plasticman

What's next? Air Control? Maybe someone wants to do a Challenge Promode Dark Mod...

They can be spawned in any mission (this means cheating of course) by typing spawn atdm:ammo_firearrow in the console. Just pick up the light in front of your feet. I really like the sound, feel and look of them. They do not move slightly upwards like in Thief, but once you know you no longer kill yourself. "Rocket jumping" is also possible which is really funny.

I sure like the ghosting, but I am too lazy to do it most of the time. This is why I really like it when a mission does not leave the choice to me and gives me the "no blackjack tonight"-goal. On the other hand it can be funny to knock out just everyone. You know you are finished when nothing moves anymore.

Google says: ...and I just found out there's a new feature: speech synthesis. It tries to read the nonsense for you, but it seems only available for short sentences and phrases. Funny toy. Could be exploited for some real terrible conversations in fan missions.

There is some good thinking in STiFU's idea, but I'm not sure if I would like it in game. This is because Darkmod's way to handle objects is so different from Thief. In Thief it makes you feel stupid when you accidently grab some junk, there may be guards nearby and you have to look for a silent surface to drop it again. But in Darkmod you can move things very close to the surface and drop them without making too much noise. So this is no trouble. I also think there's a gain in it when you have to pick up objects, it faintly resembles a process of evaluating them (at least that's how I imagine it). You don't know if that goblet is valuable until you really touch it, estimate it's weight, etc.

Wow! This is art!

This one made me feel unsure for at least a few seconds: www.radiantdark.net

I agree. It is funny thinking about it. The Wii is in your living room. A guard scares you so you make your escape to the kitchen and outwit him by hiding yourself under the table. Occasionally some family members drop by asking what's the matter with you, but you only say "Sssh! Move along! He's after me!" After waiting for hours chances are the guard no longer is looking for you, so you carefully reveal yourself again and creep back to the living room. There you find someone spoiled your game by turning off the Wii... Just a comment on the concept: I think blackjacking in a Wii-game would feel very wrong because you don't have feedback. Maybe it works with just a Wii-Mote and no game at all.

Is this the one where after an unexpected bombardement the movie's sound fades to a tinnitus for minutes?

It's an obscure feature, so only a true thief shall find it.

Mirrors in Doom are complicated. They do not work like in real life. If you want to circumvent any trouble it is best to avoid having a room or any geometry behind it. Think of it not as a mirror, but as a second room behind the actual room you want to mirror, but instead of building it, you simply place a mirror there. If you have some other geometry there it is some kind of contradiction and results in errors. If you want to have another room behind your mirror, you need to make sure it is sealed off from the room you have your mirror in via visportals, so it can not get rendered while looking in the mirror. You can see what I mean in a figure on modwiki. Good Luck.

Thanksalot. "+set driver oss " makes things much better for me. There are still some clicks but very few. Guess I should consider getting my hands dirty and fix it from the ALSA side. Or just try another soundcard. Thank you anyway.

Hi. I'm sorry to post, since it's almost off topic. When running TDM on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) I will occasionally get little cracks and dropouts in sound playback. Seems to be related to the number of sounds beeing played simultaniously -- like on the menu screen I can hear the title music, but when hovering over the menu cracks may occur due to the additional sound played. I start the mod from a terminal and get the following error message (lots of them) when it happens: snd_pcm_writei 4096 frames failed: Broken pipe preparing audio device for output Digging through the omniscient internet brought up a few things. It happens on linux with id Tech 4 based games usually when people use ALSA and the same soundhardware like me (soundblaster live 5.1 player). The Doom Linux FAQ suggests switching from ALSA to OSS. [i remember I had a similar problem with playback in Audacious (a Winamp substitute), turning to oss-emulation solved it.] So my only question for now is: how do I run TDM and tell Doom to use oss? I tried passing the "+set s_driver oss"-argument with the tdmlauncher, what didn't seem to do anything.

Ooops, I meant to reply yesterday, went in game to check, but seemingly didn't make it back to the forum. I agree everything looks faster with Doom physics. Arrows fly much faster like I think they did do in Thief, "Junk" does not fly as far when throwen. It is different but I am okay with it. Falling of a ledge as well feels faster, but IMO not too fast. So everything is fine but jumping distance. Though I have to admit practising helps it a little bit.

...and on shacknews.

