crowbars82

I noticed that there was a minor update for 2.05 so I had another play-through tonight and have some more feedback. This mission is really great, I am almost ready to reinstall DarkRadiant and have another bash at it again! Hope this helps you guys!

Hi Oldjim, If you get hold of IrfanView you can load up a DarkMod screenshot in that and do Shift + U (or Menu/Image/Auto Adjust Colours) and 9/10 times it will automatically brighten the screenshot enough for posting! - C

Hi TDM Team! Thanks for the 2.05 update! Absolutely loving the new first starter mission! Everything is pretty much spot on, I have a little bit of feedback for you guys. Regards, Crowbars82

Cheers Dragofer! I've played your mission about 6 times now, and have discovered a new moment of obscurity... I'll quickly post it in the other thread, but then I must get some kip!

Good evening all! So that time comes around again when the weekend is but a memory and the day job continues in but a few hours... ...perfect time for thinking of new ideas when you've run out of water arrows, but the torch is right next to you! How about heading back to the kitchen and grabbing a tankard, but the sink is empty and the tap is borked! Head outside to the fountain and scoop up some water... don't run back though or you might spill it everywhere! Careful you don't burn yourself! [insert water graphics here!] Other thinking for this situation was some kind of soaking wet cloth that contains 1 use. The cloth could be dunked in a water source, perhaps carried in some kind of leather pouch. The cloth can be shlomped or flung over a burning torch. This would extinguish the torch, but if not removed before a guard goes to relight the torch, he'll find a soaking cloth over the top... "Hey! I... I think we got a taffer in the building lads!" This concludes this episode of "Late night random thoughts", good night everyone! Edited due to borked images

Hi Sotha! I would be happy to help if I can. Although new to beta-testing, I believe Dragofer found my feedback to be of use, which was cool. Let me know if I can help in any way! Are there any specific rules of guidelines for beta-testing, or is it a case of making sure of the following: check there are no holes to the voidAI pathing is correctcheck for typos in readablescollision testing with all sorts of objects in all kinda of placesobjects stuck in brushes or other objectsscripted sequences act out okay without disruptionclimb everywhere possiblefind any Z-fightinglook for misaligned textures and brushesplay through the map at least 5 timeschecking all ambient sound and other sound levelsall moveables have correct weight and play correct sounds if a door or windowcheck for any FPS dropssave and load and make sure the mission reloads properlyalert guards and makes sure they don't sit down in the middle of a corridor...this type of stuff? ( I was playing through your "Thomas Porter 2: Beleaguered Fence" earlier today and what a tricky mission that is on expert difficulty! Almost threw the rig out the window, however... this is exactly what I'm looking for in a game. A challenge! )

I enjoyed watching this video. It reinforced my reasoning for continually playing older games or good remakes of older games. I got into Minecraft for ages, but now I can't play it without adding various mods that add temperature and thirst, making mining stone really slow, force you to keep your diet varied, remove the punching of trees and introduce flint shovels, picks and axes, make items fall flat to the floor instead of floating pickups so they get lost in the long grass, making torches burn out so you have to relight them, and various other things that add so many more challenging aspects to the game. I don't quite know why, but I prefer having to work with next to nothing to try and survive or get anywhere in a game. Like Project Zomboid where you will start the game with a fork or a spoon, and you'd be lucky to have a rolling pin nearby! Thief games have this to a degree because you really have to save your limited supply of arrows until you really need them, and The Dark Mod really brings this back, which is probably why I play it almost every day. I was playing the mission "Thomas Porter 2: Beleaguered Fence" earlier and almost threw my computer out of the window. I've put the mission on pause for now, but I will return to it... and I will complete it... and then and only then will I feel rewarded!

Or even a time limit when a guard will generally wake back up again, although depending where the guard has been hidden like under a shelf... they may not get back up too easily I guess. I've always liked the idea of an unconscious time limit, but this would be quite hard to put into the game. I don't normally like time limits on anything, however a reasonable time limit until the sun came up or something like this could work? I've seen fully functional clocks in some missions so the player could keep an eye on the time, or even have a pocket watch item as well!

