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  1. "...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm proud to release my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short, 30-45 minute mission in which you are the getaway driver in a team of three small-time thieves. You and your associates were fortunate enough to overhear rumors of a famously wealthy and frail old man, but things change when your cohorts do not return from what is supposed to be their easiest and most lucrative job. Now it's up to you to brave the old man's house and find your associates. Download: The in-game mission downloader TDM Website's Mission Page Dropbox Special Thanks: The kind beta testers: Cambridge Spy, stgatilov, xlm, wesp5, nbohr1more, and Dragofer. peter_spy and Dragofer for answering my endless barrage of editor questions while learning DR. The TDM Discord for their warm welcome. Ending stinger courtesy of Zapsplat. Content Warnings: Enjoy!
    7 points
  2. @snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.
    6 points
  3. Epic Games Store time, because it's Deus Ex: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/deus-ex-mankind-divided-4c6370 https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/the-bridge
    4 points
  4. Yes, I think I agree. Fifteen years ago TDM was brand new. Nobody had a firm idea of its future direction. People just made the levels they wanted and had a blast. I think we should do that again. Hence, I humbly submit Proposal 5 Proposal 5) No expectations, restrictions, set theme, or requirements. Anything goes! Make a mission, any mission you want! Be as creative as you like, or stick to tried-and-true formulas if you prefer. Make a huge sprawling masterpiece if you're up for it, or a little bite-sized gem if that's more your style. Just put something out there.
    4 points
  5. I love the idea of a 15th Anniversay contest, but I think there should be fewer restrictions on what type of mission can be made so that more mappers would be encouraged to join. Fewer restrictions on what kind of mission can be made for the contest would hopefully open up more room for creativity, and maybe we'll even get some weird, unconventional missions that break the status quo. I, for one, don't really have a desire to do the "connections" theme again. It was fun doing it last time, but if I were to participate in a new contest I'd like to do something different. And holding a contest for the third "Official" campaign mission is an interesting idea, but if a contest like that is to be done, I think that should be its own dedicated contest not tied to an anniversary contest.
    4 points
  6. Happy Necrobirthday to Thief 2014 (NOT *4* )
    3 points
  7. I thought it would be convenient to collect in one place a list of all mods\addons\improvements created by the community for TDM. After surfing the entire forum I collected the following list of mods, and I present to you their list below. I will be glad if you correct me and provide any other links to mods that I may have missed. Graphic mods Fresnel Mod (MoDB link) Flame Glare Mod (MoDB link) ModPacks Unofficial Patch (MoDB link) TDM Modpack (MoDB link) (with the possibility of separate installation) Gameplay mods Augmentation Mod Wearable disguises Player Lamp (beta) Adjust player speed with mouse wheel Stealth Statistics Tool & Loot Stealth Stat (MoDB link) Textures TDM Texture Mod Small UI tweaks Reflections to all materials containing specular maps Sounds New Footstep sounds Collection of adjusted sounds by Anton Thiefier Sounds Blackjack Draw/Sheath SFX (MoDB link)
    3 points
  8. I haven't played the mission yet, so, I can't comment on it. Regarding the criticism: I think it should also be allowed to note some things you saw as points of criticism. Actually, IMO, negative criticism is better than positive, because it points out what you maybe didn't think through thoroughly, or you simply didn't see when you created the mission on your own. I'm aware that there is a lot of work involved, and people do it in their spare time for their own or other people's pleasure. But, that really shouldn't be a reason to praise everything to the skies. Actually, I've seen my fair share of average missions which have been totally overrated. Again, that shouldn't knock anynone's work, and, I have no idea how this mission is. Just wanted to point out that noting negative things shouldn't be taken as discouraging, but rather the opposite. I've seen some mission authors for Dark Mod going from average to absolutely fantastic missions, because they learned what it takes to make good missions. It's an art, and obviously takes time to perfect.
    3 points
  9. Well then, it's been about a week since I released my first FM and I must say that I was very pleasantly surprised by its reception. I had expected half as much interest in my short little FM as I received and even less when it came to positive feedback, but I am glad that the aspects of my mission that I put the most heart into were often the most appreciated. It was also delightful to read plenty of honest criticism and helpful feedback, as I've already been given plenty of useful pointers on improving my brushwork, level design, and gameplay difficulty. I've gotten back into the groove of chipping away at my reading and game list, as well as the endless FM catalogue here, but I may very well try my hand at the 15th anniversary contest should it materialize. That is assuming my eyes are ready for a few more months of Dark Radiant's bright interface while burning the midnight oil, of course!
