or twinkle_stars)

haha nice But a petty they intersect the floor and don't swim away when a explosion or a human gets near them. ERH+ nice work on the gun, personally I would make the empty shells fall to the ground with physics instead of disappearing like that, but none the less very nice work indeed. The more knowledge you guys gain the more TDM becomes more awesome.

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

Making some lava flow and sculpting some rock today.

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

I wonder if some of the slow loading comes from the fragmented nature of the resource storage. A map contains references to various other assets which then have to be looked up and loaded from various other PK4 files: textures from here, models from over here. I don't know exactly how it's implemented at the PK4-loading level, but perhaps the need to seek and extract each of these individual assets from different files results in an inefficient, non-pipelined load process. Perhaps it could be accelerated by writing out a "map package" which includes all of the assets for a particular map (not just custom ones added by the mapper), and then pre-emptively pushing every asset from this package into memory at the start of the load process, rather than waiting for the map to request particular assets individually which then have to be extracted from the PK4 virtual file system.

I don't know whether this will help with the loading times, but I recently found I had image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression set to the default 1 (I was wondering why the colour banding on my TGAs was so bad in the game). According to https://www.iddevnet.com/doom3/ these cause TGAs to get compressed at load time. Since TDM (currently) doesn't use pre-compressed normal maps, that might be one cause of loading delay, though I can't say I've noticed a big speed-up (and presumably setting 0 will use more RAM). The question of nominating recommended 'showcase' FMs comes up occasionally, but besides the point stgatilov makes, it raises other questions: what if A is a stunning, impressive mission but utterly brutal to inexperienced players? What if B is third in a series where the first two no longer impress so much? What if C is great fun but long since ceased to be a visual showcase for TDM? (I was going to suggest that instead of trying to list 'best' missions it might be nice to have an occasional spotlight on missions that made a splash in their day - n year anniversaries for former competition winners, perhaps, since they were already entered into a public ranking - but that idea naturally biases things towards the sometimes less pretty past.)

Just WOW :| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/10/26/deaths-cold-embrace-thief-2s-new-fan-made-campaign/

I've heard good things about DCE. Might try it once I finish other TMA FMs I'm currently playing.