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That's correct. The ai needs to "see" the missing entity marker, and that depends on the lighting. Punishing the player for carrying lots of loot is really a bad idea as stated by others. But the major reason given, that it punishes the player for doing what the game requires from him or her, is also applyable on things like ko limitations or no kill objectives. I mean you are giving the player broadheads, fire arrows, mines and what else and then tell him not to use it. That is pretty ridiculous. The main issue here is the mission design. Of course it sooner or later breaks immersion if the player collects 40 vases, 20 golden plates, 12 paintings etc... But there is no reason for mission authors to clutter the mission with loot. Simple place less. Of course taking out too much guards will leave an almost empty mission that provides no more challenge and stands in contrast to the actual idea of a stealth game. But mappers can place ai in a way that taking them out is a worse option then sneaking by them. I don't see Thief and TDM as ghosting games, were the player should not interact with the ai at all. You have your tools for a purpose, and killing is an option, of course. Leaving an ai alive and conscious should be the best option in most situation and not something the player does because it is trve (in terms of how real Thief pros play such games ).

As a community mod, I think one of the jobs of FMs is to help develop the lore. So make something up, and if it's good enough it will become part of the canon.

Damn this was a fun mission! And that it was a speedbuild makes it even more impressive. Here and there I found a few graphics glitches like Z fighting, but it didn't worry me too much. I finished with about $3,500 loot and wasn't worried too much about stealth; there's one enemy that I don't mind if he spots me. You'll know which one when you play it. 9 screaming skulls out of 10.

Glad you like my stuff Regarding your question. My script replaces the location settings script that is used by the info_locationsettings entity by default, and that one handles the script calls mentioned by you (call_on_entry, call_on_exit etc.). What you can try is to create a second info_locationsettings entity and keep it as it is. This way both scripts should be run. I haven't tested it now (I may have in the past, but it was almost seven years ago, so ...). Tell me whether it works.

By system memory I did mean main system memory ("system-wide"), and that line was directed primarily at thebigh. VRAM doesn't seem to matter too much. I've had no problems loading & running the mission on an Intel UHD 630, which has no dedicated VRAM and instead draws from 8 GB of main system memory on that computer. This ran at 20-30 fps in the streets.

Just to be clear, by "system memory" do you mean VRAM (Video Memory specifically) or main system memory? My PC has 16GB RAM (already noted), which to be honest I would normally refer to as "system memory"! 4GB minimum VRAM is pretty demanding. Most high end graphics cards seem to max out at 8GB, and more than that is getting well into silly money territory, so that doesn't seem to leave a lot of room.

In terms of system memory, it seems 4 GB is the requirement for Painter's Wife. No reports of anyone with less memory being able to load it. Also, Freyk's comment wasn't pointless: many users report being unable to load the mission with the default 32-bit client, usually failing after about 25% progress. If the 32-bit client does succeed, then it might cause other problems. Anyway, he probably hasn't seen that you stated in the TPW thread you use the 64-bit client. All that said, there's a trimmed down version that just barely can be loaded by the 32-bit client, which can be downloaded manually from the release thread. Maybe that version of the mission is more manageable for your PC.

I am watching this thread, but haven't had time to try anything, but it sounds unpromising. (I was annoyed by Freyk's pointless response, but that shouldn't make me ignore the thread.) I've used glxinfo to determine that I have 2GB VRAM -- is this really too little? Looking a current graphics cards on sale this seems a viable low end option! The drivers themselves won't be old (Fedora tends to be pretty shiny and new with that sort of stuff), but as the hardware is so old the support layer for this card will be pretty stale I guess. I'll make sure to have a go this weekend and report back, there have been a number of suggestions to try. Edit: FWIW, here is my glxinfo log:

Thanks for your answer. I've updated from v2.07 to official 2.08 release. The frob helper don't work. Here's the values used in darkmod.cfg : seta tdm_frobhelper_ignore_size "40.0" seta tdm_frobhelper_fadeout_duration "500" seta tdm_frobhelper_fadein_duration "1500" seta tdm_frobhelper_fadein_delay "500" seta tdm_frobhelper_alpha "1.0" seta tdm_frobhelper_alwaysVisible "0" seta tdm_frobhelper_active "1" seta tdm_frob_fadetime "100" seta tdm_frob_width "10.0" seta tdm_frob_distance_default "63" I remember it was working well with beta 208-04 or 05 and it wasn't working anymore with beta 208-06. I don't know if it's related to others values I could have changed, here's my full darkmod.cfg : darkmod.cfg

Indeed. I personally want to expand some stuff for the setting in the missions I'm slowly working on, while referencing existing things.

