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Type of mission: Mansion/Estate/Horror Story: Lord Blackgrove recently purchased a rare expensive artifact. The whole family has now disappeared leaving the manor empty. Time to check out the manor and see if the artifact can be found. Build time: My first map ever, 300 hours (5 months). Credits: Kingsal - Breaker script for light switches and elevator Dragofer - Ambience Track 'Intent' Springheel and Sotha - Video Tutorials (those videos really helped) Feedback and testing: Cambridge Spy, Dragofer, nbohr1more, Acolytesix, wesp5, Shadow, Zerg Rush, AluminumHaste, prjames The whole community. Download (1.03): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wZc_nqHoX7kQvzfg08EpoRy2hyuH7mw3/view?usp=sharing Edit: Version 1.02 provides large performance improvements in the outdoor areas. Be sure to set TDM Object Details (LOD) to Normal (or lower) to take advantage of some of the optimizations. Edit: Version 1.03 further improves performance around hedges thanks to HMart's alternative hedge model. I’ve had a mission like this in mind for years. My main influences and inspirations are: Deus Ex - Chateau DuClare (https://youtu.be/9QLT_l8aH78) Clive Barker’s Undying - Main Mansion (https://youtu.be/t8PyXhCQB3Q?t=90) Thief Deadly Shadows - Shalebridge Cradle (Almost everyone should be very familiar with this one) (https://youtu.be/Rw4YZuRUgXA) In case anyone gets stuck and needs help, I’ve listed some questions and answers below that will hopefully help. FAQ

Announcing the release of Sir Taffsalot's Sword. Summary This is my tribute to Sir Taffsalot (Gary Pugh), whom we recently lost. He was a valuable contributor in mission creation, beta testing, and idea contribution. You are tasked with recovering Sir Taffsalot's ceremonial sword, which has been stolen from him and spirited away to the mansion of one Lord Asher. While dealing with (or avoiding) Asher's guards, you need to find the sword and a couple special objects related to Sir Taffsalot. Since Asher isn't a nice fellow, there is (of course) the need to also find evidence he is up to no good. Download You can obtain a copy through the in-game downloader. It requires 2.05 or later. Build Time Roughly three weeks to build and three weeks to beta test. Thanks to my testers Amadeus, Bikerdude, and Epifire. I18N Initially, this mission is not ready for translation. As soon as I'm certain there are no killer problems, I'll produce an I18N-ready version. Enjoy!

The latest dev build (dev16215-9215) includes many changes in dmap: 5562, 5488, 5486 The main goal of these changes is to make dmap faster. In most cases it meant writing a faster version of some small piece of code. There is one major exception: I had to write a brand new algorithm for optimizing polygon triangulations (~1200 LOC). I used two well-known FMs to track progress. Here is the total time improvement: Painter's Wife (city): 8:10 -> 1:28 No Honor Among Thieves (politics): 4:35 -> 0:30 You should expect less improvement on other maps, since these two are rather outstanding cases. The nhat/politics map was very slow to compile due to a bunch of stalagmites: they generated hundreds of thousands of triangles, which caused slowdowns in several places all over the code. And the painterswife/city is... just too big although I guess it has some local bottlenecks too. Of course, with such massive changes there is always a chance that something breaks. The worst part of it is that dmap was never perfectly reliable to begin with: it just used to fail rarely enough, and hopefully this trend continues. While I did test new dmap on some existing FMs, I didn't have much time to check the outcome. So more widespread testing would be appreciated! In case something does not work, there are cvars which can disable most of the changes and switch back to the old code. There are a lot of them, and all of them start with "dmap_". Toggling them individually is not fun, so I suggest using the new meta-cvar dmap_compatibility. You can set it to the version of TDM that you want to emulate in dmap: dmap_compatibility 207: legacy mode dmap_compatibility 208: enable major changes related to visportals and opacity (shipped in TDM 2.08) dmap_compatibility 210: enable dmap optimizations too (to be shipped in TDM 2.10, also default mode) Note: not everything can be switched back via cvar! Just setting the cvar won't give you exactly the same result as the actual old version does. But I hope the biggest differences should be removed this way. P.S. A general tip: if you could check the latest dev build from time to time (e.g. once a month) with the map you work with, that would help a lot in detecting issues early

The training mission for Thief 1 was skippable too. Games of that era really didn't hand-hold.

I still need a second NPC voice actor for my upcoming mission. It's about a person who is stuck in the level and will have all sorts of things to report over a loudspeaker system and who is between scared, desperate and hysterical but all with a funny undertone. So things like: "How could that have happened to me? Now, of all times, when I only have to fulfill another 35 months of my three-year contract! Any new or old volunteers here? Andros (Jonus Thorunsson, an Inventor) and Malasdair (The Thief) are already on board.

I don't think this is the main problem. Yes, in other games most often "frob" is called "use", but then e. g. in Bloodlines you have an additional key to "use discipline" and in e. g. Cyberpunk you have additional keys to "use" gadgets or consumables and no player ever had problems with that! I think the options are what is overlooked and it can't really hurt to mention them in the control definions: frob = Frob/Interact/Take/Drop, use = Use Inv. Item/Use Held Item

That's what your original post translates to?

You're heading into spam territory.

I just tried my most recent FM (Now and Then). On 2.09, dmap took 60 seconds. On 2.10 (dev16215-9215), it took 23 seconds. Nice! The build succeeded, and the mission seem to run fine (I played it for a few minutes). Good stuff!

You've got my love stgatilov.

No, and I have a feeling this isn't going to be possible, ever. If even NVIDIA doesn't offer a vendor-specific raytracing extension for OpenGL at this point, then it's very unlikely to ever be added. No way around Vulkan at that point.

I made more, try with headphones!

I feel sorry for Frogwares. They are a good developer and have only been improving as time has gone on. Pity they don't have much luck with publishers. I remember that Frictional Games ran into the same problem with their first Penumbra game back in the day. The British publisher they teamed up with nearly scammed them, so they published the rest of the series and its compilations under Paradox, and have largelly self-published since. I get the impression many smaller indie studios tend to pick these smaller publishers because it's simply more economical, but the inherent risk is that a lot of these publishers either go out of business quickly or aren't even as minimally scrupulous as some of the bigger publishers (and I say that as someone completely unwilling to defend big game publishers, especially the triple-A malarkey of EA or Activision-Blizzard).

Meh, performance might not be great depending on your hardware, guis still stretched. But I think you might be able to pick your resolution from the menu now.

Hello Destined, Sorry, I forgot to update this thread last nite; NH will take this part. Anyways, thank you for your offer, that's really very kind of you! Jack

In the room with the fire elemntals: are there still "living" undead?

As for your questions.

Now I have found another deficiency! The old 1.03 ambient sampled the env/gen cubemap for all specular interactions... Back to work...