Airship Ballet

Oh yeah totally just throw that out there. You just can't resist showing off, can you. You're the worst kind of people. This partnership is over.

It's certainly not for everyone! It breaks away from tradition with the new stuff, which is where I think it becomes divisive, but I assure you it doesn't just do it for the sake of it. Since I wanted the campaign to grow exponentially I had to start small otherwise I'd set the bar too high for the next missions, which also means tight corridors and a bank built on a budget. The complaints obviously vary from player to player: most people found it way too easy and short, and several thought that the abundance of loot was refreshing. Really the map started as an exercise in more complex systems with DR entities, and ended up a small map. After that I decided I wanted to do a series of bank missions and turned it into a proper mission. It's cramped, intentionally so, and the small floor space means I was really restricted when pathing the AI. I obviously wasn't going for story because, well, it's a bank job in the vein of earlier T2 missions in which you're stealing for stealing's sake. You don't have a nemesis, nor are you stealing some ancient relic or doing a favor for anyone: the only real focus is the vault and how to get into it. The second mission out addresses pretty much all of the above issues, because most if not all of the issues raised are caused by its size. I could only do so much with the space, so it ends up underwhelming and sometimes frustrating. That said, it's an introduction, and hopefully once the whole thing's finished it'll fit in nicely. With regards to ambient light I've always been a proponent of darkness. While no ambient light at all is unrealistic, I still like to leave it dark in the dingier, window-less areas. I think too many FM authors have done their work an injustice by cranking up the indoor ambient light and making everything look washed-out, so I want to avoid that and keep it atmospheric. Speaking of atmosphere, the map itself isn't particularly thematic, so I was stumped with regards to ambient sounds. I'll be changing them come the third mission's release because it's a common complaint I forgot about while changing it this time around. I just went for those repetitive drones, which I like but others apparently don't. I'll add some sound wherever I've set it to be silent, too. While it was intentional (and isn't unfinished), it striking you as odd is the last thing I want. Thanks for taking the time to respond

Yesssssssss

You're doing God's work, Son.

I never said there was, that was someone else suggesting to use Steam servers as a mirror, which no, not viable.

Yeah, me too. While the alternative poses no real problems, it's just far simpler to have everyone working from the same install, especially when it comes to bug-fixing and the like.

But there is. It's entirely possible for it to be released as St Lucia and the training mission. Were somebody to verify their game cache, it would install St Lucia and the training mission. The other option is to include every mission and add new ones via free product updates that change the master copy on Steam for all future installs. Again, very, very simple. Here's a possible scenario. Game installs with the wonderful, sublime, timeless Quinn Co. campaign. Somebody uses the in-game downloader which will work in tandem with Steam to download the endlessly praised classic that is Exhumed. The copy Steam has only installs Quinn Co, and now you've gone ahead and downloaded another mission it doesn't recognise! What's a Steam client to do?! Nothing. Steam makes sure you have every file on its checklist of the master copy. It does not remove the additional content. Since TDM works by way of plug-ins, nothing would be registered as amiss by Steam were you to add a few more .pk4s via the downloader. If there were edits to the base game, they would be reverted upon either verifying your game's integrity or installing an update. If you add in a file that isn't part of Steam's master copy it doesn't do a single thing to it when you download an update or verify your game's integrity. If something you do makes a base change to a file included in Steam's master copy, it will revert it back to the copy that it has on file in the event of an update or intentional reversion by the player. Now again: since TDM is plugin-based and reads entirely from the .pk4s you have installed and vanilla assets the map maker used, it's not an issue. Any changes made to the base install as a result of the mission downloader would not even change until an update is released. All that would happen at most is an installed mission needing to be uninstalled and reinstalled to fix any discrepancies an update would cause.

Where on Earth did you get login systems from? We're talking about whether or not to use the current mirrors and risk an overload on release, or use Steam servers and post newly released FMs as updates.

I suppose by that logic you're a big fan of Fifty Shades of Grey, too? Loading individual pages to click on a button is just categorically inefficient. If you want to unsubscribe from all your mods, there isn't a button to get rid of them all, and they're not usually all stored in convenient .pk4s for you to just delete. TDM's system is as tidy as TES plugins: there's no need for change to it. Already done: they've all been answered. I covered everything both BGS and guys in charge of Greenlight had to ask of one another.

Everything that TDM is now is as it should be. Steam isn't being considered in order to change things up, it's just hosting TDM as-is in order to reach a wider audience and give people working on both mod and missions the spotlight they deserve. One concern was, however, that an influx of Steam users would overload the mirrors similar to the period after the mod went Standalone. That would be a reason to include the current mission library in the Steam install, not any sort of problem with the downloader itself. Downloader's fine, works just as well if not better than all level selectors/downloaders in Steam games with level editors. It's sure as shit more efficient than Steam's Workshop: you can select every single FM, go make a coffee and watch some TV and come back with all the game's content on your hard drive, meanwhile on Steam you're having to open and load every single item's page one at a time, clicking subscribe then going back to the list and waiting for it to load all the thumbnails again. Even on fibre it's a nuisance. I'm not saying you ever suggested Steam Workshop, don't get me wrong, I'm just saying that as far as mission downloaders go, TDM has pretty much nailed it.

