Thieving Barbarian

Figured it out - my old mouse broke down some time ago, and my replacement mouse was too fast for my taste with the defaults, so I had put this in my .xinputrc to slow it down: xinput --set-prop "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1.5 Commenting this out fixed the menu, but it would leave the mouse too fast on the desktop. I can run it in Wine since I have it installed anyway, so maybe I'll use the Windows version until I figure out why TDM is the only program where this seems to happen.

After a long hiatus, I decided to try Dark Mod again to check out any new missions, and installed the latest Linux 64-bit version into my home directory. Upon running the game, the menu shows up, but whenever I try to move the mouse, it moves into the upper left corner and stays there. Since I can't access any menu entries, I have to tab out and kill the process after I've managed to sort my display again (it defaults to 800x600 and makes that my desktop resolution as well). Any ideas what's causing this? It's a fresh install, so any old config files shouldn't affect it, unless something's buried deep in .local or .config...

I've been thinking about some sort of an assasin/sniper mission. In this mission, you'd have only your bow and arrows, and you would have to use your climbing abilities and the environment to get into the perfect position to take down your mark - for example, shooting them through a narrow window from across the street while standing on a narrow ledge, after having discovered a complex route requiring vertical and lateral movement, swinging on ropes, etc. to get there.

Since the AI can already find its way around any other obstacles, what's preventing fire objects from being treated like any other objects - the AI would simply not walk through a fire and would find a way around it? Or are the fire entities different from other types of object, let's say a crate for example (being light emitters or whatever), so that it's invisible to the AI pathfinder? I've been playing a lot of Thief Gold lately, and there the AI would not step into a fire voluntarily (though I did throw a few unconscious apebeasts into one), and that game's pathfinder routines are ancient - the object model was probably completely different, though. As it currently is, the player can use lit torches or lamps to climb up onto, or go inside a lit fireplace with impunity - if the system relies on the mapper placing a damage entity into a fire (for example, to hide the use of that old Thief staple of a secret passage hidden in a fireplace), then it will be inconsistent across maps - in some maps fires do nothing, but in maps where they are somehow important, it would do damage and then tip off the player that there's something important enough there to make the mapper place a damage entity there (if the system indeed works like that).

Decided to start playing TDM again after a hiatus, upgraded to 2.07 and this was the first mission new mission I downloaded. A couple of things sprung to mind: first, I realized that fires cause no damage - I think this is the way it's always been (maybe), but maybe something should be done to change that? Maybe it's just my highly developed barbarian sense of justice, but as I tried to roast the pagan I found in one of the rooms and nothing happened (I knocked him out, threw him out on the street from the window and stuffed him into the brazier nearby to roast for his crimes - without success, so I had to kill him with the sword), I became slightly annoyed and proceeded to be highly unpleasant to everyone I could lay my hands on, much to their dismay. Also,

Ha, I was thinking "well, it wasn't that long ago", then remembered that I recently had a few pints in a pub with my niece who was born the same year the Dark Project came out....

Lately I've been playing mostly Thief 20th Anniversary fan missions, and been having great fun trying to jump from as high as possible. Ever since I accidentally discovered that in the Dark engine it doesn't matter how high you fall as long as you either end the fall on a ladder, rope or on mantleable ledge, I've been trying to find places where I could make as high a jump as possible. In the original Thief missions, the height usually didn't matter since either you ended up in a non-continuable position anyway or the missions were so tiny you didn't really notice it - but in many of the fan missions made for NewDark, the map sizes have grown to the point where it often actually matters - one of the missions where I used this to my advantage was Catacombs of Knoss, where you have a few shortcuts (albeit minor) you can use in this way, for example. Often there's really no advantage at all, but it's fun nonetheless, trying to break the map in some way. Has anyone else been having fun pushing the missions to their limits, making moves they weren't supposed to make or gain access to places they weren't supposed to be able to access, in any of the Thief games? Myself, I've found I get more out the game these days trying to break the game or map, rather than playing it the way you are expected to...

Nice little mission.

True that, but if I had just played the mission as I first played it, without later reading about it on the forums, I would probably have not even realized I had missed a lot of content - I would've been satisfied by my accidental speed run for the duration, since the mission felt quite satisfactory even then. Some readables that would've encouraged more detailed exploration - or optional objectives - would've made it clearer that I hadn't seen all there was, and would've encouraged either replay or more thorough exploration on the first play. Replayability is also encouraged by the way there are many different routes through the map - I think there are probably only two choke points with only one route through it, so even if I had seen every area during the first run, I would (and will) replay the mission again just to try different approaches.

I've played this three times now, and while I like it a lot, I think it's too easy to miss a lot of content. The first time I played this, I finished the entire mission almost at a speed run by accident, going through the ancient door and missing almost everything between the temple and the portal. The second time I explored more, but still managed to miss the entire area with the third statue - I only realized I had missed an entire area when reading about the third statue on this forum.

Great mission that reminded me of playing the Lost City missions in the originals. Apart from wondering how the mark got where he got unscathed through everything, the only thing that bothered me was

This is a bit late, but I just started playing Darkmod again, and this is one together with the Voltas is one the first missions I played. A good mission, but I discovered a bug that caused a crash to desktop. It may have been listed in the beta forums, but since I have no access there, I'll describe it here just in case:

Apart from multi-screen issues I've touched in an another thread, I've never had any issues with running Darkmod in 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 LTS either. I've dabbled a bit with DR too, and had no issues with that either - apart from not being able to use it due to user errors, that is... Actually, there still is one: the sound doesn't work if I've got Clementine, my music player of choice, running at the same time - but since you can't really play Darkmod with other sound sources running at the same time, that's not been a showstopper.

Nvidia control panel for Linux doesn't have those settings, at least not in any immediately obvious form. I have to take a look into application profiles to see if it's possible to use them for that purpose. When googling this, I found something about being able to force SDL games to use a particular display by setting a few environment variables, but Darkmod - or the engine to be precise - apparently doesn't use SDL because those variables had no effect.

The title says it all.... I just got myself a dual monitor setup, with a cheap display on the left side (DVI) and a better display on the right side (VGA/HDMI). The right side display is my main display, and the one I would like to run Darkmod on. The game is set to run full screen, and it ALWAYS opens on the left monitor. Is there something in the game that makes it run on the wrong monitor? I googled the problem and found no workable solutions, but other people did complain that only some games did this, so I'm guessing it's possible, but I don't really have any idea how to fix this. Running Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, with Nvidia's drivers.