Xolvix

Aha, OK then. I've already embarrassed myself once for admitted I've never properly played the original Thief games (before 3 anyway) so I would have never gotten the reference. Maybe let's not say anything about the doll marked "Dewdrop" in Alberic's Curse (although the description says it's a homage so maybe that covers it enough...?)

Hey @Goldwell, been playing old missions again now with better hardware/effects and I have to say, this is a really solid mission! I managed to barely get over 4100 for the difficult skill loot requirement, but it turns out it was optional anyway so no matter. Got three of the 6 secrets so that was cool. Seems like the next act(s) were supposed to come out a bit sooner, but art can't be rushed and recent events probably put a bit of a strain too! I have one question though. Something hidden in the mission, but no one seems to have mentioned it yet (maybe nobody noticed)?

Read this: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Inventor's_Guild

I feel I should clarify something. Prior to T4, the only Thief game I had played to a reasonable degree was Thief 3. I think I played a demo of Thief 1 or 2, can't remember which one as it was a long time ago. After getting my hands on it I did play several missions of Thief 3 and found it decent enough, but I'm aware that people at the time of release also seemed to think it paled in comparison to the originals. In fact, to this DAY I've never actually played more than the training mission of Thief 1 and part of the first mission. I found The Dark Mod a long time ago and basically treated it as a modern version of the classic Thief games. So because of this, I didn't care at all about Thief 4 not being a worthy successor to the series as I had no emotional attachment to the Thief franchise. I just treat Thief 4 as its own game, basically a simpler version of Dishonored. EDIT: Before anyone starts suggesting it, I will eventually try Thief 1 & 2 for real with stuff like NewDark and whatnot. But TDM fills that need for masochistic stealth gameplay just fine for now.

Unfortunately Square Enix owns the rights to Thief and would have to be persuaded to finance a remake/remaster for what is still essentially a niche series. They tried resurrecting the series with Thief 4 (also known as Thief, cos reusing names is cool!) and that didn't work out quite how they would have liked. Which is a bit disappointing since I'm one of the few who kinda enjoyed that game for what it was, plus it clearly had some money thrown towards it with fairly high production values. Ultimately though, Square Enix are pretty shit with their western properties. They couldn't even finish Adam Jensen's storyline with the newer Deus Ex games FFS, which irritates me more than not having a new Thief game. So yeah, it sucks. But I guess we have The Dark Mod.

It would be kinda cool if there was a speed potion in TDM that actually slowed down time in the world. Bonus points if when activating it the Matrix lobby music starts up. More bonus points if when shooting arrows you get a wobbly bullet-time trail effect. Maximum bonus points if it gives you temporary wall-running capability while it's active.

I remember playing Cry of Fear back in the day. I was impressed by the visual improvements they made to the GoldSrc engine but the actual game, while I did finish it, didn't leave a lasting impression. My favourite Half-Life horror mod is the classic They Hunger trilogy. I think I liked it because it was a bit more linear so easier to follow, a more loose approach to the horror (since you had lots more weapons to play with than Cry of Fear so be was less desperate for the player), and it just didn't take itself as seriously and had this charm to it that was really neat.

You probably didn't notice it, but in the initial post of this thread there's a bit about how the 'Hard' and 'Expert' difficulty levels have the light gem sensitivity bumped up a notch higher than normal. You said you usually play on the higher difficulty (as do I), so that's what happened. It was a bit annoying at times but it just meant I wasn't reluctant to knock out as many enemies as I could. Anyway, as for the mission itself it was pretty good, kept the mystery of what was going on for a long time and I do like a heavy dose of intrigue and mystery in missions. The only thing I needed help with was to work out how to deal with the Daltons (I had picked up a particular bottle that was clearly related but didn't know what to do until I checked this thread). Got 4555 loot which I thought was pretty good for me, and 4 out of 5 secrets. The last one I got was purely by chance - I was trying to frob a painting in case it was loot and accidentally hit a button. Now all we need is part 2...

