esme

What on earth do you think mappers do, design the architecture then grab a handful of lights, close their eyes, scatter them and wherever they fall that's where the light goes ? Bit like planting bulbs so they look natural ? Way to piss all over the mappers efforts mate, job well done there Light placement, brightness, volume that is illuminated, whether it can be extinguished and by what means, can it be relit, does it flicker & what pattern to the flicker, what colour is it all these things get considered when you light a map, if it's done well it can make a trivial section into something the player has to think about hopefully adding to the players enjoyment, after all they're playing a stealth game, taking their time & thinking round problems is usually part of the game, so I kind of hope they enjoy taking their time & thinking. So there's really no need to build a switch to allow you to turn them off into the core mod then! glad thats settled. I'm coming to the idea that you think light in TDM is just there to make it look pretty, and sound is just for atmosphere instead of being integral parts of the game

Once more, no problem with an extra lamp model being added which can be frobbed to turn it off or even scripts & settings in new missions applied to existing oil lamp models to let you turn them off, or even some other solution in new missions that lets you change the lighting in some fashion But leave the lights in existing missions alone, if you haven't got enough water arrows to deal with the lights then tough luck it's like that for a reason, the author has set you a problem and it's up to you to solve it within the game mechanic as it stands, "do I burn a limited resource or do I find some other solution" that's the problem, not "do I appeal to the developers and get the game mechanic changed so the problem goes away". There is no point in making missions with puzzles, problems & limited resources if by changing a setting on the engine all these problems disappear and crucially it's not regarded as some form of cheat like using notarget or noclip is.

"Asimov wrote stories with robots that behaved according to the three laws of robotics, but all these other authors wrote stories that didn't, this is not consistent. So I want to change all these other stories so their robots behave like Asimovs and then I want the publishers to release these modified stories and get rid of the original creations" No, you don't like non Asimovean robots don't read the stories but don't change someone elses work to suit yourself, call it an improvement and expect everyone else to go along with it. I haven't written any TDM missions but I did write one for T2, now people can download that and do whatever they like with it, no problem, but if they change it and replace my version on the download sites with theirs then I'd be a teeny bit miffed. New features are not a problem, its retrofitting these new features to existing maps that is. As for replacing AI & sound systems I believe there was quite a lot of testing done to ensure the effect on the gameplay in existing maps would be minimal. Whereas the ability to plunge a section into darkness when the author intended that you shouldn't be able to is a fairly major change to gameplay. In the mission I made for T2 I did a lot of work on placing lights and deciding whether they could be extinguished or not, on the expert difficulty I even had the AI turn lights back on if they'd been turned off, lighting is important and I chose my lighting arrangement carefully, change the lights and the gameplay changes completely as was evidenced by the reaction from my beta testers when they found the AI could turn lights back on. Now if someone retrofits a way into every mission that allows the player to turn every light off then all the work I did placing those lights is a complete and utter waste of my time, and the game becomes trivial. The author put a particular type of light at a particular place for a particular reason, if you don't like that choice go play another mission or create your own that does it your way.

Sorry in advance, I've kinda lost patience with this issue a bit As I said before it can be given as an extra option if the devs decide to put it in the core software, but kindly leave existing missions how the author made them. If you wish to tweak a mission on your system then fine, that's your system and you can do what you want with it, there are plenty of cheat codes available in the engine if you really want to make things easier or break out DarkRadiant & mod the hell out of it, but there's no reason why something you do on your system with the missions you've downloaded should be retrofitted to the core engine to force everyone else to do the same thing on theirs. Regarding the 'consistency' argument complaining that different missions, by different authors, made at different times, behave differently, I think there may be a clue in this sentence that invalidates the argument. If an author or group of authors create a campaign, then across the campaign you can expect consistency and legitemately (although a bit douchily) complain if you don't get it, but these missions have been gifted to us by many different people, with many different skill levels at many different times and you can't guarantee or even expect features that one author provides to be used by another. If the author put a fixed light source in an inconvenient position, then deal with it, TDM is not supposed to be an easy game to play, it's supposed to present you with a challenge that you don't get in other games, dealing with inconvenient light sources is part of that challenge.

I don't see a problem with having this available along with lights you can't put out in new missions. Existing missions though should stay as the author intended, if they put a fixed non extinguishable light in a particular place then thats what they intended for that mission, if they wanted the player to be able to put it out they'd have used a candle or some other light source you can turn off.

I've gone back to my original OS & I'm not putting Win10, 11 or any later version on any machine until they start treating the user of the machine as the person who owns & controls it, so can anyone recommend a good flavour of *nix that's reasonably secure & easy to use it's been a while since I looked ? It's my machine, I paid for it, I don't wan't a killswitch, I don't want all this bundled xbox & cortana crap, I want to schedule my updates to a convenient time, preferably after I've done a backup, not when I urgently need to do something and I don't want it phoning home every five minutes with encrypted information thats traceable to my machine but I have no knowledge of the contents of the message.

