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I'm looking for beta testers for the next William Steele mission. Testing will be done on TDM 2.08. The beta testers for WS6 - Baleford Museum are encouraged to sign up for this one as well. WS6 segues into WS7, and it's important that the transition be tested to be sure it makes sense. If you're inclined to sign up for WS7, and you didn't test WS6, I encourage you to complete WS6 first. Testing will be managed from the Beta Testing forum thread. Thanks!

Wrong forum to say STFU, except when there's an i in the middle. In all seriousness 'though, please refrain from using such language.

I just wanted to say well done, congrats and thanks for all the effort that went into making this mission! It was amazing and the first DarkMod mission I've played. It felt up to the quality bar of the old thief games and actually probably a lot better in some ways really. The amount of ways to navigate around the thief highways and rooftop areas in the multi-level city is staggering. I can really tell a lot of love went into crafting this. Loved the plot, side missions, locations and setting... everything really. Hardly any feedback save me finding some objectives a bit confusing to figure out. Looking forward to trying out more missions in this amazing game now.

This is a thing I've thought about for a while now, and I really wanted to know if others would like to see it as well. I for one would really love to have this! Especially since it's so easy to implement, I did it myself just by changing one line in a def and already tested the idea in practice. So in TDM you have two items that can act as weapons: The flashbomb and the flashmine. When they go off they create this bright flash which temporarily blinds every AI who sees it, including the player if they don't look away in time. It's a fun concept though I was never big into having a mine or a bomb doing it. I always wondered: Why do we not have an arrow version of this as well?! Wouldn't it be fun if TDM had a flash arrow too? You shoot it and when it hits a wall, it creates the same flash that blinds every AI who sees it! The arrow is slow enough for the player to have time to look away after firing it. Like I said I already achieved this and tested just such an arrow. My cyberpunk conversion The Dark Module (screenshots available in this thread) has an arrow rifle that offers an equivalent for each arrow type in vanilla TDM, with the exception that the vine arrow isn't included and instead you have a flash arrow. The way I remember doing it was by defining an arrow like all others, with the one difference that the effect defined for hitting a surface calls the same function as the flashbomb / flashmine. At first I didn't know if it would work but when I did this the arrow behaved just as expected, spawning the blinding flash upon hitting a wall and making the AI rub their eyes. Implementing this is thus ridiculously easy and I can probably do it myself in a few hours and post a pk4 here. I'm curious if others like the idea though. Would you use such an arrow in your FM if it was available? Do you think it would make the gameplay more fun to have it? I only tested it in a simple cubic map designed to see the custom assets I ported, no complex walls or AI's actually patrolling. It definitely felt like the behavior would be useful though, such as when you need to run through a bright area and temporarily have to blind an AI at a distance without harming them. If the devs accept the idea I'll go ahead and do it.

I hate to be the devil's advocate, but I think the EMP-arrow is unnecessary. It's purpose is to extinguish electical lights. However, electical lights are meant to be not-extinguishable. If the map designer would have wanted a light source to be extinguishable in a specific place, he/she would have put a flame-based light source there. It would only make designing maps more diffcult as map authors would have to consider the possibilty that any electrica light source could be extinguished. The way it is right now is quite clear: if there is a flame-based light source it can be extinguished, if it is electrical you will have to find another way around or time it correctly so guards don't see you. The only thing the EMP-arrow would achieve is to blurr this definition.

I think it sounds like a cool idea. Like all proposals, lots of playtesting is what matters. You can have an intuition about what's good for gameplay, but you can never know until you make up a prototype and people play it and give their input over a lot of iterations. So I recommend making a prototype first, and maybe a quick video of it in action to get people interested in trying it out. Currently you can already throw flash bombs, so I think the main issue is how using an arrow changes the mechanic vs. just throwing it. Of course it can go further and you can aim better. In theory, I think having it as an arrow, as one option, makes sense, just because, if you were a professional, wouldn't you want a little better control than just throwing the thing? This reminds me of another kind of 'contraption arrow' that's come up before (I think T2X had it, and maybe some other FMs), which was EMP arrows that short circuit out electrical lights. That might be pushing a bit far though, as it's starting to look too far out of the tech of our world.

Kudos to peter_spy for spotting to that. I seldom use autocomplete with dmap myself. Usually I just hit uparrow until I get to the recent command of interest.

