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I've also created a few alternate zombies, to add a little variety to your local necromancer lair. The first is a fairly straightforward variation that uses the hunched over animation set Kingsal created for his beastmen. Unlike typical zombies, these are fast runners.

All valid points, which is why I play Anomaly in essentially "baby-mode" by using addons that make things a lot easier. Massively increased inventory weight limits, the ability to sell damaged items, significantly reduced damage taken from enemies, increased starting credits so I can just buy things I like from the get go. These are effectively cheats but I don't care - I just want to roam the land and get into spontaneous encounters, but that's really hard to do with vanilla Anomaly so addons make up the difference.

You're right, the shadow geometry can be cached. Rendering it to the stencil buffer, however, cannot, because it's done from the camera's point of view (unlike shadow maps), and that typically changes between frames. But of course, the geometry is the more significant cost

An update has been released and is available in the in-game downloader! Changelog:

If you want to know my approach to this, it's to lift ideas from other games, books, movies, tv, comics, etc., and just adapt them to my own story. Like I like Lady Rowena's approach of having every NPC in her FMs be related to every other NPC in some way, either they were rivals, or best friends, or secret lovers, or had a bad history, and there are readables all around that fill out all the different relationships which are fun for the player to find. So I try to do something like that in my stuff. The best kind of smaller scale "events" for FMs are in the Thief 2 FMs by Eshaktaar, Lady Rowena, Lord Alan, Gaetane, Saturnine, Purah ... ones where every room or scene also has a little event or story by itself. TDM FMs have done this too, but I guess I'm a sucker for the classics. But don't discount the value of lifting ideas from movies and tv shows. Keep a little notepad around and when you see something write it down.

These are a few threads I found. Don't forget TTLG has a long history of talking about FM ideas too-- https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134149 https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133048 https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33693

This is a new wrapped corpse model, kindly created for the campaign mission by epifire. There are multiple versions, including a sitting version, and a couple piles of bodies. The City is now ready for the plague!

Silent Hill: Alchemilla is just a standalone Source mod for Half Life 2. You can download it right away and play it. If you have Steam it'll recognize it as the Source SDK and run like any Steam game. Unfortunately it has no NPC's or too much of a plot in consequence. It's just a fan mod made by 2 people who couldn've found an animator to do the job. But it is a faithful recreation of the original locations and the mod has a soundtrack too: If you haven't already listened to the soundtrack of the first two Silent Hill games, you should! The combat in the original games was easily one of the weakest parts of the game and the puzzles were archaic but it was all in there just for the pacing. Today Silent Hill's legacy is in the Amnesia game and I've heard that SOMA is pretty good as well. I mean that, as in you can't fight your enemies there, which was the point of the whole thing. Besides, enemies respawn in Silent Hill so killing them can be useless sometimes.

On a new install of IrfanView (so extensions never previously assigned to it), if you assign file extensions using the options menu within Irfanview, Windows 10 will crack the shits and give all those notifications. The idea is that you assign the extensions, then go into Windows Settings -> Apps -> Default apps -> Photo viewer and select Irfanview (or Irfanview 64-bit depending on the version installed). That will properly assign the extensions you applied within Irfanview for some reason. After doing that I haven't had any issue of it de-registering file extensions. I keep using Windows because it runs everything and I get tired of being treated like a third-class citizen by software and hardware vendors in Linux (if considered at all). So I keep finding these workarounds that happen moreso in Win 10 than anything else, because of the lack of options. I still play with Linux as a hobby and also at work, just in case it gets all too much. Thank fuck TDM has a well-supported Linux version in case I pull the plug.

Using SEED with already existing 7,000+ (I think the problems started with ca. 7,200, not sure anymore) entities prevented HHI from compiling (although I only combined 10 - 12 entities in one case). Later on in the process I was able to reduce the entity count to a lower value by merging func_statics as per demagogue's suggestion. However, it seems to be a good idea using the SEED function long before the entity limit comes in sight.

Guys, this really looks magnificent! I think 10 minutes of my 2 hours stream I was playing with light and checking shadows https://youtu.be/gMAvaK2zqxo?t=5360 Soft shadows add volume to the scene it looks more natural and believable. Where can I read about stencil shadows and maps? From what i've seen map looks much better. Then why stencil exists? Now my tiny dream to see a daylight mission with the fast-moving sun that will cast shadows from every building and character.

