demagogue

Have any of you ever played the Thief2 multiplayer mod? Some of the best experiences I've had in an FM happened when I was using it. I think I was already saying this before, but for our gameplay, the best kind of multiplayer is definitely coop. I know comp, thieves vs. guards is a thing too, and it has some fun moments, but it descends into chaos more often, not really the style of our game (slow and methodical), and you have to have a bigger group of good people for it to be fun, which doesn't happen often or for long. Whereas with coop, you really only need one or two friends. It's actually better with fewer people. So scheduling is so much easier, and just playing normal FMs is already usually perfect for it. So you don't even need special maps, and we already have over 100 FMs ready made for it.

Here's my attitude. If you have an idea you think may be interesting 1) you can expect you'll get pushback whether it's a good or bad idea (people have intuitions, but for a lot of things no one really knows how good or bad it will be until they've seen it in action), 2) you don't have to care. If you think it's an interesting idea, there's bound to be other people out there that think it's interesting, 3) but, especially if it's not a popular idea, you can't expect you'll get much help making the feature happen either. So at best, what you're really talking about is a feature you make for your own FM. And if you actually start making it, instead of asking is this feature a good idea, if you ask more concrete questions like how do I dynamically change spawnargs with a script, or how do I teleport in a completely different lockpick in (if the dynamic spawnarg switch doesn't work), you'll probably get a better response with actual answers you can use. Also, just the act of trying to make an FM and going through tutorials is going to teach you probably everything you need to know to make it happen. Generally speaking, it's an open source game, so practically anything you can imagine is possible, but some things take more time than others. This I think is quite possible (I gave two ideas of how above), but it might take more creativity and tutorial diving than usual to solve. I'm a big fan of FMs trying out new mechanics, even things that I think may not work well, I'm curious to see how it plays out anyway. So I say go for it and try to set it up, and let's see how it plays. Make sure players know about it in advance though, and be prepared for it to get slammed.

I think the logic is more like: multiplayer would be awesome for coop in FMs with some close friends. That's a good enough reason to work on it by itself. But as long as one is working on it for that reason anyway, they may as well add functionality for thieves vs. guards since it wouldn't take comparatively that much more to pull off, and some people really like it. Part of that point is the observation that coop or player vs. player functionality by itself probably wouldn't be enough for thieves vs. guards. You'd need some more features tailored specifically for it to make it work well, like mechanics to make sure the teams are balanced, the invisibility mechanics, well, basically the things you see in Thievery, although we have the chance to improve on its systems.

It was great while it lasted. I guess if anything it shows that the best hope for guard gameplay in TDM is if we get multiplayer up and running. That's always been my biggest dream for TDM from the start.

Re: Finding an internal leak, I think the quickest failsafe way is make a copy, change all the visportal textures for the two leafs to a solid brush texture, put the starting point in one leaf, then cut a hole to the void in the 2nd leaf, then when you call the point_file, it's going to run from the start point through the internal leak out to the void.

The FM that's most like that I think is Emilie Victor for Thief 2, http://thiefmissions.com/m/EmilieVictor. There are some other fairy tale-like FMs for T2 like any of KFort's FMs, https://thiefmissions.com/search.cgi?search=%2bauthor=Kfort. I can't think of any like that in TDM offhand. My work in progress is a fairy tale FM, so it would be, but I don't know how long that'll take to finish.

Japan has a shrinking population, isn't taking in immigrants, its business culture is so conservative and xenophobic they've practically shut themselves out of the global economy, and it blundered itself into the worst liquidity trap and stagflation in history by far, leading to what used to be called the "Lost Decade", but is now more like the Lost 30 years, getting ready for the 4th decade of it. China on the other hand has a massive slave labor force in combination with an open economy and the largest single market in history by far, they're aggressively forcing themselves into other country's markets with their One Road thing, not to mention a million person military and a government with absolutely control over everything that happens in its borders. The two aren't really comparable.

I think the main issue is that the AI are not suited to thief-like behavior. You might try to fake it with patrols or the RITS system, but that's a pretty thin system that breaks easily and you couldn't really replay it. But ... I think if an author were very clever and careful, and they spent enough time with it, they could make a system that works pretty well. So I think it can be done. It'd just take a lot of cleverness and work.

