vozka

I had had the aliased font problem as well, BUT it seems to be fixed now without me doing anything, no idea why. The only thing I changed was that I set image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression to 0, that was the first and only time I ever touched the console, and now I cannot find any broken parchments. Changing compression back to 1 does not break it. r_useFBO is set to 1. One perhaps important piece of information is that this is not a new 2.08 beta bug, I encountered it in fresh 2.07 installation as well (just forgot to report it among reporting other things), and it only happened with parchments using purple ink.

Oh, right, that makes sense. I like having additional objectives and restrictions, but I can be pretty dumb regarding puzzles. What about the spiders? is that intentional behavior? In the situation on the screenshot below the arrow just goes straight through the spider and breaks on the concrete floor.

Just played this mission for the second time for testing purposes and I noticed a couple issues. I'm playing 2.08 beta, not sure if that can affect any of these things. The first is that on the first playthrough the mission did not end. All the objectives except do not harm/do not kill type were checked, but nothing happened when I climbed into the sewers. The fence was standing on the street outside the sewer entrance. On the second playthrough everything worked as it should. The other issues were consistent for both playthroughs: There's also one spot in the garden, shown on the screenshot, where it's quite easy to get stuck, forcing the player to reload. Being unable to finish the mission during the first playthrough kinda soured the experience, but other than that this was super well-done, surely one of the best missions I've played so far, especially the graphical fidelity and attention to detail.

I got even more dramatic gains than you did. I have what used to be a mid-end laptop about 8 years ago, an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU upgraded with enough RAM and an SSD. With a bigger mission, Volta and the Stone, the loading time was 1:48 m with compression on and only 31 seconds!! with image_useCompression and image_useNormalCompression set to 0. Looking at the FPS at the beginning of the mission, I seem to have gotten a 2 FPS reduction with the compression off, but that might have just been statistical noise, I would need to do more tests to find out if there's an actual difference. But note that I have a Radeon 7650M, which is as I said 8 years old and basically a rebranded 5xxx radeon chip - I don't know whether its performance is even relevant for you. That's 18% reduction in loading time, not as dramatic as image compression, but imo nothing to scoff at. It might be more on slower CPUs like mine. I would think that it's worth considering depending on what the size difference is.

Again, this does not matter as long as the assets are published under creative commons and accessible in any way, even just inside the game.

I asked the owner of a different asset library (that I normally use for other work) about this situation and while he wasn't as specific as I'd like (he probably doesn't care about games, their primary use is archviz), what I got from his reply is that only the license is an issue. As long as the license prohibits redistribution and any use outside of the game, the fact that anybody can extract art from the game does not matter. Different stores might see it differently of course, the terms of use vary and some are quite vaguely written.

Right. This is what CC themselves clarify in the CC wiki I linked above. It means that TDM probably uses a nontrivial number of textures that infringe on cgtextures license. I have found in several threads that people noticed the clause that forbids redistribution as early as 2010, but they wrongly concluded that as long as the textures are distributed as a part of a level (=not a texture pack), it's OK to use them. This is not true, as long as the license is CC, the way in which they are packed is irrelevant. The only way to make it right would be to use a nonfree license.

I encountered the fully black lights and aliased fonts (mine were even less readable than yours) too, in The Accountant 1 & 2.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing here, but share alike is not related to the way the assets are distributed in TDM. Share alike is only related to the license used, it only means that anybody who uses TDM assets has to share them under the same license. That's how it's explained here: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Share_Alike This explicitly allows redistribution "as is". A better search term would be "cgtextures" since that's what the site was previously called. This gives me 59 results and some of them seem to have been used as assets although I have not checked too deeply. It certainly seems like using cgtextures was encouraged by some people and in wiki tutorials as well. EDIT: The question also is "has the cgtextures license always been limiting in this way?", which I cannot answer fully since waybackmachine is painfully slow for me today, but according to this thread it's been like that since at least 2012.

But according to CC they can redistribute them by themselves. They have to give attribution, do it noncomercially and with the same license, but as long as the assets themselves are licensed as CC, I don't see any reason why they couldn't be shared on their own outside the game. CC doesn't limit anything like this.

