Xolvix

Since I'm bored and haven't posted in a while and yet still finished Thief 4 a few times, I feel compelled to post. In response to a number of observations @Rio_Walker made: Seeing your hands and all the animations newGarrett would do was fun... at first. But given all the looting and environmental interactions the game has it really did slow things down a lot, especially when the game would occasionally realign the player just perfectly before playing an animation to open a drawer. If they had an option to disable these animations or speed them up significantly I'd have been happy. I've played using the Custom difficulty with the option to disable focus and the experience is kinda mixed. While it does make things a bit more traditional without the superpower ability to find loot more easily, it does seem like the game is designed very much for focus and disabling it can hide things you never even knew were present. If it weren't for the focus for example, I would never have noticed the "special" candles hidden around the city that talk when you light them. This game reminds me of a movie that has been reshot several times with footage from separate reshoots blended together with bad editing. It's painfully clear the story has been chopped and changed over the many years of its development and there's assets in the game that clearly had greater importance in a previous iteration but for which their plot points were cut. The most obvious example is the automatons. There's a dude who provides missions on obtaining pieces for one he's building, but apart from that there's also signs in other areas they had more importance (e.g. you see rooms full of them when going up an elevator, the Baron has disassembled ones on tables in his cutscene, etc.) Some plot elements just feel not fleshed out because they had to cobble together something to create this Frankenstein's monster of a game from so many elements. The ending sucks and is incredibly abrupt. Do we even know what the deal is with that half-built ship? Probably another abandoned plot point. With all of its problems, I still kinda like it in so far as its general gameplay. But it doesn't have the longevity of something like TDM or the classic Thief games especially with all the user missions available for them. Oh well, maybe I'm just pining for what it could have been in the hands of a better developer.

I like how this has essentially become a Linux thread despite it not being the intended focus. I play around with Ubuntu MATE because I like Ubuntu and the MATE variant has an environment I prefer with a bunch of changes I like, a good compromise between old and new. That said, TDM behaves a bit oddly in Linux. For some reason in TDM it misses the occasional mouse click - if I happen to click fast enough there's a chance the event won't register. It seems to be something inherent to the Doom 3 engine in Linux - even in dhewm3, if I make a really fast click on the mouse it can sometimes ignore that mouse event and not fire the weapon. Generally you have to be really quick on the down/up event for it to happen, but it happens, it's reproducible and I can't just accept having to consciously be aware of my mouse behaviour and remembering to click long enough to guarantee the event is registered. I'm sure many won't notice this issue, but I'm pretty fussy about such things so it annoys me. This doesn't happen on anything else in Linux, just Doom3/TDM. Not surprisingly Windows doesn't have this issue, and it's a good example of the reasons why I don't bother moving entirely to Linux. I can't stand odd quirks like this and there's odd quirks EVERYWHERE in Linux. There's quirks aplenty in Windows too of course, but I'm used to them.

Sure you can, it's called cross compilation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_compiler In the Linux VM you'd install something like mingw-w64 and use that as the compiler, the output being a Windows exe. Of course the project would have to be set up to support it so I don't know if TDM is already set up for that.

Given updates from Windows 7/8 to 10 and from 10 to 11 have been free, it seems like a low-impact financial decision on the part of the end user. I mean I'm tired of MS's BS and complications too and don't like a lot of the changes in newer versions of Windows, but I found workarounds and solutions to all the common issues and felt it was a better outcome than relying on EOL software that's going to be harder and harder to maintain especially when software/hardware vendors no longer support it. Still, if you find Linux is an option then it's better than a system that no longer runs anything without major issues. /sidetrack

As much as I'm a big fan of FOSS, it gets messy when it involves assets with a whole mix of licenses. The engine? Sure that'll work, but TDM is useless with just the engine. Even if you have a separate libre version with verified assets, you've now split the project into a full version and a libre-only version and for what? Some entry in a niche wiki and the Debian repo? Once people want actual full missions to play you begin to drift away from the restricted licenses imposed on the libre version and have to code and accommodate for that. If TDM was developed with the day-one intention of only allowed libre licensed assets then there'd be no problem, but it hasn't and what your asking is probably too much work and effort for little benefit.

All I can tell is the gamma is so low, how does one find secrets and details in the environment if you can't even see shit. But I guess you could justify the AI being dumb too if they also can't see shit.

It's possible the vsync implementation in TDM is broken in Linux, or at least doesn't work properly with newer NVIDIA drivers. I wouldn't use that driver setting checkbox as a global option if I could. If the environment variable works, create a launcher script for TDM using it.

