demagogue

He's right though. The first step in any feature request is to make an entry in the bugtracker, so it's in a list, and it gets discussed and developed from there. It just gets buried and forgotten about if it's only in a thread. I was going to do it myself, but it apparently takes some time to dig through the entries even with the filter.

If I were designing it from the ground up, I'd have a top row of small boxes designated for weapons ordered numerically, actually now that I think about it, with the ability to rearrange objects into those boxes so the designated object pops up when you push 1-9 on the keyboard, Minecraft style.

The info_location location can cover multiple portal rooms though, and often times can be quite large, such as an entire mansion or neighborhood if the mapper wanted the same ambient playing for it. It'd probably be better to get the portal room, the internal number dmapping gives to that room, if you were going that route, although that's more complicated to work with. But actually I'd recommend just a simple radius value from the object, then it's the same amount of space in every case.

First of all thanks for the contribution! For the record I'm a fan of these kinds of fan patches that change some fundamental parts of a game, because I think people have moods that play to different sides of games sometimes. But I don't think changing or adding to the core game is the way to cater to most of them. (Games usually have a natural tendency towards some norms to the exclusion of others, and a good designer respects what their game is telling them it should be.) But having a fan patch with these other styles is the way to do it anyway because we can, and freedom is power. Save restrictions is a good example of this. We do put the number of re-loads in the debrief stat screen. I still agree that that's the best way to deal with these kinds of meta-game things in this kind of genre, so if a person does ghost or ironman a map, the stat screen will verify their claim with a 0 Stealth Score and 0 Reload stats. Having a save room actually changes how the player approaches the gameplay, so it's not just a meta-game thing. It puts it more in the territory of a rogue-like, not quite no-save permadeath, but it raises the stakes. I think that'd be a nice vibe sometimes. I still agree I don't think it's great for the core game because it puts meta things into the game world, which isn't our core vibe. But again a fan patch for it when you're in the mood is a good way to play in that way anyway. I don't know if I'm going to try it any time soon. I might. But in any event I'd be really interested in seeing someone make a let's play video to see it in action.

For T2 FMs, this list from a post is pretty good, starting with the ones in bold, but it leaves out a lot of the top rated ones on CheapThiefMissions, which covers classic FMs. At least the top 10 on that site are also must plays. (I think the link already takes you to the ordered list, but click the "Rating" button to make sure it's ordered by rating if it's not already.) And for recent FMs, there's the Thief Guild's top rated list.

I script a lot of FMs that I don't have time to make, including an entire massive campaign! The one I mentioned above is one on that list. It's not Patently Dangerous, which was an FM I actually released.

Funny. I scripted an FM once about an author abandoning an FM, and the NPCs are just left there to fend for themselves and find meaning in their existence.

In principle I like the idea of community campaign building. But the official campaign itself never really captured my imagination, not to mention it'd be hard for people to have an idea of where it's going, much less making it cohere. I scripted a Dark Mod campaign meant to introduce the districts, factions, and lore that does capture my imagination. But I'm not in any real position to ask people to build for it, and also there's still the problem that people may have different visions for it that may not cohere well. As for the "connecting mission", that might be interesting... But I'd reframe it a little, not that it has to be connecting per se, but you know, a hero or even another character from some FM in an adjacent setting alongside (or before or after) an existing FM, kind of like what Rozencranz and Guildenstern did for Hamlet, if you know about that. I think it's better to have it more open ended how an author wants to build off an existing FM than only connecting two FMs per se. That might be a really interesting theme to see play out.

One way to do that would be to link the map with the location system. A mapper can already make a system to do that with the location scripts. Basically when the player enters a location (or a set of locations), it can trigger a script that switches out the map for one with that location highlighted. That's how Thief used to do it, and I think it's still fitting with the setting. Having a literal dot moving around the map would be much harder. I'm not sure we could do that without source code support. But It also wouldn't be as fitting to the genre. I'd be happy to see some mappers having a highlighting-map though, just for some interesting variety.

The Thief2 FM "Mission X" was structured like that. But from the perspective of someone making or using a multiplayer system, it should be as general as possible so mappers can make whatever set-up they want for their FM, like that, or leave it open to the players to play it however they want. I think one way for the system to work most basically is have a coop mode (shared objectives, loot, scripts, etc.) and a "thieves vs. guards" mode (separate objectives, tracking loot count & capture count; it should probably be set up like the old Thievery mod) and those are pre-made so a mapper can just turn one on and tweak some things. Those are the two most popular MP cases for this game. But then if they want to, mappers could micromanage the parameters if they want to make their own mode, and the system should facilitate that. That was my thinking. But I think coop is the big one for us, since all of the FMs will already be set up for that, and that's the way I imagine it'd be most used. So that should come first.

