Oktokolo

As https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21267-mod-save-at-will/ exists, the "no" option existing doesn't make any sense. And you missed the "Don't care" option for the second question. To every author out there: If you want to include save restrictions in your mission, just do so. People who don't like them, can disable them via a trivial mod. Do not feel obligated to waste one of the precious difficulty slots for a non-save-restricted hard mode or something like that. Just include it on all the levels you feel it belongs to - even easy if you fell it fits your mission.

Maybe, allow the updater to update to an itermediary "2.09a" where the only change is the added installer and that the post-update script replaces the updater with a shortcut (or symbolic link on linux) to the installer before starting the new installer.

I spent an hour researching the save restriction system, writing a tiny mod that turns it into the opposite and testing it on the only mission using the save restriction system available today. So it doesn't matter anymore, whether any difficulty level also contains save restrictions or not. Authors are free to experiment with save restrictions without having to consider the impact on player experience for us few who like to be able to save whenever we want.

I played almost all the missions ever made for TDM and am pretty sure, that you get more AI, more random patrol routes, less player tools (most often still more than plenty though), and sometimes even better hidden switches/routes/loot when playing the Expert difficulty of a lot of missions. The support for the three (not sure whether you could have more) difficulty levels is well-integrated into TDM and used by almost all authors to some extend. Tying some arbitrary restrictions to a difficulty level is just the most boring and obvious thing, a mapper can use the system for.

I don't like hacking the objectives system either - but someone has to give us special snow flakes our safe space where we can blackjack everyone with no remorse... Hardest step is to find a way to only prevent objectives from failing when that would actually make the mission fail. After that, the objective-related stuff would probably be almost the same for all the different restriction removal mod flavors.

Yes, every modification can break things. Even the anti save restriction mod might be able to do that at least indirectly by making players forget to use save items which may or may not need to be useed to trigger plot progression. And yes, extra challenge switches like this should be in the core game... But they aren't. As you can already read in this thread, some people indeed are just afraid of greatness freedom of choice. They don't get, that a minority of players wants to be able to mix and match difficulty modes - like in "i take all the AI and objectives but without that save/blackjack/loot/ghost/kill/whatever restriction, that has been slapped on top of an otherwise fine missions like some <whatever-ingredient-you-don't-like> on an otherwise good pizza". I definitely understand, why devs probably won't want to get involved in heated strawman battles about "progressiveness" or whatever absurd crap people come up with - just because they make another aspect of the game configurable from the settings screen or even just the command line. I guess, having stuff like this packaged into one tiny mod per changed thing is the best solution i can implement without becomming a TDM dev. So i did just that. Whether i actually manage to get the other (definitely more complex) mods working and whether they will break tons of missions, i don't know. But "Save At Will" literally only consists of a trivial change to just one core script file not used for anything else than the save restriction system. So i consider breakage to be unlikely.

No need to edit maps as there now is a mod for that: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21267-mod-save-at-will/#comment-469781

The recent discussion about save restrictions (peter_spy especially) convinced me, that the time for restriction removal mods has come. The first of the series disables save restrictions. Just drop zzz_saveAtWill.pk4 into your TDM folder and play any mission at any difficulty without save restrictions. Implementation details: I made tdm_savegame_admin::updateLoop in scripts/tdm_savegame_settings.script just set unrestricted save mode instead of whatever has been configured by the mission author. Other anti-restriction mods, i might do (most likely first): - Disable knockout restriction objectives and remove knockout immunities from AI - Disable Min loot objectives - Disable forced ghosting objectives - Disable kill restriction objectives - Open for suggestions zzz_saveAtWill.pk4

If i remember correctly, the "Savior Snaps" save system was the very first target of mods in that game... Maybe, that is the real solution to the whole save/kill/blackjack/ghost/minloot/whatever restrictions problem: Mods for fan missions. Does TDM already support mods overriding mission behaviour?

Enjoyed this mission on easy to avoid save restrictions and had fun. The ancient tomb theme never gets old and the mission executed well on it. The low-poly art style hints at the Tomb Raider series - and there indeed is some well-measured jumping and lots of verticality in this mission (yes, a map would have been nice).

