demagogue

It's the aesthetic he's going for. If he were going for gritty realism, he wouldn't be doing windows and siding like that to begin with. I like grimy things too, but I know when an aesthetic needs to be authentic to what it is, and this is true to its vision.

It's running on a server where all clients are seeing the same events, which is the foundation of a multiplayer coop game. That's a big deal. The gameplay and aesthetics you can tweak, but getting all the underlying systems to work and playable on a server is a nice accomplishment. From what I understand of TDM's code, most systems weren't made with multiplayer in mind like he said. I don't know how relevant this is, but systems act directly on $player1 (or whatever it was) all over the place, which is the local client, and I think if it were to be multiplayer, some of those systems would have to be re-tooled from the ground up to handle possible other clients causing events in the same world. I've glanced at Tos's code for multiplayer Thief2 and got an idea of what goes into it. Multiplayer coop for TDM has always been my #1 pipedream for the game, even above standalone and soft shadows and other things that we eventually got. But I don't have any illusions about the challenges. It's not impossible, but it'd take a lot of work for a long time by a very dedicated person or small team. Nice to see this project getting somewhere with it though.

A disturbance in the planet's electromagnetic field maybe?

I got the idea Assange's day finally came because he was smearing poo on the walls inside the embassy, and probably that he was starting to go full Howard Hughes judging by his appearance, and somebody in the embassy made a command decision, probably after repeated warnings that went unheeded, that he'd overstayed his welcome and the embassy invited the police in to get him. More broadly speaking, as a public law lawyer I'm interested in transparency and accountability. I've done FOIA work before (Freedom of Information Act, the law that requires the gov't to release certain info and there's a whole process about it), and have always felt the more info released the better. But I also feel like there needs to be rules where if something is abused, the person can be punished. That's the problem with Wikileaks. It's not accountable like gov't actors are, and Assange's case has always struck me as what impunity does to people, where he started getting cocky and rampantly abusing his power and using Wikileaks for blatant propaganda. If you're going to have it at all, it needs to be independent, professional, and its officers need to be accountable for what they're doing. They weren't. So this is an important step in that direction.

I scripted an entire campaign and it's glorious. I may create only the first mission of it, and then we can see if I can go from there. In a nutshell, the Empire is at war with Menoa, and the Menoan army has Bridgeport under siege. The player character is actually from a minority group in Menoa. To use the European analogy, if Menoa is the Arab world (it is in my vision; I know the canon story, but I'm not above twisting it to the needs of my story), and the Empire Christian Europe, the player would be a Zoroastrian from Persia/Arabia, persecuted by both Muslims and Christians, except in my vision of our world we have Empire Builders (Catholic-inspired), the Menoan Ghazi (Islam-inspired), and Menoan Pakdamani (Zoroastrian-inspired). Long-story short, the player starts in a ghetto with other Ghazi/Menoans in the city and finds an opportunity to get out of the city to help the Menoan army get in. But before he gets to them he gets caught by the Builders who come up with a plan to use the player to sabotage the Menoans (holding his father-figure hostage as leverage), and from that point forward the player is like a double-agent playing both sides, both sides variously trusting / mistrusting him. Along the way he'll visit the Menoan capital (medieval Baghdad-inspired), the Empire capital Sancta Civitas (Rome-inspired), and some deserts, forests, and sea voyages along the way... As each side is looking for a secret & powerful occult relic at the center of both religions that could serve like a weapon of mass destruction to give them the edge (a la Indiana Jones & the Lost Ark). I like it because I went ahead and wrote up an entire history of the Builder & Ghazi religions and the Empire & Menoan empires, and all of the political dynamics between the two and internally, within the empire, Builderism, the different factions, the different feudal lords, etc. (A major piece of this story is the rivalry between Bridgeport & Sancta Civitas a la Rome-Constantinople, where the Archbishop of Bridgeport is trying to get religious autonomy from the Builder Patriarch in S.C., and the feudal lords taking sides in the political implications of that.) The religious implications of the relic also enflames all of the internal tensions in the religion & politics. I already have the whole thing pretty well scripted out, down to the level of map-flow (the basic scenes for each map), story, and dialog. But making the thing is a whole other bag of sardines. But like I said, I hope to at least get the first mission out. It has to get into queue though as my fairy tale-inspired mission will come first.

