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It's a shame, because I like the small-to-medium sized missions. I don't always have the desire to play a huge sprawling masterpiece. Sometimes I just want to sneak through the City streets, get into the mansion, steal Lord Frobley's crown and get out again in 45 minutes. Those are the missions I like to play and so they're the ones I tend to make.

Yep, using Unity - so far I've had a good experience with it. I came in knowing no coding so the fact that there were a ton of tutorials, and a lot of very well supported third-party assets, has been a big plus. The game (shameless plug: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1461150/Shade/ ) is 2D, but it uses a 3D camera for some effects so having that was also a nice benefit.

For The Lord's barks, out of 391 sound clips, 44 would need a time extension (so 11.3%), in order to still allow a verbatim (i.e., unshortened) subtitle with a quite-fast reading rate of 20 CPS or 240 WPM. The maximum time extension I am doing is 1/2 second beyond the end of the clip. That is twice as long as considered best practice, but permits all of those to be rendered verbatim. Except for one, that even with a 1/2 second extension had to be shortened. I mark this with the comment "// Shortened" in the .subs file.

Considering only barks, not conversations... For most barks where the audio is more than 1 second, subtitle display extension is neither needed nor desirable. When it's reasonable to limit the subtitle duration to just the audio duration, that's what the captioning community seems to recommend. However, if a comparison of clip length to reading time (estimated by character and/or word count) shows that there's not enough time to read the caption (given a maximum reading rate chosen as policy), then the solutions are - shorten the subtitles (i.e., make it non-verbatim) slightly extend the subtitle display time So, in order to minimize the need for (1), the ability to do (2) is desirable. The amount of extension should be done on a per-subtitle basis, not by a global parameter. Hence the optional parameter.

As a general question regarding configurability: are you really sure this is needed? I have added hardcoded global extension and minimum time. If you don't like these values, we can choose better values. Since the amount of space for one subtitle is very limited, all subtitles have more or less the same text size, and hence they take about the same time to read. So why do you think some particular sound should be extended by 3 seconds while most of the others are OK with 0.2 seconds?

Also, please keep on your radar changing the parsing for the "inline" command, so that it can take an additional optional parameter, I'm informally calling "extends to". This is the time in fractional seconds to show the subtitle. (This is one way to define the parameter; another would be as the ADDITIONAL time, beyond the clip duration.) For The Lord subtitles (currently about to start my final QA pass), I've already generated Extends To values, but marked them as "// TO DO: " comments so as not to break current parsing. Probably you'll see those subtitles next week - since IRL the kitchen is being boxed up in preparation for remodeling.

No not really, but you can hide everything except the room and then it's easier to move to the room. But not a good solution. Interesting. Could be used with info_locations. Although HMart's solution is probably better. Well, if you have DR active with a map file with one room-layer active, then in TDM teleport to another room and in DR activate that room-layer and sync camera, it will probably not be so harmful on system resources, depending on the size and complexity of that specific room. I think this stuff can already be done with scripts directly in DR (make a menu, jump camera to specific positions, activate/deactivate layers, etc.), but I find DR-scripting too difficult to understand (no Python knowledge).

Ah, OK. That changes things, probably removes the case for changing the conversation's "wait until finished" behavior. Interesting that the player/narrator sound emitter doesn't seem to have the restriction that "one actor... cannot say two sounds at once". Yes, .srt should handle 2 lines (but I haven't done anything with .srt myself yet. Barks aren't generally long enough for that. For inline, you just embed a "\n" to get 2 lines.)

I do find that UE5 has a distinctive look, like blurry low res rendering while moving that is very discernible. I can usually tell the engine just by how it feels/looks in general.

Yes there should be, not to jump easily to any entity in particular but you can "save" a camera view position and then jump/teleport to it. if TDM engine team didn't changed any of this you could try: cvar "where" or "getviewpos" -> "prints the current view position" so you can know where you are in world coordinates cvar "setviewpos" -> "sets the current view position" ak teleports the player eye/view to that position If this particular cvars don't exist in TDM then look in the TDM wiki for something similar it most exist. btw you can bind keys to cvars, so if you need to jump to a particular position many times, you can do bind key setviewpos x y z yaw -> bind f1 setviewpos -50 30 75 180 and just press f1 to jump to that position when you need Hope this helps.

Creating even a small mission is a big effort and rather time consuming.

People absolutely are producing new missions, it just happens quietly until someone's ready to reveal it or suggest a beta test. There's even a call for beta testers in this very sub-forum: Crafting missions takes time. It's not unusual for there to be silence for a while and then multiple missions arrive from several different people within the same month.

Visportal control for advanced mission designers!

The games market in general has grown exponentially. Most play action games or "RPG's" like Assassins Creed though, so, I'm very doubtful that the percentual amount of people playing "immersive sims" (I don't like that genre designation at all, it says nothing about the kind of game really) is higher than it used to be. Steamspy for Deathloop (which is probably the best to compare as it wasn't sold for peanuts yet) says 500.000 to 1.000.000 owners, which sounds high, but, if you compare it to the really popular games, it's a fraction. IIRC, Dishonored 2 was lower at that point, which makes me think that Deathloop is more popular because it's a more modern setting with guns in it. By the way, you may know the game Myst. It used to be the most popular game world wide. Could you imagine that game being the most popular these days? The market has changed, people have changed. To be fair though, one has to say that video games used to be something for nerds, while the market has vastly opened up, of course, with especially console gamers making a big part of the market nowadays.