Goldwell

The duality of man!

Inside the Silent Dagger you'll find a tip right here This note reads Deciphering the note "Skip the BS and tell me the code riddler!" Thank you very much! I did take a lot of inspiration from T2X as well as Dishonored and a few of DrK's incredible Thief 2 FM's.

Re: the Grayman shrine. I specifically didn't want to tie anything to that area. Originally there was loot and it was marked as a secret area, but I felt that was in poor taste. So it just became an area solely dedicated to just him. As for 1, that's hilarious 2. That was a decision I was conscious of. There's always a battle, especially in immersive sims of whether you force the player down a path or give them options. I treat it kind of like Dishonored how you can kill or not KO enemies while playing the game, but in the sequels the canon story is always the pacifist approach. Clara only interacts with him if you frob the body/corpse after you're done. In retrospect I probably should have added that narration line after the contract completes. Oh well!

I agree, it's important to give players control over whether they want headbobbing or not. I think that takes priority over any customizations that may exist in missions.

Thank you both for the kind words, glad you enjoyed it

Thank you for bringing it to my attention! I will mark that down as something to fix for the next version release.

Hey Xolvix! Yes there has been a long wait between act 2 and 3, longer than I would have preferred. But between personal events that have popped up and taken my time away from mapping and also big world issues, it has just extended that time even further. Work is being made though, in fact I actually just took a break from working on Act 3 to check the forums and saw your message. The wait should be over soon Re: your spoiler question

Taking a guess i'd say that was probably the stuff inside the safe then. Definitely need to have a look at that.

Re: I'm not sure what treasure you're referring to sorry. What gave you a hint that Lord Balcon had a big treasure? I haven't played this mission in many years and have forgotten a lot of the finer details haha Re: the bugs you found, those are quite interesting! When the mission was released there was an issue with that safe I believe, but the shadow bugs weren't there. That does appear to be a problem with running an old mission (I think this was a 2.03 mission) on 2.10. However I do plan to go through and update all of my older missions for 2.10 at some point, so i'll add those bugs to my todo list, thank you!

Thank you for the kind words! I am hopeful that the wait won't be too long

Congratulations @Wellingtoncrab Your mission is absolutely incredible, one of the most refined and well built city missions in the entirety of TDM (imo). The visual fidelity, style and gameplay flow is absolutely top notch and while I did enjoy every entry in this contest, I thought yours did stand out as the top of the bunch!

It already is obvious that my missions belong together by the fact that they say “by Goldwell” next to them.

Yes you're spot on! Dishonored was the reference point for the pickup animation/sound.

If the team wants to do that then the easiest way to do that would be asking whoever has the source files of the original intro video and then re-render it at a higher quality.

Thanks for leaving your feedback! Firstly with the mention of continuity. My missions since Shadows of Northdale Act 1 have very much strayed from the standard core of TDM. There are design and game choices in the core game which I personally am not a fan of, so for all of my missions I decided to flow a certain way adopting changes such as using Kingsal's arrow models and animations, to implementing Epifire's custom models and of course to my own tweaks and feel. I always set out to make missions that I personally want to play and prefer, now with that I completely understand it's not for everyone. Some people find my missions bad, some find them great, and some just okay. And that's completely fine, just the nature of games and mods. We are all entitled to enjoy or not enjoy whatever we want. I just make missions the way I like them and prefer them to be made, and among my missions I try to keep a strong sense of continuity among my design/game choices. If people dig it, sweet, if not, sweet! Now as for your other points: It was awesome doing a brand new protagonist. This was the first TDM mission with a female protagonist and it felt quite refreshing when writing dialogue and how she would interact with the world. There are about 60-80 custom player sounds I had to implement as well as narration lines of course. But to implement the player sounds I think you would need to do quite a lot of work to get them into the core mod. Firstly some of the sounds aren't the best pick for the action they're doing, good enough for my mission but not good enough for a core asset imo. Additionally there are some other unknown issues which need to be beta tested, such as one other poster pointed out of the guards using the same sigh vocal as the player which means sometimes they make a noise that is meant for Clara haha. So there would have to be some changes to the core vocal definitions to address that as well as what ever other issues come up. If someone wants to do that, they have my blessing but I don't have the time personally to do that. This is another Goldwell FM feature, one that I don't think would be appreciated if it was in the core. You'll have players ask "well why can't I pick up food anymore? I wanted to throw it to distract a guard". That animation was originally scripted by Obsttorte, and then optimized by Grayman. Complaining that sometimes objects fly through solids is not something i've ever experienced with the script, and it is a bit nitpicky and doesn't really matter or negatively impact the overall effectiveness of the animation, that's my personal opinion on that. As for it being added into the core game, because the script in its current form alters how frobability works it would need to be changed so as to not break previous missions. For example if you frob an object that is targeting another entity, the script breaks. Which is why all of my missions use a S&R system. You would have to either change the script to support that, or go through and retroactively change every mission that has such an action. It could be done, but it's a lot of work. This is a personal preference of mine and one that I actually saw in a few Thief 2 FMs. Having two lockpicks doesn't add anything of value, it just makes it more annoying having to switch back and forth. When the actual action of lockpicking remains the same, I figured okay lets just simplify this down to just having one lockpick. You still need to engage in our lock picking "minigame", so you still need to listen to the clicking and time it so that they click on the right time to get the door/chest open. So nothing has changed on a technical front. As for why would the lockpicking be different in this mission? Well again because I prefer the system of just having one set of lockpicks instead of a snake and triangle lockpick. Additionally I recieved very positive feedback during beta on that so I decided to keep it in. This doesn't feel like a big deal to me. If I had a full water arrow sitting in the basin of Lady Volta's bathroom for example, instead of just the arrow head people would complain "well why is there a full arrow in the basin?". I think that falls down to a matter of preference, because opening it up to the realism critique just opens a whole can of worms that neither side can win. And extends even beyond that, why can our thief carry so much? why can they hide in a shadow when being right infront of a guard? why can you fall from a great distance and not sprain your ankle? etc. There's a lot of choices you make whether to gamify something or make it realistic. Of course you can't go too silly, but I think having just an arrow head for the water arrows in area of waters is well within acceptable limits of being gamified. The player sees a source of water, they check to see if there are water arrows. I personally love and prefer the new sounds along with the loot animation, I feel the two go together great. But there is no right or wrong opinion on that, just opinions! I see what you mean! I definitely could have improved the new menu screen there. Fair point! Blasphemy! The sword is mightier than... the shadow? Thanks once again for playing and leaving your input