Nico A.

I admit, my suggestion was unnecessarily radical in its stripped-downness. I agree we shouldn't let go of functionality. In my opinion, a reasonable goal of the "new mission" page, which is an _ingame_ downloader, is to choose a mission to play, _ingame_. But, right now, what are the steps one has to take to start a new mission? Click "New Mission" Hit "Download Missions" (a rather small, inconspicuous button btw) Click on the mission from the list Hit "More" if want to see some screenshots and introducory text, then "Back" Hit "Select For Download" (for each mission separately btw, if bulk downloading is the goal) "Start Download" Message that I find the mission in the "New Mission" page --> "OK" (what am I supposed to do now? I wanna play! OK, I guess I just hit "back") (ah, here's the "New Mission" page!) Click on the downloaded mission (still no "play"? OK, then "Install") Message that game will be restarted Click "New Mission" (because we're of course in the main menu...) "Start This Mission"This makes around 13 clicks before someone can play a new mission. That's really all that bothers me. I think even without stripping down functionality we could reduce these steps significantly. I think tomorrow I can come up with another layout.

Yeah, I agree that leaving it like that would be easiest. But I thought since the mission download page is to be remade, then better change something now. Why would I like to see it change like that? Because this menu seems way too overloaded to me, and the only reason for that seems to be that it enables bulk downloading, which could as well be external. So imagine if there was only an external option to download multiple maps at once - would that bother you as a user? To be honest, as a newbie I would look at the website for downloading multiple missions anyway. As a long-time TDMer, I would realize something changed through an anouncement in this forum. Yeah, I also thought about that. But from the standpoint of "I just want quick skipping through the missions and take a glance at the mission details" it would be confusing to always have to uncheck first.I don't think so... I agree this would be the most complicated part and perhaps requires the campaign makers to zip their single missions together. Probably also requires quite some new coding, I don't know. But still I'd think that'd ne a neat feature to have (instead of skipping through campaign name 1: mission name; campaign name 2: mission name, ... in the list).This might also work, but when should the player hit "play" then? Normally you'd have to go to the "new mission" menu upon relaunching, which looks like this: But, assuming the new design, this menu would be redundant except the "Start This Mission" button. IMO it would be better to have a little text label say the name of the mission. Maybe it's even sufficient to have the last selected mission have a green checkmark whereas the others have gray ones or so. I see your point. IF it was scrollable and you could sort by date, would that work for you?

I think that would make the app too overloaded. Better to enable bulk downloading at the website, if that is possible. What do you think about this suggestion for a new "new mission" functionality?

This might be true. What would be needed is a more sophisticated measurement (I know more about that than about programming, I'm studying social sciences), that takes into account which difficulty level the player chose and somehow functions as a weight; also, a rating for a mission should only be visible if more than one person rated multiple missions, and these are the same persons. Not impossible to achieve, but a bit cumbersome. I still think quality ratings tell you more about the person who rated than difficulty ratings. Principially I agree. For this and for other complications, ratings should be left out.

Wow, this looks so much better. In your layout you put a "rating" header. As I said I think it would be much better to have a difficulty rating rather than a general rating, both for map makers (newbies get discouraged, even when they see "no rating") and for the players (I play all the top rated missions first and then I just stop because it's "not so good anymore"). Also I think rating difficulty is closer to objectiveness than rating goodness. The problem would be when the players should rate the missions (preferably after they completed a mission), but that sounds difficult to implement and could be a problem for later. Yes yes yes! As VanishedOne pointed out, bulk downloading of missions may be preferable, but why must this be ingame? If there is no "chosen maps for download" panel, that would leave more room for mission details (the one you clicked on). Later today I'd like to try some slight rearrangement after my imagination. For the bulk downloading: could such an option not be made available directly at the website? Just thinking... I'd say scrollable lists are a must-have, but if it's really that complicated to implement, I'd better be quiet

I have a question: What is the point to download more than one mission? In my opinion, this makes the mission menu overloaded and for newbies, as I was one not long ago, potentially confusing. Here's why I think so. When I go to the mission menu, I want to search for a new mission to play. Normally I don't want to download a bunch of missions for later; I want to play one of them right now - the one I'm going to download. It even happens to me sometimes that I wonder why I can't download a mission I selected - then I realize I first have to "select for download". Terribly confusing, in my opinion. My suggestion and question if that might be possible: download, installation, relaunch of TDM and launching of the "new mission" menu all in one go and automatically. If we can agree that the point of downloading missions is to play the downloaded mission instantly, then this would make the most sense imo. Also I'd suggest a difficulty rating of the missions rather than a general rating (might be discouraging for map makers). Of course this comes with its own problems, but when I download a mission, I want to proceed from easy to hard rather than from best to "not so good anymore". @Wallace: That's what I thought also: separate the missions into single missions and campaigns. Makes chosing a mission to play easier. I tried messing around with the GUI a little bit to change everything to my liking. As I have absolutely no knowledge on programming this kind of stuff, I didn't come far. That would have taken me many months (at least). But as you guys want to work on that maybe I should stop trying things out on my own anyway. When there's some raw work a newbie can do, I'm glad to help.