I love the cheats in this game, but generally I treat them as tools to actually help finish a mission when there seems to be no other alternative. noclip - Used when I occasionally get stuck in level geometry and can't wiggle/mantle my way out. notarget - Used when there's an area filled with undead enemies and I lack patience in dealing with them. Also used when I'm lost and want to scout a very complex area without being assaulted, often linked to the undead infestation (at which point I'll reload and then do it properly). tdm_show_loot - Used when a mandatory loot requirement hasn't been met and I've tried my best but can't find any more. tdm_show_keys - Didn't know about this one until recently, but is used to find, well, keys. Some missions are pure key hunts and not fun when you've looked everywhere (that you think) and still can't find mandatory keys. The loot and key cheats are really useful but also expose one's dumbness. After using them you'll be thinking "how the hell did I miss that, it was right in front of me!", but often it's the case of Oh it's that one painting out of all the other unfrobbable paintings that can be looted to hit the loot requirement Oh it's that key lying on the ground in darkness that's required to exit the level (Heart of Saint Mattis, grrrrr) Oh it's that key that's on an NPC which is partially clipped into their body so I couldn't even see it much less frob it Cheats do suck the fun out of missions if you use them continuously, but sometimes you reach your skill limit or things happen such that they're useful tools.

That's exactly it. In your dark mod directory there will be a "DarkmodKeybinds.cfg" file that contains all of your keybinds. If you delete it or rename it to something else, the next time you run The Dark Mod a new version of this file will be created with defaults.

I question the value of the stock dark mod video that plays after clicking New Mission. If the FM author has provided their own briefing video then cool, but the basic one that autoplays if a custom one isn't available doesn't really serve much value since it's like, OK we know what game we're running. If it's there to break up a sudden transition from the main menu to the briefing section, maybe add some quick black fade-ins/fade-outs to smooth the transition instead. If the stock video is still desired however, then I'd agree that it should be re-rendered to a higher fidelity so that it can make use of the improved video support.

Some doors are lockpick-proof, so to ensure this isn't the case try playing the Training Mission and the area with the lockpicks. If they still don't work, delete (maybe make copies first) the .cfg files in your darkmod directory to reset the configs, then try again. I know for a fact lockpicking works fine for me in 2.10 so maybe there's a broken config setting somewhere.

Two things: (1) Which mission does it crash on? Does it crash on every mission you've tried? If you can get simpler (older) missions to launch, there might be hope still. (2) You might want to consider trying an older version. Run the tdm_installer program again, select "Get custom version" and select a release like 2.08 or older. The installer tool can rollback to older versions even when launched within a 2.10 directory so it's not that painful to do. It will prevent you from playing some more advanced missions that use the resources of newer releases, but if it means you can still play the game with most missions, it's a compromise.

OK, finally finished it. Very nice painting in the kitchen - getting up close it's probably the highest resolution texture I've seen so far in TDM so to use it for as a memorial to grayman is very worthy. As for the mission itself, pretty good, it's the type I like although once the ghosts/undead appear things kinda slowed down a bit due to their inherent difficulties. I only found three of the five artifacts, although it seems like the ones I missed could easily be mistaken for regular items (think it was a cup and a large pot). But hey, that's what replays are for. Still, great mission overall and congrats to those who contributed to it!

Seems like the best fix would be to add another checkbox to the "Advanced settings" area on the initial installer screen for the option to keep already downloaded files if the user cancels.

Still playing this mission but great impressions so far. Just a minor thing in case it gets the FM gets updated at some point - It seems like your personal consolehistory.dat has been embedded within the "black_mage.pk4" file, so it messes with my own console history. So now I know you typed noclip/notarget/quit wrong several times.

