Midnight

Oh, I have a feeling you won't need to worry about getting the word out with this campaign . That second pic looks fantastic, can't wait to see it in-game. I tried a similar type of setting (sewer / cave combination) in DromEd and the results were... not as good .

I was mainly impressed with the character animations, which are usually quite difficult and they appeared smooth, but thinking about it now, he was probably just using stock Doom III animations. Oh well, his loss I would say. I can't see his mod succeeding if he takes the "I can do it all myself" attitude. Hopefully we'll see co-op in TDM someday, but it's going to take a couple people who are passionate about TDM for it to succeed.

It's not that fun, unless things have changed drastically in the 8-9 years since I built computers . It's also not terribly difficult to learn, but if you're considering upgrading soon I would suggest finding someone you know, or a local computer shop to help you. By the sounds of it, the mainboard will support a new graphics card, but the only thing stopping you from upgrading is that there's not enough space in the computer case, is this correct? Cases are pretty cheap, and it should be really easy to transfer all the components from your current case into a larger case. As has been said though, do some research first and again, try find someone to help you if you've never done anything like this before. Are you sure about this? You should find that if you have a graphics card, then the onboard graphics won't be used anyway, so all you have to worry about is whether the power supply has the power for the new graphics card.

Yes, this is my main concern about this. Some people would rather not see a project to completion if it means they lose full credit. Not saying that's the case here, but we'll have to wait and see. I've sent him a message to spur him on if he's serious about this.

Ah, I see your point. Then again, I like the visual style of all the thief games so they're not necessarily mutually exclusive (it was the physics that killed TDS for me, amongst other things ).

If that's possible (that different branches can be kept in sync) then that would certainly make it easier to have missions that could be played in both. The T2 multiplayer patch has shown how many single player missions can translate to co-op quite easily (surprisingly), but there have also been many that would need some tweaking, or might not be suitable at all (Embracing the Enemy comes to mind). Not that I'm accusing anyone of this, but I think it would be premature to dismiss this being a suitable companion project for TDM purely because it is inspired by TDS. The third person view he used in his videos is a little worrying, but if this were to become a MP branch, then it isn't like we'd see the removal of rope arrows, swimmable water etc, and instead, the gameplay would naturally be more like TDM than TDS. I just hope that he doesn't feel that TDM isn't a suitable base to build from and would rather recreate TDS from the ground up. If so, I very much doubt it would ever see completion if the success rate of most mods is anything to go by. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Sorry if this has been posted before, I know some of you are already aware of this but I couldn't see a thread dedicated to it. I've only just come across this project called Thievious thanks to a post by clearing at TTLG. Although I was doubtful at first (inspired by TDS??) I was suitably impressed at the in-game videos and the potential that this could have, although the title of the mod sounds a little silly so I've suggested 'Thieves' would make a better name for a co-op Thief game. Now, I know that the TDM team aren't considering any multiplayer development, and most TDM fans (myself included) are primarily interested in a single player experience, but co-op would be a worthwhile addition to TDM gameplay since thieves would often (in the real world and in this universe) collaborate and are not always the lone wolf characters that most of us associate with Thief. I would hate to see this co-op project fail to progress because it's just a one man tech demo at the moment with no real support, and at the same time, it would be disappointing if it were to be completed, only to have one or two playable maps. My question then is, does the team agree that it would be mutually beneficial for Thievious and TDM if this project were taken under your wing, so to speak, so that if it were eventually completed it could benefit from being able to play TDM missions (some of which would presumably need to be modified for co-op support)? Ideally, what would be great is if at some point in the future, you could launch TDM missions from within the launcher in co-op mode, which would use the multiplayer work demonstrated in the Thievious project videos. More than anything, the reason I suggest this is that I hate seeing resources duplicated in different projects, when sharing those resources could speed up the development of both. I imagine that if Nightblade had been undertaken in Doom III it might still be around because they could have shared some of the resource and development work that went into TDM.

Nice. Much better than what I was about to suggest (The Dark Mug ). Agree this definitely needs a black mug, that Dark Radiant version would look pretty good in black I think.

A mouse mat might be a good fit for that image... Edit: Bulk order?

