Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Oktokolo

Member
  • Posts

    852
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by Oktokolo

  1. 2 hours ago, JackFarmer said:

    One would wish for the old home computer or PC times back when the players still had to show a certain standard knowledge in order to be able to install and play games at all.

    You don't and shouldn't need special knowledge to install a game. The game's installer or your repo's package manager installs the game adhering to the OS-specific standard where things go - and then the game just works™.

    So if they would start ranting about problems running the game due to permission problems or the like - yep, that would indeed be TDMs fault (i believe, that sort of problems have been fixed with the new installer though).

    And when it comes to actually playing the game...
    Yes, they will rant and some will also troll - as they always do. It happens for all games in all genres on steam and everywhere else. Not a big deal if you don't need the game to be a financial success.

    TDM isn't for everyone. But it isn't only for people older than X either. The playerbase isn't static. It ages as every human does. Some die. Some are newly born.
    I expect there to be a lot of players already which just don't know, that a better version of the graphically badly aged thief series exists and comes with over hundred levels...

    Somehoe this community just expects them to know - but most likely a lot of them don't, because TDM isn't mainstream and niche games in general are hard to find.
    I stumbled upon most good stealth games around ten years after release. And i searched.
    Some i still find only through GOG (like the Death to Spies series).

    Maybe , bringing TDM to GOG would work too - as gamers there are less mainstream-AAA-centered.

    • Like 1
  2. 14 hours ago, Kurshok said:

    I disagree. The American Revolution brought freedom to the colonies. Then the Civil War brought freedom to the slaves.

    Okay, WW2 was just the last example where it worked.

  3. 4 hours ago, Kurshok said:

    And it's not about making the war go on longer, although I don't mind if that happens so long as freedom is maintained for the Afghanistani people and the current terror we see with young war brides being taken and schools being shut down is stopped.

    There is only one example where war actually brought freedom - and that was against the highly hierachical and centralized Nazis which started WW2 to conquer Europe.

    Since then, each try on bringing freedom with bombs failed epicly to the point that not even the imperium believes in bringing freedom with bombs anymore.

    ISIS exists, because we systematically bombed away any structure of power that would have prevented that from happening.
    And getting new suicide bomber recruits is dead easy if you search for them in a region where everyone knows someone who lost a family member by drone strike.

    • Like 1
  4. On 8/26/2021 at 12:59 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

    We have modern graphics and quality assets unlike those times, but with the same raw gameplay based on feel and immersion rather than hand-holding and falsely trying to look cool.

    I actually experience TDMs stealth system as way more player friendly than what i see in AAA games. The light gem clearly communicates your visibility and surfaces looking silent are silent - while in other games stealth is more trial and error (and often light and sound are completely ignored).

    • Like 2
  5. 21 hours ago, Kurshok said:

    There's a resistance group that's holding off the Taliban currently in one of the cities. I'll go search up where again.

    Edit: Ahmad Mahmoud is their leader, in the mountains of Panjshir.

    A suicide bomber of the "Islamic State" killed 100+ people at Kabul airport.
    So if you really like that war to go on longer, you could also support them.

    • Like 1
  6. 16 hours ago, stgatilov said:

    By the way, when I could not find something, I often walked around the rooms of interest while constantly frobbing all walls/tables/everything...

    Just turn on the wireframe and you will see the switch on the underside of a desktop as a blob of tiny tris... 

  7. 4 minutes ago, Kurshok said:

    It would be better for humanity to die free than live as slaves.

    Well, currently about 1% of humanity is living free and while i don't expect that number to significantly change in the near future.
    While a sudden death of 99% of the population would certainly help a lot on stopping the ongoing terraforming, i somehow am not quite able to actually wish for that to happen though...

    • Like 1
  8. 1 minute ago, Kurshok said:

    I think we should regroup our troops into where the resistance against the Taliban currently resides and try a pushback.

    It really doesn't look like there is any resistance against the Taliban.