You can try forcing vertical sync in Linux if using NVIDIA drivers with environment variables: __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1 ./thedarkmod.x64 https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.146.02/README/openglenvvariables.html

I can confirm your issue. My monitor can run at 165 Hz so I set the in-game FPS cap to 166. When capped at 166 FPS I can't hear any faint footsteps while creeping either, but when set to a cap of 144 FPS the creeping footsteps played as expected. I've only played a handful of missions since I got this monitor so I likely just didn't notice this and if there were any other oddities like the camera and other movement, I didn't notice them either. Still, there's clearly something subtle happening at higher frame rates. I'd be curious if the problem happens on say a 60 Hz monitor but still capped at 166 FPS. Guessing it would. As for the other thing you noticed where the actual frame rate cap doesn't seem to match the one selected in the menus, I think this is more of an issue with the Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine the game uses as its base. My understanding is it took some work to actually get higher frame rates than 60 working in the game in the first place. Even the dhewm3 source port of Doom 3 doesn't have it working correctly. Even if you uncap the FPS the timing of the game goes to warp speed and it's completely unplayable. https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/pull/297. Amusingly there's at least one TDM dev who posted there, since people talk about how TDM implemented their own solution (not without its own bugs).

Merry Xmas!

I can't say this about TDM necessarily but I have seen quirks that happen on Linux that don't happen on Windows even with cross-platform software. I was testing some Quake map packs in Linux using the Quakespasm engine, a very popular source port. I noticed a particular map pack was missing music in Linux but worked fine in Windows. I thought it may have been a codec issue, until I discovered the map in question was requesting audio file "track102.ogg" but the actual title of the file was "Track102.ogg" and Linux filesystems are by default case-sensitive. Renaming the file fixed it but man that was some bullshit the end user shouldn't have to deal with.

Krita has really gone from strength to strength in the last few years. Even though it's targeted more at painting, I'm finding Krita functions well even with general image manipulation to the point where it can replace GIMP for most tasks for me. GIMP is still handy at times but Krita's UI is superior. I did try a simple AI diffusion plugin I found for GIMP but it did all the work on a server on the Internet somewhere and that required being put in a queue, etc. My card is powerful enough to do the CUDA work locally with this Krita plugin, and after some practice it's really effective.

Well since you're a Linux user and already know about scripts, I invite you to learn about the inotifywait command which can monitor the changes made to a directory or file. You could have your mogrify script run whenever the screenshots dir changes (i.e. a screenshot is saved). Examples - https://www.thegeekdiary.com/inotifywait-command-examples-in-linux/

It does, hence my confusion about why I don't get it. But post after post after post I see on reddit and elsewhere, even others with Firefox and uBlock Origin, having a hell of a time and discussing solutions. It's so inconsistent.

Well I guess Google must feel confident in their anti-adblocking tactics. They've decided to bump up the price of YouTube Premium in several countries/regions (from the 1st of November): https://9to5google.com/2023/11/01/youtube-premium-international-price-increase/ On the Australia subreddit someone mentioned how their plan will be increasing from $17.99 a month to $32.99. That's fun.

A bit tongue-in-cheek but I think there's something to be said for the browser you're using. Like I said before I haven't encountered the popup at all yet, but I've being using Firefox for ages so I wonder if the popup, even with the latest filters in uBlock origin, is just more difficult to bypass in Chrome due to Google's control of the browser.

Good work! I enjoy short missions because things are nice and focused - you get in, you get out. Also I tend to do better with the loot amounts and I was able to get all the loot without too much trouble, which is rare for me. If I were to make a suggestion though - I found the intro briefing sequence a bit distracting because it was so obvious the narration was pitch-shifted to make a deeper voice. If you felt the original voice wasn't deep enough for your needs, I would either get someone on the forums to record it for you or just leave as is. That's my only real complaint and it's not even about the mission itself, so pretty good first start!

I have trouble seeing a mass shift to Odysee. I mean people said the same thing when reddit had its API changes - various alternatives were being mentioned (most of which I've forgotten the names of already) but it hasn't had any real impact. Same with Facebook, same with Twitter/X. People are creatures of habit and will tolerate a LOT in order to not have to change their habits. Plus of course these platforms are where all the content is - network effects and all that. I love it when legitimate alternatives are available, but unfortunately these large platforms know all the rules by now. You put the squeeze on AFTER you've achieved dominance in your market.