As I voted "Other" on all three I shall explain... What do I think about objectives that limit my ability to KO AI? This could be contextual to the mission itself. If the mission's story rules are to sneak in and out of a mansion without being seen at all, and knockouts would giveaway that someone was there that night when stealing the Sceptre of Costsalot from Lord Ivan O'Locksondoors. A good way to not have to enforce a specific knockout limit would be for map designers to put in the guards with the special "I can't be knocked out" helmets in key locations perhaps? Although, I have played several missions with non-knockoutable guards, allowing me to choose whether or not to distract the guard from their post to drop a heavy crate on their head, thus possibly alerting even more guards if nearby! A mild issue that I have faced with missions where you are not allowed to knock out a single guard... you have to wait for ages and ages for the guards to patrol back and forth, waiting for that moment to creep across the hallway without being seen. This can get a little boring after a while, so I've bound [PgUp] and [PgDn] for "Timescale 2" and "Timescale 1"! What do you think about objectives that prohibit killing? This makes sense all round and also good to be mission dependant. If it were Garrett from Thief then this option should always be permanent because Garrett is not a killer, he's a thief! However, this is The Dark Mod and every mission has a story to it... so I think prohibiting killing is fine but it is down to the player's choice too. I prefer to play on expert every time because of the challenge, and not being allowed to kill guards is a personal choice I play by default. However the mission "Trapped!" is great fun because of having the option to once in a while go bow-crazy and headshot everyone for the lols! What do you think about "collect X loot" objectives? I don't mind too much because I usually grab the required amount to steal by the end of each mission, but there is always that extra bit that I missed and sometimes I've replayed missions again and again and still cannot find the actual total loot within each level. I'll admit I've even resorted to binding a key to "TDM_Show_Loot" and NoClip+NoTarget through the map because of simply needing to know where that remaining loot actually was! Terrible I know, but a settled mind is better than madness. Perhaps if a mission stated that the character that you are playing as required X-amount of loot to pay off this guy and that loan-shark and etc etc... this would make more sense. But then it IS a game after all, so as for collecting 100 rings in Sonic the Hedgehog is the thing to do to get rank "A", it makes sense to have to collect 700 loot on easy but 1500 loot on expert and so on. For that little extra realism, I've always wanted a "Loot Sack Weight" mechanic, where you have a limit for how much loot you can actually carry at once, before you should head back to the start location to drop off what you have found so far, or hide it in a bush as a loot pile to collect later and then return to where you got to in that mission. I would really like a mechanic like this, especially when I just stole 3 massive golden urns from a mantlepiece and then in my mind I'm thinking - "Where the hell am I carrying all this loot? In my Star Trek Elite Force Holo-Belt?" All in all I think these a good questions, and as long as a balance between good gameplay and strategy is met then each option can work! Example of how a "Loot Sack Limit" could look * Edited for spelling failures

This is too true. After gaming since 1986 I've watched how the "games industry" has developed and how over time it seems to be more about how to make more money whilst the true core of what gaming actually is seems to dwindle away sometimes. This is not always the case, but there is definitely an increase in linearity and "help me play this game" icons pointing you to what you need to do, follow the dotted line to the exit, "press A to complete the game" type thing. I find it a little sad that because of the rush involved to meet tight deadlines, things get borked and patched later, but still never be as good or polished as they could have been if we didn't have "money" perhaps?

And a greetings from me! In my opinion nothing really replaced the Thief shaped hole since Thief 2. I still need to complete Thief 3, which didn't quite feel the same to me. The latest Thief game is very different to what I expected and is just odd. The Dark Mod is most excellent however, and I agree with being blown away with the content and detail put into it. Even when getting the angle wrong when trying to blackjack someone and hitting the celing instead of the back of the dude's neck!

I would be happy to help out. A have quite the meticulous nature when it comes to these things. I'm currently playing through all of the fan missions by date of release, from oldest to newest, and logging any issues I find and short review. Finally completed the Heart of Lone Salvation. My god, what a mission... excellent however!

Thanks Grayman for your reply on this, makes very much sense indeed! I'm currently totally stuck in Thief's Den 3: Heart of Lone Salvation. Totally stuck. I like the fact that I am stuck however! I'm going to restart this one methinks, and attempt to pay more attention. There goes the weekend!

