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Pretty subjective. Looking at things like the rough details in the normal map, I don’t think that’s what the original model is intended to convey, but I guess I don’t know either. It’s all subjective, but if that is what you are going for you are operating more in the territory of making a skin variant and the base material should remain intact, as I would consider yours to be more of an exception in terms of depictions of armor, which even when ornate, tend to have a more diffuse reflection: Personally given the darker setting I would prefer to use the original.

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Hi! There has been a lot of discussion about TDM playstyle recently. I got curious and would like to have a poll to see what kind of playstyles people prefer. Remember, there is no "wrong" way to enjoy a TDM mission.

Just remember:

Yeah this is really getting out of hand:

The old one looks like this: What I'm going for is this: The latter is more appropriate for the "elite" armor. Does this look like glass too?

@Arcturus I am sorry but the elite armor looks significantly less like a metallic response and more like some kind of glass, polished stone, or clear coat. The reflections are too intense and uniform and that is obscuring and smoothing over detail you can see pretty clearly in the original imo. It doesn’t really suit the material or look like an improvement yet to me. When the old material was on screen, your test lighting is actually quite flattering to the specular response, and my reaction was “that looks pretty good, I like that”. Maybe dial down the intensity of the reflection, use something like a colored cubemap so you get a less neutral “glassy” reflection response, and try adding some masking?

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Elite merc is one of the better looking NPCs in the game, but I think we can improve couple of things. New material looks like this: I modified the specularmap slightly. Since he has a sword i updated that too: The handle and blade use different cubemaps. There's no reason why elite guards shouldn't have polished shoes. Although the uv mapping on those is atrocious so don't look too closely. That's why the fronts of the soles are too shiny. Importing and fixing the .md5 mesh in Blender is practically impossible because of this issue: Not that I want to get into that. I think the excessive shininess of soles can be mitigated by creating a separate specularmap, as the boots and armor are in separate materials.

When I get that mood I go into no-clip + no-detect and fly around the map, sight seeing.

For me it was Hitman. I imagine if this pool was made last year on a Hitman forum most players, including myself, would answer that they save and load very often, and always go for perfect stealth. Which could lead one to arrive mistakenly at the conclusion that there is no value in save restrictions or encouraging non-ghosting gameplay. Then the "Freelancer" gamemode update came out, a mode masterfully designed to make the player have to roll with all punches at the threat of perma-death, and it is beloved by the community and regarded as one of the best stealth experiences currently available. I was suddenly bringing into missions shotguns, grenades, and all sorts of tool I'd NEVER used while playing through all the trilogy, because why would I ever use a shotgun in a Hitman game before? It's clear that the mode was very deliberately designed to make us stop doing the whole "bring only a lockpick and coins to all missions and do nothing but sneak and reload when seen", and instead engage with the whole of the game, and it has clearly worked. Almost everything in Freelancer could already be done manually by the player before the mode existed, play random missions with random equipment and don't load. That means nothing, there is still immense value in the mode and restrictions existing as an extra gamemode, there's a reason people like the mode so much. At around 13 minutes this video illustrates my points:

I agree with that and, oh boy, do I hate all the games that don't place these correctly, but instead e.g. before a long unskippable cutscene up front to a boss fight or before a long winded pointless way to reach a jumping puzzle instead of immediately before the place where it gets dangerous!

Pool party anyone? I hear the Inventors Guild has lights that work underwater and everything!

There is actually even an entity specifically for this kind of stuff: trigger_inactivity. AI walks through a security room with some guards playing cards. The mapper notes that the patrol cycle is so that the AI visits the security room every X seconds. The mapper decides that if the AI is gone for 3*X seconds, the guards note the AIs absence and toss the playing cards aside and start patrolling. And yeah, then the player knocks them out, too.

Ok, maybe low res reflection itself didn't look so nice, but when paired with heathaze effect it looked nice. This one uses the heatHazeWithMaskAndBlur.vfp (in this case the stronger version that I made). Unfortunately it doesn't react to light at all. It's also very buggy.

I played this masterpiece tonight. Amazing quadruple-A quality mission. Perfect balance in gameplay, outstanding visuals, expertly crafted story and pacing, interesting location, excellent opportunities to use tools, tools were given, AI patrolling was interesting and challenging. I completed it with some fall damage and stealth score of around 4. Kept me on my toes from start to finish. Wow, just wow! Hats off! Please keep making more!

