Destined

I recently got an ad for this game via Instagram: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3341000/Thick_As_Thieves/ Does anyone have any further information? The people working on it (people from Thief 1-3 and Desu Ex) make it sound promising. I am not convinced of the PvP part, but according to Steam there is also a single player mode, so it may also be fun to play alone... I will at least keep an eye out during the development.

I also feel you. I used to be a regular here in the forums, but since my son was born in 2022, it basically grunded to halt, although I still get the mails on threads that I wrote in. Ironically, your post in June about not having time got me back here and got me motivated to try and use some of my precious spare time to get some progress on the map I started years ago. I still have not been able to finish a map and want to change that, as long long as the community here is still active

No, I have not, but was expecting that Dark Radiant also has further developed. I first wanted to update the game, before turning to DR. But thank you for the remonder.

Thank you very much! I will try to use the installer then. 32-bit version is not required for me, but good to know...

Hi all, after a longer hiatus, during which I was not very active on the board and only occaisonally visited, I wanted to start up The Dark Mod again (and continue to work on my current map). Since time has not stood still here, I wanted to update first, but when I run the updater, it tells me, that all files are up to date? Have there been bigger changes that require a fresh install, or can this have other reasons? If I need a fresh install, could you remind me, hwo to transfer settings. I know, it was not very difficult, but I would like to avoid to miss any files. Thank you very much in advance!

You could try to play around with frame commands: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Frame_commands These commands require you to alter the animation files (so you should create a copy and rename it for this project). Unfortunately, the pause command is listed as "not used yet", but maybe you can circumvent that through a trigger, which then pauses the animation via a script command. Maybe this helps you.

I bought a set of lockpicks some time ago and tried some time to learn how to use them. After some time I could open easy locks quite reliably, which saved some students of mine the money to buy new padlocks for their lockers, where they locked in the keys. But I never got the hang of opening more difficult locks. I have one five pin door lock, that I can open more or less reliably, but never magaed to open anything with six pins. I think it is fun to try, but usually lack the motivation to practice on a regular basis for more than a couple of days in a row. Like Abusimplea I can recommend the Lockpicking Lawyer. Especially his 1st of April videos are hilarious

Just look further down this subforum:

One way to introduce more variability with only medium effort would be to create skins that allow for the use of the "color" spawnarg. I have already done that for a couple of Spingheel's modules, but unfortunately lost the files in a hard disk crash some time ago. Here is the thread about this topic:

I think we should ask @taaaki what he thinks about the feature and its implementation. He should know best.

But it was transferred to the English language and is used there, like other German words, e.g. kindergarten or schadenfreude. As a German I sometimes stumble on texts or shows that use such words and usually it takes a couple of seconds for me to realise that it was actually German

In one of Sotha's Thomas Porter Missions (I think Lich Queen's Demise, but am not sure) you had to brew a potion by using items on a kettle. A similar system could be used for crafting, if it could be advanced a little further. E.g. you have a container into which you have to drop the items you want to use to craft. A script checks, if these items are suitable to create something and if they are, they are created. If not, they could removed again from the container. You could place a manual on how to use this (written by the Inventor's Guild if it is supposed to be mechanical or by a Mage if it is supposed to be magical) near it and even spread a couple of recipes around the mission. This would be kind of like the new Prey, where you can create different elemental cubes from scrap and then combine these cubes to create items. You could even consider to use the element part as well: A script checks, which materials are used on the model dropped into a container to create the respective elemental cubes (or spheres or something like that). For crafting the elemental items are used. It could also limit the use to certain moveable items: If they are too big to fit into the container, you cannot use them. This way, you would not affect any earlier missions, while the setup could be saved as a prefab for use in future missions. I think some crafting system would decrease the hesitation to use single-use equipment. I am also an RPG-player, who usually finishes the game with hundrets of potions, because I always keep them for the right occation, just to realise later on that I could have used tons of them without affecting my game later on. I found the Witcher games to have a nice workaround for that. You had a limited amount of potions that you could use at a given time, but could produce them quite easily. This way you could use them without having to fear that you would miss them in the next fight, but still had to give some thought about which ones to use. There already are some scripts that check if the player is allowed in specific areas (e.g. in Fieldmedic's "No Ordinary Guest"). These should be quite easy to modify to check for certain items in the inventory as an addition to the current location. As usual it would just require a mapper willing to implement it...

