lost_soul

Hey! I like this! The setting is very different from any other FM so far Performance is very good, but I think I might have hit a bug. Thanks for the mission!

@Mortem: Wow, that sounds very T1-inspired. I miss those narrated mission overviews! It really adds to a mission. Hopefully we will see that FM one day.

I purchased a copy of SS2 some time ago and I wanted to play it on my netbook... but I can't unless I lug around a CD drive! This game cost me FOURTY BUCKS used and is over a decade old, and still I have to put up with this BS. It is an example of why I buy everything either used these days, or from the bargain bin. These software publishers don't care about me and I don't care about them. Either they can provide a fun and always-usable product at a reasonable price (Gog/Frictional/id) or they don't deserve to be paid.

I played some Quake 2 DM Online the other day. It was pretty fun. Sadly, most of the games coming out these days won't be playable Online in a decade.

In short, your concirns are valid. However... Technology is changing. The capacity of hard drives has exploded over the past decade, while optical media has made pathetic advancements in terms of capacity. I recently reinstalled the majority of my PC games. It took the better part of a day, shoving disk after disk into the CD drive to get them set up. Some installers would only copy the files at around 2X speed, even though my drive is obviously much faster than that. This annoyed the living hell out of me, as did having to insert disk two and then put disk one in again at the *END* of the installation process! Who coded this thing, a monkey? Surely they can get all information required from Disk 1 before asking for disk 2! Anyway... even though I hate digital restrictions malware, I would prefer to go digital. I like services like Gog and I like my massive and cheap hard drives. They make setting things back up easier and faster. If I need to reinstall my game, I can either dig out and connect the external hard drive, or just download it again from Gog. I find it funny though that people trust a company to keep authentication servers up for a game a decade later. The majority of these companies can't even bother to patch their older games to fix bugs like multi-core and graphics issues, and yet I'm supposed to believe the servers won't just disappear eventually?

I don't mind respawning enemies as long as they're not infinite. When I clear out a particular area of a level and come back later to find bad guys, that is a good thing because it keeps me on my toes and surprises me. However, when I have to keep taking out endless amounts of enemies while trying to find some piece of a puzzle it gets very annoying. Also, I pretty much fell in love with TNM when... For every action in a game, there should be a reaction. If I disobey orders or steal from allies, I shouldn't get a "mission failure" screen, but suffer some negative consequences in the future. NPCs should remember how I treat them, using different bits of dialogue based on prior encounters. TNM got this all right! Another game I had started getting into was Strife for the PC. I purchased a copy, played it a bit, but lost the freaking disk. It is similar to Doom, but with RPG elements.

Also, The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex was absolutely fantastic. I must have played it through 6 or 7 times. Some folks complained about the maps being too large, which I guess is sort-of a valid point, but that is better than the alternative. I would rather have a slightly stretched out world to explore than a world where all locations are a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from each other like DXIW. The TNM soundtrack is worth the download alone...

Well for starters, the player model is only half-animated. This can be seen in a few FMs with mirrors. I don't know about the underpinnings of the game though and whether network play would work. Another conceivable problem would be the ragdoll physics. Let's say player 2 knocks out a guard. His system has to transmit the exact position of the limbs of the body to the other players and update accordingly. I think a lot of games that have ragdolls only render them on the client, like ut2004. It isn't like Quake 2, where there were strict character death animations. Player 2 could be dragging a guard through a hallway and have it get stuck on a door... etc Coop play would really be awesome though. I think somebody was working on Coop at one point... Nobody here is going to make Thief levels for The Dark Mod. I thought there was a fan-patch for T2 that has multiplayer though...

Thanks for gram good grammar. I'm looking forward to this mission! Do you authors ever put hidden notes in your FMs? Something like if player takes the second bottle from the left into the bathroom and sets it on the counter, a message appears on the mirror? I think if I were an author, I would do something like that.

For me, the one big "no no" in games is respawning enemies. My usual tactic when playing a game is to take care of all of the enemies and then concentrate on whatever objectives I may have. That was what ruined NOLF2 for me. The first NOLF was a fantastic game, but the second one had repetitive environments with unlimited enemies... bleh! Even Halo did not stoop to that level. Recently I've started playing TFC (Team Fortress Classic) again. I still love this game, because it can always deliver a different experience based on the class you play as. One day I was a spy, infiltrating the enemy base and discretely sabotaging their base/eliminating opposing players. The other, I was a pyro running around with a flame thrower, freezing people in place and roasting them whilst circle-strafing like a madman! Another day, I was an engineer building turrets on top of the enemy base to keep them trapped inside (I'm evil) while my teammates kept scoring.

