Melan
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Posts
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Posts posted by Melan
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This is damn good. Classic Thief 1-style thievery in an ominous mine/tomb complex. Crank down the gamma, close the curtains and get taffing!
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Nice use of light to lend a special mood to an already excellent scene.
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They are part of the mod's look. Could be altered for specific missions, though (as some people have already done).
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As I wrote, something like this has already happened on the server side. Someone renamed one mission "Talbot 1: Fiasco at Fauchard Street" and another "Talbot 2: Return to the City". What is the third mission you mentioned? "Sir Talbot's Collateral" exists, but is probably something different.
Actually, Talbot 1 is Prowler of the Dark (Thief 1), 2 is Return to the City, 3 is Fauchard Street, 4 is Bad Debts (Thief 2) and 5 is Disorientation. 6 and 7 were planned but never built.
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- Goldwell
- Melan
- Bikerdude
- Springheel
- Bikerdude/Team
- Melan
- Melan/Bikerdude
- Comes with the mod, so no need.
- Bikerdude
- Not an official or listed mission
- Buikerdude/Team.
- Comes with the mod, so no need.
- Sotha
- SirTaffsAlot
- SirTaffsAlot
5. is Goldchocobo, Mortem Desino & Bikerdude
11. is Fidcal
I don't mind if my missions are renamed to be part of a series, although it is kinda confusing/self-defeating in the case of the "Talbot" missions, which span three games, are only loosely connected, and have been left unfinished.
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Definitely a major bug.
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Good! Bikerdude, can you create a ready-made template that works with the readable editor? (using the Stone font and the GUI we have on SVN)
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- Popular Post
- Popular Post
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No - in fact, I tested the map on a different machine. But I see the problem now. This should probably be documented on the wiki because people will be using the function a lot.
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Very good job, Spooks! That second shot has a very strong Dishonored feel to it.
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I have been playing with the Model Scaler, but there seems to be a problem. When I load the map in the game, the rescaled objects appear as black cubes (denoting missing objects). Any way to fix this?
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Yeah, you have to move the prefab close to (but not exactly to) 0,0,0 before you save it.
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I would be up for a contest - actually, I am planning a small map that's using 2.05 assets, although that doesn't necessarily mean the modules - but it'd have to be 2 weeks minimum, like the 2015 Halloween mini-contest. You can build, polish up and release a mission under 2 weeks without cutting corners or delivering an untested mess.
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Sotha, you keep making your levels easier and shorter and I keep wondering if you're subtly making fun of people like me.
Easier? Going the no-KO route, the mission was quite on the hard side with three patrolling AI in a limited amount of space, and them relighting the lanterns I put out.
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Warning: Mission four (three is just a long cutscene) starts out pretty tough, but becomes downright amazing after those initial few minutes.
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The first three are from the Kelenföld Power Plant in Budapest. The control room is an iconic piece of art deco industrial design; unfortunately, while this part of the plant is decommissioned, it is not open to the public
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Noooooooooooooooo
If you do, you have to provide a separate version with static. ^^
Or just record some lovely static and package it as a video?
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Browsing the Mapcore community boards, a major online hub for level designers, there seems to be a lot of game-independent portfolio-building out there - at least that's the impression I got. After that, lots of TF2, lots of Hammer work, some Unreal and some modern military FPS stuff I am not familiar with. What makes that board curious is that single player is almost completely underrepresented, and Thief / TDM seem to be completely missing (skacky used to be a member, but hasn't been active for years). There is practically no cross-pollination between them and the TTLG-centred design community.
Judith: I remember that Hourences quote. It was already written from hindsight, since the mid-2000s were the time level design tasks massively grew in complexity. Hourences himself started in the UT design community, and was part of the Operation: Na Pali team. ONP had over 40 large to massive SP levels (the original Unreal had 38). This would be inconceivable in modern commercial projects, let alone fanmade mods. Now it is eight years later, and the same trends have mostly continued. (I say mostly because Minecraft building is apparently a huge thing.)
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Our standards are generally for 512*512 or 1024*1024 textures, but I am starting to wonder if that's still an absolute yardstick. The guidelines were written with 2009 PCs in mind, and there has been an increase in computing power since then. I have used 2024*1024 and 2024*2024 textures in a few areas without apparent ill effects on performance. I suppose as long as you don't use several of them, you ought to be fine. (JohnP's Thief 3 texture upgrade was already using 2024x2024 textures a few years ago.)
