Dragofer

Still bright enough to raise my alert level to 2.

Guess that's a shame, he was quite useful. You can send me all of his WIPs so I can misappr upload them to the abandoned FMs repo for adoption. Also a reminder to brush up on our French, given the setting of TDM.

This is probably the most practical way of indicating breakable electric lights and can be done with existing models if the effect consists of something like sparks + flickering.

The weapon hack is something that IIRC forces a model to render in front of everything else. It's limited by the fact that it can only apply to .md5mesh models, currently, such as the viewmodel of the player's arm and any weapons attached to the arm.

There are a few ways to state the version number: Inside darkmod.txt, included in the .pk4. The version number in here is what should be shown ingame in the mission downloader. Mappers can write whatever they want inside the readme.txt included in the .pk4. This is the same as writing a version number into the release thread. There is also the internal version number, which always has to be a whole number. It's entered directly in the admin interface, and only team members can see it. The existence of the last, internal-only number has led to some confusion among mappers. I think I used to put whole version numbers into my darkmod.txt (i.e. v2 or v3), but declare a decimal update (i.e. v1.1 or v1.2) on the forum thread and in the readme.txt. It's also possible to have different version numbers in the darkmod.txt and readme.txt. This is something that should be caught during beta testing.

Yes, I've been working with a mapper who ardently adheres to the principle that only moonfacing windows should cast moonrays indoors (so about 1/4 to 1/2 of all windows), even though this is a powerful tool for creating an atmosphere and for maintaining some gameplay challenge. I found that this approach often ended in scenes that had only dim and uniform ambient_world lighting, which meant players couldn't really appreciate many of the details. Something I've seen in things like Dishonored is the use of sourceless lights to add highlights to scenes that otherwise contain no lit lights. That could be an especially viable approach in a mission like this which has a haunted theme.

It occurred to me that, by now, this package goes well beyond mere bugfixes by including a range of gameplay changes (i.e. adding the ability to frob-extinguish oil candles, which isn't a bug that was patched). Maybe players would have a better idea of what this package does if it had a more fitting name, similar to how Snatcher calls his work a modpack? In other communities the term "unofficial patch" is typically associated with collections of community fixes to bugs that exist in the core game and were never addressed by the devs. Most players would therefore expect an "unofficial patch" to provide them the same experience as originally intended by the devs, but without technical problems.

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

Yes, the stim/response system allows for this kind of thing. Easy enough to emit a custom stim around the lantern and put a response on all photophobic AIs to that stim. The response script would check whether the photophobic AI is within the lightbeam, then call a flee function on it. The main problem is that the flee function is unreliable if the AI is already busy with something else.

Nice - did you find a solution for how to avoid it clipping into walls or other solid objects when coming too close? Off the top of my head there was also a need to handle its behaviour in case the player gets submerged, and various other ToDo's.

Assets in FMs always overwrite assets in the TDM installation, regardless of whether either of the files are within or outside a .pk4.

My impression was that the unofficial patch has become a large collection of various tweaks and features by various authors, or at least that's what it was being marketed as. Making it modular has significant advantages for those who might want certain parts, rather than the exact same combination as the one you endorsed. It also makes your patch collection more futureproof in case you add stuff that not everyone wants to have. In any case, it's advisable to at least adapt the file structure to the new addon conventions so that players are able to install other addons alongside yours.

Some changes were made to the training mission, but this process began while 2.12 was already in beta testing, and it became too extensive. To my knowledge this mainly consisted of adjustments to the messages in order to match the new 2.12 control scheme, addition of a vine arrow training area, some minor gameplay changes as well as major visual changes. A last minute major issue caused the mission to be reverted to its 2.11 state except for the adjustments to the popup messages. The training mission is slated to undergo proper beta testing of its own later on.

In fact, there are no 2.11 turret features since it's a completely new thing for 2.12. Unofficial script versions of the turret also rely on code changes that were made during turret development for 2.12.