    There is plenty of resistance against outsiders bombing wedding ceremonies though...

    • Like 1
  9. As someone who barely uses any single-use equippment, i obviously would have no use fgor crafting in the missions we currently have...

    But: If you can pull off Arx-Fatalis-level crafting and design missions in a way that single-use equippment is actually useful or even required for success - that would probably be some fresh gameplay i would like.


    Maybe it would be best to start small though:

    - Could start a mission with creating some picks on a workbench from metal scraps.

    - The original blackjack is just some leather sock filled with sand or granulated lead. Surely a textile sock and some moist sand could work for a night too...

    - Vine and moss arrows could be made by combining water arrows with some (enchanted? maybe we are somewhat pagan?) vine roots or moss.

    - Water arrows could be made from a regular blunt arrow (do not exist in the game yet, just a broadhead without the head) and some small water container (noisy on impact) or water crystal (magical?).

    - Basic cooking should be easy to pull off and giving away food is a pretty rare objective in current missions.

    - Copying keys could make sense when guards would actually start searching for missing keys and basically make other guards start searching too (not a real alert but effect is sorta same). Would need beeswax or clay for making the mold. Then put key back before it is noticed missing. Then get to some workshop, heat metal and cast it or file down a blank. Use copy to open (or lock) something.

    - Copying documents might also make sense in some missions.

    - Currently almost no social stealth exists in TDM. Disguises could change that. Maybe steal some clothes, adjust them to your measures and then be recognized as someone else (like in Hitman, but you have to alter the clothes somehow before you can use them successfully).

    - Making poisons and applying them to your broadheads or sword could replace the gas arrow and mine.

    • Like 1
  10. 21 hours ago, Kurshok said:

    Which actual people; though?

    Well, the people that actually live there of course.

    And the Infrastructure is just a side effect of trade. China wants minerals. But they aren't the common colonial power like us westeners. They go the cheap route: Be nice to the locals in power, bring your own infrastructure and get the minerals you want without needing a massive groundforce to control the mines and transport routes.

    Whether the Taliban will just siphon up the money and do like us westeners do - or whether they let the whole population benefit - that only time can tell.
    We know that they are strictly against drugs - so maybe, the USA can at least parrtially just win its war on drugs by not even trying anymore...

  11. Let us all hope, that China's politics of "we give you infrastructure and you give us minerals" works out better for the actual people there than USA's "our hellfires bring you freedom and democracy - please tell us any cell phone numbers you want us to blindly bomb".

    • Like 1
  12. If you have to use some antivirus for compliance reasons, Windows Defender will let you add that checkmark on the list...

    But personally i don't use any snakeoil.
    Detection rates are abyssmal for current treats and the common snakeoil solutions are running all sorts of parsers in a way too powerful security context. The only thing they really improve a lot is the attack surface.

  13. The only way a species can diverge into different "races" is, when there isn't much intercourse. So that can only happen on earth after global travel died. Interstellar travel is almost impossible without fusion power - which always was, always is and maybe always will be just fifty years away...

    Most countries are already dystopias, free will for the majority is always an illusion and most probably also know that. Greed for wealth and power doesn't really seem to die. The terraforming project also has already did enough harm - so climate will continue to get worse both politically and metheorologically for some decades from now.

    The future is all biblical plagues caused by humankind itself.

     

    • Sad 1
  14. 4 hours ago, demagogue said:

    Yes, I think it's mostly come down to needing a champion in the inner circle, and we can't exactly have someone outside the inner circle making decisions about it; cf. the trust thing again.

    If a random dog from the Internet would decide to bring TDM on Steam, he could do just that as TDM is released under a set of licenses permissive enough to allow just that (as long as you do not in any way profit commercially from it).

