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GUFF

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Everything posted by GUFF

  1. Excellent, excellent mission. Easily the best I've played for Dark Mod out of the maybe ~30 I've played so far. I went in with no expectations as I'm new to Dark Mod and don't really have a feel for the authors but knew once I got just a few rooms into the basement and went through my inventory, the maps etc. that I was in for something special. If I had to compare it favorably to any kind of mission made for T1/TG/T2/TDS, I'd probably compare it to Transitions in Chaos: Conspiracies in the Dark for T2 which was just a legendary mansion mission. You've got a story with multiple layers going on here, from the one woman everyone seems to trust with their money and other info to that staircase where the accident happened and how it all ties in with the guy who you're there to steal from, among other things to not spoil things much. Great visuals in the area design, with multiple ways to traverse some parts of the mansion. It's really a full-sized mission of better quality than you'd expect in a retail game, honestly. Beats many of the missions in the original Thief trilogy in quality, easily. I finished it in ~2h40m and was short about 700 loot it seems. No idea where it could be or if I missed any section of the mansion (the burned section is all inaccessible?) but definitely one I'll revisit sometime. That you're almost done a 2nd and 3rd map in the series is great. Looking forward to those for sure.
  2. No. They saw it in complete darkness from a distance and went alert and approached it. This also applied to zombies and spiders in similar conditions. I think I first noticed it while playing Knighton Manor, but Solar Escape was the mission I was playing around in when I was reminded of it and thought something was off. RJFerret confirmed it.
  3. More "would like it to" but a lot of less conspicuous behaviors such as light sounds from banging around while manipulating objects tend to alert AIs to higher levels than shooting them in the face with a water arrow currently does.
  4. There's a few tricks that make blackjacking easier but will affect your stealth score by causing the AI to at least stop and look. Walking behind them until they hear a sound and stop then switching your move speed over to sneak and popping them works very well. You can also mostly walk towards an AI and then break into a run and pop them before you make a footstep sound which sometimes may even stop them from raising your score if you're good at it. Depending on surfaces present, if you're on the quiet surfaces like carpet you can actually run. Another old tactic from the original Thief games is the jump-jack (which actually had an entry in the stats screen in the first two Dark engine Thief games) where you cover some ground without making any sound and land the blackjack mid-flight, just don't use it when multiple AIs are around unless you're landing on quiet surfaces. I don't blackjack as much in the Dark Mod as I used to in Thief because the guard patrol routes in most FMs are not awful and they tend to take some time to get to and back to wherever they were going, and then they usually have stops in their patrol routes as well. Ghosting is easier in TDM in my opinion. Once you get used to the mechanics, anyway.
  5. Odd scenario I've never run into, but yes. Actually being pelted with a water arrow should alert a lot of AIs into at least level 3 or 4. It tends to cause a level 1 or maybe 2 right now I believe unless you repeatedly shoot them.
  6. I noticed this before but it slipped my mind until I was playing an FM a couple hours ago, but there seems to be no check as to whether an AI can actually see a rope arrow's rope. It seems that even in complete darkness when there's no way they can see a player in the same light level, they'll still see a rope arrow and be alerted. Also, even non-intelligent AIs like zombies and spiders will also see and react to rope arrows like this, even in darkness.
  7. I posted about this on the TTLG thread right after release but the major issues I had were: For the first major puzzle, the The second issue was the 3 statuettes puzzle. The last part wasn't too bad, I guess most people are not that good at judging jump heights/lengths. I only died once because for some reason I didn't get to mantle. Mantling in Dark Mod is still a lot more forgiving than under the original Dark engine, though.
  8. Mirroring the loot requirements being kind of hard to fulfill. I only had... When I was done, and no idea really where the rest could be. I had to but couldn't find any more after that or even any ledges outside that looked like they could be roped up to, climbed up to, that contained any loot. Had issues finding the .
  9. Pretty great mission. Very unusual length for a DarkMod mission it seems-- I'm guessing largely because of engine restrictions, but you made it work by spacing things like the AIs out far enough. Longest DarkMod mission? Could be, although I've still got quite a few I haven't played yet. This mission reminds me of some of the longer T2 greats like "The Den" (L'Arsene series) and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit. I missed about 2000 loot on the top difficulty, which is pretty crazy. Maybe I'll replay it some day. I must have missed whole areas to have missed that much loot, or you're just sneaky and placing them up on beams and stuff like in that Definitely one of my favorite missions for DarkMod since I started playing it. Not quite as good as some of the Dark engine (T1/TG/T2) greats but I don't think you've been mapping for quite as long as some of those guys had been when they'd made those. The quality of this mission easily competes with original Thief series missions, though. That's something to be proud of for sure. One thing I don't get though (story-related?) -- what's the deal with the grocer?
  10. This is a great short mission. The dirty squalid look reminds me a lot of DrK's Rocksbourg series for Thief 2, and the low loot value objective along with really having to look for loot as well as the scrounging for equipment really helps convey that kind of setting.