I also mentioned nurbs. Do a forum search for nurbs to see threads on them, but to start off you can read up on them here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20163-roadmap-for-tdm-in-2020/page/5/&tab=comments#comment-444657 Edit: Somewhere on YouTube there's a video showing a will-o'-wisp flying around using this system, so you can see the system in action and know where to find an example. I even think FenPhoenix was the one that uploaded it. I'd post it if I could, but I can't find it just now. But if you search enough on YouTube or just ask FenPhoenix maybe by PM here or on TTLG, you can find it that way.

Sounds like exactly the job for a particle effect, at least for the moths. If you do a kind of moving particle cloud of them, it'll look random enough. For the bats, I don't think they'd circle a light so much as swoop around. And for that I think you'd use animated models on nurb curves and trigger different ones randomly to get your randomization.

Trump would be all too happy to abandon Taiwan, and he's already abandoned Hong Kong, but hopefully his days are numbered. As for the Uyghurs, I wrote a report about their plight. It's on such a massive scale, comparable in scale to the Nazi holocaust in the sense it involves millions of people affected in one way or another, the detentions are over a year and basically by quota (at least 1/3 people detained without question), incredibly abusive, and even if you aren't detained there are 100,000s of cameras and phone scanners and 10,000s of homestay security officers that literally live in their houses and "marry" the daughters (i.e., a state sponsored rape and race-cleansing campaign), etc. When problems are on such vast scales and multiple levels, you have to address them at a vast scale and multiple levels. Pressure on the government I doubt would work. Educating the population isn't likely to work. Facilitating the escape of the population to other countries can only go so far. Targeted economic sanctions might help pressure the forced labor part, but the problem is the forced labor is so tightly integrated with the broader Chinese supply chain economy that it's almost impossible to tease out the Xinjiang contribution from the entire Chinese export market, and I doubt any country is going to just completely cut itself off from the Chinese market. Educating foreigners about it would be good for playing the long diplomatic game though. It's a problem from hell. I wish we could do more.

AFAIK there isn't just a global setting for it (but that'd be an obscure setting if it existed, so you'd have as good of a chance of digging through Doom3 tutorials or the code to find it as anyone else), and different things are localizing sounds in different parts of the stereo field for different reasons, so it sounds like it'd be hard to rig it source by source as well. I'd also think you might be better off doing it through your operating system or just, you know, turning your headphones around.

The problem is that FMs are incommensurable. A "10" would be a fantastic score for a massive FM and a terrible score for a tiny contest-sized FM. So it means somebody would have to play through all of them and personally judge the fair rate of its difficulty in a way that's equal across all FMs, and keep doing it for every new one that comes out. That's a bit unreasonable. What if the author disagrees with the proposed rate? What if the author's idea for the rate is actually quite inaccurate? If it's such a high burden, you might have multiple people doing it, but then how do you make sure they're being consistent (without just adding more people checking)? Or you just don't, and then the ranking can mean much different things for different FMs. But I think most of all, it's just something that interest will ebb and flow, so work on it may be inconsistent. All of that said, one might add a cheap normalization system like "Steal Score / number of AI", or probably it'd need to be a little more involved than that, "X - Xmin / Xmax - Xmin", where max and min are ... uh, a function of number of AI... I'd have to think through that. Or have a difficulty coefficient, like 1-3 AI = .1; 4-7 AI = .2; etc... Maybe one could add another modifier based on AI-mutual-proximity (AI next to one another are much more difficult than a large FM with isolated individual AI). Etc. Another problem is that difficulty probably doesn't scale linearly either. But it might be hard to figure out the curve, and how would you measure it anyway? Poll players, rate it by the % of FM time they're "in danger", etc, etc. It'd take some careful thought, but at least it'd be a universal system that might be somewhat meaningful. But because it'd still be prone to error (even serious error), I think it'd be better to put it in parentheses or in some context to cue the player that the rating may be absurdly wrong. But then players don't understand it and just think it's buggy and we get lots of complaints why their ranking is so ridiculously inaccurate in a given FM and people are going to tell you how stupid and broken the system is, etc... So it may take a lot of iterations to work out the kinks. Well, if someone wants to try it, they should definitely get a system up and running we could test and work out the kinks over a lot of FMs long before it's going to players. It's hard to judge if it'd be a good system for our game without having a working model we can consider concretely, as opposed to abstract speculation.

