demagogue

Perfectionist with the loot even after you're done with the mission, huh.

Just under a gig a second? Not bad. I'm in Japan, so my ping is always in the 100s of ms. I might make do with something like that someday.

The score was originally a positive score from 0-10, where 10 was a perfect run, and it went down from there. And it turned out that so many games were 0 that people just assumed it was broken, which made it kind of useless. (It also hid the fact that busts were getting overcounted, which is why it was almost always 0 and we didn't even realize it, much less fix it, until we switched to an additive score.) Then we debated increasing it to 0-100 (where 100 is a perfect run), but the thing you have to keep in mind there is "80" will mean something very different for a 10 minute contest sized mission (where it's a really bad score) vs. a 5 hour sprawling mission (where it's a great score). So to avoid both of those issues I had the idea to make the score positive, so it can go up indefinitely. No matter how bad you are, you always get a meaningful number. And like a golf game there's a "par value" so bigger scores are okay for bigger missions but bad for small missions. So "20" just looks (accurately) like 20 in busts instead of "80" looking (inaccurately) like "80%" stealthy. When we did that, though, we kept the name "Stealth Score" because it'd already been around for like a year or more at that point. And now it's been around for like 11 years. I understand the logic of the point. "Score" sounds like a higher value is good when it's worse. But the name has a kind of inertia at this point from being around for so long too, and most people understand what it means easily enough.

The treadmilling and circle-walking often happen when geometry has changed and the dmap hasn't been updated, so the pathfinding is out of date. It can also happen if there brushwork for paths isn't very clean. So if you dmapped and cleaned up areas where that happens that might prevent it from happening more. When areas are made well, I think it's a rare occurrence.

It seems it's some kind of dynamic LOD. You can see distant geometry morphing (or appears to be morphing) even when the player is hardly moving. Voxels (or more typically voxel geometry converted into poly geometry for the render) are one place you see that happen. That morphing looked a lot like a promo video of Voxel Farm. But I don't know that that's what they're doing here.

The first time I registered, I was surprised to discover an account had already been made for my email by someone in Thailand, and I wasn't the only person that happened to! So I can understand why they want to fill my Epic library with so many free games, but I still don't really want to give them my credit card info. It's amazing how much money they must have to do this though, from Fortnight, and I foresee them filling another bunch of Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold with their Unreal 5 engine effectively obliterating the visual difference between rendered geometry and real world video, or for those studios that take advantage of it anyway.

Usually I'm a little miffed about them giving away games that I paid for, especially if I paid full price, but in this case I've logged dozens maybe 100s of hours in this game, so I can't really complain. I think the story of the base game is lousy, but the gameplay is great, and the open world gameplay, plus if you throw in all the mods, is also great. Honestly though my favorite thing I like to do in this game is just aimlessly driving around fast and creating periodic havoc and trying to shoot my way out of it. Part of that is that I don't have a car anymore (in real life here in Japan), and it used to be important for me to drive fast down the highway listening to music (which is a thing people can do in the US that you can't really do in Japan), and of all the games that have open world driving, this is the game that's the best outlet for that fix.

A little testing reported in the TTLG thread on this said that a 1 million poly fbx mesh is 30 mb, a compressed 4k normalmap would be 22 mb, but a 3 million poly .fbx mesh is already 84 mb. So if they keep it in the 1 million poly neighborhood and you lose the normalmap, it's not exploding too badly.

No gonna lie, I looked at that like Homer looks a donut, gargling noises and all. If that was really all in-game and not prerendered, it pretty much demolishes the real world / game world separation. I hope some studios use it for good.

You can definitely see the situations where it contributes, daytime outdoor scenes and big stretches of light-colored textures that break up the texture and give it some dimensionality, both of which are kind of rare for our game environments, but it makes a big difference when it makes a noticeable difference at all.

The assets in the SVN (their authored features) are available packaged in the game for the purposes of the license. That makes them pubicly released. The asset folder in the SVN requires private SVN access, so it's not publicly accessible AFAIK.

