chumbucket91

Welp, most folks seem to think that the mod is good as-is so I guess I'll leave it alone lol. I think, in a hypothetical future where autosaves are incorporated into the base game, some option to either respect or override fm author intents would be necessary, but it seems that is not the ticket for a drop in mod and thats a reasonable enough argument for me. Only thing I might change at some point is the time interval between saves (5 minutes is maybe a hair too short. 8 minutes maybe?). Otherwise, I've run through a few other fms with this and am pretty happy with it. Seems to even work in the Hidden Hands campaign so its resilient to more edge cases than I thought it would be when I posted it. Whoo!

I'll check that out today. Not sure if I'll be able to "fix" the mod or what such a fix would even look like. Ran through Hazard Pay on expert for a few minutes, and the autosave script did manage to create a save at the five minute interval. So, as written, this mod overrides the intent of the FM author and just makes saves for you anyways. Not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, its a player side "accessibility" mod so it does make sense that it would take precedence and not respect the setting. On the other hand, the whole point of this fm difficulty option is that you can't just save whenever you want and you need to use Resident Evil style "typewriter ink", which this mod renders irrelevant and that feels pretty bad. Is there some cvar I could check in the autosave script to see if manual saving is disabled? And is that cvar fm specific to Hazard Pay or would it be reasonably future proof for other fms that may want to do something similar in the future? Stretching ideas a bit further, how much scripting work would it take to have this mod add options to the options menu? Would be nice to have sliders to control the slot count, save time interval, and a tri-bool setting for "enabled", "enabled unless the FM says no manual saves are allowed", or "disabled". btw, great FM so far @kingsal .

Go for it. I'll check that out today. Not sure if I'll be able to "fix" the mod or what such a fix would even look like.

Maybe my gaming sensibilities are too modern, but nothing kills my desire to play this game quite like missing a ledge by a floating point rounding error, falling three hundred feet onto the cobblestones of a lovingly fm-author crafted alley somewhere in Bridgeport, shattering Definitely-Not-Garrett's knees into a fine paste, and realizing that I haven't saved in half an hour. With the release of 2.12's support for "tdm_user_addon_" scripts, and after faceplanting in Lady Leicester's back alley for the fifth goddamn time this year, I decided to crack open the scripting tutorials and try to solve this problem. An hour later, and I've hacked together this player addon mod/script to call $player1.saveGame() every five minutes during gameplay. It will create up to five autosaves, named "__autosave_X", while you're playing an fm. It simply starts at number 1 and counts up whenever you boot up an fm, wrapping around after reaching 5, so I don't think its guaranteed to always pick the oldest save to overwrite. It seems to run well enough after a quick test in "A New Job", though, so I thought I'd upload it here just in case anyone else has similar frustrations. Note that these autosaves do cause the game to stutter while the save is happening, so this little QOL feature does notably impact the game. If you're already in the habit of constantly mashing F5 you probably won't need this little mod. Also, it seems like the autosaves can't screenshot the game correctly so they are blank. To install, simply drop tdm_autosave.pk4 into your root Dark Mod install folder. To uninstall, delete the same .pk4. If there are any small, straightforward improvements I can make let me know, but I imagine there are lots of dark corner case bugs here (which may well be why this isn't officially supported in tdm itself?) and my programmer powers are limited. Feel free to copy/modify/share anywhere you like. tdm_autosave.pk4

This topic actually fits with the topic right below it in the general discussion forum right now (About carrying a maximum amount of loot) (EDIT: That you are also the original poster of, apparently.): It would be an interesting mechanic if the player had a "loot sack" that could carry a maximum weight of items, and in order to put something in the "loot sack" you had to pick up a moveable item, and then use it. A game mechanic could be made out of determining which items in your loot sack were actually valuable enough to be considered loot, and which were junk - if you picked up a junk object you could also put it in the loot sack. The challenge would be to find/guess which movables in the game were junk and which were valuable - since you could only carry so much stuff. The counterpoint, of course, is that this is completely contrary to the way Thief games have worked before, and is a change to a widely accepted convention in a game engine that's already finalized and released... yeeeah. You could probably make this mechanic in an individual FM using the Scripting system in DarkRadiant, with enough work. Give every movable in your map a "weight", a "value", and a frobbable tag that, when "used" while "held" caused the item to disappear into your "loot sack" until "weight" was greater than "loot sack capacity", and at the end of the mission your total "loot" score was the sum of the "value" scores of everything in your sack.

That music needs to be expanded into about six different pieces and put into DarkMod assets so that I can use them in FMs, definitely. Because that was awesome. As far as replacing the main menu theme goes, though? DarkMod's menu theme is kind of an iconic thing to get rid of at this point, for better or worse. I never really jumped up and down about it because I liked the song (I'm kinda getting tired of it), but because... it's the DarkMod song. At most, it could use a remastery or arrangement or something - it wouldn't feel right to be replaced completely.

