demagogue

Just remember, if you include the Thief games, people have been making and playing FMs since 1999. And (the really important part) they're still fun to play. It's such a perfect formula for a game, I can see why it's gone on for 20 years already and why people stay with it or come back to it. I think we're about as established as a gaming community can be.

I don't know if there's anything that we could release that really works and that's going to get worked on. But when Thief 1 or 2 turned 10, TTLG held a "10th Anniversary Contest". That might be a good idea. In the TTLG version, people were encouraged to make a OM-like mission. We can sort of do that too, make a small mission like that first generation of TDM missions. Anyway, small missions usually get more entries and are more fun to play in line for a contest. And come to think of it we haven't had a contest in a long time.

I think it's kind of a cool idea. Also kind of a gratuitous gimmick. But if somebody did it, it might be fun to try out. Does it allow you to play on any computer through the browser? That's how I'd use it, just to show friends, or message a link where people can just go and play. If it's not like that, then the utility of this drops off somewhat. As an aside, if somebody wants to tackle a gratuitous but cool feature, I would love somebody working on a multiplayer version. That's still my #1 pipe dream for this game, for 10 years now I've pined for that.

We seem to have just flown by the 10th anniversary of TDM's 1.0 public release, which was on Oct. 18, 2009. I didn't see any threads on it (were there any I missed?), and now it's like 2 weeks past. But it feels like it's important enough that it's worth acknowledging anyway. So, Happy 10th Birthday TDM! Here's to 10 more of our favorite game in the shadows. Huzzah! o/"

Oh this is great news. I love that world and this is my favorite RPG since Skyrim, game of last year for me too. I don't know if it's as amenable to modding as Skyrim, but I hope people come up with some good stuff. I wanted to make a politics mod for Skyrim where you have to get support of all the jarls to make a bid at getting elected ruler, but maybe I can do that for KCD now.

I think pockets of video game culture like online shooters have become cesspools of bigotry and misogyny and rage, which is why I'm happy with our more civilized culture of night thievery and quiet murder and mayhem. But, yeah, it's not the gaming that's driving the rise of authoritarianism and all of that, and that cesspool is a symptom of other things going on which focusing on games is a convenient way to ignore.

All of that's cool. The layout of medieval streets is convenient for our issues with lines of sight and visportaling, which is I think the most important design issue a mapper faces, or at least the first and most basic one. You don't want intersections where you can look from inside one leaf through a second into a third (absent a few mini leafs like for L-shaped alleys) if you can help it. And having streets come together at weird angles helps. A map like you posted doesn't exactly do it, but it has some good ideas, like having a long straightaway that isn't actually straight but jagged along its length.

Having a legal entity makes sense & is fine by itself. I think the issue was more about what formalizing would mean for the team and workflow, because then (depending on what country we do it through) you have to have trustees / board members, a constitution and bylaws, annual reports, sometimes tax forms, etc., and generally team members consider themselves fans just like anybody else and weren't all that hyped about formalizing. (I'm not particularly worried about being sued over the assets and that side of it, because it probably would have already happened by now if it ever would.) I think at the root of most issues is that we're a really small team that does this in our free time as a labor of love. We could be more ambitious if we had more people that we could trust (i.e,. have been a constructive part of the scene for a long time & has the time & initiative to do the work) and that could do everything that needs to be done in the way it needs to be done. The chicken-egg problem there is that we could do better promotion if we had more people, but it takes the promotion to get the more people to do it. A lot of it too is that we have a system that's been working for us, and people stick with what works.

I will say I appreciate the passion you're showing for getting our game promoted. We should be more well known, and it's great that people still have an urge to get the word out. There are a lot of reasons why we can't change the license, why even thinking about it is a non-starter like Spring said. But one of those reasons isn't that we don't want to be more widely promoted. That would be great, and if there are ways we can do that that don't require entire structural overhauls of the game or its assets then I'm all for it! If you're really into this, I don't want to dampen your spirits for that part. You could (we all could) start thinking creatively of ways we could be promoted in all kinds of outlets ... a promotion campaign or a new & really great promo video or making TDM part of some large event or contest. I understand we're limited by certain parts of our structure and that's a drag (albeit necessary), but there are still tons of things we can do, and if you have the initiative and energy to try some ideas out I encourage that.

