tapewolf
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Days Won
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Posts posted by tapewolf
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Okay, that was absolutely amazing.
I found it got off to a bit of a slow start, I got lost a lot in the early sections and had no idea where to go at first because the streets were all blocked off from one another. A lot of FMs (and of course, Thief itself) will colour in the section of the map you're currently in - something like that would probably have made my life easier since I'd at least have a better idea of where I was.
However, once I actually found where I was going, it got a lot more fluid and really engrossing. That new special effect was put to an excellent use. The writing was good too, just enough readables to paint a clear picture of what had gone wrong.
This map also has the dubious honour of being the first one I've played that caused the Threadripper/Vega56 setup to jitter. Some of Jack Farmer's missions have caused the fan to go into overdrive, but this one actually made it stutter in a way I haven't seen for many years. I'm not sure how much of that is the map and how much is down to 2.10 being beta (since it may have been built with optimisations off for debugging etc).
One question:
SpoilerDid we find out what happened to the mage from the tower whose glasses I nicked? Since they were still there I presume he was in bed or something, but I was half expecting to run into him or his remains in the Mage complex.
Anyway, congratulations on making an awesome mission, I really enjoyed that.
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Okay, that was awesome. I loved the weird obsession with food - was that part of the original plan, or an addition of your own?
The conversations were particularly good as well, and I particularly like it when a mission has a closing scene.
The only thing I struggled with a bit was the volume level of some of the voices. That's something I see a lot so it might be the way I have my sound system setup. I had to restart the mission and crank up the volume to hear what the guys were saying in the opening scene.
All in all, it was fantastic and you've done a brilliant job bringing this to completion.
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That was a lot of fun! The plot twists worked very well.
Calling the place 'Gatwick' felt a little jarring because I couldn't stop thinking about the airport, but hey, presumably there was a Gatwick long before that thing was built.
Having the fish moveable but not actually able to be picked up was something I haven't seen done before. Granted it made for some fun times where I was smacking them across the room with the sword to see how far they would go, but did mean that I couldn't do my usual trick of leaving them in plundered safes or the Queen's bed.
Something that I'm not entirely sure was correct was
SpoilerThe key assignments. The Zelmer and Braxton keys seemed to be fairly interchangeable which I suppose might make sense if Braxton was Lord Z's aide and was trusted to that degree, but it felt like a bug (not least because the last mission I played shipped with a skeleton key by mistake)
If you do an update, it might be worth considering
SpoilerAn optional objective of dropping Lord Z's Evil Plan diary and the Archbishop's letter onto the Queen's bed so that she has the evidence needed to depose him
Out of interest
SpoilerDo we find out who has 'done' Lord Z and I missed the vital clue
...or is that for the followup mission?
All in all, great stuff and I hope there is an episode 2 in due course!
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I have noticed it is usually possible to bend the "no kill" rules by getting the guards to massacre each other. "Sons of Baltona" for instance has a wonderful arrangement of boxes where you can hide but the guards can still see you and start throwing knives or rocks or whatever it is. By this means you can get them to denounce each other as thieves and in the end you will be left with one guard and a heap of bodies, all without violating the mission parameters. In some cases they will accuse the captain/lord/archbishop or other NPC of supreme importance of being a thief and cut them to ribbons as well.
This seems to be the case for most missions with a no-kill rule, though there are one or two where this is so rigidly enforced that infighting is blamed on you as well. This can be annoying since it may happen by accident and I have to separate the two of them (e.g. with a box or gas-arrow) to prevent their murdering each other and failing the mission.
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11 minutes ago, Bienie said:
I think you are getting two desks mixed up. The desk in the manor doesn't have any secret documents. They are all in the small room you can access by scaling the wall on the south end of the Cobb St. tunnel. These are the same type of desk so I guess that can be confusing. You wouldn't be caught by any AI where the challenge documents are though, as it's a singe room way up off the ground.
Glad to hear you were playing through the other CoS missions recently. Does this one measure up to the previous ones?
Ah, thanks! Yes, I spent enough time trying to figure that out that I clearly got extremely confused.
Anyway, this has been very enjoyable and is a great addition to the series. That wardrobe was a particularly awesome touch.
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Okay, I've completed the main and bonus objectives, but I'm stuck with
SpoilerFinding the secret missions. By coincidence I did a playthrough of all the other CoS missions the other week, so I know to expect a bunch of documents to enable each one.
At one point while tearing around the level in desperation, I found that the study in the Manor had the top two drawers openable and the bottom drawer contained the secret mission documents. Then the guy saw me and that was that. When I went back to the Manor, the top two drawers were unfrobbable again and the bottom drawer has nothing usable inside it.