There is one advantage with how all the settings categories are currently listed - every available option per category is presented on the screen at once. There's no chance the player could miss that something could be set/changed because they didn't realise they had to scroll to get to more options. That said, it does seems like the keybinds are where they are because while there's some overlap between Movement and Actions, there's literally no more space in the Movement subsection to put anything else so it kinda spills over into Actions. The game supports scrollbars, we know this in the mission downloader. Maybe a UI refactor is on the cards.

The original Dishonored has a similar issue, even on the hardest difficulty level. You can lean and the AI doesn't notice shit, but they fixed this in Dishonored 2. In the sequel, depending on the difficulty level (or if you choose a custom difficulty and adjust it yourself), leaning will either cause you to have zero visibility to the AI, the AI will notice you but slowly (my preference), or you'll be seen as easily as if you popped out entirely from cover.

What all these folks said. Leaning is partial visibility, if you can keep only part of your body exposed to lighting sources then it affords you the opportunities as I presented. That's not cheating - that's literally how real life works too. The best parts of this game are when I apply real-world thought processes to it, like "hmm, if I do this as I would in real-life, I expect this outcome" and you try it in the game and it actually does what you expect (for better or worse). That's one of the greatest strengths of the immersive sim sub-genre. EDIT: Also for what it's worth, leaning in TDM feels realistic and introduces some danger still. There are a number of games that have the lean capability, but my favourite worst example is Soldier of Fortune of all things. That game has a lean mechanic for some reason, but it's totally broken. If you lean around a corner, the game doesn't modify your visibility to the AI to compensate. So you can lean around corners as much as you like, shoot the shit out of your enemies and they'll never see you until you actually start walking. It was quite a feature to abuse when low on health though.

Since people are talking about leaning, I have to say I use it a fair bit as well. For example, sometimes I need to lean to get a good shot with a water arrow at a lamp that's near a doorway I want to enter. If I get too close I'm illuminated enough for the AI in the room to respond, however if I lean a bit I can often get the shot I need without being lit so much that I get seen. Additionally, there are times where there's loot on a table or something that if I get too close I'll be spotted, but if I lean forward I can just reach it with only a moderate increase in visibility. These are just some scenarios I've encountered where leaning has proven useful, and it's one of those tools in my bag of tricks that I'd hate to lose. As for other improvements, I just want to give a shout-out to those who improved load times in 2.10. It's seriously noticeable just how much shorter loads are, not just for initial loads but also especially when loading quick-saves. EDIT: Oh and another thing - the download servers for both the main game as well as the in-game downloader for missions seem to be much, much better than they were. I dunno if slow servers were removed and/or bandwidth was increased, but regardless I'm getting fast downloads for the most part with the vast majority of mirrors.

What the hell, where did this sudden onslaught of missions over the last few months come from?

I never really thought about this. From memory I seem to recall arrows being ineffective against human targets once they are in their combat state, but I'm the kind of player that treats combat state as a failure state with a few exceptions. As for zombies and the undead, their immunity to anything other than holy water-buffed water arrows and fire arrows resulted in me just ghosting around them. I always assumed this was a deliberate gameplay choice to make them immune to standard arrows and didn't even know mappers could change this.

If it does end up getting modified, consider adding some sort of cvar to allow for switching between the updated and traditional crouch toggle response. Muscle memory goes both ways and people used to how TDM does it normally may be put off by the change.

I think I get the point of their concern. I just did some tests and The Dark Mod is the only game I found that triggers crouch toggle on key release, not key press. All other games will activate crouch toggle on key press. The fact that it sticks out as being different might bother some people.

Thanks. I feel some of those "experimental features" don't really need to be marked as such anymore, they seem pretty stable and almost discourage people from enabling them. EDIT: May as well give first impressions after all the settings business... Bloody hell, what a start. Plus I think someone else mentioned it, but the new female protagonist is so refreshing a change that I can't help but smile. And so much detail, I'm not normally a graphics fanatic but with all the trimmings and the latest TDM it definitely shows and helps with the atmosphere.