lost_soul

In no particular order: Glenham Tower The Transaction St. Alban's Cathedral Knighton Manor Flakebridge Monastery

"Only voice acting that could use some improvement are some of the guard and thugs." Hey now, The thug is just perfect. Many of us love the character as he is. I've told myself that if I ever make an FM, he will be the mansion owner/target/ etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day someone makes an FM that takes place in the snow and decides to reskin the rock to look like a snowball.

Yes, AIs will acknowledge each other. The player can be set to cast a shadow with pm_showplayershadow (I think), but again we have the problem of the player model not being fully animated so it won't look natural. I don't think the guards will notice that because it is not intended to be enabled. AIs will notice blood puddles and weapons lying on the ground and go into alert mode. They can also be set to turn on/off light switches. They will (as of 1.07) work more closely with each other to stop the player. They warn each other of intruders and search together. and if you do a lot of damage to most AI, they will retreat.

I tend to agree with Springheel. I am not a developer though. The mod is pretty much where I want it to be. All we need as players is more missions to play. I've played every single one of them. The thing that TDM gives us (that no Thief game ever did) is complete flexibility. *anything* can be changed by FMAs. Since the Thief source was never and probably will never be released, only so many aspects of the game can be changed. You can't have real-time lighting. If you go the TDS route, you can't have swim-able water. We can't play TDS correctly on any platform except Windows.

Watching that part again, that was pretty funny. "so be prepared for anything... Yieeeeeoh"

I agree. The sound of pulling back the string is great, but the sound of firing the arrow could be a little more powerful sounding instead of just a little wisp of air. Thief 1/2 nailed this perfectly. I also miss the sounds of arrows traveling through the air when guards are launching them at me, the way you heard them flying through the air in the old games.

hahahaha Nice one! that's what happens when you type a response in the middle of the night...

Sure, 44.1 KHz, mono recording. mp3 is good for just a demo, but all real game audio is encoded in ogg. Of course it is best not to convert from mp3 to ogg because of additional quality loss. So if you're ready to record the real lines, use flac or ogg with a quality of 6.

Some interesting ideas in there, but yeah, you haven't experienced some of the current features yet. Guards do have ranged attacks. For one, there are archers, and standard swordsmen can throw rocks at the player if he is out of reach. Gas arrows, fire arrows, and mines are all there. My personal fav are the gas arrows. There's nothing like gassing a crowd of guards all at once. Third-person and lint loot have been discussed in the past, and I got the general impression that the team didn't care for these features. A lot of the classic Thief players don't. I don't want this to turn into a debate, I'll just say that the Doom 3 engine already supports third-person views with a rotate-able camera, and someone could probably do some fancy scripting to get a reasonable third-person mode working. The main problem there is a lack of upper animations for the player character. As far as loot goes, I agree it would be cool to get to use your loot collected from one mission on another, but this would probably upset some mappers if they wanted you to have a set amount of tools to complete the mission. Still it would be cool to have a lasting accomplishment for completing missions. As for the footsteps, its a video game thing. All opponents in stealth games have the magical ability to discern the player from fellow guards via sound queues. I don't know of any reasonable way to fix this without breaking a game (making it too easy).

A question. If you nail a guard on a ledge with a rope arrow, will the rope come down? That would be funny to see.

Yeah, I hear that. Those of us who are into action/twitch first-person games have come to hate anything below 40 or 50 FPS. My cheap $55 GT440 runs TDM very well though. It is a low end, though new card. Also, maybe you have a friend with a dead Geforce 9xxx series card laying around. Such a card could possibly be fixed with a heat gun and some thermal paste, the way I did. Just thought I would give a few suggestions for a cheap solution.

Contains spoilers... Here's a nice video playthrough with commentary. Unfortunately I cannot understand most of it.

What is your CPU and how much RAM do you have? I used to play on a 7600GS, and my biggest bottlenecks were a crappy CPU and 1.75 GB of memory. If I ran "killall monsters", I got great FPS. Lots of AIs in an area will slow down a system with a poor processor. Give it a try. Since you have Doom 3, you have nothing to lose but a few disk swaps and a few hours to acquire TDM. You can also use "tdm_lg_interleave 3" to get a 5-or-so FPS boost on lower end systems. It decreases the amount of times your visibility is calculated per rendered frame. When I overclocked that old 7600GS, it didn't do squat for my frames-per-second, but when I OC'd the CPU to 2.4 GHz from 2.2, it made a pretty significant speed improvement, noticeable immediately.

For screenshots of a dark game, it is tough to make them look good. Most of the time, they are shown on a web page with a light background, making them either extremely dark or washed out with color-banding if gamma is increased. JPEG artifacts can also make things look bad. The game itself looks great. Most of the textures are of good quality, bar a low-res one here or there. It is definitely miles ahead of TDS in the texture area. There must be at least 100 hours of game-play to be had by now. This is assuming you spend two hours on every mission experiencing it to the fullest. Obviously you might spend more than 2 hours on one mission and less than this on another. It is just a rough estimate.

What kinds of vocals do you need? Stupid guard? Smart guard? General townsfolk?

I'm excited about this contest. It will be cool to see what some more new mappers have to offer. A piece of advice for the new mappers. Watch out for "NoShadow". I've seen this option used on a lot of lights in new maps where it plainly sticks out, like a candle on a table that doesn't cast shadows. It is a simple mistake that detracts from immersion.

I just want to see more FM playthroughs on Youtube with the player talking during the game. It is entertaining to watch these videos while I do mundane tasks such as floss my teeth.

I've already got one cheap 32 GB ssd and I'm pretty impressed with it. 32 GB is plenty for Linux (my install only uses about 7 GB). The one thing that made me wonder about the Plextor one I posted above is that there are no reviews. Not even googling the model came up with any.

How does this one look? It is 128 GB and still a max speed over 500 MBps. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249014

Now that I don't need to buy a new video card, I'm considering getting http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147133 Is this a good deal? I now have a SATA-III board (Gigabyte 970a-ud3). The read speeds on this SSD are twice the SSD I currently have. The manufacturer gets bonus points for advertising Linux compatibility right on the overview page. It also comes with a mounting bracket, which is another plus for this unit. thoughts?

As a player, I think its a great idea. Don't be afraid that we'll vote/compare these against missions from experienced mappers.