Oktokolo

Damn, the PTSD is back. Somehow managed to forget that one. But you are right. Your mission owns the crown of laggyness and this mission is probably only the second laggiest and lowest FPS mission in the repo. I'm sorry for disrespecting your and cugzkani's mission and hope you both can forgive my ignorance.

While this must be the absolute laggiest and lowest FPS mission in the repo, it still plays well and is fun. My recommendation is to blackjack everyone and close all windows to at least get tolerable framerates indoors. The flicker of distant geometry over the fog sortof kills the outdoor athmosphere a bit but that might solve itself in future TDM versions.

Plot: Act 1: Player is a sneaky ratman or ratwomen breaking free from pagan slavers, finding all members of their enslaved family, freeing them one by one and bringing em home. Act 2: Builders raid the rat village kill some ratpeople and steal an artifact of immense religious importance. Player gets tasked to recover the artifact and follows the builders to their outpost. Player somehow gets hold of the artifact and brings it back to the ratpeople village. It is decided that the infinite growth of the human settlements endangers the rat people as a whole and that something has to be done against that. But knowledge about the enemy is scarce and player is one of the very few, who can speak "human" (actually pagan, but close enough). So player gets send to infiltrate the next city with a tinkerer (maintains the player's gear) and a granny which happens to be the only one available who can read and write human (she is supposed to teach player that skill). Player makes camp somewhere reasonably safe outside next non-pagan human settlement and does some reconnaissance and resource gathering missions. As new villagers seem to mainly come from an actual city, that city becomes the new exploration target. The three ratpeople travel to the city, make camp somewhere safe outside, find a way in, find a safe place in the sewers and make camp there. More reconnaissance and resource gathering missions happen. It becomes more and more obvious, that resistance would be futile. The humans are just too many. The three ratpeople travel back to their village and report to the council of the united ratpeople tribes. The decision is to mount a covert resistance with the intent to delay the human expansions until some more sustainable solution is found. Act 3: Player has most experience in human-controlled area, so it is them who gets to do business in the big port city where all the support from the human's mainland arrives. From the sewer base, reconnaissance, sabotage and support missions to strengthen the local gangs (which are hostile to each other) are done. This is the longest act. Shittons of different missions are done by the player. The city becomes more and more chaotic. Sometimes the player sets stuff on fire. Sometimes they steal extremely valuable items, sometiems they frame officials - or assassinate them... Places get heavier guarded and look more and more desolate. Gang contacts yield opportunities for missions too. Message arrives from home that a solution might have been found. Player is to find out of the whereabouts of an ancient artifact and recover it. Player discovers in missions that the artifact has been brought to a keep in the human's homeland. So player needs to somehow travel to the human homeland with one of humans' big ships. Player is in a huge port city in humans' homeland. Finds a new hideout in the sewers (seriously the only place humans don't like to lurk around) and does reconnaissance missions to find out where the keep is. At that occasion, some opportunity sabotage and assassinations can be executed too. Player finds out where teh keep is and travels there. Player finds a way into the keep, finds out where the artifact is, finds out how to get through the mundane and magical safety and security measures and steals the artifact. The artifact immediately takes ownership of the player and commands them to collect the other artifacts of its set. Player travels to other places and does missions to retrieve the artifacts. Player immediately knows where the artifacts are which aren't protected but also has to do missions to find out where the protected ones are kept. The artifacts are reunited, player does the ritual to combine them and the entity within them demands a new worthy body and a kingdom to rule over. Player finds out where the humans' king is and gets closer and closer, finally touching the king with the artifact. The artifact disintegrates, its former tenant moves inside the king, the possession of player ends and player immediately kills the king (there is a reason why that entity could have been captured in the first place) and the entity is gone (probably just died like a normal person) - but so are the artifacts. Player travels back to port city, finds a ship headed towards home, sets sail - and arrives at port city it rat peoples' homeland. the city is more or less like it was when player left - just a bit more run down. Player travels back to their rat people village and reports. Act 4: Missing other options, the rat council decides to continue the covert resistance against the city dwelling humans. The pagans have "joined" the resistance mainly by raiding weaker frontier villages. But they also raid more in general now. So the player is sent to investigate, why... But that is content for the first DLC. Gameplay: Semi-open maps (maybe even a whole village as "open world" but no actual open-world-sized open world). Mechanics that interact with eachother waiting to be exploited by players in (un)anticipated ways. Real shadows, real sounds, some parcour (plus sliding down ladders/pipes/ropes, hanging down ledges and procedural free climbing). The blackjack, the rat's claws, the rat's teeth, the broadhead (but none of the other arrow types). No mines or grenades in most missions (just an unlimited supply of stones for distraction). No potions (maybe holy water to throw on the ground or directly at undead), healing by eating (very slow regeneration). Lockpicks with various designs (the minigame is the same but you don't have to choose the pick or change it in the middle and for some locks a purely cosmetic tension wrench is used for immersion's sake too). Missions are selected from the main menu, from a menu when using an exfiltration point, from a menu that pops up when frobbing a map in one of the hideouts or camps - or by talking with other people. Where game world consistency allows for it, missions are playable in any order. Once-completed missions can be replayed at any time. You can save whenever you want like in TDM and there are autosaves triggered on mission start/completion, map change and at mission-specified events. Tech & development: Unreal Engine 5, SpeedTree, prerendered AI-generated voices (they are good enough now), game mechanics from TDM plus a bit more procedural parcour, better physics and a dialog system. The stim system is rad and has to be in there too. Missions are mostly like small-to-medium-sized TDM maps. Assets are made in Blender, maps are made in Unreal. If something is needed that is missing in unreal or Blender, a plugin for Unreal or Blender is created... As it is impossible to fund such a niche game completely in advance, the game is developed as early access with modding as first-class citizen from the start and all plugins are released as FOSS as they are made (hoping to establish a Bethesda-style long-tail business due to people still buying the game ten years after creation because they want to play the mods).

