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A review of the game from a YouTube channel I follow :

“Banking Holiday Speed Build Contest”

And get the F off Vista, even Windows 7 has much better support for more advanced video technologies. You should be able to get a free version of Windows 10 with that product key.

Is there any renewed interest in a mission contest? Now that I've created the poll, I am kinda partial to a Thanksgiving contest since it straddles the fall \ winter seasons ( my favor TDM seasons ).

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When somebody has been repeatedly told that they are not running a supported configuration, openly admits that they have perfectly functional other ways to play the mod, but repeatedly spams the same demands for support again and again, it is clear they are acting in bad faith. He probably doesn't even care about actually playing the game in a VM, he just wants to watch the support monkeys dance in his pointless little circus. I suggest they stop indulging his wishes.

So I'm getting into mapping, and naturally I gravitated right towards a couple Youtube people. I firstly watched the tutorials from Nico Autia cause those were the first I found, and those ended up teaching me some of the more basic useful controls in advance. But I encountered a problem, and went to look for other tutorials to check their approach, and I was gradually lead to Springheel's much more indepth workshop series. Springheel starting with modules and prefabs for his rooms has definitely been useful for teaching me how to USE those features - I have a tester map I've been using his stuff in - but for actual map-making, I don't rather like the prefab and modules approach to start with. On my actual first map I'm trying to work with, I've been using the idea of VERY roughly outlining the level layout with sloppy brushwork, to get a feel for where everything should go and how the place should flow. Ideally, I've set myself up with very primitive versions of what the level should look like, when I begin decorating it and making it LOOK nice and functional later. But really, I'm a new guy. So I just want to actually ask since I'm going kind of against the primo tutorial: Is this a good way to be mapping? Pictures in link. https://imgur.com/a/9DC5u8H

Baby steps. Be grateful this appears to be a regular installation and not a virtual machine.

yeah, not really, but several cultures do have harvest festivals, so it can still be around that same theme. Plus I'm tickled by the idea of an FM where Corbin has to steal a frozen turkey for his family dinner because the butcher was sold out

As I recall, this was a known issue with AMD drivers and is fixed in Dev Build dev16599-10071 and newer.

Oh boy this still going. I don't think anyone's done sufficient testing of The Dark Mod in a VM because why would you - Virtual Machines are generally not well built for running anything but 2D games and basic 3D ones. Just run the damn thing on the host machine and be happy I say. Besides, you never actually answered the major question multiple people have asked so far: "Why do you need to run it in a VM?" Maybe you have a valid reason for wanting to do so, but given it's such a exotic requirement it's gonna take extra effort to find a solution. If you keep refusing to answer it then why should anyone put their free time and effort to help? Not working in good faith then.

@madtafferyou can see a bunch of permutations of the speed build concept across T1/T2/TDM as well as the resulting missions over in ThiefGuild’s contest browser: https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/?works=lists&work_lists=contests

Here is an index of video's: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=DarkRadiant_Video_Tutorials , in case you need more. I had this idea as well. I have not made anything yet. Nice to see others agree with it as well. I thought some aspects of this mapping guide of Unvanquished are interesting: Source: https://wiki.unvanquished.net/wiki/Tutorials/Mapping_guide

Can't speak for the others, but I start all new areas (and often whole maps) exactly how you describe: brush it out, add portals, add lights and add tentative ai with level comprising routes in order to see whether a. there are problems with AI navigation in general and b. if it is possible to sneak around AI in critical areas. If you want to create your own modules from brushes, then you should check Sotha's tutorial.

agreed. the key is just keeping em small, I think. Lord knows Written in Stone was wayyyy larger than we wanted it to be

You aren't answering the questions people are asking. No-one has time to talk to a brick wall anymore, sorry.

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.

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.

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.

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hehe yeah the name is a bit confusing TDM != the dark mod but i forgot that xD. the TDM based gcc compiler is a version of gcc that supports throwing exceptions across dll boundaries without linking to the shared gcc runtimes, it was originally based on a very old patch from mingw.org back when mingw gcc could not even build the shared runtimes so exceptions were broken without it. Later it was picked up by another dev who used it to create a version of gcc for those who did not want the gcc runtime dll's as dependencies of every windows program they created. Over the years some bugs crept up with newer version of gcc and he updated his code to support those but unfortunatly he was even worse at mutex locks than me xD so the new version caused numerous bugs. I been trying for some time to get it corrected so that it would be in a useable state again. i was just hoping that maybe someone here could maybe spot more goofups so i can get them fixed before it makes it way into the msys2 packages.

A rare artifact, the Builder's Chalice, is available for the taking. Looks pretty straightforward, but looks can be deceiving... Yes, another mission for 2022. I think this makes eight this year already; we had eight for all of 2021! Great work, everyone! This is a smallish mission. It does not have any spiders or undead. It is a puzzle-heavy mission, with a built-in hints system in case you get stuck. This mission contains a couple of small homages to Grayman. This mission requires TDM 2.10. It uses some 2.10 features (subtitles, secrets, volumetric lights). Note that the volumetric lights are used in a specific way, such that your "Shadows Implementation" can be either Maps or Stencils, the volumetric lights will work either way. Version 2 of the mission is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pbz6spmqpo4vrg4/byanyothernameV2.pk4?dl=1 This fixes the "Open Doors on Unlock" problem. Have fun! Special thanks to JackFarmer, who created some wonderful and appropriate ambient sounds. He also did some Alpha testing to catch some early mistakes. Also thanks to the Beta testers, who struggled with some frustratingly-hard (or impossible) early variations: Cambridge Spy, Acolytesix, wesp5, datiswous, Bienie, Shadow Thanks to Chloe for some great voice work. I made plentiful use of sounds from freesound.org: https://freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/75194/ https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/482781/ https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/403005/ https://freesound.org/people/rhodesmas/sounds/322930/ https://freesound.org/people/fisch12345/sounds/325112/ https://freesound.org/people/BockelSound/sounds/489507/ https://freesound.org/people/ultradust/sounds/167747/ https://freesound.org/people/Crinkem/sounds/496328/ https://freesound.org/people/LucasDuff/sounds/467697/ https://freesound.org/people/RuidosoSoundFX/sounds/507161/ As always I've used some of Springheel's modules and Orbweaver's ambient sounds. And finally, huge thanks to the developers of The Dark Mod, especially 2.10, another milestone in this fantastic game. A few more screenshots

