Dragofer

I've changed the version number in darkmod.txt from 1.0 to 1.1, I think that's what's needed from my end?

Objective conditions using AND or OR were quite unreliable for me as well. I remember RJFerret made an annotation in the wiki that he had to type AND in lower case, but that made no difference for me. I ended up writing a one-line script that causes the mission to fail, called as a failure script by certain objectives. More complex mission failure logic could also be scripted. Regarding the galleon interior you mentioned earlier, that sounds like Pandora's Box. The ship there is actually custom-built out of brushes and patches, making it more roomy, so its interior wouldn't fit the stock galleon. That said, the Invernesse from the second part of Down by the Riverside is modular, you'd be welcome to reuse these modules. The starting ship also has suitable material, while not being modular.

On a separate note, I've updated the mission to v2 (formerly named v1.1), see the first post for a download link and changelog.

Thanks very much for these reviews. @mirceakitsune: my main intention for this mission's gameplay was to focus on tough stealth scenarios (on expert), with some 'where does he keep his secret stash' scenarios along the side like you often find in Thief missions. I really wanted to keep those straightforward, also because many people don't speak English natively, but still realised that the words of the wise wiki ring true: if a task seems easy to the creator, it's probably still hard for the players (I think Sotha wrote that?). @Sotha: I'm glad you took such a liking to the first part of the mission and its visuals. Regarding how to make visuals, I'm not sure if there are secrets that I know, but I do find it interesting when mappers share their approach. I've thought about the question while I was updating the mission: To begin with, when I have an empty room before me I briefly imagine what it'd look like furnished. Not with too much detail, just the big pieces like beds, desks, carpets, lamps. Having that kind of plan also helps with the workflow. For heavily cluttered areas like ship cargo holds I imagine three or four pieces at a time and then place them - i.e. 'This is a good spot for a huge package, a medium package + crate on top and a sack along the side.' When furnishing rooms I rotate smaller things, even if it's just a little, scatter them, and in general look for ways to make things diagonal, for example deforming some of the more visible beams. This is to avoid the grid-like look. Something that's important to me is keeping within the colour theme of an area, so most of the time my ideal is a handful of hues of brown/grey/white and a colour or two like red - all newly placed models and textures should fit into the existing scheme. I often recolour stock textures for this purpose. As regards architectural layout I'd like to follow Moonbo's advice as much as possible, which is to 'break the cube' in room shapes. That can mean things like L-shaped rooms, diagonal walls and floor height differences. It can also mean things that prevent you from seeing the whole room immediately from the doorway, such as a hanging curtain, a huge bed or the room's shape. For lighting, the way I see it is that interesting features should be highlighted, while some objects can cast interesting shadows especially when the light is at certain angles. Examples of such objects are mounted animal heads, humans and railings. Fireplaces are extremely good at casting captivating shadows in my opinion due to their low position.

@moonbo, that's a shame to hear. It looks like I need to change how that part is implemented. I've started making an update recently - in the meantime, the

Something that occurred to me recently is that for both of my released missions, as well as the one that's work in progress, there are songs with exactly the same titles (and two of those are quite likeable). It's an interesting new perspective on the missions, that's for sure. https://youtu.be/KCGN48GqdZg https://youtu.be/TQVYV12TZic Does your mission also have a namesake song, and is it any good?

Very good, this is definitely on the right note and quite unique as well. For me this is an interior sound. My feedback is that the recurring sound of about 5s duration seems to be quite noticeably played in reverse which makes the sound feel like it stumbles at the end every time. If you could smoothen that out it'd most likely be TDM-ready.

They are indeed dissimilar in some ways, but what they have in common is that they're suited for remote and solitary locations. The setting that I specifically had in mind was a grey and rocky bay along the shores of Newfoundland, the very sparsely populated land mass on the other side of the ocean. You'd find nothing but a weathered fishing settlement with decaying ships, and on a cliff somewhere above a lighthouse. Somewhere, quite a ways off the shore, a mysterious ship has laid anchor. So much for the setting, on to the ambients. They all use long drawn-out tunes as their basis, which I think is key to their sense of isolation. Some of them also have moments of silence. Besides that I have no more specifics or a particular track that I'd like you to emulate: simply just something that captures the feeling of being on your own in that setting.

