STiFU

This is a general TDM issue that has already been discussed a couple of times. I actually reported this myself once. I guess this will be dealt with in the next update of TDM.

I agree, but I also think that the falloff radius of AI sounds is in general a little too low. I can never localize an AI by it's footsteps because I simply don't hear them, while in T2, the sound of the footsteps was all a thief needed. On marble floors I can still hear them, but everything other than that is damn quiet. So aside from raising the falloff radius, it'd maybe be worth trying to normalize the AI footstep sounds a little bit, so that the more quiet AI sounds will become a little louder.

Ah sweet. That secret was nice... You really seem to love levers and buttons!

That's no bug. There's an invisible retina scanner that unlocks the door for him! But seriously, if it was implemented that he couldn't open the door anymore, after you stole his key, the team would also have to implement that he gets alerted once he discovers that the key was stolen and that he starts calling for some guards to bust the door open or at least search the key or the thief for him. I guess this was a gameplay choice. It would make ghosting a mission way too hard or even impossible in worst case scenarios.

I no-clipped through the level to check for that objective and while doing so, I noticed that there is another secret room with loot in it that I didn't discover before, although the mission stats screen showed that I got 1976 of 1976 in loot. (damn it, I spoiled the secret to me myself, but I still got no clue how to open it) So either the total loot score is broken as well, or there is another bug in TDM here. Still couldn't find that darn objective though... Anyway, I really gotta continue learning now. Damn TDM-addiction... And Tels, maybe I'll have some spare minutes this evening to setup a small testmap. But I can't promise anything, because I got some friends coming over and I somehow doubt they'll be interested in that...

Secret: About the optional objective, I played on difficult the first time and I didn't notice any new objective. Hmn... How is it triggered? Maybe it was broken due to all the bugged AI...

I haven't setup Dark Radiant and all that right now and I also gotta start learning for an oral exam on 7th in a few, so I ain't got the time right now for experiments. I can add it to the bugtracker with reference to this mission though, but this might not be universal enough and we don't even know for sure yet if it is really an issue with the height of the lightsource or not.

I played it again today, but on medium instead of difficult. The AI didn't get stuck in doors this time, blocking my way through the mansion, so it was a lot easier... I got all the loot now, but it was really hard to find. I only missed two secret places, one of them not being mentioned anywhere (I think). A little hint or at least some background information, why that loot was hidden there would've been nice, since that place is nearly invisible on lower gamma-settings in combination with an LCD display that suffers from bad contrast in dark places. Anyway, I discovered a couple of smaller issues. The first of them might need fixing by the Dark Mod team itself: by which you enter the mansion is so low, that the lantern appears to stick out of it at the top. The place is only lit up for brief moments although the lightgem is fullbright all the time. I assume this behavior is caused by the height of the lantern being linked to headbob. I guess this should be adjusted so that the player can light up any place he is capable of traveling through.I noticed some awkward effects on a tray. It seems like you wanted to fake a reflection or something, but it looks rather weird. Check out this screenshot.There are also a few other modeling and texturing issues, but I guess this is not the place to mention them. If you want, I can PM them to you though... You can also lean through a wall at one point of the map, looking into the blackness of the void.These issues didn't decrease the fun I had with this FM in any way though. I have never been that immersed in TDM until now. Congrats again and thanks!! Greebo, what optional objective? Is there a secret bonus objective? I just checked the objectives on every difficulty and there is nothing listed to be optional.

If that doesn't work, maybe a teleporter could be used right in the playerstart. Maybe the target location or different teleporters could be toggled depending on the difficulty.

Oustanding Mission. Kickass atmosphere and true thief feeling. I am seriously amazed. Nice to see what can come out of two months of work. I played it on difficult and it was really a high niveau FM. Found only 1500 in loot though. Gonna check it out again tomorrow. However it eventually got ridiculously difficult as the AIs started bugging. In the end, they blocked my way home, so I had to cheat my way outa there. (Any yet another reason to play it again tomorrow ) Congrats!

Springheel, are you seriously complaining that the secrets were too hard to find? ;-P Personally, I think the more challenging the better.... But the loot-objective could've been a bit lower I guess. Finding secrets shouldn't be mandatory. I agree on the Dave-issue though!!

All the videolinks are down as well, so I successfully checked for some on . It looks pretty good aside from some minor issues, like that bow-effect that is sometimes visible on the teleporter and that you actually see the playermesh for a brief moment when you go through the teleporter. Still definitely nice for use in a map like this...

For Oblivion I found 2048x2048 ground textures (and 4048x4048 Landscape textures), which is also quite a step up from 512x512. But here, you of course have more grounddetails to work with... Those texture packs were pretty good as well. To be honest, Oblivion was painfully ugly without them! There were really cool mods and graphic tweaks for that game.

I am always pro high-res texturepacks in old games. I recently played Deus Ex again and the highres texturepack improved the visual quality a lot... And I don't get it, that there's supposed to be some sort of magic going on with lowres textures. It's just blurry!! ;D

I too got a feeling to hit something, so I pulled out my sword on two guards and I noticed that both were killed by one blow to the head although I played on difficult. I wonder why they were so easy. Some of the guards in the Trainingmission were a lot harder... But that's no specific issue with this map, which was pretty nice. Liked the boarded doors and windows and all the destroyed stuff lying around. I had a minor problem frobbing these because of a too short frobdistance, but I got them in the end, so no biggie!! =)

Uh that Indie game looks interesting. Gonna check it later. But prey was definitely awesome too.

