[External art assets licensing]

13 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

Yes, that is exactly what "SA" \ Share Alike means. You must "share" in the "exact same way" (alike).

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". 

11 hours ago, VanishedOne said:

https://www.textures.com/faq-license.html#anchor-games says 'you need to release content that has been created using our materials under a closed source license'. I tried googling for "textures.com" site:thedarkmod.com and out of the results I got, the only one that clearly seemed to identify a texture as coming from textures.com was in R Soul's red button. That attribution is also in the readme packaged with it, which doesn't otherwise identify any licence, open or closed.

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.

[External art assets licensing]

6 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

Share Alike means that other projects can use TDM "game assets" and share them too as long as they also "follow these rules" (Alike).

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.

[External art assets licensing]

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: 

Quote

6.3

 

You are not permitted to:

 

(a)

 

sell or distribute any Content (modified or not) by themselves or in a texture pack, material, shader, scale modelling papers (pre-printed or digital), scrapbooking pack;

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?

[First impressions and overall polish]

On 3/24/2020 at 10:54 AM, STiFU said:

6.2. As far as I know, that's not supposed to happen. Can you give and example? Maybe a video or a location info (GetViewPos in console)

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

[First impressions and overall polish]

19 hours ago, chakkman said:

Master of Shadows is on the market for a couple of years now, there's been Steam sales for it, it was sold below 10 €, and, a lot of people will have bought it on sale. Also, it has a different setting, and is a fantasy game with orcs, elves, and goblins, while Thief/TDM are rather classic middle age, with fantasy elements, of course.

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. 

 

18 hours ago, freyk said:

tdm doesnt have an "official" installer,  you described the TDM updater.
the updater downloads (and updates) TDM gamefiles from other locations, including the training mission amd some other missions.
Yes, is normal that its takes long and can crash. (especially when it  comes from a slow mirror)

Our "unofficial" installer, create a folder on a user specified location, sets folder permissions, places the tdm updater inside the folder and starts the updater.
i recommend new users to run the installer, to avoid several beginner problems. 

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. 

 

7 hours ago, STiFU said:

TDM has been in the news numerous times and has won numerous awards. It's initial release dates back soooooo long ago! Anyone interested in stealth knows about us and if not, they live in a remote cabin without internet. The only thing we can improve is availability, e.g., through Steam, Epic etc., see below.

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.

7 hours ago, STiFU said:

In a project like this, it is not easy to guarantee that there a no copyright infringements, hence, nobody wanted to step up and be the legal entity for these contracts.

Absolutely understand. I believe it's solvable, but I get that a thing like this is way too much trouble. Too bad.

 

7 hours ago, STiFU said:

By the way, we currently have like 3 active coders + 2 who occasionally help out and they all do that in their free time, so they obviously pick projects they are interrested in. And gaining more publicity is usuallynot the primary interest of a coder.  

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 :).

[First impressions and overall polish]

7 minutes ago, chakkman said:

Remember that the game industry grew exponentially since then...

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? 

 

5 minutes ago, chakkman said:

What it lacks compared to a fully fledged game is a high quality, consistent feeling campaign.

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.

[First impressions and overall polish]

52 minutes ago, chakkman said:

The Thief games weren't that popular in the first place, and, this is a community mod, based on a pretty old game engine, which makes it a 100 times less popular even.

I also don't think stealth games have really taken off much in terms of popularity. Rather the opposite case. Most of the peeps these days prefer fast action, with not much to think. That's why stealth franchises like Thief, Splinter Cell, or Dishonored are dead, or have changed the whole gameplay direction. I think it's safe to say that this is very niche. But, like many niche genres, it has a strong fanbase, in the sense of a few people who are really into this stuff. 

TBH, I'm not even sure if promoting this more would make sense in terms of gaining popularity. I used to be pro for releasing the mod on Steam, but, frankly, I wonder how many people you really would reach that way. The people who are into such games probably already heard of TDM, and the people who don't won't be convinced by releasing the game on Steam or another platform. Leaving aside the problems which have been pointed out more than once why it will be very difficult to release this on Steam or another platform anyway.

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.

[First impressions and overall polish]

1 hour ago, freyk said:

And what are your opinions about installation procedure of tdm, vozka?
when using "Freyk’s Unofficial Installer" and the  tdm updater?

I used the official installer and while I didn't have problems with using it, I thought the process was a bit weird and confusing and it surprised me how long it took. I thought something like "oh, okay, it's probably downloading some missions from the library so that everything is up to date" and was disappointed when I realized that was not the case. I have not tried your installer yet, but from the screenshots it seems to look and work like a common installer most people are used to - I would definitely prefer that. 

[First impressions and overall polish]

46 minutes ago, STiFU said:

1. I think the Training Mission and the two Missions Saint Lucia and New Job are fairly easy and perfectly fine as a start. Plus, Saint Lucia has a lot of history, so it is a very important FM.