Ah I thought you were talking about Half Life 1 because that is a source engine (HL2) based game but yes is a very nice Silent Hill based mod, petty that imo is mostly (a very good) level design showcase, imo the gameplay is very minimal. Btw he or they are now working on this comercial game https://www.indiedb.com/games/twin-soul

At least for classical stencil shadows, yes. You can't really implement a forward+ renderer with stencil shadows. Technically, TDM uses a trick for soft stencil shadows that would allow it, but it is detrimental to performance. And even then, stencil shadows would have the disadvantage that they need to be rerendered on every frame, whereas shadow maps can potentially be cached as long as the light itself or the shadow casters in its vicinity don't move. As for putting shadow volume generation to the GPU: that's possible, in principle. However, my experience with geometry shaders has been poor, they usually tank GPU performance quite significantly if you use them for anything other than a few simple objects. I'm not sure it's a good trade-off, and personally at least I think the kind of effort needed to implement it is better spent on improving shadow mapping. But that's just my personal opinion

I'm sorry to say that I've played so much stalker mods that even tho I love stalker and nothing comes close to it, not even Metro, i'm just tired of Stalker mods, IMO is just more of the same. Some mods just make the game much more complex and harder in the name of realism, but them prevent you from selling a "too damaged" weapon has if that was realistic at all, others bring a bunch of good looking but out of place/totally unrealistic weapons for the setting, others make the inventory management so complex that you think is a full RTS (real time strategy) game instead of a simple RPG. I would love that some day the Stalker community would take Xray engine and do a totally unrelated game with it, like Broken Glass Studios team did with Doom 3 but I know is unrealistic to think this, TDM is unique and imo was initiated at the right time.

Thanks! Glad you didn't have any problems. The voice lines in question were those that I myself recorded, so no need to worry the pissing thug is still awful as ever! ^^

Thanks for that.

There are a few ways to cut the entity count. You can combine func_stats into a single entity, although you'll want them in a single leaf, otherwise the other leaf will render. (Sometimes you want to do that on purpose.) The other trick was you can use the SEED system to re-render the same object as many times as you like, good for things like grass and rocks and wildflowers, although if you're clever you could use it more generally. But the point is all of those objects will count as just one entity. I'd be nice to bump up the count though if possible. It's just on the edges where a mapper can feel the limit if they're working on something big enough.

For what it's worth Bienie, I didn't get any game-breaking bugs and didn't have to noclip to get into the secret room like a lot of others. Guess I was lucky. Great mission too! Also your update suggests the removal of sub-par voice lines. I haven't checked but I hope "Now I'm gonna piss on ya" hasn't been removed otherwise there'll be hell to pay!

I just want to say that while I also like soft shadows, I still stick with stencil shadows for multiple reasons: (1) it's still the fastest shadow implementation in the engine, (2) it's the most mature and has the least rendering issues of the shadow implementations, generally speaking, and (3) the look of the shadows reminds me of Doom 3 which I still look on fondly, plus it's unique looking and novel since no-one else uses them anymore. Still progress and all that. I'll probably transition to shadow maps once it becomes the default and stencils are deprecated/removed.

Just who I was waiting for to log in. Knew you’d have the answer, thanks. Will that number go up with 2.08, anybody know?

8192, to be precise. 1/8th of the former Thief Deadly Shadows limit, although we don't have to worry about managing that stuff too much. Only what's spawned is what counts.

FWIW my Lenovo has a preinstalled app that can soft-limit charge at 70%. I don't use it. I buy new stuff before old breaks.

Mappers could replace the run animation with the old animation if they want the slow run.

