Xolvix

Cool thanks for that. I guess I'm not surprised that the final main area I haven't visited yet was going to the answer to my question. Took me long enough to even find it (seems like something others had issue with as well). I think I'm just more miserable I didn't find a single secret without hints.

I've had a break from TDM for a while and after the 2.11 update I decided to give this mission a go. It's pretty cool and the type of mission I like, although I found myself having a bit of a headache overworking my brain and eyes trying to scan carefully for things, and not even realizing there were secrets! What's worse, I'm nowhere near the 7000 loot optional objective (on Hard) and it feels like I'm close to the end, but tdm_show_loot seems to show the vast majority of what's missing in hidden areas which are no doubt locked away via those secrets, so no wonder I can't hit the limit. Oh well. I still haven't finished it yet but I'm close, but I have a question: Anyway, good work!

The thing about "gaming veterans" is that there are very few who can retain the same creative level and quality as they age. When you're young, you have passion and energy and a willingness to almost break yourself for the craft. But as you age you have more responsibilities, you become more exposed to dumb office/team/management politics, you become a parent, you get tired, become more cynical, etc. The vigor of youth gives way to the treachery of age. We even have a recent example. The Callisto Protocol had much of its media coverage and marketing focused on the fact that the game director (Glen Schofield) was one of the Dead Space co-creators. After its release, it more or less disappeared from talk entirely because the gameplay, horror elements and story were all unremarkable, bordering on mediocre. Games are made by teams and not one person and I'm not a fan of putting gaming veterans on a pedestal. Occasionally there's exceptions but they're also quite rare - Hideo Kojima earned his reputation with continued successes but most others have not. Anyway, that's a bit of a digression. The article was fun read but I have my doubts of another official Thief game, even if it is free from Eidos now.

Gonna give my well-wishes here too. I haven't updated yet, actually I haven't played TDM in a while because I got distracted with other games & life. But I'm gonna come back and finish those missions I haven't completed yet and the new improvements/features sound pretty cool. Despite my previous reservations, I'm eager to try out the new blackjack KO indicator feature - might actually result in far less savescumming if I know a KO is guaranteed now. Anyway, great work as always!

I have to admit I was a bit confused until I realized I had rebound my crouch to CTRL which is apparently the default key for creep. I thought CTRL was the default for crouch in most games (except some who think C is an acceptable alternative) so I tend to rebind where possible. As for creep I bound it to ALT which works well since it uses the thumb rather than the pinky. That said, I agree a toggle feature would be useful. I just hope it's an option though because I can imagine the number of people writing posts asking "why is my movement speed stuck so slow all of a sudden".

Oh wow. I've been playing TDM since the time it was actually a mod for Doom 3, and I guess I always considered mastering KOs in this game to be something of a rite of passage, given there's always a chance you'll fail no matter your experience. Now you are able to get a visual indication of a guaranteed takedown, which I think is an overall positive but it takes some of the uncertainty away. On the other hand, I will freely admit to save scumming. I would often save before attempting a KO even if I thought it would have a high chance of succeeding. So I'm trading lots of saving in a mission for an animation showing the chance of success. At least there's a cvar to allow for both styles, I like that.

Shame I have an Australian accent, probably doesn't fit in the TDM universe. Oi cunts I 'erd something. Fucking taffa!

I had a look at the full list and I don't I've played a single game there, not even the oldies like DOTA 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. I don't think I'm a very good contributor to the gaming economy I think.

Apologies but I don't think I can. All I remember is it first appeared a while back (not sure which update) and I'm pretty sure it was in one of those "Beta testing" threads for the version in question. That's all I can remember, apart from seeing the report once.

I've noticed this bug was introduced a number of updates ago and I think it's been reported as I remember reading the same comment in another thread, but given it's mostly aesthetic and extremely quick I don't think priority has been given to fix it yet. HOWEVER... around the same time this bug was introduced I did notice that sometimes, if there's a guard in your area looking at you but you're hidden in darkness, but you save then quickload, the guard will sometimes react that they've noticed something. If you quickload again then generally they won't react. Basically I wonder if that brief flash you are seeing also affected the global illumination when it happens and as a result it also affects gameplay because it reveals your location for a split second.

I generally dislike DOF in games except in three circumstances: (1) in-game cinematics, (2) characters engaging in conversations with someone, or (3) some sort of in-game menu system. Basically so long as the depth of field is being used in non-gameplay parts of the game, that's completely fine and often enhances the result. But TDM is virtually all gameplay and doesn't have such systems, so all DOF is going to do is make the game harder by making things in the distance less clearly visible. All that said, I ain't got a problem with it being integrated into the engine. There's a handful of missions that do have cinematics, albeit small ones, so it'd be kinda cool to see it being used in such situations.

Depending on what it's using, if it's simple enough it should be able to run using Mono on Linux though. Look at how KeePass 2 runs on Linux to see how to run a .NET application in Linux (specifically the Other Unix-like systems section): https://keepass.info/help/v2/setup.html#mono

If you're asking if I have the ability to make GUIs then yes, you can literally draw them using Qt creator/designer. If you're asking if I'm going to do it for the purposes of this project, probably not right now as I've got barely enough time to play TDM as it is. I just don't think that website development translates well to desktop development. But you are right, these days you'll certainly find more people in general able to do UI development using web-based technologies, so in terms of the availability of people it most definitely has an advantage over traditional native apps. BTW, that joke about rewriting using Rust is because it's basically a meme in the programming community to rewrite old codebases in Rust because it's more secure or something like that. Plus it has a lot of fanboys. Just wanted to address the confusion.

