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Ah, pity I wasn't reading the forums back in February. I'm fond of that game, along with Bugbear's other early title, Rally Trophy. I was never too good at FlatOut, but it was always a hoot to play.

Complaint From Players The player must pick up candles before extinguishing them, and then the player must remember to drop the candle. The player must drag a body before shouldering it (picking it up), and the player must remember to frob again to stop dragging the body. The player finds this annoying or easy to make mistakes. For players who ghost, some of them have the goal of returning objects back to their original positions. With the current "pick up, use item, and drop" system, the item might not return easily or at all to its original position. For example, a candlestick might bounce off its holder. (See player quotes at the bottom.) Bug Tracker https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6316 Problems to Solve How can the "pick up" step be eliminated so that the player can directly use or interact with the item where it is in the game world? How can so much key pressing and mouse clicking be eliminated when the player wants to directly use an item? How can candles be extinguished and lanterns toggled off/on without first picking them up? How can bodies be shouldered without first dragging them? Solution Design Goals Make TDM easier for new players while also improving it for longtime players. Reduce tedious steps for common frob interactions. Make it intuitive so that menu settings are unnecessary. Do not introduce bugs or break the game. Terms frob -- the frob button action happens instantly. hold frob -- the frob button is held for 200ms before the action happens. (This can be changed via cvar: 200ms by default.) Proposed Solution Note: Some issues have been struckthrough to show changes since the patch has been updated. Change how frobbing works for bodies, candles, and lanterns. For bodies: Frob to shoulder (pick up) a body. Second frob to drop shouldered body, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Hold frob (key down) to start drag, continue to hold frob (key down) to drag body, and then release frob (key up) to stop dragging body. Also, a body can be dragged immediately by holding frob and moving the mouse. For candles/lanterns: Frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. Hold frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to extinguish candles and toggle off/on lanterns. For food: Frob to pick it up, and then frob again to drop. Hold frob to eat food. For other items: No change. New cvar "tdm_frobhold_delay", default:"200" The frob hold delay (in ms) before drag or extinguish. Set to 0 for TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Benefits Bodies: New players will have less to learn to get started moving knocked out guards. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players have played several missions before realizing that they could shoulder a body instead of dragging it long distances. Frob to shoulder body matches Thief, so longtime Thief players will find it familiar. Second frob drops a shouldered body. Players still have the ability to both shoulder and drag bodies. Compatible with the new auto-search bodies feature. Dragging feels more natural -- just grab, hold, and drop with a single button press. There is no longer the need to press the button twice. Also, it's no longer possible to walk away from a body while unintentionally dragging it. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Candles: New players will have less to learn to get started extinguishing candles. With TDM v2.11 and earlier, some players didn't know they could extinguish candles by picking them up and using them. Instead, they resorted to throwing them to extinguish them or hiding them. Hold frob to extinguish a candle feels like "pinching" it out. Once a candle is picked up, players still have the ability to manipulate and use them the same way they are used to in TDM v2.11 and earlier. For players who ghost and have the goal of putting objects back to their original positions, they'll have an easier time and not have to deal with candles popping off their holders when trying to place them back carefully. Set "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar to delay of 0 to restore TDM v2.11 (and prior) behavior. Solution Issues Bodies: Frob does not drop a shouldered body, so that might be unexpected for new players. This is also different than Thief where a second frob will drop a body. "Use Inv. Item" or "Drop Inv. Item" drops the body. This is the same as TDM v2.11 and earlier. This is the price to pay for being able to frob (open/close) doors while shouldering a body. Patch was updated to drop body on second frob, while allowing frob on doors, switches, etc. Candles: Picking up a candle or lantern requires a slight delay, because the player must hold the frob button. The player might unintentionally extinguish a candle while moving it if they hold down frob. The player will need to learn that holding frob will extinguish the candle. The player can change the delay period via the "tdm_frobhold_delay" cvar. Also, when the cvar is set to a delay of 0, the behavior matches TDM v2.11 and earlier, meaning the player would have to first "Frob/Interact" to pick up the candle and then press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish it. Some players might unintentionally extinguish a candle when they are trying to move it or pick it up. They need to make sure to hold frob to initiate moving the candle. When a candle is unlit, it will highlight but do nothing on frob. That might confuse players. However, the player will likely learn after extinguishing several candles that an unlit candle still highlights. It makes sense that an already-extinguished candle cannot be extinguished on frob. The official "Training Mission" might need to have its instructions updated to correctly guide the player through candle manipulation training. Updating the training mission to include the hold frob to extinguish would probably be helpful. Similar Solutions In Fallout 4, frob uses an item and long-press frob picks it up. Goldwell's mission, "Accountant 2: New In Town", has candles that extinguish on frob without the need of picking them up first. Snatcher's TDM Modpack includes a "Blow / Ignite" item that allows the player to blow out candles Wesp5's Unofficial Patch provides a way to directly extinguish movable candles by frobbing. Demonstration Videos Note: The last two videos don't quite demonstrate the latest patch anymore. But the gist is the same. This feature proposal is best experienced in game, but some demonstration videos are better than nothing. The following videos show either a clear improvement or that the player is not slowed down with the change in controls. For example, "long-press" sounds long, but it really isn't. Video: Body Shouldering and Dragging The purpose of this video is to show that frob to shoulder a body is fast and long-press frob to drag a body is fast enough and accurate. Video: Long-Press Frob to Pick Up Candle The purpose of this video is to show how the long-press frob to pick up a candle isn't really much slower than regular frob. Video: Frob to Extinguish The purpose of this video -- if a bit contrived -- is to show the efficiency and precision of this proposed feature. The task in the video was for the player to as quickly and accurately as possible extinguish candles and put them back in their original positions. On the left, TDM v2.11 is shown. The player has to highlight each candle, press "Frob/Interact" to pick up, press "Use Inv. Item" to extinguish, make sure the candle is back in place, and finally press "Frob/Interact" to drop the candle. The result shows mistakes and candles getting misplaced. On the right, the proposed feature is shown. The player frobs to extinguish the candles. The result shows no mistakes and candles are kept in their original positions. Special Thanks @Wellingtoncrab was instrumental in improving this feature during its early stages. We had many discussions covering varying scenarios, pros, and cons, and how it would affect the gameplay and player experience. Originally, I had a completely different solution that added a special "use modifier" keybinding. He suggested the frob to use and long-press frob to pick up mechanics. I coded it up, gave it a try, and found it to be too good. Without his feedback and patience, this feature wouldn't be as good as it is. Thank you, @Wellingtoncrab! And, of note, @Wellingtoncrab hasn't been able to try it in game yet, because I'm using Linux and can't compile a Windows build for him. So, if this feature isn't good, that's my fault. Code Patch I'll post the code patch in another post below this one so that folks who compile TDM themselves can give this proposal a try in game. And, if you do, I look forward to your feedback! Player Complaints TTLG (2023-01-10) Player 1: TDM Forums (2021-03-13) Player 2: Player 3: TDM Forums (2023-06-17) Player 4: TDM Discord (2021-05-18) Player 5: TDM Discord (2023-02-14) Player 6: Player 7: Player 8:

Its not that people are dismissing the game because of lack of shouldering, but rather a combination of things. That would be a real argument that the following occurs; 1. People don't know how to keep from making noise when moving stuff around (holding creep). 2. People don't know when black jacking works and when it doesn't (general options menu toggle). 3. Blackjack hits overhead stone overhead archway or wooden foundation (was fixed). 4. Picking up a blackjacked guard should be easy and players should know how to do it right away (new). 5. Not know how to extinguish candles and lanterns (easier and new). 6. Not knowing about general gameplay tips specific to missions (new). 7. Not being able to use favorite addons together (new). 8. Being able to know how much loot is left in a mission and mission stats like stealth score mid mission to properly ghost w/o too much spent on replaying parts of a mission (pending and in a addon). 9. Guards either searching for the noise disturbance for too long, or giving up too quickly and thus making some small missions either really tough for small mistakes or far too easy to get through (difficulty changes proposed by some). Many of these are not fixable without a global tip system for first time players, a expanded tutorial mission, and quality of life changes (a general gameplay change is not always about accessibility, options and cvars exist for that reason, but sometimes its about making it so that a button press should do what most players intentions aim to do, 95% of the time.

@snatcher I understand that when you feel your work doesn't live up to your goals that you don't want it out in the wild advertising your own perceived shortcomings but that leads to a troubling dilemma of authors who are never satisfied with their work offering fleeting access to their in-progress designs then rescinding them or allowing them to be lost. When I was a member of Doom3world forums, I would often see members do interesting experiments and sometimes that work would languish until someone new would examine it and pickup the torch. This seemed like a perfectly viable system until Doom3world was killed by spambots and countless projects and conceptual works were lost. I guess what I am trying to say is that mods don't need to be perfect to be valuable. If they contain some grain of a useable feature they might be adapted by mission authors in custom scenarios. They might offer instructive details that others trying to achieve the same results can examine. It would be great if known compelling works were kept somewhere safe other than via forum attachments and temporary file sharing sites. I suppose we used to collect such things in our internal SVN for safe keeping but even that isn't always viable. If folks would rather not post beta or incomplete mods to TDM's Moddb page, perhaps they would consider creating their own Moddb page or allow them to be added to my page for safe keeping. Please don't look at this as some sort of pressure campaign or anything. I fully understand anyone not willing to put their name next to something they aren't fully happy with. As a general proviso, ( if possible \ permitted ) I just want to prevent the loss of some valuable investigations and formative works. The end of Doom3world was a digital apocalypse similar to the death of photobucket. It is one of my greatest fears that TDM will become a digital memory with only the skeletons of old forum threads at the wayback archive site.

Congrats on the release! Remember to check ThiefGuild as well as the DarkFate forums (via Google Translate) for additional feedback.

Just curious, based on this discussion: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19239-soft-r-gamma/?p=427350

A couple more: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21739-resolved-allow-mantling-while-carrying-a-body/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22211-feature-proposal-new-lean-for-tdm-212/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22198-feature-proposal-frob-to-use-world-item/ https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22249-212-auto-search-bodies/

Ever since I worked on "Chalice of Kings" with Bikerdude, I have wanted to get flame particles with new particle glares into the core mod. My reasoning was that the candles have glares and the un-glared torches look mismatched. This proposal was met with mixed reactions, so (knowing the history of TDM feature proposals...) I have created a technical demo. You may download it here: zzz_flameglare.pk4.txt (fixed) Just rename without the .txt extension at the end and place it in your Darkmod directory. Here are some screens. Using particles for this is probably the wrong way to go now that Duzenko has an emissive light feature in his branch: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19659-feature-request-emissive-materialsvolumetric-lights/

Author Note: This is a brand new mission and a new entry into the accountant series. There are some different than usual puzzles in this FM, so if you find yourself stuck try to think about your pathway forward in a logical manner. And if you're still having troubles then pop by this thread and ask (preferably with spoiler tags). This FM is brand new and serves as the first installment in The Accountant series, a few years back there was a small prologue style mission released however I felt that it did not represent The Accountant series so I decided to go back to the drawing board and do a whole new mission that's larger, has a better level design and has a story that lines up closer to what I plan to do with the accountant series. The mission is medium sized and you can expect between 30-90 minutes to complete it depending on your playstyle. Beta Testers Captain Cleveland Crowind Kingsal PukeyBee Skacky SquadaFroinx Voice Actors AndrosTheOxen Epifire Goldwell Stevenpfortune Yandros Custom assets Airship Ballet Bentraxx Bob Necro Dragofer DrKubiac Epifire Kingsal MalachiAD Sotha Springheel SquadaFroinx Available via in-game downloader File Size: 233 MB - Updated to v 1.1 (01.06.2018)