The only experience I have with a single player game using the mic was in a Zelda game for Nintendo DS (not sure if it was Spirit Tracks or Phantom Hourglass). In this case you had to blow into the mic in some instances and I was rather annoyed than finding it an enjoyable feature.

This sentence really got me: "We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

Obsttorte made a script some time ago, which emulates the older Thief version of highlighting the room the player is currently in and marking the ones already visited. I cannot really search the forums right now, as I am only on my phone, but it should not be too difficult to find. If I remenber correctly this script uses the location system to achieve the effect and has to be set up by the map author. Personally, I agree with people that a mini-map doed not fit TDM. In general, the decision should definitely lie with the map author, so a map generated from the map geometry would be too much and could give too much information. Displaying the ingame map in the corner would be fine, but is also not really necessary in my opinion.

Heilung is actually mostly German (at least the home country of the band members is), but the themes and languages they use are ancient European (and mostly northern). I like them, but it is a kind of music I cannot listen to too much. Especially the poems and spoken passages are quite strenuous at times.

I still cannot really see the need for an arrow. If the guard is so far off that you cannot throw the flash bomb in front of him to blind him, it seems to me that he would also be too far off to require blinding at all. The only advantage of an arrow I could think of would be more preicision, but I think if you practice throwing the flash bomb, you should also get the precision you would need to blind a guards.

Isn't that what gas arrows are for? Ranged knock out... They are quite rare, as range on knock out is quite powerful, but they exist.

I immediately recognised the first from Fallout 3. Great irony playing the song on a radio in a wasteland after a nuclear blast; I loved it Don't know other games using one of these, but the style would fit to Bioshock as well.

@joebarnin Depending on what exactly you try to achieve and if the teleporter is activated by a script, it may be possible for the script to check if the player is currently climbing? If so, you may be able to delay the teleport until the player has stopped climbing, which in turn would avoid the problem you are having. Not sure if or how this is actually possible, but it may be worth looking into. @MirceaKitsune The first spawnargs that would come to mind for me would be "team", "personGender", "personType" and "AIuse", since these mainly affect how AI interact with an entity. However, this only changes how AI interact with the entity, not the other way round. I would assume (at least I have seen no spawnargs that suggest otherwise) that the behaviour of your entity with other AI is hard coded in the entity class. This means you would have to take one of the AI entity classes and manually change all physical properties to match the werebeast/manbeast (e.g. model, animations, skeleton definitions, ik definition, etc.). If you want to try that, I would suggest you the open the def file of an AI entity (e.g. a guard or a civilian) and copy paste any spawnargs from the werebeast/manbeast that appear to have anything to do with animations, models, or other physical interaction. Which ones exactly you need, would be trial an error. It is a lot of work and I am not even sure if this works, but it is the only thing that I can think of.

There is an entity called target_callscriptfunction that calls a script function when targeted. The script function to be called is defined by the spawnarg "call", which has to be added. I hope this helps.

I think here we need another distinction according to intent of a speech/medium, etc. Dirty jokes and porn do not have value in terms of discussion, because their intent is to entertain. They never claim to contribute to anything like a public discourse. A call for violence (at least in the context of a public speech) does not intend to entertain, but tries to reach people and get them to act. It is similar for other media. Your example #KillAllWhiteMen can be meant as a provocative way of advertising, but looking at what is happening in South Africa right now (where they literally are killing white farmers), it could also be seen as a literal call for violence. I think this is similar for "hate speech". In a calm situation, it will not do much. Maybe be seen as provocative or as someone simply venting. But in an already tense situation, it will pour oil into the fire and may have negative effects.

Yes, I think we are in agreement here. I would still say that there is one case, in which the person giving such a speech should be liable: if malicious intent can be proven for the person that gave the speech. However, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to prove malicious intent, if the person is not stupid enough to admit to it himself. But there may be people whose egos are so inflated that they get overconfident and to do so.