Unfortunately this is also the reason we're getting slower applications with greater memory requirements. People don't want to build native applications anymore, they want languages originally intended for web development but repurposed for the desktop via Electron because it's... easier. Somehow we managed to make zippy applications using C/C++ for ages (even cross-platform using toolkits like Qt/GTK) but now that's IMPOSSIBLE apparently. /old-man rant

You've named the Nameless mod twice already. You have good taste. I may as well also suggest Deus Ex: Nihilum. Kinda similar in terms of production values as well as having plenty of voiced NPCs.

Just make sure it's rewritten using Rust, that's what all the cool kids are using these days apparently.

I agree that the mission browser and management functions in TDM are limited due to the nature of the in-game UI. You could implement a launcher component that is part of the main code rather than a third-party tool, and that might be useful because you can then transfer all the mission selection stuff to the "launcher" which by using the desktop windowing system, will have much greater opportunity for flexibility. Unfortunately it won't integrate as nicely into the TDM GUI itself though. On the other hand... you could just redesign the entire TDM GUI. Smaller fonts, push menu elements out to the edges of the screen a bit more to allow for a greater density of info in the middle of the screen for the mission browser. That kinda sounds like a major task though.

I guess the issue is that The Dark Mod is just the one executable. It doesn't have a launcher since the means of browsing, downloading and launching missions is all integrated into the same program used to actually play the game. Which I kinda prefer due to its simplicity, but I suppose it does limit the number of extra features you can shove into the GUI. Technically I guess there's nothing stopping anyone from making a separate launcher. The code for reading the mission server, acquiring missions, unpacking and reading mission metadata is all there anyway. One could build a GUI application that would then allow the extra features you wanted, plus the information density would be much greater compared to the in-game browser. Even launching missions would be easy since you'd just have to change the currentfm.txt file and then launch TDM as normal. So yeah. Someone could write that I guess, as a side project...

Oh man. I have a lot to say about Invisible War but I think this dude summarizes most of what I think much better than I could explain: Also if you do intend to play Invisible War at some point, please for the love of God, install this unofficial patch after installing the game: https://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-2-visible-upgrade/downloads/visible-upgrade-full-edition The quality of life improvements are so significant it's basically mandatory on modern systems. It adds widescreen resolutions, removes the pop back to desktop between level loads/quickloads, adds some really good community texture packs, and so on. If you go and look up screenshots of Invisible War, it's actually quite fascinating just how much variation there is between pre-release screenshots made during development and what was actually released. There is a particular screenshot that shows what is clearly a PC-centric HUD kinda similar to that in the original Deus Ex, which makes me think the decision to make the game cross-platform with the Xbox was not in the original design and perhaps came from Eidos management. Unfortunately the exact screenshot I remember well but seems to be partially lost to the Internet as it's REALLY hard to find. I'll keep looking. EDIT: This isn't the image I'm looking for but it does show the HUD I'm thinking about. If only they didn't experiment with the eyeball HUD they ended up with...

They're gone? Shame. I was about to accuse them of being Nort.

I had a similar problem a long time ago back when I was a bit of a gamma/brightness nut (see my older posts). I was obsessed with getting the best level of contrast between shadows and lights, however given it was also adjusting all elements of the interface it was overblowing maps and readables, the background to the inventory screen and even the menu. Some of it was tolerable, but other times it looked like I was staring into the sun. The solution was to basically give up and remain with the defaults. Not only did the stop my obsessive-compulsiveness but it was better because it made missions look more or less the way that the mapper likely intended it to look.

What is this feature? I'm not sure I even know what you're referring to. I guess that means a no for me then.

Look I'm still trying to learn how to render donuts in Blender, it's gonna take time! Anyway, I like the hand-le but to be honest, that's the kind of detail that even with a super high-poly count you're not likely to notice as a player. You'd have to get really close and be in the mindset of wanting to pay attention to the details to actually notice. Most players (including myself) would be preoccupied with the act of lock-picking and/or opening and then grabbing what's inside. It's one of the dangers of putting in a lot of detail into assets that barely get a second look by players. I do try to stop and "smell the roses" from time to time, but I also miss a lot of nice details even when trying.

Not quite. The project is based on this: https://github.com/copy/v86 The source package for Felix's windows95 is around 2.35 MB, but the actual full releases are in the area of 300 MB so he must be bundling a Windows 95 base package alongside it. Basically this project is about adapting an x86 emulator running in Javascript to be run within an Electron framework, and tailored specifically to run Windows 95 smoothly. I'm not downplaying Felix's efforts though - taking bits and putting them together such that you can run Windows 95 in Electron in a fast, smooth and reliable way takes effort and skill. But he didn't build Windows 95 in Javascript and frankly I don't know how he could since its source code is still locked up at Microsoft.

Maybe I'm just a little tired but when I opened up the thread and glanced at the image, I thought the idea was how you were going to create a new asset based off the real-life safe shown in the image. It took a bit before I realized it wasn't actually a photograph! I got nothing to contribute except to go for it, we need more safes!