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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/24/22 in all areas

  1. DarkRadiant 3.3.0 is ready for download. What's new: Feature: Remove menu options which are not applicable to current game Feature: Grey-out menu entries that are not applicable Feature: FX Declaration Parsing Support Feature: FX Chooser Feature: Renderer now takes "translucent" keyword into account Fixed: Lighting Mode Renderer draws hidden lights Fixed: Loading map results in "Real Hard DarkRadiant Failure" exception Fixed: Crash when trying to set default mouse or keyboard bindings Fixed: Unit Tests intermittently get stuck on Github runner Fixed: xmlutil thread safety problems Fixed: Some materials aren't displayed correctly Windows and Mac Downloads are available on Github: https://github.com/codereader/DarkRadiant/releases/tag/3.3.0 and of course linked from the website https://www.darkradiant.net Thanks to all the awesome people who keep using DarkRadiant to create Fan Missions - they are the main reason for me to keep going. Please report any bugs or feature requests here in these forums, following these guidelines: Bugs (including steps for reproduction) can go directly on the tracker. When unsure about a bug/issue, feel free to ask. If you run into a crash, please record a crashdump: Crashdump Instructions Feature requests should be suggested (and possibly discussed) here in these forums before they may be added to the tracker. The list of changes can be found on the our bugtracker changelog. Have fun mapping!
    2 points
  2. My apologies, disrespect was not my intent. I do stand by the statement that the vast majority of players will still probably opt for the ‘best content’ available. TDM is already pretty damn niche, and playing the missions that aren’t as skillfully designed is even more niche than that. To be clear I don’t think length or complexity has anything to do with quality. A 30 min map can be just as good as Iris or the like. I’m mostly talking about well designed and polished experiences which every content creator should already be striving for. If a ranking system were implemented I don’t think that would mean less players for the ‘amateur ’ levels. I’d argue that’s already the case that they are least played, the top tier missions are still the most played, it’s just that that information is not readily available. Which is annoying. I even bet if a mission were ranked poorly that would mean more feedback for the creator to work with. By the way I am no stranger to creating large amounts of content for free. I just spent a year and over 1000 hrs co-developing a quite involved Half Life Alyx campaign so I recognize the effort involved. I don’t wanna come into this community rocking the boat, it seems like you guys value positivity and constructive, (rather than sheer democratic) feedback. I stand by my statement though that I think adopting a ratings system would help grow the community and encourage more creators.
    2 points
  3. Making a map, even a small and simple one, is a lot of work and I don't think it's fair to deride even less highly rated levels as "amateurish" or "mediocre". Mappers are creating something and giving it away for free, and that kind of talk seems disrespectful to me.
    2 points
  4. EDIT - You can find a working external script with instructions in this post ---------------------------------------------------------------- Hi! First post in this forum. Greetings to all. I am a long time fan of T1 & T2 and I recently stumbled upon The Dark Mod while looking for some T2 Fan Missions and I immediately fell in love with it. Here goes a heartfelt thanks to the developers for having created this masterpiece and my recognition and appreciation to the TDM content creators and artists. Thanks. Back on topic. A couple of weeks ago I started playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. The game makes use of the mouse wheel to increase and decrease the speed of the character and while it took a couple of missions to get used to it, it felt natural from that point on. So much so that after beating the game and launching TDM again my first thought was: this game mechanic should be a must in the stealth genre. You can see it in action in the first minute of this video: I understand chances are this new mechanic cannot be implemented in TDM right away: we are currently limited by the 3 existing speeds / levels of sound (correct me if I am wrong) but regardless, if the development Team would allow us to use the mouse wheel to switch between creep, walk & run it would be a step forward in the right direction, in my humble opinion. Cheers!
    1 point
  5. I hear you. I don't disagree with this. A successfully completed mission can have moments of stealth, being discovered, and returning to stealth. And, that has its own sense of rewards and immersion. That can be quite fun. My comment was about pure stealth, the power fantasy of stealth, and ghosting, since Marbleman's preferred playstyle is ghosting and was part of the original question. If the player is discovered, that power fantasy is broken. Sure, for a ghoster, they might be able to recover, regain stealth, and successfully complete the mission, but their desired experience is broken. There's an objective in their mind of "don't alert anyone" and possibly "don't leave a single trace behind." Do they start the entire mission over or load a save? With save restrictions, they must restart the entire mission over or load from a checkpoint. That's not fun. So, why would a game designer put save restrictions on the player when the player, who wants to be forced to recover from their mistakes, can just not save (or unbind the quicksave key)? Players who iron mode do this.
