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Hogwash

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Everything posted by Hogwash

  1. I'd like to create a small island. I'm starting with a large cube room with sky on the ceiling and walls, and then the sea bed/stone texture on the floor. However, even on normal ambient_world the join where sea meets the wall/sky is visible, and if I put on fog that just makes the sea bed grey and doesn't effect the sky at all. What is the best way of hiding this? Do I just reduce the volume of the ambient_world so it falls short of the far wall and make it dark, or is there a better way? Is the large cube a bad thing to be doing in any case? Thanks.
  2. I was under the impression that standalone TDM would be a 'long way off' but if you have made that much progress already it is very encouraging. I think Serpentine has a good point regarding the main page posts. A monthly 'round-up' post listing all released missions for the month along with other content would keep the home page fresh.
  3. I find it really sad that the mod has not attracted anywhere near as much attention as it deserves. The team have done a fantastic job, and FM makers plus other contributors have also put in many of hours building, testing, documenting and helping out the community. The toolset, itself the primary goal before any official campaign, is very polished and to get even this far is a great achievement. I'd love to be able to contribute something positive to the mod. I've been poking about in Dark Radiant this weekend with mixed results. I would have joined the beginners' contest if it wasn't too late. I'll try sticking with it and get at least a single mission released in the not-so-near future. Yes, it's a shame that interest on the part of the hardcore Thief community has been lacklustre. In some respects, e.g. the different universe, different 'feel', this is understandable but also completely unavoidable. I don't think too much time should be spent trying to convert the TTLG faithful aside from carrying on releasing great missions and showing them what we can do. Fresh blood is what will ultimately save TDM if it needs to be saved. People who may have never played Thief at all, or only played Deadly Shadows, that can bring their own ideas to missions and content. Spreading awareness is the key but also difficult when there are so many professional games and amateur mods out there. I keep thinking that a viral video would be a good idea but that is easier said than done, and you don't want to cheapen the mod or give off the wrong message. While Doom 3 is a requirement perhaps getting copies of the game out there to people might make a difference. I would be willing to contribute to a fund for this purpose. Perhaps you could have competitions for non-players to enter (e.g. contributing artwork, music or fiction set in the mod's universe) with the aim of getting them playing. If we had 100 copies of Doom 3 to give away and got only two mission makers and five regular players and forum posters from this it might still be worth the few hundred bucks shared between us.
  4. I've just finished this. It's a masterclass in design, difficulty, usage of ambient audio and readables. I definitely got a Thief 2 Shoalsgate vibe playing this. I really like how Braeden is becoming well established as a secondary location to Bridgeport. The way the mod's setting and mythos is developing organically is quite impressive.
  5. Sapphire HD 4870 512MB, bought in July '08 so coming up to four years old. It has served me pretty well although I must admit my gaming is pretty much limited to TDM plus the odd online shooter, and I haven't bought any new games for quite a while. I run TDM on my monitor's native res @ 1920x1080. It runs pretty well although I don't usually have AA or AF turned up as I'd rather have the performance gain. Sometimes it can be quite choppy, usually in parts of maps well known to be taxing. I'd love to be able to run TDM at a solid 60fps with all settings on high (and find the perfect gamma/brightness levels!) but that's going to take a hefty upgrade as well as perhaps some engine/mapping optimisation. I'm going to stick with what I have for the near future, although I'm thinking of going the small form factor route at some point down the line.
  6. Haha, wow, oh boy...I thought I had already upgraded but even the version number staring me in the face in the menu didn't make me twig. All fine on 1.07, thank you. I've just finished and didn't realise it was that small, although it was an enjoyable little diversion. With a little polishing and expansion it could be a good little introduction FM for new players.
  7. I tried playing this last night but was getting black walls in the corridor at spawn. Ambient settings didn't seem to make any difference. I downloaded it through the downloader (which should be on the fixed version I'm guessing) but the problem was still there even after replacing the pk4 manually with the one linked above. I played A Night to Remember instead and that worked fine. Any ideas?
