esme

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 ?

Ahhhhhhh, yes My natural avarice concerning shiny things got the better of me, I wondered why Now I know I can see I'm going to have to think out of the box a bit more with this, 6/6 secrets & all loot One tip for newbies, don't click if you don't want to know

Is it bad that I read that as "tdm porn test" & not "tdm pom test" It may be time for my eye tests again

Hmm, in the first mission I found could some kind person suggest where I could look for a clue to the Loving this mission btw

QFT, I play Thief DP, MA & DS as well as TDM Can't quite bring myself to get the latest incarnation of Thief though

Well they were guests, I did invite them, so blackjacked would have done, mind you they did eat the bbq I did so they may have been assassinated they just don't know it yet

Thanks guys, unfortunately you picked the one weekend where I can't play them for a release Anyone want to take some guests off my hands so I can get stuck into these And once again, many, many, many thanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pju-RPhMAaA&start=108 Jump to about 1:10

So as I managed it on Hard with only the one KO can I take that as an expert ? Loved this mission, usually I don't like forced ghosts & I definitely don't like having my blackjack restricted but it fitted nicely with the story, if you're trying to impress a potential client then the more guards you leave active the better. It looked beautiful, guards were nicely placed & routed to make things hard but not impossible. Could have used a hint about the but that's a very minor thing And thank you for hiding loot , I always look there when there is one and it's always nice to be rewarded for the effort. Excellent mission, it would make a great start to a campaign

I have to agree with this, TDM is definitely one of the more civilised forums I visit, please accept my apologies for the suggestion And I honestly can't remember which mission it was so please don't assume it was yours, I've played most of the available ones and while some weren't quite to my taste, they were all damn good. I take the point that IRL generations of artisans have become very good at hiding doors, but IRL we have tools for locating them we can touch them to feel for temperature differences, knock on the wall listening for the hollow sound or these days we use scanners, these things aren't usually available in a game world* so some other technique needs to be available. No problem with not providing an indication if the door can't be opened from this side, it stops the player wasting hours looking for the control to open it for a start. Thank you to all the mappers for the missions to date, I really must get my finger out and have a go myself * - I have used the knock on walls trick in Thief to check if people hid doors as the entire surface of the wall & found a few secrets this way, doors make a noise, walls are silent

OK I know they are secret and therefore should be hidden, but there ought to be some clue that they are there, especially if they don't frob and are switch activated. Wear marks on the floor from opening/closing, slight changes in colour, a break in the pattern, a seam round the edge, a footprint in the dust, something. I've noticed in a couple of missions that secret doors blend seamlessly into the wall which is ok if it's following the pattern of the bricks or the seam coincides with a natural edge but in at least one I've seen a hidden door blends into solid stone without leaving any kind of seam or edge, sorry I can't remember which one. Now I'm sorry, I don't care how good the architects of these places are supposed to be, if you have two pieces of stone, wood or metal there's going to be a boundary between them that can be seen, it might be faint but it'll be there and the player should be able to see it if they are paying attention. Ok whining over, let the flaming commence.

TTLG have done it currently the second announcement on the home page Headers come back as Content-Type: text/html Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.13, ASP.NET X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:39:01 GMT Content-Length: 27067 200 OK

Just remembered this thread, if we're going to revamp/rejig/fettle the site in some way, any chance we could include the GNU Terry Pratchett thing ?

Just scored a some brownie points by knocking up a couple of pinhole cameras to watch the eclipse with :smugbert: Would have been a lot more had we not had solid cloud cover but I'll take what I can get And we can use them when we do have some sun, probably be 10 minutes in June sometime And as I look out of the window, the skies are, of course, clearing

A man is not dead while his name is still spoken. - Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue GNU Terry Pratchett It'd be a nice gesture for the TDM site, but if you don't want to or you can't, don't worry about it. http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/

If I have comments on Thief fan missions or games I make them over on TTLG, if I have comments about TDM & it's missions I make them over here

Originally Manchester, now Sheffield where I've found that for some people the War of the Roses never ended