Xolvix

I'm of the same opinion in that I generally dislike KO-limitations on missions. One could argue that the solution is to just play the easier skill level(s) that doesn't have that restriction, but unfortunately this tends to come with the baggage of also requiring less of the player in terms of loot limits and possibly even additional objectives that you'd be happy to do on the higher difficulties if it weren't for that KO limit. On the other hand, my stubbornness for playing on the hardest difficulty level means I have to deal with these missions that, due to the KO limit, essentially force ghosting. And you know what? I actually became a better player of TDM by being put in a situation where I basically had to learn how to ghost properly, take my time and so on, because I couldn't KO or kill like I wanted to. If those limits were never there, I guarantee you I'd never have developed decent ghosting skills because it's frankly much harder. But now, even on missions that don't need as much ghosting as others, I'm still better at playing TDM because of those skills gained from missions which forced my hand. I'm not sure if this helps when it comes to the topic of quicksaves, but I just wanted to address how limits can sometimes help the player because of how it forces them to get out of their comfort zone and deal with the new problem.

If all else fails, you can download the mod from here (uploaded by @nbohr1more apparently so it's legit): https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads/the-dark-mod-210-full-64-bit

I swear the development of AI sprinkled with some over-hyped assumptions about the progress of tech, seems to suggest that within maybe 10-20 years from now, it'll be like: --- Me: Man I'm tired of these boring-ass games. OI! COMPUTER! Create me a stealth game with <insert gameplay requirements, desired art style, perspective, and other parameters>. Computer: Running AI algorithms, generating engine, assets and levels. Game will be built in 5 hours. Me: I'm gonna go into the refrigeration unit for a while, I really miss when we still had a season called "winter". Let me know when it's done!

If you really want to distill things down then sure, we are biological machines and AI's should be able to replicate whatever we can do, given time. Hell you could probably combine the various text and image generating AIs out there to create the assets for a map at this point, including the story. With enough time, probably the maps themselves could be created by AI. But if I know that I'm playing a map created entirely by an AI with minimal to no direct human influence... eh. It takes something away from it. There's a reason people enjoy practical effects like actual jets doing their shit in a movie like Top Gun: Maverick as opposed to a complete CGI fest. Not quite the same analogue I know but still. Otherwise it gets to the point where all content is synthetic and that feels incredibly stale. As a side note, we have enough AI tech to create fairly realistic fake articles that can be used to slander and manipulate to a degree not seen before. The issue of art being wholly created by AI is one thing, but the damage of this tech to manipulate society to a negative degree is much, much worse. Such is the progress of technology I guess. Maybe that's my bias to be cautious about it.

I'm OK with it when used appropriately. The current AI image generators are good starting points for various things, but there are often imperfections that one would still expect an artist to fix before using it. You don't just use Stable Diffusion to make what you want and you're done, especially if there are human characters in the image (fine details like faces, hands and such tend to appear slightly deformed and it's very noticeable). I'm also not a huge fan of using it to upscale textures for older games because the end result can shift the intent of the artist with some of the finer details, but again, that's only if the replacement is left untouched. If it's then modified by the artist to more closely match the original then that's fine I guess. A part of me is a bit uncomfortable with such AI because I tend to feel that art is the domain of the human rather than the machine, and I've heard the idea that AI will be able to basically replace all humans in the art-making process eventually. Maybe that will still happen, but if am aware that a bot made some artwork instead of a human then there's something lost. Art is one of the few things that still has some soul attached to it (excluding mass-market stuff), so I don't know if I'm being old-fashioned but I'd feel better if I knew at least the base of the work was still mostly under the creation of a human.

I reckon the AI should be tweaked so that if it decides to perform a head turn, for perhaps a 1% chance each time a turn is going to happen, it turns the head a full 360 degrees. Just to confuse the player.