When you're set to release, you'll show up in upcoming for a little while, and also be in new releases for a fair bit afterwards. A lot of people will jump on from that and Greenlight alone, but yeah people who play Thief or Splinter Cell or whatever will end up being recommended TDM, see that it's free and hopefully give it a go!

Don't be obnoxious about it. I never actually saw you directly offer to straight-up publish it, which is probably my fault if it was in this thread. All the same, a stealth release wouldn't do anybody any favors. The whole point of putting it on steam is to garner publicity at the same time to grow the community: the last thing you want is to silently release in an instant and become lost in obscurity. The only people who would hear about it are the people who already know about it, but greenlight is the best way to make yourself known on Steam before releasing, because free games aren't very commonly plastered over the store page.

Shot in the dark is that everything is also part of the "Default" layer, or whatever layer has the star next to it when you begin to build. If you've been going around pressing "add to layer" then you've got a bunch of stuff on one layer and the Default layer, meaning that when you hide your own one, they're still visible because Default is visible. You need to either use the "move to layer" command or select everything and remove it from Default.

I think I'ma just keep posting recommendations in here. Plenty of really fun stuff dropping into my cart lately. World of Guns - a F2P game about taking apart and reassembling guns. Sounds boring, is actually a huge amount of fun. I'm not a gun nut, definitely not: I can name the popular ones that pop up all the time in shooters but have no idea how they perform against one another, what sets them apart etc. I got this expecting it to be really American dull and educational, but it's actually European a fun test of memory, agility and precision. It's basically free, but you use EXP earned from working on a gun to unlock the next one, and it gets progressively harder to unlock them as you go. There are shortcut buy-ins and the like if you enjoy it enough anyway.

They do different things, neither of which affect the steam Glad you liked 'em, more on the way!~

Sounds to me like it didn't trigger the frobability properly because it's set to be frobable when the case is fully opened and you stopped it somehow.

I'm not sure I follow. Is the proposal to establish an FTP and in-game GUI specifically for a very select few people to download and use in their maps? I think a forum-based hub for it is the best alternative, that or a webpage open for everyone to download from. As Steve said, extracting an archive into the root darkmod folder and refreshing DarkRadiant is incredibly trivial when in the middle of mapping. It's way, way more effort to integrate a Dark Mod Workshop. There've been a few attempts to start up hub threads where people link to assets, but they've never really taken off. I have a ton of prefabs I'm planning on posting in a "Merry's Stuff" thread not long from now, but I'd make a general "Stuff" thread and host everything in a public Dropbox folder if it's actually in demand.

- It's a DirectDraw overlay, far as I know. Since others like it (FPS counters and hooks for recording software) work just fine, I don't think you'll need to worry about that. You can add non-steam games to Steam and have the overlay just plain work so long as it uses openGL/DirectX and has no overlays of its own. I know for a fact that it works with the current build of TDM because I've added it as a non-steam game long ago and use the overlay from it all the time, no problem. - That comes later once you're in cahoots with people and they're notifying you of any changes to make. The real focus here should be letting people know. It's less important, obviously, since sales aren't paying off your mortgage. All the same, you wanna be promoting on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, whatever you can to get yourself out there, and that Greenlight page better be convincing! I'd love to contribute to the Greenlight spread, at the very least. Since it seems to be generally accepted that Steam is a good thing, though, said Greenlight page should be put together and uploaded at the earliest convenience of everyone involved.

I've been told off/patronised on Youtube for leading guards to pitch black and KOing them after being seen in my T1 FM videos. I've been raised to believe that I'm a terrible thief, and watching this is a huge relief.

You'd be surprised what you can trademark. Cadbury almost got away with trademarking their particular tone of purple. Anyways, Melan posted links to the technical terms. They really do have to pursue their copyright if they want to actually own their own branding. They don't have a choice, because while they don't want to stop Persson from using 'Scrolls' they do want to stop someone making an Eldar Scrolls game in a decade. IIRC he won in the end anyway, didn't he? I'm sure some dirtbag will come along and copy the name near-as-dammit (with some change to Elder since they let 'Scrolls' slide) and prove the necessity of that kind of legal action. I imagine your argument is why they lost, but it's also why we'll have a few X Scrolls games on the app store in short order.

It was specifically because of the word scrolls, and not because Bethesda wanted to but because they have to protect their copyright. American copyright laws are bizarre, in that if you don't really pursue your rights to your name, you can eventually lose all rights to it entirely. They had to do it again recently for a game with "Fallout" in the name. If they didn't, someone might start a new game called Fallout--that's completely different to Bethesda's--but because they didn't defend the word 'Fallout' in the first case, they aren't allowed to prevent it being used in that way the second time around and into the future, and then lose their claim to it altogether.

No? The Moddb announcement is pretty spiffy!

I plan to, thanks!

Since I'm sending you all spelunking for mission #3, I think it's only fair you get a little sump'n sump'n to see which drops are fatal and which are the way forwards. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFRIEMBUaUc&feature=youtu.be Strike the Earth!