lost_soul

My thoughts: There's no point (or reason) to be upset about this. Thief 4 will provide a single-player story and coherent experience. TDM provides an on-going experience through fan missions. They are different in this way. I am actually kind of glad that EM probably isn't going all out to make the game user-modifiable. TDM has a head-start and will likely have more FMs. This is good because I use Linux and I'm sure Thief 4 will never run here. I'll still check out Thief 4 if it scores favorably, but I won't run out and buy it like I did with Thief 3 and DXIW. That was a mistake. I suppose if TDM wasn't around and maturing I would be upset. After seeing so many PC game devs sell out to consoles though, I can't pretend to be surprised.

I'm running Linux and willing to beta-test as well. I've got plenty of free time.

Finally got around to finishing this mission. It was fun, and reminded me a bit of The Lost City from Thief 1. Thanks!

I played the Penumbra games, completing the first two and enjoying them a lot. Although the atmosphere in this one is good, I just can't get into it. The game has this problem where if you don't figure out what you're supposed to do in a reasonable amount of time, your lantern runs out of oil and you are pretty much SOL. Sure, there is the tinderbox, which can be used to light the occasional torch or candle, but you don't get a whole lot of those. The player should always have some sort of infinite source of light in a world like this. Penumbra got it right. You had a flashlight that was more effective, but you also got a glow-stick that lasted forever if your flashlight ran out. It is no fun to stumble around in almost pitch-black rooms with no light source looking for clues.

IIRC mirrors aren't officially supported by TDM. However, you can still use them. Some missions that have mirrors are Bikerdude's newest one and "patently Dangerous". The biggest issue is that the player doesn't have upper animations, so his arms hang down at an unnatural angle, and you don't get any animations if you select/use a weapon.

ouch... How big could that cell phone firmware have been? This is the age where printer and graphics drivers can be over 100 megs.

Speaking of big brother... Here's another consumer device that has kill-switch functionality! http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/362485/microsoft-details-windows-phone-7-kill-switch Don't worry though, it will only be used to maintain security and stop viruses. Kill-switches and forced updates are always for YOUR protection. They will never be misused or anything like that.

What are your system specs? On my old junky socket-754 machine with 1.2 GB of ram, I got crashes while loading some big missions like NHAT2. It would finish loading and then bomb back to the desktop. This was because I had my swap disabled (pagefile for windows users). Enabling that fixed the crashes. Maybe if you don't have enough ram, you can lower details and get to play the mission. I suggest setting com_machinespec to 0 (it doesn't look *that* bad) and image_downsizebump to 1. Either of these are certainly more pleasant than image_downsize for sure. That last one will make even the menus look ugly.

Well I've yet to see this happen during normal gameplay. I have turned on g_dragentity though just to have some fun, moving things around. When I moved a guard over something he wasn't intended to walk on, like a bench or toarch, he died. The first time I saw this, it made me ROFL. Maybe this is the same thing that happens automatically.

Any chance we could have CUDA support integrated into TDM some day? I guess that would require the Doom 3 engine be open-sourced, but we could get even better performance on modern hardware. All Geforce 8x + cards have the ability to do general-purpose computing. I don't think Doom 3 touches this stuff with a ten-foot pole though.

While enjoying this mission, I kept thinking... "Remind me, why are folks still trying to get the Dark Engine source code released?" Yep, it is that good.

Linux user here. I would be happy to give it a try.

The thing you must realize about Unreal engine 3, Source engine, and whatever other engine is currently popular is that they will likely never be open sourced. Even if you can use them to create free games like TDM, you are still at the mercy of the original engine coders to fix bugs down the line. That means in nine years when we all have 40-core CPUs and a TB of RAM, if a low-level engine issue shows up with the new hardware, we would end up in the exact situation we are now with that other game series. The community would be unable to make a proper fix, and the engine vendor will no longer care. They already made their money from that old engine and have long-sense buried it, in favor of some new one. The other thing to consider is the expandability of the Doom 3 engine when it goes open source (hopefully next year). People can add all of the new graphical effects they want to the game. It could be ported to run on virtually anything. TDM is already a current-gen game in my opinion. TDM looks far better than Doom 3. The characters in D3 had claw hands, and many of the textures were blurry/muddy.