Looks great! You ought to put up a video here so people can really appreciate your accomplishment. (This isn't a good texture pack for this setting, but it gets the job done.)

I'm wondering how much coding support would also need to be done. It sounds like some of this would call for cuing and cycling through idle animations, cycling through animation variants for different things, and for things like mantling, to do it justice you'd want the animations to be in line with the different mantling mechanics, i.e., responding to things like cancel conditions, morphing a jump animation into a mantle animation, etc. Just off the top of my head, some of that sounds like it needs code support to handle it, which is a bigger can of worms than just making a few stock animations.

I understand that animations are hard to make and even harder to make look good, but you'd think in 15 years somebody could just bite the bullet and make them... Alright, I can look into it (after/if I finish some other projects). I've been making models for my own projects in Blender and lifting animations straight from Fuse (which is awesome system once you get used to it BTW. You just remodel their stock model, and as long as you keep a small set of key vertexes in basically the same key places, you get to use their ~400 animations for it). But I've been looking into making and tweaking some of the animations for my own purposes. I suppose I could look into the TDM player animations. I don't know if it affects gameplay, e.g., with the movement, bounding box for collisions, falling of ledges, things like that, side-effects which were admittedly annoying in TDS. Presumably it'd be ideal if it also had no effect on anything and was just a visual effect; but I don't know if that's possible as it is the model.

I clearly don't visit this sub-forum often enough. This is such an awesome feature! Thanks & cheers all around!

The first thing you can do is change the design a little where approaching Objective B will trigger B as the hidden objective, and give you (repeat) your revelation there. That way they can at least go ahead and fulfill B while they're there and go back to A to fulfill it later, and from their perspective it looks like they were meant to do that. Basically you design it as if you expected the player to take either way in the fork, as if you meant for them to do that, where each side of the fork still gives new information so feels like a revelation and "progress" (it's just the order of revelation A->B vs. B->A works a little differently, but both independently work and look intended, and you get the same end result either way). I did something a little like this in my FM with the hidden objective being triggered also as you approach it (I think through a nearby readable), so you could do things in different orders and it always flowed as if it was meant like that. It's part of thinking in terms of non-linear, hub & spokes model level design, where you design it so the player could visit the spokes in any order and it feels like the "intended" progression the way you word readables, etc. Another way is a "key" mechanism. You either can't get out of the "area" in the west part or enter the east part unless you fulfill A, where the act of fulfilling A itself gives you the "key" to make progress, although it doesn't have to be a literal key. It's also something you can build into the level design. When a player enters a new area, they know there's "something to accomplish" there, and they shouldn't leave until they've gotten whatever they're supposed to get from it.

This guy is a key character in my closest-to-finished WIP FM. You can't really replace him without ruining the effect. So if it gets put into working order, I can actually release it as intended.

A few points.... - Oh I doubt you're going to get map authors involved in this, and bugging them about it is asking for hostility. This is something a group of interested fans need to want to do on their own, for its own sake, as like a kind of meta-game in itself, if it's going to get worked on. And thinking about getting quick action is also not the productive approach I think. The Mapping Project was a thread that went over something like 8 or 10 years, little bit by little bit. It's a meta-game people played off and on for their own amusement, to solve a different puzzle every other weekend, and I think that's the better way to think about it. - Making a script to collect all the readable texts into one searchable database I think would be a cool project for the same reason it was done for the Thief Wiki, just as a compilation of texts from the world for the record. It doesn't have to have anything to do with this project, but it could help support this project. But anyway, one thing I learned from the Mapping Project is you shouldn't prejudge what's going to give you information. There were plenty of times some random aside in a readable gave us a little clue about where an area was. But I also did say some fan should make a summary of the important lore bits they can draw out from scanning readables over time to actually be useful for a project like this. I recognized that much. - As for Springheel's point... there are different ways to look at it. One is having lore to help authors make maps. For that purpose, I think he's more or less right. There's enough now for people to make stories for their maps, so they don't really need this project. But I don't think a project like this needs to have much if anything to do with that to begin with. A project like this, to my mind, is, like I said, a kind of meta-game we can play as fans, to make a lore bible as a creation in itself, not to help FM authors (although they can use it if they want to), but to be a creation that stands alongside FMs as its own thing. - And on that, to consider Spring's point more broadly, as for what level of detail to shoot for ... I think a good lore bible should read like a good history book you might actually find in that world, like the histories of Edward Gibbon, Tacitus, Livy, etc. Some big landmark events, some dramatic scenes and interesting personalities, and some good storytelling and handwaving that makes the empire look grander than it actually is. This is all just my personal take of course, although I'd emphasize (from a long experience in this community, like 20 years) that it's a bad idea to bother people to goad them into participating with this or any fan project. Just have it out there and make it look interesting; and if people want to join, they'll see it and join.