I thought overlap meant the two areas either have an internal leak into each other or a portal without a separator, so both areas are treated as one area and it just picks one of the location_entities. So as to the question where is the overlap, I thought the entire space of both locations overlap as if they were one location, and it's just a matter of finding the leak or portal without a separator and separating them. Edit: Sorry I may have just misread your post and think it's saying something it's not. If you just want to know which two locations are getting combined, then I see your issue. Also (this is maybe an aside & I'm going by very old memory here), but I seem to recall the area number is set during the dmap, so it's possible the number might change between dmaps. I guess the theory would be easy to test in your case though, if you dmap and then got the warning with a new area number. But anyway that's not a big issue in this case. I guess another way to do it is just put different ambient sounds on the location_entity, and eventually you'll hear that one isn't playing in the location like it's supposed to. Not sure if that's so much faster though.

It's player-caused events in the world that are problematic, of which frobbing is the first thing people usually think of, but it'd include S&R, objectives, scripts, locations, triggers, weapon & tool use, GUI, AI reactions (who does the AI run after on sight?), etc., etc. And that's just thinking offhand. I'm sure there's many more. Basically any time you see $player1 in the code, which is everywhere, it means only player1 can do that event. I had the idea to actually have a general system that takes any use of $player1 in the code and applies it to all of the appropriate clients in the appropriate way, which might take more work up front, but if it applies across a lot of systems it'd end up saving work. I'm not a real coder though so I have no idea what I'm really talking about. Thievious kind of annoyed me because the guy was doing so much work to just recreate a worse version of TDM from scratch. Imagine if he'd put all of that work into a TDM branch? And I expected it to disappear because that's what always happens with projects that big for one person. But I can't fault people for wanting to make their own projects themselves, and I wished the guy luck with it. Somebody posted another UE4 project like us on TTLG recently. I thought the same thing to myself, but I wished him luck anyway. In his case he at least has a different aesthetic (more modern) and different systems (popup menus for interactions), so you can at least argue it's a bit different game.

I mentioned this already, and forgive me if I sound like I'm repeating myself, but if it's going to be like a year of work no matter which engine you pick--okay, maybe you can save a month here or there or get some slightly better feature with this or that engine, but still it's a massive undertaking whichever one you pick--the number one reason I thought it'd be best to pick TDM wasn't really because it's the best option for multiplayer, but if it did have multiplayer, then you'd have over 100 maps to play coop style right out of the box. And my experience with T2MP is that if a FM is great for single player, it's almost always also great for coop, and I imagine comp too (because players just take the place of already existing guards, so the level is already built with thieves vs. guards in mind). I can't tell you how much fun it is to coordinate how you're going to rob a mansion together with a friend, and when the unexpected happens, you can run to your friend's aid. When I'm playing single player and I get caught, I'll be tempted to restart, but if there's another person there, you want to game on because either they're coming to help you out, or you're watching your friend get chased across the grounds and it's hilarious. And so many of our maps are so good. I can't imagine someone spending a year making multiplayer on another engine and we only get 3 maps, when we could have all of our great maps to play with a friend! It may be extra work on the multiplayer side, but so worth it IMO.

Yes and it's already lost to the sands of time, which is another reason to not go the independent route. If somebody built off the TDM base, there's a better chance it will get picked up and continued if one person can't do it alone. As for the transparency point, that's exactly how Thievery works, and it works great. You should watch some videos of it in action (I put part one of a series below). It's fun. You can see other things they had to do too, like flashbombs whiting out guard's screen, footprints sticking out a bit more, uh, a few other things. As for the second point, for the game just to work, it's okay for the animations to be kind of basic, just the minimum to signal what the player is doing.. Possibly the basics already there might be fine. Thief2 also has super basic player animations, but it doesn't really matter to enjoy the multiplayer experience, since the other players can still do all the normal thief things. And if it works, you can expect people will improve the animations over time, so it can get released & people can start playing with it well before you've got perfect animations. In my understanding, the biggest task isn't animations but having player events shared across multiple clients for literally every system. But even for that, I think once you've done it for one system, it will be easier to do for the others.