Um, phrasing?

Happy 15th Anniversary to The Dark Mod! As of October 17th. 2024, 15 years have passed since the TDM 1.0 release! In that time, we evolved to most or all of the features that players were asking for since the concept of TDM was first mooted in the TTLG forums in late 2004. Campaign Support, Soft Shadows, EFX Reverb, Multi-Core Rendering, Uncapped FPS, Ambient Occlusion, Subtitles, are among the roster of perennial requested things that have been brought to life by the development team in addition to the core Thief 1 \ 2 game-play items like the Lightgem, Rope Arrows, Swim-able water, lock-picking and ( of course ) advanced AI enemies. To commemorate this occasion, please join us in celebrating the Release of 5 missions for our 15th Anniversary Contest! . The Imperial Sword Bikerdude was encouraged to reclaim an abandoned version of his older mission and rework it into a new one. Now the formerly lost work is a glorious new experience with scripted dialog, special events, and a decayed imperial cityscape! . The Wizard’s Treasure Thebigh has made yet another bite-sized mission with a focus on quality game-play and challenge. The mission is extra impressive for the scope and visuals achieved since his decision to join the contest was fairly late compared to other entrants. . You Only Fly Thrice DeTeEff has continued his progression of high quality and complex releases. Another relative late comer to the contest, this mission is a tour-de-force of excellent game-play ideas and is quite handsome with excellent volumetric lighting and modular asset usage. . Volta 3: Gemcutter Kingsal has decided to release his long awaited Volta Series sequel to be included in the contest. DO NOT MISS THIS MISSION! . Pinnacle: A Test of Talents UncertainTitle and TwilitWitch decided to risk their first mission release to be included in the contest roster. The use of both modular assets and many custom models give this mission a familiar yet refreshing visual appeal. . Please join the celebration and vote in the forum threads for each respective mission based on their contest criteria ( Game-play, Story, Visuals ). . . The Dark Mod 2.13 “Developer Build” The Dark Mod 2.13 is still a few months away from release but we wanted to highlight the fact that a few more of the long requested changes have been added in the upcoming release! . Parallax Occlusion Mapping! In the above video, you can see a that TDM has finally incorporated the long requested effect. This wont be applied to all textures since there may be some problems with visual anomalies and performance but we are already preparing for a future where lots of textures use this new and more three dimensional surface effect. Better AI sight! While the AI have always been good at seeing the player due to the lightgem ( sometimes “too good” so we had to nerf their sight ), AI have had various challenges seeing things like bodies, missing objects, opened doors, weapons, blood, etc. This is because it is not practical to give all entities \ objects their own lightgem. Instead we have used very simple math to represent lights which don’t match shadow and light textures. In 2.13 a new sampling approach aims to improve this so that AI can better see ( or not see ) items and bodies in a way that better matches the actual lighting in the mission. Mission Search! There is now a search window where you can specify the mission author or title to help you find your preferred mission rather than scrolling through over 170 missions. You can also change how mission titles are rendered with either the original title or the title with prefix words like “A, The” moved to the end. Improved Training Mission! The Training Mission has been upgraded to include a Vine Arrow tutorial, a Slow Match tutorial, EFX Reverb, Volumetric Lights, and some performance optimizations! Translation Packs! Between TDM 1.06 and 2.0 Tels and the translating community started translating many missions but these translations required that the original mission be altered in a way that made it harder for the mission authors to revise. The meant that translation packs were in limbo being hosted by 3rd party sites \ forums along with their orphaned old missions. The translators over at the Darkfate forums came up with an solution by including not only the translation strings in the translation pack but also the altered map files, GUI defs, etc that had translation work done to them. This would leave the original mission untouched but allow translation packs to override some parts. We have gone through the old archive of these translations and have reworked them to work with the latest version of TDM (and the associated missions). Most of the translations are Russian ( due to the continued work of the Darkfate people ) but many of the early TDM missions also have German, Italian, French, etc translations too. Subtitles! Datiswous has been creating story subtitles for many of the existing missions in the TDM mission database. Most authors have incorporated these into their official releases, otherwise players can still add them to the FM folder. . Hidden Hands: Blood and Metal Campaign Just before the 15th anniversary entries were starting to arrive, JackFarmer released an enormous 5 mission campaign that continues his well regarded “Hidden Hands” series!

For me it's more like every 15 seconds or so.