Yeah, there are quite a few glass-free 3d display techniques by now and some of them don't even require to be configured on a certain viewing distance, but they are really expensive, so it's useless again for a "mainstream" 3d package. But still very interesting... But I generally prefer polarized vs shutter-glasses too. It is indeed a little kinder to the eyes and you don't have to puke during a camera pan, because of totally blurred contours...

I don't know many TVs that emit polarized light for stereoscopic viewing, but the ones I know do it like this: The uneven lines are polarized horizontally and the even lines are polarized vertically. So it is an interlaced signal and the resolution of the picture seen by one eye is half as big as it could be. Maybe that's the reason they decided to go for shutter-glasses. Better a smaller temporal resolution than a smaller spatial resolution. Also you will probably see weird linestructures all over the screen.

Hehe, manual stereoscopy. Nice! The nvidia drivers ship with a tool for taking 3d screenshots nowadays though. About the eyestrain: The cameras have to be an exact eye-distance away from each other. Higher or lower distances cause headaches and worse. This is not much of a big deal anymore today though and I am almost sure that the distance can be adjusted to your personal needs somewhere in the driver settings (maybe registry).The cameras shoot parallel, which is basically not a correct representation of the human visual system, but it is the only option that allows viewers to perceive more or less correct 3d in the borderregions of a screen.This last point is mostly just an issue with movies, since it is caused by depth of field. Sometimes the viewer focuses on things that appear to be nearer to him, but aren't actually focused by the camera, which is why they are blurred. The brain tries to deblur those objects and is once again confused that it can't do anything about it. =) So the best thing to do in a 3d cinema is to actively focus on things, the director wants you to focus on... In games, it would be good to disable DOF for that matter.So in conclusion, we are pretty much done with too high eyestrain. It's really just up to the viewer now... The 120 Hz Monitors shouldn't be a problem in this aspect, because LCD are hold-type displays, hence no flicker can be perceived. If you can wear activated shutter-glasses without getting a headache, you're good to go and it's very unlikely that you're going to get an headache from those.

Just to make sure we understand each other correctly: I was talking about how stuff like you described can be realized in Radiant. I was not describing a scene with two separate rooms and an actual big-ass teleporter in one of them... =) Let me expand your example with the two doors. Imagine they were linked by a very small mystic U-shaped cave-tunnel in which you'd have to crouch. You pass through there and as you enter the original room again, you suddenly realize that you're in an enormous ballroom instead of the little lumber-room you started your travel from. This could be realized with a teleporter in the U-Tunnel without the player's notice. You have to use tricks like teleporters and cameras in Radiant because the tool is bound to the limitations of our known three-dimensional space. (That second example with the two rooms is a teleporter-trick too of course, or you build the same room again^^) EDIT: Now that I think of it, I guess you could also pull it off by converting the geometry of the ballroom and the lumber-room to static meshes and out-of-world one of them by a script, but a teleporter would be the easier solution.

Nvidia 3D Vision is apparently only compatible with direct 3d games currently and as far as I know, they don't intend to add openGL support. But the last time I checked was quite some time ago, so maybe, there are some good news for us by now! So far, I only tried 3D vision with anaglyph-glasses (those red-cyan plastic glasses) and that has already been an amazing experience, although you have a serious colorreduction and it leads to headaches on the long term, because the colorcontours aren't filtered completely, so your brain is getting kind of confused... (I tried to edit the colors in the registry, but nvidia turned this option off in the recent drivers) Anyway, all this fun is pretty expensive. You have to consider that despite the nvidia 3d package, you also need the non-plus-ultra hardware if you want to play the current games in full-detail 3d-optic, since you get an performance-loss of about 70% (if I remember correctly) when stereovision is activated. I tried stereovision in Crysis at work on a very fine machine (Intel i7 975 extreme, 12 gb ddr3, 2x EVGA Geforce GTX 295) and it was unplayable, even on lower detaillevels. And that machine already costs 4000€... I also spent some time eyeballing that package, but I couldn't try it anywhere yet and I don't want to buy the cat in the bag. You see, the shutter-system introduces some motionblur and I am concerned that it might somehow add to the native motion blur of the LCD, making it all a blurry sludge. Depending on the display, that native motionblur can be pretty bad as well. I'd prefer a solution with a plasma-display, which would also be a big cost factor again.

You would have to setup teleporters if you want to surpass the euclidian disposal of seperate rooms. Funny would also be a "shrinked" player, walking on walls/ceilings etc. Somehow I am thinking of an "Alice in Wonderland"-themed FM right now... Anyway, if you're planning to do stuff like that, I strongly encourage you to support it with a good story and not something like: "You have just been drugged. Fight your hallucinations and get a cure!"... I could very well imagine an insane person though, sneaking its way out of the asylum. Not really thiefy and no proper guardmodels available, but maybe interesting.

Ahh, that makes sense. I would have to correct my vote for "Story & Text" then... Can I revote, when I delete my vote? But still, some nice gimmick in there would have been better.

Yep, that one works best for me too. I've added the suggestion to the bugtracker (Issue #2065), just so that it doesn't get lost and anyone can pick it up, when he/she got some free time... Best way to find volunteers for this! I also strengthened that this is just a minor tweak of minimal importance.

Hehe I would've laughed. What a shame you've spoiled me the fun...