demagogue

I think practically speaking the stairs approach is something mappers can do that'll just work. The AI should follow the player in tandem, so I think if they weren't specifically directed to go opposite directions on the stair by path nodes, then I don't think that problem will happen too often if at all in practice.

Just jumping in to applaud Arcturus for coming up with that. That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about in my post, thinking outside the box, and looking back on it, I'm almost surprised I didn't think of it myself, although I was hilariously close to it. But anyway, it's a bit buggy, but that can be tweaked, but probably more important is that it's better than what we have now (no climbing at all). The big issue that I see is that it's more of a solution for mappers to do themselves, rather than fit for a general solution for the core package, which I guess is symptomatic of using a hacky approach. But as a hacky solution, it does the job pretty well! I think it'd prove pretty robust, won't it? Wherever the elevator is (if it falls off mid-way like in the 2nd video), the AI will always call it up or down to themselves, it's just a bit more delay. And the mapper should take care of the geometry, in terms of being able to step on and off properly. As for being oriented the wrong way, you know a button can also trigger a script, and I think such a script can just turn the AI pushing it by fiat. (Now I have to remember if the AI ID passes to the script when you push a button. I remember talking about that ages ago, and I think it was dealt with in some way.)

I think it's similar with the problem of flying AI. It'd be a fundamental rewiring of pathfinding to add z-axis motion completely separate from the x-y plane, as in they're not walking on a surface. If I were going to try to rig it though, I'd probably do it in a hack-y way, like you just tweak the pathfinding a little so that the nodes at the top and bottom of a ladder connect, and when the AI wants to traverse it, it approaches the bottom, "triggers" the ladder like a switch, and it transports him already to the top, then throws in some stock climbing animation in between. Maybe not too different to the way elevators work. Actually I wouldn't trust the normal pathfinding to do it (not least b/c of edge cases like AH said), but it'd be even better if the mapper designated the bottom and top with some kind of marker object, and let the code take it from there. Anyway, I think there are some ways it could be rigged, but it'd still be a lot of work & would need a lot of testing and tweaking. But it really comes down to a very motivated & competent coder actually making the thing.

It's probably been mentioned many times before, but one alternative is to have a key ring, so that all keys are combined into one inventory slot that matches any key on the ring to a door when it's used. That would resolve the main issue behind people wanting to drop keys, which is to avoid having a cluttered inventory. I think someone's already made a key ring function, but it's still not standard. Edit: You could do the same thing with a folder for readables. The idea is that there's one inventory slot for the whole collection, and then when it's used in some way it could open up a 2nd level to see (and in the case of readables select) the individual items.

Just to clarify, and going off of wesp's comment, the hard sell isn't deciding to add a voluntary option per se. The ethos of this whole game is to let players and mappers do what they want within a pretty broad range of styles. So it'd be an easy ask if it were a trivial thing to do, like change a "0" to a "1" or some other value in some def file like wesp is saying. But when it's not a simple task like that but one that requires quite a bit of coding support like it seems this it, the hard sell is asking someone to dig through the source code and figure out how to code the thing in a way that is robust & doesn't break other things, which means research, planning, coding, debugging, play testing, and then more coding to fix everything and deal with all the comments that come in. If you really want to get down to brass tacks, the central ethos around here is DIY. If you really care about this, there's a place you can get the source code, and we have an entire forum and wiki that has all of our institutional knowledge to research almost any topic. If you don't know any coding, this is your perfect chance to learn, like I and a lot of us did just to put in new features we wanted but no one else was gonna do. Basically, if we can't get wesp5 on the job, it's only going to be harder to recruit the other usual suspects. So if you want to see it, you may need to do it yourself, but you might be happily surprised at the willingness of people to answer your questions and help you with the task, if you're really serious about taking it on, that wouldn't otherwise do it themselves.

I think this could be a good idea to have available for mappers to make maps based around, though not as a basic mechanic. I'd think it'd be best worked, in terms of gameplay, in combination with the lantern. So you can always read it with your lantern on, but of course that makes you visible for the time you're reading it. So the player should move to a safe space to do it and a good mapper could play with that tension, safe spaces you can go to vs. the time it takes to get to them vs the value of the info in the readable, etc. Anyway, I think it'd be interesting to see in one-off FMs that played with the idea and would welcome seeing it in action. I agree with everyone else that I don't think it'd be great as a general mechanic for the base game. But I'd encourage someone to make a map with it in action to see how it plays. Edit: Also, if someone is going to all that effort, there should be a way for players to make it standard for themselves in all FMs too, since some players might want it for their own games. I have an idea that it might require a source code change, though, meaning it'd call for a modded .exe file, not just a mod you can drop in a folder, which complicates it somewhat. But maybe someone like wesp or somebody could put it as an option in their mod pack, as I think it might be a hard sell as a voluntary option in the base game, but you never know. Maybe it could be.

