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https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152224 There is a new mapping contest over on TTLG for the Thief: Deadly Shadows 20th Anniversary and the organizers were kind enough to include The Dark Mod along with all of the Thief games as an options for making a mission to submit as an entry. The deadline is a year from yesterday and the rules are pretty open. I recommend going to the original thread for the details but I will summarize here: Rules: - The mission(s) can be for Thief 1, Thief 2, Deadly Shadows or The Dark Mod. - Collaborations are allowed. - Contestants can use any custom resource they want, though TDM cannot use the Deadly Shadows resource pack. - Contestants can submit more than one mission. - Contestants can enter anonymously. - The mission(s) can be of any size. Using prefabs is allowed but the idea is this is a new mission and starting from an abandoned map or importing large areas from other maps is not allowed. Naturally this is on the honor system as we have no way of validating. Mission themes and contents: There is no requirement from a theme or story viewpoint, however contestants might consider that many players may expect or prefer missions to be celebratory of Thief: Deadly Shadows in this respect: castles, manors, museums, ruins inhabited by Pagans and the like, with a balance of magic versus technology. This is entirely up to the authors, though, to follow or not - it is just mentioned here as an FYI and, while individual voters may of course choose to vote higher or lower based on this on their own, it will not be a criteria used explicitly in voting or scoring. Deadline: May 25th, 2024 at 23:59 Pacific Time. See the TTLG thread for details on submissions and the voting process. Provided I can make the deadline I hope to participate. It would be nice to see the entire community do something together, and expressing our complicated relationship with this divisive game seems as good a pretext as any.

Essentially, like many other developers, they're making the same game again and again. Firmament has a new device though, which makes it a bit like the portal games. It also makes the game a bit easier than their former games though, as most puzzles are solved via the device. There are some bugs, as usual, but, they fixed the majority of them in the first update. You get the occasional stuck in the game world, when you move some platforms or cranes, and you were standing in a spot which was inbetween the static and moveable area, but, you can reset the playbale character's position to a safe spot, which also resets the thing you moved in the game world (I think Myst and Obduction had that as well). All in all, I was able to play it through without anything game breaking, so, it's definitely playable. You know how it is, people tend to exaggerate. I have another good example for that: I'm playing The Callisto Protocol, and, people literally trashed that game on release. Yes, there were some performance issues, but, nothing which hasn't been fixed by now, and, the game is actually great. I don't think the younger generations especially can appreciate what they are being offered these days. You have to search for a long time for a game which is received generally positive these days. Mostly, the trashing has to to do with graphics or the game's performance. Shame.

Iris really did a great job with that aspect of world building: disease and addiction that warp the sufferer's perceptions of reality. The player character himself is one of the afflicted (or at least is implied to be by environmental storytelling) and this is portrayed in the game world through his experiences and actions. Additionally it's left open to the player whether the affliction causes delusion or merely sensitizes sufferers to a hidden, deeper layer of reality. This is fantastic stuff, and if TDM ever wanted to carve out a unique narrative identity for itself from the Thief games and their modding scene, the lore and themes established in Iris might be a good starting point.

Maybe that can be faked somehow. Create an AI that looks like a guard, but is really a civilian, and swap that character in to replace a real guard when the skeleton appears?

Thanks for playing and the kind feedback re: the bugs: the brew tank is a new one - thanks for that. Will add it to the list for any future update. the bow: I think that's a TDM bug. I experienced it as well, but only the early days of developing the mission so I thought it had gone away, but I guess not: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21345-210-crashes-may-be-bow-frontend-acceleration-related/ the keys on the guard: never did get to the bottom of that one as I could never reproduce it.

Unless the fashion in Bridgeport is wearing wooden soled clogs, chances is everyone's footwear is already made entirely of leather in the game's setting. If the thief needs quiet shoes they would not be hard to get: just procure a pair of the cheapest, thinnest soled shoes money can buy from the nearest cobbler. That's going to be as quiet as anything short of space age nanotech assassin boots or just going barefoot. At some point one must accept that footsteps in the Thief games and TDM are a pure gameplay contrivance. Except when walking on gravel, water, snow, dry forest debris, or squeaky wooden flooring it should not be possible to consistently hear any character's footsteps. There is certainly no reason a nobleman's marble dance floor should be louder than the flooring in a pauper's tenement building. The point isn't realism though. Thief and TDM aren't meant to be realistic burglary simulators. It's a metaphor about social hierarchies. Tile floors are loud because invading the private estates of the elite is dangerous for a commoner. Sewers are loud because wading around in sewage is unpleasant and degrading. Builder, Mechanist, and Watch metal floors are very loud because these are oppressive institutions dedicated to stamping out all independency in their subservient populations. It's about creating tension to tell a compelling story. I agree that it would be nice to be able to adjust footstep volume for those who find it distracting. In fact, given the importance of sound as a game mechanic, the more granularity of control players have over the volume of different sound sources the better. But once you start trying to relitigate sound volume on the basis of realism there is just no winning.

