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Sturgeon's Law: 90-odd% of everything is crap. 90-odd% of software is crap, 90-odd% of movies are crap, 90-odd% of books are crap, 90-odd% of music is crap, 90-odd% of games are crap, 90-odd% of tv recorders are crap, 90-odd% of Amazon is crap, 90-odd% of all products and services are crap, 90-odd% of sports commentary is crap, 90-odd% of tv is crap, and as you get older 90-odd% of having a crap is crap.

As I can run it on my 6-core i5-11600K, 16 gigs of Ram, and a RTX 3060 Ti with 8 GB VRam, and get 100 plus frames per second most of the time (actually the full 144 frames of my monitors refresh rate most of the time), I'm sure you can run it well. If you ask me, those requirements are probably for the VR mode, which obviously needs a lot more beef. The game is nice, by the way. I finished it two days ago, and, it was a lot of fun.

I've changed the example code in wiki entries "Scripting basics" and "My first map script" to use what @Frost_Salamander indicated: $player1.setHealth(0); // kill the player instead of $player1.kill();

Better downgrade your Netfux subscription to the 1080p one. Better yet, upgrade to p*racy.

What a great mission - from script to execution! The best vertical mission so far for me. I loved the architecture - from mushrooms to clock tower (!). Also the pace of the mission (corridor-like) fits more cinematic experience compared to other missions... it's like an episode of a good TV series - it starts slowly, flows, builds up and then comes the finale - never a dull moment. End animations are just perfect! The only bugs i found: could not climb out of the water minor graphics glitch: sometimes the scene bounding box lights so it is visible as a box:)

I reported about this a lot during beta testing and some of these got fixed I think. I think the reason is that the mission has a lot of noshadows lights, for better performance. Source Possibly with the performance improvements in 2.11 (stencil shadows + Ai processing) it's not needed to have so many noshadows lights in there. Fixing whould also make the mission look better. I'm sorry to hear, hope you recover soon.

Good ol' times with an Nokia 3300. Bullet and hackerproof.

https://github.com/thedarkmodcommunity/scripts/blob/main/player/kill_player.script

Iris really did a great job with that aspect of world building: disease and addiction that warp the sufferer's perceptions of reality. The player character himself is one of the afflicted (or at least is implied to be by environmental storytelling) and this is portrayed in the game world through his experiences and actions. Additionally it's left open to the player whether the affliction causes delusion or merely sensitizes sufferers to a hidden, deeper layer of reality. This is fantastic stuff, and if TDM ever wanted to carve out a unique narrative identity for itself from the Thief games and their modding scene, the lore and themes established in Iris might be a good starting point.

In a fantasy world everything is possible. depends only on the imagination of the mission devs. Any kind of plagues, entities supernaturales, time travels, other dimensions, magia, impossible inventions and weapons can be seen in all the mission released until now. Even a Thief capable de jump and climb with a ton of loot, but not when carrying a person.

Fair enough . Anyways thanks for taking the time to look into it, and I learned something new today!

OK that makes sense. Looking at some of the other window material definitions some of them don't have that keyword. Also, if you are outside and noclip up so you are outside the window next to the other lamp (the standing copper one), you can see the lightgem light up. So I guess one workaround if you really wanted to use that material is to just make your own version and remove the 'noshadows' from it?

Because the visportal is closed and lights in that visleaf are no longer active, they're shut off. Why bother wasting CPU/GPU time on lighting a room that's completely closed off.

what is 'noshadows' intended to be used for in a material definition? I see that it means 'don't cast shadows', but in practical terms does that also mean 'make the material transparent (to light)'? If so, why isn't the light shining through when the door is closed?

That certainly seems to be part of the issue. When I copy and paste that part into a test map, and place a light behind the windows, the light goes right through. So in reality, light is bleeding all out of there in into that room from both sides. You only see it on the wall because the light is close to that spot.

This might be why, maybe. The material def for that window texture: textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty01_unlit { qer_editorimage textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty01_unlit_ed glass noselfshadow noshadows diffusemap _black { blend add map textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty01_unlit rgb .4 } frobstage_texture textures/darkmod/window/smallpanels_4w_dirty01_unlit 0.15 0.40 } Includes noshadows, so when the visportal is opened the light is activated in that visleaf, and it shines through the window panes.

It's not that lamp - it's the one above it

Here, the light entity is offset and it's center is in the wall. Did you do that offset or is that part of the model?