Good luck! The more research you do up front the easier going it'll be.

Yes you can do that too. But then the difference is most good coop games are with 1 or 2 other people and most good competitive games are 6-10 people. But actually I was thinking of a different point which I made in my original post, which is just that, if you're going to do multiplayer at all, you may as well make it have a coop mode and a competitive mode so it's not even a debate. That's the best of all worlds, because then you can still play with it whether you can just arrange a game with 1 other friend or with 7 or 8 friends/strangers. Edit: The other great thing about coop is that we already have 100+ maps to play coop style for free, because you just spawn every participant as if they were the original player, and most existing FMs will be coop friendly as long as events that happen to one player happen to all of them. Occasionally there will be progress-closing events that might lock other players out. But even in those cases, when it happened in a T2 map, we'd just open the map in an editor and change that one element, like as easy as putting a ladder or tunnel for other players, so it'd be multiplayer compliant. Whereas with competitive maps, you really must make the map to play comp style, so there won't be near as many maps to play. But then you only need a few good ones for it to be fun, since every game will be unique.

We may be thinking about this from opposite ends. The technical aspect that makes it feasible is that there's already a game there. The alternative (if you want a new system is) you have to completely remake the game, and keep in mind TDM has been in constant development from 2005 to 2020, so it has 15 years of work put into it. Between taking an existing game and adding multiplayer and taking empty code and adding a game and multiplayer, it's obvious to me that the former is the shorter path, acknowledging that "shorter path" is still probably more than a year of work for a dedicated person or few people. Let me back up too. If you want to play multiplayer right now, you can already do it with Thievery and Thief 2's multiplayer mod. Thievery has the same problem cabalistic just mentioned; it's geared towards competitive gameplay, and you're not going to find enough people to make for good games. So it's kind of a dead game, since without a good group of people there's nothing to do with it. But my experience wtih T2MP is that coop is different. For coop, you're not waiting for people to join servers, you're contacting a friend or two directly and asking them if they want to play a map coop with you. It's something you play with your friends. And that can still happen even if people aren't joining servers. So that leaves you with two options, either play T2MP, which by the way is not compatible with New Dark. So you're really playing a 20 year old game with it. Or put multiplayer in a new engine. And then you have two options, branch off of TDM or start from scratch on a new engine. And my original point was just that, between those two options branching off TDM is the shorter path. I suppose one thing to consider is that you could try to port a lot of the TDM code into a new engine. But I don't know if that's even going to save you much time. It's true that TDM's code does not have multiplayer in mind, and it will be an issue at every turn. But for me the two choices are recreate an entirely new thieving game thinking about multiplayer from the start (a 5+ year project for a large team) or walk through the TDM code with a fine-tooth comb and retool it for multiplayer literally line by line. In my understanding, that would also be a massive project, but now we're talking about a project for one person over a year and a half, instead of 5+ years for a large team. So that's the case I was trying to make. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to pull off. But I think it'd be worth it for coop style, since I know I'll always have a few friends that would like to play it coop style with me.

Multiplayer would be awesome. It should be up to mappers to make their own maps fit for it once we have the basic functionality. But generally I think there should be two basic types of gameplay, coop and competitive (thieves v. guards). In the coop style, loot, objectives, and all the player events, etc., are shared across players, and they should be able to play any FM released, so there are already over 100 maps to play coop style out of the box. Competitive style should track stats for each respective team. (It'd be better to do it in a general format, to define however many teams you want.) And then the stats are shared for a team, so loot could be shared for the thief team, and thief-kills or 'captures' (how did Thievery do it?) would be shared for the guard team. Aside from that, the gameplay should be as hands-off as possible to allow creativity among mappers to make up their own kinds of FMs for it. That's my vision, and I hope it happens someday. I'd love to play TDM FMs coop style. It's so fun doing it for T2 FMs. (Thievery is fun, but T2 coop is even more fun.) In that respect I disagree with Nico that it should be a very specific type of new gameplay, we should keep our existing gameplay as far as possible. And with that, I disagree with Orb that it'd be better to start on a new engine. We already have the game, so IMO it's better to just stick with the game we have and just add the networking part and the minimal UI needed to make it multiplayer, and then hand it off to mappers to go from there. TDM is by far the best base for a MP thieving game IMO. Why reinvent the gameplay wheel when we already have the whole game in place now?