Currently the absurd animation first does sortof a drop before actually mantling up. Just removing the drop part would make it much better already.

Maybe if i hold it a while to get the straight line trajectory. Didn't test. I just remember the throwing mechanic to be incredibly hard to predict.

Use case: Fire at something in front of an AI without a good path of approach, switch to blackjack run to AI and make it sleep.

Honestly, that could make flash bombs usable to a lot of players. The throw mechanic is completely unintuitive and a usability nightmare. But as an arrow it could be actually useful.

They may add as much bugs and jank as they want - if they also add the Bethesda-typical modability!

It will also release on GOG.

I tried it some years ago and it was already abandoned back then. It never got finished, and probably never will. Better try Monomyth after release (it looks like still being worked on, so there is hope).

As probably no one will dare to suggest it if i don't, i do it: Cyberpunk 2077 with Realistic Combat Overhaul (i also use 230+ other mods, but i might be a mod hoarder and you definitely can have a good stealth shooter experience with less than 30 mods) Obviously, that game isn't pure. You probably can ghost your way through a lot of the missions. But if you actually want to play nonleathal, you better play something else. Where it shines, is the world building and gameplay. You get a shit ton of exploration, a pretty diverse set of side missions some with exceptionally good story writing. And you can play most of it as a stealth game. While it is immersive, it isn't really a sim though. You can't use the environment in unexpected ways apart from some verticality (and even more verticality with mods). So yeah, it is more like Deus Ex if it where open world (world opens up after first main quest). But stealth was meant to be a viable option in the base game and with mods it actually is. P.S.: Also the two Styx games - they actually are hardcore stealth. And Arx Fatalis (ugly but aged better than thief).

Splitting functionality up into more files might be easier to do. In both cases, mappers wouldn't need to override the entire thing just to change tiny aspects of it (probably mostly looks and parameters).

1.5 GHz just isn't enough to get any good single-thread performance and games still need that even when they sortof are multithreaded today. But still kudos to them building their own CPU and it probably more than good enough for powering the offices needed to keep critical infrastructure working. Thanks for sharing.

Humans use semantic information to modulate pacing and pitch over sentences and even entire paragraphs. Having a language model like ChatGPT detect the semantic "features" of the text and feeding them as additional input into the speech synthesis model might reduce the amount of markup significantly or even eliminate the need for the common case where the speaker's emotional state is rather neutral and the meaning of the message matches the actual text. That might be a pretty intuitive way to provide additional emotional context that can't be derived from the text alone - like the state of the speaker (exhausted, happy...) or subtext (sarcastic, ironic, bragging, threatening). But just slapping an emoticon in front of some parts of the text might also work good enough when combined with a language model trained to detect them. I'm excited to see, which path speech synthesis will go. Pretty sure, results will become indistinguishable from professional voice-acting in the next few years.

The voice itself is pretty good. But the sentence pacing just doesn't exist. As a result, the voice has no emotion - it sounds "dead". That said, an emotionless dead-sounding voice would obviously be perfect for characters like Dagoth Ur...

As a player that uses the blackjack a lot, i would like to be able to move bodies over minor obstacles without the intermediate dropping.

I would welcome a minimal impact of movement on the light gem too. But we already have the footstep sounds and therefore it is just a nice-to-have which will likely not be implemented soon except if someone not working on the core game mods it in (if that is possible). If someone would try implementing it, they would probably calculate the lightgem brightness bonus from the silhuette (crauched, standing, wielding a weapon, carrying things or a corpse), the movement speed and the unmodified lightgem brightness (as currently calculated by the game). newBrightness = movementSpeedFactor * stanceFactor * carriedItemOrCorpseFactor * unmodifiedBrightness

No problem, was just amused about stumbling upon what had to be a post quoting SPAM which had since been removed. I assumed that you posted something angry targeted at the spamer and then edited the angry part out after the original post vanished by moderator magic. Leaving the quote with the actual SPAM in was pure irony gold... Btw, it is a common tactic to do some low-effort legit posts before starting to spam. I don't look at previous posts for SPAM detection. I most often don't even follow the links. After all, advertising a service in this thread is as obvious as it gets. That is bot-style bluntness...

Now that is some nice SPAM you are preventing from spoiling in your quote...

I would expect a completely static version only blurring farther away objects to be least intrusive. You can't know where the player actually looks at and mouse-"scanning" the screen gets unimmersive pretty fast. But like very cheap fog, a deapth of field effect could be used to enable more aggressive level of detail reductions for far-away objects. So i would see the effect more as a performance optimization for outdoor areas. It might enable mappers to create more realistic city streets which don't have to do an artifical sharp bend every few meters to allow for geometry culling. P.S.: Don't forget to turn the effect off when using the monocular.

Looks like yet another "horror"-themed shooter. Bethesda should instead focus on the Skyrim successor.

I totally get the eyehurt of that streamer. But it isn't the brightness of the guis in general. It is the contrast between the environment and the GUI. GUIs have the same brightness regardless whether you look at them in the shadows or in electric light. The result is that the newspapers actually hurts a bit when frobbing one in a dark environment because of the sudden brightness change. The white default newspaper assets obviously are the worst offenders. But even the beige parchment readables (and also the objective screen using a similar background) can be way too bright when opened in the shadows while playing in a lowlight environment. Considering the average value of the screen the user saw before opening the GUI might indeed work. The light gem value could also be a good enough indicator of environment brightness and is already calculated.

Sorry, but Iran is of geostrategic importance and therefore the people there can't live in peace. That sadly also includes the women. At least the war against Iran and its population is just an economic one - for now...

Try E9 1C 55.