What am I missing to get at those documents? (This is the fixed version without the Master Key, by the way)
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12 hours ago, MrMunkeepants said:
There is a note stating that he often complains about it being on the top row.
SpoilerIt took me a while to realise that you need to combine an address and passcode into a larger number, but after a bit of experimenting I was able to work out which pair of numbers was which.
Since the box is claimed to be at the top it was a matter of brute-forcing 50-59 and then 90-99 with the passcode as the last two digits until I found something.
When I realised the number was symmetrical I kicked myself for not trying that first.
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I enjoyed that, burgling a casino made a fun change, though I do wonder if it could have done with a larger gambling hall because in the end there were only about 3 clients. I particularly liked the concept of the girl creeping around and leaving secret messages in dark places.
I think the hardest part was
Spoilerfinding the deposit box since I couldn't find anything that looked like deposit boxes, but I figured it out in the end.
If you do a video cutscene like this in future it might be worth getting an external HDMI recorder - the sort you'd use for games consoles - so the PC only has to worry about the game and not the video capture as well.
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36 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:
then:
Thanks, finally got it. Yeah, I spent a long long time last night and today looking for something like that, hidden or invisible. If you do a map revision it might be worth making it just a little more obvious somehow because it's very well hidden. I was even starting to wonder if the map was corrupted and it had gone missing.
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44 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:
I'll correct the Korg mistake!
As for the last scroll:
Yeah, I did notice that
Spoilerone of them had a key, and its resemblance to the freezer was noted. However I've not been able to find a suitable lock for it.
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Okay, that was a lot of fun. Love the System Shock 2 vibe the first couple of floors give you, the ambient music worked very well. (By the way, that's Korg M1, Roland made the D50).
I've completed the mission. I'm still missing two secret areas somewhere, but what's really bugging me is how to get
Spoilerthe final scroll out of the freezer. I've not found a switch, can't smash or blast it open, and even out-of-the-box ideas like cutting the power or CO2 line further in the facility have failed to turn up anything.
...so reluctantly I'll have to ask for a hint there.
P.S. Nice record collection in the recreation area, and I particularly loved the power generator.
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This was really well put together and I'm eagerly awaiting the followup. The storytelling was brilliant and the difficulty was about right... I managed to find 4 of the 5 secrets off my own bat.
My one criticism is that the voice acting in the intro, although well-recorded, sounded a little wooden, people reading a script rather than living the parts. I appreciate that's not going to be easy or quick to change but it might be something to watch out for in the future.
Having an outtro video was excellent, though. I wish more people would do that! It's annoying to have this great story build-up and then... just a score with the intrigue left hanging rather than an aftermath or epilogue of any kind. So very well done for that.
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11 hours ago, ddaazzaa said:
I never accounted for blocking the door. It's not an issue on a first playthrough though. If I release an update I'll look at doing something with that. I might also look at tweaking starting inventory.
For what it's worth you're in good company - you could do a similar trick in Thief in the Haunted Cathedral (though I heard they patched it in Thief Gold).
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Out of sheer perversity, I...
Spoiler...jammed the door to the vault with a crate and was thereby able to get back to the boat with the artifact, which the mission did not take into account.
Apart from that it was great. The only other thing which left me feeling slightly disappointed was that...
Spoiler...given the masses of health potions and how tooled up you are by the end of the mission, I was expecting some kind of grand confrontation with the demonic guy who kept hassling me. As such I felt somehow let down when I managed to escape and finish the mission with no obvious harm.
The over-abundance of weaponry also led me to wonder if I was supposed to blow up the artifact to end its evil, but I wasn't obviously able to do that either.
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57 minutes ago, Acolytesix said:
Is anyone else getting "Shader not found" at the end after getting out of the house. The courtyard now has a bridge across and out of the walled in area. The sky is pulsating too. Also with "Shader Not Found". Lets me go to the other side of the gates with the dead horses. Lots of pretty colors and cubes
definetly a bug! Can't end the mission....
SpoilerDid you, personally, read the scroll? I don't mean "quickly click through it to complete the mission objective", did you actually absorb and understand its contents?
I believe going through the far gate will complete the mission.
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41 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:
Fun fact: In the first phases of making this mission, I had the sitting AI and the chairs too close to the table. Because of this, whenever they became alert and got up, they got on the table and plates / cutlery started flying everywhere. I spent minutes dying of laughter as forks and knives flied everywhere at neck-breaking speeds as the AI bumped into them
Funny you should say that. Since it wasn't encouraged to blackjack the guests, I was blackjacking their dinnerware instead, with similar results.
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I enjoyed that, though I spent far too long trying to annoy the guests, or tricking the guards into killing them. One of them does have a tendency to climb up the pillars by the stairwell, that just seems to be a thing he does, regardless of where you are in the quest.
