Xolvix

Oh man I've just started continuing this mission after a leave of absence. I got distracted by shiny AAA titles for some reason and have now gone back to classic TDM, something I was intended to do anyway. Unfortunately this distractionary phase seems to have lasted for... a while, since the last played date for the mission was apparently February 2023. It also appears I'm out of date as there are a ton of new missions I've been ignoring. It's almost embarrassing, but now I'm ready for it and I'm reminded just how epic in scale this mission actually is.

True, I have nothing but respect for Ross for at least giving it a go. I remember seeing in one of his videos how he said he didn't really want to necessarily spearhead this project, but he had to at least try something because he was getting more and more frustrated about seeing games die with no legal recourse for those who purchased them. His motivation was that no-one else was pursuing anything similar so he wanted to try himself and chose a particular window of opportunity (discontinuation of The Crew) as being the time to do it. He's also stated how even if the whole thing ends up going nowhere, he's at least satisfied he gave it his best go. Ross said he'd be more bothered if he didn't try something, basically. Even if the law doesn't change, this whole process might help provide some clarity in terms of what rights people have (or don't have).

Nah it's OK, I'm not that sensitive. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if much happens. I assume with the extra votes it'll probably hit the threshold for the number of real legitimate votes required to progress, but I have concerns it'll not be treated by lawmakers as a serious topic due to the focus being on gaming, despite it actually being more about consumer rights.

I post for the first time since January with a detailed response about an important(ish) topic and I get a laugh reaction. In all seriousness though, if one doesn't like DRM they have to be careful posting nowadays since a lot of people have a lot of time invested in games and platforms with DRM of various sorts, and any issues you raise with the game/platform these people will take as personal attacks against themselves, even though it was never intended. Not so bad here, but reddit and Steam forums? Good God. Bruh we both live in Australia, it's not that bad here with regards to the authorities most of the time. I mean it does depend where you live (I'm in SA) but comparing our cops to those in the US is like using a cheat code.

I don't know if I'd call it a necessity given places like GOG exist. I might tolerate some DRM so long as it's crackable or there's a plan in place to remove it at some point. I read somewhere that Denuvo has moved to a subscription model which has motivated publishers to remove it after a while once its value has diminished beyond a certain amount. I think this is the reason why games sometimes release an update that removes Denuvo after a while - most of the bulk purchases would have been made by that point so there's no value in continuing payments for it. Unfortunately it's taken a lifetime for me to accept that I have very little influence in most matters and ultimately the only decisions I can make are those for myself. If I wish to boycott a company or product or anyone that is doing something I disagree with, that is a personal decision and I cannot expect others to do the same. Even if it means your hobby or interest ends up going to shit because of the indifference of others, it sucks but all you can either do is navigate the shit or do something else. We must follow our own value systems, even when there's an incredible amount of money invested in an industry that is continually pressuring us to not do so (you MUST play this game, you MUST buy this console, you're missing out! FOMO, etc).

If you downloaded the mission via the in-game downloader recently, you probably acquired the version that was updated to work for the 2.13 beta. It's one of the few missions for which the update is known to break in 2.12. As per all the discussion above, look at @stgatilov's post for the previous version known to work with 2.12.

Quick question - I notice the majority of missions seem to have updates now. I'm assuming this is to support 2.13 in some way, but will updating the missions cause them to have issues and become incompatible whilst still running 2.12?

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.