wesp5

Really sad news! I too never met him, but I played and loved his series. I hope, as his son suggested, at least the two almost finished missions can be completed in his memory, as otherwise all his work on them will be lost in time forever...

I wanted to test this, but I had some never before encountered problems to just install a mission: - On the mission list page "Download Missions" and "Refresh List" are overlapping. - I needed to deinstall the active mission to even be able select a new one to install. - After installing a new one I didn't get the usual summary on the left screen half. All of these points are connected to the last active mission which was "Hidden Hands: The Anomaly". So are some of the 2.10 GUI changes incompatible with older missions that change the GUI themselves? Which would be quite annoying and should somehow be fixed or avoided, or somebody would need to test all missions for similar issues. P.S.: I checked the new item movement now and I like it. What I don't like at all is the new Frob highlight system! Why was this changed in the first place? The new one not only ruins the atmosphere with the white glow, it also creates a lot of artifacts when e. g. seeing items through containers, doors through walls and white lines everywhere.

No, we shouldn't! I always use it and I rarely have problems with duplicate missions. And in most of these cases the problem was that the FM author renamed the mission or something similar.

Can you take a look at the names of campaigns or similar that do not fit the loading screen? I changed them to fit in my Unofficial Patch and while you are going through FMs you might do the same. You can find my version here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/the-dark-mod-unofficial-patch

Is there any chance of making the order and names be consistent with the web version while you are doing this? Regarding "a" and "the" and full names being cut on the loading screen and campaign affiliations missing. I fix a lot of the latter in my Unofficial Patch, but it would be much easier if this would be in the core mod...

I don't want to change that, but I thought it might be interesting for people coming from other games to read in the loading tips.

Interesting info about the different alert infos! Can this be explained in the loading tips? Because in most other games, enemies rather quickly return to normal.

Speaking of which, it a guard notices the player, but does not find him for several minutes, does he assume he is gone, sheath his sword and goes back to unalerted? I mean he wouldn't walk around the whole night with his sword drawn, right?

All this "assuming" looks like magic to me when in fact there is just a trigger switching them to immune in a second. I am not talking about them attacking, just about them hearing a noise and being in the middle of drawing their sword, not concentrating at all on their neck... Just out of interest, how was this handled in the old Thief games? Did the guards there switch to ko immune the second they heard something too?

So what is the magic happening for guards with metal helmets then? They can be KO'd fine with their helmet on as long as they are not alerted! One second later, no way.

The main issue I have is that you can't blackjack guards that are alerted even if you are right behind them and they haven't drawn their weapon, because they magically become k.o. immune. I have fixed that in my Unofficial Patch, so you might want to give that a try: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/the-dark-mod-unofficial-patch

I played every mission there is and I have never seen this. How did you manage that and in which mission?

I hope we can find the bug that might be causing this, because your suggestion would clash completely with the look and feel of the UI in my opinion!

I think Dragofer made this possible specifically for this mission. It might have given me the idea to add it to my patch in the first place :)! Like also his Numbers Scrolls...

Besides that putting out oil lamps is only a feature of my Unofficial Patch as far as I know, I also made a change there so that you can put out a candle directly when you FROB the candle itself, while you will pick it up when you FROB the base. You will still pick it up too, but at least you extinguish it first and I would like to change that to not picking it up (Obsttorte, any tip?). I believe that removing the taking option would not be good, as there might be missions without a lantern where you need to get a candle as light source...

We could continue the discussion in the candles thread. As a last posting here though, I didn't even know that there was a training variable and I think binary should be enough. You can turn it off again once you remember things :)!

Ah, then I misunderstood your suggestion because I was thinking about popup windows. Yes, this would be a perfect solution in my opinion! As your title is "scripting guru", can you pull this off just with scripts ;)? At the moment I think we need it for: 1) candles (use to extinguish), 2) bodies (use to shoulder) and 3) food (use to consume). There might be other stuff I forgot and I still think we should also add the info to the controls just to keep the setup consistent as we need to take a look at the all.lang translations anyway!

I agree with stgatilov that this should not be a feature for every mission, but as far as I remember "A new job" already has some tutorial like popup windows. We could expand on them or add the necessary lines quite easily. On the other hand we could also add the text to the control options like I suggested. What again was the argument against it? That players have to read some more or could interpret it in a satirical sense ;)? Or is translating new additions the problem? Because while checking the strings file I noticed that two control keys I restored have my comment still attached (added by wesp) and appear in English in several other language versions. The same is true for a lot of new GUI additions!

I don't think this is the main problem. Yes, in other games most often "frob" is called "use", but then e. g. in Bloodlines you have an additional key to "use discipline" and in e. g. Cyberpunk you have additional keys to "use" gadgets or consumables and no player ever had problems with that! I think the options are what is overlooked and it can't really hurt to mention them in the control definions: frob = Frob/Interact/Take/Drop, use = Use Inv. Item/Use Held Item

While this would be a much more complicated solution than to just add some more info to the key descriptions, which people could look up anytime, I also have to say that in my opinion the training mission is one of the most boring missions of TDM in the first place. Forcing players to do it could end up turning somebody off! I would rather suggest to add all necessary infos to "A new job" instead. Also for years I have pleaded to add some * to the name of the missions that ship with TDM so they get listed first as I do with the patch. Otherwise if you have downloaded several other missions the training mission will hopelessly get lost in between them.

Okay, but then we need to change some other strings too, because installing/uninstalling is still used elsewhere. As for the other issues maybe we should add a tool tip what "frob" is actually supposed to mean? Then we could get rid of additional explanations there, but I think while the joke about the bodies was great , a question like about the candles could indeed be solved by the "use held item" line. People might remember and just try out what happens! At least the video line and the mine line should be fixed as they are only about fitting info better on screen...

I just took a quick look and would suggest to improve the line about restarting for video changes to the one below, because the current one doesn't fit on the parchment: "#str_02298" "Screen size, aspect ratio or fullscreen changes require a restart" And again I would like you to consider adding some more details to the Frob and the Use Inv. keys like listed below. We just recently had the extinguishing-candles thread: "#str_02405" "Frob/Interact/Take/Drop" "#str_02190" "Use Inv. Item/Use Held Item" I also think shortening the explosive mine name isn't needed anymore for the HUD and should be changed so it consistenly has the same name anywhere inside the game: "#str_02202" "Explosive Mine" Also while I like the new approach to the main menu itself, the strings below might be clearer to new players as the mission is already "selected" in the list when you click it: "#str_02960" "Install this Mission" "#str_02961" "Uninstall Mission" The latter gets a little bit cropped at the end. Is there a character limit for strings on the main menu? The same is valid for the "Restart Mission" string and should be fixed.

So could this be added as an option to the core mod? Like better graphics costing fps performance?

I added infos for both to the key definition options menu in my Unofficial Patch, I hope they will finally end up in the core game in 2.10!

So can somebody do some comparison sceenshots or explain what's special about this new method?