    2 points
  10. The Numbers don't lie. It has been 15 years since the release of TDM 1.0 in 2009. I think we should consider a contest to celebrate this. Further, the contest goal should be with the intention of motivating the completion of a campaign that can be deemed official. Here are some possible ways forward: Proposal 1: Middle mission(s) Authors are asked to create a mission that expands the story between "A New Job" and "Tears of St Lucia". This can involve escaping the heavily guarded city perimeter, stowing away on a ship or caravan, attempting to recruit a partner for St Lucia and failing, getting caught by Builders before arriving and having to escape their compound, getting lost in haunted woods on the way there, etc. Any interesting way that the connection between the two official missions can be expanded. Points are awarded for making explicit references to Corbin, St Lucia, and any story elements in the two official missions. If the resultant mission is of high enough quality, it can possibly be made into an official mission. If we get a number of excellent submissions and they do not cause logical inconsistencies, we might even be able to add two or more to the official list. Proposal 2: Intellectual Property distinct approximation of TDS missions Over the years, many have asked that we recreate Thief 1 \ 2 in this engine. Obviously we cannot do this due to copyright law but we could create similar missions and stories that approximate the Thief 1 or 2 designs. That said, I think that most of our audience has played these missions to death so it may be underwhelming to see them arrive in approximate form anyway. What might be better would be to develop a similar story to TDS and make missions that resemble what T1 \ T2 players were dreaming would arrive when TDS was announced and the first screen-shots were shown in gaming magazines. So take any TDS mission you like, examine the story arc and wildly re-interpret something similar but on a much grander scale. Since it's possible that two or more contestants will choose the same mission to re-interpret, we have a slot system were authors need to claim their preferred mission and if it is taken then they must select another one or lose some story points. The slots represent a sketch of what the mission author might try to do rather than a blueprint. If authors can come up with a mission that has almost no resemblance to any TDS mission but would make for a compelling story development in a similar story arc then that can be claimed as an alternative to a slot. Proposal 3: Same as proposal 2 but we stick with Thief 1 rather than TDS. Wildly re-interpret T1 based on what you may have dreamed of when reading the gaming magazines or playing the demo. Slots system to prevent duplicate submissions. Maybe with either proposals 3 and 4, we still require the use of Corbin as the protagonist and a connective enough story that they could also be adapted as middle missions for the official campaign if the team agrees on it. Proposal 4: Another "Connections" Contest. We just allow authors to connect any two missions with each other or expand the story of an existing series or single mission. So those are my thoughts. I'll leave it to players and mission authors to suggest other proposals and if we have some sort of consensus about the most popular proposals then we will make a poll. Realistically between now and October we may not be able to hold a contest with any strict guidelines ( and tricky issues with maintaining a distance to Thief IP ) so proposal 4 may still be the easiest option.
    2 points
  11. I have updated the thread with poll options. Please vote I even though I have given-up on the connections part of this, it might be nice if authors used Corbin as the protagonist to at least pay homage to the included missions.
    2 points
  12. Yes, I've been working with a mapper who ardently adheres to the principle that only moonfacing windows should cast moonrays indoors (so about 1/4 to 1/2 of all windows), even though this is a powerful tool for creating an atmosphere and for maintaining some gameplay challenge. I found that this approach often ended in scenes that had only dim and uniform ambient_world lighting, which meant players couldn't really appreciate many of the details. Something I've seen in things like Dishonored is the use of sourceless lights to add highlights to scenes that otherwise contain no lit lights. That could be an especially viable approach in a mission like this which has a haunted theme.
    2 points
  13. So, I just retextured the caulk brushes to shadowcaulk and this seems to be working fine. Suitable fix??? However, I did find another light leak right next to this one:
    2 points
  14. Excellent FM Ansome! It's a really tense one that's for sure. High quality alround. Worked brilliantly with the recent new Darkmod and my framerate was hitting max fps @ 144 with my gfx card and processor barely getting warm. I could not wait to get the hell out of there Thanks for all your hard work and to all those who helped you. I hope you make another one - bigger, creepier
    2 points
  15. Weird, maybe a bad file on the server. Try this instead. https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads/the-dark-mod-212-full
    2 points
  16. Great mission. I love the readables. Everytime I came across "face too symmetrical" I think off dr. Steinman from Bioshock.