  8. If loot is defined by the mod and given a default value, would it be a good idea to have a loot list somewhere, perhaps on the wiki, showing all of the loot objects, their default values and a little screen shot? Newbies might find it useful to get a feel for what they have to look out for. I really like the idea of Mandrasola being part of the mod's universe and appearing in other missions. Perhaps it needs to be given a street name(s) like real illicit drugs.
  9. I like the idea of spices and tobacco: something for which a servant or peasant might save up spare pennies and which serves as a small luxury to make life more bearable. A pouch, leather or otherwise, with a symbol on it to denote the contents might be distinct enough to indicate its value to the player. They could also be used as objective-based items, e.g. putting spices into food to make someone ill.
  10. I'm not much of a re-reader of books or a re-watcher of films or a re-player of missions. I have to wait a long time until I have forgot enough about the work before I revisit it so that there is still an element of the unexpected. For example, I hadn't played the original Thief games (TDP and TMA) for a few years until a few months ago when I played through them again in order. It was quite fun because although I remembered certain things like the order of missions, plots etc. I hadn't remembered every last secret and puzzle. I felt like I was discovering parts of the Thief world all over again. If you told me to play through The Dark Project again right now it would feel like a chore to slog through. Even if there was an update that changed the missions slightly. I'd rather mission updates be just for things like performance optimisation and bug-fix improvements. If you start putting in additional objectives, more secrets, new areas or other such content then for me it starts getting 'messy'. Walkthroughs for the old version(s) might no longer work properly, you don't know what versions different people have played when they talk about it, review it, ask for help, and so on.
  11. It needn't be an either/or proposition. You can run Thief 1-3 alongside TDM and enjoy fan missions for all of these without the universe imploding. The two communities have more in common than not and it's a love of Thief and the gameplay it provides that keeps us playing OMs and FMs right up to now. What I would like to see is TDM pick up enough steam, if it hasn't already, to become self-sufficient in as much as anybody with no interest in the official games would have enough TDM missions being released to keep them engaged, and the community would have enough activity so that the forums are busy, contests are held with a healthy mix of entrants, full campaigns and mini-campaigns are made over the years, and enough new blood is brought in to replace the rate of die-off from members that leave. It would be nice to go over to TTLG's FM forum and see as many releases for TDM as for T2, with lots of different people playing and commenting on them. Of course, what has been seen already is definitely encouraging and perhaps it's a little early to be getting pessimistic.
  12. I too have been looking at a RAM upgrade. I've currently got 2x2GB of Corsair XMS2 DHX DDR2 800 (the one with the silver comb heat spreader) and two spare slots on my motherboard. However, another 2x2GB pair of this RAM will cost me about £60 which seems a lot and not too far from what I paid about two and a half years ago when I bought my existing sticks. So like Baddcog I'm wondering if going from 4GB -> 8GB is going to make any appreciable performance difference for things like TDM.
  13. Regarding the hardcore TTLG contingent, I'm guessing the main consideration might be the different/undeveloped universe. Understandably, certain names, locations and characters can't be used due to IP issues and this might put a lot of people off. This is perhaps inevitable for a community that starts threads discussing Garrett's dick size. Even FMs and mission packs that feature new characters (e.g. T2X) have the benefit of an established gameworld and environmental conventions that are taken as given. You might be someone else and robbing a generic mansion, but you feel as though out there in the night everything else continues as normal, that Bafford's and Ramirez's estates are continuing to exist elsewhere in the City. The Thief series has the advantage of three professionally produced games that have created and built upon a rich tapestry of characters and places, and the games' plots are arguably key components of fan interest, if only for attracting and keeping fans in the first place before they discover FMs. Naturally that makes the challenge of attracting existing FM makers perhaps a lot more difficult than if the Thief IP could have be used. It's been said on TTLG already that The Dark Mod lacks a 'strong protagonist' and this is a perfectly understandable observation when you consider the emotional investment in the original games and the strong association with Garrett in particular. Of course, TDM as it is is a toolkit rather than a fully-fledged game (not to downplay the achievements made so far in any way), and although an 'official' mission pack was talked about it is quite an undertaking and there are more immediate and pressing concerns. It will be interesting to see how the mod's own universe develops, organically or otherwise.
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