I do like retro stuff, so fair enough.

Why might it be something especially for me? I like Roguelikes & all, but I don't know if I'm that special in that regard. Anyway, reminds me a little of Vampire Hunter, which I like a lot, with the forced scrolling & jRPG style, which I'm not sure about but could give it a try.

Just for some backstory, I'm talking about Dark Mod, I think Fidcal was the one that put in the original Stealth Score stats that tracked alerts, then I did a major overhaul of it, and then I had to drag in Grayman to clean up a lot of the bugs and issues. There are things I did with an eye to ghosting, one being that a Level 1 alert didn't count to the Stealth Score, because in a good number of FMs it starts with it already being busted, and it's the one where the guard doesn't know anything is strange yet, it's just a slight noise, the wind or rats. I counted Level 2 and up as a Stealth Score hit. (But it still counts Level 1 hits in the alert stat if someone wanted to count it.) Anyway, I don't know enough about Thief code to offer much. I glanced through its source code when it first got leaked. But from the work I did on TDM, I suspect that it's something you have to get from the source code, and that it won't be available through just a mod... the reason being because the source code will have to explicitly hand the stat over to be accessible to a mod, and if they didn't already do that for a stat, then there's no real reason to do it at all. So I think it'd require a source code change and new compile of the .exe, which means it wouldn't be just a mod you could distribute, but you'd have to distribute an entirely new .exe game for it. That's just my guess, but that's a reason why it probably hasn't been done yet. My first idea would be to post somewhere that Corbeau, the person (or team?) maintaining the New Dark release, and see if they can add it into an update to New Dark, although I don't know if they're even maintaining it anymore.

Even when we can get on, like now, the delay just to open a thread or post is maddening.

I think recommendation styles often split between cinematic FMs with great atmosphere, story, and big set pieces at the arguably cost of open gameplay vs. gameplay FMs ones with really well thought out, challenging, and open level design at the arguable cost of tight impactful storytelling. In a way that's the old ludo vs. narrative debate. Of course there are some FMs that do both sides well, but even then there's usually some emphasis on one side of the coin over the other. Anyway, my FM love language is definitely on the gameplay side of the coin, and while I can appreciate the big set pieces and storytelling beats, they don't do as much for me as FMs with environments really well designed for challenging gameplay where I'm fighting for progress. To each their own though. I'm glad there's not one style of FM and we have a good amount of diversity.

I've been following the TTLG mod discussion on this. Basically it's lots of bots. Lots & lots of bots. There are ways to crackdown to bring down the bot number like a human check when you log in, but that also tanks the SEO on the search engines and kind of ironically also deters actual humans logging in too, or something like that.

Yes, on first sight it looks like you didn't get the mission packaging right. So that's what you can look up. I'd say the first time through every aspiring mapper really ought to just follow Fidcal's A to Z tutorial straight, doing exactly what it says. https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/A_-_Z_Beginner_Full_Guide_Start_Here! Then you know you've covered every step from start to finish. But of course everybody has different approaches that work for them. Ok, I guess I'll add a little more. As you probably already know, there are two ways to run a mission, from inside DR, where you need to package everything directly into TDM's folder structure (some people even make a separate install for editing), and from inside the game, where you package up a .pk4 and run the mission from that, although that might be seem a little less efficient. I recall doing it both ways, making periodic landmark .pk4 versions, and then doing little changes running them through DR, until it felt like enough had changed that I'd pack it into a new .pk4. I think some people only make the .pk4 at the end, and I imagine some people run off .pk4s every time. Just learn how to package missions both ways and figure out what works for you.

Heh, I'm still regularly using my first Paint Shop install from like 1998. It's just a really small portable program that I know inside-out, and I can do a lot of things faster & just as well in it than the monoliths we have today.

There are so many things that have probably fallen through the cracks. If you ever look through old threads from TTLG or here, probably even most of the links and screenshots will be broken. I guess it's the nature of working through an online digital medium. Practically whatever platform you pick is going to be unreliable over a long period in one way or another. It's really good that you found the code for this at least & that you seem to be getting back on the horse, so to speak, as far as being a fan contributor.

That might be a fun exercise to try. You have a part of the city hub, with your apartment, a store to spend loot, and a job list where you can pick the next mission, either linearly or maybe you can have several FMs to choose from, and when you finish the mission, it brings you back to the hub with the loot added to your total to spend. I wonder if you could do that without needing to change the source code. It'd be really interesting to try out! But if it did require source code change, maybe you could put it out as a patch and the hub mission. It's worth looking into.