Cool video of some upcoming medieval games.

Reminds me of the area around the start of Behind Closed Doors (the "back way" around). You might get inspiration looking at it again. I learned a lot from just opening it up in DR and looking at how things were put together. The scaling looks to be almost exactly twice the size of your drawn version, which at least would make the math easy to work out in re-scaling it.

Thanks for the update. Cue "This is why we can't have nice things".

I liked the original way, with the sockets not flipped, just for aesthetic purposes (the heavy side of things naturally flip downwards). I guess either way works though. Monochrome somehow works for this group, like they're using a printing press with a single plate.

I would make the tube of liquid pretty fat to be more medieval looking, like alchemical glassware. For that matter, it'd be fun to have a whole set of alchemical tools in the same style, with brass croppings, and a thermometer could be one of them. Then I could make an FM with alchemy. If any of you recall, my T2 area in the Chain Project had an alchemist's room you could visit and turn any lead you found into gold. For that matter, Soren (the bad scientist) in my TDM FM is pretty alchemist-y, with all of his knickknacks on his shelves. I love that kind of mad lab stuff, with the mystical edge of alchemy or astrology or tarot... I love magic science and would love more objects for it.

I think the hammer is appropriate. This is a quasi-medieval society, so most social institutions would be quasi-religious, like European guilds and public admin would use Christian iconography. I see Inventors like masons, mixing a literal craft (masonry) with Christian-like mysticism & iconography. This is just my own vision for them. More generally speaking, I think about FM-based world building like comic strips, where different authors can have quite different visions for their world with different ideas about key characters and groups, as long as it's paying homage to some of the canon pieces (like Batman's or Superman's origin story shouldn't change, even if you play it very differently). So I think even inconsistent visions can co-exist for something like the Inventors. They're kind of designed to be shadowy and unclear anyway, so ripe for different visions. All that said, I think you'll get less complaints & greater appreciation if you use something other than a hammer, but still vaguely in the neighborhood, like masons themselves didn't use direct Christian iconography, but they used religious-like iconography.

The Metro screenshots reminded me a lot of the Stalker games, which is one of my favorite series of the 2000s, and I'm hearing good things about then. So I'll probably pick them up at some point on sale.

It's under atdm:entity_base and is called atdm:absence_marker. (FYI under "Entity" in the top-menu, you can open the entity tree and just start typing "absence" or any other part of an entity name and it will be selected.) Placing them directly isn't the way they were designed, but my guess is it'd work. Worth a shot anyway. Edit: Note IIRC the AI needs to see it. So it can't be spawned in the dark, and is best if it's spawned under a light. Kind of funny, it needs to "see" an absence, but it makes sense when it's a small object.

There is an absence marker you could spawn in the appropriate place under the appropriate trigger conditions that does this job for missing objects that you could try. I'm pretty sure you can't do it as easily as putting a property in the AI's spawnargs, but you could still just spawn the marker by a script or whatever outright. It would need some fore-thought and playtesting to see that it works logically, but it's one possible way to do this. (There might be other ways.)

Ironically a "lights going out" marker wouldn't work because the AI couldn't see it, because it's in the dark (IIRC). But I think the torch & light "should be on" flag works by ... well I don't remember exactly. Better to go straight to the source code than try to speculate. Edit: I don't think they cue an alert change anyway. For a torch, they cue the AI to mumble and relight it. Edit2: I should have looked at the link you posted first. I was talking about the "light should be on" flag, which might work for this too if there's an electric light version. That link is for a "it's broken" flag, which as the link describes it is in the stim/response system. In that system, a broken item is going to give off "vis" stims, and if an AI "receives" the stim (by seeing it), then its alert rises. That is, it's not a marker-creating class at all; it's in the stim/response system, which objects carry in their properties (IIRC). You'd want to do testing to see if / how it works in practice if you really want to use it.