They're good missions and their difficulty is right. But Saint Lucia especially has problems. There's a wall you can walk through with a bit of effort, in place where it happened to me accidentaly. And right opposite of that is a wall that you cannot get closer to than about 0.5 m for some reason. There are also stairs in the courtyard that seem to have broken lighting (looks like they're fullbright). I can play it again and give you the positions if you want. The voiced tip about tipping over the hammer played in the wrong room, before I even managed to get to the room with St Lucia. And lastly there are two annoying things lacking polish. Firstly all the readables can be grabbed into the inventory, wich with the current inventory system creates lots of clutter or a need to drop everything back after reading. It would be much more sensible to have most of them readable in place. Secondly chests have frobbable bottoms, which makes grabbing items from them annoying. I see these things as outdated design which should be fixed.

The training mission has similar problems, plus some missing words in books.There's also the problem of the archery range, where you get a couple vine arrows without any explanation of how they work, and it's easy to use them to get into places you were not supposed to go and get stuck there. In the object manipulation training there's a tip about looking under a hat to find a ring, so you manage to find a hat, see that there really is a ring under it, but realize it's so tiny it's currently impossible to be frobbed. That's bad design for a tutorial mission. There are other details, like there's a chain in the barn behind the archery range hanging from the ceiling, which for some reason cannot be climbed although there are climbable chains in other missions. It may seem like a pointless detail, but you're teaching new players wrong things about the game.

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

2.3. Having bugged missions almost never happens. If we see that a mission got broken by the lastest release, we usually release a Hotfix for that.

I was just playing A Score to Settle and the main objective (

Spoiler

throwing Sykes into the privy

) did not work even though I checked in a youtube playthrough that I did everything right. Considering this mission already had some problems once after an update, I assumed that it broke again. I don't know though, may have been a one time bug, somebody else should probably check.

 

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

4. Never heard it! And I doubt the average player would care much. It's an open source community project after all. Nobody expects AAA-polish.

I admit I'm a musician and na audiophile so I may be biased in this regard. But I sincerely believe that in places where achieving AAA polish is relatively easy, it's absolutely worth doing so and it will help the game in the long run.

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

5. Known issue, see bugtracker.

Right, I only noticed the flashing issue and not the two other things in the bugtracker, but I'll look again.

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

6.2. As far as I know, that's not supposed to happen. Can you give and example? Maybe a video or a location info (GetViewPos in console)

Happened in the training mission in the first climbing training areas, trying to mantle up on the construction in the courtyard. I can go back and get the position later.

 

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

7.1. Yes, that's exactly why I added the frobhelper. Other than that, it is up to the mapper to scale the frob-boxes accordingly.

Right, thanks, I didn't know if that was an engine problem or a mapping problem.

[First impressions and overall polish]

One more thing regarding included missions:

"A better solution would be to do the above and also select and include say top 5 missions (could be done by community voting) that are great in both the concept and execution, technically up to date and with varying themes. If better missions come out, there can always be another vote and a different set of missions integrated in the next release."

There is another reason why this would be helpful: people modernizing assets (and I may be able to help here a little) could search which older or less detailed assets are used in the included levels and focus on improving those first, again to bring the overall polish higher. It would be great to have this as an automated tool that would show most often used assets in a set of levels, but I assume that's too much work with not enough benefit (and I haven't checked DarkRadiant yet to see if something like that exists already).

[First impressions and overall polish]

Hello everyone! 

I started playing The Dark Mod a few days ago and I'm pretty sure it's one of the best open-source games available, so naturally before even installing it (after reading reviews and seeing screenshots and videos) I was asking myself: Why isn't this more popular??

Sure, immersive sims are a bit of a niche, but some of them have a large number of raving fans recommending them everywhere 20 years after release - I see people recommending System Shock 2 and Deus Ex on sites like reddit at least once per month even though I don't watch gaming discussions a lot. Why aren't they recommending The Dark Mod just as much? What's different here?

In my first post here as a random nobody, I will criticize TDM, and I'm aware that it may come off as arrogant. I'm doing it because I'd love TDM to be more popular and well-known and I believe that looking at it with fresh and naive eyes (although after 20 years of gaming and with a little coding and 3d graphics experience) might provide some value in this case.

I'm strongly convinced that the key to not only retain new players and convert them into raving fans, but also for various potential media efforts to work well (including being on Steam, which as I understand it is still possible, although not planned right now) is overall polish and first impressions, which is an area where I consider TDM to be lacking the most. From the beginning I played TDM with a notepad open, writing down everything that I saw as an issue, especially those that seemed realisticly fixable. I'd like to contribute somehow, so I see this as a first step, perhaps I'll be able to do more in time.