Well the other day I heard some unnatural noises coming from my GPU fan in my laptop. I had been playing Tremulous for a few hours and the GPU was at 76 degrees C. This is unusual, because Trem is such an old game with low requirements. Obviously it was dirty. I cleaned it out with a friend's vacuum and now it runs cooler and quieter. Hopefully the fan wasn't/isn't failing. You know how it is... any time you say "I think I fixed it!", tomorrow it will have the same symptoms again. This is the machine I rely on for TDM, but everything else I do/play can be done on the older spare machines around here. I actually thought I killed the laptop at first, because after vacuuming it, the fan didn't spin at all. I guess this is normal, because it kicked on when I raised the temperature by running some games.

like that one about an arrow getting stuck in an arrow in an AI... lol That is a pretty uncommon occurrence.

yep... but I think somebody (not me) is planning on releasing a new mission at the end of this month.

If you guys are looking for places to trim the memory usage, you may want to re-encode some of the sound effects. I notice that many of the Ogg Vorbis ambiance are encoded at 499 kbps. That is way past any point at which you'll be able to hear a difference in sound quality. I've got all my Ogg Vorbis music at Q5 and it sounds just beautiful. That is roughly 160 kbps. Some of the mono Ogg files in TDM are also at 239 kbps. Perhaps if you use 192 kbps for ambient music and 160 for other sounds, it would trim memory usage quite a bit. I certainly wouldn't re-encode the existing sound files, but if you've got the WAVs it may be worth a try. Also keep in mind that memory usage will only increase. If females are about to enter the TDM world, that is more voice sets you'll have to load at runtime, which means more memory will be used. Many commercial games use 64 kbps or so for vocals and sound effects. Doom 3 only used 35 kbps, which was pushing it a bit too far. You can hear compression artifacts in some of the sounds. Bikerdude: if you're looking for a Linux tester, I would be happy to do it. A re-encode of the resources could be made very simple by a Linux scripter. I'm not that guy, but I bet it would go something like for $FILE in (ls *.wav) do oggenc -q 5 $FILE done

I used Bing a couple of times. It never really bothered me. I'm getting very annoyed with the new insta-search thing Google has though. You can disable it. I just prefer to flush my cookies when I close the browser so that companies can't track every single thing I do. One example is going to a page that has a Facebook "like" button on it, which says "none of your friends like this yet". I wouldn't be surprised if they keep track of every site like that I visit. Suppose I should give Yahoo another try. Their homepage was always too cluttered though.

@LEGION: I'm an ambiance addict too. There are some darn good ambient sounds in this mod... both voices and music. I think the mission in this campaign with the best ambiance was the first one. (SPOILER ahead) I was very immersed near the courtyard just before you enter the main halls of the church. The wind sounds... the darkness... the amount of guards... it was great! I also love the music that plays in the church, called gregorian03_loop.ogg

The "Rosemary" guy sounded very drunk.

... and if you don't want to transfer large WAV files to the team, you can always use FLAC. It is lossless. There are open source encoders for both Windows and Linux (Mac I'm sure too).

Funniest... bug... ever! http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20101011/03194311357/the-history-of-the-fake-free-public-wifi-you-always-see-at-airports.shtml

Welcome! It is always nice to see more people interested in TDM. There are already some GREAT missions to play. Have fun!

These old computers may be in the trash, but the content that people created with them will live on. I'm talking about the mod scene. A wile back, I visited the Mod Archive and downloaded hundreds of their highest rated songs. Most of these were made in the 1990s, probably on Pentium class machines. Some of the melodies in these songs are so pretty that I listen to them every day... again and again. This may be part of the reason I am interested in older machines. It seems like music in games went down-hill with the switch to completely digitized audio. Just compare UT2004 to the original UT, Unreal 2 to Unreal, Deus Ex Invisible War to Deus Ex, etc. It seems like when the musician has a limited tool-set, they focus more on the melody. EDIT: I've had my share of laptops too. I didn't include them because they don't get used as often except the current one. There's a 2000-era K6-3 sitting over here with 192 megs of ram. I wanted to hook it up to the stereo and use it to stream music. It works, but the DAC in there isn't so hot. You can hear the computer "thinking" in your headphones or speakers. Modern machines do not have this problem. It really isn't that noticable, but I want crystal clear audio. Try connecting a good pair of headphones to an EEE PC some time. The thing produces beautiful sound... no background noise at all! It is amazing, considering the $259 price I paid for it.

One could also run FPS games on 1982 hardware. I was pretty surprised to see this! They have them for the ZX Spectrum. Wolf3d could have been done at least 8 years earlier.