Yes originally the NC part got tacked on because some massive repository required (under the SA part) that we keep it, and we don't have a paper trail. I doubt that the NC part of our license is the bottle neck that's limiting our exposure and promotion at this point. I haven't studied it, so you might have a point. I don't want to be completely dismissive of the idea that gaming media may be looking over us because of our license. Although if that's really the case, then that's unfortunate that something like two letters in a license will lead a gaming outlet to reject attention to a game that won PC Gaming's mod of the year just for that, and I want to think so much the worse for them. Edit: I'm kind of sour on the whole economics of gaming promotion to begin with; it's one of the things TDM has been refreshingly clear of and even part of our ethos (if corporate gaming won't do it, fans will do it themselves). But before I even get to that stage, my first intuition is that it would be a massive, potentially impossible, task tantamount to kicking a pack of rabid sleeping dogs for marginal results, a few people here and there even if it works. And to add another category of cases I don't think mentioned yet, everybody that created and submitted assets to the project (possibly including every FM; I'd have to look at that again), did so under that license. So technically you'd have to get all of their consent to relicense their contributions, and some of them haven't posted or responded to messages in years. And for that matter some contributors, like me, don't actually want to relicense and would refuse because, at least in my case, I've seen first hand that commercialization-talk leads to actual dysfunction in the management of the mod. That's not to say that dropping the NC part will necessarily open us up to that by itself. It's more like, sometimes we get people coming in making waves with commercialization talk, and the easiest most convenient way we can shut it down--without having to have a 6 hour lecture on organization theory & small team interpersonal dynamics--is just point to that part of our license and be done with it. Those two letters have done more good than harm for us at least in that respect. I'm ok with more promotion and exposure, but we hit some limits before (like trying to get on digital platforms) that still make us hesitate for things calling for massive structural changes to the mod. We were lucky we got it standalone and it'd have to be something pretty amazing to go through something like that again, which this really isn't. Next month will mark our 10th year of release without any issues with our assets or licensing (beyond the heroic efforts to get 2.0 out), and we've had one of the coolest communities making some of the coolest stuff in gaming out there. Why would we kick a bunch of rabid sleeping dogs now?

All I remember was for func_stats you'd convert them back to brushes, resize, then convert them back to func_stats. But I don't even know offhand if that applies here.

Ah right, that's something I used to know. Actually no-AF might work for my FM since it's going to be scripted and not go to ragdoll anyway (I think). I'm guessing it's in the SVN assets trunk somewhere, right? I'm also willing to work on it just to get it into a state where it'd work for that FM. And maybe I'd just package it in my own pk4, since I don't want to have to commit the team to spending time vetting it or taking it for the base assets or anything like that, given that this would be my first project like this and my QA tolerance for the FM doesn't have to be as high as the game's.

All of this is a weird way to phrase things considering TDM is not Thief & built off the Doom3 engine, but anyway for the record: By Thief engine I guess you mean TDM engine, and not the actual Dark Engine for Thief, which is open source and for all I know they may well be also having this debate. If they do it for Doom3, they would have to release the sourcecode, and how possible would it be to port to TDM (which is on the Doom3 base)?

I seem to remember somebody posting that they had a few animations already working for it, so I assumed that meant the AF was working. But I wasn't entirely following what was really going on, and you're the one that would know. If it's any motivation for someone thinking to work on it, I have an FM WIP that really requires the wolfbeast (I started it pre-2.0 when we still had id's version). So if somebody could get it in working order, I can get that out already and we'd have another nice FM to play that really features him in a cool way.

We have a 3/4 completed wolfbeast, that might even pass if you can handwave over a few missing core animations. Speaking of which, I need that wolfbeast for one of my WIP FMs. Yes it's difficult, but he's not-substitutable (and cool) enough to be worth it IMO. I should take my own advice though. =/ (If you really want something done you ought to do it yourself if no one else is.)

If you missed it, I got it and can't use it because I already have it on Steam. PM me and I can give you the Steam code as long as it lasts. (I was under the misunderstanding that "complete edition" meant it had DLC I didn't have, and it's not like that.)

If you read the wiki page for the TDM world, you'll see we already have moors in our world, and moors are the main antagonists in the official campaign (St. Lucia, etc). I believe the character models are already in the package for use in FMs. In the campaign I scripted (The Dark Campaign), the Middle East equivalent plays a big role. The player character, Khursand, is a Persian equivalent, although his family is like 5th generation in Bridgeport, and he grew up in the equivalent of the Arab Quarter. Maybe 1/3 of the campaign takes place in the world's Baghdad equivalent. And a lot of the backstory mirrors the politics and dynamics of relations between the Abbasid caliphate & Mediterranean Europe. I think I can get around to making the first mission at some point. But I don't know if I can get around to the whole campaign by myself. A whole campaign is a lot of work!

You need part of the func_stat inside the leaf for it to show. I mean when one part is inside the leaf, the whole thing shows. So the solution, I think, would to have some tiny or invisible bit of func_stat that you create as part the buildings object inside the leaf behind that portal, then the whole thing will still show. Recall that func_stats don't have to be contiguous objects.

