thebigh

Really impressive mission. Of all the TDM maps I've played this one gives me the strongest Thief Dark Project vibes I think, with the dark ambient, heavy stone architecture, and just the general vibe of the interior of Lendermann's home. I finished with a perfect stealth score but only about $1,150, which is going to give me another reason to replay the mission some day. Among the highlights for me were getting two pieces of loot stashed high up above the streets. I always love reasons to go exploring. There was one area with a non-functional switch that I could not get into. I'll have to uncover that secret another time.

Interesting mission. I liked the city streets with several upstairs apartments you can clamber up to and loot. This is always a nice touch that makes the City feel lived in and gives the player a reward for exploring. The architecture is unfortunately weirdly oversized, making me and the watchmen seem like little hobbitses walking around a human town. I though the church was really impressive. Unfortunately grabbing the objective loot there was too trivial because there were no Builders walking around, making it sadly a bit boring. What tipped me off to the solution to the puzzle wasn't the book, but the fact that you could climb up to the cathedral rafters and nothing was there. Loot goal was too unfair on the hardest difficulty. You've really got to find all the tiny rings in the crypts, which is nearly impossible because it's a labyrinth and the rings are virtually invisible against the bright ambient. All in all I thought it was an interesting mission let down by a lack of guards, weird architecture, and uneven pacing.

They say he was run over deliberately but, given the bumbling ineptitude of the Russian invasion so far, I wouldn't put it past one of their generals to get run over by his own men accidentally.

Forced combat is a hard no for me.

Most places have strict laws against people-smuggling. XD

In that case your cheapest and most convenient option might be to pay for extra baggage with the airline. Certainly cheaper than buying a laptop, and probably cheaper than having your desktop shipped. The major down side will be lugging all that extra weight to and from the airport. But I successfully transported my desktop this way just last year. It is definitely doable.

I think I enjoyed this mission even more than the first Selis Woderose map, though that's probably just my own preference for smaller missions rather than enormous sprawlers. Lord Rake's castle was definitely a highlight. You really captured the feeling of a decaying castle well. Cool puzzle at the end.

This is a really cool mission. Despite occasional issues with oversized, empty hallways it was a lot of fun to play and had a strong Thief 2 atmosphere. Guard patrols were enough to keep me on my toes without feeling that I was always waiting for them to stop parading around in front of me. I had a good chuckle at the sly M. C. Hammer and Down in the Bonehoard references. I played on the hardest difficulty, finished with about 4,800 loot and a dismal stealth score. I didn't find the treasure map but I did complete the necromancer's tome optional objective. I look forward to finding the rest of the stuff on another playthrough some day.

This looks impressive. It's really going to make designing my lighting much easier.

I would guess that physically moving the player backwards could produce weird geometry errors that are hard to diagnose or predict, and would be a real PITA for the programmers to deal with. Drawers and such bumping into me when they open doesn't bother me much. I've learned where to stand, at an angle to them, so they open properly. The one that bugs me is lockpicking a door and it inevitably swing out towards you. There's not much really to do about that except for mappers being aware of which way their doors rotate.

Interesting you should mention the Inventors' Guild. I recently started work on a new map that will feature them heavily. I envision their facility to be sort of a cross between a university campus, a tinkerer's workshop, and the HQ of an 18th century Learned Society. I'm thinking there will be a moderately sized lecture theater, more than a few laboritories, and a really nice library.

Yeah, I got good use out of the moddb articles. But an itemised list of specific new models would have been handy too. I have seen a few ancient links to posts from like 2005 that no longer work because of changes on the board. I didn't know there was a secret dev board as well. I hope it features a creepy little girl reading prophecies out of an ancient tome.

When I was doing my Christmas Connections entry I found it hard enough to discover what new furniture items and such had been added since the previous version.

What the hell has Corbin been smoking?

I'm glad somebody liked T4, because I thought it was an offensive slap in the face to fans of the original trilogy. Dumbing the game down and putting the player on a railroad is not what the Thief games are supposed to be about.

Regarding the bad performance near the luminous mushrooms, I suppose that must be because each one is a light source. So you have a lot of light sources close together with overlapping light radii, and that's a recipe for bad performance. You could fix this by setting each one to "extinguished" "1" and putting a single light source in the middle of each mushroom patch.

I don't think that's entirely true. Mantling and ragdoll physics have been improved recently, and the jankeriffic blackjack behaviour is getting fixed soon too.

Ugh, crypto! I hope that when and if this scam bubble bursts, the market will suddenly be flooded with affordable 2nd hand GPUs.

Hm. I worry that a slow-fall potion would break existing maps worse than the speed potion. I am thinking mainly of "Thieves' Highway" missions where falling off the rooftops is supposed to be lethal, with the floor far enough down that the drop is long enough to kill you. With a slowfall potion you could survive the drop and then get stuck down there with no way to get back.

Be careful with showtargets though. It makes you glow brightly.

I don't mean to suggest it's definitely not worth the effort. Just trying to get an idea of how often data corruption does happen. It seems like the kind of thing you could have a checksum to verify. If any individual file fails its checksum, delete only it and try downloading it from another mirror. This would be better than assuming the whole download is kaput and starting from scratch. I guess as TDM gets bigger the odds of something going wrong increase but it's likely to affect mostly new users because those of us who've already been playing will usually only be updating an existing install rather than downloading an entirely new one.

Is this something that happens often enough to be concerned about?

If a guard finds an unarmed scullery wench knocked out in a corner he might start searching around for an intruder. If he finds the corpses of five slain watchmen in an alley it would make sense for him to panic, run to a flee point, and summon every other guard he can find.

TDM can be a bit finicky about jumping off objects with sloping edges anyway. If the lip of the object slopes off downwards sometimes you just can't jump even though you hit the key in time. It can be frustrating.

I liked your mission a lot more than my own and I have no idea how I placed above you. It must have been that one bullshit vote you got right at the end.