thebigh

Enemies respawn, at least in some areas. If you're running low on supplies you can clobber a few mimics or operators (be careful) and loot their corpses.

Acolyte6,

Congrats on the release. It was a fun mission to test and I know a lot of people are going to love it.

What an awesome mission! I really enjoyed this one. It had strong Thief 1 and 2 vibes to it with the grimy yet spacious interior of the tower. I finished with a mediocre stealth score (got into a fight with the little spideys at the temple) and nabbed all but about 100 of the loot. Another thing I liked was that there's more going on in the City than just your mission... the dead watch guy in the temple for instance, and the jerk counting his loot at the start of the mission. I wish I could map this well. Gives me something to aspire to.

Would it be possible to add a second "load pointfile" menu option that loads the first of the .lin files associated with dropped portals? Currently to identify a dropped portal you have to manually rename one of those .lin files to mapname.lin and load it as though it's a geometry leak pointfile. Speed mappers will thank you.

They really should have called it Neuroshock. That would have made it clear it's more along the lines of System Shock and Bioshock. Anyway, I thought the game was a bit uneven quality wise. The stealth is cool and I'm a sucker for derelict space stations. And I appreciate that it's optimized well enough to run OK even on my ghastly potato of a computer. The gloo gun and the recycler bombs are cool too. But I could never really warm up to the protagonist, and there were places where the loading screen bulkheads were just too close together. The typhons being tedious bullet sponges after a while got annoying as well. And don't get me started on that huge typhon that turns up all the time and you have to hide from it for ages until it wanders off again- it's only scary the first time, after that it just slows the game down and is annoying. Random observation: Morgan is the only person on that space station who eats the peel along with the banana.

Count me in!

Congratulations on this clever and fun mission.

Speaking of the spider AI, I noticed that it really struggles on sloped floors. Testing my own level I found it couldn't handle a slope as gentle as 15 degrees without embedding itself in the floor and becoming immobile. This is a problem because intuitively one would expect a spider to hang around in caves and other natural environments where the ground is not perfectly horizontal. I got marginally better results, or so it seemed to me, by putting a horizontal monster clip underneath it at level start and letting it walk off onto the sloping floor but it still wasn't very good.

Sure, count me in.

Yes, I agree with all of this. And in a way the structure of Dark Mod and its fan missions already encourages it. If you're on a mission to steal a valuable relic from Lord Derpinstone to lower his social standing with other nobles, consider what you learn during the job. You get a detailed knowledge of his Lordship's mansion, some idea of his neighbourhood from what you can see through gates and over fences, but nothing much beyond that. Same goes for people. The thief is probably going to learn all about the Lord and his dirty little secrets- but probably only enough of the power structure of Bridgeport's upper crust to serve the needs of that one level. Coarse generalities like appearances counting for as much as merit, and that Lord Derpinstone has enemies ready to profit from his misfortune. We should not get a detailed idea of how it all works. And if things like this do eventually become more fleshed out it should happen naturally, from FM authors dropping some info here and there. Too much advance planning could make it a bit "samey" and inauthentic.

I'd be happy to provide the text from my beta mission, without making anyone go through and read it, if that will save time. There's nothing much in there that could conflict with existing canon, or place restrictions on future FMs anyway. As long as this project doesn't end up putting vetoes on fan missions for contradicting canon, or compels authors to flood their maps with infodumps, I'm happy to help.

Part of the charm of the old duology was that it didn't inundate you with lots of worldbuilding details. You got hints, fragments of conversations, but not much more. A lot of things were left vague and mysterious, and that's what made it atmospheric. There's room for vagueness in Dark Mod as well. In fact, I think it would be a mistake to insist too strongly on conforming to a rigid structure.

Possibly a stupid suggestion from a total novice, but can you tie the start patrolling command to the death of the guard the revenant is fighting? I guess this pre-assumes each revenant has a single designated target but it might help you debug whether it's the fighting that messes up the patrol route. Maybe also teleport the dead guards away, just for now, to test if the corpses are blocking the revenants' path somehow. I suggest these things not because I'm a darkradiant expert (far from it) but because I've learned from other projects and map editors for other games that most bugs are because of the dumbest thing you can imagine, not some arcane scripting subtlety.

Hello everyone, I just put the last touches on my first mission, called The Factory Heist, and I'd be very grateful for some beta testers to give it a thorough blasting. I will put up a thread in the Beta Tester forum shortly. This is just to see how many people want to sign up for the job. Thanks in advance.

I think I must be the world's biggest dope. I did have that, and it was called startingmap.txt.txt (thanks for that, Windows). Now that I fixed the suffix it is working as expected. Cheers!

Okay, so I'm putting the last few touches on my first map (YAY) but I cannot get the briefing text and objectives to show up. How do I do it? According to the wiki, all I need to do for briefing text is to create a suitable xd file called briefing.xd in the xdata directory. In my case this would be \games\darkmod\fms\factory\xdata\briefing.xd since my actual map file is called \games\darkmod\fms\factory\maps\factory.map. The first line of the file is maps/factory/mission_briefing, and for now I just copied the rest of the stuff from Closemouthed Shadows since I know for sure that works. Unfortunately, all I get when I start a new mission is a blank sheet. When I go to the objectives screen Darkmod crashes to a black screen and I cannot bring up the console. From the blank sheet briefing, if I go to the console I get the error "WARNING:DisplayBriefingPage: Could not find briefing xdata: maps//mission_briefing" What am I doing wrong?

For such a simple mission this is remarkably challenging for a no-knockouts run. I've been watching Sotha's video series and finally decided to play the level itself. It's loads of fun.

No, it does not show the text of the xdata on the model in/game. It's just a blank sheet. This is what I was actually trying to do: have the text visible on the model but without being able to get the readable popup by frobbing.

It's more than just a signpost or a name on a plaque but it's just "flavour" text that I don't want to mislead the player into thinking is important by having it highlight. The text decals are fiddly, and at leas the readables editor shows you a preview of what it will look like.

Architecture and lighting are brilliant, and the sound is remarkably atmospheric. Unfortunately, this mission is very very very very boring. There is nothing less interesting than being presented with a million locked doors and having to guess which one the key you just found opens. Many of the puzzles are just not logically constructed, and the endless key hunt just becomes annoying.

Is it possible for a readable to display text in-game without being frobable? edit: nvm, I fixed it by setting frob_distance to 1. Still technically frobable, but can't be reached.

I would be against subjective user tags like "ugly" for the reasons VanishedOne mentions. I think it should be restricted to objective criteria like "has it got spiders".

It's in the Beta Testing forum

Count me in. I'm perhaps not the greatest expert in the mechanics of Dark Radiant yet, but I have an eye for detail.