    1 point
  6. But isn't stealth gone only temporarily? They calm down again with just their weapon readied from now on. You don't consider it to be stealth after first detection at all? I don't feel like it's "insta-death" when I get detected. Stealth is hard, so it doesn't really bum me out when I get made at rare instances. I even enjoy the sudden change of pace that the chase forces on me, and in some cases it makes it easier to reach my objectives. I feel like in this universe it is common for those who hold valuables, to have frequent unwanted visitors, and when normally it feels wrong in stealth games for AI to "go back to normal", the setting of TDM really makes it much more immersive. They have no alarms to sound the whole town with, nor do they have effective tools to lure you out of hiding. Their best bet is just to keep their eyes open and ready themselves. You proceed further from them, and will soon encounter AI who knows nothing about the nearby alert. Depending on map of course. Also, I might even go as far as to say that successful evasion during chase still is a practice of your stealth skill. The manner by which you return to becoming invisible.
    1 point
  7. I'd say the TDM forum is a very good place to ask such questions, because TDM can be a great game for testing out stealth game mechanics. It's open source and anyone who puts in the effort can make a mission. Like you, @marbleman makes missions. One of his missions (along with Random Taffer) won the Thief II 20th Anniversary Contest. He is both a creator (missions and walkthrough videos) and a player, which makes him one of the best people to research this, in my opinion. He has a game designer's mindset. As a player, I am very interested in what @marbleman discovers. One thing that makes his question interesting is that it is so easy to get off topic and talk about the pros of unrestricted saving instead of the pros of restricted saving. So far, the stated pros of restricted saving can be self-imposed by the player without removing the save function. Why remove the save function, then? What are we missing? Intriguing! @JackFarmer We don't want to read negative, unhelpful comments towards or about @marbleman. We want to read helpful comments instead, which will lead us towards answers. Can you help? Do you know of anyone who might have an answer? Is there something you have read in another thread that might be helpful here?
    1 point
  8. Can't speak for the others, but I will surely not work on bug fixes for this mission in December or so. I am just checking whether this stand works identical compared to the previous version (except for the reverb, of course).
    1 point
  9. I have been an advocate for mission ratings a long time. I understand both sides of the coin of course, but the casual player likely prefers to just pick one of the best rated missions and start playing instead of reading through all the mission descriptions, potentially digging through forum entries to find a suitable mission. Things like average playtime, general mission type and player rating would be really helpful here. Or maybe instead of rating, something neutral like "number of times played / downloaded". I think that would be way too elaborate. How about rating on the mission finished screen?
    1 point
  10. Thank you. Yes, I have agreed this with Dragofer last night.
    1 point
  11. I thought of one more: The placement of restricted saves allows another channel for visual communication and a more reliable safety net between the player and the map maker. E.g. suppose you run across a well that you could jump down (like in Bafford's Manor) and the map maker has placed a save point right next to it. That will tell the player jumping down the well will commit them to one of three things. a. A point of no (easy) return. b. A skill check. (Like a tricky swim, or labyrinth navigation, or a puzzle, or a big old spiders nest awaits under the well.) c. An item check. (Like needing a rope arrow to get out at your destination, or a breath potion to survive the swim.) The save point is a signal to the player that they might want to prioritize finishing up their explorations in the current area before attempting the new location. And it gives them a way to back out if they do go in before they are ready, without negating the narrative weight of having an actual point of no return or difficulty spike. (Plus, conversely, if you come across a similar situation later with out a save point that communicates something too. Either that it's safe to jump down this well, or setting up the ultimate betrayal.) And the real beauty is no one can complain that whatever was put after the save point is unfair, because they were diegetically warned in the most emphatic way what was coming, and also explicitly handed the knife to cut the rope they use to hang themselves. None of this is possible if you leave saves states entirely in the hands of the player. (Short of actually breaking immersion and telling them "Hey, dummy! Save before jumping down this well!")
    1 point
  12. No, it has to be / must be set by the mission designer for each light and AI separately and can of course be activated for all difficulties. Plus, this is not possible for all types of lights. I am pretty sure that longtime and sorely missed DM contributor grayman posted somewhere ca. five years ago, that AI awareness rises slightly with each difficulty level independently from the mapper's settings.
    1 point
  13. I have seen @Klatremus use an interesting hack to solve this problem, which was to first drop a readable document (which seems to fall straight down and land silently) and then to drop down onto the document ... which then amazingly cushions the fall and makes it silent!