Congratulations guys! That's an impressive list of updates, I especially like the individual FOV and non-pausing Objectives screen. Looking forward to trying all these out later on (once it's dark outside), but I did have one question. Save games from 1.00 won't work with this update, which is fine (gives me an excuse to replay all the missions ), but if smaller updates are going to be coming more frequently in future, will it mean that save games in 1.01 may not work with these future updates, or is it simply that 1.01 was such a big update that it couldn't be backwards compatible with saves?

This has probably been covered elsewhere, but has anyone thought of allowing tdm_update to check your servers for updates to installed FMs rather than just updating TDM itself?

I guess the main feedback was whether there's anything in there that would contradict the universe that the team imagines, and whether any of it would be useful for adding to that universe. The main worry I guess is the section about the plague quarter, which in my text predates the necromancers. The wiki mentions the quarter was only contaminated 20 years ago, so I wasn't sure whether the necromancers and mages were imagined by the team as being ancient factions. Reading through the wiki I had the feeling that there was a lot missing, which is one of the reasons I was writing further background to the universe. I do realise that this is likely intentional as it gives FM creators more freedom to create their own history etc, but one of the things that seemed particularly lacking was the universe beyond the city, which I think is limited to the island of Menoa. This is why I created the city of Blackrock. [Edit: I see you've added a map to the World At Large page, so I guess there still some fleshing out that will occur.]

@Springheel: I sent you a PM, not sure if you've seen it.

I have some ideas, but I'm reluctant to express them publicly until I have a fully realised storyline thread. Right now I have about three separate themes that I'm trying to tie together into a single consistent story. Trying to connect them isn't easy since I'm dealing with four different factions and have to link them all together somehow (some of this is already done). I'll give some thought to having separate smaller campaigns if I can't resolve this. I've also been writing little bits of background info for the TDM universe to help get an idea of the world and those who live in it. I'm trying to keep this as faithful to the existing universe as possible, but I'd love if someone from the TDM team could have a read in an 'official' capacity to provide feedback. If there's anything in there that the team likes it could be added to the wiki, or not as the case may be. One thing to consider though, getting back to the original question of small campaigns, even a single mission (if it's large enough) can give you a pretty good idea of a certain faction. Although Cragscleft wasn't the only Hammerite mission in Thief1, it fleshed out the order pretty well in the player's mind. For this reason, I don't necessarily think that you'd need 3-4 missions focusing on one faction in order to help players understand them.

Isn't there an issue with having a space in the "Doom 3" folder name? I think you should be okay renaming it to "Doom3" and trying again.

Oh, I wasn't complaining at all, though I guess it could have come across that way. I was just remarking how surprised I was that I could still use AAx8 with little difference in FPS, and believe me, if later (larger) missions start to impact on performance then I won't hesitate to drop the resolution. I'll try testing this today, to see what difference lower resolutions have.

Here are the results of a test I did to compare each different setting and the overall effect they had on the FPS. CPU : Intel Q6600 Core2Duo 2.4GHz GPU : Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS (384 MByte) Ram : 2 GByte (1066 MHz DDR3) OS : Windows XP SP3 Resolution: 1680x1050 I wanted to keep the resolution native at 1680x1050, which I know is one of the biggest framerate hogs, but I like full res Initial test achieved 25.6 FPS with all settings maxed out (except for Bloom, which was off for all tests). The following represent turning off or altering each setting, whilst leaving the others at max (to avoid muddying the results): 26.3 FPS - Anisotropic: 1x 31.0 FPS - VSync: Off 25.7 FPS - Shader: Standard 25.7 FPS - Ambient: Fast 50.6 FPS - Anti-Aliasing: Off 50.4 FPS - AA x4 49.7 FPS - AA x8 25.6 FPS - AA x16 (original test with all settings maxed out) I was expecting anti-aliasing to be the largest hit on FPS, but I was surprised to see that AA x4 and even AA x8 had fairly negligible effect on framerate, whereas AA x16 had a huge impact on framerate. Luckily, I can't really tell much difference in visual quality when using 16, so I'll not use this in future. Since I can't stand not using VSync, the only other option available if a performance boost is needed is lowering the resolution.