You need to make a brush with the same texture and copy-paste the texture from one of the brush's horizontal surfaces onto the patch

I thought Melan's documentation of how he made Fiasco at Fauchard Street was excellent: Thread.

Excellent find, this is exactly the kind of ambients repository I'm always looking for. From what I've listened so far it's clear that the tracks are for all kinds of games. There are also TDM-capable ones among them, which would be quite unique. Recently I also found another great ambients collection on ttlg that's much like Gigagooga's, this one by sephy. It distinguishes itself from Gigagooga's by having mostly quite short ambient pieces and hits, which means it'd be very good for using a Thief1&2-style ambient setup like you find in Full Moon Fever. On to your soundtracks: - Soundtrack 1: This definitely conjures an image of a mage's tower, or space in my mind. Well done on the mystery aspect, in its current state this is already mission-grade. One thing I'm curious about is how it would sound if the higher pitched wave-formed sound were toned down or even left out, so that you'd have a more subtle version? - Soundtrack 2: I quite like this one musically, for me this is an Arabian-exotic soundtrack. It'd be a great fit for an adventure game for sure (considered sending it to a game company?). In TDM I think the best use would be as credits music for an ambitious mission. - Soundtrack 3: Another well-done musical piece. For most scenarios in TDM I think it'd be a bit too much in the foreground - might be because of the piano? Maybe it could become better suited for a mission if the piano were less present. Now, if I could make a request, if you could make a solitary-type ambient that draws elements from: - OldChurchLoop from sephy's work - solitary_theme from TDM's existing ambients - factory_distant from TDM's existing ambients (default volume is rather quiet) - haunted_something_is_wrong_here from TDM's existing ambients (no shader exists for it in TDM 2.04, so you must either manually open the sound .pk4's or create a shader like the one in this thread) - possibly also my Distant if it serves as inspiration Then I would at once become your greatest fan. Such tracks are rare, and I cherish them.

There's a spawnarg in prop entity defs called something like 'drop_on_alert_index' that could be overwritten in DR. Though there's probably some bug or reason for why it was decided to let AIs drop things as soon as they're disturbed.

Thank you for the reference, I quite appreciate finding new rogue-likes.

Yes, you need to uncheck the option box named 'center around 0,0,0', then move the door so that the map origin is where you want the door's origin. (Though I believe brush&patch entities get converted into models at map load anyway so that the distinction in rotation behaviour only applies inside the editor). Some additional viewpoints: - I had a slanted basement door + ladder in Down by the Riverside. The door rotated upwards so that it only moved on one axis - it's very problematic to use multiple axes. Still, I'm fairly sure AIs wouldn't use this door even if it had stairs. - You can get nonstandard doors that will be used by AIs if you make them sliding doors without rotation. You need to place a vertical door-like nodraw brush intersecting the door in the middle in order to get AI door handling. This can all be one entity, as I found out since last posting here. You also need to place door handling position entities, see the Doors wiki page for that. - The option I'd go for in this case here as already suggested would be to make a normal door at the bottom of the staircase and leave the top open.

I like it. What strange things will one find within, I wonder. It's quite mysterious. Also, the snow theme is a good fit.

I'm most curious whether this is in some way related to your metal & steam monster. The specific script you posted looks to be for something else, but after working that out you'd be armed with the knowledge to really handle that beast. What a sublime way to terrify the playerbase that'd be.

Excellent, thanks for the suggestion, the horizontal door is now functional in both directions. I've added a nodraw normal-shaped sliding door halfway up the staircase, converted the horizontal door to func_static and bound it to the nodraw door, added some door handling positions and now it looks like normal door behaviour. From here it's a matter of refining it, for example making it harder to disrupt the system with moveables.