"...to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure about a very old and feeble man who pays for his few necessities with Spanish gold." Good day, TDM community! I'm Ansome, a long-time forums lurker, and I'm here to recruit beta testers for my first FM: "The Terrible Old Man", based on H.P. Lovecraft's short story of the same name. This is a short (30-45 minute), story-driven FM with plenty of readables and a gloomy atmosphere. Do keep in mind that this is a more linear FM than you may be used to as it was deemed necessary for the purposes of the story's pacing. Regardless, the player does still have a degree of freedom in tackling challenges in the latter half of the FM. If this sounds interesting to you, please head over to the beta testing thread I will be posting shortly. Thank you!

The real St. Alban was a pagan who became a celebrated religious personality, this All Saints Day 2010 The Dark Mod places its own spin on this mythical figure. Screenshots: Intro: "'Business' has been slow lately, even more so after most of my gear got snatched during a Watch raid... I've since been forced to hit the streets and pick pockets for a living. But my luck was about to change, last night I was approached by a red hooded figure with a proposition... As we sat down in a dark corner of a nearby inn, he told to me that the Builders of St. Alban's Cathedral in the Old Quarter had recently unearthed a discovery that might lead to the final resting place of some saint." " But before I do anything, I need to get my tools and stash from the evidence room at the local watch station." "with the hawks, doves will congregate they will drop honey from the cliffs wine will surge over the earth the sheep will wander harmlessly with the wolf then the wicked will rise, but to retribution" - 'scripture of St Alban' There is a new version out now, see the following thread St Albans Cathedral version 1.6 Build Time: about 2-3 months. Thanks:- Huge respect to the Dark Mod team for such a great mod and for all the hard work they put into it and continue to put into it. Special thanks to Fidcal, Serpentine and others for their help on the forums and to Testing:Ugoliant, Baddcog, Grayman, Lost soul, Bjorn and Baal (for doing all the Vp work in the town. Readables: Ungoliant and Mortemdesino for all awesome work on the readables. Resource: Fids, Grayman, Ungoliant - guis, models & images. Misc: Loren Schmidt - the author of the map I based the cathedral on. Info: # Like Thief2, some things are climable, pipes, wall vines etc.. You can also drop some of the keys, some door that are frobbabe mean there is another way inside - explore u taffer! # Due to TDM being a lot more of a resource hog than T2 I have been forced to limit the number of Ai in the mission, but they have better placement than my last mission. # On all difficulty levels the player starts with vertualy no tools/weapons, there are weapons to be found - read, read, read! # For the love of all that is holy, read the briefing otherwise you will problems completing the mission. Known issues:- # This mission will have less than optimal fps at a few points on the map, mid range DX9 card(X1900/GF7800) or higher required. # On low end PCs I recommend, V-sync is off, AA is off, Aniso is 4x or lower and that any and all background apps are closed.

Yeah it would be cool to see some more detailed statistics and it’s a shame they aren’t really captured. Since we are talking about fan mission platforms, where players also make the content for the game, I feel like the best thing we’ve got is you can look at the number of content releases for the games. Keep in mind the graph counts campaigns as single missions - so for example NHAT and TBP both count as 1 mission. A good year for TDM has has approaching maybe 50% - mostly we’re 25-30%. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152494 You could also look at the number of ratings thief missions get on https://www.thiefguild.com/ vs TDM ones, but that is pretty iffy in that you could chalk that up to more awareness of the site in the thief community than TDM Out of curiosity is there a reason a thief player can’t be a new player? I kind of think a player is a player and new players would be ones who are playing the dark mod who weren't? Is there disagreement the base of players most likely to pick up the game are fans of the thief games? They are certainly the most fruitful place to find feedback on the game beyond the sphere of this forum that I have seen. When we were trying to finish up SLL there was a lot of discussion on the forums about how long it had been since there was a release for the game. I am thankful that the stats show at least some stability over the years in terms of releases for TDM, but the trend for all of the games is decline. Not doing anything is a valid response if that’s what the devs want to do - it is not possible to provide evidence that any effort will slow that inertia. As a player and content maker I would just prefer trying to find feedback where it is offered from players who were willing to try the game but ultimately could not engage with it and see if there is anything that can be done within reason to ease them into the game. The game has a lot to offer imo. All those players are potential contributors - contributions in turn attract players - it’d be nice to see the cycle go on as long as it can.