I have no idea what's causing this. It's the oil lamp just inside that window on the upper deck of that room. Stuff like this drives me crazy. Also, while I was just sitting outside staring at it, sometimes the light bleed would just suddenly appear even when the door was closed, or it would remain visible after the door was closed and would disappear if you moved/looked around. I thought it might have been another door opening somewhere, but that doesn't appear to be the case. I can't seem to reproduce this at all. I thought it was a similar issue that I had in another section with the ambient light changing slightly, but I can't see any difference crossing between those rooms. Anyone else notice it?

Thanks: will look at the lights changing - that might be the same ambient thing that happened in the square I've fixed the readable already for an update I'm getting ready the pool - the lights are magic

A new screenshot from Shadows of Northdale Act 3

First I was like "eh? hatch in a jungle setting? looks a lot like.... nah, I'm just imagining it." Then came Desmond, Jacob, 815 code, Fleetwood mac albums in the very dharma-like rooms and lightning. I wonder how many references I missed. Very nice mission, however I didn't know what to do with 2 white squares in the undead section. (Not saying it is too hard. I love the difficulty and puzzles of TDM missions, and the lack of handholding. Being challenged by a game seems to get rarer these days.)

@thebigh Glad you enjoyed it. My first mission, so so long ago!

I dont remember watching someone being so anal about a free contribution asset they were just gifted in a long time. Perhaps when you actually spend more time working on mood, flow, storytelling in your mapping, you'll realise technical details are not really an issue, you get whatever is available, whatever technical limitations there are, and you tell your story and thats all there is to it. Springheel could have gifted us models with a zillion polys and who cares, people would still happilly find a way to use them to enrich their maps. Its well known by everyone that its the mapper who is in charge of budgetting polys and lights and AI inside each of the scenes they create, trading between geometry detail, lighting setup, AI population to find the balance they need to tell the story they want in that particular area of his map. Its his responsability, alone. You'll use whatever is available to you (map manually, use prefabs, import models, model your own, etc), and find that balance, it as simple as that. So, please dont let us hear anymore of unoptimised models and how inconsolable that makes you. Just start using them. Scene getting a bit heavy? Go in there, change some things around, find that balance. Simple. Springheel doesnt have a "circle". But the amount of work he has put in, innumerable to count, plus the amazing quality of it (his was the first map I played and it is still my favourite (Score)), that must have gotten him a good number of fans, thats for sure. I know I am one. Specially of his impecable work leading tdms art direction to where it is today. Lets just appreciate what people are contributing and try to match it with our own quality contributions, or simply aprreciating it by playing the damn thing. Which I just might, a Springheel mission is a pretty good reason to dust off your copy of tdm and give it a go.

Oh my. What a nice mission! All in all. Really good mission. I am quite sure this mission will fare very well in this contest. Congratulations Grayman!

@vozka vozka thank you for this excellent review. I'm sorry to say I can't give much of a reply as I'm suffering severe health and cognitive problems. Most likely this is temporary but for now I'm in a fix. __________________________ @vozka I can now give a more coherent reply and I'm recovering nicely. I agree with every point of the critique and I'm in a quandary about how I should go about applying fixes. I think your preamble to the actual critique shows an exact understanding of what I was attempting to do in the FM. You understand that it is story driven. You understood the main elements of the story, that basically a farm boy of pagan background entrusts himself with a mission. His village needs help. Because he's earned a certain bad reputation and fits the bills requirement for having daring and a certain amount of cunning, so the mission is a natural fit; also amongst other things he wants to earn himself a good name. He has friends to help him along the way, and makes friends of friends along the road of the pagans. The FM uses devices to distinguish the pagans from the enemy they face and divides the space into distinct enemy and pagan areas, and areas in between. The pagans are opposed by corrupt nobles and their army of fundamentalist Builders, as corrupt as the nobles they serve. It's very black and white. Then there's the city guard who, being ousted from real power by the Builders are resentful and won't help the Builders and will ignore the player unless attacked or the player is caught trespassing in their inner court. That's about it. The critique mentions some gameplay elements that detract from the story and I agree about those. It also mentions gameworld failings that interfere with enjoyment, with gameflow and immersion. It seems to me that to fix these flaws will require a total rewrite of the FM, rebuilding the entire thing. For example, I understand the problems mentioned w.r.t. the lighting and know how to fix them, or at least bandage them over so technically there's no apparent problem. But I have a notion that the not so apparent problem here is in what's being lit. That there should be a rearrangement of things so light can be more focused and contrasted with the dark. I'm only starting to think through ways that I might do this. Needless to say anything like this would take time, probably a year, and I'm not sure whether I'm up to it. I've been playing a new mission by Kingsal and know I haven't anything near that level of skill. IMO the FM is unplayable right now. Actually I had asked that it be removed from the TDM database. I don't like the idea of leaving a blot. Thank you again.