Oktokolo

I have the suspicion, that most of the unfair acuity is caused by room-to-room leaks. When you can hear a guard walking by outside the room as if it where inside the room, chances are that the audio system actually assumes it being inside the room. Dmap can't warn you about improper room-to-room sealing - and beta testers are often experienced players, which barely make any noise anyways. I expect there to be tons of these internal sealing bugs in existing missions.

I really doubt that i would use this feature myself and chases are a pretty rare occurence in my playstyle anyway. But enabling humanoid AI in general to open unlocked doors whithout pausing could make AI door handling look way less robotic. Slamming em open would definitely be a bit over the top most of the time though. So the quick open probability and door open/close speed factors should probably be configurable for each alert level on the AI.

Iris. After that you should abstain from TDM for some weeks, to let your spoiledness level cool down to a reasonable level again before playing the other top-rated missions.

Looks like multiloot® finally solves the problem with hard-to-frob coin stacks in the common under-the-counter cash box. Almost every mission has one or more of these. It is a far better solution to the problem than the totally-not-a-crosshair frob helper. I will definitely use it. Btw I played Prey too - but totally missed the multiloot® feature. Would be nice to mention it in the tutorial and have a descriptive tooltip in the settings as it is quite an unexpected quality of life feature when comming from games which don't have it.

Most spacious rooms, best ventilation and comfortable beds - had fun robbing this train and would definitely do it again.

Repeating crossbows where pretty inaccurate and mostly used balistically by non-soldiers to rain clouds of bolts on the battle field. I doubt, that they would be a good weapon for a guard or the different player characters in TDM.

Yes, in a lot of missions, the architects are ridiculously ignorant about door opening direction. In general, doors should open into the rooms, not the hallways. And while there don't seem to be any regulations about that in "the city", that is something, authors surely could know from first hand experience as it almost always is that way in real life... But we also see timberframed buildings with vertical beams cut by windows in most TDM missions, so i doubt that architectural realism is valued a lot in this community...

Don't worry, i play with doors not automatically opening and report all such cases i stumble upon. So in general, missions released till a month ago should be fine. And when playing a mission at release date, noclip still works as advertised.

You can configure doors to not automatically open on unlock in the settings menu.

Proof of the ivory tower's existance:

Sometimes i stumble over links to posts that only result in an eaccess denied message. So there seems to be a hidden private board somewhere in this forum where the devs discuss all the really interesting stuff.

If they would use your patch as a base - wouldn't players using your patch get crashes because of duplicate definitions or script objects?

The updater knows the checksums - it scans the installed files and compares checksums to known ones for the desired version to select the files to download. So only replacing the corrupted file and continuing with the downloading is the logical thing to do. Almost every web server and browser out there also supports resuming of partially downloaded files - so if we had checksums for individual chunks of N MiB in size, only at most N MiB would need to be redownloaded on corruption or disconnect. Some of TDMs pk4s are hundreds of mega bytes in size and there still are regions (like Australia, China or Germany) where a stable and fast internet connection isn't the norm yet. I myself only had a slow and shaky wireless "broadband" connection for some months last year. I had to surf the web with images disabled sometimes... Downloading TDM would have taken days (but i would have still tried if i hadn't it installed already).

So what you actually want is corrupted files to just get redownloaded from another mirror instead of cancelling the installation?

Full PBR and global illumination next?

Well, i guess, apart from facing criminal prosecution in a country, he would never visit anyways - he also is a combatant now. Might have way more drastic consequences than just ending a career.

My suggestion is to just use the volume of the sounds, the player hears - as that is, what has to be calculated anyways. It isn't the most realistic way to do it. But it is cheap and easy to gauge for players as they can hear the noise level at their position.

The base ambience loop normally isn't loud at the player position (and every single time it actually was, it also was quite annoying). So yes, it should lead to an acuity adjustment factor of zero. The acuity adjustment factor can be offset by a constant value to achieve that. And a bonus would be, that volumes below that offset value would actually lead to higher acuity - matching real world experience. So: Less acuity in noisy environments - but more acuity in silent environments.

Player action audio masking could even be automatic. The cheapest solution would be to reduce player-generated sounds by a factor determined from current overall ambient loudness at the player position. Sounds at the player position have to be calculated anyway, so the extra CPU load should be negligible. Obviously, that would be a pretty naive solution, because noise at the AI location would not be taken into account. But it would still be an improvement to immersion and mappers could still tweak the acuity of the common machinist working in the boiler room.

If you did not decide on a legibility enhancement method yet: Blurring the background and/or rendering the text with a dark one-pixel wide outline works pretty well with almost any background.

Thought experiment: The Warsaw Pakt still exists and Canada is about to join it. I know exactly, what the USA would have thought about that. Yeah, sure, i would really like to believe Nato to be a purely defensive alliance while we drone civilians to death in various countries far far away. The thing is, that we literally fought wars for oil. I would like to be on moral high ground against dictators like Putin. But sadly its all moral flatlands till the horizon. There aren't any hills to stand on.

The thing with Russia is, that it actually can be fully self-sufficient when managed correctly. It has fertile land, fossil energy deposits (oil, gas, Uranium), sustainable energy sources (wood, wind), building materials (stone, clay, sand, wood), iron ore, some other ores and even diamonds... With a strong leader they could be fully self-sufficient in a matter of a few years. But they don't even have to, as they share a border with China. China is the biggest single market and basically the factory of the world. China also could easily be self-sufficient - and is working on that since a few years already. Russia + China = World dominance! Both: Economically and military! We are pretty stupid, so we force Russia to finally make friends with China right now. We should have not expanded Nato eastward back then in 1999. But now we are also in a world trade war which we actually started. Could be worse: We could also try to invade Russia in winter... again.

Not sure whether 32 bit version of TDM is able to use more than 2 GiB RAM. So try the 64 bit version first. But huge maps like Iris may just not fit into 4 GiB either. So maybe, you have to upgrade...

Looks like doors have a spawnarg "open_on_unlock" set to "1" by default. That spawnarg is ignored for users with "open doors on unlock" set to "no". You could try setting this to "0" to make that unfrobable doors behave the same for all players.

Thanks, Worked. The installer first failed with ini not found. But after restarting it, it worked and found beta210_8. Can't have been a permission issue - TDM is installed in an ordinary c:\games folder not protected by the system like all my games. As game devs are ultra-ignorant when it comes to adhering to any platform-specific standards even on the mainstream desktop game launcher OS, i don't install games into c:\program files...