vozka

Well this was great! Hard to believe it was your first mission, everything seemed really solid including all the staples like rooftops, vertical shortcuts, hidden compartments, readables etc. And it wasn't a small mission either! The similarities to CoS 0 were quite apparent too, looking forward to continuing with CoS 2

A nice mission! Exploring took me longer than expected, especially finding those safe deposit boxes, even though I have to admit the clues were there the whole time. I enjoyed the overall theme - Four Flags seems to be way more fun than Six Flags. And just today, what's the chance, I was thinking that it would be nice to have occasional more modern music in TDM missions, just as a throwback to a couple tracks from the original games, so I was very pleasantly surprised. What I disliked was mostly already said: some parts of the building seemed a bit too empty of people and because the NPCs also seemed to be super attentive, the contrast between how careful I had to be on the ground floor and in the rest of the building seemed a bit strange. And the first cutscene was just way too silly for me. I don't think this method worked well together with the stuttering fps, low visual quality of the models and artifacts of the engine like the lady's shadow seemingly being bald. It reminded me of this cinematic masterpiece where somebody remade the whole of Titanic in The Sims 2. The playable scene after that was hilarious though.

Great mission! I have to admit I wasn't patient enough to find nearly everything, only spent about 80 minutes with it, but I loved the atmosphere (although that seems the be the rule with almost every mission I play, especially city missions). I realized I would prefer it if the main objective was a bit longer (even if it meant less side content), but that's just personal preference, can't please everyone :). Like other people I appreciated the library and the "Narnia" secret quite a bit :). Didn't find the third secret in the library. The only small problem I had was that a guard on the ground floor of the manor spotted me through a closed door or through a wall from the kitchen. A bit annoying in a place where being spotted means game over, but it only happened once. I had a good time and since this was my first CoS mission, I'm now sure I'll try the rest of the miniseries too.

That's what I thought, aren't some types of companies designed specifically so that you can only lose everything the company owns and not anything that is a property of you as a person? Of course starting one would still cost money, yes. I imagine that if someone volunteered to actually do it and go through the bureaucracy, the community would chip in and get the money together. But I'm not going to be the one who volunteers.

Another problem not mentioned in this thread is that I'm pretty sure TDM contains textures that are distributed under licenses not compatible with TDM's licensing models ("asset license" which prohibits redistribution, relicensed as CC-BY-NC-SA which allows redistribution). Had some discussion about that in this thread, but the crux is that even if people wanted to use a non-free platform like Steam (which, imo, would be a great idea), I don't think anybody would want to legally sign their name under a project with known licensing issues unless those are fixed.

You do still need to have modelling skills, but there are some tools that allow automatic retopology to lowpoly available. The state of the art really is surprisingly good and improving every year because there's a lot of demand in commercial games development. InstaLOD is truly amazing, it's a commercial piece of software, but you can get a free license with some limitations (none are a problem for a project like Dark Mod). I think it's for a year, but I'm not sure. I tried it and it does actually work, the results often do need some tweaking, but really not that much, it saves hours and hours of work. It's so good I thought about making a thread about it here. It even has automatic tools to remove baked shadows which are kinda usable. The biggest problem I found is that Dark Mod need to be much more lowpoly than most modern games and the polycounts needed are at the bottom edge of what InstaLOD can do, and that the system for baking textures lacked some slightly niche features that I wanted. I actually think that getting good photogrammetry data without too many anomalies and with workable lighting is a bigger problem nowadays. It looks easy in these youtube videos, but I personally couldn't get good data unless I had a proper mirrorless camera and lucky lighting.

I appreciate the effort to try to make PBR work with current materials as that's probably the only way it could be integrated in the game, but have you tried testing it with proper PBR materials? Either remaking some that are in-game by hand or just getting some "standard PBR" textures from the internet. One of the big advantages of the PBR workflow is that there's a lot of good quality assets with compatible licensing on the internet, like https://cc0textures.com/ I'm honestly wondering how big of a difference it could make. I don't have an idea because while I believe the PBR workflow to be visually simply superior, I don't have enough understanding of engine developoment to know how well it can be implemented into an older engine that wasn't created with PBR in mind. At the same time I like your work already and I'm sure using actual PBR would only make it better.