Welcome to the forums Ansome! And congrats on making it to beta phase!

On the off chance this is a case of ignorance and not stubbornness... Imagine if every object in the game only had one interaction mode. What would you want that interaction to be? For candles and lanterns would you rather be able to put them out or pick them up? For bodies would you rather be able to shoulder them or drag them around by their limbs? Now imagine for whatever you decided, the game only let you do the other thing. For new players who don't realize TDM supports multiple interaction modes, that is how the game feels right now. The essence of the proposal is that whatever interaction is the most indispensable--the "primary action"--that should be mapped to the default short frob that everyone is familiar with. The less important "secondary" action gets mapped to the new long frob, which we hope will be more discoverable than the use-while-frobbing combo. We might not all agree yet which actions make the most sense as the primary vs the secondary, or what should happen in all of the obscure edge cases, but I hope we at least have a consensus that this idea in principle is a worth deploying as an accessibility concession.

The fewer words you need to explain your mechanic the better it is designed: For static objects press "frob" to interact with them. For moveables press "frob" to grab them and "use" to interact with them. TDM follows these simple rules nicely. @Daft Mugi I welcome this initiative and I encourage you to carry on experimenting. Here are my thoughts: Interacting with moveable lights: currently to extinguish a candle I must "frob" it and "use" it. If I extinguish a candle unintentionally it is my fault (I pressed the wrong button). With your design, is it my fault if I frobbed a candle 201 milliseconds and extinguished it unintentionally? Long-pressing buttons in TDM is faulty because there isn't any visual timer / bar / whatever. Dragging vs shouldering a body: interacting with the limbs of a body is the more challenging of the two mechanics. Do we really want to promote the easiest of the two and make the challenging mechanic more difficult? Besides, with your design I unintentionally drop bodies often while I intend to interact with doors, is it my fault? In my opinion the short term solution is a very long frob (0,5 secs or longer) to extinguish a candle and/or shoulder a body. Leave the original mechanic intact but have the new functionality somewhere in there for those who want them. The long term solution is something else: what would you do if you were to build these mechanics from scratch? Think big. PS1: Developers should never point players to anything that isn't available in the in-game settings. cvars should be there for 1) debugging 2) testing 3) very special cases, mainly accessibility / usability. PS2: "This is how Thief does it" sounds like a lame excuse. Thief is dead, TDM is alive!

Perhaps I am mistaken, but this seems to have been the position on other accessibility features not needing to be forward for existing players in places like the main menu as long as they are addressable by cvar? But they will at a minimum be able to move a body right away without sinking hours into the game thinking they can only drag them around. As far as the merits of double click vs long press it sounds like it is worth testing, but can’t say without feeling it out. Long press has been working fine on my end.

It's not hard. Nor would it be hard if you had to simultaneously hold down 3 different key modifiers, or enter a sequence of 5 directional inputs timed with key presses like a fighting game combo, and yet I bet you would agree that would be ridiculous. For any software there is value in streamlining the most common interactions thathas nothing to do with accessibility. When most players click a body 95% of the time they don't want to nudge around the limbs, they want to pick it up and move it. When most players click a candle 99.8% of the time they don't want to move it, they want to put it out. It doesn't make sense for these most common interactions to require 2 actions when they could require just 1. That's not to say that this is a obligatory change that will massively improve the quality of the game. You are right that it is a very minor thing, but if the willingness exists to create a patch to change it then it seems like a no-brainer to make it the default. That's my interpretation of this thread.