    2 points
  17. You're too kind! I don't think I've created something on par with what some of the veteran creators have put out just yet, but I'm very happy about how well it's been received. It's been especially nice reading messages sent to me about the lighting and sound design inside the house, as I spent a long time tweaking it and was afraid others wouldn't appreciate those tiny details. I'll certainly be back again to release another mission in the future as you've all been very welcoming, especially the dev team!
    2 points
  18. I'll try to get more of these added to the wiki tonight unless someone beats me to it: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Add-ons
    2 points
  19. For proposal #1, I imagine making a mission fitting seamlessly between the two stock missions in TDM would be a tricky endeavor, truth be told. The first mission is a small tavern robbery and the second is a modestly sized church break-in with a very reasonable jump in difficulty—fitting a mission snugly in between these two in terms of difficulty and scale is a high bar to reach. A contest to make a sequel to "Tears of St. Lucia" sounds more reasonable and would probably flow better for someone playing all three for the first time. I'd probably avoid doing something TDS related when a similar contest that allows Dark Mod entries is already ongoing, but proposal #3 sounds fun if we're given enough freedom to wildly reinterpret a Thief 1 mission. I'm somewhat mixed on the slot system as it really comes down to whether or not you want a full campaign with no repeats out of this contest. I personally wouldn't mind playing 2-3 different interpretations of something like the Bonehoard, it's bound to be interesting seeing what elements of a mission FM authors focus on.
    2 points
  20. So yeah it's indeed a lot of work, but it's cool to get it working at least (mission The Hare in the Snare):
    2 points
  21. I'd put in a vote for Proposal 4. I really enjoyed the "connections" contest. Proposal 1 as a close runner up, though I'd expand that to allow for a sequel or sequels to Lucia.
    2 points
  22. Find attached to this post v0.5 of the Player Lamp, updated to 2.12 standards. The Lamp can run in parallel with other mods Updated tdm_player_thief.def from 2.12 Download the pk4 and place it in your TDM folder. Launch a mission and cycle through the weapons. Nothing else and nothing more. Enjoy! z_handheld_lamp_v0.5.pk4
    2 points
  23. You know what would be neat? If I could sort mission list. Not Download Mission list (it is sorted) Sort by size, by date completed, sort by author, grouped by author... by Plot. I mean... I look at my list right now, there are check marks, going going going and there is a break, because the mission I clicked said "Play this one first" but despite being "technically" connected by the same story, they're not in order on the list. Not labeled as "Nib the Nip" "Nib the Big Nip 2: Electric Avenue" "Big Nib of Nip 3: Here is a little smut for you and me" and so on. Yes, it's because of individual names, which is great mind you, but I'd like to see in which order story lines should be played. If there is an overarching plot, I mean.
    1 point
  24. Finished this up yesterday and for the most part, found it enjoyable. The puzzles weren't too hard as your clues were good for them. Thank you for all your hard work and I look forward to more missions from you.
    1 point
  25. I felt like an absolute dunce, when I started the mission for the first time... Because, the note confused me. I thought that I was supposed to complete the task on the note and then return to this door, it will be open I'll talk to an NPC or something and will progress further. So I spent several minutes looking for a door outside, and finding none. I thought - maybe I need to use the window, it's partially open, I bet I can squeeze through it. So I did, and fell out of the map, whereupon I saw the rest of the map and realized that the note was slipped under MY front door. Had to restart =D I enjoyed the mission, but I also missed the painting. I should've tried "the Number" right away. The sneaky boi was great, I wish we had encounters like that on some occasion. It's such a novelty IMO. I wasn't attempting the Ghost so eventually I was fed up with this guard and used my gas arrow, then... this happened. I enjoyed the final stretch, but my immersion was broken a little, because the area where we get a new mission had a missing wall and a floating tree, for some reason. Great map, and mission. PS: I realize that they probably just drop them, but taking first mission into the account, I can't help but think that people eat fingers with rings on them.
    1 point
  26. Go ahead and fix them if you want. The purpose of the wiki was to attempt to resolve as many leaks as possible prior to 2.12. If a map contained too many leaks, there is a map-wide workaround that reverts to 2.11 mode at the cost of reverting to 2.11 performance. It's up to you if you want to clean-up the leaks and retain the optimizations or just use the easy-button and set the mission to 2.11 mode.
    1 point
  27. Any of you heard Age of Wonders 4's OST? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0TcoMGq4iA I love how after all these years, Michiel van den Bos still conserves his "Melodic" spirit.