Following the recommended age limits strictly is imo only useful when parents don't care about what the kids consume and don't have good judgement themselves. The age rating is a useful guideline for sure, especially for people who don't have the option to check everything their kids play, but that's all it is for me. One thing that I'm missing a rating of how serious, realistic and gritty something is - I believe grotesque violence or sex to be a much smaller problem than adult topics which do not even have to be super explicit visually, but are just too heavy. Prostitution, slavery, rape, gang stuff, topics like that. I'm answering as someone who doesn't have kids yet, but I'm in my early 30s and believe I have enough perspective regarding my own childhood gaming. When I was a kid I played a lot of violent games, I enjoyed them then and I still enjoy them now (Brutal Doom is some of the best fun I've had with video games). I never had a problem distinguishing between games and reality, I've always been a peaceful person. My dad made me go return Carmageddon when I was like 11 years old and looking back at it honestly, I don't think playing it would have any negative influence on me. But I realize that most of the games weren't super realistic or super heavy, and those that did feature more adult topics were typically RPGs with a lot text, which, at the age when they would be inappropriate, I found boring (don't know why, I read a lot of books, but in games I wanted easier interactivity). Nowadays, with the trend of adult gritty TV series, and with story and dialogs presented in more realistic graphics with voice acting (although not nearly as realistic as in TV series, yet), we may get games that are too adult and realistic due to topics shown and the way they're pictured. That I would actually consider a problem for kids. I think that videogames are still a juvenile medium, you rarely get games that truly seem like they're aimed just at adults and feature difficult topics. But we will probably get those in the future. I don't think kids playing Doom Eternal or even Postal 4 is necessarily a problem, but a kid playing a gaming equivalent of Breaking Bad, Narcos or The Wire definitely can be one.

Confirmed. When I have something other than a key in hand, it works normally, no crash.

It's fine, I know it's not an easy problem to solve . Would a savefile help? This is a save just in front of the decontamination chamber, when I go inside and pull the lever the game crashes right after the decontamination mist sprays me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2zd6371szm82rdy/hhta_crash_save.zip?dl=0 I'm running a relatively fresh install of 2.09 in Windows if it helps (I do have several other missions installed, other than that I'm mostly in default settings and did not do any updates).

I can confirm this, the game crashes for me as well and I did not use any cheats.

Just finished playing this, and like other said, that was a great first mission! The environments were very good, this kind of "slice of the city" design is one of the reasons why I like playing Dark Mod. There were enough unique areas like the waterworks and shop basement to make it memorable and some interesting characters too. Really almost everything about this mission was very solid and I had fun the first hour, but then I encountered a problem. Some of the things I had to do were mostly clear, but not at first sight and to solve them all I had to do quite a bit of backtracking. Example: Because the loot objective at highest difficulty wasn't super easy, traversing back and forth through the whole level and finding what I missed not only in the waterworks but everywhere else as well became a slog for me. At 2320 loot I wasn't having fun anymore and decided to declare the mission finished. Now this was subjectively quite a problem for me because I tend to remember the ending of an experience the most, so a great mission with an ending that I did not enjoy became kind of spoiled. But from a level design perspective I think this was largely a matter of a few NPCs being too alert, possibly breaking down the one big area with a couple hiding spots or different modes of traversal, and ideally having an optional loot objective. I think this might make a similar future mission friendlier to people like me without changing your creative vision. I'm a fan of having optional loot objectives in general by the way, because I can never know in advance how difficult it's going to be to get it (it really varies) and how fun it's going to be, but I like to have a concrete number that tells me "if you got this much, you've probably seen most of the level". I'm looking forward to playing any future missions from you. Oh, and I encountered a few small bugs:

What a great mission! I was expecting something short and focused on one topic/location, so the density and variation of content was a very pleasant surprise. The creepy house and the kitchen secret were especially excellent and helped the overall atmosphere. It felt not only sinister, but also kind of hopeless, which I never really got from other missions that I played. Quite often even in missions where the topic is kinda heavy the point of the mission is that you have some agency to influence it (like the Painter's Wife), whereas here you just explore and rob people and watch all the bad stuff that is happening or going to happen around you. I'd like to see more of that in the future. The very end provided an unintentionally hilarious counterpoint when right after getting the message about what happened later that night together with some creepy music, the weird-ass "mission completed" jingle started playing, completely ruining the vibe. Well at least the final impression wasn't depressing.

Great mission. All the important things have been said already - I liked the creepy atmosphere created only with events that were quite realistic, and I also thought the characters and writing were very good. The videos were great as well. I managed to find 3 out of 5 secrets, and about 4150 loot, and it took me about 1:45 hours - couldn't imagine getting 5k. Until I found one of the secrets even 3k was not simple. There were small things that I couldn't solve: Looking forward to anything else you create.