vozka

He seems really bitter about the project for some reason, quite strange considering this all happened 20 years ago. Having seen the footage it seems that is definitely more than "a smattering of barely populated test levels" and I can see a group of fans making a game out of it.

I thought about this as well and on one hand I'm excited about the idea but on the other it would bring so many changes I'm not even sure if it could work. You'd have to redesign many of the stealth tropes at least. For example, being in a room with dark walls while a guard holding a torch passes through might be fine, but being in a room with white walls might not because the amount of reflected light would be high enough to make you visible. Awesome. Being careful of other people seeing you casted shadow. This would raise the difficulty so much (if it's implemented in any way realistically) that it might be less awesome. Being seen through reflections in windows, mirrors or water. Possibly leading to frustrating situations where you have no idea how you were seen, unless the game specifically tells you. I'm sure there are many other things you could think of.

Perhaps I was unclear because that is not the case. I am complaining that the way the delay is manifested in the game looks wrong, not about the delay itself. The delay itself is probably pretty realistic, but in real life the guard would not react by completely ignoring something he's seen and going on with is life for a few seconds before suddenly turning around and attacking the character. He would probably stop and be confused before realizing what's happening and then attack. I will have to focus on it next time I'm playing because this is just something that I realized now after reading this thread, not something that I focused on recently. I have not changed any of the AI settings and I think it happens when I'm partly lit and the guard is pretty close.

On the topic of guards, is anybody bothered by how they don't respond to noticing the player immediately but after a short delay? Seems like it might be intentional because most people don't have inhumane reflexes and it takes a moment of confusion to realize what's going on when somebody surprises you. But the issue is that between the moment when a guard has you in his line of sight and when he starts acting, he usually just continues what he was doing. This creates weird situations where guards just walk past you on their patrol after clearly seeing you and then suddenly turn around, yell and attack you. From a gameplay perspective obviously it's not a big issue, it just often looks wrong. So I was wondering if that's intentional or what was the motivation. I'm thinking that playing some sort of "confused, looking around" animation on the guard would make this situation look much better.

There's no simple way to add polygons and make the model look better without a lot of work. What might make more sense would be replacing low-res textures. Those imo are more pain to look at and more often used right next to high resolution textures on the same surface or in the same room. After playing a few games (Thief 1 & 2 among others) with neural network upscaled textures, I believe this technique could be used with success. It takes a while to tune the processing pipeline so that the textures aren't oversharpened, noisy etc., but the results can be good. It takes a while to select the right textures, process them (often needs hand retouching for seamless texturess for example, and alpha channels are not always supported) and test them in-game, but it's doable.

What a great mission. I have no opinion about the various small changes - I enjoy them as they make the mission feel fresh, but I can't say if I prefer them or not. Streamlining the lockpicking is nice on one hand, but on the other hand I've had some tense moments where the timing of a patrolling guard was tight and having to switch between lockpicks and trying to pick some door while he's coming round the corner and nearly breathing down my neck made the situation even more exciting. But I appreciate the effort made so that we can experience something else :). What I liked about the mission the most is how polished and balanced everything was. Like your other missions that I played the difficulty is just fine, the mission is large and nonlinear enough to be fun, but starightforward enough to not be frustrating. Very enjoyable, including the side contracts, it just flows really nicely. I got stuck at the main objective for a while, but there were several hints around, I just wasn't attentive at first. Oh, and bonus points for replacing the mission accomplished sound, always appreciated. And the main menu is nice too.

Gaming laptops are generally bad, but there used to be office style laptops with dedicated GPUs that work reasonably well. I have an 11 years old HP Probook 6xxx like that with aluminium frame that's still working well, that particular line used to be really good and cheap. That's a thick brick from before the style of super thin "ultrabooks" though, which are even worse for cooling than laptops before that. No idea if somebody still makes laptops like that, maybe Lenovo, but those are going to be expensive.

Having limited second hand knowledge of how politics actually works in my country from various friends and acquaintances who are politically active, I find any theories about a "plan" fabulously optimistic. Ime when any significant change happens it's either chaos or greedy people who do not care about anybody else, but almost never any actual plan.

Savefile for The Black Mage here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CHXidcfVLtxcF2JebQjRB5kXfebOL1pE/view?usp=sharing This is the non-crashing bug, where the bow merely doesn't work. I have a water arrow in my hands in the savefile and when I try to fire it, it doesn't work and the animation is broken. I'll try to record a crashdump if I reproduce the arrow in the face crashing bug. EDIT: The bug happens when loading the save in a clean install, at least on my machine. After "fixing" it through switching weapons and reloading the same save it doesn't happen again, like I already mentioned. However if I "fix it", restart the game and load the save it does happen again. So the issue lies in some state that doesn't reset through loading but does reset when launching the game.

