thebigh

I'm using a Brother J4440 that I'm reasonably happy with.

HP printers are garbage anyway. I've never owned one that worked right. Still more reason to boycott them.

I'm working on one that's slowly coming along. I've got a self-imposed challenge that the whole thing has to fit in a 1536³ box. Skybox, "blue room", everything. The radii of speakers and lights are allowed to poke outside, but everything else has to fit inside. This is roughly the size of Thief's Den 1, so enough for a decent-sized house and a small city streets segment, with plenty of verticality. Wish me luck!

I don't agree with that. Although in the original picking doors and bypassing keypads was cheaper individually, by prioritising stealth you'd normally have to get around several locked doors. So you'd spend maybe six picks total getting through three doors. In GMDX I'd use four picks to get into what used to be a passageway around the guards only to find out it's now a dead-end room with some ammo crates in it. I felt like GMDX was herding me into combat all the time and I just don't want to play DX that way. People like to crap on Revision, but for all its faults it does try to be fair to all play styles.

I'm not a fan of GMDX actually. It's clear the author thinks the Rambo playstyle is the Only Correct way to play Deus Ex, and has made all the stealth routes super expensive in terms of lockpicks and hacking tools or has walled them off entirely. It should actually be called Gimme Less Deus Ex, because it diminishes the game. I prefer Deus Ex Revision which, despite some questionable architectural choices here and there, and a bit too much treacle, is at least balanced for combat and stealth oriented players.

It's a shame, because I like the small-to-medium sized missions. I don't always have the desire to play a huge sprawling masterpiece. Sometimes I just want to sneak through the City streets, get into the mansion, steal Lord Frobley's crown and get out again in 45 minutes. Those are the missions I like to play and so they're the ones I tend to make.

Yeh, I have to get mapping again.

Creating even a small mission is a big effort and rather time consuming.

Is there an easy way to handle situations where multiple guards are barking at once?

When this happened to me, it was because the dumdum was trying to flip the back of the switch and was walking through a bunch of rooms to get to its back side. Also, are you using atdm:relight_position entities to tell the guard where the light switch is? They struggle to figure it out otherwise.

Heh, interesting to finish a mission with XD

You need to physically drop it, with the 'R' key.

More info regarding that candle bug- I was playing Heart of Lone Salvation and took a gold candlestick with an unlit candle on top of it. The candle spontaneously lit itself when the gold candlestick was removed. This was in Andrew's room, viewport coords (1838, 4617, 228) (6 11 0) on beta 211-06.

What a fun mission! I love the humorous little conversations you put in all your maps. They just add so much life and charm to the TDM world. I found one of the red shinies before I knew what they were for, and then spent an interesting twenty minutes tracking down the others. And devising a way of getting the gems on the Builder compound door without alerting the two Watchmen was a challenge. Those long sight lines were an interesting puzzle to overcome. Massive fan of your missions.

Isn't that what layers are for?

Aha! It's packed in one of the .pk4s. No wonder I couldn't find it anywhere by just searching for "map_of.tga". If this is bad practice I'll have to release updates of two of my missions, as I just copied the way Builder's Influence did it.

Sure thing. I also have another problem, one that I think is only affecting me. Both these screenshots are from the mission The Builder's Influence. The first one is from Release 2.10, the second one is from Beta 2.11-01. For some reason the latter is using the in-game map from Hidden Hands: Initiation. This is very strange because it's a fresh download of TDM and I don't currently have Initiation anywhere on my computer. I think at some point map_of.tga got stashed somewhere- I don't know where, when, or why- and the beta version looks for it there but 2.10 does not. AFAICT any mission where the in-game map is named map_of.tga is affected. I'm on Linux Mint 20.2. @JackFarmer do you know what's going on here?

It seems to have started with Beta 2.11-01. Here's pictures taken from three consecutive restarts of The Outpost, viewpoint coordinates (1007, 355, -63), (45, -136, 0) in a fresh install of Beta 2.11-01. All of these candles are meant to be extinguished. The problem is very intermittent. Sometimes it won't happen at all just by restarting the mission and you have to quit and re-enter Dark Mod to get the bug to show. I couldn't replicate it at all in release 2.10.

I'm happy and grateful for all the work that's still being put into the game, and the missions for it, by so many talented people.

I don't know. TBH the only reason I care is that it puts 2022 into outright third instead of just equal third with 2011 and 2013.

It does seem strange to count the re-release of La Banque Bienveillante, but not Sneak & Destroy. My count is also 14.

That's new... I'll fix that and another couple of tiny bugs in the next few days and post an updated version.

That puzzle solution didn't quite work the way I imagined it would

Count me in!