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Since due to the nature of this forum, file/image sharing is used quite frequently, I thought to present some alternatives to the widely used Gdrive, which I don't like so much, especially since the last TOS change. File Sharing To share large files there are several options that also do not require registration. The first is File Hosting Online, which supports files up to 25 Gb, encrypted and also includes a Virus Scan that ensures safe use Another good option is Gofile, free to use, privacy focused and unlimited Bandwith. No refistry needed. While the files are accesed or downloaded at least one time a week, they are never deleted, otherwise inactive files are deleted after 10 days. If you prefer to use P2P, that means to share files directly from PC to other, without a hoster in the middle, there are also very good options, which permits to share files and folders without limites of type and size. The most easy to use is O&O File Direct, a small Desktop app (sadly only Windows), very easy to use 1 Open the app and drag the files/folders you like to share in its window 2 Optional adjust the days and amount of permited downloads and if you want a password 3 Share the link which apears in the app Done The only limits are, that the receptor only can download your files, when your PC is online, on the other hand this permits that you can stop the download in any moment, going offline or shutting down the PC. The other limit is, that the files to share can't be in a protected folder. Her are an Example with a list of Search Enines (Html file 423,56 Kb). While I am online, you can download it https://file.direct/f/pmjVFnjfkjFTKTt5 Videos One of the best options is Streamable (need a free account, inactive videos are deleted after 90 days in the free version) Alternatively you can use Streamja, a simple Video sharer with good privacy, free account optional (nick, mail) Images Ok, there are a lot of Image sharer, most used the known Imgur, because of this I add only one which offers some advantages over Imgur. ImgBox (free account) is a reliable platform to share and host images like Imgur, but it make it very easy to upload and post dozend of images simultaneous, selecting all the images you want and drag them on the window, offering coresponding bulk codes from the selected images to post them with one click for forums (BBcode), Html and others, fullsize or thumbnails. More since Imgur used since some time the hated webm formats for gif images, hardly accepted in most forums.

As @Zerg Rushsays, "good" and "free" are not a happy combination for VPNs. I used ProtonVPN Free for a while, but it took months to get off the waiting list and given an account, the performance was terrible, and any kind of file sharing (e.g. BitTorrent) was completely blocked. I now have the basic package for $5/month, which I consider extremely good value even though I don't use it all that frequently. You have a big choice of servers with good performance, and some of those servers support BitTorrent (I use the ones in Iceland). Be aware that most VPNs don't support IPv6, so if you have an IPv6-enabled ISP, your IP address can "leak" even while the VPN is active. Some VPN software (including ProtonVPN) will therefore include an IPv6 "kill switch" to prevent this from happening, but you should always check it's working by going to a "What's my IP address" site and ensure that no IPv6 address is visible.

I would argue that a Thief game built entirely around ray tracing, would perhaps be the perfect example of ray tracing tech used for gameplay as opposed to just for looks. Assuming it's done right, it would mean zero confusion between what looks like a dark area of the map as opposed to what the engine considers a dark area of the map. Despite the Doom 3 unified lighting engine, there's still too many situations where the lighting of a region betrays its actual visibility to the AI, so you'll go there to hide but it actually registers brighter than some benign other area of the room due to.. whatever. A ray traced lighting engine should eliminate that discrepancy completely.

you are there!

The magic is in the denoiser. In Quake 2 RTX, you can even switch the denoiser off and see all the noise in it's glory if you want to. Basically, real-time implementations rely on very few samples, and aggressive denoising, not to mention fewer light bounces, Q2RTX being limited to only 3 diffuse bounces, as they are generally the slowest to calculate, at least in Blender they are. Additionally, most games that do real-time ray tracing only use it for one or two aspects of the scene like reflections, not for literally everything, like Q2RTX does. You can even have real-time emissive textured surfaces in Q2RTX, like the screen of a monitor in a dark room, where whatever is on the screen causes accurate shadows and colored lighting in the environment. It's amazing. Of course they can't just bolt this onto Thief's game engine and call it a day, the lighting and materials would also need to be reworked to properly take advantage of it.