I haven't been able to reproduce the crashing bug yet. However I encountered this again twice in The Black Mage and I have a save where it happens after loading a game. I can upload the save here if you want. However I observed that when I switch to a different weapon and back, the bug gets fixed and doesn't happen even after I load the same savefile again. When it happened first in this mission I fixed it by switching and then loaded the save and tried to reproduce it but couldn't. However until I switch weapons I can load the save repeatedly and it always happens. I didn't try shutting down the game and then starting it back up and loading the savefile again. Maybe that would work and reproduce the bug. But I'm not trying it just yet because it's possible it would just fix the issue again and I'd lose this save that reproduces the bug. Is there anything I can do now? Look at some logs, post the savefile so somebody can investigate?

I'll just offer some encouragement - I played Thief Gold (and later Thief 2) for the first time maybe 3 years ago and I think the game aged very gracefully overall. I don't have any problems with old/retro games in general, so I may be a bit biased, but apart from the graphics (for which I recommend the AI texture upscale mods, less blur without changing the overall graphics direction) it felt I'd even say fresh compared to many modern games.

Since I posted about this in 2 different threads, to sum up: 1. Non-crashing bow bug: sometimes after loading a game I cannot use the bow at all. Pushing left mouse button brings up the bow and immediately puts it down again, releasing does nothing. Switching to a different weapon and back fixes it. Happened definitely with broad arrow, maybe with water arrows, and I observed it in Iris and Hazard Pay. 2. Crashing bow bug: the game would crash immediately after headshotting an NPC with a broad arrow, when the arrow made contact with its face. In all cases it was a close shot, from a meter or so when the NPC was either already attacking me or about to. Observed in Iris (don't remember which NPC, but it was a human) and Hazard Pay (a zombie). I do not use the bow aimer. My Darkmod.cfg is attached. Now this is pretty interesting because I also run MSI Afterburner. I use it to slightly underclock my GPU and turn up the fans because the GPU is an older GTX 970 and it runs too hot otherwise. However I do not experience crashes in any other games (some more demanding than TDM, some less) and I also didn't get any crashes in 2.09. And I didn't get any crashes with water arrows. Darkmod.cfg

The same crash (right after headshotting an NPC that was attacking me with a broad arrow) happened to me in Iris. So that's probably not it either.

For the record I do not use the bow aimer so that's probably not it. I may try the other changes you suggest.

A very nice mission! I admit it felt a bit underwhelming at first when I thought that it's "just" a well-made city mission, after playing some of the other recent amazing missions... But it wasn't, it was something else, so good work! By the way the secret Grayman's area was beautiful. Great idea. I encountered some bugs though, although some may be 2.10 bugs, so here they are:

Great mission! I'm not a big fan of horror missions, but I can play underground zombie adventures anytime. And this was a great one. Very much enjoyed the size, verticality, the way you get to see different places from more points of view in different parts of the mission and really the level design overall. Beautiful. Grouping zombies and blowing them up with a fire arrow was very satisfying. Played on hard because I wasn't in the mood for save rooms and the difficulty was fine, not too difficult, although I did savescum quite a bit to land headshots. Found 3 out of 5 secrets. Question: I encountered a few bugs, some of them possibly 2.10 bugs not specific to your mission:

In the words of the great poet Sir Mix-a-Lot, it's so... Big! Fantastic mission, it's not just about the size of course, it's so well made, detailed and cohesive. Surely one of the best missions so far. Sometimes I'm a bit unhappy that TDM tends to be a bit less lighthearted and more serious than Thief, but how could I complain with missions like this. I'll probably go back at some point, I'm sure I've missed a lot. Got less than 5k loot, but still spent over 3 hours playing it. I don't have the patience to fully explore everything right now, so maybe a second playthrough in the future will provide even more than this one.

Nah, I did my best tinkering with it. I guess I was just unlucky with crappy displays. I hope that OLED technology improves enough to reduce the effects of burn-in so that it can become mainstream. I'm moderately happy with my IPS panel - those things are absurdly cheap for the quality nowadays, I edited photos on a 100 USD Samsung monitor and had few surprises when I had them professionally printed - but the contrast of OLED displays is really exciting.

Damn, all the CRTs I used back then were bright with vivid colors but had terrible black levels, they were more dark grey. Did we just use poor people equipment?

