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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/26/22 in all areas

  1. I've said this before but back when TDM was literally a Doom 3 mod and required the base game to be installed, I envisioned the idea of being able to go on a complete power-trip and hoped it was possible to open the console, type in "give all" and then it'd spawn all the Doom 3 weapons in TDM. It never actually worked, but taking on the builders or the undead with a chainsaw or shotgun or even the BFG would be... entertaining.
    2 points
  2. That's completely wrong, if anything, save restrictions would cause players to AVOID combat, which comes with the HUGE penalty of death and causing the loss of all progress since last save / mission start. If anything, quicksaving before a combat encounter should encourage players to try something daring and dangerous and not too bright. Can I make that jump? Can I take on 2 guards at once? Can I just run by these undead? etc etc. Quicksaving provides safety net for trying things without huge punishment.
    2 points
  3. The real way to make people rely less on the ability to load (because that actually is, what safe restrictions really seem to try to achieve), is to make failure recoverable without loading. There is no point in saving if you know for sure, that you won't want to load that save. TDM is one of the most stable games today. People almost only save for reallife reasons and to insure against ingame failure (either in general every N minutes or before trying something expected to be a gamble - like extinguishing a torch using a water arrow). Designing for absolute recoverability is at least pretty damn hard. But having safe spaces (rooms, the AI can't reach) near difficulty spikes, reducing the AI cooldown time and using a clear design language would probably make people feel less in need of that revorey insurance already. Important would be to actually advertise deviations from the standard path - so players know, how this mission is different. As an example, expecting the player to get that in your mission headshots kill zombies is a bit far a stretch when the player has played literally over a hundred other missions where headshots wheren't killing zombies. Such stuff would need explicit advertising because a lot of players would only be able to get that insight by accident or reading the spoilers in a forum thread otherwise. Death actually is the elephant in the room. The biggest ingame failure, players insure against by saving, is the death of the player's avatar. So that would have to be eliminated somehow. Technically, it doesn't actually exist right now either as the player can just reload. But that mechanic obviously needs to be replaced by something else if you want players to be confident that they won't want to load. Waking up in a cell instead of dying, just spawning in a nearby safe room, being left for dead but recovering a bit after the AI leaves the scene - all potential replacements for one or the other situation normally undone by a quick tap on the quickload key. There should be way more possible ways to replace that final game element (i just am not that creative). But the point is, that there needs to be a non-final replacement for that final ingame failure. And then there are other ways of getting stuck - on geometry, by going somewhere the designer didn't thought to be accessible, killing the wrong person or just by accidently throwing a key into an inaccessible gutter. These aren't that common (well, the first one is, but the noclip console command exists). But players, who don't save regularly, start doing so when experiencing a non-recoverable situation. So these situations have to be made hard to create or otherwise catered for. On the extreme end, it may be possible to create missions that exhibit no reason for saving apart from meatspace stuff like having to go to sleep. But you aren't fully against saves. So just having a sane autosave system can already do a lot to make the player save less. When the player enters a safe room and ther wasn't just an autosave - just perform an autosave. It signals the player, that this indeed is a safe room - and that you took care of his insurance already. If going the path of confidence, i would actually advice against using save items or manually activatable "bonfires". If the player thinks about saving, they will do so and just fall back to the (still available) save system, they have been trained use by all the games and missions that came before yours. TLDR: If you really want players to not save, give them the confidence that they won't want to load.
    1 point
  4. I don't think that the file has problematic code in it, but I can't prove it to you. I'm afraid these positive detections happen every now and then, something is triggering the scanners. Uploading the sound.dll file to the online scan services shows this: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7fe3607c7dd33cfee7cef53d0ccbdd3142a9f8860cfe24d639c4be043136c4dc It confirms that BitDefender doesn't like the file, for what it's worth. I could look into creating a checksum of the uploaded files next time I create a release, but this doesn't really add much value other than you're being able to prove that the file's the same as the original on my system. If the sound.dll gets infected on my machine while I build the release, the checksum would still be matching. One could make sure and compile DR from source code, to rule out anyone messed with the released files on my computer or on Github.
    1 point
  5. @datiswoustry upgrading your flatpak to the new 3.3.0 release. The 3.2.0 flatpak was indeed compiled against wx 3.0.5, but since a blocking bug got fixed the new one is using wx 3.2.1. I've got both flatpaks installed, and for me the old one has the scrollwheel issue and the new one does not.
    1 point
  6. Hey wesp! Thanks to Obsttorte, TDM v2.11 will be delivered with Blackjack improvements and apparently new mechanics. To what extent, I don't know. It would be good to have the current or future Blackjack rules fully explained somewhere. *My* take is my own thing. Obsttorte is Legend! Alternative sounds. Stock footsteps on water are fine in 95% of the missions since stepping on water isn't common or doesn't go on for too long. Regardless, it always sounded to me like being in a bathtub. The turning point for me was the mission Marsh of Rahena, I couldn't bear it anymore after a while. Marsh of Rahena is a good mission if you want to compare the stock and the alt version.