Since it's a one-off problem, only for the first ambient at game start, then the way you fixed it is really the right way, because the system-level alternative would be whole a little subsystem (a specialized fidelay and mandatory _z soundshader) just to handle the first 0.1 seconds of game start, and then the old system for all the maps already out there, which is a bit much. And I think it's not even that common because many ambients start quietly to begin with. That said, there might be an easy bit of code that could make sure the fade in always works for the first ambient that doesn't mess with anything else in the system, like a hardcoded initial 0.1 sec. delay only for it, and that may be worth doing. But it'd need experimenting and testing to make sure it works as intended and doesn't have unintended consequences. Anyway, it's good we have this documented for now as the way to fix the problem for other people in the future that run into it searching for a fix. In fact it'd be good to put in the wiki to make sure the fix doesn't get lost.

This is a different issue than the click of sound at the start of every transition that I was talking about in earlier posts that you're referencing. This may be a problem that's always been there but nobody really noticed or commented on it, or maybe only for certain ambients? So the first problem is that the ambient starts abruptly at game start presumably because the sound system isn't online yet to process the fade in, and it just starts the ambient at full sound. So then you added a delay, but since you're not coming off of a previous fade out to sets the volume to zero, it plays the full volume ambient through that delay and then cuts to zero and fades in. My idea is that if you want a fade in from the start, don't start with that ambient as it is. Start with a .1 second of silence, and then fade in the ambient. There are two ways I can think to do that. (There might be other ways.) 1. Some ambient soundshaders start with a "leadin" spawnarg that starts it with a bit of silence, originally used to stop the click of sound (soundshaders ending in "_z", there were two versions, one with and one without the _z, unless that was later changed). You could confirm that the soundshader for that ambient uses a "leadin" arg, or if it does but it's not long enough, maybe use a custom soundshader to use a longer leadin blip of silence. (In that case you'd have to make the longer silence file yourself.) 2. Or another possibly easier way may be to start with an "override" sound, look at the Sound Override part of the tutorial with silence, and then after .1 second or whatever, transition that to the normal location-based ambient according to the instructions, and then the override sound will fade out and yours will fade in. I think you'd do that by setting the override arg to "1" from the start and then change it back to "0" after 0.1 seconds using Target_setKeyVal as the instructions say. Confirm that the "silence" sound is stereo. I noticed if you start it with a non-stereo sound, the system stays non-stereo. I think that was fixed, but good to double check. If it isn't, then you could do the same thing with a normal ambient that just starts off silent or very quiet for that first .1 second.

No I can't see the videos. Put them up on Youtube as non-listed videos. Also, what's your system? Is it a relatively slow or older system? The first time one enters a location, there's some work being done that might be pre-churned from then on, so I think it might have something to do with the work load slowing all kinds of things down, including the ambient going online. If you know your way around DR (or editing the map file directly), you could test things like setting the native volume of the location entity to zero from the start, and see if it happens when other speakers turn on for other reasons the first time, like a trigger. It may be an issue that all speakers face that this system inherits.

Keep in mind we're usually talking about something like a massive forest or mansion or cathedral, etc., where it's absurd to think you're going to cover it very well with a simple circle the radius of the whole area, or even 30 circles for all the different rooms or areas, whereas with the location system, the locations are created out of walls and doorways, so 99% of the time they're exactly overlapping where you want your ambients transitioning on and off.

Bumping this thread. I was trying to parse the code for LibreCoop recently, the multiplayer coop mod for Doom3, or Dhewm3 more exactly. The main alternative is OpenCoop, but I think LibreCoop is more developed. Anyway, it got me thinking how much work would have to go into a coop mod for TDM. It's still my biggest wish item. The idea I got was one has to basically walk system by system through the code and think about the client and server side of packet swapping. TDM has a lot more and more complicated systems than Doom3, but once you start getting a feel for it, I think the basic system doesn't change that much. In a way it reminded me a bit of a pared down save/load system, what you need to update a game state, except you're streaming it in in real game-time, and you using tricks to fill in gaps to ease the load. The other thing I noticed is that maps themselves need their scripts tweaked and anything else happening in the world. But I wonder if there's a way to procedurally do that when a map is loading, so one could just use the FM files as released. It looks like it'd take more than a year or two if one were working steadily through it, although I think one would get efficient at it over time. Like I was noticing, there's a consistent logic to it. But most of all I think it'd be worth it. I really like Thief coop, and I think it'd be great for TDM. I'm just FYI'ing about it now because I was browsing through the other coop mods. Not even soliciting opinions or anything. Just thinking aloud (avisible?) about it.