Speaking of organizing, if somebody wants to get the ball rolling, the first thing we should do is pull out the readables & barks (audio files) from FMs. That is someone should spend a few weekends reading & listening through them and pasting at least lore-carrying ones into one catalogued document. If someone could code a script (like in Python) that could do it automatically that would be even better. Since it's all in a standard format, doing it by script wouldn't be that hard. If you know the Thief wiki, they catalog all the readables and barks by the file names, and then in lore discussions like the mapping project, people would link to a specific one to support this or that proposition. In our case, you'd want to title them by the FM name and then file name, then the entry name, then the text. So one entry would look something like below. This would give us the fodder we need to get started, and it's a good kind of project for a fan that would like to contribute something but isn't into mapping or making assets. Edit: They or someone should also make a summary doc that summarizes the important lore points from the dump to save everybody having to trawl through everything just to get the important bits. ---------------------------- stlucia.pk4 saintlucia.xd Journal_Priest1 ---------------------------- [Page 1] October 4th The Lord Builder hath granted us a great boon. Today the widow Madeline did bring to me a gift she bought from a merchant who did just return from a pilgrimage to Torino. The merchant claimed that the trinket was a shard from the head of the True Hammer, just as merchants sell to the pious but gullible souls in a dozen market- places in the city. The widow, bless her soul, did have a shine in her eye that I have not seen since her husband did perish at Belhaven hospital, so I had not the heart to tell her but accepted her gift without comment and placed it next the statue of St. Lucia in the front chamber. As I did pray quietly there, feeling the weight of all that had happened and asking God for a sign to reaffirm my faith, the statue did most suddenly begin to weep. I could not believe mine eyes. T'was if The Lord Builder were speaking directly to me through His servant St. Lucia.... [Page 2] October 21st The shard seemeth to be but a simple piece of metal, yet when I hold it, I do sense some kind of power within. God hath responded to my prayers in a way that I did not dare to hope, solving my crisis of faith and the poverty of my parish at once. For donations from wealthy visitors, who would never set foot in this church but for the weeping statue, swells our coffers as it hath not been in a generation. Even two Moors--foreign infidels from the south--have visited to see the statue! With the new donations we can begin construction of new works to honour the Master Builder. First repairs upon His house and those of His people, then new walls, gutters to keep the streets free of refuse; my heart soars to think of it. October 24th His Eminence the Archbishop is coming here to witness the miracle and thus pronounce it so. With all the trials and plagues that this city has endured these last years, such a thing could renew the faith and vigour of all our people! ----------------------------

As I understand it, Bridgeport is on the southern coast of a high latitude continent on the western edge closeish to a Spain / Anatolia-like mixed Ghazi-Builder region, Menoa, Ghazi being the Islam-counterpart. To the direct south is moorish territory, which can be like traditional Ghazi territory (Iraq), and the Baghdad equivalent should be down there, or more like North Africa and the Ghazi center is much further ... east? Edit: Probably west makes more sense. The role of Bridgeport is roughly equivalent to Constantinople (because of the proximity to Menoa), but it has some London flavor. It's still Builder, but a more orthodox brand and it's inflected with the Asiatic-equivalent influence compared to Catholic-like Builderism. To the far east also on the coast is the capital of the Empire, both the political and religious center, Sancta Civitas. There should be a political and theological tension between Bridgeport and S.C., and it's moving towards a break, but currently it's still one unified Empire. Bridgeport is still very much a commercial hub of the Empire. To the north are the Germanic/Baltic-like pagan tribes that are on a spectrum of less Empire influenced as you move north. Edit: I think of the empire more like the Carolingians than anything else, a few major urban centers claiming control over a the whole eastern side of the continent, but really diffuse and fragmented, less than what the HRE was, but more than whatever Germany was after 1600. XD In my reading, the world takes flavors from medieval European and Middle Eastern / North African history, but it mixes them up a bit.