It would be a mission in itself to add such a lighting mechanic. It must be tricky, perhaps a little restricting, when adding any new developments or features to The Dark Mod due to how they could potentially break existing missions. I truly appreciate this entirely however because of this fact. So much work has already gone into this game and I simply cannot stop playing and replaying The Dark Mod because it is actually that fantastic! I've decided to even purchase some of those flickering LED candles to set up around my rig for Dark Mod sessions. Obsession... dedidcation... or just plain weird... I don't mind

This is a good point, although I've yet to play a mission that doesn't have at least one moveable candle. And of course some missions have the option to purchase a lantern at the start. I'm replaying through all the maps in 2.04 for a laugh so I will keep this in mind! [EDIT] So yeah, this one would be tricky to read but not impossible. In the first mission The Outpost there are 2 patrolling guards in this room. If you play on Expert Mode then you must not attract any attension at all else mission is failed. If this sort of lighting mechanic was implemented for readables, to be able to read the note on the wall you have to wait for one guard to go around the corner and the other guard to stand looking out the window. Then a quick-key to turn lantern on, right-click to read note, read the note quickly, right-click to stop reading, quick-key to lantern off before the guard turns around. (Fingers poised ready to Quick Load, haha!) I just tried this myself and it is do'able but very risky, especially if you're so hardcore you don't even want to Quick Save/Load!

Hello again! Just a random thought I had about being able to read the letters and book in near total darkness. Could the current light level of the player be transported to the rendering of the readables? Current readable light level Potential readable light level if reading near a light source Potential readable light level if reading in the shadows What do you think?

This exactly. Sorry I completely forgot to mention about the multi-monitor reason for this script! Is there anyway I can change the title of this post or who I could contact to do this. Would be useful having this information within the title itself! Well... the weekend is here, Dark Mod mode = 1!

Hi everyone! This subject has likely been approached already, however I wanted to share my fullscreen-windowed solution as some of you may find this useful. By using the wonderful AutoHotkey and a few lines of code that I found online and wish I remembered where so I can actually give credit where it is due (whoever you are thanks for this!)... ...this script will work on pretty much any game that has the option to run in a window. EDIT : Somehow I forgot to mention that this is mainly for those of us who have multi-monitor setup, as Alt-Tabbing is not fun! The script should make anything windowed to the size of your current desktop resolution, I have only tested this in 1920 x 1080 though. To use this, please set the game settings as show in image above and then download Full_Screen_Any_Windowed_Game.exe (Understandable dubiousness for home-made executables can hopefully be dispelled with these virus check results, I'm here to help, not hinder ) https://virusscan.jotti.org/en-GB/filescanjob/usx04d2w1i https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/462693d7a5329c9cd2ba5d918b89c13cbc0d4868d38b8117c7a621a67918b43f/analysis/1472684261/ Once downloaded, run Full_Screen_Any_Windowed_Game.exe and then load up Dark Mod. Once running in a window, simply press Ctrl+F11 to make it borderless fullscreen! Press Ctrl+F12 to return to a window again! To exit the script, right-click the taskbar icon and choose "Exit". >> You should make certain that Dark Mod is the active window before using the shortcuts! << It is possible to Ctrl+F12 your desktop into a window, which is actually quite fun/weird to experience, you can always Ctrl+F11 it back to normal though! You can also attempt to fullscreen things like Windows Calculator or the Taskbar for wacky results! The entire script is literally this: #SingleInstance force #Persistent ^F11:: SetFull: { WinSet, Style, -0xC40000, A WinMove, A, , 0, 0, %A_ScreenWidth%, %A_ScreenHeight% Return } ^F12:: SetWindow: { WinSet, Style, +0xC40000, A Return } If you still do not want to run the executable provided, you can download and install AutoHotkey, copy the script above exactly and then save it to a "newscriptnamegoeshere.ahk" then run that instead. Another thing to note for nVidia users: and I didn't realise this for years... but when you run certain games in a window the colours can be restricted! To solve this open your nVidia control panel and observe the image below. This will allow the full colour range and will no longer be a "musty grey" so that the dark shadows have proper gamma! I hope that you find this as useful as I did! Please let me know if this doesn't work for any reason and I will be more than happy to help! Happy borderless fullscreen-windowed thieving!