Great job. I don't understand most of it, but I'm still impressed. That's what I was thinking also.

Actually I think that would make for a really interesting plot. Maybe not even a spaceship from aliens; what if, with all the technological knowledge of TDM's time, someone greedy tries to launch a huge thing into space and our thief has to stop the whole city from exploding, because technology's not ready? With all the metal floors of the spaceship this would also be a rather complicated mission. Someone please use this theme as the final mission in a campaign.

How could I then make a handle to that custom door, which moves correctly with the door even though the door is tilted like that?

How can I rotate the origin from a brush? For example, when I create a door entity and rotate it along x 20°, then the origin is also rotated likewise. But when I create a door from a brush and rotate it 20°, the origin is not rotated. I want to fix this. But when I select the origin vertex and rotate it from there, it just changes its position and doesn't rotate.

Okay, I'm just phantasizing out loud here, I don't think these are easy things to do. Just some wishful thinking from my side. 1) Add a little green "run" button in the menu. When hit, it launches TDM in window mode and automatically testmaps the current map. Just for convenience reasons. 2) Create an "Easy start" option when creating a new map, that asks how many instances of each item the player should be equipped with at the start, what the ambient light should be. Stuff like that. 3) Add an option for subtractive level editing. Okay, this is really impossible I guess...

Ah! I tried that and somehow it works. I guess I need to refresh my knowledge on image basics. That is, when I mark the option "generate mipmaps", then the image appears as it should in the game. However, when I change the image to grayscale, then the same problem appears again. But it's only with grayscaling. I'll look into that tomorrow. Thanks a lot! edit: even that works now. I needed a gray-conversion-option that didn't delete my color channels (and found it in color-->desaturate).

How do you edit the main menu DDS files? When I open them in GIMP and save as the same file (and even when I'm not changing anything), then upon launching TDM, this picture is not there anymore. Instead where it should have been everything is white. However, when I open the same picture file in GIMP again, it looks perfectly the same. For example: I opened in GIMP, just clicked "overwrite background_empty", then let the zip archive refresh, and launched TDM. It looked like this (see attached file, I'm not really sure which image extension I'm allowed to use here... ): Can someone please help me how to edit the pictures? I really want to mess around with the menu!

Sorry to interrupt, I too have a question: I was playing around the .pk4 files in the darkmod directory, unzipping them to elsewhere, and deleting the old .pk4. But when I rename the .zip to .pk4 - I did this with the tdm_gui01.pk4 - the game won't start normally (even though I don't make any changes!), but show a black screen saying Does anyone know where that comes from? What do I have to consider when making changes to the .pk4 files?

http://ehnahremetal.bandcamp.com/track/birth From 5:01 onward I'd imagine this as a cool background music for the last mission's cutscene in a long campaign... experimental and probably too much metal for the thief-lovers, but I'd prefer that over electronic beats.

This has to be the most beautiful mission there is so far. I can see why it took you that amount of time to finish it. I felt most immersed, even got a little afraid of height while climbing around the beams in the tall hallway...

Ah! This makes sense. Many thanks!

How can I retain the faces of the two resulting brushes at the clipped plane? When I use the clipper tool, and even with Shift+LMB, the faces are lost, like this: Is there a way to create them anew?

Just played it. I loved the look of the windows in the upper rooms (the elevator) and, most of all, the cut scene. How long did it take to make it?

I really dig that dialect. The problem is, most others don't... +1

Perfect! As someone who is still trying to learn and don't expect to get his first map done until the end of the year or so, I'm digging myself into this. Way overdue that someone does something like this! I only watched 3 minutes so far, but I already love it. Btw, you are from saxony, aren't you? That's where I come from.

Woah, this came fast. Many thanks...

May I abuse this thread to ask an ignorant question: Is it (easily) possible with The Dark Mod to put missions together like a campaign? I mean, in a way that you don't have to download each new next mission in the series after completing one (which also in a way allows you to play a later mission before finishing a prior one), and, more importantly, that lets you buy equipment for the next mission in the value of the loot you found in the former. Not that it's of any practical importance for me for the next several quarters, but I'm just curious...

I really enjoyed playing this mission. Pretty scary at the end, I like this I especially enjoyed the storyline. A little thing that still adds to the immersiveness imo is the fact that not at every place that would make up a good hiding place there is something valuable hidden. To me, it seemed rather rare to find some gold in the suspicious places (except among the wine bottles). I really liked this, it makes the mission more realistic. Also, some of the nicest rooms I saw here. Some were even so nice I could imagine living there. All in all, well done from me