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Can't believe nobody mentioned yet that PREY is free on Epic right now. This game is absolutely incredible! Loved every bit of it! You can also grab Jotun on Epic, which is short and nice, but obviously nowhere near the quality of PREY.

New pre6 release is available in the first post. The playerstart visibility is fixed, and I could finally resolve that bug causing the weirdly stretched geometry in the render views.

If you ever wondered what a .proc file actually contained & why, there's now a wiki page page on it: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=PROC_File_Format It's a treatment of a complicated subject, so I can't guarantee I've got it 100% right. Just more right than anything else I've seen about it.

Yes! Written in Stone is/was one of the missions I am currently playing, and this was the conclusion I came to as well. I think the story (what I have found of it) even supports this course of action. These are clearly not happy people. Killing them is a mercy. However it seems I am just not good enough at combat to kill all the enemies with the resources I had collected to that point, so I ended up putting Written in Stone on the back burner in favor of other FMs. At some point I'll return to it and most likely finish it up using notarget. The world geometry itself is lovely and I want to take my time to admire it without having to worry about enemies. In terms of trying to diagnose what made the balance between exploration, puzzle solving, and enemy presence not work for me in this mission I'd draw a comparison to Iris and Hazard Pay, which presented similar challenges for exploration and puzzles but did not make me want to genocide the entire map. The first useful thing they did was prominently signpost important locations for the player, often with actual sign posts in the game world, and in Iris's case with markers on the map. Secondly they provided lots of safe corridors (that were easy to find) for efficient traversal between key locations. These safe spaces also often included overlooks or vantage points with clear views of the hostile areas so they player can get an understanding of the layout and plan their next moves without time pressure. And lastly in places where the player does not have the benefit of signage, maps, or prior visual scouting, these FMs revert to a much more linear level design. (Like a vine with side branches, instead of a spider's web or tree like labyrinth.) Now that I think of it, a lot of my most favorite TDM FMs follow these rules: Requiem, William Steel In the North and Home Again, Volta 1 and 2... That's not to say I think being lost or needing to make your own safety (Rambo style) have no place in TDM. (Perversely, Down in the Bonehoard has become my favorite T:TDP mission, and it breaks almost all these rules at various points.) But in those cases where being lost or ultra-violent is the intent, I believe the change in playstyle should be supported by tailored story beats and a generous equipment loadout.

I have the 2006 Prey and I love it, it's an incredibly good game (Puzzles with death walker elements similar as in TDM House of locked secrets). This new version reminds me too much of other similar FPS, plus unfortunately it beats my system to play it. Prey 2006 Also free (abandonware) https://archive.org/details/Prey_2006_Windows https://www.myabandonware.com/game/prey-dd1 (instructions to run it with the patch in the comments) (Doom 3 engine)

My first map (way back as a wad file for original Doom 3) was of my basement. I had a demon popping out of my refrig. So yeah, there's a tradition to map what's close at hand. Vids are great, but it's hard to use them as a reference, to try to remember where you saw a particular problem solved. A general Google vid search (relying on YouTube's automatic speech to text transcripts) I don't find too effective. For written content about DR mapping, some reasonable starting points are the Dark Radiant user manual and Fidcal's A to Z Beginners Guide, https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here!. I'm doing my 2-cents here and there on the wiki too. The writing continues!

Working on more wiki pages. As I kind of an aside, I got curious about inlining, which I saw occasionally mentioned but not really explained. So I researched it with the results now here: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Inlining

Haha, the 2006 Prey was nice and all, but the modern Prey is like a Deux Ex on a space station. A must-play for every immersive sim fan.

*EDIT* Nothing, found the compass

Personally I think Moonbo's Requiem FM is about as good as one could wish for in terms of a spiritual successor to the Thief trilogy. The story hits all the important notes, and the level design is uniformly top notch across all the expected axes of stealth gameplay. And there is even a sequel that trailblazes entirely new territory from its predecessor in gameplay, story, and tone. That's just icing on the cake. Indeed there several FMs for TDM that I believe equal or even surpass the quality of the original games' levels. The trouble is how do you discover them in that giant downloader list? Are there other great missions in there that I have yet to find? That is undoubtedly the greatest current weakness of this project. The ability to sort FMs in the game client (i.e. both the downloader and the mission launcher) by date, size, and author would be a great help. Search by keywords or tags and support for grouping missions into collections would also be very useful.

Good to know....

Thanks for playing, glad you liked it. These zombies are pretty amped up. I struggled to find a good balance there so thanks for the feedback, it will help me tune them in the future.

I enjoyed this mission. Zombies are not usually a favorite because they move slower than chasing guards and don't say funny guard things. Still these zombies kept me on my toes, and they were exceptionally gifted in the hearing department. They found me from half a large room away while crouching and moving forward slowly. Luckily there are lots of hiding vertical hiding places and the means to scramble away easily. Some of the jumps were hard to gauge (like the hanging pallet with the human guy sitting among the boxes) and I found myself falling to my death attempting to make jumps without a rope arrow. All in all, the strength in this mission is the Indiana Jones vs Tomb Raider level design and visual features.

I fear there won't be any fix for this. Drivers won't get updated because I suppose this series of GPU is considered to be too old today. And to the best of our knowledge, there is no good way to detect this driver defect on TDM side. The best idea yet is to automatically create a screenshot of the menu after a few seconds, then run some heuristic image analysis to detect if it is broken . That's totally unreliable, and will need considerable effort to implement. Regarding FAQ... If you have looked through several FAQ locations, please post links to them, and we'll add information. One of the problem with community-driven wiki is that it gets filled with too much information over time, with most of it becoming irrelevant/outdated

Hello, It was pure coincidence I went to check the forum and saw your post had just come in a few minutes before! Sorry I took longer this time.

It's a good question I think. As someone who pays maybe a little too much attention to news (both local and world events), it's very easy to become bitter about the world. You continually see people in power act like total dicks and get away with it, you see people break the rules that others are obliged to follow and get rewarded for it, and eventually it gets you to wondering why you're trying to be a good person if it's clear that humanity rewards certain types of person, mostly psychopaths and sociopaths. Eventually it can get to the point where you're so worn down by it that you start to judge if doing the "right" thing most of the time and trying to be a good person is worth it. Why try to follow a zero-waste lifestyle when big polluters will nullify any impact you or even hundreds or thousands of people like you will accomplish. Why bother worrying about self-improvement if you think we're heading to a state of societal collapse because things aren't getting any better? Why not just stop giving a crap about anyone anymore and instead embrace greed and nihilism? So yeah, I do sometimes fear losing my grasp on my own morality. But I think what keeps me going and prevents me from falling into a downward spiral is both my upbringing and my family. My value system is generally strong enough to withstand too much temptation to be a dick, and my family is important to me and I don't feel like compromising my values when others depend on me.

On Linux try r_fboColorBits 32 and r_useBindlessTextures 0