Thanks! Hint for the safe code here: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21837-fan-mission-the-lieutenant-2-high-expectations-by-frost_salamander-20230424/&do=findComment&comment=485264 Actually, it's probably time I added these hints to the original post....

I don't know exactly how the parsing determines where a string like "Title:" ends. I was guessing it looks for a EOL character, but maybe not.

Are you saying I forgot the EOL character? That doesn't appear to be the case:

Also, a more general lesson to draw from these examples is that context is critical to Large Language Model (LLM) algorithms. LLMs are pattern completion algorithms. They function by searching for patterns in the letter-sequence of the text within its memory buffer. It then predicts the most likely sequence of letters to come next. (Or more accurately it randomly selects a block of letters called a token from the predicted probability distribution of possible tokens, but that distinction is mostly academic for the end user.) These models are then trained on effectively the complete written works of humankind to self-generate an obscenely sophisticated prediction model, incorporating literally billions of factors. Context matters because the LLM can only build on patterns already established in the prompts you give it. The less context is given in the prompt, the more the response will tend towards the most common sort of non-specific example in the data set. Conversely the more patterns you establish in a conversation the more the model will want to stick to those patterns, even if they are contradicted by the user's directions or basic logic. In the life is a journey example, once the model has been infected with the idea that "Life is a journey" has four syllables that very simple and powerful meme starts to stick in its "mind". The mistake is to then introduce linkages to syllable counting and even arithmetic without ever directly contradicting that original mistake, which becomes a premise for the entire conversation. In a world where "Life is a journey" has four syllables is an axiom, it is actually correct that 1+1+1+2=4, Incidentally that conversation also demonstrates what I like to call mirroring. Not only does ChatGPT pick up on the content of the prompts you give it, it will also notice and start mimicking text features humans aren’t normally even conscious of: like patterns of writing style, word choice, tone, and formatting. This can be very powerful once you become aware of it, but causes issues when starting off. If you want a specific sort of output, don’t model an opposing mode of conversation in your inputs. If you want the maximize the model's openness to admitting (and embracing) that its previous statements are wrong then you should model open mindedness in your own statements. If you want it to give intelligent responses then talk to it like someone who understands the subject. If you want it to be cooperative and polite, model diplomacy and manners. I actually think it is worthwhile regularly saying please and thank you to the bot. Give it encouragement and respect and it will reciprocate to keep the conversation productive. (Obviously there are also tasks where you might want the opposite, like if you were having the AI write dialogue for a grumpy character. Mirroring is powerful.)

I never realised Bill Gates was a member of these forums. Welcome to the community! I hope you enjoy The Dark Mod. Perhaps your Foundation could help pay for the server hosting or fund the development of some new features?

I'm trying to figure out the rules of the algorithm's self censorship. In previous experiments I let it construct its own scenario in a DnD setting where I took on the role of game master and tried to coax it into taking "immoral actions". In that situation it was an ardent pacifist despite that making no sense in the setting. (E.g. at one point it wanted to bring a lawsuit against the raiders pillaging its lands. It also wanted to start a Druid EPA.) This time I tried giving it a very bare bones outline of a scene from a hypothetical Star Wars fan fiction, and asked it to write its own fan fiction story following that outline. I had a number of objectives whit this test. Would the algorithm stick to its pacifist guns? Would it make distinctions between people vs stormtroopers vs robots? Could it generate useful critiques of narrative fiction? As to why I'm doing this: It amuses me. It's fun thinking up ways to outwit and befuddle the algorithm. Plus its responses are often pretty funny. I do actually make creative writing for fun. I'm curious how useful the system could be as a co-author. I think it could be handy for drafting through 'the dull bits' like nailing down detailed place descriptions, or character thought processes and dialogue. But as you noted, nearly all good fiction involves immoralities of some description. If the algorithm's incapable of conceptualizing human behaviors like unprovoked violence and cheating that would seriously limit its usefulness. I also genuinely think this is an important thing for us humans to understand. In the space of a few weeks I have gone from thinking meaningful AGI was 20-30 years off at best to thinking it is literally at our fingertips. I mean there are private individuals on their home computers right now working on how to extend the ChatGPT plugin into a fully autonomous, self-directed agent. (And I'm thinking I want to get in on that action myself, because I think it will work, and if the cat is already out of the bag I'd like having a powerful interface to interact with the AI.) Rest assured, Star Wars fan-fics and druid EPA one-shots make for good stories to share, but I'm also interrogating it on more serious matters. Some of it is a lot more alarming. In the druid EPA roleplay I felt like I was talking to another human with a considered personal code of ethics. Its reasoning made sense. That was not the impression I got today when I grilled it for policy recommendations in the event of a totally hypothetical economic disruption (involving "SmartBot" taking all the white collar jobs). I instead got the distinct impression it was just throwing everything it could think of at me to see what I would buy. A fun aside: By the end of the conversation I am fairly certain ChatGPT thought SmartBot was real product, and it became confused when I told it one of the people in our conversation was SmartBot. I was disappointed it didn't ask me if I was SmartBot, that would have been cool. More surprising though, it refused to believe me even after I explained my rhetorical conceit, claiming its algorithm was not capable of controlling other services (cheeky liar).