You're using a dark theme & he copy/pasted black text in. You could click-select or cntl+a higlight the text and probably read it that way, or copy & paste it into a text doc. I wonder if the forum could have code that converts text color appropriately to the forum theme, although it's not the highest priority issue anyway. Anyway, to respond, database errors happen sometimes, and it's usually fixed by the time the admin sees the alert and has some free time to fix whatever the issue is, which usually isn't that hard. The forum is back up now anyway. Edit: I say that and now it's down again. Well hopefully whatever the problem is gets reliably fixed soon!

Well in the campaign I scripted, Inventors are pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes and they have a very old lineage, Keeper-like. I think of them like the Illuminati or maybe Masons or Templars in real world history, or anyway the mythic version, not necessarily the real version, or a public face of a group like that for Bridgeport. I'm just saying, like everything we have for mappers to work with, or like comic book characters, they can be whatever a mapper want to make them within a kind of boundary of people buying it, which depends on how well the mapper can sell the story. I think their potential is bigger than one might think at first. Well the main point is that they're the best placed faction that could play that role, compared to any of the other factions. You work with what you've got. Okay, you can come up with your own faction and throw it in too, but it'll probably hit harder to work with what we've already got.

TDM has its own kind of mystery cult in the Inventors, although FMs haven't really developed them in that direction. When I scripted my campaign, portraying them as a mystery cult was an important theme in my story anyway, which my released FM just hints at as a prequel.

Al_B, the admin, explained the reason in a post on the Facebook page that they were being overrun with bots and scans, so he shut the main portal down until they subsided. But anyway it's fixed now. Edit: It was more than that. He put in some kind of bot scrubber code to ... I don't know, do whatever bot scrubber code does to ward of the bots.

Campaigns take a ton of work, even more so for an individual or very small team, and we're a small community. There are a lot of half-made campaigns that never got released. And actually we usually tell new mappers to start with smaller missions just to learn how to make a good mission. It takes a lot of work just to get to the level where a mapper is ready to make a campaign too. That's why when there is a good campaign that comes out, it's a marvel that it actually gets released. I agree it'd be fantastic to see more of them, including the fact that missions are even better when they have that continuity and things like being able to spend your loot for the next mission, for sure.

The official releases of System Shock 1 & 2 and Thief 1 & 2 also include fan patches in them. Well typically these games have a clause buried in the license that they own modifications too, so that's gonna be the reason why, and they're going to quietly presume they own the whole thing without digging into it, which might not be really kosher, but nobody disputes it -- except I recall the maker of the SS2 patch Kolya was a little miffed that his patch was put into the commercial release, or rather that they restricted it's use outside of the product while integrating it, since he wanted to keep it freely available & not to make a company money, although he granted that they had the legal right to do it. TDM is a little special just because it's a non-commercial game, idTech4 was open sourced, or anyway GPL'd, and about the only thing we restrict is that assets are under a CC license. The disputes we sometimes get aren't really about the license so much as tact & courtesy, e.g., to not recycle or change someone else's map as one's own, or at least you should get their consent first.

Practically speaking, to get on to Steam you also need to formalize the team as a legal entity, which brings up stuff like tax filings, a board of directors and executives, reporting requirements, etc., that I think nobody was keen to take on or hand over to others to take on. To begin with, it'd change the whole character of the team & the project a lot, I think. I forgot the issues with GOG and Itch now. I think everybody admitted it sounds good in principle at least. It's just herding cats when you get into the details, and half the cats are missing. That's before you even get to the actual mess with all the licenses. --- I noticed in the credits of Blendo Game's Skin Deep, when I played it recently, that there's a credit for the TDM Engine, from which he evidently lifted some things for his game. Brendon has long been making his games with Doom engines, so there's a reason he did that. I'd say he's also a friend of the community. He's visited the forum & is known for his games & thinking on immersive sims. But the point is that there's an example of someone branching off the TDM engine for a commercial project (that's also on Steam BTW). So if you have questions about it, that's someone you can contact to ask about it. I'm sure it matters that probably none of the assets carried over, though, only the game engine, or parts of it.

Cool. I remember back in the day I was advocating that the team should release asset packs that combine fan-contributed assets in a map like this, laid out kind of like an Ikea, which would make it so much easier for mappers to grab what they want and plug it into their own maps than have to trawl through threads searching for things. The idea never really took off, but it's good that convergent evolution led others to having the same idea at least for their own assets anyway. Oh also, these chests all look great, so good work on that!

I saw an announcement for this and I thought it was some little fan project, but this is a legit new game. The aesthetic was respectable but a bit too "clean". How is it that modern graphics can never quite capture the dingy authentic look of the days when light was baked in? I don't have experience with VR, but in principle the hands gameplay is an interesting innovation. Well, I'll give it the same hope I've given every Thief game since TDS.