namuh1

Hello Everyone. I have searched the wiki, the forum (advanced search) and the FAQ's finding MANY references to Mission Type but NOWHERE have I been able to find an explanation of what Mission Type is. Could someone please enlighten me and in addition explain the difference between the 'official TDM' mission list and the community maintained list since the Types 'seem' different between the two. Thanks in advance for any help.

Everything is running fine completely outside of Steam. Tels is correct. TDM is using virtually none of the original Doom3 and certainly not the CD key or any part of Steam.

Just in case Steam is eavesdropping I still like Steam for 'other' games, but it is nice to be free of the arcane debugging you have to go through to figure what's wrong when things are not right under the Steam umbrella.... there now I've been nice to everyone

Good news! and then Good news! For those who would like to be free of Steam. I consolidated the above advice and in the end simply copied the Doom3 tree that exists under the ..\steamapps\common folder to an entirely different place. I then ran the tdmupdater which was ver. 57. It autoupdated itself to ver. 58 and then seamlessly installed ver. 1.08 of TDM, finishing with an updated Training Mission. I set my launch shortcut to point to TheDarkMod.exe and everything appears to work fine (I just finished Thief's Den as a test mission). The graphics are crisper, the audio is also better, not that it was bad before, but now it's awesome. The updater got rid of the old launcher on its own so the new startup sequence was a no brainer... simply run thedarkmod.exe. Kudos to the team who put this update and updater together!!!.. not to mention the new executables and FREEDOM FROM STEAM. ... and of course, many thanks.

Well whether it works or not, now it sounds like a fun challenge. I'll duplicate the Steam tree and rip it down piece by piece to see if this works. If not, I can go back to the original without loss of continuity. Thanks all for the advice. namuh1

Thanks nbohr1more and I'm sorry to be a bit dense. I am gathering that I still need the rest of the Doom3 assets but not the executable? So if I am on the right track I would take: F:\root\g\Steam\steamapps\common\Doom 3 as the base and copy it to another location like: F:\root\g\Doom 3 and then have TDM as: F:\root\g\darkmod which would effectively remove Doom from the Steam tree? The reason I ask is because the current structure is: F:\root\g\Steam\steamapps\common\Doom 3\darkmod which, as you can see, has the darkmod sub-tree included in the Doom3 tree.

Hoping against hope... So? does this mean I can 'finally' get out of the Steam tree and have this in it's own directory structure? I'd do almost anything for that as I don't like being tied to Steam at all. And, of course, if this is what it means, should I start with a fresh download and install because otherwise the tdmupdater is going to run in the Steam tree. Thanks namuh1

So I've tried an advanced search and come up dry on specifics. So before I leap into the void by installing 1.08 with Steam (getting 1.06/1.07 running on my system with Steam was 'not' easy) I would like to know if anyone has had any significant and or unsolved issues updating to 1.08 on the Steam Doom3 platform? Thanks for any input. Cheers, namuh1

Well Sotha since there have been so so many reviews and analyses of your work, I can hardly add much to the mix. But I would like to offer an opinion on your 'philosophy' and 'design' of your missions. I, personally, find it delightful to explore the workings of another persons imagination. I don't see a 'mission' as something to provide a 'particular' experience, but rather to be taken at face value and enjoyed for what it has and not at all for what it 'seemingly' lacks. To me the whole point of these FM's is the fantastic multiple ways of playing them and the quite different results one gets depending on the path taken. This is a long winded way of suggesting that you keep right on making these FM's YOUR WAY while completely ignoring suggestions for content that others 'think' should be included. Not that you can't also be inspired by other's work, but I've never played any FM's that are any 'better' than these and I'm thoroughly hoping for more in the future. If the community starts setting 'standards' for what a FM should be the originality and often completely unexpected content will vanish. Thank you for your work.

LOL BTW Ultimate kudos on this series of yours. I can't remember enjoying a thread of Fan Missions so much. Thanks for the effort and many thanks for the help.

Strictly a fight question: any help appreciated.

Sheesh!

I never had much use for AOL, but what you describe about the use/misuse of the warning system is likely one of the reasons.

Oh sorry, I didn't understand your reply fully. I see now that I probably see mine because it's my post and others see theirs for the same reason but we don't see each others. That makes sense... issue resolved. Thank you again.

Lol, as far as I know I'm not even a very small ass... but can you tell me why it appears below my avatar and no one else's? At lease I've never seen it on anyone's and, while I've not posted much, I read quite a lot of diverse posts. BTW thanks for the responses both of you.