    1 point
  28. Right now core count is printed by job system, and features are printed by SIMD processing system. From the implementation point, vectorization and multithreading are orthogonal...
    1 point
  29. I though something similar and suggested adding objectives to the Training Mission. That would help introduce some linearity into the mission and also suggest tasks to players, where the objectives are listed in order of increasing level of difficulty.
    1 point
  30. I can't wait to try this, Lovecraft's works are one of my top favourites all time, so glad to know there's more than one author who is inspired by it. I never got the chance to read "The Terrible Old Man", but I did read "The Picture in the House". I have this good memory of playing Neverwinter Nights, somebody made a fantastic module about the work I just mentioned, "The Picture in the House", it's actually what inspired me to read it. Let's see how influential this mission will be!
    1 point
  31. TBF though, I've caught a lot of grief over at the Guild for my levels being on the difficult side. XD
    1 point
  32. There's a cool trick that is making what you have on your "hand", very small, or at lest smaller enough to not get out of the player collision mesh, so it can never reach a wall, the player collider prevents it. And then move the object very near the camera "lens" and it will look big and normal despite the small size, is a nice trick that I learned a few fps games use. But I don't think is the one idTech 4 uses... Unfortunately I don't recall what that trick/hack is anymore, I just remember something about the engine code having what idSoftware called "weapon hack", probably just looking at the engine code and searching for weapon hack, will give some results, thou like I said, right now, I don't recall how it is used.
    1 point
  33. I'd love some criticism, thank you! I'm very glad that you got super absorbed into this FM's atmosphere, I loved reading your theories about the story! Your criticism about the readables/story is entirely valid and highlights an element that is most often criticized about Lovecraft's work: you rarely get straight answers or a clear picture of the greater threat. I encourage you to read the original "The Terrible Old Man" (all of H.P. Lovecraft's works are in the public domain and readable online), as you'll get an idea of how short and vague the source material was as well as the careful moves I had to make to not show my hand too much when constructing the narrative. Whether or not I kept in line with Lovecraft's principles is for others to judge, but I'm glad your imagination went wild with this FM! Your curiosity regarding what the bottles are, what the purpose of the little statuettes is, and immersion into the story from what little breadcrumbs I planted gave me a smile from ear to ear. Thanks, Bergante!
    1 point
  34. Yeah - I totaly agree ! my expectation have realy been unfair - but as i said - I got into this mood and i think this is worth a praise your right " Spring Cleaning " is much more the mission to compare them
    1 point
  35. Hi Ansome What a nice surprise kopfrkingl had just now told what could have been my statement . (but mine has some Criticism) I´m not a modder myself and it seems your first mission , and I can feel with how much work / intention / ambition and love you´ve finished this one !!! Atmosphere and design are wonderful, only the house is a bit tubular and I am happy you offered “The terrible old man” to us Please : keep on going ! Like somebody once said : yes you can ! Sometimes - with a little help from your friends (here are plenty around) I hope you´re ready and fine with/for some Criticism i´ll put it in spoilers - so you don´t need to read it every time you come up
    1 point
  36. Yes, the stim/response system allows for this kind of thing. Easy enough to emit a custom stim around the lantern and put a response on all photophobic AIs to that stim. The response script would check whether the photophobic AI is within the lightbeam, then call a flee function on it. The main problem is that the flee function is unreliable if the AI is already busy with something else.
    1 point
  37. This is a great first mission and a neat adaptation of Lovecraft's short story. I especially loved the start - the streets after dark, the door that slams shut as you approach, and the house's silhouette against the starry sky as you walk up the road. The atmosphere was so thick one could practically cut it! Once inside the house, I kept expecting the inevitable, and my enjoyment of finding loot was matched by my paranoid dread of encountering the terrible old man. The end was not unexpected but definitely well done.
    1 point
  38. Wiki is updated
    1 point
  39. Yes this is the trajectory. By the way, have you tried the "No Honor Among Thieves" campaign?
    1 point
  40. Okay, so I managed to beat all four of the previously-released Hidden Hands missions in preparation for this upcoming campaign, so now I'm ready to tackle this bitch once the thread's up.