These usability/accessibility changes have been committed as code rev 10446. As a bonus, the "Show Frob Helper" setting now has presets -- committed as code rev 10447. The presets are: Always = show crosshair dot at all times Hover = instantly show dot on highlight Fade In = gradually show dot on highlight No = never show dot

New script for mappers: my flavour of a fog density fading script. To add this to your FM, add the line "thread FogIntensityLoop();" to your map's void main() function (see the example in fogfade.script) and set "fog_fade" "1" on each foglight to enable script control of it. Set "fog_intensity_multiplier" on each info_location entity to change how thick the fog is in that location (practically speaking it's a multiplier for visibility distance). Lastly, "fog_fade_speed" on each foglight determines how quickly it will change its density. The speed scales with the current value of shaderParm3, using shaderParm3 = 1000 as a baseline. So i.e. if shaderParm is currently at 1/10th of 1000, then fade speed will be 1/10th as fast. Differences to Obsttorte's script: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/14394-apples-and-peaches-obsttortes-mapping-and-scripting-thread/&do=findComment&comment=310436 my script uses fog lights you created, rather than creating one for you. Obsttorte's script will delete the foglight if entering a fogfree zone and recreate it later more than one fog light can be controlled (however, no per-fog-light level of control) adding this to the map requires adding a line to your void main() script, rather than adding an info_locations_settings entity with a custom scriptobject spawnarg in my script, mappers set a multiplier of fog visibility distance (shaderParm3), while in Obsttorte's script a "fog_density" spawnarg is used as an alternative to shaderParm3 smaller and less compactly written script fogfade.scriptfogfade.map

The devs didn't title this thread, and @datiswous said they're attempting to mislead people by using Russell's name and a retro style to make it resemble Thief, which is cynical. I grew up on forums like I'm sure anyone who likes a game from '98 did. I actually left the Discord immediately after joining it because it was more off-topic doom-posting than anything relevant to the mod. I thought the forums might be better, but it's mostly just grown men yelling at clouds and telling strangers how mature they are, and a few brave souls actually developing anything. Depressing place, I'll just stick to enjoying new missions every 6 months without an account.

True, but, 1. this thread is called "Western stealth FPS with Stephen Russell", and, 2. nothing you said changes anything for me. The gameplay still doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. And, if you really think this forum is cynical, then you don't visit forums much. Actually, the majority of the users are are pretty mature, unlike in other forums.

We didn't make the holidays (such a busy time of year) so here's a New Year's gift, an unusual little mission. Window of Opportunity Recover an item for a regretful trader out in a wilderness setting, and discover more! Available within the in-game mission downloader or: Download: http://www.thedarkmo...ndetails/?id=79 Alternative: https://drive.google...WTMzQXZtMVFBSG8 Some unorthodox gameplay on regular/ghost difficulties. (Arachnophobes might prefer short mode...) Please expect to need your lantern in regular and ghost modes! Short ("easy") mode is a smaller map, so if you are looking for areas others reference below, or 100% of the loot, you'll need to play on another mode. I wanted to create my first mission before I became influenced by too many others' ideas, and limited myself to what has been done before. As such, this mission is not set in a city/town, and has some features that are likely to be provocative. There's a section some really like, which others don't, either way I kept it short to not last too long. That being said, I hope you do find it fun! :-) Special thanks to those who provided valuable testing and feedback: Goldwell, Kyyrma, plotzzz, 161803398874989, PPoe & Bikerdude (who also contributed a sound). (Please remember spoiler tags to not expose things meant to be discovered by playing.) Like so: [spoiler]secrets[/spoiler] If you are having trouble finding the main objective, here's what to pay attention to in the mission for hints: There is a spot it's possible to get stuck on the ground in the corner by the cliff/rockfall where there's a rope laying on the ground, please take care if you poke around there!