Horace is the free game in the Epic Store this week, which seems like a very interesting platformer that I'll certainly try myself. Positive Steam review "If you've ever played Jet Set Willy, then this is sort of like that - in that it has a mansion inexplicably filled with conveyor belts, electrified barbed wire, and self-animated garden shears - but it's also so much more. A massive world to explore (outside the mansion), a fantastic story, mini-games, and a ton of other surprises, this was absolutely my game of the year for 2019. I don't usually enjoy platformers where I die over 1000 times (I know, the game keeps count!) but I played this one to the end of the story, and then some more for the additional quest, then some more for a few achievements, simply because I was having so much fun that I didn't want it to be over." Negative Steam review "The story is... fine. Honestly, it carried the game for me and kept me playing for as long as I did. Unfortunately, the gameplay gets a bit tedious and the game felt like it was dragging on by hour 5. If you can overlook mediocre gameplay for a decently crafted story, you might like this game." https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/horace/home

@ demagogue Thank you, that's all very good advice. I often look for these types of "events" in movies and books that I see and read. I try to steer away from taking things away from other people's maps because I don't want to be accused of stealing plus, I want to keep my events/maps as original as possible. But I understand your point, taking inspiration from other people's work seems permissible as long as it's only inspiration. Oddly enough, I've gotten quite a few ideas from watching old cartoons like Thundercats and even Tom and Jerry. My search continues...

Pay a lady of negotiable virtue to go & chat up a guard If there are two guards, have the 2nd one either get jealous & butt in or be a mate/be embarrassed & give them some space While they are distracted rob 'em blind or Pay LoNV as before, then go find the NPC's wife/girlfriend have them go & have an argument with LoNV, guards gather to watch, rob blind as before

@STRUNK Thank you for suggestions, these are great!

@Jetrell Setting fire to something attracts npc's/guards attention and gives you an opertunity to enter an area.

@Jetrell Just a thought. Have npc's/guards get in a fight by throwing things at them so they knock eachother out? Two grumpy guards already having an argument, and when you throw something (applecore, empty bottle, horsedung) from the direction of one of the npc's/guards, they'll get in a fight, and you can steal whatever they were guarding ...

Looking at the code, used_by_inv_id spawnarg is not read anywhere. I guess that note on wiki is a king of feature request. UPDATE: I don't see inv_id either.

This was a great mission, shooting way past what I considered reasonable for a "speedbuild"! If I had to choose, I'd say my favourite aspect is how it captures the same feeling as the great Thief 2 FMs: always another area or secret to find; being able to sympathise with inhabitants in their little sidestories; and how it doesn't take itself too seriously. What I also liked was how cold it felt. When you said it'd be a wholesome seasonal mission I was expecting something fuzzy warm like Thief's Holiday, but the street lanterns with their chill lights and the frozen breaths conveyed the exact opposite. Needless to say I enjoyed getting indoors to a well-stoked fireplace wherever I found one. Lastly, that "bag" was fantastic: both the idea and the execution, and I quite enjoyed climbing all over those good-looking custom assets (maybe here'd be a good place to ask if you'd offer your custom assets to other mappers?). Well then, many thanks to you both for this Christmas surprise, and I'd sure welcome more such cooperative projects!

Author note: A couple of weeks ago Kingsal & myself set ourselves a challenge, to see if we could make a small wholesome winter themed Dark Mod mission. And if we could do it as a speed build in two weeks. The final result was Snowed Inn. Enjoy and Merry Christmas! Thank you to our beta testers Epifire & Skacky. Thank you to Moonbo for his briefing video script revision. NEW UPDATE AVAILABLE 1.1 Version 1.1 Mega Mirror Version 1.1 also available via the in-game downloader File Size: 379 mb

The other day I was super impressed with Reman's creation of a Thief-themed Minecraft mod. Today I stumbled on this Harry Potter mod which is equally impressive, though as far as I know still not available yet.

Sorry I can only manage to get two decent screens per post. Really enjoyed toying with the shadows from statues and placing blood decals.

Sundered is the free game on the Epic store this week. Which is described as a hand-drawn metroidvania. https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/sundered-eldritch-edition/home Positive review on Steam If i could give this a neutral rating i would. The game is fun at times but for the most part its a very forgettable game. The story was boring and the game never tries to make it interesting. The combat is a lot of fun but can get really frustrating. You will most likely die many times but you will get better as you continue. The art work is amazing but the areas are very boring a lackluster. I feel there are many pros and cons to this game but all i can say that if you enjoy a difficult game, fun combat and metroidvania type game than this is a good choice. Negative review on Steam Gameplay loop consists of traveling through rooms filled with 20+ of the same 2 enemies in a 1 button game with no mid air evade. The skill tree is cool but the gameplay loop throws annoying amounts of enemies at you to give you the currency required to make skill tree progression. Boring and tedious, filling the room with 20+ enemies doesn't make something challenging.