  11. This is probably the mission that got me to download DarkMod as I saw a short 5 minute youtube clip of it. Still IMO the best overall mission I've played, as well, though I haven't played too many of them yet. Anyway I played it for a 2nd time under the new 2.01 patch and now ghosts have hair but still no heads. I don't know if that's "scarier" or not. Just wanted to post about it.
  12. Unfortunately I downloaded and updated every single mission available as of today with the ingame downloader showing nothing new available. So I can't test this myself unless I delete them all. Another issue I've noticed is that some missions download and then are checked as "Complete" despite never having played them... these are: The Chalice of Kings In Rememberance of Him Pandora's Box As for how I installed the game, I used the updater.
  13. I had similar issues as well. The updater would download the new version of the updater 97-99% (never 100%) and say it was "complete" and I'd restart the updater to find it didn't apply the update at all. So I had to replace tdm_updater.exe with the newest one from the website and then everything was fine--downloaded and replaced the rest of the updates with no issue at all. Bit off topic but on the subject of the in-game mission downloader, as a newer player of about a week I've noticed that it downloads older versions of missions first as there's immediately full-sized replacement updates/translations available after just downloading several missions that way.
  14. The AI hearing on certain surfaces in the Dark engine Thief games is insane. You can be crouched and sneaking and you'd be heard from quite far away so players ended up having to use a well-known bug where you shuffle forward a bit and stop before you make a footstep sound in areas with a lot of the loudest surfaces such as metal, tile, and gravel. In TDM it's much improved since you can crouch-sneak and no one will hear you unless you're right up next to them, but the trade-off is moving very, very slowly--whereas a practiced shuffler in Dark engine could move nearly walk speed. I just started playing TDM less than a week ago to give it a try and for what it is, I think it's alright. There are issues of course and I still think the overall gameplay of the Dark engine Thief games is better and more consistent, but there's still good fun to be had here. My major thing I don't like is combat. Not straight up combat which is just plain bad in both games and really melee combat is hard to implement well in a first person game so it's forgivable, but the "stealth" combat of sneaking up and one-hit killing an unaware enemy. Even when aiming for vitals and sneaking up behind a perfectly unaware target to use your sword, you can't easily kill, say, an undead AI. Backstabbing a haunt or two in Dark engine games to get rid of them was almost like blackjacking annoying guards in central areas that would seriously slow down your progress because avoiding them was too laborious and you had to pass through that area multiple times, but you can't really do it in this game to the undead. The bow is probably the hardest thing to adjust to in how high I have to aim to hit a target from a certain distance but does work as it should for the most part. Straight up combat (I rarely/never engage in it but this was evident in the training mission) is both better and worse at the same time. Better in that multiple enemies can more easily attack you rather than stumbling around each other like they did in Dark engine trying to get at you, but worse in that it's almost impossible to actually fight them unless they bug out and just stand there after swinging at you while only one of them continues the assault, which was the only way to really win the 3-on-1 fight in the training mission in such a small area. They also seem to swing through each other and hit you sometimes which is kind of weird. I haven't really spent a whole lot of time testing this aspect of the game but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to it and like in Thief it's not something that's a central part of the game anyway. Minor issues would be... How often I end up getting caught on geometry (usually while I'm checking out or hiding out in some room with unmovable furniture and having to reload my saved game because I cannot get out. The AI as a whole is better at noticing you when you do really dumb things than in the Dark engine games and I don't have a real complaint with that. The only real issue I have there with the AI is with pickpocketing where you need to be almost pressed up against them due to extremely small frob distance, although coming from playing Dark engine FMs on and off for the last 10 years I have noticed that in TDM you can actually almost be pressed up against an AI while in a narrow hallway hiding in the darkness and they still won't see you which would never work in Dark engine since I guess the player took up more space. So the optimal pickpocketing method seems to be hiding in the darkness in their patrol path while waiting for them to go by rather than walking behind them on a relatively silent surface and grabbing as they'll go into either alert level 2 or 3 if you try that on all but the most silent ones in TDM. I like that AIs will relock doors that you leave open but if you close them they won't. Kind of nice touch but also still gamey and works in the context of the game because you'd think realistically they'd still relock them anyway. Just means you have to be thorough in closing locked doors you know AIs will path through. Nice touch. Also nice touch is in some missions where the AI will relight some of the lights if you put them out, but I assume this has to be defined on an individual basis in the map editor. One thing I like about the missions I've played so far is that the authors have made patrol paths that make just avoiding enemies a better option or at least eqvuialent in time usage than KOing and hiding bodies. This was also possible in Dark engine but so many authors as well as the original level designers just made AIs on continuous paths with no stops for any reason which encourage just KOing them. Movement in general doesn't seem as smooth but at least mantling is more forgiving than it was in the Dark engine, although the fan-made NewDark patch had improved mantling vastly if you turn on the option for it in the config. One thing I always thought would be cool but probably really hard to implement is "reverse mantling" off of a ledge where you hang down then drop to make less noise on drop/prevent fall damage. I probably have more thoughts on this but this is just off the top of my head in 5 minutes or so.
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