Here it is:

1. Starting missions. I see this as one of the most important things, because nearly everyone will play any levels you include in the installation first and see them as an showcase of what TDM has to offer. Being thrown into a mass of missions to download with no easily reached information on their quality and limited other information is confusing and annoying.
   1. The best solution would be a complete high quality campaign, but that's not realistic. A good solution would be to fix issues that are present in the currently used levels and bring them up to date with best current practices. I don't remember having problems with the first mission, but I encountered several in both the training mission and The Tears of St. Lucia. By the way while the training mission is quite plain in some places, I believe that the concept of training on your own is good and I don't think it would have to be remade completely (as I saw someone saying around here).
   2. A better solution would be to do the above and also select and include say top 5 missions (could be done by community voting) that are great in both the concept and execution, technically up to date and with varying themes. If better missions come out, there can always be another vote and a different set of missions integrated in the next release.
2. Mission browser.
   1. The fact that the game has to restarted to play a new mission is annoying. But the bigger problem is that the game doesn't tell me that or why that is anywhere. How do I play a new map? Oh, I'm supposed to install it? But it's already installed, I just downloaded and installed the game and it says that the map is already included...? A tooltip explaining this shown after first launch would help, perhaps also using a different word than "install". 
   2. Missions have varying quality, sometimes simply because they were made for an older version of TDM when the state of the art was a bit different. Allowing voting and sorting by popularity would help tremendously. A featured most recently added mission could be shown by default, so that they have a chance to get ratings. 
   3. A possibility to flag missions as being bugged in the current release would also be great.
   4. There are some weird clunky behaviors. The most annoying I've noticed is that only one thing can be downloaded at once, so when a mission is downloading and I try to open the description of a different mission, it won't load until the mission download is finished. And to close the loading box I have to exit to main menu and then come back.
3. The loading is glacially slow. I realize this is probably a multifaceted issue complicated to solve, but couldn't the loading start in the background during the intro video/text, difficulty selection and shopping? That would be a huge improvement.
4. Sounds in the menu: the clicking sound when you put a cursor over a menu item gets very audibly cut if you quickly move your mouse from item to item. I realize this may seem like a small detail, but it's literally one of the first things a new player will hear and it gives the impression that the person implementing the menu sounds didn't care much. If allowing the sound to overlap and play more at once at the same time would be too much of a hassle, just use a super short click sound where it won't be as obvious.
5. Quicksave & Quickload
   1. It seems that the HUD overlay breaks for a fraction of a second when saving/loading, but I noticed that this is a known issue.
   2. The sound sometimes pops annoyingly, perhaps a super short fadeout/fadein would help.
   3. It's a bit weird that quickload doesn't start immediately when pressing the button. Even weirder that the game simply goes on until it starts and doesn't pause itself - that would help and should be easier to fix.
6. Movement
   1. Always run is not very usable. Believe me or not, I actually finished Thief Gold and TDS with always run and preferred it that way, the difference is that you could press shift to walk or ctrl to creep, while in TDM you have to pres shift AND ctrl at the same time to creep. That's really uncomfortable.
   2. I cannot mantle to those high above head places while running. I personally don't like this, but if it's a conscious design decision, the game should definitely tell me this and give some explanation during the training mission. Seems to be fixed in 2.08
   3. I seem to sometimes get quiet crouch-drops and sometimes not, even from low elevation, don't know why. 
7. Object manipulation
   1. it's very annoying to frob small items. This seems to be adressed for the next relase with an aiming dot if I understand it correctly, which is good, but I believe that small items like rings, individual coins or keys on corpses should also simply have larger frobbing areas. In the training mission I was not able to pick up a ring lying on a movable box at all. I believe that TDS used larger bounding boxes for item selection, so you didn't have to aim at tiny items precisely and it seems like a good solution to me.
   2. Item highlighting is sometimes nearly invisible - this happens with well-lit objects like candles or items right next to them. 
   3. Picking up a an item and resting it against the wall or furniture while still holding it results in repeated and yet weirdly spaced clanking sounds even when I'm not moving anything, not even touching my mouse. This is especially weird when it's a candle making metallic sounds even though the candlestick is not touching anything.
   4. Also, door sounds are SUPER LOUD, which is weird because a thief won't be banging doors, and weirder because most guards either ignore them or only notice them when standing very close.
8. Default keybindings for use item make no sense to me - how could I use a health potion or a flash bomb in the middle of a battle when the key (Enter or U) is nowhere near my left hand position or on the mouse? I mapped it to tab, no idea if that replaced any other key binding, but it seems to be working.
9. Not sure if this happens everywhere, might be a problem with older missions, but I've seen NPCs do such long strides when on stairs that they're nearly sillywalking, even though they're walking in normal speed.

 

This is all for now, I noticed more issues, but those seemed to be mission-specific and therefore more difficult to fix. I can write down issues I had with the 3 included missions if there's interest.