Whoa! This looks gargantuan. 320.9 MB! This will definitely be approached, most likely a full weekend, stock up food, phone off, curtains closed... you know the score. What I've been doing over the years is playing through the mission as they were released. But also as some Dark Mod mechanics and things have been updated, I really don't mind replaying through the list again to see if they play differently. Of course now we're on 2.04 and low and behold I've done St. Lucia, Outpost, on the Chalice of Kings now. I did have to have a look at some of the latest releases and I have to take my hat off to you guys! The level design is off the chain!

Aye this is true, I've got 4GB on this GTX 960, but set Dark Mod to 2GB usage as GPU-Z shows 1.5GB used when Penny Dreadful 3 is fully loaded, and it is a massive map indeed. Thanks for the advice though dude! I've learnt all I know by fiddling with too many numbers and breaking many things, haha! I found a sneaky secret yesterday, when setting seta tdm_door_control (experimental fine-tune door opening mechanic) to "1", you can open locked doors! Cheeky. Hopefully this will be considered because it really adds to the game, being able to open the door a tiny bit to peek in

Hey AluminumHaste, I've got 8.00GB Single-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz according to Speccy, and I've upped the video ram to "seta com_videoRam "2048"" for a laugh. I think have a notion as to what was causing the issue... it could be totally not this, but a random guess sometimes works: In Penny Dreadful 2: All The Way Up the player starts with nothing, the guards are scripted to drop a sword so you can collect it. I've noticed that once a guard has been alerted and they have drawn their sword, if you knock 'em out, they not only drop their own normal sword (cannot collect), they drop the collectible sword too. I think the collectible sword possibly fell out the map and caused the area to crash the game when approached. I knocked out some guards by dropping a crate on their head because they had an anti-knockout helmet on, and the body kinda bashed into the floor and the ragdoll got trapped and started flailing about like it does. I heard a crazy clanging noise and guess it was the sword falling out the map maybe? This could be completely wrong, but I may also be onto a winner with solving this crash issue. I have no idea however, haha! Penny Dreadful 3: Erasing the Trail is absolutely massive. Loving it...

It is useful to know the com_numQuickSaves command, thanks Nbohr1more! Okay, I've just spent the last however long replaying Penny Dreadful 2: All The Way Up and I've got to say the Penny Dreadful series are absolutely fantastic! Hats off to Melan and Bikerdude on these. This time round I made sure that I quicksaved, turned off Dark Mod and restarted my computer as well so that I would have the full "loading a quicksave from a fresh-boot" scenario and that error I had with not being able to pass certain areas did not happen again. Although I did blackjack a guy so hard he went through the wall and his model only stayed in the map as his hand were coming through the floor. I felt empowered. Next up: "Penny Dreadful 3: Erasing the Trail"...

It could also be something that occurs when quicksaving/quickloading... I've experienced this before, back before The Dark Mod was standalone where I had saved my game in a certain mission and I could re-load my game at will and all would be great, but when I closed The Dark Mod and loaded my save the following day, the save was corrupt.

Hey Nbohr1more, I did indeed do this. When I realised 2.04 was out, I deleted absolutely everything and started all installs from scratch. I always get the missions from the in-game downloader now, this menu is such a great addition (even if you have to selected each mission individually for download) I believe that the crash problems are something to do with a particular event within this mission. I restarted it, and was able to travel through the particular areas started above without crashing, it seems that "something happens" during gameplay that can cause these areas to become crash-zones... I tried running without sound as well, but my quicksave will not load when using seta s_noSound "1". Will keep testing!

Hi Freyk, Nothing was in the Darkmod.log, so I set the darkmod.ini to output all errors, warnings, debugs, info and changed the 0 to 1 on most LogClasses. The problem is that it appears that the game does not have a chance to actually log anything when this particular crash occurs. I opened the map in DarkRadiant and found that there are various VisPortals used around the map, this particular VisPortal has a flag called "shop_skip", which I assume is used as a function when first loading the map to skip the shop screen? From what I can see, every single VisPortal used in this map has this flag, so I doubt this would crash the game. I have tried all kinds of things, such as the "(Nvidia) Disable Threaded Optimizations" fix, "(Nvidia) Disable the Streamer Service", (Nvidia) Disable Index Buffers, playing with the Graphics Settings, changing all sorts of stuff and nothing seems to fix the crash at these particular 2 points of crashing in this map, so my guess is that it is some kind of problem with running this map under Dark Mod 2.04. I will try to reinstall Dark Mod 2.03 and play the map to see if it crashes again..