    1 point
  14. Making great short-form content is challenging in a way that transcends medium and genre. There are many more full length novels that people would describe as sublime, or life changing than there are short stories which earn the same praise. Likewise for music, movies, and games. The near universality of this phenomenon suggests to me that it is not a lack of skill but a fundamental limitation of information density that biases us in favor of more expansive works... So, yes, the most acclaimed TDM missions also tending to be on the larger side should not be surprising. But with that being said, we should try to recognize shorter experiences of exceptional quality when they occasionally pop up. Case in point, I'd direct any new players to Sir Talbot's Collateral as one of the best stealth experiences I've ever had. This despite being entirely contained to one quite small and mundane townstyle manor-house. The amount of interconnectivity and flow Baal and Biker managed to pack into one 3.5 story building (hardly more than 3 rooms wide and 2 deep) is just astounding. (I should clarify that STC is a small mission, but not necessarily super short, due to high difficulty and some hard-to-access areas, but still a great experience for a very reasonable investment of time.) Something also to keep in mind: It's not impossible to get a great deal of enjoyment, even from a deeply flawed product, if one part of it clicks with the consumer. For instance I really enjoyed no-target and no-clipping around the mission In Remembrance of Him, despite it being nearly unplayable as a Thief/TDM level. The dilapidated Romanesque architecture was super cool, and I was hooked by the unusual story it was trying to tell (despite some questionable twists at the end... and a writing style that screamed for the intervention of a firm-handed editor). I'd actually be as or more interested in having a list of bad levels with some interesting feature--worth checking out--than in another enumeration of the current best-of-the-best. Iris was great. Phenomenal! But it took me the better part of two whole weekends just to get the first ending. I don't have that kind of time right now. Plus I don't expect to see it's like again very soon. A few more mission like In Remembrance of Him that I could buzz around for 30 minutes, seeing some cool sights, would be more my speed. And maybe we could inspire some quick and dirty spiritual successors in the pipeline that would capitalize on the qualities of such missions while dodging their downfalls.
    1 point
  15. It boils down to "Neither I nor anybody else wants to play missions that aren't absolutely top-tier" and I think that's both discouraging to novice mappers (or those who specialise in small-to-medium maps), and not even true.
    1 point
  16. But why? Asking the question makes no sense if you don't want to restrict the quicksaves. And, be the way, the discussions were about a Resident Evil type save systems which was baked into a single mission, on the highest difficulty setting, not about disallowing quicksaves generally. I highly doubt that there are serious ambitions to change TDM's save system, and, if there were, and the system really would be changed, I'd uninstall the game, and never play it again, because I hate when games don't allow quicksaves. The people arguing for such a change are stupid anyway. Again, everyone who wants to limit himself from saving so often can already do it. The game doesn't have to dictate it as a gameplay option itself. It's radically changing the game, and, especially with a game which has so many custom missions, this would be a total catastrophy for existing missions.
    1 point
  17. My understanding is that the original meaning of "save scumming" is when people take a game which is supposed to have permadeath (typically by deleting save files when the player dies), and "hack" it by backing up and restoring those save files outside of the game's control. In other words, modifying the intended design of the game in such a way as to make it less challenging. Like you, I can see no justification for using the word to refer to people who simply make use of a save feature which is exposed by the game and expected to be used by players.
    1 point
  18. Yes they do. You can use the current save system any way you want. The problem is in the head. Actually, by implementing a restrictive save system, you'd take freedom, not give it.
    1 point
  19. For the German speaking viewers, here is a relatively new YT video explaining how to use the DM VR mod.
    1 point
  20. I'm starting to think we need another mapping contest.
    1 point
  21. This. And, the game must also not define how it is played in terms of saving. There should be room for every kind of approach. You want to restrict yourself in the way you save? Then do it. You have the freedom to do it. As much as the people who want to save have the freedom to do it. Win-win.
    1 point
  22. Quicksaves should be restricted because: We want the game to be the exclusive domain of a small minority of hardcore players who are able and willing to spend 14 hours a day honing their Dark Mod skills, and we regard all other players as "scum" who should bugger off and play Candy Crush instead. We assume we know best what gameplay experience will be most rewarding, and want to force our one-size-fits-all solution on every single player for their own good. We want to encourage the development of unofficial forks of the game (since it's open source), and regard the resulting player confusion as just another part of the excitement. We firmly believe that game difficulty should only ever move in one direction: upwards. We are unable to improve any of the unpredictable and confusing mechanics which motivate save-spamming in the first place (like blackjack failures or hitting the wrong part of a light with one of your 6 remaining water arrows), and we consider removal of the save function as the easiest band-aid.
    1 point
  23. I love my freedom. The mission creator must not define how the mission must be played.
    1 point
  24. Yeah IRIS is a PHENOMENOL mission, but the Thief community offers much more variety and environments of missions. The best way to sample them all is to play them all. None of this "I have no time to play them" stuff. They aren't going anywhere. Play just an hour a month and maybe in 10 years you'll have played them all. There's no rush.
    1 point
  25. I respect and admire that viewpoint and maybe that attitude is what makes this community so special. But realistically most people don't have time to play every mission, let alone even 10. I think for the community to grow (and thus more missions and more support) it would be paramount to have a rating system, so people less inclined to scroll through every forum post regarding outstanding missions don't get disinterested straight out of the gate. In this respect I see this as an opportunity to include more people into the community, not exclude content creators. I see the lack of a ratings system as a barrier to entry, and it would be great to remove that.
    1 point
  26. Some new content is on the map, alongside a new mechanic! VIDEO:
    1 point
  27. I am working on Elevator stuff, need to figure out how to keep the player inside the elevator when saving...
    1 point
  28. You "only" need to have a better PC than the author of the mission you're playing. That's the only actual sysreq.
    1 point
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