Experimenting with the horizontal door, I've made some progress: it has to be the sliding type, if it rotates you get an unmanageable chunk of dynamic monsterclip that obstructs everything. AIs are now able to go up and down the staircase if the door is open. The AIs are also able to walk over the door when it's closed. So far, if I command an AI to walk downstairs when the door is closed, he sees no need for opening the door and goes to turn in circles on top of it. Added a levers setup as per the wiki, but they aren't used because the AI doesn't seem to think it's necessary to open the door. Combined this with door handling positions, and also with door handling positions just on their own, but there was no difference. After that I tried things like adding a block of wood or monsterclip to the door so that it's shaped more like a vertical door, getting quirky results. Maybe with enough experimentation it might be possible to get a working setup.

It's not the chest itself that I actually meant - it's the wall behind it.

Great, it was as simple as targeting the window from the lamp model, that's all I needed. It didn't work earlier because I was targeting from the light itself ("set target0 on flame" "window"). It does indeed look like it won't work if the light entity itself targets the window to get the skin to change. I tried this on a stock oil lamp and candle holder: it has to be the holder, not the light. I was interested to see if other objects like a crate could also toggle skins of an object when frobbed, so I copied the scriptobject and frob_action_script spawnargs over from a frobable lamp. Well it worked for one frob, after that nothing happened anymore, even if I def_attached a light entity which I thought might help the lightholder script know what to do. No matter, I was only looking for a way to make standard oil lamps work. Yes, that's the method I was using in Down by the Riverside, but it didn't seem right to duplicate windows to get the effect of a skin change. Hm, that could be used for a cutscene, but it'd be problematic if the player was able to interfere with the process - things like if the door was left open by the player, or the player stopped the door's movement while the AI was using it, or a crate was dropped on the door. Horizontal doors would be on my wishlist for making ship prefabs that are too small to have two staircases (like the one I'm finishing off now).

Can lights toggle the skin of a targeted model, so that an exterior window would fit to the interior lamp? What I've tried was to let the lamp's flame entity target the window model, then set skin_lit and skin_unlit on the window model, but that caused no reaction. (I know that the flame is set up correctly because it's able to hide and unhide that window if I set "hide" "1" on the window) Also, has anyone managed to get AIs to use horizontal doors, for instance the cargo loading hatch on a ship? Something I tried was setting two door handling position entities for where the AI should stand (I used the wiki to copy-paste spawnarg names), no luck. Even if I let the door start fully open, the AI will only move downstairs if I move the door about 64 units to the side.

Thanks hanmin, to answer your question: On a different note, I've posted solutions for all the steps in this mission in the first post on page one, it should be easier to have everything in one place.

Thanks very much for your feedback, I'm glad you liked the mission. That rat setup was a bit hacky because AIs can only reach highest alert state if they have an enemy to lock on to, so I had to briefly place an invisible spider wherever the woman's eyes were currently located, triggered by a custom stim/response setup. It worked fine in a test map, but something broke on the way to the real map, so I just disabled it and pushed it to the back of my agenda. Funny that someone should dig around in my script files and notice it, heh. Strange, that's not the first bug that looks like the ingame downloader only partially completed. But it worked fine when I tried it, the downloader's archive is identical in size, 55346 KB, to the original archive that I submitted. Thanks for this review Spooks, I especially appreciate your view on the ending. Commenting on the quoted part, I still remember after completing One Step Too Far I planned to make a mission with a more conventional story. Though over time, the way my various mapping projects progressed, my hand was led back in the direction of my original style. Not that I mind, back in Thief 2 it was always the unusual fan missions that really drew me in (Ruins of Originia tops my list, if only Ycatx would return to finish his grandiose campaign), so it's probably only normal that my own missions also have something unusual about them.

Thanks very much Outlooker and Spooks, it’s wonderful to see other people enjoying one’s own creation. That really sounds like great advice right there John Atkinson Grimshaw captures phenomenal amounts of atmosphere in his paintings of 19th century harbours, misty forests and roadside manors, while Ivan Aivazovsky is incredibly skillful in how he portrays ships, the sea in all its forms and faraway coasts. It’s a joy to view their works. I’ve taken a look and double-checked: the windows and doors are all functioning there, but random pieces of the outside do render. I’m supposing it’s part of the engine problem where things in closed visleaves bleed through. @VanishedOne, for the time being this is the Of Brambles and Thorns series. @Tarhiel,