If you use the same name of an object in a pk4, then the pk4 version will override the mod version in FMs. Well there are hierarchy rules it follows; you have to do it the right way, but I think it's possible. So that's how you could override the normal electric lights with breakable versions. Note it would probably break the game logic of some or even a lot of maps. There's a reason mappers use electric lights, e.g., they want to reward the player for making it to the switch to turn them off or they want some forced stealth so it's not too easy, etc. But gameplay patches are usually for after you finish an FM the normal way and want some variety anyway.

We shouldn't use a real-world logo to an actual organization. A cross of tools and having a gear in it I think would work though to show they aren't completely separated from builder ideology but may see themselves as a kind of offshoot.

I don't recall one being made before. Now is as good a time as any for an artistically inclined person to make one.

Why don't you do it? Our assets & IP (characters and story) are free to use for anyone for any purpose (that allows the assets to keep their existing CC license).

Yes, I was too lazy to read through the relevant thread, so we were missing my initiative to even bother looking. Edit: For the record, I don't have any particular desire to see T1 or T2 remade. They're classics in their own right, and I wouldn't want to see them remade for the same reason I don't want to see classic black and white movies remade. But I'm much more interested in seeing T2 FMs playable in TDM, and I like the idea of a script that could do that. I have an idea TTLG FM makers might not be too happy about it though.

As the Dark Engine was originally built for UU and modified from there, his script would be the obvious starting point, if he ever released the source for it.

The clever way I could see it done is if somebody created a converter script which took the Thief 2 .mis files and converted them to TDM .map files, either substituting best-fit textures and objects, or I guess the script could just outright import T2's textures and objects and other things (and convert anything it needs to), so T2 zip files go in and TDM .pk4 files come out, if we're pipedreaing this anyway. Then they could just release that script which people who own Thief 2 could run, pointing it to their T2 map folder, and get the TDM maps spit out. I think that'd be legal. Not only could we get Thief 1 and 2 maps out, but we could also get FM maps spit out as well, which would I think quintuple the number of FMs we have in one shot. Actually this is kind of an awesome idea, now that I think about it. The thing is that Thief maps use negative geometry (cutting holes out) and TDM uses positive geometry (placing solid blocks). So it wouldn't be a simple conversion at all, and I'd think you'd have to cover a lot of exceptional situations that don't fit an easy mold that you might have to just hack in. But, like many things, we have the source for both games, so it's possible in principle. The question is just how much work someone is ready to put in to study up & do it.

I've experimented more in the other direction, customizing a Windows shell. One can make a very Linux-like shell even in Windows, or pick and choose different elements. In the end I'm also not such a hardcore user that I care enough to invest the time and energy for such things. It's fun to play around with for a while, but then life takes over and you just want to get work done without extra hassle. I'm still very much into the open source & collaborate ethos, but more so for software (like ours) than an OS. Well, one thing, I don't have any motivation to ever use macOS or iOS. Way too closed for my taste. So I do have my limits.

That reminds me of a comic I can't find right now but it's something like: Panel 1: [disgusted looking guy] Ugh, there's 137 distributions and the whole field is a confused mess. Somebody needs to just simplify things with one central distribution that users can easily install and operate and it does everything they want. If no one else will do it, I'll do it myself! Panel 2: 6 months later -- [another disgusted looking guy]. Ugh, there's 138 distributions and the whole field is a confused mess. Somebody needs to just simplify things with one central distribution that users can easily install and operate and it does everything they want. If no one else will do it, I'll do it myself!

Well there you go. And if you can't trust either Troika or Paradox (who bought that IP), which are about the most fan-friendly studios you could hope to find, it only gets worse from there, unless they have some angle for it like Valve which isn't actually all that fan-friendly in the end. In fact, you should probably be suspicious if the company seems too friendly. Cf. the little contact we've already had with Square Enix. I mean they were ok to us -- we had a joint contest & they're fine with our existence and all (that's the good news) -- but they really didn't get what we we're doing and the whole interaction was awkward. I think I might worry if they started caring, even positively, and it's kind of nice to be at arms length. We let them do their thing in peace and they let us do our thing in peace lol.