vozka

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.

So did I, but I had to write the path by hand. Not exactly intuitive.

I just tried the new installer and I'm having a bad time trying to choose the install directory. Firstly it's weird to have an installer that's still trying to install the game into the current directory because for many people that will be a temp directory where the installer executable installer was automatically extracted after they launched it from inside the archive. Could it perhaps detect whether there are already Dark Mod files present in the directory and if not, default to something like Program Files in Windows? Secondly is there no way to change the drive letter in Windows in the wysiwyg directory picker? I couldn't find it. The whole dialog is ugly and not very intuitive imo, but being unable to use it to locate a directory on a different disk is the biggest problem I'd say. The fact that the installer has to restart any time the directory is changed is really weird too, but I assume there's a good reason. All in all as an end user without any knowledge of background changes I find the new installer to be a sidegrade at best. I do like that it now shows the size of the download and time estimate - that is excellent.

I encountered a small issue that is unclear to me:

Perhaps we should delete this whole conversation because while I appreciate you guys wanting to help me, like I said twice, I did find it in the end and finished the mission. I mentioned it took me a really long time because it made the mission kind of tedious and less enjoyable and I'm interested to know if there was a readable somewhere saying where to look for the mechanism that I missed (or even what to look for) or if the players are supposed to find it on their own. For me personally an ingame hint telling me what to look for would make the mission more enjoyable, but I'm not discounting the option that I'm just dumb or unlucky.

Again, not the problem, also like I said I already finished the mission. The problem I had was finding where to input the code, the actual mechanism, not what the code number was.

Yes. Right, must have missed that. Perhaps it would be better to not use generic names like "safe key" so that the player knows what keys they do or do not have without having to try all of them (I think that all the other keys were named well).

Finally finished this, a nice mission, but I've got to admit one thing - I couldn't for the love of god find Everything else was fine, but even after looking at it several times I didn't notice it and since there are various different openable compartments around, I didn't even frob it by accident. I was sure I must have missed something so I searched through the city several times and the mission became quite tedious after that as a result. Was there a readable hint somewhere telling me what to look for? Other than that the idea and the execution are good, but I felt lost (and not in a good way) more often than in any other mission I've played. Which might have been just bad luck on my part. I also couldn't find Here are some small technical problems I encountered in this mission, although some of them are probably 2.08 bugs: https://imgur.com/a/G4yWuos The "shining" openable windows even though there's no light on either side were already mentioned. Also, the red highlight that appears around an item in the GUI when you unsuccessfuly try to use it seems to have a broken alpha because it was just a big bright red blob instead of a subtle highlight in this mission. It works fine in other missions.

Found a couple smaller issues so far. Firstly it's possible to get stuck behind furniture immediately in the beginning: The newspaper also deserves a small fix, the second headline about the mayor is too long and looks obviously out of place.

I just finished playing all five William Steele missions and I've got to say, what a brilliant series. One of the few things I'm missing in TDM is an overarching story like in Thief games, so playing these missions back to back was a treat. Although the story is smaller in scope and not as strong as in T1/T2, it's obvious that a great deal of effort was put into it, there's a crapton of readables that are interesting and yet not too long and I love how one continuous story brings us to such different places. I especially enjoyed WS2 because I just like rooftopping and verticality, something about the aesthetic makes traversing the city in heights really enjoyable even if the mission is not very challenging. And then the Warrens! Possibly the most unique mission I've played so far. I've seen some really cool gimmicks (...like the dream sequence in WS3), but what made the Warrens special was how the whole concept of the mission was kind of different in so many things - super non-linear map, not too many patrols, fantastically bleak atmosphere, the finale... - and all those things worked together to create a mission that was different and yet coherent. There were of course some parts I thought were weaker (like the partols in sewers, I don't mind unpredictability, but when 3 guys suddenly patrol together and leave half of the sewers unattended, it doesn't make sense), but most parts were really strong and I recommend this series to everyone.

Apart from the aliased text which has hopefully been fixed for next versions, and which I started seeing again i 2.08 after seeing it a couple times in 2.07 and then never again, I also encountered a couple black objects. Both screenshots are from Northdale part 2, first one is from the path to city watch station, second one is from inside the station. If I recall correctly, the round lamp was already fixed during the betatesting, but apparently only for the turned on state (or maybe it was a similar looking but different model). It looks fine when turned on and emitting light, but when you turn it off, it turns black. With the hanging lantern it's possible that nobody noticed, I only did after seeing it for about the third time.

Firstly because it's lesser known and therefore more unique to the game and secondly because it's a fictional world inspired by history, not a historical setting. Abstract art started in the victorian era. But I'm not pushing it, just answering why I thought it might be a good idea.

What the title says - I thought it might be interesting to use actual contemporary art pieces from living artists in the game as some important loot. The reason is mainly that I very much value games with attention to details that you don't notice at first, making them even cooler when you do. Using actual art pieces that are unique and have some value is one of those things from my point of view. I realize this idea will be all about what fits the games setting and what does not. I'm not able to properly judge it as I haven't been around for long, but since it's not really a historical game, merely one inspired some historical period and containing some anachronisms, it seems possible to find stuff that would work. Naturally I'm not coming here empty handed. But I don't know anyone who's doing art that looks like it's from the 1600s, best I could do is abstract art with no specific modern features, that could be made in the victorian era. I can imagine stealing it from a rich eccentric merchant or perhaps a weird cult, but it's no portrait or bust that would fit in a standard hallway. This is the sort of painting that I'm talking about: And there are also some small ceramic statues: These are both from an actual local artist and I could easily get permision to use them. The second one I already tried 3D scanning and retopologizing to see if it's possible with my equipment, and it is. What do you say?

Right, I mentioned that above, this is not a final lowpoly version, I will reduce the polycount and possibly make a shadow mesh, same with adding doors. It also has 4k textures right now. I wanted to get it working as is first so that I know that my workflow is correct and I can test it in game. Could you upload a zip of the test mission with model that you used so that I can try it here please?