Ok, that sounds right. I just remember reading that if a part is below the ground and it's multi-level (like 2nd floor), there's a chance the AI paths to the floor underneath it. That wouldn't apply to this anyway. I think in my FM the issue was parts were uneven ground at an angle, so it was just very close to the ground.

That looks great to me, better than the previous two versions. I think what grayman was getting at is we're supposed to elevate path_corners a little off the ground. At least that used to be the advice; it might be old advice now. But that's how I interpreted his comment. It might be the opposite now for all I know though.

First of all that's a great image. I think the 2nd road is better in the sense that the border is much better than the hard border of the first version. But it is unnaturally straight. A little irregularity in the edges or slight curve, if you can keep that border, would do it well I think. It's not such a big deal though. It still looks great as it is.

Re: Steam. I don't know if it was even that it wasn't felt worth it. It's a lot of work and it's a beleaguered team, the copyright clearance brings back bad memories of what we went through to get 2.0 standalone out, and the entity doesn't really mesh with what we are. It's interesting that people sometimes comment, like making demands or complaints or even compliments, thinking the "team" owns Dark Mod. But if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to the community, and at best the team is more like trustees of it, taking care of its development for the benefit of everyone. If it did become an entity, I actually thought the best thing would be a trusteeship or a non-profit public interest organization for that reason. There are some open source projects that do that even. But we're not really all that formal. People come and go, and it's something people do as a hobby, not a vocation. Oh, all that aside, probably the main problem was GPL though. We can't mingle Steam code with our code because the GPL license means its source would have to be released. Their first contact with us was a disclaimer that they rarely accept games under GPL unless they're protected. Ostensibly they can do it, but they weren't encouraging about it.

I think the name should also be able to apply to the TDM world, so I'd recommend the Plague Contest. And I wouldn't put a hard limit on the themes, but roughly something appropriate to the circumstances, like plague, zombies, or just being cooped up in a house for a long time.

I have a lot of bullet notes for texts. I think it'd be an interesting project to write some of them up into histories for a library. I think for an FM library, we're talking about an excerpt of a few pages standing in for the whole book. The catch is that I'm busy with a lot of other things going on too, so I don't know exactly when I'd get to it. The other issue is that some of our history has already been developed in other FMs, and I'm not really up to date with what other FMs have developed. We ideally need a psycho fan that knows every detail from every readable in every FM to compile it all to add to the list. But anyway, absent that, I can give you some of the independent history I developed for my FM. Oh a third issue is that my history was developed specifically for my campaign, which I also can't guarantee is consistent with the overarching canon... Originally my version of the Menoans was like the Arab/Ottoman equivalents, but it seems the canon interpretation is they're more like the Spanish and the moors to the south are the Arab/Ottoman equivalents. And I think I started to rewrite things from that perspective (replacing Menoa with the southern empire, I have to look up again what name I came up with them, something like Ghazali?), but then that also raised the question of who are the Menoans then anyway, and I had ideas, well if they're like the Spain equivalent, then maybe they'd also been occupied for a long period by the Ghazali. What I mean to say is there are lots of issues like that where basic questions about our world and history have to be answered one way or another that could have big implications. Maybe I can put some texts together and we can have a community discussion about it. That might be a fun kind of fan thing for us to do, if people actually got into it.