Sort of, yeah. I finished my session with it lately, and I mostly stand by my initial opinion. In similar vein to other AAA colossi, it's a game with gorgeous graphics and lighting, as well as very detailed animation, but with very low standards in all other departments. I can only guess that someday this will be compared to David Cage's work, who'd really like to make movies, but don't want to be judged by criteria applied to the art of cinematography (as both the audience and critics would just trash everything he ever did). The pacing, the dialogue, the narrative structure, the whole buildup and the outcome, it's all fairly cheap, annoying and subpar. I can see the ambition, but it's backed up mostly by technical skills (graphics, camera movement), not by being educated in literature, cinema, or general culture canon (script, dialogue, pacing, editing). It kind of exists in its own bubble, and it uses very extreme emotional situations to manipulate the audience to think this is serious approach to the subject matter. I know I felt manipulated, but it still was cheap. Like waving a set of rattles in front of a baby: Hey, here's your super violent moment! Exciting, huh? And now, super deep empathy moment! And now scoffing teenager dialogue!, Etc., etc., ad nauseam. And with no character development whatsoever. All the consequences come only slightly at the end, in the form of PTSD flashbacks, but that's mostly it. So while I know what the fuss was about now, I hope it wouldn't be regarded as something profound in games, because if so, then this really is a bubble with low standards and only remote connection to reality (cultural and otherwise).

That is very similar to my suggestion for a separate command-line tool to run dmap. Essentially it would be the TDM binary but compiled in a mode which only ran dmap on a map specified as a command-line argument, and would not include any of the higher-level gameplay or rendering code. Running it as a command-line tool on demand (which then exits) would be much easier to manage than having a persistent process which accepted commands over IPC.

Looking at that image, that wall is the 4th element hit by the light after the first func_stat that creates the shadow. That makes it sound like the render engine isn't backtracking far enough to the shadowcasting element. You could test that by moving or temporarily getting rid of some of the middle brushwork and see if the shadow casts then. But one way you could at least fix the problem if it's a rendering hiccup is to reduce the light radius so it doesn't reach that wall, and then maybe have some invisible lights in the other directions if you want the light to spread in other directions.

I wonder if TDM could be launched without actually creating the window, i.e., just trigger a dmap in the tdm executable in the background.

Press "CTRL" + "ALT" + "~" (tilde) and this should open the command-line console then type r_ambientGamma 1.2 and press enter then press "ESC" to close the console. You should be able to right click your darkmod.cfg and open it with a text editor like notepad. For the purposes of this discussion, we would ask that you simply click the "drag files to attack" "choose files" area at the bottom of the forum reply interface and then browse to your darlkmod folder and select your darkmod.cfg. If you cannot attach it, try renaming it with a .txt extension then attach (then rename it back to darkmod.cfg).

They have 1GB VRAM and the driver is stumbling on the VBO size Old AMD Linux drivers must be even worse in OpenGL than Windows

I read a bit in the beta thread and it seemed everything was about shader details so I would have thought obvious issues like this would have been caught anyway ;)!

Aah. Sorry I never got back to that. Glad you fixed it on your own.

You could always come up with a great Builder saint or several saints who were women, in the more ancient or more recent history of the church. Maybe the Builder faith has some great female "Mothers of the Church", though lesser in numbers than the "Fathers of the Church". Despite the setting obviously being quite sexist and women not being all that emancipated in any part of society, maybe there were some more educated female representatives of the church, like abesses or nuns or devout noblewomen or peasant women who devoted their lives to religious philosophy, or science (naturalists, herbalists, women researching humanities), teaching (churchly schools), and various charity work and social activism (hospitals, tending to the poor and sickly and homeless, helping during epidemics, etc., etc.). I'm thinking of educated women like Hildegarde von Bingen, or queens declared saints (e.g. Elisabeth of Hungary, Hedwig of Poland, etc.). Maybe you also had great female saints who helped coordinate missionary efforts in the early centuries of the church, or were martyred for their devotion to the faith and spreading its ideals/teachings when it was looked down upon. Loads of possibilities. You don't necessarily need a Virgin Mary analogue, as the Builder faith apparently lacks a Christ-like figure anyway, so you can do a lot with more mundane female saints. Fun fact: In the real world, Saint Clare is, among other things, the patron saint of television, telecommunications and the Internet. Sounds like it could gel quite well with a techno-religion like the Builder Church, doesn't it ? Just go through a list of various Roman Catholic or non-Catholic female saints and church personalities and read up on their lives and accomplishments. You're bound to find some inspiration sooner or later. Here's some stuff that might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Late_Ancient_Christian_female_saints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_female_saints_of_the_Middle_Ages https://www.catholic.org/saints/female.php

Hi there, I picked up blender a week ago(having a little bit of experience with modelling in the past) and I am trying to recreate a building from my home town. [EDIT UPDATE SCREENSHOT] I wouldn't mind some tips on keeping clean topology like straight lines and stuff like this... It actually drives me nuts. [EDIT] Also I am still thinking how to deal with the lower level brick sculpting, would love some suggestions. Also congrats on the updates, I haven't been here for years but you guys really haven't been just sitting on your asses all this time Really nice to see all that.