Thanks for your feedback. Yes I will look into the chest mechanisms as well as they are a bit unstable.

Good to know! And yeah the player is not meant to get over the gate that way, we'll have to file that down for a bug fix in the next release. Thanks!

Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed the mission and found the challenge level enjoyable. Ghosting CoS1 is indeed tough, though it is possible to supreme ghost it (no first alerts, no extinguishing lights). I hope you will get even more enjoyment out of replaying and going for side missions and challenges! Expert level is mostly meant for replayability or those who like punishing difficulty, as are the optional challenges. It does seem like quite a few people have run into that pesky lever bug now, even though my testers or I have never been able to reproduce it. I suspect it's not easily fixed, but I think I might just remake the mechanism to remove that bug. There are a couple more "quality of life" fixes I've been meaning to add anyway. I guess I will take a break from mapping CoS 3 to take care of it, should only be a few days work.

Thanks for playing everyone! If folks downloaded 1.0 and haven't started the mission. Please uninstall the mission completely and re-download it to get the new 1.1 version.

Yes there is one gas arrow in the level.

Today Shadow Tacticts Blades of the Shogun is the 24hr free game in the Epic Store. This is a stealth game in the style of Commandos and one that I personally enjoyed a lot. The level design is great and it can be a challenge to do everything stealthy, which is kinda necessary because of the sheer amount of enemies. Once you master the mechanics it can be a little bit easy sometimes, but it's still difficult enough to give you satisfaction upon completion, especially in the later levels and if you want to be a complete ghost. https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/shadow-tactics/home

I've created a walking flame-bearer skeleton as a security device for crypts or mage towers. The held brazier is part of the md5mesh, and the mapper binds a flame to it. The skeleton is a functioning AI, but he can't attack or let go of the brazier, so if alerted, he will search for and track the player, but won't be able to do damage. He works best when combined with other AI for that reason. You can set them to a neutral team to the player if you don't want them to react, and I've included a static model as well if you don't want any AI functions. The only thing about the current implementation I don't like is that the flame stays burning if you kill them...it would be nice to have it go out like a dropped torch. Probably just requires a script, so if anyone feels inclined to add that, feel free.

Epic is giving away a free game every day during the holidays. Each give away is just available for 24 hours. As the time frame is so short it wouldn't really make sense to post about every game.

Space Engine is amazing. I cruise in that all the time, but I wouldn't really call it a game. It's just a pure space travel sim. My favorite game in this genre is called Empyrion - Galactic Survival, where you just start on some alien planet and first just have to survive, then start building tech, work your way up to building a ship, and then exploring other planets. It's still wonky, but it's better than No Man's Land & Space Engineers IMO, the other contenders. Well if you like pretty simple gameplay, nice stylized visuals, and don't mind the game getting repetitive, you just jump to a planet, do the thing, then off to the next one, you just like the Zen flow of it or whatever, that's No Man's Land. If you like designing complicated machinery, basically Minecraft's Buildcraft in space, but there's really no interaction with the universe outside of that, that's Space Engineers. And if you like an open universe with lots of variety and interaction with the worlds, lots to do over a long and hard-won progression, some cool story, and you still get to build stuff (just not as complicated as SE), that's Empyrion. And now there's this, Outer Wilds. I really don't know where to place it in comparison to those others, so any opinions on that would be interesting to me.

that 20 hours long for shadow of the tomb raider is probably people rushing through to be the first to finish, if you take your time and look at all detail it be more like 35 - 40 hours.

Who would pay for the rent anyway, when he steals anything else. In Thief 3, you could even steal from the landlord, and he doesn't seem exactly on the right side of the law either, considering he got some money from an illegal business (which you could steal too...). Not sure what kind of business that was though, but was something shady.

The rent is too damn high.

in t2 it could be that basso was his landlord, and after the rescue at the start of that, basso would give garrett free rent for an extended period of time.

Yeah I could never figure that one out when I was playing. Always thought if you could steal that kind of money the least you could do is not bring the attention of the watch by minding your rent. Speaking from Garret's view anyway. I'd steal everything else but if I had to pay rent somewhere I'd at least keep that one spot of my life legitimate to keep concealment. Interesting topic nonetheless.