This is a really good and difficult question. I consider myself to be a rather rational person and as such, I would consider even books like "Mein Kampf" as source material. I was taught in school that the book, while present in almost all households at the time, was actually read by only a very small portion of the populace. If more people had read it and understood what was proposed in the book, Hitler might have had far fewer followers than he actually had. Protocols of the Elders of Zion was unknown to me before your post. This is more difficult in that it is based on fake and fictional texts, but the intent of the book seems to be furthering the antisemitic narrative. I am not sure in how far this book calls for violence, so I cannot really tell how I would classify it. Books are generally more difficult to classify, because they have to be read and interpreted and especially the interpretation can vary from reader to reader. Ideally, during their discourse people would notice that a book calls for violence and decide against it; finding a reason why the call is in there and realising that it contradicts a respectful together and/or human rights. This is at least how I would handle books. Unfortunately, as said before the interpretation can go other ways as well and further an aggeressive reasoning. As for a test whether a speech triggers violence, I have none. The correlation would be the only suggestion I have, but this has two important faults: it can only be done in hindsight, so it is too late anyway and you cannot transfer this to other speeches and, as discussed at length here, a speech alone is never the only reason for violence. It can be a factor that added to the general atmosphere of aggression, but it will never be the sole cause. For the examples you brought up: speeches, which explicitly advocate violence, would definitely fall under this label (and if I am not mistaken are already covered by the law). Critisism is much more difficult, because in this case the question how it is delivered is very important. It makes a huge difference, if you say "Child marriage is bad and should be abolished by this group." or if you say "These people are child fucking pedofiles and don't deserve to live." In many cases you can see a difference between critisism that tries to start a dialogue and critisism that wants to antagonise the other side. The latter is of course more likely to further aggression and violence against the other side, but as I said it can only be a factor, never the sloe reason. EDIT: I just thought of another reason, why it is so difficult to correlate speeches and violence: You can never verify that the violence would have occured without the speech. You are stuck with the situation that includes the speech and cannot see the outcome of the same situation without the speech. In some cases (like the video Lowenz posted) the violent people will cite the speeches or name the author of the speech, which clearly shows a connection, but as said before the speech will always be a factor of many.

I agree with what was said later on: "The Koran causes terrorism" and "Hate speech causes violence against minorities" is not comparable. It is the agressive interpretations of the Koran (which can be interpreted as similar, if not the same as hate speech) that causes terrorism. So, I would give the books a pass, the same I would give violent games, films or other media a pass. It is not the source material, but rather people interpreting it in a way that causes violence, that is the problems. This can be the Pope that incited people to go on the Crusades for Christianity or Imams that incite Muslims to terroristic acts. In a more secular context, it is public figures that blames certain groups for everything bad that is currently happening and inciting people to attack said groups. For me these are all comparable as well as condemnable. Al Andalus mentioned by Zerg Rush is a nice example that religions can live side by side in peace, if they respect each ohter. I am not sure what the reason for the attack by Christians was, but I would suppose it was either secular lust for power or a more violent interpretation of spreading your faith (which again I would interpret as inciting by religious leaders). Having thought more about it, I would agree that hate speech alone will not be enough to cause violence. You always need people that listen to it and heed the message. This works best on a fearful, frustrated, and insecure (?) mass of people. In the 3rd Reich Germany was recently destroyed in a war and had to pay reparations to other states. People were poor and frustrated and then a person appeared that told them that it was the Jews' fault and they are bad and should be eradicated. If the people would not have been in such a bad place, it is likely that the whole thing would not have worked. Similarly, today the target audience for hate speech (that actually causes violence) are mostly the poor, the unemployed, and/or the poeple frustrated with the current government (for whatever reason). Coming back to the question if, when, and how hate speech should be prohibited, I would say it is very difficult to say. It would be better to change the circumstances that cause hate speech to lead to violence, but in many cases these are very deeply rooted and cannot be changed on a whim. So, the next best thing to prevent violence is to remove speeches that trigger violence.