After playing the training mission I considered starting a thread like this one. Looks like someone beat me to it. I know the team spent a lot of time tweaking these things and I fully respect it. Like greebo pointed out, consistency is important because authors rely on it. But since the release still wears a beta tag it is also OK re-tweak some (but not many) minor things. IMO it's only the jump. Walking/running speed, mantling and all the other movements feel just right. This is subjective. I like games better when they focus more on fun, less on realism. Right now jumping feels more like in real life, like I should eat less junk food and do some training. My vote goes for giving it some more length and make the character feel less weighty. If the team decides to keep it like it is, I'll happily readjust my perception and get used to it. You did some great work here. Just imagine all these parameters that go into movement -- and people only complain about jumping...

The screens in the tutorial look familiar. I think I saw it on D3W first. While it looks beautiful the part with not affecting the light gem kills it for Darkmod. ...raising my hand again for hand-painted light-textures: I'm still very fascinated by what some guy called Matt Breit achieved in a Quake-4-Map (Strombine) by PAINTING light textures according to the geometry. Check it out here, at least the screenies. I tried it myself in a testmap but my only result was that you actually need skills to make it look good...

Me too. It's okay not to have some sort of canon police. What will be considered canon in public consciousness depends on the impression an author can achieve with an FM. There will be classics and there will be "my first map". And somethings in between. "Classics" will get a higher ratings and better reviews at the known places (like the circle or southquarter), get played by more people and so on -- looks to me like this is self-regulating. I understand it is intriguing to map out the whole place. Makes it feel like home. Still it may be better to leave these vast white spaces labeled "there be dragons", so authors can put there what ever creeps up their minds. Sounds more entertaining to me when I don't know what to expect. One exception though: Bridgeports bridges must be huge. I imagine in a real city you could see them from many locations in a distance. Same is true for the upper parts of the city, when looked from the lower. Things like this could be put it generic skyboxes for authors to reuse according to the part of the city they are having their mission take place in. So if your mission is located in a center part west of the river, you would choose the skybox showing a hill north, one bridge north-east, the other one south-east, etc.

Now look at this. Dopefish wants to grow plants. ...can I have Dope-Arrows then? Like when you hit them guards in tha lung them all git reel mellow? smooth???

I have a different keyboard (Cherry Stream, Model G230), same OS, same problem. When I try to rebind the arrow keys via doom's menu, it displays UP, DOWN and RIGHT as "0x00"; LEFT is recognized as ALT. As a workaround I can disable numlock and use the arrow keys on the numpad. But it would be nice to have it working properly. Google refused to deliver a solution...

It was. Made me wonder why "Der Spiegel" would be hosting Darkmod...

Me too. No problems with stencil shadows. It sure was an issue in Doom -- looks to me they optimised light count too much. Some surfaces ended up with no light at all and there was no ambient light. But this is not a limitation of the engine. It depends on mapping skills how your lighting looks in Dark Mod. If you set up ambient light right there are no pitch black areas and if you are willing to spend enaugh time and effort you can always come up with hand painted light textures... ...custom made for each scene in your map. For these hacked in soft-shadows: I take it they were some kind of post processing -- do they work properly with the light gem?

Better not do this. You could end up blackjacking your family...

Funny thought this. About the signal-noise-ratio: it's a nice picture but eventually fail. We can not translate the qualities of different games into one quantity and compare them by numbers. This would be like saying chess is better than soccer. More like "ten times better". I mean there's nothing wrong with favouring one over the other -- everyone is free to like or dislike whatever s/he wants. But we really shouldn't do something like a scientific claim about such things. Oh thanks! The term "voyeur perspective" nails it down. What's cool about Thief gameplay (at least that's my opinion atm) is less the storytelling -- books or movies could do that better -- it is confronting the player with a certain scenario. For example the way to get the key in Saintlucia: it takes only two readables to give you the illusion of three different characters, their relationships, their lives etc. -- it goes quite deep and we don't even see or hear them. On the other hand you don't have to read these. In fact I only read the one in the house and stumbled over the key by accident before reading the second... ...but this kind of freedom only adds to gameplay. You have to pick up the clues yourself, the more you dive into it the more complete a picture you get. @STiFU: Wow, trickjumping obstacle courses! Consider me noob, I only saw these in War§ow, completely failed and wiped it from my memory...