How about a "Public Holiday" theme - but a holiday that is celebrated in Bridgeport. It would be interesting to see different takes on what holidays might be celebrated there - and possibly weird traditions associated with them. Is a PH good for our protagonist (businesses closed, lax or drunk guards) or is it bad (revellers in the streets, commitments to friends or family)? This seems to me to make more sense that basing it on a RL public holiday that wouldn't be celebrated in Bridgeport anyway.

The best place to look would probably be creative commons online repositories, especially 3D scanned models from museums (which however require some processing to get down to a reasonable tri count for a game). Otherwise, Goldwell has a bear rug. A different approach could be to pose the werebeast in Blender and export it as a model.

A Halloween theme would be awesome but it's admittedly tight. You could do a three or five room contest and get a good number of entries that fast though.

Thanksgiving is not international enough I would think. But do correct me.

I suppose it might be enough, now a matter of me having spare time to look into it

hehe i wont i actually got a good deal on a 24 core threadripper for 196 dollars :O.

Hooray the scrollweel issue is gone!

Take the enemies design, they're really not so "scary" being Dusk an horror game. Quake Ogres are still nightmarish creatures (combat behaviour, visual "impression", etc.) no matter the low poly technical aspect. It's all about the design.

Done, https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6110

Looks like it's happening for me with 3.3.0 and 3.2.0.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a very, very good point. I hope it will get more discussion. Realistically, I don't think the most common human response to being ineffectually surprise bludgeoned or stabbed or shot by an invisible shadow man is going to be turning around and trying beat the crap out of him with your sword--irrespective of how well armed and armored you are. When facing an unknown threat, the safe response is always flight not fight... at least until you get an idea of what you're dealing with. For simulation verisimilitude then, the universal human-actor reaction to being attacked by an undetected player ought to be to run away. This would give the player an opportunity to effect their own escape or enact other contingencies without the automatic resort to save scumming, as you say. For guard actors it would make sense for them to revert to attack mode a few seconds later, although if one wanted to make the response more sophisticated there is a great deal of latitude. For instance when the player shoots an unaware sword guard with a bow it would probably make more sense for the guard to keep running. There is a high chance they will not be able to path back to the player, and will be at a big disadvantage when all they can do is throw rocks. However that calculus might change if they have a bunch of friends nearby... and so on. The point is, this could be a relatively low effort option to significantly deepen TDM's immersive simulation. There is a reason ghosting is the near-universally preferred style of play among expert Thief/TDM players. The reason is not that blackjacking and sword fighting are unreliable or clumsy, because it's actually been well demonstrated that in the hands of an expert they are quite the opposite. (See the meme-worthy video of AluminumHaste Errol Flynn-ing through an entire prison of guards.) Rather it's because violence degrades the engagement of the simulation rather than improving it. TDM's stealth gameplay is like a game of chess: a complex interplay of predicting opponent actions and developing your own hand of contingencies. Combat gameplay is more like tic-tac-toe: once you learn the trick, the outcome is literally determined from the moment the game is played. Making blackjacking more predictable with new animations or simulation logic would help make this handicap mechanic more accessible to newcomers, sure, but it doesn't change the real problem that knockouts are just the absolute dullest way of interacting with other actors that the game supports.

I think the context cue from the animation driving this thread addresses this aspect potentially well, especially if the legacy blackjack systems stay in place. I would be of the opinion the issue is really with the inconsistency or ambiguities in the core mechanic and that addressing this at the root by simplifying (if not outright aping the thief rules) is the best way to go, and is certainly at a minimum time well spent developing and testing. Not wishing to alter to core mechanics is also an understandable position, in that way I would find the context cue animation to at least be a promising improvement and helpful to players like myself who see the nuances as frustrating instead of engaging (kind of in the vein of the frob helper/bow aimer). To me the KO loop is predominantly about closing the gap and remaining undetected - adding this finicky positional layer has only ever added friction in my experience as a player. More or less I am just happy to see this being worked on and I look forward to testing when it makes it to a dev build!

It's a https server, hence it wasn't working. I don't have access to an http server it appears. Heck, I don't even know what difference the s at the end makes

@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.

Thanks!

Does it apply for the latest mission update (1.21)? I didn't installed 2.07 hotfix and use win7, don have that problem.

I can fully understand that! Please note this package is just my personal taste of how I would like it to sound. I tried to still remain a noticeable difference between AI and player footsteps and added some detail on especially the player sounds (like if you walk on wood there's more stomping and if you sneak on wood it is more the shrieking wooden boards you hear). You can test out the sounds in the Black Jack training room or compare them directly with the ones in the pk4 file, but as I said it is just an alternative to the currently used ones, so I guess it should somehow be... alternative. I put my hopes on this being fixed by a future natural support of EAX (or its equivalents), so I think we should stay curious on the following game updates.

That is some very fine work. Especially the tile sounds. I've always had issue with the tile sounds. One of the other things that has always bugged me, is if you're a master thief, you're going to wear soft shoes, that are very quiet, not leather soled shoes lol. Wish that was fixed.