Melan

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.

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.

TBH I am more bothered by that strip of wooden parquette in the middle of the tiles than I am about mismatched trims.

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.

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.

That's really cool, and a testament to all the work that has been done in making this mod, then turning it standalone, then refining it even further. In the unlikely event we don't make it, we can still benefit from a slogan like "Too hot for Steam", or "VALVE hates it! Local man discovers one weird mod to help his thieving!"

I was asking because I haven't noticed this problem. Perhaps it comes into being when you use very thin walls (which I try to avoid for both aesthetic and realism-related reasons), but using angled and rotated architecture doesn't account for it. Some slight deterioration can take place over time, but that is typically not too severe, nor too hard to fix with a little work. Keeping everything a standard 90 degrees looks like extreme caution to me - and a waste, because you are missing out on a lot of cool shapes.

How long does a Greenlight campaign last? One month?

Asking for trouble how?

You can get in there too, but you have to go around and approach from another direction.

raymeld: Definitely not.

Necrobob's missing, that's who. He hasn't logged in here since January 2006, and on TTLG since April 2016.

Oskar Kaubisch - Eisenach, Wartburg. The Elisabeth Well at the Knight's Hall, 1926. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Martin Luther had both lived in the castle (several centuries apart, ofc.).

There are briefing templates which are easy to set up and which provide moving images and text, but for voice and more sophisticated animations, you have to go outside the mod.

The majority of missions use custom assets of some kind, but they tend to be the easy stuff, mainly textures and the odd model or sound. To give you an idea about their prevalence, take a look at the mission list sorted by size. Missions with very few custom assets (like much of the Thomas Porter series) weigh in around 10-15 MB for a moderately large map. All the rest is custom stuff! It always depends on what's included in the core mod and what isn't, though. I could substantially downsize my FMs after my textures made it into the standard package. Penny Dreadful 2 was over 100 MB, and we got it down to 43 (there is still a lot of custom stuff in there, particularly voices, but less than it used to be). That said, you can easily make a mission with what's already in the mod;you don't have to make everything yourself - there are people with specialised skills who can and will help you do this or that.

Neat! Kinda frustrating they are still using images from the 2008 version of St. Lucia, but still, the trailer is there and should make a good impression.

Thanks! And nope, not a bug.

That's something! Guess you could voice the whole campaign if you wanted to. I'll add you to the ongoing conversation (no pun intended).

What kind of voices do you do?

Libraries with piped in sewage... How classy.

raymeld: You will not need Thief 2. You will need to run fmselect.bat (or thief.exe -fm), and I think set up a few folders where the FM selector will store the missions.

LFG.HU, by yours truly.

Although it is more than five years old now ( ), it may be interesting for beginners to look at the thread where I documented making Fiasco at Fauchard Street, a small-medium-sized mission using newbie-friendly and time-saving methods. It can give you an idea on what kind of work goes into a mission, and how you can manage the workflow. Of course, you've got even more tools to work with today - including modular architecture, optimised code and a generally broader asset base. Another, related point: Fiasco is not a micro-mission. I see the "1-5 rooms" suggestion, but I'd recommend going a bit further. You don't need to create a sprawling FM, especially not on your first try, but if you make those 5 rooms, you can make it 10 and get away with it.

I didn't come to TDM as a complete newbie, but I did pick up the much more obscure and ornery Dromed without any sort of technical or programming background. It was less scary than I originally expected, and went surprisingly well. Now DarkRadiant is much more user-friendly than Dromed, and it has become even more accommodating since its first versions. By more-or-less following the A-Z tutorial, you can gain most of the skills you need to make a mission, and if you are stuck, just ask on the forums.The rest is imagination and perseverance. Making levels is always time-consuming, but I'd estimate a beginner could create a decent-sized maps over one or two months, or a small one in a few weeks - and that's without the new architectural modules. You don't really need to learn modelling to make a mission (I have never created a custom model, although I have asked people to make a few simple ones), while creating custom textures is fairly straightforward. But at this stage, TDM has more than enough base assets to let you develop a mission of your preferred type (except monster missions, since at this point we only have giant spiders and fire elementals).