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You can have dozens of path corners in any single patrol route (a fairly common case for long, branching patrols with RITs). I generally fine-tune mine to the small details, e.g. my latest mission has 440 path corners and about 85 other path entities. The only limit is the general entity limit, but it's probably not path entities which will make you hit that. All in all, go wild.
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I don't think I agree about this piece being applicable. The broadly understood Thief level design community isn't exactly taking off as an exploitable sensation; it is a shrinking community. At this stage, it has produced a lot of content, including high-effort, high-skill projects like TDM, the full Thief campaigns, the codebase fixes and various enhancements. It is an ecosystem of creators and fans (people who just enjoy playing the results and being part of the community). It is sufficiently densely networked that anyone who is part of the community can benefit from it: you have access to a steady stream of new missions, and if you want to create something, there is a supportive and knowledgeable community to walk through through the creation process and to appreciate your work.
However, it is a mature system that has been shrinking for some years - there are occasional upticks, but the influx of new people hasn't been great. There are fewer highly polished missions instead of several newbie efforts. The "What are you working on right now" threads on TTLG and these forums are both moving more slowly than they used to. Now at this stage, things are still good. It is a late golden age. But if we continue losing people, we will enter a territory where fans will no longer have access to a steady flow of content - they only need to check a few times each year. With less buzz, some creators give up or refocus on different hobbies. With less creators, it is harder to enter the community (while entry barriers become higher as newbies are afraid of presenting their early work in a world of sophisticated missions by experienced authors) and the networks start to disintegrate.
Eventually, message boards grow empty, databases stop being regularly maintained, and Internet decay slowly eats away what remains. At first, someone fixes things when something goes wrong, but eventually, they cease to care. At this point, the network has little value for either consumption or creation: "nobody" creates because there are "no fans", and "nobody" is a fan because "nothing" is being created. You can see this on the example of formerly vibrant design communities which are no longer active, and haven't been revived in a meaningful sense (as Quake and Doom have been).
The more realistic threat is not dilution via excessive popularity but its opposite - slow drying up and eventual disappearance.
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TBH I am more bothered by that strip of wooden parquette in the middle of the tiles than I am about mismatched trims.
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Judith: Some people can cope better, but I'd be pretty heartbroken if I had multiple large, abandoned maps (that had little possibility of eventual publication).
Sotha: I wrote "more", with Coercion and Mother Rose duly noted.
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As I understand, these modules were already a massive commitment of time and effort on Springheel's part, and ended up burning him out real bad - so much so that he has effectively stepped back from directing the mod's progress in the way he had done since the beginning. It may not be apparent, but many of us have struggled with burnout issues over time. It is why you can't play The Crucible of Omens campaign, it is why Shadowhide's excellent city map remains unfinished, it is why Skacky has a whole mission lying abandoned (although it is rather different from his usual style), and it is why Jdude, one of the most talented TDM mappers, has one released mission out of several half-finished projects (St. Lucia, which should give you an idea on how the rest is like).
I am not writing this to claim anyone's work should be above criticism (in fact, we need good constructive criticism). Rather, I am drawing attention to the practical considerations of developing a total conversion project and the missions for it. It is better to have eight completed, tested and released missions of average quality than two unfinished masterpieces. Yes, the latter are a sad loss, but the world belongs to the living, not the could have beens. The same goes for textures, models and everything else. Not everyone is as talented a modeller as Epifire or nosslak (and where it comes to AI, the long-gone oDDity), but people somehow filled the gaps. Not always perfectly, but in a way that made for a functional game with a solid asset base.
I am on the opinion that if people come to the mod, they will do good work even with imperfect pieces, and some of the results will be outstanding. Last year's crop of missions included The Accountant 2, King of Diamonds, Full Moon Fever, Volta and the Stone and Down by the Riverside - well beyond the call of duty, and a testament to their makers' creative energies. (If anything, I would have welcomed more small, less ambitious missions, but I can't be greedy). Now, they were made with imperfect assets, and affected by constraints we all experience. But they could still use those assets to deliver something outstanding maps. And I am sure the same goes for these modular assets - if people use them.
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FM Contest Idea
in Fan Missions
Posted
The real tragedy is that anyone would perceive it as two separate communities, and unfortunately, many do.