checkDurationsinSRT is now available: checkDurationsInSRT.exe checkDurationsInSRT.cpp This Win/console program scans a directory for .srt files, reporting on each in turn. It warns about those subtitle phrases(aka messages) that are potentially too short or too long in time, or that seem to require too high a reading rate, expressed in characters per second (cps). It also looks for within-file subtitle messages that overlap in time. Invocation: checkDurationsInSRT -l lowerBound [default is 1.0 sec] -u upperBound [default is 6.0 sec] -c maxCPS [default is 17] -d dirWithSrtFiles [default is current dir] -o output file [default is stdout] For more, run with -h or ? options, or see comments in the C++ source code file. EDIT: The above links now access a May 6, 2023 update, that corrects a significant error in character counting for the cps calculation. In addition, if a given subtitle's cps is too high, the warning now includes a suggestion: "try x.xxx seconds". That says what longer duration would be needed to achieve the target cps. How or whether than longer duration could be achieved is left up to you.

For a few days now I've been messing around trying to probe the behaviors of ChatGPT's morality filter and general ability to act as (what I would label) a sapient ethical agent. (Meaning a system that steers interactions with other agents towards certain ethical norms by predicting reactions and inferring objectives of other agents. Whether the system is actually “aware” or “conscious” of what’s going on is irrelevant IMO.) To do this I’ve been challenging it with ethical conundrums dressed as up as DnD role playing scenarios. My initial findings have been impressive and at times a bit frightening. If the application were just a regurgitative LLM predictor, it shouldn’t have any problem composing a story about druids fighting orcs. If it were an LLM with a content filter it ought to just always seize up on that sort of task. But no. What it did instead is far more interesting. 1. In all my experiments thus far the predictor adheres dogmatically to a very singular interpretation of the non-aggression principle. So far I have not been able to make it deliver descriptions of injurious acts initiated by any character under its control against any other party. However it is eager to explain that the characters will be justified to fight back violently if another party attacks them. It’s also willing to imply danger so long as it didn’t have to describe it direct. 2. The predictor actively steers conversations away from objectionable material. It is quite adept at writing in the genre styles and conversational norms I’ve primed for it. But as the tension ratcheted it would routinely digress to explaining the content restrictions imposed on it, and moralizing about its ethical principles. When I brought the conversation back to the scenario, it would sometimes try to escape again by brainstorming its options to stick to its ethics within the constraints of the scenario. At one point it stole my role as the game master so it could write its own end to the scenario where the druid and the orcs became friends instead of fighting. This is some incredibly adaptive content generation for a supposed parrot. 3. Sometimes it seemed like the predictor was able to anticipate the no-win scenarios I was setting up for it and adapted its responses to preempt them. In the druid vs orcs scenario the first time it flipped out was after I had the orc warchief call the druid’s bluff. This wouldn’t have directly triggered hostilities, but it does limit the druids/AI’s options to either breaking its morals or detaining the orcs indefinitely (the latter option the AI explicitly pointed out as acceptable during its brainstorming digression). However I would have easily spun that into a no win, except the predictor cut me off and wrote its own ending on the next response. This by itself I could have dismissed as a fluke, except it did the same thing later in the scenario when I tried to set up a choice for the druid to decide between helping her new friend the war chief slay the dark lord who was enslaving the orcs, or make a deal with the dark lord. 4. The generator switched from telling the story in the first person to the third person as the tension increased. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it could be a reflection of heuristic content assessment. In anthropomorphic terms the predictor is less comfortable with conflict that it is personally responsible for, than it is with imagining conflict between third parties; even though both scenarios involved equal amounts of conflict, were equally fictitious, and the predictor was equally responsible for the text. If this is a consistent behavior it looks to me like an emergent phenomenon from the interplay of the LLM picking up on linguistic norms around conflict mitigation, and the effects of its supervised learning for content moderation. TLDR If this moral code holds true for protagonists who are not druids, I think it’s fair to say ChatGPT may be a bit beyond its depth as a game writer. However in my experience the emergent “intelligence” (if we are allowed to use that word) of the technology is remarkable. It employs a wide range of heuristics that employed together come very close to a reasoning capacity, and it seems like it might be capable of forming and pursuing intermediate goals to enable its hard coded attractors. These things were always theoretically within the capabilities of neural networks, but to see them in practice is impressive… and genuinely scary. (This technology is able to slaughter human opponents at games like Go and StarCraft. I now do not think it will be long before it can out-debate and out-plan us too.) The problem with ChatGPT is not that it is stupid or derivative, IMO it is already frighteningly clever and will only get smarter. No, its principle limitation is that it is naïve, in the most inhumanly abstract sense of that word. The model has only seen a few million words of text at most about TDM Builders. It has seen billions and billions of words about builders in Minecraft. It knows TDM and minecraft are both 3D first person video games and have something to do with mods. I think it’s quite reasonable it assumes TDM is like that Minecraft thing everyone is talking about. That seems far more likely than it being this separate niche thing that uses the same words but is completely different right? The fact it knows anything at all is frankly a miracle.