I think Ghosting, K.O., and kill limits are pretty good examples for realism vs. gameplay. Of course i wouldn't be a thief in Bridgeport as being a thief in a city packed with guards, having walls and guarded gates around every few houses, and facing a kill-on-sight death sentence as soon as anyone even sees you outside... No, i wouldn't be a thief there. But TDM is one of these power fantasy games, where you can be a ghost robbing everyone blind. Or you can be a burglar knocking out twenty people without even one dying due to traumatic brain injury. Or you can even be the thug murdering your way through. I know for sure, that in the real life i can't ghost, i can't blackjack someone with him guaranteed to survive that, and i daubt, i could even willingly kill someone if i had a gun. But the game does not judge you for having fun imitating various shades of bad in the virtual world. So when it comes to the playing styles "Ghost" to "Thug" or even the level of tool use (and certainly the tools themselves), that isn't a question of realism at all. Personally i just have more fun blackjacking my way through than ghosting by the same guards multiple times. And sometimes i like to put an arrow in some of the badder guys too. For some reason i try to use as few consumable tools as possible though. I would suggest to authors to only have no-kill objectives to protect characters that have to survive for technical reasons (AI needed in a scripted sequence) or the story to make sense. Ghost/blackjack/kill restrictions are objectives that are implicitly present on each mission anyway. All the author really does by making them mandatory is telling people how not to play.

Hello! I sat and read a book and felt an urge to map/play TDM, so I went to the computer and started up the mod and saw that my current version was out of date. I haven't mapped (seriously) for some years but I see now that you've released 2.08! It makes me really glad and brings tears to my eyes that the dev team still cranks out exellent content! I must bend away my thoughts and thinking of "I cannot make anything useful..." and try to make another mission! In other words, Fieldmedic is not dead, I'm trying (again) to take up mapping! Cheers!

These are the ruins of Gräfenstein Castle in Germany.

Congratulations on putting together this epic-scale map with some interesting and frustratingly, fun missions. I can tell a lot of work went into it from many different people. I enjoyed the main storyline, the idea of the player being more than just a simple thief. And how you can choose the method of exacting revenge on the villain makes it more than just a Mario World level —collect coins, free the princess... Oops! She's in another castle. And as much as I enjoyed the missions, I do feel the need to share my critic of the map. Humans build cities based on a geometry for planned growth or asymmetrically for natural growth. This map uses neither and is difficult to navigate. All the buildings have near identical exteriors in the dim light, there are no landmarks to reference. And the street signs are dark placards sitting in the dark, of limited use on the ground, but definitely not helpful if you've gone vertical. Another issue with the mapping is that, because of the hodgepodge of structures, there are many areas where you can literally walk on air (Hill Street is a good example), or get pushed sideways during a jump by an invisible wall. The latter is a feature found throughout the map. I have no suggestions on how to fix this other than through a walkthrough in Dark Radiant. But about the layout of the city, I do have a suggestion. It's based on my past work within government public works. And I give it as advice, to be regarded or disregarded —not for me to be a know-it-all or an attacker. I know a ton of work went into this project. Any building that was constructed by the government, a church, or wealthier faction should be part of a geometry. It can be part of a grid —polar or Cartesian— a militant triangle, star, diamond, etc. (as long as it's pointy), or your choice of polygon. Poorer areas, or places where the sprawl has grown with the city's population, are normally going to be like tree branches or rivers. The passageways flow around larger buildings (connecting to but not overpowering geometric ones) and natural formations. So for this map, the area around the church, the clock tower, and all major buildings housing the wealthy or government services (electrical and water centers) should be on a geometric pattern. This includes the verticals. The pipes and lines should radiate out in the same pattern as the ground-level roads. The "sprawl" is not random. There is a pattern to how sprawls develop, and often it grows like a tree. main branch of traffic forms, and the smaller branches bud out after that. If the sprawl is growing out of decay, the original large structures will look more like rocks in a river if you take a bird's-eye view. In areas where geometrical growth meets asymmetrical growth, in a newer city (only a couple hundred years old) you often find its a no-man's zone. There's not really any established business or housing from either side that seems to be permanent. It's in flux. Older cities will still maintain the line, but there is a mix of well and poorly funded architecture. Two of the biggies for navigation are the facades and the roads. In an area around a well-funded, high-profile project such as a church, the church will decide the look of the area. If its design is sedate and dark, many of the major structures in the neighborhood will to reflect that. And the road, which is normally funded by the builder, will be uniform in that area and wider than those found elsewhere. So around our theoretical church, that's in an older city, the buildings should show signs of having started out from the same designer. The roads should all be the same material and wide enough for high traffic or parades. A more recently built clock tower nearby our church will have it's own sycophantic buildings, but in better condition, and its own unique, wide pavements. If the structures' properties meet, then there is a distinct border. More often than not though, there is an intermediate section of sprawl that connects the two areas. Where sprawl sits closely between two properties, it leans more towards one design or the other. This is not really important for smaller maps. Smaller maps are tiny sections of larger geometry or asymmetric growth and can be treated independently. There are fewer high-level patterns to consider, and the above topics won't affect a player's run. But on a large map such as this one, consideration to city planning and growth can drastically increase a player's ability to navigate. One last note. This advice is given based the growth of a city considering material wealth only. Vying political factions and wars will change the footprint of various parts of a city in different ways than I described above. Asymmetric and geometric patterns will still arise, but density and direction will be different.