I have a few questions regarding the license of TDM assets in relation to using 3rd party roalty free models and textures (either as is or for derived works). I understand that TDM assets use the CC-BY-NC-SA license. This trivally means that for creating these assets we can use anything licensed under the same license, CC-BY-NC-SA, or anything under CC0. What about other CC licenses? From this page in the CC FAQ I understand that we can also use CC-BY and CC-BY-NC, as those can be relicensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. So far so good. I have noticed, though, that most asset libraries today (free or paid) use some form of "roalty-free license" or "asset license" which allow any type of usage without attribution, even commercial, except redistributing them in their original form. This includes some of the asset libraries that have been link around this forum as usable. This licensing is most prevalent with models, but for example textures.com also uses a similar license. This is from their terms of use: While textures.com explicitly allow using their textures in games in general, this section seems to be incompatible with CC-BY-NC-SA as CC in my understanding explicitly allows redistribution. But while trying to research this licensing issue I noticed that textures.com was used for assets at least in the past. So how does this work? Are there exceptions where TDM assets can use a different license? Or is textures.com a relic of the past from when licensing wasn't enforced? If it's the first case, there would be other potential sources of assets that could be adapted for TDM. For example I'm a paid subscriber to blenderkit.com, a library with almost 2000 models which can be used under a license that doesn't allow redistribution and some of them probably could be used in TDM's setting. They're mostly hipoly with PBR materials, so retopology and some material work would have to be done, but that's less work than creating models from scratch and I want to try to do it anyway. So what's the situation?

I just downloaded the 2.08 beta and tried it again and it seems that this issue has been fixed.

At this point I think we're going even more into speculation, but I don't believe that fantasy vs. dark and more realistic setting is a clear cut issue, after all Kingdom Come Deliverance is a pretty successful game. You may be right of course, but I don't think it can be said this easily. In any case I believe that while TDM probably won't be as popular as commercial stealth games, there is a definite unfulfilled potential. That isn't useful for me personally then. I'd appreciate a full release installer, where I download one big file, install it (with possible update check at the end) and I'm done. Lots of those mentions happened in earlier stages of development, I think that this plays a role. Again, I believe (and I know you probably disagree, just explaining my point of view) that publicity only works well if the product is polished and feels like a finished game. Also I for example did not know about TDM until I decided to play Thief Gold for the first time a few months ago. I remember reading about it in previous years, but people mostly said that it's not super stable and playable and only worth trying if you're a huge fan of Thief, which I wasn't. In retrospect I'm sure I would have enjoyed it. Absolutely understand. I believe it's solvable, but I get that a thing like this is way too much trouble. Too bad. Oh believe me, I know. I've been using open source software for a long time and I studied computer science so I do know a lot of coders and I respect that their interest in a hobby project is often elsewhere. But I don't have to like it :).

Right, but why does it matter if a small fraction of gamers play stealth games, when that fraction actually bigger in absolute numbers than it was 20 years ago? While this would no doubt be the best solution, I'd argue that making a small selection of "best of" levels that would be included in the base game and fixing all the small stuff that I mention above would be a good substitute that is actually doable.

Stealth games are probably less popular relatively, but not in absolute numbers I believe. Styx: Master of Shadows, which according to reviews is a decent but flawed game, sold between 500k and 1M copies until now, according to Steam Spy. This is in the same ballpark as Thief 2 a few years after release. The engine is not bad, imo the biggest problems it has are its not great performance and slow loading times - it does look dated next to modern fully pbr engines, but it works quite well with the dark, contrasting aesthetics of TDM and fully dynamic lights. Many popular commercial indie games look worse. What I want to say from the beginning is that as soon as you play a high quality level, have controls and graphics set up etc., this does not look like an old community mod, it feels like a fully fledged game. That's why I think it is very important to bridge the gap between downloading the game and playing a high quality mission, because in this gap it sometimes does feel more like a game engine than a finished game. And it does not have to be that way. And I believe that for any promotion to be successful, this polishing work has to be done first. You say that everyone who would want to play TDM already knows about it, I disagree - I think that catering only to players who are already desperate to play something like Thief and actively search on their own for something like TDM is precisely the reason why it is not more popular. If TDM as a whole looks more like a finished game and is promoted as such, I see no reason why players who bought Styx, or even some of the people that play more action oriented immersive sims like new Hitman games, wouldn't want to try it. As for Steam, after looking through the forum I have not found the reasons why it couldn't be done - I know there was some problem with greenlight, but right now there are open-source games on Steam and the need to pay a one-time 100 USD fee and probably create some official entity representing the game seem like small problems. It is entirely possible that I missed something though.