I like that idea. Make this arrow emitt powerful electrical flashes burning out electrical lamps and stunning enemies! Maybe actually drop them like with a tazer.

Zen 3 reviews are out: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested

Yeah, facepalm yourself, have fun. You just talked about how more geometry means more work, and so I talked about Daz3D farts, which is very common these days. Now you got me needing to explain your own statements to you and babystep the entire context over, and this isn't the first time, either. No time or energy to do it this time, so I'll just say this - if you can't answer the original question (which you barely bothered to even read) then simply just don't waste time with a reply. Please. For everyone else, here's a link:- https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20377-graphics-technology-sharepoint/&do=findComment&comment=452815

I'm all for new stuff, but I think we agree that we already have two flash items. Your EMP idea on the hand would offer some new gameplay possibilities :)!

Kind of funny to see wesp5 being the one saying now hold back a second on a crazy feature proposal. I think he's saying about the same thing I was. Not sure it's necessary, but I don't think there's any hard reason not to have it as another option if a mapper wants it except a general rule against feature bloat, which is admittedly a respectable reason too as we have a kind of minimalist approach. I actually wasn't meaning to argue in favor of it per se (yet), just that it'd be interesting to see in action and think about it from there.

Tell that to folks who fart out characters from Daz3D like it's nothing. Your advice is a bit cynical. Higher polycounts doesn't necessarily correlate to more skill and effort, infact the opposite may be true. But ultimately, the GPU doesn't care if it's artful or not, it's all about numbers, and that's what I was asking about - solid figures, not yet more vague philosophies.

I don't know if something like this would be needed. If guards are so far away that you need a flash arrow instead of a flash bomb, I would assume I could sneak by without them noticing anyway. Also as an emergency weapon the flash bomb is thrown much faster than the arrow can be shot. But I really like the idea of the EMP arrow! Because at the moment there is absolutely no way to kill electric lights. I could see it having a sparkling crystal in the front and thus it seems not at all out of the tech of the world.

Exactly, which is why I'm asking. This is a good list, but it's from the 7th gen just into the 8th, so this info is quite outdated and is already showing a huge disparity, even though we could safely guess why some numbers are different to others (such as fighting games and games not using all the crazy rendering bells and whistles):- https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/yes-but-how-many-polygons-an-artist-blog-entry-with-interesting-numbers.39321/ What the internet needs is some Digital Foundry level of inspection into modern (9th gen) titles, that provide info like that Quake 4 page I provided in the last post. I can barely even find a modern wireframe shot.

The game keeps crashing during/shortly after the video sequenze where it shows the city watch has located your hiding place. I tried to proceed from different save games. I reinstalled the mission and also updated "the dark mod". Nothing seems to help. Could someone help out ? EDIT: I was able to fix this problem now by deleting and reinstalling the entire game.(I saved a backup of the fms folder of course) Possibly it was just corrupted game data caused by my ailing hard disk, but has had nothing to do with this mission at all. By the way, I enjoyed this mission very much. Very well done !

I figure this thread is a relevant place to ask... Does anyone know a modern and up-to-date place to find stats and metrics on recent game releases, in terms of polycounts and drawcalls and performance? There's a lot of yabber and vague info floating around everywhere, but extremely difficult to find hard solid numbers since around the early 8th gen consoles. People these days simply don't seem to know. I remember way back, looking through these engine features:- https://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance.html ...and naively thinking that all game engines would provide these kind of tools, even those not necessarily moddable. How wrong I was. I have 'Wolfenstein Youngblood', that's the most recent title that has these kind of console commands for development. That's great and all, but I'd like to find like a 'hub' dedicated to folks into dissecting modern games and seeing exactly how they tick.

I'm sure some of you will recognize where these shots were taken from

Video is updated and should be bright enough. All sfx is WIP. Background ambience will be changed.

Here is a fun side-by-side comparison. Just a note: The story/plot and set pieces will have no ties with the Thief series. I am planning on including Easter Eggs for nostalgic reasons alone.

When I opened the map with my office laptop, the map was very dark. I'm quite sure my monitor needs calibrated. These images are more more accurate as to what the ambience is supposed to look like (still wip and tweaking)

Running into another little issue with DarkRadiant recently: I can no longer copy and paste brushes and entities. When I attempt to DR tells me there's no clipboard module attached. Is the module failing to compile, or something else causing this not to work properly?