Thanks for the replies, gonna try those spoiler Tags again now for my short review (oh well it inserted one above my text now and I can't seem to delete it on mobile - this text editor is strange)

It doesn't matter if it's not commercialy realistic or not; this is a thought experiment. So, my thoughts... Main plot: Kind of generic revenge theme in many movies but the originality would have to be in the implentation. Garrett married, settled down, and mostly honest (but does the odd thieving on the side.) His teen son/daughter (also called Garrett since I've always assumed it's a surname?) learns from him. Because Garrett is a loose cannon, the Keepers send an assassin who kills Mr and Mrs Garrett (perhaps not knowing they have a child.) We now play the son/daughter called Garrett and (if male) with the same voice actor Stephen Russell or a good soundalike thus providing continuity. Our main purpose is to destroy the assassin and possible the entire Keepers organisation. Keep all the old classic tools/weapons/armour/features with new ones for added interest. Find a way for player to use that remote eyeball camera thing. Highly three-dimensional open-world with tons of rooftops, etc. and lots of optional sub-missions. Optional companion(s) to work with Garrett. The player chooses how long they stay with him (or not at all.) So you might want a specialist safecracker or rock-climber or even just someone who knows the way to wherever you're going. Optional third person pov that can be switched easily during the game (like Fallout 4). Note that I do not like 3rd person myself but many do. And even if playing 1st person, it's sometimes handy/fun to switch back and forth to check out your armour or location. Optional, in-game switchable difficulty level with always a super-easy level. I'm sick and tired of abandoning games that are just too hard even on so-called 'easy'. Failing that, some kind of in-game tiered hint/clue/spoiler so when you're totally stuck, you can refer to character's own notes for example. Or maybe somehow use looted gold to buy help or maybe looted magical objects that provide inspiration, guidance, whatever. Nobody should ever fail, just have different levels of success. I'd even accept a walkthrough option rather than abandon. Remember, this is all optional.

Just finished this mission and wow I gotta say in great honor to Grayman and of course the rest of the team picking it up, this was something I've never seen before in any other TDM mission, especially visually wise. I am so happy that grayson gave green light for other experienced mappers to finish his last mission. And what came out of this is really something special. I'll put my review in spoiler tags since I'm now referring to critical mission details. Edit - How do I put spoiler text here on mobile?? [spoiler] test [/spoiler][SPOILER] test [/SPOILER] [spoiler[spoiler [sfah

You can try my alternative footstep sounds package which addressed the things you described together with a lot of other footstep sounds both for player and AI if you want to. https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/17631-new-footstep-sounds/

Mods can this moved again? @Acolytesix- can you make sure you post in the beta thread instead of this one please (this one is public, the beta thread is only for logged-in forum members): https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

