Spooks

@Epifire I vote for splitting it as headlight+electric box and support for purposes of rotating as well. Also I'd say the spikes don't seem large enough! For a light that big I, as a player, would expect to see a proportionately sized antennae to suck the juicy electricity in (regardless of whether or not that's how it works). Not comically oversized, maybe about 50% bigger. It would also be nice to have a stubbier, inverted support, so we can stick this to ceilings. Here is a very bad sketch. @bikerdude, Those stair and pipe assets in the second shot look fiiiine. Props on the texture work.

The way this effect works is there is an emitter that shoots down particles really fast to simulate a godray. Unfortunately it does produce shimmering as you said, but it's the only way to fake volumetric light currently. The mapper can make the particles shoot out faster to hide the shimmering but that usually tanks the FPS.

Tried it tonight and it's pretty interesting to hear the difference. The default audio's so-so but I noticed where it really dropped the ball was representing sounds that are above or below you. OAL definitely made a difference there, I now agree it'd be a nifty addition to have in the core mod.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can make an AI stand next to a lever when operating it? The lever's below a flight of stairs and every time the AI on the second floor is supposed to flip it, he just goes above the lever and frobs it straight through the stairwell! Path_corner/interacts don't work for my purposes (it's a lightswitch that shouldBeOn) and I've tried door_handling_position to no avail.

Yeah, Alchemy Universal is a muddy mess, if only for being proprietary bs. The modifications that make it work on all soundcards are either obsolete or trojan horses. We just have to wait until the EFX solution gets implemented in TDM for real reverb action. On the 5.1 thing, this video by the Verge is all about binaural audio (which HRTF is all about) and even mentions what's the difference between 5.1 and binaural at the 4:20 mark. I think I already had OpenAL enabled for TDM just because, but hadn't heard of these HRTF datasets. Will definitely get around to trying this. edit: %appdata% IS appdata/roaming in Windows 7.

Well godspeed to you, Nico A! Couple of dark, spooky places that won't be that dark in-game but you could make them so if you're patient enough and blow out all the candles:

I was in the same situation, and I did get the GOTY for Christmas. It really is a better deal to get the GOTY as it seems the story DLCs will never go below 50% off. If you remember the Missions page on the main menu, there's a new tab in the GOTY edition that allows you to play the DLCs without replaying anything. I'm pretty sure The Knife of Dunwall takes data from your end savefile though, to determine Corvo's actions. I've not had a chance to play the story DLCs but I've been doing the City Trials and they're pretty nice to look at and play. I have also had this bookmarked for a year or so and I'll finally be able to try it since it only works with the GOTY: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=141188

Sure enough Biker, I've been wrasslin' with visportals disappearing and having to cut them every other way until they work and could use some pointers on that.

Yeah I never quite got this when setting up my directory settings. My game is TDM2.0 and my engine path is D:/Games/The Dark Mod/. Works fine but all my fm subfolders (maps, env, etc) are in the dark mod folder where the .exe is. Should be fine when it's time to pack my fm into a .pk4 (i'll just pick and choose the folders/files) but I already know it's gonna get messy if I work on more than one thing. Do I use the "mod" or the "modbase" box to setup a dedicated project folder?

I'm more or less done with visportaling. I'll probably come up with something smarter than building the map in one huge caulk box and compartmentalizing afterwards next map. A view from outside map bounds shows how much FPS the map had w/o visportals. I was supposed to do some more stuff with tilesets but I'm glad I got to get done with this horrid mess.

As someone who's friends with some of the developers, why yes, you should totally buy Black Mesa if you haven't already!

You can also try and export the railing to an ase with the script, I don't know if it'd help but it may be worth a try to see if it's dmap doing it, if it looks fine in DR.

@Bikerdude, it's the left side of the gable where the dormers are (top-left) in that first screenshot. Sorry, I did think of red circling it but I was in a hurry and I wanted to make sure to take a wide enough shot so the place in the map is recognizable. As an aside you can mantle onto the thatched roof leading to that gable and you'll go out of visportal bounds and the game will do its usual "freeze for a minute while all the visportals open". @nbohr, indeed, it works okay when you lower it in game, it's when you set it at the menu and then attempt to start the mission is when it crashes.

Deleting and redownloading the files through tdm_update does fix it but hell if I know which one actually made the map crash. I spent 2 hours of trial and error testing - it seemed the .cfg was doing it but after replacing every option line by line until the old and new .cfg were identical it still ran fine. Beats me. If anyone is having problems though, yeah, backup then delete the .cfg and start your .exe so it generates a new one. If you have any custom keybinds just copy them over from your backup and it should be fine. Now that I could look around, I'd say the performance is pretty good! I was getting 30 FPS average on most large areas, which is very playable compared to the 10 FPS I've sometimes gotten on some other FMs. Here's a couple visportal hitches I noticed: edit: I've done more trial and error testing and I think I know what's causing the crash now. Setting your LOD settings below Normal will crash the map. I had mine set to Low and so had Thor judging by his .cfg. It will crash on Low or Lowest for me, if anyone can check if they can reproduce this behavior I'd be thankful.