Just yesterday we put together a quad-core AMD system for somebody. We didn't have the intended hard drive (500 GB) at the moment to complete the build, so we put in an old 80 GB drive with 600+ bad sectors just to TEST the system. I then booted an Ubuntu 10.4 CD and everything just worked. 3D acceleration was there, networking was there, sound was there, and the resolution was set to the appropriate 1440x900. I'm not one of those who go around trying to convert everyone to Linux, but I do have to admit: that was pretty freaking amazing. I was playing a Tetris clone and browsing the web while the system installed onto this dying hard drive. Part of the reason for installing that bad hard drive was that I wanted to use Ubuntu's disk utility to see what exactly was wrong with it. The only thing the BIOS would say was that the disk was failing. Then I ran the self-test and found the massive amount of bad sectors.

I just played through Circle of Strain for T1 this morning. I don't see TDM vs Thief as some sort of "Them vs Us" mentality. It is more of a "The mainstream industry won't provide us with a *modern* platform for stealth FMs, so some folks made one themselves."

Okay, I fixed it. I just re-built the system in an old Sony Vaio case. The case wasn't originally compatible, but I "made" it compatible by cutting the power switches out of the two cases and swapping them. The Sony's cord was too short and it had lots of extra pins for front lighting which nobody really needs anyway.

I also would recommend leaving the mission as it is. The town layout is great, with lots of places to go/things to discover.

One thing that would be cool is a performance optimization. It seems like TDM missions have gotten better performance over the past year, from Return to the City and St. Alban's Cathedral.

I still love my Asus G50V. It has a Geforce 9800GS with 64 cores and it ran TDM great. It was my "desktop" for two years because my real desktop was a piece of crap. I chose a laptop at that time rather than a desktop because I wanted a laptop that could actually run Linux (my prior laptop was ATI and the graphics drivers are still beyond worthless for that). This G50v would get the job done. They're going for $600 used, and this one has a faster CPU than mine did. If (like me) your only goal is to play TDM well, you could buy this used laptop and save the rest to get yourself a new desktop in a wile.

I agree with the folks who say there was something magical about T1. Part of it was the ambient sounds, part of it was the vocals, and part of it was probably just because I played that game first. I've played a lot of T1 FMs and T2 FMs. While there are lots of great T2 FMs like Wicked Relics, Saturio Returns Home and Heist Society, there have been a lot of FMs that were just too linear. Some felt like cookie-cutter levels out of a console game like Halo where we're just going from point A to point B. This isn't meant to insult anyone because I'm not mentioning any of the names of these FMs, but I didn't see as many linear missions like this for T1. I really believe that for an effective stealth mission, there must be at least some form of player choice of where to go/how to proceed with the objectives. It can't just be "go through that sewer over there, climb up in this one room reserved for you, work your way through the house to the front by going from room to room, and then come back out the same way you came. It leaves no room for experimentation. What if I want to enter from the roof? What if I want to try my luck with the (usually heavily guarded) front door?

So, I got another power supply for $35 and it seems defective. The machine does not start no matter what with the new power supply. However, if I connect the bigger power supply that won't fit in the case, the machine works just fine. Now the plan is to transfer all the components out of this old case into another spare one and use the power supply that was originally too big. Hopefully that will work. After that, I would love to take a bat or hammer to this old m-ATX case!

I used to use a program called Taksi Desktop Recorder (http://taksi.sourceforge.net/) I only used it for screenshots, but apparently it can do video too.

No offense, but this is the twenty-first century. Not everyone wants to Run Windows anymore. I don't know about Unity, but UDK is not cross-platform (besides consoles). I still believe that the TDM team made the right choice, because the mod can run on any PC regardless of the OS. It will probably eventually run on the Mac too.

Thanks! I've been playing the mission, though I haven't completed it yet. I must say though, your missions contain some of the most convincing skyboxes/backdrops I've seen. It seems as though the world actually continues on beyond the places the player is allowed to go.

Whenever I check out a game, I always look for gameplay videos and not just fancy trailers too. I think more FM play-throughs would help the mod. Another problem is that even if you look for the dark mod on youtube, you'll only see a few videos, because lots of them are called TDM and won't return with "the dark mod".

One question I've been pondering over is whether the TDM developers will focus their attention on mapping soon. The mod is starting to feel pretty darn polished and stable now. I would happily pay $20 for a map pack for TDM (if such a thing were allowed).

@topic creator: Have you played ? It was built on the Zdoom engine, but is more of a melee combat game than a shooter. In this game, ammo isn't handed out like candy. The game took me back to 1992, playing Streets of Rage at a friend's house on her Genesis. I started cracking up when I saw the fire extinguisher! Also, the music is fantastic. It isn't midi. It isn't orchestrated, but it also isn't excessively loud/annoying rock either. The tunes are just right, with very catchy melodies. The game has multiple endings and multiple paths, but it is quite short.

was an interesting game. I played this back when it came out, but never managed to complete the demo. The environments were cool: much bigger than Doom and semi-realistic. I also dug the music.