The AI randomly turning their heads is interesting because it brings up a somewhat contentious issue I've seen when it comes to stealth games - how predictable should the AI in a stealth game be? I've heard the argument that the AI should follow a rigorous set of rules with the randomness taken to a minimum, at least while they are in their relaxed state. The reason is because the player needs to be able to plan their actions based around patrols and behaviour from the AI if they want to remain in stealth, and that info can't be obtained if the AI starts drifting off from predictability. But some prefer little moments of unpredictability like the turning heads because it means the player can never be completely certain of what they will do, plus it helps the AI appear more human and less like robots. There's other elements of unpredictability too - sometimes they'll stop and eat something from their pocket for example, cough, smell their finger I think? Plus some mappers code the AI's patrol routes to be randomly chosen from a set rather than being the same each time. I think with regards to the heads turning at least, I do like it and feel it's a part of TDM's character, but damn if I haven't been caught out by this at times and reloaded a saved game because they decided to look where they shouldn't.

If I try to kill a spider I only use arrows since they're more precise, plus it means I can keep my distance from the bastards. But as for their hitbox I guess it depends on the spider itself. In my experience I've always been able to hit them (with arrows), but as to whether it's a one-shot kill mostly depends on their size and sometimes location of damage. But yeah they can be buggy, the linked post also mentions their ragdolls acting silly if you manipulate them. Frankly any excuse to not use spiders is fine with me.

Since I recently finished CoS 2 I figured I'd give this one a go. Parts of it were familiar so maybe I had played this a long time ago before upgrading my system, but it was still mostly fresh and I explored a lot. Very enjoyable, but I had a bit of an issue: - there were way too many objectives, especially if you were able to trigger the hidden ones. The problem isn't really even the number of objectives, but rather the UI is not designed well for that number of objectives. You just keep scrolling and the current position of the objectives page isn't saved when you get out of the objectives screen and come back later, so you have to remember how far to scroll down and where to find them. The font doesn't help either - it's a great size if you only a few objectives to show but there's way too much here so it becomes a mess. I'm not sure what the fix is for an in-depth mission like this. Maybe a smaller font, a customizable objective screen where completed objectives can be hidden maybe, but that sounds like a lot of work to implement in the base game. Other than that, all good!

Well that was fun! I remember playing this mission quite a while back, but I decided to try it again on the hardest difficulty seeing as how, having gone through it once already might make it easier to stay under the knockout limit. I also took on a challenge, the "Ratter of Brooksdale". But something occurred that I should probably mention because maybe it's a "bug" or a failure of game logic, I'm not sure. I killed a rat that was hanging outside the Brooksdale Shipping Company entrance. I then picked the lock on the door, crept inside and waited for the interior guard to move away from the power switch inside the building. But since the door was open and the rat was visible, he walked for a bit then immediately ran outside with sword drawn, muttering about seeing blood. I know the AI reacts to blood but I didn't expect rat blood to put the guard in a frenzy (and hence neighboring guards). It didn't raise my stealth score though and it was actually beneficial as it kept them out of their regular patrol zones. But still... the game doesn't distinguish rat blood from human blood. Maybe I should have used a water arrow to clean it up first, but surely the guard would be able to see the nearby dead rat and realise it's not from a person?

From what I've read the game is pretty short anyway, maybe 4-6 hours for an average playthrough and up to 10 hours for 100% completion, whatever that means for this game. Of course games don't need to be long to be worth it, but for a mid-priced title with probably little replayability, I dunno. Apparently it does open up a bit more in later chapters but then goes back to a fairly straightforward path. The Steam reviews are worthless though. "Overwhelmingly Positive" but the vast majority of them are currently lame attempts at cat jokes rather than anything of value.

It's hard to be enthusiastic about new TV shows these days, especially if they're based on an existing franchise with a large fan-base. Too many producers/show-runners/writers seem to rely on the presence of the fan-base for the viewership and don't bother putting in the effort to make something worthwhile, since the preexisting fan-base will supposedly be enough to make it a success. Name your poison - Star Trek, Star Wars, Halo, various Marvel properties, Resident Evil, etc. That doesn't mean adaptions of existing products can't be decent (e.g. The Boys), but I think there's enough recent disappointments to temper expectations these days. Seems like the best option is to jump in after a season or two has aired and there's enough material to justify if it was any good.

