chakkman

Yay!

@SeriousToni That is encouraging. I always wanted to take a look into it, but, I've always been too lazy, and a bit too overwhelmed either by such complex software.

Frankly, if I had the choice between doing FMs for Thief and TDM, I would choose TDM. I still think Thief has the better lore, better assets, better music and everything, but, TDM is just the more modern and better engine.

"It's exciting that the community is creating a new editor.  Between that and the NewDark updates Thief isn't going anywhere "

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Shows how insanely good the games and the lore were, that, after more than 25 years, there's still lots of content coming out for them.

Some Thief FMs are very high quality as well.

It can be hot and dark too.  

Good question. T1 and T2 seem literally overflowing with new missions these days, compared to TDM.

Sounds like a plan.

@jaxa: There's something messed up right now, isn't there? Some sites are taking longer, or don't load at all.

Chronicles is nice too, just a little short. 

And, mind the last level (Red Alert), it's notoriously buggy...

There'll be a patch soon for the game, maybe they'll fix some of the issues of the last level of Chronicles.

Well, that's almost half the time that I needed, so, congrats anyway.

Hope you had a good time, it's a nice game. I've still to play through the remaster, but, I played through the original.

ThiefGuild has become my go-to for Thief Gold and Thief II FMs.

It's already released: 

I think so. Looks great.  

Blackheart Manor.

Have you seen this? 

Nice. Another thing to look forward to in 2024.  

The "H" CPUs are mobile CPUs, so, that's gotta be a laptop.

Are you measuring that on battery, or on power cord?

Check here for proper benchmark results: https://www.notebookcheck.com/Intel-Core-i7-12700H-Prozessor-Benchmarks-und-Specs.589169.0.html

@The Black Arrow Same with Penny Dreadful 1. 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed those missions, but, you're right that they just don't give you enough means to deal with the enemies. I simply ended up "ghosting" these missions, which obviously is the intended way to play them - strictly one way, no other way.

That said, both are really cool missions.

Bonehoard is definitely a "survival" type of mission. My point is that it gives you enough option do deal with the undead. The zombies I couldn't kill with holy water arrows (I definitely try to save those as well, as you can never know what awaits you), I lured into the fireball traps. Or, I destroyed several of them with a fire arrow.

The unkillable guys like the fire shadow are a different matter, of course. You're best to do your job, and then get the hell out of the area they patrol. But, for the rest of the enemies, the game gave you enough options, which is all I'm asking for as a player, because I like to clear areas I want to explore. It's a lot of fun to explore levels like the Bonehoard, that's why I like to explore them fully, and, that's just not possible with unkillable or hard to kill A.I. everywhere, and no options to defeat them.

The "supreme" ghosters, and other "supreme" people can play the way they want anyway.  

My favorite mission of Thief Gold.  Just brilliant.

I tried it yesterday. Had some problems... First I changed the default resolution to 1920x1080, and clicked on "Restart video" in the video options, and the game still stuck with 640x480... Tried a couple of things, until I took a look into the config files, and saw that seta r_mode was still set to 3, not to -1 like it should be. So, changed that, and the game booted in 1920x1080. Changed some other video options, clicked on "Restart video", and the game booted to a grey screen. Had to force quit the game, then somehow some icons in my taskbar were missing. Rebooted, icons there again. Started a game, pressed escape to change some option, game crashed.

Kind of the experience I had with many mods in the past. Buggy as hell. 

I just wondered what's the best, and then it dawned upon me...

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This is perhaps the last sticking point as I'm not a fan of giving the player such a large arsenal that what is inherently supposed to be a horrifying creature can be dispatched with relative ease. This is frequently remedied by having such a vast number of zombies that it becomes a matter of resource management more than anything else, but seeing as I prefer a smaller scale, I'd rather have fewer undead enemies that are more impactful than a gauntlet of weaker ones. The last thing I'd want is for the player to feel wholly in control of the situation they're in as that burns up any tension we've spent building towards their encounter. I'll certainly be giving the player options, of course, I might even make the undead vulnerable to flashbombs again as I did in my first FM, we'll see.

That's the problem I've been talking about though: FM authors not giving players the necessary tools to deal with the undead. I'm afraid your approach exactly reflects the issue I was talking about. 

It's all up to you, of course, it's just sad for me, as the original Thiefs weren't like that.

I wasn't talking about a "large arsenal" either. The original Thiefs gave you just enough to survive. See the Bonehoard mission for a great example.

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To be honest, zombies are never overdone

I agree. Never get old really, and, the zombies in Thief always had some interesting characteristics which separated them from the zombies in films or other games.

But, to the question when the last time was that a zombie was unnerving or scary to me, I recently played through Doom 3 and its addons. The zombies (or the Doom 3 equivalent) in that game are definitely scary.  

What's not so cool about TDM is that missions almost never give you the tools to deal with the undead. Hazard Pay is a nice exception to that. But, I think it kind of puts the cart before the horse. Instead of making zombies vulnerable to a single head shot, I think missions should give the player tools to deal with the zombies. Holy water, fire arrows, mines, you name it. The original Thiefs always gave you enough firepower to deal with zombies, if you wanted to. The big word here is "options". Give the player options, if he doesn't want to kill everything, he can do that, if he wants to, he can do that as well. That's what I always found good about the old games, that you have options, instead of a single, linear way.

I would stronlgy vote against making any of the undead creatures even stronger than they are. Bad enough that 99,9% of the missions don't give you adequate weaponry to deal with them...

Not sure what you mean with "resurrecting", by the way. In the original Thiefs, the only thing that happens is that they stand up again, when you slashed them from behind with Constantine's sword. It simply doesn't kill them, it just sends them to "sleep", and they wake up when you get too near them. The only way to kill them is to mutilate them, with arrows with holy water, or with fire arrows. Which is practically the same as in The Dark Mod.

Sorry, my bad. No idea how that happened.