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Yeh, that button has to go. There's no real need for it.

What program do you use to update? TDM installer? Previously updates were done via an updater. This changed. Now installation and update is being done with the TDM installer:

Can't say I'm eager to put a button in there that could potentially wipe a WIP mission. There'd have to be some solid safeguards (warning messages can be skimmed and misunderstood by a busy mapper) to make sure that this is a mission that's been downloaded from the server, i.e. by checking whether the folder contains exactly a .pk4, darkmod.txt, savegames folder, and no other files like an extracted maps folder.

Here is a revised EFX reverb file:kiss.efx Since Baal already expressed that he wasn't happy with the current setup, this may be added as a replacement depending on feedback. Just add it to /darkmod/fms/talbot/efxs/ ( you'll need to create the efxs folder )

I most certainly will not be giving up on Venice. I've put too much time in it to give up.

EDIT: Original on Youtube

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.