I don't think Russia could be self-sufficient with success because it lacks the infrastructure to reach a lot of its natural resources and to refine them. It's only rich in theory in a similar way that many African countries are "rich". It also lacks high tech industries in general. Tech can be supplied from China, but what's more probable than China and Russia vs the rest of the world is that China will economically exploit Russia because that's just what they do (they're doing it already, buying and extracting resources in Siberia and creating pockets of Chinese population, so far small ones) and they have the upper hand now, hurting Russia in the long run. China may be trying to become self-sufficient with imports, but their whole economy is based on exports and there's no way that's going to change. For that they need the west to exist in a non-collapsed state because the Russian market is not going to be big enough to replace the west in decades even in a best-case scenario for them. This situation could in fact easily be used to sow discord between Russia and China by the west and it would be the smart thing to do, but I don't know if any western leaders have the balls to do that. Warsaw pact was a coalition of totalitarian states that even used it to oppress and murder its own citizens. That is not a useful comparison. Even in the stupid Iraq war with made up weapons of mass destruction "we" managed to depose a murderous dictator. This is true of most NATO operations, even the ones that are seen as screw ups are rarely black & white. There's is nothing to redeem the invasion of Ukraine, that's what makes it strange and why the reaction to it was so strong.

I think you overestimate the political culture and activity of common citizens in Russia. It's hard to describe how much common Russians outside of the largest cities are used to suffer under whatever tzar is currently leading the country and mind their own business. And Putin is just one person in a whole huge interconnected structure of oligarchs and ex-kgb mafia. He may be a level crazier than the rest of the structure at this moment, but I don't see any significant change happening if somebody gets rid of him. Long term maybe, but certainly no revolution or immediate positive development. In any case Putin being removed or NATO going into war with Russia is nothing more than fantasy at this point and I don't see that as particularly useful.

I don't think it's reasonable to say that the situation with refugees from African countries is the same as the situation with refugees from Ukraine. I'm not saying that African refugees are somehow "bad" because I understand they have no interest in dying in a war that they probably don't care about and don't view it as "their" war. I wouldn't want to do that either and I never spoke against accepting them. But at the same time with Ukraine the situation is quite different. The message is pretty clearly "we want to take care of this war and return to our country ASAP, just let us get our families to safety and give us as much military support as you can". Also Ukrainians are culturally closer to us and most of the countries that the refugees are going to already have sizeable Ukrainian minorities, so the citizens have a feeling that they "know them". The transports are more organized and most people have legal documents. It may not be fair, but it's obvious that in such situation the refugees are much more accepted. Your list of military operations is nice, but I don't think it tells much on its own. I don't know about all of them, but those that I do know about I'd argue none are nearly as black and white as what's happening in Ukraine. But to be honest I don't really want to go into it further. Arguing about what NATO or the US did wrong while there are people dying under Russian aggression, some of whom I met in person, somehow doesn't feel appropriate. The first wave of refugees is already here and me and my family are collecting aid for Ukrainian mothers with children sleeping in a gym not far from here, will be driving it to them in the evening. That's a better use of time than arguing anyway.

This is not at all about reelections, this is about starting world war 3. As soon as NATO units get involved, that means an all out NATO vs Russia war, and since in a conventional war Russia would obviously eventually lose, it would probably mean a nuclear war because Putin would think he has nothing to lose anyway. There isn't much more the rest of the world can do than supply Ukraine with a shitton of money and weapons and sanction Russia to hell. It probably won't be enough, Russia still can drain Ukraine through sheer numbers even through its incompetence. But there are situations where no good solutions exist, only more or less bad ones. What would have helped is if we had at least half as strong of a reaction to Russia occupying Crimea, the "separatist republics" or even Georgia in 2008. But it's too late for that.

I see your point and respect that your experience with NATO and the US army is different than ours. But I think this is a bit simplistic point of view. The primary reason for the existence of a strong army is not to win wars, it's to deter others from starting wars. If you look behind the borders of Europe and US, there's still a surprising number of more or less armed conflicts regularly happening, sometimes significant ones and sometimes smaller ones like violent border disputes. All of that has big consequences on the economy, human development etc. Pretty much nothing like that is happening to NATO members, and while that has more than one reason, being backed by the best military alliance in the world is a big one. This is a bit like having a good IT department in a company - when it's doing its job, you don't even notice it's there, but when it actually stops working, things go to crap fast. You can of course have a different opinion, but most geopolitics experts would disagree with it.

I believe that's just a red herring. I know Putin claimed that's what he wants at some point, but like a week later he demanded that NATO gets out of central and eastern Europe altogether and returns to its pre-1997 state, which again seems like an excuse to start the war more than anything because he must have known that's a completely unrealistic demand.