I've been using the strategy from Thief 2 for forests, which is "rooms" that are giant cylinders, skybox above and a brush texture below, that open to each other at portalized kiss points that are strategically aligned so you (almost) never see into a third room through one. And then you stuff it full of trees and brush to kind of hide the walls as dense forest brush. (Cf. Trail of Blood and Baddcog's Relic: Left 4 Dead.) Optimization-wise, it works pretty well. You get really dense mazy forest in all directions that's believable-ish if you hide the seams well. They're also dirt easy to make (make a giant box, I think the hotkey was control-number to make an n-sided cylinder, then you just drag it oblong, duplicate and cut; top half is skybox, bottom half is brush texture). The challenge is that we don't have great brush textures or objects fit for this purpose. I made a texture that does the job. I still wish I could find some better objects I could use. Rocks also work well. I just think impassable brush is a bit more realistic. I don't know if it's the best approach, but I've sunk enough into it that I want to see it out, and it can serve as a proof of concept for everybody else. The other thing I'd really like is individual giant branches that I can add to base tree trunk objects to construct my own forest canopies and make the trees differ, another thing T2 did.

I can't see it happening for Thief from a proper studio. It'd be great to see a fan made Thief movie, and I think that's actually in the kind of scope where a team of fans could make it. You just need to find a neighborhood and a few interiors that look medieval enough, and have a good script, and I don't think it would take much more. But for that matter it'd also be (/would have been) great for a team of fans to finish of the Hammerite Imperium campaign, the COSAS campaign, the T2 Gold missions, our own Crucible campaign, etc, etc. But anyway a fan made Thief movie would be cool & our best shot of seeing one IMO.

The vocal set can be defined in the AI's .def file. If it's a spawnarg, then it's permanently set at spawntime. If it's a dynamic argument then you can change it with a script or whatever in-game. I have an intuition that it's a spawnarg though, which complicates silencing the AI by just changing the vocal set to null or whatever parameters silence the AI in-game since that wouldn't work. You'd have to choose between the AI being noisy or silent from spawn. IIRC that's another reason I leaned towards the teleport trick. I mean in the end, I just hid my AI behind an unopenable door because I still had problems getting the pathfinding to register post-teleport. But if I wanted to do it properly now, I'd go with teleporting in and out route and just make sure the place I teleport from and to has pathfinding created in the dmap (i.e., it's in connected space to the start marker so the A* algorithm reaches it. I think that's what I missed when I tried it the first time).

If you make it invisible and non-solid, you'll also probably need to make it mute or you can still hear it. I found it easier to just teleport the AI to a distant place, and teleport it back in if I needed to, if that could work for you. If you do that, just be sure that the place you teleport the AI to is someplace either part of the main mission space or maybe that the AI could technically walk to from where it started so the pathfinding still works post-teleport. (It's something like that. I can't recall the particulars. The point is pathfinding will break if it teleports in from or out to a place entirely detached from other mission space.)

The advice people often give in this situation is, when you really can't find the source of a problem, you just clear the problem area or brushes and re-build it from scratch with a very clean building style. If you can track it down to a small area, then that's not so bad, but if it's a larger area, that might be more effort than it's worth, especially in your case of otherwise being on the verge of release.

We could have a whole topic just on this, but what is everybody's opinion about drawing out a level in advance of building? I draw a top-down map, and sometimes in the margin I might draw how I think the scene might look. But I draw it out as a guide. Maybe about 80% of it I'll build as it is in the map, but another 20% I'll improvise as I go with buildings or orientations or features. Well, sometimes, if it's like a mazy outdoor area, I'll just leave spaces open with general comments like "trees and brush here" and completely improvise areas like that. My thinking is that, except for a few key things, nothing is sacred or set in stone, and I let myself feel free to change things around once I'm in the editor dragging stuff around. But I plan like that from the beginning. It's part of my more general strategy of node-based plotting. I plot an FM based on nodes of key events, and the whole story is connecting those nodes together. So that works for the mapping too. I'll plan out the rooms for key scenes, but the rest of it is basically connecting the nodes together in a space, and that's what I'll leave open for improvisation as I go. What are all of your thoughts and strategies for the balance between planning and improvising?

The other thing along with face merging is highlighting two vertexes and hitting a button that merge them into one vertex. There are so many times I wanted to do that. (Can we even do it now? I feel like I'm behind in my DR feature knowledge.) So vertex merging and face merging would both be great ideas. This is the first time I'm hearing about that second idea, but I can already see how useful it would be. Building with positive geometry is so often: duplicate, drag, re-size. Duplicate, drag, re-size. Duplicate, drag, re-size... And that looks like it could boil it down to , click-drag, click-drag, click-drag. Or at least click-drag, resize. I already really like it.