    1 point
  7. Excuse me? Inconsistent platforming? Are we playing the same game? TDM has some of the BEST mantling and ledge grabbing of any game I've ever played. I'm almost always disappointed in other games mantling systems.
    1 point
  8. You seem to not understand, it wasn't a misread at all. I did what a THIEF should do, what we've been trained to do over the course of these games; stay in the shadows, avoid the light. First thing I did was put out the light and hid in the shadows. Being Rambo isn't something I'm interested in when playing thief/Darkmod.
    1 point
  9. @AluminumHaste Ha! Well I think there is plenty of agreement that should also be a valid play style - second only to climbing out of map bounds at every opportunity.
    1 point
  10. @grodenglaive Hope you enjoyed it, thanks for the kind words! For anybody else interested, I've played and beat it using cabalistic's VR port, and it was awesome. No real problems other than peeking through keyholes with func_peek being borked in VR.
    1 point
  11. Thanks Jeff, please give it a go. Beta thread is already up with a download link.
    1 point
  12. I usually play on Expert for the added difficulty in most missions, extra AI, higher loot goals, more optional quests. Some missions even have less of the map available to the player unless you play on the highest difficulty. Also, killing the undead is not a requirement so I'm not sure why you felt you needed to kill them.
    1 point
  13. Well I can tell you in the only mission that restricts save games, when playing, I did EVERYTHING to avoid dying. That means, no combat, no crazy jumping attempts, no sneaking past enemies unless I was absolutely sure I wouldn't be detected. And I lost progress enough times that I never went back and finished the mission. Are all players going to be like this? No.
    1 point
  14. It’s been many years since I played the original, so I won’t be useful as a comparison tester (old vs new). But if you’re looking for another pair of eyes, I can give it a go
    1 point
  15. Another thing. The Dark Mod is, by its nature, rather punishing to mistakes. Fail to hit a guard perfectly on the sweet spot of their head/neck to trigger a blackjack KO? They're on full alert gunning for you, triggering the attention of nearby AI and you can do fuck all except to flee and hide. Since they'll be alerted for quite a while, this can potentially ruin an entire playthrough (not to mention your stealth score). Games like the Deus Ex and Dishonored series? At least in those games if you blow your stealth approach, you've got guns/swords/weapons/augs/powers to bring to bear. You can adapt and take down those pesky AI even if you screw up. Those games allow for a rapid change of playstyle which makes mistakes cost very little. TDM deliberately gimps the player because you're playing a lowly thief after all, not a highly-trained bodyguard/augmented individual. The penalties for failure are much higher because you can't respond with force. So I quicksave like a scummy bastard before almost every blackjack attempt and before any use of an arrow aimed at an AI target. Hell I sometimes quicksave before using water arrows if they're limited. I have no shame because the cost of failure is too high to avoid, at least for me.
    1 point
  16. It's interesting because I recently read a thread on the Doomworld forums on people's opinions of single-segmenting maps in classic Doom/Doom 2. In other words, playing a map from start to finish without using saves - if you die, you have to replay the entire map. The general consensus was that saves are useful, however there was some merit in there being extra tension and challenge knowing that death couldn't be rewound easily by reloading a save. On the other hand (and speaking as an adult), people have to work and often have limited time for gaming. Having to replay a long map because you died can be quite off-putting and takes the joy out of a game if it happens often enough. Savegames keep the tempo going, keeps the feeling of progress going. Also someone pointed out that starting a map from scratch after a death is kinda like using saves anyway, just a single save at the beginning. You're just being tedious by denying the use of saves in this case. Dunno where I'm going with this. Trying to be diplomatic and say I can see all sides to the discussion.
    1 point
  17. The Flathub package has been updated, it should be available once their system finishes building it.
    1 point
  18. I don't have all day to play games anymore, not being able to quicksave when I want/need means I basically stop playing a game that makes me lose progress like that. If I spend 20-30 minutes on a section, meticulously clearing out guards and loot, only to lose all of that, the will to do it all again vanishes. Now for some people who are powering through a level quickly, it's only going to be a few minutes of gameplay lost, they might not mind.
    1 point
  19. @wesp5 Given the quality of your responses to this thread I suspect you are not reading much and understanding even less. Bridgeport is ultimately whatever the author decides it is. So either you will respect my wish not to alter the setting of my mission in your patch, or you won’t as you have implied. I don’t think you advertise your patch as changing story elements of missions and I don’t think players who install it are expecting these types of changes. I respect the work you have done in the preservation of Vampire: Bloodlines but your focus on these types of details has been adding minimal value. I will place a disclaimer on my mission thread and on future releases advising players not to play them with your patch installed.
    1 point
  20. Are you using saves from earlier mission's version in updated one?
    1 point
  21. Does it apply for the latest mission update (1.21)? I didn't installed 2.07 hotfix and use win7, don have that problem.
    1 point
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