As I'm feeling pretty uninspired with where I am in my current map I've been tinkering about with them modular facades to make me feel more productive. I'm doing a grid of 64. What you're not seeing is the half a day of figuring out how to align the pieces to the grid so there's room for sealing geometry and making sure the tileset can loop on itself. Gotta say it's made me think a lot more about the grid and being mindful of powers of two, so it's actually great to split from mapping for a bit. I've been poring over the walls in the Boyle Estate in Dishonored to see how Arkane did it and it's opened my eyes to the repetition and little tricks they do to hide their modular panels. I've already got edits for the corners of these planned but that's for tomorrow. I may do a post on the MBT thread at some point later summing up some of my experiences with the method after I get some more mileage out of it.

I have to corroborate with Thor here, the mission makes TDM CTD about 1/8th of the way through Generating World every time. I have the 4gb-patched version of the .exe, tried with the original one but it's still the same. I also tried starting both on Normal and Expert difficulty with no difference. I should've probably asked to beta-test when I had the chance Here's the Windows error report: e: and my .cfg too, just in case:

bikes in TDM when

Two of my favorite missions in Thief were Assassins and Song of the Caverns. They're missions where you start with a simple objective but end up somewhere completely different. The first time I played SotC I went "Whoa, I'm actually going in the opera house? In this mission right now? Cool." The sudden change startles you out of your expectations and shows the circumstances of the situation you are in are not entirely within your control. It's something you must adapt to on the go, rather than having the mission be all spelled out for you in the briefing, like a puzzle waiting for you to solve it. With Thief-style games there's always this constant stream of micro-scale unknowns the player has to deal with - a guard or a light where the player wasn't expecting, what's really in the next room that's not marked on their map. Pretty much as soon as the problems are introduced, the player can formulate some way to solve them. Doink the guard, douse the light, check for hazards/loot/your objective in the new room. Put something like that on the macro-scale though and it makes the player look at the mission with a new set of eyes. The place they were meant to rob turns out to have completely burnt down last night, do they just go house to house now? The item that they had to get has changed location, how are they going to go about finding where it is? Grave robbing goes wrong when the tomb entrance caves in and they have to find a way out through the catacombs. You can sorta see this to an extent in most of Thief's missions: e.g. both Return to the Cathedral and Strange Bedfellows contain previously established locations that turn out to house way more than you were led to believe. Even a tiny subversion of expectations like that can go a long way for me. That's not to say every mission should be like this, missions that play it straight like Framed or Shipping And Receiving in T2 are great examples of how a steady and methodical untangling of a level's knots can still keep you on your toes. On a more banal note, I do love me city missions and the best thing for me is being able to just look at a house, say "I wonder what's in there?", then be able to actually break in and see for myself. Especially if the door is locked but you can find some very obscure way of breaking in that makes you feel smart. Oh it's hell to make every house on a street explorable, both for mapping and for gameplay focus purposes, but even a bit of it gets a big plus from me when it comes to any sort of city FM.

When I select multiple func_statics made out of brushes and rotate/mirror their origin point remains unchanged/they don't rotate around it if the func_* entities around origin is enabled. Was this always the case or is my DR borked somehow? I swear I remember it didn't work like this.

I've been cranking out facades for the edges of my first map the last couple of days. Kinda the only screenshot I can show since everything else is all over the place, but at least it's a show of some progress. So far it's been a slow, learning experience and I could probably start another map and do it way faster but I'm committed to shipping this first. I need to visportal badly as well, my sight lines are pretty crazy.

Rutter's Delineations of Foothill and its Abbey, 1823. Haven't read it, just looked at the pictures, but these high-res engravings are pretty amazing. If you wanna have a crack at making this go ahead, the damn book has floor plans and cross sections of the place and everything.

Is there a reason why zoned ambient sounds sound awful compared to normal ones in-game? Put the same ambient .oggs, one normal and one zoned (e.g. forest_children and forest_children_z), on two different speakers/zones and you'll hear the difference. Mono and crushed down to like 22KHz. The only difference in the sndshd files is the leadin, global, omni and loop keywords. Could it be silence.ogg is a mono sound? I dunno, it's bugging me.

I'm in the same boat as STiFU, while W2 is recommended just on the grounds that it's the Witcher, it's def. the weakest one in the series. It sort of requires you got replay the game at least once to get the full picture. Because the game is wider rather than longer, then, it felt a bit less exciting than W1 for me. A lot of the crafting is also useless since you can just find better stuff on your travels. I've read through The Last Wish and I have some of the other books laying around, but I'll go out on a limb and recommend the prose too. Very pleasant.