Climbing on one of the statues in the hall in hopes of finding a quest item behind it got me stuck and needed a reload (or noclip) to escape from, but apart from the occasional slowdown I didn't see many problems.
I did like the storyline and the ending, I presume that also explains the business with the telescope.
Do we ever find out what happened to
Spoilerthe missing guard?
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35 minutes ago, joebarnin said:
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FYI I managed to bring Lord Clifton...
Spoiler...back to the future.
Not sure this was intended because the history of the painting just says he was knocked out and died 10 years later.
Granted, he's now stranded in a future where his house is a ruin and he and his wife are dead, but on the plus side, he gets to know that his machine worked. When he wakes up, anyway...
(I'm hoping this doesn't get fixed because the mission was a bit of a downer where he's concerned)
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3 hours ago, JackFarmer said:
Together with @Jedi_Wannabe you have been the only one till now to mention that!
...you also have an M1 at home?
for the Books of the True Believers:
Their only purpose is to prove that the Builder's religion is quit lunatic!
When I gave the texts for these books to @Amadeus for editing I really had concerns that he might think that I have crossed the border to absolute insanity and he would fear for my mental well-being. Later on I found out that he actually loved that weird stuff.
Yes, the M1R. They got cheap on ebay a couple of years ago so I grabbed one. It's been a fun addition to the studio. I had been meaning to ask if you used the real thing or the VST in these, but it didn't seem worth digging up the Hidden Hands 1 thread to ask something that's irrelevant to most people's enjoyment of the mission anyway...
Those keys should become apparent in time. As for the cube:
SpoilerThere are four double-doors in the main hall with the huge statue. The prison and the library are two of these, but there are two others.
EDIT: It can be confusing because apart from the library, they all look the same, like they're leading down into the prison. I kept getting them confused myself.
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Just completed this, it was amazing. I particularly love the soundtrack work in this series, and am still impressed you managed to find suitable uses for the M1 Pole preset.
I've also enjoyed the slipping in of contemporary lyrics and musicians.
SpoilerThe bomb thing was probably the most puzzling, particularly since there is a piece of electrical equipment apparently going haywire next to the airlock. When I went round auditing the fans I thought I just being something crazy, especially as I didn't figure out how to open the fan and actually found the bomb by accident, albeit in the place I suspected it was.
I also utterly failed to get into the lock area, I really couldn't find the key. I managed to enter the lake by opening the gate in the radio room, jumping off the roof of the building and into the water, and then quickly racing through the gate before it could self-close.
A possible bug is that one of the undead in the crypt was apparently flagged as a regular NPC. When I took him out with a fire arrow, the game ended because I had committed murder. I think he was also immune to holy water, but I didn't last long enough to find out for certain.
SpoilerWas there a use for the four 'True Believer' books, or was it just interesting backstory? It certainly set the tone well for the note from Brother Leonard.
EDIT: Oh, yeah also
SpoilerThe fire elementals are quite prone to friendly fire, especially if I went down to watch the battle taking place. I had to reload on one occasion because they all soared up to the ceiling to duke it out and left the remaining zombie standing there like a lemon.
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second "lockpick":
Ohhh, right. I thought that was an overflow pipe. Thanks! Hopefully that should see me through to the end.
EDIT: ...and finished. It would have been kind of nice to have some kind of follow-up, e.g. an ending video, at least some kind of closure for the story. Not many mods do that, but it's a nice touch for the story-heavy ones.
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OK, I was hoping not to have to ask this, but I have hit a wall.
I am stuck
exhuming the bodies
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My character makes a 'hmmm' sound which implies that he's missing some kind of tool to perform this operation, but I can't think what.
I figure he's trying to remove the head. My shortsword won't work for that, nor would the crowbar (messy) so I went back into the keep proper, and tried getting a variety of items which could conceivably be used for this task, including the axes and swords from the guardroom, a carving knife and meat cleaver from the kitchens, a saw and shovel from the workshop, but he won't pick any of these up. In desperation, I even went back outside to the guillotine in case he wanted to detach the blade from that. Incidentally, I was amused by his reaction when I attempted to use the cellar key on the body.
Reading other parts of this thread, I notice that there is supposedly a second tool for opening locks, which would explain many of the chests I can't get into. However I can't find suitable tooling for that either.
It may be that the missing tool is suitable for both tasks, but either way I'm out of ideas. This aside, it's been a lot of fun. The mechanic of having to carry the lantern around and put it down when you need to do something else is a little frustrating, but it is more realistic and, AFAIK unique (for DarkMod missions). It adds an interesting twist. I think 'Alone In The Dark' did this too.
Looking for a mission
in Fan Missions
Posted
Keep in mind it's part of a series - it would be really nice if they were compiled together into a campaign at some point so there's less messing around playing them in order.