Whether or not it's the "proper" way to do it, Grayman's idea definitely looks easiest - although lots of other good ideas are in this thread. Thanks for the quick replies, everybody! This probably won't be the last question you hear from me... - Chumbucket

Hello TDM! Let me start by saying that I am a HUGE fan of this mod and have been playing Thief FMs for at least 5 years. I think I've downloaded and played every Fan Mission released for TDM and I've otherwise been lurking for quite awhile. I've finally decided to pick up DarkRadiant and attempt to make a map of my own. I've gone through a good portion of the A-Z guide on the wiki, and will probably finish the rest later, but I've decided to get started on a Real ™ Map. The first map I'm making is a pretty formulaic mansion raid mission (my favorite kind). Rather ambitious, so I'm not posting screenshots or getting anyone excited just yet (still drawing room layouts on paper), but I do have a question about how far I can stretch the editor - this will affect my design choices going forward. My question is this: Is it possible to have the player choose their start location in a FM, given a list of possibilities? For example, there's a game called SWAT 4 where the player leads a SWAT team into various criminal hideouts to make arrests and such, and the player, before starting the mission, has the opportunity to choose their entry point. I think this idea will work well for a Mansion Heist, and I really don't want to touch making an outdoor area any time soon, so what I'd like to do is change, say, the difficulty menu, where instead of choosing between "easy", "medium", and "hard" difficulties, the player chooses between "Basement", "First Floor back door", and "Second Floor Window" entry points - for example. Is this possible, and if so how would I go about doing it? I do have some programming experience so I wouldn't shy away from having to edit some gui files or write a python script in darkRadiant if that's what it took, but some clear directions would be helpful before I go digging through code. Thanks for your help! - Chumbucket

For me, it's just as much of an immersion breaker when I find a door that's a flat wall as it is when I find a door that I can't highlight and open. Considering that Thief and/or TDM manages to be the one of the most immersive games in gaming as we know it regardless of the odd unopenable door, claiming that either option is an "immersion breaker" is sort of making mountains out of anthills. Also, using flat textures for T1/T2 was somewhat due to the limitations of the engine at that time - now that it's feasible to add a few more polygons to static decorations... well, there's one less reason to use the flat, non-normalmapped texture for a metalocked door.

The chair in question was in the map "The Outpost", on the top floor of the building next to a desk in the room directly ahead of the spiral staircase (NOT the room with the Bishop NPC and the bed, but the one next to it). I bumped into the chair from the right side (facing the wall) while I was looking at the clutter on the desk (I believe I was looking for a readable). My relatively uneducated guess says it's a mapping issue, as I haven't seen any other chairs do that... Anonymous logins can't post bugs, and my forum account doesn't work there, so...no I couldn't, unless I missed something obvious. Sorry :\

I've been lurking for ~two years getting glimpses of progress, but now that it's out I have to join the forum just to say thanks - even if I have no mapping skills and was just waiting for the mod so that I could play it. This mod is AWESOME and DAMN NEAR PERFECT ALREADY from the player's perspective. I've had an itch for Thief for a long time, and I can only replay TDS so many times (unfortunately, I can't get T1 or T2 to work on my Vista laptop.) More than the mod itself, however, I've been very impressed with the presentation and installation process. The new website design is simple and functional, easy to get around in, and has good support for showcasing FMs (although I don't know why you still call them FMs, 'cause really there are no OMs, but nevermind that...) The updater and installer worked perfectly for me - even though I have Doom 3 installed through Steam. (I just had to find the right folder to put things in, which wasn't hard.) The actual game, of course, made my head asplode. A few little things I noticed, if you're looking for random bugs to iron out: 1) While the time-honored tradition of knocking guards out and then dumping them in the river to kill them worked just like it did in the Thief series, the ragdolls didn't make a splashing sound when they hit the water. The visual splash effect appeared, but no sound. 2) I somehow managed to make a chair fall partially through the floor by nudging it. This might have been a mapping problem, and I just grabbed the chair and it pulled itself right back up through the floor, so no worries. 3) I have framerate issues, but this crappy lappy has a 2.2gHz dual-core, so I'm not suprised, and it's still playable. There are no other graphical or aural issues on my HP G60 Notebook PC running 32-bit Vista with a Nvidia GeForce 8200M graphics card. 4) The guard voices are a little too quiet sometimes, and the builders sound like chain smokers. The former causes gameplay issues, the latter is downright funny. I can't wait for some of the other missions that have screenshots on the main website to come out! I can only replay the training mission so many times! XD Also, best of luck and greatest of thanks to everyone on the team!