Well you are the first I've run into who has it too. I have no messages in it and any attempt to 'change the warning level' is met with 'you don't have authorization'. It wouldn't bother me except that I never see it on anyone else's posts and it makes me feel like I'm marked for some reason that I'm unaware of. It really sucks when you think you may have offended someone and you have no idea when, how or why and worse there's no way to rectify it. The people here put huge amounts of their time and energy into this mod and it's missions and the last thing I want is to, inadvertently, be a critic or a pain to anyone. I even feel weird posting this, but I'm tired of having it hanging over my head for no apparent reason.

The question is: 'what is it'. I have it appearing on my posts with a white line beneath it. I've never been warned about anything or told I was out of line ever, but I have it and I don't see it on anyone else's posts? I've sent messages to two of the Moderator/Admins: sneaksiedave and greebo neither of whom see interested in responding... since they haven't. I've searched the help topics and the forum topics and found nothing about it. If I've done something wrong, I'll correct it, but I can't see what it might have been as I've only made a few posts ... all of which were either an attempt to get the game running or a question about a mission. I've never offered an opinion on a mission or the game except to give the highest kudos.... so WHAT IS WRONG? I'd appreciate a relevant answer if someone could please help me out.

Thanks! I'll do just that. Compliments on this mission...it's quite fantastic!

Ok so I'm getting to this mission late, but it's too fantastic not to finish so a couple of questions: Any help appreciated.

Thank you lost_soul! I never thought about that. I'm still getting used to the things you can do in this mod that were not possible in Thief. Thanks again!

Most excellent Mission... thank you for the enjoyment. One question: How is the Special Metal Disk used? I got into the outdoor crypt and found the recess with another metal disk with square pins coming out of it, but any attempt to use the Metal Disk fails? I finished the mission on expert, but there is clearly much more to discover, especially finding other ways to deal with the alarm (I did the test part and then wound up picking the lock on the case and just taking the sceptre anyway.... although the guards went on alert, they did not aggressively interfere with my finishing the rest of the objectives. Help with the Metal Disk appreciated Thanks Again!

lol ... well that's one way to a fix. it wasn't really important anyway since the game is playing fine, but i'm kind of a stickler for completeness sometimes. thanks for the heads up.

Am still hoping someone will reply with a way to force the reloader to 'wait' longer for the current tasks to exit so I don't get the (application running) failure..... but simply restarting manually works so maybe it's not super important. I would like to know why the wiki method of making a shortcut with the custom args to steam.exe fails completely while simply running the tdmlauncher.exe works fine, but these are just curiosity questions unless others are having similar problems. Otherwise, I'm playing with everything working although 2x the game has shut down in the middle of an FM once locking itself needing to be terminated by the Task Manager and once taking the whole machine down. Anything I can do to save any information that might help the dev team on this?

I found this FM completely captivating. Only one question: How do you open the locked cabinet in the Master Bedroom? Found everthing on medium play ... going back to hard to find ALL the gold. Thanks for the time and effort to create such fun.

So here is some fresh information. I have discovered that running TDM by directly running the launcher located in the darkmod directory works. BUT only partially in this sense. If I load a new FM and click OK when the dialog indicates that the game will be restarted with the new FM now installed, I get the same error from Steam that the game is unavailable because the application is running. But once I exit that dialog and run the game again from the tdmlauncher in ...\darkmod the mission is correctly installed, will run and will also save instances of the game properly AND will load the instances correctly when the game is run at a later time. So at this point I have two unresolved issues, fortunately, neither of which now prevent playing, but WOULD be nice to resolve: 1 - Using the shortcut given in the wiki and running Steam with the passed args does not work AT ALL. It will pretend to load a game, then fail in the restart and on running it again, there is NO loaded game EVER. 2 - No matter how I run the game, when I load a new FM initially, the restart fails with the original message that caused me to begin this thread. BUT running the game again from the shortcut scenario gives NOTHING loaded however running the game from the tdmlauncher shows the FM correctly installed and playable... This is true no matter how I initially load the FM. I have no idea why the wiki shortcut method fails, but I AM wondering if the 'restart failure' is related to the original instance of doom not having time to exit properly. I wonder this because in digging through logs I found an entry that gave a message twice about the instance still running and waiting 1 second, then continuing... even though the restart then fails with above message. Could it be that the tdmlauncher is simply not waiting long enough or failing to correctly wait for a complete exit of the first doom instance.. or any other intermediate program that might be still resident? Is there any way to test this, for example, is there a way to force the launcher to wait longer before it tries the restart after copying the new FM into the 'current game files'? That's as far as I've gotten, hope it sheds some light. I'm happy to continue with any debugging that anyone wants to try since I'd like to get this all working seamlessly, but at least I CAN NOW PLAY.... the best Thief Mod in the world... kudos to you folks! Thank you all for the tremendous effort you have put into making this Mod the best ever in the world.