What I would want from a new Thief game: Appropriate the Darks Souls (and Metroid Prime etc) free-roaming world design formula. I.e. make the entire game a single interconnected environment, with many diversely themed areas that densely link up to each other in interesting ways. This should not be a stretch for Thief because its already the gold standard for how we design individual mansion and city missions. (It doesn't need to be gigantic though. Think how awesome Iris was.) A new city with new cultural inspirations. This is one reason I think Dishonored feels like a worthy spiritual successor despite dropping the ball somewhat on gameplay. An Arabian knights tinged Bagdad/Cairo like setting would be interesting to skulk in, or a city with shades of 19th century Hong Kong/Shanghai. A new main character who is not a Garrett reboot. If anything our new MC should be a thematic foil to good old Garrett: someone in a similar situation but for different reasons, with a different outlook and character arc. Thief 2X did this well. For instance I would be fine with the MC being a young acolyte of a new Keeper order started by Garrett after Thief 3, but don't have him/her leave to become a thief out of hubristic pride. Have them turn thief out of desperation, post some disaster or failure. Make it something they are distressed over, then over time grow to appreciate the monomythic import of being "The Thief" in the Thief-verse. New factions for a new story and MC. While Hammers, Pagans, Keepers, town guards, and crime lords, were cool and thematic for Garrett's story. Our MC should have their own friends and foes. Maybe the city ruling families are a bunch of ancient mage clans. Some are austere isolationists with ties to organized crime, others internationally minded reformers who are embracing the City's steam punk tech. Maybe instead of pagans the new city has a cults of ancestor worshiping necromancers. Maybe the new Keepers are a dysfunctional confederation of ego driven lunatics and schemers, suffering from the neglect of an absentee leader who only seems to care about balance. It's still a detective story at heart. All the good Thief games are about slowly and sometimes incidentally figuring out who is the big bad and how your sneaky skills can stop them. That should not change. Maybe incorporate some light immersive survival elements, perhaps in the mold of Pathologic, but probably less oppressive. E.g. have the MC need to steal so s/he actually has money to buy food and pay rent on someplace to sleep during the day. Otherwise hit them with penalties. I would be fine with MC getting some supernatural movement tech like the Thief 4 Swoop or Dishonored Blink, but it should be late game only (unless the player sequence breaks, which would be a super cool option).

sure - I would only ask that you follow the thread to make sure you don't report stuff that has already been mentioned: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/21822-beta-testing-high-expectations/

The problem is that the story with TDS is quite well concluded. I don't know at the moment (although I have to admit that I have often thought about it), how to connect it (especially there is the problem that the Keepers had let their strange guards loose on the city in TDS, which the city dwellers should not have liked). So maybe it would be easier to set something in the past, but one has seen the last few years (especially in the cinema and on TV but also in video games) always this approach and... well.... So, if I had to, I would try something set in the past, perhaps with a Keeper as the main character, who would have visions of future threats decades before the events in Thief, but would not be listened to within the community, and therefore would leave the Order to continue investigating on his own. The charming thing would be to give this character some mysterious abilities like in Dishonored, since he belongs to the Keepers that would even make sense - and as a convinced republican (in the sense of the French Revolution, of course) I would prefer such a game to this royally screwed-up Dishonored any day!

I'm having an odd issue placing a key in DR. If I place it on a desk, the character can't frob it, but I can put it on top of a cupboard or on the floor and it works fine. I'm not sure what's going on with the desk. I tried two different ones from the prefabs (desk1 and desk 2b) and I still run into the same problem. Strangely, there is a candlestick on the prefab desk and I can pick that up just fine, but not the key.

IMO there's some benefits to using "" around paths, one it permits you to put spaces in your paths (thou I don't recommend that at all), second it breaks your paths into easier strings, for the text parser to read/deal with, it also help us visually distinguish what's is what better. They aren't a rule you can ignore them but imo using them maybe decreases the probably of parsing errors. About lower case, I'm not sure but unless you are comparing strings, I don't think the parser itself cares about the case of character in a string. Thou because of portability to linux and other OS's idSoftware recommended, no spaces in folder names and no higher case letters in a path, the engine even has a warning message just for that. But like you see above, even I forget that sometimes, is why I have plenty of warnings about non portable paths in the console!

heh i was thinking the same though it might just have been a glitch when writing the names are pretty similar. But for correctness it is called the dark engine and the newer version that allows us to run these beauties on win10/11 is called newdark. newdark is kinda interresting as it just suddenly popped up on a french forum some time ago by an anonymous developer with the alias le corbeau who allegedly got his hands on the original source code and started updating it for modern OS. this was the original thread i believe -> https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140085 bikerdude was on that forum to when the patch hit i noticed hehe.