    But i like the idea of using a non-profit for it - as that legal vehicle exists in a lot of countries and might indeed allow to claim responsibility without actually doing so... 😇

  15. 7 minutes ago, SeriousToni said:

    You can't?? 😳

    I tried for half an hour in the newly updated No Honour Among Thieves v4 - EFX Edition campaign in the basement in level 3.
    Guess some dev thought it to be too cheesy and "fixed" that fun stim/response exploit away.

    Dousing torches held by guards was a significant part of my water arrow usage (i am a hoarder and rarely spend water arrows on static light sources)...

    • Sad 1
  16. 2 hours ago, peter_spy said:

    As we all know, stealth games like SC or TDM these are about scanning the environment, assuming a strategy and trying to execute it. The finite aspect of player resources is important and makes for different setups mappers can create. Whether it's a whistle or a mic-based sound, you're giving the player an infinite resource to cheese through your map, and it makes the gameplay awfully boring. I bet that the number of mappers that would want that is excatly 0.

    The "whistle" already is in TDM - it is just called "jumping" here.

    I use it whenever i would use the whistle in other games.
    I almost never use noisemaker arrows and for me, cheesing is part of the fun (so sad, that you can't water-arrow-splash guard-carried torches anymore).

  17. 11 hours ago, Anderson said:

    [Just do it!]

    I don't know anything about the legal system in Moldova, but it is a small former soviet state, not in the EU, and has a low GDP...
    You might indeed be immune to the legal risk preventing everyone else from doing it.

    So yes: Just do it!

  18. 18 hours ago, OrbWeaver said:

    So, who's volunteering to do all of this on behalf of the Dark Mod team?

    That they want to know who you are and how to handle payment and taxes if you ever sell something on their shop, really is to be expected and shouldn't surprise anyone.
    That they want 100 USD upfront is their way to prefilter against the worst shovelware (which became a real problem some years ago).

    The things listed aren't the reason, nobody (including me) does it.

    The thing not on the list is the problem:
    If, whoever currently owns the Thief IP, sees the game on Steam and claims copyright, Steam tells them to contact you. And if you are legally reachable, you then have a legal department of basically unlimited resources and life time on your arse.
    That is the worst case, but it can happen if you are living in a democratic lawful country where it is to be expected that a copyright law suit financially ruins you for twenty years even if you win in the end.

    • Like 1
  19. 10 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

    I feel it would make most sense with the VR branch: This would be very fitting with its goal of immersion and using the player's body to control the character. And if someone would bother implementing the feature for that, there would be no reason not to back-port it to the vanilla engine too as it's not technically VR dependent.

    Yep, might be nice in VR. But in keyboard/mouse mode you would have to filter out the keyboard clicketiclackety - certainly doable but definitely not trivial...

  20. 11 hours ago, Dragofer said:

    Steam probably just wouldn't accept a submission from a legal entity that's in a country without copyright enforcement. If the copyright claimants can't get at the "owner" of the game, then they'd just go for Steam itself?

    Steam definitely allows a single person from Russia to have multiple games (paid and free) on their platform:
    https://store.steampowered.com/developer/AleksandrGolovkin

    I doubt, that Steam actually cares about Copyright. It is probably more a compliance thing for them. They have to let someone sign something so they can say that they did all they could.

    This game clearly comes from a country famous for their copyright-enforcement (and yes, it isn't even available in english):
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1029500/_the_Three_Kingdoms_of_China

    So while the majority of games on Steam seems to be western world Indies, they certainly do not exclude the less copyright-sensitive countries...
    And they actually have nbo reason to - as has been already said, they can just remove a game on an incomming copyright claim until it has been resolved.

    What they seem to do check for (now, it was way different some years ago) is a minimum level of quality - which TDM definitely offers.

    9 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

    I don't remember if other open-source projects like Xonotic or 0ad are on Steam too, I believe at least Red Eclipse is...

    Red Eclipse 2 is:
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/967460/Red_Eclipse_2

    Battle for Wesnoth is too:
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/599390/Battle_for_Wesnoth

    • Like 2
×
×
  • Create New...