I normally just copy the whole fms folder from the old version to the new one after a fresh install. If i don't do the a fresh install, i copy the whole TDM folder and then just update to the desired version. I had some missions refusing to update properly or getting stuck in an update loop some TDM versions ago. But i deleted the offender's folders and after the redownload of just that few missions, everything was fine again.

Just state the required TDM version prominently in the anouncement, so direktlink clickers know what they get themselves into. Getting more users to install the beta is good - more testers means a better TDM with less bugs faster for everyone. The Beta seems pretty stable to me. So it isn't likely, they get a worse experience by playing on the newer version anyways.

Missions can state the minimum required TDM version in their Darkmod.txt. They are not started by older versions then. And iirc they aren't offered to older TDM versions for download either.

AFAIR potential copyright violations (TDM assets are released under a non-commercial license) where not a reason at all - not even "inter alia".

"help" and "?" typed in the console could list available commands with a one-liner about what they do.

Yes, definitely important knowledge. So as listing available console commands isn't something i ever managed to do ("help", "?", "list", "commands", "cmds"... nothing i can intuitively come up with, lists them)... What actually are the commands for setting hue, saturation, luminance and glow-width?

While definitely clearly visible even in dim lighting, the black glow outline (preset 6) looks good to me. It still has some glitches. But they don't jump right in your face in dim to dark environments. Most environments in TDM are dim or dark.

I get, why the engine has to restart and that this requires a full restart of the application. But couldn't the install/select button just do both: Install/select the mission if not already installed/selected and restart the application (and therefore the engine) and start the mission by giving a command line argument to the new application instance? When wanting to load an old save of a non-selected/installed mission, aborting the briefing to the menu would still be possible.

Couldn't there just be a little bit of pulsating grey be overlayed over the targeted geometry? Primitive example for pulsating grey: https://glslsandbox.com/e#78468.1 (imagine it overlayed with plenty of alpha over whatever the pixel would show when not frob targetted).

Wonder what drove the peaks in 2014 and 2019? And yes, there definitely seems to be a solid lower limit of eight missions per year. Maybe, mappers are more likely to start a contest near the end of a year when there are less than eight new missions released so far...

Now that was a welcome and healthy snack of a mission.

You missed it because you package by zipping your current mod folder instead of first coppying selected stuff to a separate folder and then zipping that. Other stuff, not recommended to put into the pk4: "__trash__" (38 MiB), "savegames" (7 MiB), "guis\assets\loading_screen_old.tga" (2MiB), the autosave and *.bak files in "maps" (11 MiB), the duplicated "darkmod.txt"/"readme.txt"/"startingmap.txt"/"xdata" in "sound" (all tiny), "consolehistory.dat" (tiny), and "xdata\backup" (tiny). I am not a mapper, so this are only the obvious cases. There might be more or not. P.S.: You are probably not the only one who packs hundreds of Megabytes of ballast with their mission. Downloading all missions on a new install takes forever nowadays...

That isn't cheap or unexpected at all - but literally the "sim" in "immersive sim" in action. Surfaces determines impact noise. Paper is a rather silent material compared to harder materials like stone and tile. So of course you can just silently land on paper. Not unexpected at all (but i didn't thought about that too). Granted, a single sheet wouldn't be much in real life. But it still is just a game and the engine has its limits. I would still allow dropping sheets and books to dampen a fall for any level of ghosting allowing the non-plot-forced use of non-consumables because it probably reduces the overall waiting time quite a bit. But as with all gameplay mechanics, you could outlaw it explicitly for "Supreme Ghost Mode".

So someone mentions a four times increase in pk4 filesize and you aren't the slightest curious about what happened? Well, i was: "sound\ambience\Sounds of Space music.wav" is 330 MiB in size and only contains drone sounds for torturing owners of bass-capable audio equipment - a pretty good candiate for deletion or at least compression into ogg-vorbis like the rest of them...

Looks like there are GUI system changes in 2.10 and that addon is probably based on Dragofer's version for 2.07, which is based on the original GUI from back then. Chances are, that it has to be updated to work with 2.10 even if it worked fine with 2.09. I recommend mentioning the issue in the linked thread if you are still interested in using the addon.