Goldwell

Alright we have plenty of testers now. So if any mods want to close this thread that would be appreciated as it's not necessary anymore. Thanks to all who posted here!

Sure thing, and that should do us! I also have Epifire and Kingsal who signed up to beta test, so in total that will put us at 5 testers which is a solid amount. I will get a build compiled and ready and might be able to get that out to you guys this weekend. If not it will be Monday or Tuesday next week (at the latest). Keep an eye on your personal messenger inbox, as i'll be conducting the testing via that.

Of course that's no problem! All i'm looking for are players to comment on the gameplay and flow of the mission, if any parts stood out as too hard or boring and if you spot any performance issues or bugs along the way to provide a screenshot of the area (so I can easily track it down).

Hey everyone, Shadows of Northdale Act 2 is ready to be tested. This is the sequel to Act 1 so I am looking for testers who have played that mission. Please respond to this thread if you are interested, we will begin testing early next week (probably monday or tuesday) and I will be sending out further details via personal message then.

Another thing Ill add to this conversation is that I feel that some people forget to just laugh it off. If I see someone spewing nonsense online I just laugh and think what a dickhead! And move on. Whats the point in being offended about what internet strangers say? If its not a personal attack it doesnt really effect you. Censoring opinions and wrapping yourself in bubble wrap is not only a boring way to live life, but you're going to miss out on a lot of interactions and knowledge. I have friends from all over the political and religious spectrum, some of us very strongly disagree in certain areas but we are able to communicate like adults and discuss different ideas and concepts. That doesnt poison the well of your thoughts, it just provides insight into how someone else is the way they are. If we all thought the same, life would be pretty damn boring wouldnt it?

The engine does support that. You can set health on each entity and then what model it has when it breaks. So you could have an indoor electric light that when struck with an arrow makes a glass breaking noise and then switches to a broken glass model. The stopping factor here is that most authors dont turn this on or use this feature much.

What about a blueprint or a parchment or something in the center? Because you have the gear in the background, and the hammer and spanner too which represent the guild so a blueprint/design sort of logo in the middle might cover the creation aspect of the guilds ethos. Either that or something like a moon crest or wolf or something just so its not blank in the middle. I think the rest of the design looks great around that. Its just nailing that center bit.

Its looking a lot better now, but Id change that middle icon to something else.

Looks good! I could see that translating well to a cloth banner logo. I guess a wooden sign would need to be a bit simpler in design though.

I wasn't around in those early days but I do remember seeing an image pertaining to the inventors guild once before on the wiki. This one:

These book covers are beautiful! I tried importing one of them as a skin for an existing readable model. Sadly it didn't turn out too well though, I matched the book texture upto the old one but it looks like the inside of the book model uses a middle part of the texture to fill it in. I built a book out of brushes and then converted to a model which doesn't look too bad imo The main difference is the texture on the inside of the model. Great find though!

One crucial difference is that both of those games you mentioned have larger teams behind them and they have funding too. Here we have a small collection of developers focused on other improvements to the engine and an even smaller handful of people who make missions. Its a nice idea, but its not practical for this community and mod.

Coming from the point of view as an FM creator I think ultimately this is a lot of work with a decent risk. On a creative level, being limited to recreating what someone else has already made would be boring. You would just have to open up Thief maps, pull those assets and then build the same way they did. Thats not very inspiring, its just monotonous work that would be really tedious. Then you carry with it the risk of alienating thief fans, some might find it cool, some might be pissed off, but it might attract the ire of square enix who only see the dark mod violating their intellectual property. And even if thats not the case, who has the lawyers to prove that point in court. Weve seen in the past AAA publishers are insanely over protective of their IP. With TDM we have managed to go entirely independent so they cant touch us. Following a project like this would open us up, even if you branched it out I cant help but think it might still cause problems. Im not saying it wouldnt be cool to see, just the effort behind it and the risk it carries isnt worth it. Especially when that author could use that time and energy to create new FMs that arent limited creatively.

I'm just going to make the lute player an undead immortal skeleton called Ralph who is eternally bound to play his lute in the tavern, the residents are used to him now so they just happily co-exist as long as the ale flows and the music plays. That's as good as solved for me!

I tried that however now he just sits there doing nothing. This is the def file I have for him anim play_lute_idle_sound models/md5/chars/guards/proguard/play_lute_idle.md5anim { no_random_headturning frame 1 call overrideLegs frame 2 sound alien01_loop } entityDef atdm:prop_playable_lute_soundplaying { "inherit" "atdm:moveable_lute01" "editor_displayFolder" "Props" "editor_usage" "Attaching this lute will activate playing behaviour." "model" "models/darkmod/musical/lute01_held.lwo" "name" "specialitem_lute" "frobable" "0" // don't frob until the AI drops it "is_mantleable" "0" "drop_when_ragdoll" "0" "drop_set_frobable" "0" "unbindOnalertIndex" "2" "replace_anim_idle_sit" "play_lute_idle_sound" "joint" "Hips" }

How did you do this exactly? I created a trigger_entityname on the floor under the lute then I added a name to the lute in the def file which was set on the trigger_entityname. However when the AI drops it nothing happens. Did you have a working example on hand by chance? or remember which mission it was in if it's been released?

Re: Default sound playing, it doesn't play any sound on my end. Looking at the def files it only mentions sounds for the bouncing of the object itself. I added an "s_shader" to a new definition which does work however when the AI is interrupted the sound continues playing as it's tied to the object existing and I can't find a way to force the object to despawn upon the AI dropping it. I do know that the props for winebottle and cards have sounds associated with it that are not in the def files. The bottle causes the AI to play a "tdm_bottle_slosh" sound when they take a drink but I have no idea how it was done because there is nothing in the def file mentioning it, so I assume that is just hardcoded into the game. So that leaves the last option of running a script, i'm a bit reluctant to do so as I don't think it's good having a script constantly checking in the background if the AI is playing a certain animation, wouldn't that overload things a bit? Edit: so it appears you can set things to disappear by using ""destroy_on_detach" "1"", I found that not listed in the spawnargs but on another entity. Now it looks quite strange because as soon as he is alerted the lute disappears, which at this point i'm willing to accept. But the music continues playing so it doesn't really solve much.

I have an AI who has the def_attach "atdm:prop_playable_lute" and he plays the lute, but I have a speaker next to him which transmits the sound of the music. This is a good setup until the player aggravates him or causes him to stop playing, in which case he will get up and move around but the music will continue to play. Is there a way to somehow tie the speaker playing the music to the AI, so that it only plays when he is sitting and playing his lute animation?

Congratulations Judith!

Just finished playing this mission and I loved it!

Those are fantastic looking scenes! Especially that last one

That’s fantastic! Btw how is that setup where you got onto the ladder so easily? A frequent problem I have is the player seems to overshoot my ladders easily and then fall to their death.

Thank you for that! I had read through that before, however it says that the loot carries over for the menu shop of the next mission. But my missions have an ingame shop the player visits rather than the traditional system. But one problem there is that if the loot carries over from the first mission, the second mission can't really have a loot objective as it might be reached by the time the player starts the mission. Unless I somehow turn the loot the player gets from mission 1 into an item called "fence credit" or something in mission 2, and then I could edit the ingame shop script so that it uses the fence credits before it burns into the players loot. It sounds like a lot of messing around though, and i'm not sure if that setup is even possible.