The skull of Herzeloyde? It's been years since I played it but I remember it being quite challenging near the end. I've got to agree here. I used to have Epilepsy when I was younger and that type of lighting situation could previously have caused a seizure of sorts. If the rate of flicker was lowered to something like 2 flicker states a second it should be okay. Just wanted to add my thanks for this mission. The design and gameplay reminded me of Calendra's Cistern, which I hope you take as a very good compliment. I loved the bits of loot that were out of sight up on a ledge somewhere, and exploring the different rooftop areas was very well done. I did manage to get to somewhere I shouldn't have though. I wouldn't suggest you change this though, some of us like breaking through to the other side

Thanks for your suggestions everyone! I've been meaning to read Pepys as this would certainly give a good idea of what life was like but had always been a little intimidated by the scale of the work. I found a smaller selection of his diary on Amazon though, so hopefully this will be useful. I also found a copy of this book at my local bookstore which I thought was a bargain at £12. I've given it a cursory glance and it looks quite interesting, plus it has lots of good pictures (maps, portraits and weapons). @Mortem Desino: I may need to pick your brain at a later stage as the Builder equivalent of the Inquisition is something I'd planned on including in the story.

I'm interested in finding out more about the time periods in our own history which The Dark Mod is loosely based on, to help provide some background and inspiration for a storyline I'm working on. I came across an interesting looking book today which could offer some inspiration, though I really wanted a more 'grounded' historical look at the middle ages (with a particular emphasis on the early medieval feudal system) and the Victorian era. I'm hoping to get a better feeling for what constituted 'everyday life' for the various different classes of people, as well as a broader overview of the political, social and economical environments which led to things like war, plague etc. I'm hoping that posting this here will be rewarding, given we're all somewhat familiar with this setting (both from TDM and previous games) and have a good idea of what would be useful, and also that this thread could become a list of useful references for FM designers to visit. So, please post your thoughts, recommendations and links to books or websites, videos even. Whatever you think might help FM makers create stories with rich backgrounds and missions with a feeling of historical authenticity.

It's not a bad idea (this has been done for fan missions in the past), however, I don't think it would necessarily be as useful as you suggest. I've also just finished all of the recent missions, but I liked all of them, so my score would have to reflect that (and therefore my personal preferences as to what I enjoy in a mission). This inevitably would create many situations where a mission that scored well wouldn't be to your liking (and the opposite is true as well), so ends up not being that useful. I'd prefer a review system instead, since it gives you a little information about the plot, setting etc, as well as the quality of the mission. There are already reviews of each tdm mission by SneakyJack over at ttlg (and linked to here I believe). Perhaps these reviews (and others from different reviewers in future) could be aggregated and shown on the missions download page to be more accessible to new players who haven't visited the forums yet.

As another customer, I have to second this opinion. Why don't you people stop wasting everybody's time and start showing you care about your customers! Sheesh. Also, when are you going to add Garrett to this mod?

I enjoyed this little mission, really liked the story as well. Here's a weird case of synchronicity: In two different missions I've been working on (originally for DromEd, but now moving to TDM) I included a thieves guild and I called them the 'Black Hand Thieves Guild'! Don't know if the thinking behind this mission was the same but the 'black market' hand imprints from Thief 3 gave me the idea for the name (plus it sounds cool ). Anyway, the way I see it, this could be almost the official thieves guild (or at least the most prominent) in the same way the Downwinders was the most commonly used guild in the original Thief.

I totally agree that most steampunk is over the top, and I've not read any specific literature on the subject either so my own opinion is based purely on the 'fashion' aspect of the word as you put it. Having said that, I can't see how you equate steampunk with style not substance. There appears (from my uneducated perspective on the topic) to be quite a bit of depth to steampunk. If you ignore the modern attempts at steampunk (such as laptops or digital devices made to look Victorian), the idea behind a lot of steampunk (I'm getting really sick of this word now) seems to be a sort of natural or intuitive progression of Victorian technology, which fits in with the world that LGS was creating (more in TMA than TDP). I guess the test will be what FM creators prefer. I don't have any plans for this kind of design in any FM I'm currently working on, but I thought I'd throw this idea out there to see what other people think. Aside from anything else, expanding on this genre would add a whole heap of largely unexplored possibilities to the official Thief universe, and could set TDM aside from the originals in a creative sense.

The BBC has an article about steampunk at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8376028.stm (see the pictures link for some examples). I'd love to see this kind of aesthetic added to TDM (especially once the Inventors Guild is released). The original LGS games were a bit tame when it came to steampunk, but I think it would really suit TDM especially, within reason of course (we wouldn't want to see steam powered automobiles etc). What do you think?