Just to add a few cents, since I recognize what you're saying. I had a few things in mind in the quote of mine that you're referring to. First is that I actually scripted a full campaign the purpose of which was to introduce our world and some evocative lore, The Dark Campaign. It treads a fine line between the two poles you're talking about. It doesn't introduce much more lore than it needs to for the story and leaves lots of things open, or hints at larger things, but the story is also intentionally scripted to give FM makers a base in lore to make their own FMs from. So I was first talking about getting out this big cache of lore I'd already compiled & extended for that project. Second, my mind about canon is that it organically grows from FMs in a way ... how to explain it ... sort of like the way the Bible was constructed. There were a lot of texts saying a lot of things, but the generally recognized community leaders recognized the texts and facts that had the most authenticity and authority and canonized them. FM stories are like folk legends then. An FM should feel free to come up with whatever lore it wants for itself. So now it has a kind of folk lore status. But it doesn't become canon unless it's recognized, so that you can keep the good stuff and throw out the slush. Third, the context of what you were directly quoting wasn't me proposing an official declaration of canon like a Lore Bible. What I had in mind there was a coffee table lore book as its own stand-alone art project, where the same rules above apply. It's lore, but only what's recognized as canon from it should deserve any status of canon. (Another wrinkle, people can disagree, and you can have schools of thought, which I like the idea of.) Fourth, maybe most important, all of this meta-talk doesn't really mean much. What matters is having texts right in front of you (I'm using the term "text" as a shorthand for any artifact, a readable, a map, a convo, etc.) and going piece by piece and having a discussion, well, does this deserve to be canon, all of it or part of it or it needs to be translated. The best example in our community for this kind of thing is the Thief Mapping Project and the canon debates involved in that. A Dark Mod Lore Project might look something like that thread with one major difference, which is that it wouldn't only be debating canon out of existing texts, it would be debating canon in the creation of the texts themselves. So there has to be an inspiration element to it. Somebody is going to have to tap into the spirit of the world and get some kind of inspiration from it, write out what that inspiration tells them, and then it will be up to others, the recognized canon gatekeepers, to recognize if it's the "true inspiration" of a prophet or the ramblings of a false prophet or some of it looks inspired and some of it looks false. And then the debates can go from there. My point there is, the debate is probably more important and interesting, as an artistic and fun project in itself, than the answer. But the nice thing is it also ends up with an (evolving) answer that we can use as lore. Like with the Thief Mapping Project. The great achievement of that isn't so much the map itself, but the 100 page thread debating why it looks like it looks, and then the map is just the final form of all that debate. This shows one of the major differences, by the way, between a company just tossing out lore for entertainment sake (which probably doesn't mean much to us, since we can't trust they really love their own world) and a community pounding out the lore based on discussion, shared understandings, and mutual love for this world and this game (which really means something to us). I agree it shouldn't be the kind of project that crushes a world's mystery with the blazing antiseptic and unforgiving light of reason. But it should also try to come up with the "right" answer. The Mapping Project is a good reference again. Another good reference is the kind of debates medieval scholars had for that matter. They weren't doing real "science" like we think of it today. They were trying to be precise, but mysticism was built right into the middle of it as well. And again, there can be different schools that take different tacks, and that's great. tl;dr: Less meta-talk, more lore debate. We can talk forever about the theory of it until we're blue in the face, and it still doesn't matter. Let's just start laying out proposed lore and start talking about it and see where it takes us. That's my proposal for this thread.

You don't have to make it so complicated. To use the example given here, start the tutorial mission. As soon as it starts, open the console (default "cntl + alt + ~"), and paste in "setviewpos 333.11 -1872.76 220.25 4.9 88.0 0.0". Then type in "envshot <filename> <size>" with some file name like "tutorial_screenshot1" and I need to experiment with the size, but I imagine it needs to be some exponential of 2 like 512 or 1024 (it defaults at 256, which is much too small to be useful), and you'll get the images in the "env" folder in your darkmod folder. I'm going to cruise around some FMs I like and find some nice scenes I'll edit in the setviewpos coordinates for later.

Custom art like this is pretty much the textbook case for using custom assets for a specific FM and not standard. I think this kind of art would work well in a non-standard FM, so I would be happy to see an author use it, but not outside of that.