What I'm saying is I've been reading people post stories about those popups asking people to disable their adblockers when trying to use YouTube. I haven't encountered that personally yet which means one of two things - either the YouTube changes haven't been rolled out into my area yet, or my ad-blocking extension has been updated to suitably deal with it. There are people who say uBlock Origin was able to bypass the popups, so it can be done. But it's a cat-and-mouse game being played right now.

No shit that's the whole bloody point of this thread! I mean YouTube can certainly try, but there's been a never-ending war between ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers for as long as blockers have existed. As with most things, YouTube will probably find a solution that most people cannot bypass, but anyone determined enough will find a way. YouTube can TRY to block users with adblockers. But whether they'll succeed or not is very much uncertain.

Part of the issue, at least for me, is that I didn't even start using an ad-blocker until ads had become so ridiculous they were actually impacting the performance of my computer. I started using a blocker way, way back when I had a single-core CPU. I can even remember what it was - a Flash ad displayed on DeviantArt. The problem now is that I've become so used to a cleaned-up web experience that browsing the web in a non-blocked fashion is so incredibly shitty that if it weren't for ad-blockers, I'd barely use the Internet. I can understand YouTube wanting to block ads, I really do. But from what I've read the increase in ads on YouTube over recent years is just not going to encourage me to disable my blocker and I'm not prepared to pay for Premium since I don't use YT much anyway. Is it unethical/immoral? Well I've crossed that bridge years ago; the web is so horrible without blockers that if it's unethical/immoral to block them, then I'm happy to be judged so. What I can say is that I would use YouTube even LESS if I was forced to view ads. EDIT: For what it's worth I've never had YouTube show me that pop-up yet. I know the rollout is staggered but also that uBlock Origin filters are regularly updated to deal with it, so who knows. Maybe I did have it but the blocker dealt with it silently as with other ads.

This is now a thread about the classic Nirvana album "Nevermind".

It's true some Android phone manufacturers copy Apple even after making fun of them. Samsung are notorious for mocking Apple then copying the exact thing they mocked them for (removal of headphone jack, removing charging power brick, the notch, etc.), but they're just one manufacturer. I have a Motorola Android phone for example and baring a few annoyances it tries to stay fairly traditional with a mostly stock Android system and a headphone jack. Options exist, is what I'm saying. But then again tech companies are very, very good at building ecosystems that can be painful to move out of. Apple do it, Google does it, Microsoft does it, etc. It's why I think it's best to never fully go all-in if possible, so that you can pull the ripcord if it gets too much. As for your concerns about tech journalism, don't fret. Journalism as a whole has been shit for ages, it ain't just in the tech sphere. So many people sucking up to companies in the hopes they'll get free gear or swag or an invite to their next reveal, whatever it is (tech, entertainment, whatever). People don't like asking hard-hitting question because it puts them on a "list" - there's always plenty of sycophants, and the bills needs to be paid.

I promise I'm not trying to be "that guy", but I feel like this is one of those cases where the answer is staring you right in the face - Android. Not that Android doesn't have its own issues of course, but it does have the value of a huge variety of models and by extension an increased chance in finding one that suits your needs better. Apple likes to keep things simple by having total control over the design of its hardware and software, which is great... if your needs and wants align with theirs. I guess what I'm trying work out is if this is a rant and then back to business, or a rant and then an opportunity to try something different.

Well I finally got it and I think it'll rather swell. I've already gotten used to the higher frequency and fortunately I can throw the overdrive on the maximum without any noticeable over/undershoot. I do have a minor quandary and that is with gamma. The monitor comes with three gamma settings - the default appears to target the standard 2.2, while the other settings will set it a bit above and below this level. After a bit of experimentation I'm tempted to set it to a slightly higher gamma, because this brightens the blacks a little better which can be useful sometimes. It also makes the monitor match the gamma of my old monitor a bit closer which helps with familiarity, but I'm aware I'm deliberately messing with the colors compared to what's intended. I think I'm so used to the TN panel that on the standard gamma settings everything looks much darker now than before. I found I had to up the gamma/brightness in a lot of games manually when I didn't need to before, so I figured well if that's gonna be the case, why not just up the gamma in the monitor and save the trouble? But I don't know if I should just force myself to adapt to the 2.2 gamma instead like "normal" people. EDIT: Damnit now I'm not so sure. Night scenes look a lot better at the default gamma, but more importantly TDM looks better with the default gamma. With the brighter gamma like I tested, sure it looks more familiar to my previous monitor, but it's also a bit more washed out. Plus of course the desktop is affected by the higher gamma which also affects things like images and other content. Default gamma it is then, if games are too dark I use the in-game brightness/gamma options like most people do. Unless you're playing Starfield.