To be fair, that particular mission is perhaps the only one I've seen out of the 100+ available missions in which you HAVE to fight and kill someone in order to progress. From what I remember from the mission's forum thread, it was a bit controversial having forced combat but the mapper felt it was worth it since most players avoid direct combat and so it presented a unique challenge. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't use that mission as a representation of how the game typically plays out, since it's the one mission in the entire mission database for which sword combat is mandatory (someone correct me if I'm wrong). All other missions allow for ghosting, knockouts, and other methods for dealing with enemies. The sword is when you have no other options, and I believe supposed to be clunky to avoid players using it as the first resort rather than the last.

Well I feel lucky then since I never actually got around to playing System Shock 2 despite being a fan of other immersive sims. I suspect it's because people like to play it with various unofficial patches and packs and tweaks that I'm not really sure where to begin. Nice to see an Enhanced Edition is on the way, so I'll wait to see if Nightdive does a good job with that and not another screwup like Blade Runner.

I was going to say that an RTX 3060/3060 Ti would be totally overkill for TDM, but I guess if you enable soft shadows and set its quality to high, ambient occlusion to high and are actually running at 144 Hz and playing the latest, most graphically intensive missions... then maybe it makes more sense. Which is kind of amusing to me for an engine that is based off of a 2004 game (and yes I'm quite aware the engine has advanced considerably more than what Doom 3 could do, so leave me alone. )

All good. Let's redirect it with another memorial, the grayman painting from The Black Mage! And if you want the original 4714x3143 sized version, here it is

I made this thread with the intention of showcasing the strength of the community with some added positivity, while making a small remark at someone's expense. I think things may have been derailed somewhat... but that's the nature of threads I guess. Guess he really hit a nerve with people.

Wow, talk about a fucking change in topic from the initial post. And for the record GIMP's loading times are fine on modern hardware, or at least with an SSD. Hell it used to be worse, since as far as I remember reading the Windows version would regularly stall on startup scanning for fonts to make a font cache, but now it scans them in the background speeding up loading times considerably. So I don't know what this crap about it spending time scanning for fonts is since this hasn't been an issue for a number of versions.

IDP.Generic is just AVG thinking that the installer is doing something that kinda looks like malware, but doesn't match anything specific in its database. Basically it's an AVG hiccup from AVG being overzealous in its detection methods, since "looking like malware" can cover a wide array of software installer packages. But as @LDAsh said, a lot of them pay for certification so that such AV (along with Microsoft's stuff) doesn't flag them. I'd recommend going here and submitting a false positive form, since it will help others using AVG as well: https://www.avg.com/en-ww/false-positive-file-form

All good, I just didn't want people to think we're a bunch of trolls who pick on people for fun without any context. The main point of the thread after all was to show the strength of the community. But again, when a person starts slandering everyone along with the project then I guess they become fair game.

To be very specific, the source of the memes (make sure to click Read more): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/profile/47453-nort/content/&type=core_statuses_status&change_section=1

I feel blessed to be ready to see potential "in-jokes" in future missions. Maybe not quite in the sense of a memorial, but it does fit the spirit of the thread in that it's cool to see references to things related to the community/project embedded in missions that only those who've been around for a while might appreciate. Although I admit, a small part of me feels bad since it's at the expense of a (former) user member. But then again they were the one who lashed out at basically everyone and the project itself, so maybe I'm just being stupid.

There's something fairly unique in TDM, at least as far as I've seen in a user-made game. I remember when grayman passed away last year, it wasn't long before we started seeing missions that had memorials dedicated to him implemented somewhere within the missions themselves. I can't remember the exact missions I've seen with grayman memorials of some sort, but I've definitely seen at least three. Just small things, in most cases requiring a little extra work from the player to find them always tastefully done. Well I was recently replaying a bunch of missions and came across this within a recessed area in a mission called The Warrens, an area I hadn't discovered in previous playthroughs: Sir Taffaslot was another mission creator who made a handful of missions who also tragically died a few years ago. The amazing thing is not only is it a nice little memorial to just randomly find when playing, but the author of this particular map (The Warrens)? grayman. Hell the guy even made a dedicated mission as a tribute to Sir Taffaslot. So yeah. We may just be "nothing more than a cult posing as a game development project", but it does bring a tear to my eyes sometimes in way most other games don't.

Launcher icons on a smart phone. At least for me, since it needs to differentiate between launching the app and a "long-hold" in case you want to show app info, uninstall, etc.