I finished this mission yesterday, and, I really liked it, nice mission. I especially like the variety of your missions. It felt a lot like Northdale Act I in that regard. You can break into shops or homes, you can deal with the black market store owner, you can rob him (yes, nice Dishonored vibe there ;)), there are side quests/contracts you can accept, and there's a lot of variety in terms of the locations as well. Makes the missions interesting. I also like that there's always a certain linearity in your missions. The player gets lead in a way, instead of having a complete open world, which might get confusing in terms of order of objectives. There always seems to be an obvious and "logic" way you go as a player in your missions. The difficulty was perfect. I don't like too hard missions. I played Written in Stone a while ago, and, while i enjoyed the first part of the mission, the later part was way, WAY too hard for me. I liked that your missions also cater to the more casual player, not the super skilled pwnzo0r player, which many other missions seem to be designed for (which, obviously, is bad for people who just got into the mod). The visuals were great, as expected. The two Northdale missions are great in that regard as well. If anything, I'd criticize that, sometimes, you seem to design some spots overly narrow and small. Most places are OK though. The one thing I didn't like was the voice acting, and also the script of the playable character. The tone, and also the lines she says are a bit too happy for my liking. E.g., I don't care if the thief who just robs noble's homes rather would be in the pub, or own a home with such a nice garden, stuff like that. I rather like the dark tone of your other missions. After all, it's a dark theme and a dark world. Just a minor niggle though. Overall, I really enjoyed the mission. Well done. :)

I think dropping ray-tracing into Thief 1 and 2's levels would ruin their designed shadows and make sneaking around impossible, but a new game built from the ground up with raytracing in mind could be interesting.

@Tarhielthank you for generous words and your time spent playing the mission. I am very glad to read you had a meaningful time with it. I am especially glad to hear you enjoyed the readables as I worked as hard (if not harder) on those as any other element of mission. My eternal gratitude to @Amadeus as editor who helped immensely in making them bearable to read. When it comes to how I learned to make the mission it’s really the same stuff involved in trying to accomplish anything really: you just keep accepting failure and frustration willingly well past the point your body and spirit are telling you to stop. It will seem like everything is an endless and impossible mess until suddenly it isn’t: and you and the thing you are trying to do are in finally sync. You also learn to accept a thing is “finished” (or perhaps you are “finished” with a thing) well before it is ever perfect. Since the deeper meaning of anything exists as an undercurrent below the surface, expressing it plainly poses some risk it may lose that very meaning for which it was created, so I will endeavor to answer your questions about the story up to the point I can: Thanks again for playing!

Where is the Eastern reading room? The easternmost room I could find is this: But I can't find any

Okay, when I started to play this mission, I had no expectations whatsoever. To say my mind was blown off is understatement of abysmal proportions - this was fucking awesome! Right from the opening intro, the nostalgic and bitter atmosphere permeates through and I did felt like I was playing Disco Elysium all over again for a while - it was bitter and made you think, but you couldn´t stop. It was only after first few hours I had to look and found out this was a winner of a contest - and deservedly so. From the masterful leveldesign - man, where did you learned this??? To map so good? - I have read in your comments this is not your first map, rather your first released one, but you deserve all the praise for it - it easily can rival Goldwells, bikerdudes levels, etc... - I am talking that kind of quality. It´s quite vast, but more importantly full of details, various new objects that can be taken and slowly unfolding story as you progress - which is quite subtle, as you have to "connect the dots" between various readables and what you find or saw. And what an intricately created world! I loved the fact there was a historic explanation of all the various cramped buildings and materials they are made of. When I mention readables - they are tastefully written (hats off to all the people writing and perfecting this) - what I saw here, is Golden Grail of well written readables in Thief/Darkmod missions. There is so many other things I would like to write about, but I have to run to my training, so I have only one plea: please, make more. Make many more and welcome amongst Taffers! PS: And few questions at the end:

With now full EAX support, and XRAM emulation too! From the log of UT3 (I use it as a benchmark) Init: ALAudio device requested : Init: ALAudio device opened : OpenAL Soft Init: AL_VENDOR : OpenAL Community Init: AL_RENDERER : OpenAL Soft Init: AL_VERSION : 1.1 ALSOFT 1.22.0 Init: AL_EXTENSIONS : EAX EAX2.0 EAX3.0 EAX4.0 EAX5.0 EAX-RAM AL_EXT_ALAW AL_EXT_BFORMAT AL_EXT_DOUBLE AL_EXT_EXPONENT_DISTANCE AL_EXT_FLOAT32 AL_EXT_IMA4 AL_EXT_LINEAR_DISTANCE AL_EXT_MCFORMATS AL_EXT_MULAW AL_EXT_MULAW_BFORMAT AL_EXT_MULAW_MCFORMATS AL_EXT_OFFSET AL_EXT_source_distance_model AL_EXT_SOURCE_RADIUS AL_EXT_STEREO_ANGLES AL_LOKI_quadriphonic AL_SOFT_bformat_ex AL_SOFTX_bformat_hoa AL_SOFT_block_alignment AL_SOFT_callback_buffer AL_SOFTX_convolution_reverb AL_SOFT_deferred_updates AL_SOFT_direct_channels AL_SOFT_direct_channels_remix AL_SOFT_effect_target AL_SOFT_events AL_SOFT_gain_clamp_ex AL_SOFTX_hold_on_disconnect AL_SOFT_loop_points AL_SOFTX_map_buffer AL_SOFT_MSADPCM AL_SOFT_source_latency AL_SOFT_source_length AL_SOFT_source_resampler AL_SOFT_source_spatialize AL_SOFT_UHJ Init: Device supports: EAX4.0 Init: Device supports: EAX-RAM Init: Device supports: ALC_EXT_EFX Init: Found EFX extension with 8 effect slots and 5 potential sends Init: ...'reverb' supported Init: ...'equalizer' supported Init: ...'low pass filter' supported Init: XRAM : YES Init: ALAudioDevice initialized. Init: Client initialized

@gokudo thanks for continuing to play and I always glad when players appreciate and are curious about these elements of the setting. While this story indeed has its end - if I am ever fortunate enough to finish my next mission it will certainly carry over and expand on many of those elements. Though I will always ultimately trust your and other players intuition and innate curiosity over laying bare these types of details about the setting which is not (at least to me) a particularly interesting way to interact with a video games story.

@Tarhiel

Glad you enjoyed the mission. Thanks for taking the time to play!

@mysakbmsure if you shoot me what you have already in a spoiler tag I can give you some hints on the ones you are missing

@Wellingtoncrab, just found the Stained Visage. Oh my. I don't know how you do the atmosphere, but it makes me want to weep. I won't ask for advice. Clearly I can go home now, and come back again for a more thorough dig another time. A bit sad it's ended so quickly!

@Araneidaethanks for playing and I am glad to hear you are enjoying the mission! I hope you make it through the second half without too much frustration. If you get into a spot where a clue or some guidance might helpful let me know!

I haven't noticed much of a difference here between 2.09 and 2.10, but I have been on the 2.10 dev builds for a long time - could be a simple as when you install a new version of TDM it typically overwrites your cfg file - this sets the ai difficultly settings in the gameplay menu to default which as Goldwell points out is quite insanely sensitive. Could it be you had adjusted these before and they simply got changed back? I would definitely adjust them to your taste either way.

First TDM mission with a female lead and a cool change to the lockpics, making TDM even greater, if possible.

I'm silly. I keep forgetting about how a sufficiently-large developer can have multiple teams working on different things. Although I do remember reading that work on Mankind Divided only began proper once Thief had been shipped, so I just assumed it was the same people. Regarding the old school approach, there's commentary in the updated version of Human Revolution that mentions that once you've dealt with Sanders (the terrorist leader holding a woman hostage in the first major mission after the prologue), SWAT is finally allowed to enter the facility after being held back by Sarif's influence. Once this happens, most people (including me) normally finish the level by boarding the VTOL, but if you go and backtrack through the level you'll see SWAT units have now populated various areas of the facility and you can talk to them. The idea was to mirror the first mission of the original Deus Ex and how once you've dealt with the terrorist leader there, UNATCO troops populate the area in the same way. Except there you have to encounter them on your way back to HQ so they can't be missed, but there's no logical reason for a player to backtrack in Human Revolution for this mission at least so you'd never see them. Still, interesting detail and at least showed respect for its predecessor. As for Thief 4, I can't remember where I saw this (think it was a video), but in interviews before its release one of the devs talked about how a player can think that a game they enjoyed 10-15 years ago was one of the best things ever, but can come back to it later and discover it was all in your mind essentially. Then another dev reinforced it by saying it's all nostalgia and how games have come so far in such a short amount of time. In other words, it's a blatant attempt to try to steer people away from making comparisons to the original Thief games by calling them old and shit, since they know their product won't compare favorably. It didn't work.

No, they were different teams. The Deus Ex team decided to take and 'old school' approach to developing their game. I read an interview where designers would question designing maps with areas the player might never see and the team leads had to explain that this was how the older games did it and that it made the players feel like they discovered something on their own. Paraphrasing but that's the general idea. The designers were of the mindset that the map lead the player from point A to B. The team making Thief 2014 took the opposite approach and repeated all the same mistakes of Thief Deadly Shadows, only worse in my opinion.