You also need to remove that if it's already installed. Anyone have a permanent way of disabling the killswitch ?

Yes, but irl they are also controllable so you can turn them off

I'm coming to the conclusion that Win10 isn't worth the price

How about something a little bigger than a space ship that still allows for city type stealth ? something like the city in Dark City

Well you did say "Gameplay could be a bit more demanding" @ Pwyll, you got your wish, enjoy

I've never had a problem with the single quicksave mechanism, well except the time I accidentally quicksaved instead of restoring just as I got killed but that was my fault, so of the options the 2 quicksave system please

I'm not a stranger to death, both my brothers are dead, my mum, possibly my dad but he buggered off when I was 13 so effectively he died then, my cousin who would be a day older than me had he lived died of leukemia, an aunt of throat cancer, an uncle of bowel cancer, grandparents and multiple aunts & uncles. Some were religious some weren't and I've never seen anything that makes me think they might have lived on. I have the belief that when you die thats it, you're conciousness dissipates to nothing and the only part you play in the universe from that point on is as constituent atoms and memories in other peoples heads. I'll be happy to be surprised but I'm not expecting to be. So I make the most of what I have and try to leave good memories in other peoples heads.

Would the following scenario be possible ? Say have a guard room, when an AI leaves for a patrol script a timer, if the AI returns cancel the timer, if the AI doesn't return the timer expires and the other guards become alerted and go looking for them. Maybe even have a couple of timers one expires then the remaining AI start wondering where the other one is, next timer they get up & go searching

'sok, my heart rate will be back to normal in a day or two @esme, just take a few deep breaths :-P.

might even be possible to build such a meter as a custom game object to test the idea without modding the base TDM code, i don't know what access designers have to OS functions from within the game though

How about something simple like an ambient noise/decibel meter next to the light gem ? It won't tell you what is being said in conversations but it will tell you the level of ambient noise and the pattern will give you some clue as to what's going on. Most AI conversations are barks and it's not vitally important to know what the content of the bark is if it's really important to know then there's usually a readable somewhere, the behaviour of an AI changes if the alert level changes so you don't really need to know it's saying "hmm thought I heard something" it helps with immersion, but if you knew it was saying something & saw it's behaviour you could roughly tell it's alert level and whether you need to watch out for it. Footsteps should cause the meter to pulse with each step, increasing amplitude means approaching, decreasing means going away, conversations should make it react, so you should be able to spot AI behind cover if they're making a noise. It might be possible to take this from the normal sound output, if I click on the sound icon on my toolbar it gives me an indication of the level of sound currently going to the speakers irrespective of whether they're turned on or not. What would be nice would be if it could be directional, so as you turn a sound source makes a greater or lesser effect on the meter, perhaps make it an average of the L/R channels sound level. No idea how easy it would be to implement but it sounds simpler than retrofitting subtitles and finding a way of displaying them that gives the same direction & distance cues as the sound system.

I'd realised I'd missed a few things, odd unexplored bits here and there, so rather than go back to them I restarted mission 2 & did them on the way past. I'd already done a couple of 'otherworld' bits so I decided I'd try the other end of the mansion this time round. How bad could it be I thought, I've seen some pretty bad guys in the 'otherworld', lets see what's in that room over there ... oops ... I think I need to do some cardio workouts and do something about the dents I just put in the wall behind me ... I'll just be over here gibbering quietly to myself & having a little weep

Deserted room via @abandonedpics

Not very practical but nice to look at http://www.steampunktendencies.com/post/122321702124/concept-design-by-vasily-serduk Nice bow Nice arrows Nice axe Nice hammer Nice sword

First one I saw it in was the first Duke Nukem Yeah it would be a fair amount of effort & I'm not sure what gameplay benefit there would be, if any, just an idle thought

One thing I've always thought about food in Thief & TDM. If you eat a little you're health improves and that's ok. But if you trough down multiple wheels of cheese, a barrel of apples or two and a few deer legs in a single sitting you ought to feel decidedly unwell. Would that be something worth thinking of, eat and health improves up to a critical amount of food after that health starts to decline ? This would be ordinary food found in ordinary places, magical/blessed food would be exempt from this rule

Thanks for the link biker, doesn't really tell me what I needed to know though, I'll have a dig around

Still playing this and enjoying it immensely, I can't put it better than Melan in #81 excellent mission & a good story

can you go back to your original system with an image backup or is the license voided so you stop getting updates ?