    1 point
  41. Here's my first FM. A small and easy mission, inspired by Thief's Den and The Bakery Job, where you must find and steal a cook's recipe book in order to save a friend from going out of business. Download: Mediafire (sk_cooks.pk4) TDM Website's Mission Page The in-game mission downloader Thanks to: The people who helped me get this far, both in the forums and on Discord. The beta testers: MirceaKitsune, Mat99, Baal, wesp5, Cambridge Spy, jaxa, grodenglaive, Acolytesix ( Per the author in the beta testing thread. ) Skaruts has given permission to the TDM Team to add Subtitles or Localization Strings to this mission. (No EFX Reverb.) If anyone from the Community or TDM team wishes to create these we will gladly test them and update the mission database.
    1 point
  42. We are proud to announce the release of: The Dark Mod 2.12 ! The 2.12 development cycle introduced many large code overhaul projects. Most of these were to lay the groundwork for future fixes and optimizations. The final release is yet another leap in performance over the already impressive 2.10 and 2.11 releases. A full changelog can be viewed here, but some highlights include: The Dark Mod 2.12 is a major step forward for mission designers! The culling system has been extensively overhauled to ensure that your CPU and GPU are not wasting resources rendering unseen geometry, lights, and shadows. Some of our best map optimization experts have achieved similar performance gains to what this new culling system does but it is a rare skill and we have even managed to improve performance on missions that were generally regarded as “well optimized”. Mission authors both new and old can follow standard mapping practices with no need to dive deep into sophisticated optimization techniques even for some pretty challenging scenarios such as wide open areas and long views. Players will immediately notice many missions that have made their system struggle with FPS now may be running much more smoothly! Smoother controls for players! Also during the 2.12 development cycle, work has been done to make controls more seamless and accessible. Frob can now use hold or click actions to use items. Once you get used to the mechanic, it will be hard to go back to using a separate “use key”. Mantling is now smoother, faster, and less prone to cause the player to clip through geometry. Leaning is now more subtle and less prone to cause motion sickness. To reduce the tedium of shuffling knocked out AI around to search for loot, you can now configure TDM to automatically loot any frobbed AI. A special thanks must go out to community member Geep! Over the course of 2.12 development, Geep has created subtitles for nearly all AI barks along with developing testing tools and procedures for this gargantuan task! You can see these changes in action by changing the Subtitles setting to “On” ( rather than “Story” ) on the Audio settings page. Geep also provided substantial feedback for our GUI and subtitle design process and edited font data to improve text quality overall. Datiswous has complimented the massive work by Geep to create AI bark subtitles by creating mission story subtitles for a large number of missions. Thank you! Turrets are now natively supported in The Dark Mod and can be paired with Security Cameras! Finally, the nasty 2.11 bug that caused AI to allow arrows to pass through them at certain angles was fixed by Joebarnin! Your assassin style play-throughs should be far less frustrating. See also, our 2.12 Feature discussions: To UPDATE, simply run the tdm_installer.exe file in your darkmod folder. Note that tdm_update.exe is no longer supported, but you can download the new installer from the Downloads page if you don’t have it yet. Please be aware that old saved games will not be compatible with 2.12, so finish any missions you might be in the middle of first! Also, some missions created prior to 2.12 may need to be updated so they will be playable in 2.12. Use the in-game mission downloader to check for updates.
    1 point
  43. But soon you will want to change all the pipes in your mission...
    1 point
  44. With TDM 2.12, the credits showed the cursor during the credits along with some warnings printed to the console. Here's a fixed "credits.gui" file for Accountants 2 (version 3): https://gist.github.com/daftmugi/f180850af5612eed149d93b8fa3c56c5 Check the "Revisions" tab on the GitHub gist to see what changed. In short, it uses "nocursor" instead of "showCursor", and it fixes the number of args passed to "transition".
    1 point
  45. First some people come saying the license of TDM is too free and blocks using TDM in commercial projects. Then other people come and say the license is not free enough (seriously, I wonder why). Anyway, the license will not change.
    1 point
  46. Sounds pretty good, and I'm looking forward to it. Looks like a taffing good time, tbh. Might I suggest a name change, though? DOOM 3 was DOOM³. The Dark Mod is no longer a mod, so how about The Dark³ (TD³)?
    1 point
  47. maybe eventually we'll get rid of that old 1998 bug, that strange gem flashing in the bottom part of the HUD......completely ruining the immersion! :v
    1 point
  48. This was a very long development period! Phew! I’d like to thank Bikerdude for doing all the beta testing so we didn’t need to have a long beta testing thread.
    1 point
  49. Oh Mighty Builder, Please carve Graymans name in your anvil, so his name and actions will always be remembered. During your builds and constructions.
    1 point
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